by C. E. Murphy
“Tell me you got what you needed.”
“We did,” Eldred began, but Janx, sibilant and angry, breathed, “Oh, yes, Margrit Knight. We did.” He glided up behind her, great weight and heat making the air so heavy she couldn’t breathe. Her head throbbed harder and she stuffed a fist in her mouth, trying to hold back a cry as she bit down, then gasped raggedly for air and twisted to look up at the dragonlord.
Daisani accompanied him, expression bleak with anger so old it looked as though it had been banked for centuries and only now brought to the fore. “You let us believe she had died, Alban.” The vampire’s voice was impossibly soft, barely disturbing the static in Margrit’s mind, and then rose to a sound so sharp she thought she couldn’t hear it with her ears: “You let us believe she had died!”
NINETEEN
“IT WAS WHAT she wished.” Alban’s sorrow was heavy enough that Margrit felt it as her own. She sagged against the gargoyle’s broad chest, relieved to tears that the two immortals’ anger wasn’t directed at her. Through a headache renewed with every heartbeat, she listened to Alban’s soft words, heard reassurance in his voice and felt exhaustedly, inexplicably safe. “After you fought, after the fire began…” The gargoyle shrugged, large motion that shifted Margrit against him and made her feel tiny and fragile in his arms. “She could not live with what we were.”
Margrit could almost hear the words Alban didn’t say, the choices he made to spare Daisani and Janx what Sarah Hopkins had said centuries earlier. Not what we were, because Alban had been fond of the woman, but had never loved her as his friends had. What they were; what they are: those were the words Sarah had spoken all those years ago. She could not live with what Janx and Daisani were, for all that she had loved them, too. Alban’s memories flowed unchecked now, a quiet river of regret. Despite her pounding head, Margrit gathered them up and held them close, seeing deep parallels between a woman born almost forty decades earlier and Margrit’s own family. Rebecca Knight had turned away from learning Daisani’s true nature, a cut that wounded the vampire more deeply than reason explained. Perhaps it stemmed from a love lost in a far-gone era.
“What of the child?” Janx’s voice scraped low, each word so precise it stood on its own, a threat instead of a question. “Did the child live, Stoneheart?”
Alban sighed and folded his head over Margrit’s, new and ancient grief welling inside him. She closed her eyes, feeling the answer within him, and the weight of the promise he’d made to Sarah Hopkins: a promise of silence, no matter what the cost and no matter what truths might be revealed or hidden. And yet, after nearly four hundred years of keeping that silence, he drew breath to answer.
Tariq, hissing fury, burst in to steal Alban’s chance. “Forget your ancient grievances. Is what was seen in the human’s memory truth?”
Margrit, numb with foolishness, opened her eyes and said, “Yeah,” even as Alban tightened his arms in warning.
As one, the djinn exploded in a whirlwind of outrage, their combined strength enough to knock the strong-bodied selkies and slender vampire from their stances. The gargoyles remained unmoved, and Margrit, safe in Alban’s arms, did, too. Janx, even weightier than the gargoyles, looked unimpressed and insulted. Margrit shot a worried glance toward Chelsea and Grace.
Both returned her gaze with unruffled calm. Chelsea still sat in her council chair, looking tidy and patient and sad, and Grace stood with her legs wide and arms folded over her breasts, a platinum superhero in black leather. Static rushed up to fill Margrit’s head again and she turned her face against Alban’s chest in confusion, certain that if she wasn’t safely ensconced in his arms, she’d have been whipped around the room. The djinn were settling now, their display having earned too little awe, or maybe they simply couldn’t talk in their air forms, and, like angry children, wanted to be heard more than they wanted to indulge in excess.
“Then we know who Malik’s killer is.” Tariq spoke almost before he’d finished forming, making his words airy but full of spite. “No wonder you offered us so much, mortal. You bargained for your own life.”
Margrit lifted her eyes, oddly relaxed in the face of his challenge. It was partly Alban’s presence that gave her confidence. His gentle strength was a well to draw from when her own ran dry, and his compassion ran ever deeper than she’d known. She could feel his breath, her own so slow as to match it, making the two of them one.
More prosaically, her head also hurt too badly to allow for fear or anger or any high-pressure emotion, and so she felt only detached reserve as she met Tariq’s eyes. “I offered you as much as I did because I believed it was right. I still do, and the offer still stands. You have another day to consider, and then if you insist, my lord djinn, we’ll take it to the mat.” The last words rather lacked the dignity she’d hoped for, but they were at least spoken with the same tranquillity as the rest of her statement.
“Margrit?” Daisani’s voice scraped as badly as Janx’s had a moment earlier, his astonishment even deeper than Tariq’s. “You took Malik’s life?”
“I did.” Alban interrupted as Margrit drew breath to explain. Daisani’s expression went ever more incredulous, and Margrit said, “He had help. They can’t change if they get soaked with salt water. I had a watergun.” She lifted one hand to mock squirting, then realized what she’d done with dismay. Not the confession, but the playful pull of an invisible trigger. It lacked all the formality that her exhausted headache was trying to settle on her.
“In their defense,” Janx said unexpectedly, “the thing was done in my defense. Malik was trying very hard to kill me, and very nearly succeeding.” He spun the corundum cane in a theatrical circle, apparently having forgotten the anger that had held him in its grip only moments earlier. “I know, my old friend, that you swore an oath to keep the djinn safe, and to make restitution against anyone who might breach your word. Perhaps this once we might…forgive old vows, and leave the game to continue.”
Daisani shot the briefest of glances at Tariq, who curled his lip as he looked at Janx. “Do as you will. Your vengeance is not ours.” With a twist as dramatic as the dragon’s, he whipped himself into a dervish, the other djinn following suit. In a moment they were gone, leaving nothing but a rattle of dust in the air, and then even that faded. The youthful selkie who had spoken to Margrit at the meeting that morning gave her a look of angry scorn, and with no more commentary, led his people from Grace’s audience chamber.
Margrit mumbled, “I’m going to have to talk to Tony,” and turned her attention back to Janx and Daisani.
They stood as though locked in ancient combat, both so still they seemed all but lifeless. Neither looked happy, though Janx’s face was so accustomed to wearing merriment that a hint of it lingered and marked him with a profound sorrow, as if the exaggerated lines of a comedy mask had been peeled away to show its tragic partner underneath. “Very well,” the dragon finally whispered. “If it is not so easy as that, we will make do as we must, my friend. As we always have and as we always shall.” He swept a less insolent bow than any Margrit had ever seen him perform, though it wasn’t precisely respect that marked the gesture, either. Acceptance, maybe, or resignation.
Then, as one, the two men turned to Margrit and Alban, and this time it was Daisani who murmured, “The child, Alban. Tell us of the child.”
“He can’t.” Margrit’s voice sounded light and distant to her own ears. The headache made her feel as though her skull had been stuffed with cotton. “He promised her. You must know that. He promised her that whatever happened, he would never tell either of you. If I didn’t have such a messy mind, you wouldn’t know now.”
Daisani, startlingly, bared his teeth at her. For all that they were flat and ordinary, Margrit flinched back, heart rate spiking at the show of aggression. Her headache flooded back and Daisani’s voice grated across it: “The child would be one of ours, Margrit Knight. After all you’ve done to change our people, you dare make mockery of something this important?”
“I’m not mocking.” Margrit’s pulse fluttered in her throat, bird-quick, distressing her with its vulnerable show. “I’m just saying he can’t tell you. You know how gargoyles are.”
“Margrit,” Alban murmured. She smiled, trying not to wince as moving her face redoubled the pain in her head.
“Am I wrong?”
He huffed, answer enough, and Margrit’s wince-inducing smile repeated itself as she looked back at the ancient rivals standing above her. “She lived. They lived. There were two of them, both girls. Sarah named them Kate and Ursula. They lived,” she said again, and this time her smile didn’t hurt. “Congratulations. One of you has descendants.”
Something too weak to be rue flooded through Alban as Margrit blithely, deliberately, took the onus of silence from him and shattered it with a handful of simple words. Gratitude that she would do such a thing colored with wry acceptance: nothing was sacred to Margrit Knight, no secret precious enough to be kept when it could be played as a hand. Whether that was the lawyer in her or the human amidst immortals, he was uncertain, but the why hardly mattered.
Janx and Daisani stared at the woman bundled in Alban’s arms as though she’d thrown a lifeline they were incapable of grasping. “They were born in the spring,” Margrit rattled on. “Alban was there to make sure Sarah was all right, that she had money and a home and a nurse, and then he left them. They didn’t look like much, just little and red and squalling. They were very small.” She cradled her arms, familiar gesture, but somehow conveyed Alban’s size to the newborns’, and how extraordinarily tiny and fragile they were to him. It was rare to see a gargoyle act out moments shared through memory; to see a human do so bent Alban’s mind out of shape with astonishment.
“It was too dangerous to go back.” Margrit’s voice was high and soft, words a singsong. “Sarah wanted a quiet life, one not ruled by the Old Races. The only way to give her that was to leave her alone. And when you left London and he did go back, years later, to check on her, they were gone. She was clever,” Margrit said in a voice more like her own. “I’d have a hell of a time running from you, but it wasn’t that hard in the seventeenth century, was it?”
“Margrit,” Alban murmured with a note of quiet dismay. She turned a smile edged with pain up at him.
“Sorry. Talking distracts me from my head. I don’t really understand what’s happening to me.”
“It was what you might call a feedback loop.” Eldred spoke, making Margrit startle within the compass of Alban’s arms. She peered over his biceps, fingers curled against it.
“I forgot you were here.” A moment passed and she added, with greater concern, “I forgot about the trial.” She struggled out of Alban’s arms, pushing to her feet and putting on a veneer of professionalism that belied the grayness of her skin tones. Alban, watching her, knew she was in pain, could see the lines of strain in her face, but as she relaxed into her courtroom personality he doubted what he knew. “I’m sorry,” she said far more briskly. “I didn’t mean to create this kind of disruption.”
“It was hardly your fault. None of us anticipated this.”
Margrit nodded once, still briskly, before a little of her facade crumbled. “What happened? It felt like the top of my head came off. Still does.” She touched her hair and flinched, then dropped her hand again, clearly unhappy with what she’d just given away.
“I think, in any practical terms, that’s precisely what did happen,” Eldred said ruefully. “Your susceptibility to our ability to share seems to…amplify, upon creating a true bridge between minds. And your thoughts are not patterned as ours are.”
“You took off the tops of all our heads,” Janx murmured. His gaze on Margrit was hungrier than Alban had ever seen it, sending a surge of protectiveness through the gargoyle. He pushed out of his crouch, not moving from beside the chess table or Margrit, but there was no need to. Janx and Daisani had come close enough that simply standing expressed Alban’s size in comparison to the other two. Only in his dragon shape could Janx rival Alban’s gargoyle form, and he doubted Janx would make that shift in this company.
“So the ritual opened my mind and you all rode my memory.” Margrit’s voice was strong with comprehension, though she added, “Oh, God,” much more softly as the implications of that intimacy set in. “But you have my memories of Ausra. Of what happened. What do we need to do to conclude the trial?”
“Biali shared his own memories while you changed clothes,” Eldred said quietly, then sighed as he turned to the gargoyle whose actions had begun the tribunal. “And so I suppose we may as well complete the forms. Why did you, Biali of the clan Kameh, bring us to this tribunal?”
“To see justice done for Ausra. For Hajnal,” he growled, glaring at Alban. Alban, stung by understanding, lowered his gaze. He had no room left in him for hate, if he ever had. For him, only regret colored their dealings now, though Biali still spoke with anger. “Cut the farce and get to the heart of it.”
Sorrow passed over Eldred’s face, deepening his voice further. “We have already taken Biali’s memories into our own, and there can be no doubt that the trial is decided. Margrit Knight has chosen compassion time and time again, even when it was to the detriment of her own cause. Biali’s choices were perhaps born from love, but have taken a path of vengeance. There can be no forgiveness for enslaving one of our own, just as there is full acceptance for one whose true heart is proven in our court.
“By right of trial, Alban Korund is free and a welcome part of our community. Biali Kameh will walk alone.”
“Are you nuts?” Margrit surged forward, disregarding her headache as she put herself mere inches from a startled Eldred. “What are you doing? You can’t exile Biali, not after all of this. The whole point is that this is a stupid law, exiling people from tiny communities. Biali made a mistake. He made a huge mistake, but didn’t the lesson he came back with say love conquers all? He acted stupidly, he chose badly, but Hajnal wasn’t just talking to him when she said a beating heart is the strongest force on earth, right? Isn’t that what you said? That you’re all supposed to listen and gain wisdom from what’s found in the depths of the memories by those on trial?”
Protests rose around her, but outrage had Margrit in its grip thoroughly enough that she couldn’t hear their words, only that they spoke. Her head felt as though it would fly apart with every breath, adding insult to her indignation.
The remaining tribunal members gathered around her and Eldred, wings half spread to make both a private area and, some primitive part of Margrit’s brain recognized, to threaten her with their size. She was small, they large; she should retreat, not fight. Her anger burned through any sense of menace and she continued shouting at Eldred, confusing her circle of jailers enough that they fell back a little.
“You do not understand our ways,” Eldred said below her invective. Margrit threw her hands up, sheer exasperation.
“Of course I do! You and goddamned Alban, determined to stick with the rules against anything even vaguely resembling sense! God, you all deserve one another! All right, fine, you want to play it your way? I’ll play it your way. I demand another trial to determine Biali’s proper place within your society.” Red spiked through Margrit’s vision as she shouted, and she wished she had a gauntlet to throw down; the gesture would be wildly satisfying.
The gargoyles surrounding her fell back farther, astonishment driving them apart. Eldred gaped, then tilted his head back and laughed, a warm, rich sound of genuine amazement. “Who do you challenge, Margrit Knight?”
“You,” Margrit snapped. “All of you. Anybody. Whoever I have to, as many times as I have to. This is a stupid law, and I’m not going to stand for it.”
“Do I get any say in the matter?” Biali asked from somewhere behind her, voice as dry as desert sands.
“No. You’re causing all these problems. You can just be quiet while I save your big, broad ass. Chelsea!” Margrit elbowed the gangly gargoyle out of her way and emerged
from their circle to glare at Chelsea. “That serpent, you said he’s basically the truth at the heart of everything, right? And I’m about as favored as it gets in his eyes right now?”
Chelsea’s feather-thin eyebrows rose. “I did, and you are.”
“Hah!” Margrit turned back to the gargoyles, heat rushing through her veins in buoyant triumph and passion. She could ride it through the pain, especially if she tried not to breathe too deeply. “So if we’re reducing those journeys to platitudes and clichés, then Biali’s got love conquers all and I’ve got the truth will out. I’m right, and right now I’ve got the serpent at the heart of the world watching over me. You really want to go up against me with that kind of linebacker on my side? Because if you do, I’m ready and willing.”
Silent gargoyles exchanged glances before Eldred surprised Margrit by turning to Chelsea. The tiny woman cocked an eyebrow again, as if disavowing responsibility. Eldred looked toward Biali, then lifted his voice. “Alban, what say you?”
Biali’s scarred face contorted and Margrit remembered abruptly that he had more than once expressed disdain for the mercy Alban had shown him in battle. Alban’s answer was a long time in coming, and left its mark on Biali’s face, as well. “I have no need or desire to see another of our kind exiled. I hold no grudge, nor any lasting damage. Let him belong.” Far more softly, he added, “It is what Hajnal would have wanted.”
Eldred’s nod of acceptance was stiff. Margrit flung herself into one of the chess-table chairs, skidding across the floor in triumph. The action jarred her skull and a pained blush heated her face, but for the moment, she didn’t care.
“Margrit.” Though she hadn’t noticed his retreat, Janx spoke from the door, where Daisani stood at his side. “I think Stoneheart would not answer this, but you’ve proved wonderfully indiscreet. What of Sarah, Margrit? What of Sarah Hopkins?”
