Maledicte

by Lane Robins

  The boy stared into the great, clouded mirror that hung on the gilded and flocked walls, a spot of uncertain shadow in the midst of rich colors and elaborate hangings. Touching the rippled glass, the boy leaned close, fingered his reflection.

  “You are comely enough,” Gilly said, wondering if the boy had ever seen his face in a looking glass before. Despite the jarring notes of sword and accent, Gilly knew the boy was no more of the aristocracy than he himself was. “But it’s no assignation we head to, only rest.”

  “There is nothing before me but a rendezvous,” the boy said, his thickening tongue slurring his words. The boy pressed his face against the cool glass, closing his eyes.

  Gilly took the boy’s arm, and the boy leaned against him, looked up at him with enormously pupiled eyes. “Have you seen Janus?”

  “I have not. Is he fair like Last?”

  “Fair,” he agreed on a sigh. He tugged Gilly’s blond tail of hair; his dark-fringed eyes closed, then flickered open in sudden awareness. “Bastard. I’d better get my lunas in the morning.” He shoved Gilly away.

  Gilly led the boy away from the mirror, and looked back over his shoulder, expecting to see the boy’s reflection lingering behind, as stubborn as the boy himself.

  At the painted room, Gilly unlocked the door, went inside, and lit the gas lamps. The boy stared at the furnishings in a near stupor.

  The room was shadowed. The gaslight illumined only a circle the size of a man’s outstretched arms, and the chamber was easily thrice that, if not more. The bed itself was a small room, walled of swagged draperies, embroidered with gilded serpents. Even to Gilly’s eyes, they seemed to undulate in the wavering light; how must they appear to the drugged boy? Thick carpeting underfoot stifled sound, turning each movement into a secretive whisper. Heavy, dense curtains draped the distant walls, though Gilly knew there were no windows behind them, only the murals that gave the room its name. One drape, drawn back, revealed nothing but the image of rushing water, full of movement without progress. This room was a well-appointed prison.

  The boy shivered as if he had sensed Gilly’s thought, but headed for the swaddled bed as if for a long-sought rest. Gilly watched the boy clamber up the bed steps and lie down. Only then did the boy release the sword from his grip. It sprawled over the counterpane beside him like a living thing.

  Gilly closed the door, drew out the key, and locked it, sealing away the boy and his sword.

  The click of the bolt sliding home sounded as final as a headman’s ax in the silent hall. Gilly winced, expecting the boy to rouse, sputtering curses and making futile strikes against the heft of the oaken door, but the moment passed in peace. Tucking the key into his vest pocket, Gilly returned to the library.

  Vornatti waited, slumped down in his chair, too worn tonight to make the walk to his chambers without aid.

  “The boy?” Vornatti said, without raising his rough-whiskered chin from his chest.

  “Caged. Asleep,” Gilly said.

  “Good. I’m not inclined to conduct business at this hour.” Vornatti pressed his hands into the arms of the chair, trying to raise himself. Though his face grayed with effort and his hands whitened, his body stayed motionless. Gilly forestalled further effort, slipping the rug from Vornatti’s lap, setting the pistol aside, and, his hands beneath Vornatti’s shoulders, hefted the diminished weight of what had once been a big man. Vornatti fell against Gilly’s side, muttering. “Too much Elysia,” he said.

  “Too much winter,” Gilly said. “I measure your dose most carefully.” He lifted the old man into his arms like a child, chary of his grip on brittle limbs, and carried him down the hall to his quarters.

  Despite the prevailing fashion for the master’s quarters to be housed higher than the common riffraff of ground dwellers, Vornatti’s rooms were on the main floor, dictated by his long illness, and guarded from intruders by Gilly. Gilly’s footsteps grew muffled as he set foot to the thickly piled carpets of Vornatti’s room.

  A barbarian’s bedroom, Gilly remembered thinking, when he first came to stand wide-eyed and tentative on the sill. An oddity in the kingdom of Antyre—Vornatti’s bedroom had been furnished in Itarusine fashion, a carved, curved bed with high sloping sides, covered not only with Antyrrian linens, wools, and velvets, but the heavy pelts of winter snowbears, imported from Itarus at exorbitant cost.

  Afraid of falling in his later years, of exacerbating the swelling in his back, Vornatti kept adding carpets, until the floor had risen high enough to make Gilly step up into the room. The fireplace along the exterior wall glowed darkly, muted by ash and spent coal. Gilly frowned at it, at the ghost of his breath in the air. He set Vornatti down on the bed, and helped him remove his dressing gown, draping it over the bedstead. He knelt and removed the slippers from his feet. Despite the homely wool stockings, Vornatti’s feet were white and cold to the touch. Gilly chafed them until Vornatti drew away. “Enough, Gilly, leave me my skin.”

  “You’re the one who complains that cold feet keep you from your rest,” Gilly said, and Vornatti settled his feet back into Gilly’s hands.

  Vornatti tangled his fingers in Gilly’s hair, pulled the tie loose, and combed his locks with gnarled motions. “My Gilly,” Vornatti said, and Gilly, still kneeling, assessed the tone. Amorous? He hoped not, thought not.

  He straightened, took himself away from Vornatti’s caress, and drew back the linens to the scent of hot earth. The heated bricks were still warm to the touch when he tugged them out, and helped Vornatti into their place.

  Vornatti stroked the skin at Gilly’s throat, the soft cotton of his shirt over his chest, but the caresses were cursory. Again he stepped away from Vornatti’s touch where normally he would have allowed it, or even prolonged it, making such small contact the opening move in their barter of desire and favor. He didn’t need anything tonight but information, and Vornatti had always been free with that.

  “Are you going to send for the magistrate? Turn the boy over to him and his workhouse?” Gilly’s belly clenched with anxiety. He was worried by Vornatti’s interest, by his own conviction that the boy’s presence could alter the fragile balance of his life with the baron.

  “That boy’s too delicate for the workhouse,” Vornatti said, wincing as Gilly folded back the bedding and his bones took the weight of the furs, linens, and quilts.

  “You think him delicate?” Gilly asked, remembering the boy’s grip on the sword, the willful refusal to give in to the drugged wine. The boy and his sword raised the fine hairs on his neck. Vornatti would not find this boy as pliable as the city whores he used to collect.

  Vornatti laughed, a harsh, quick bray. “Perhaps not. But still, I intend to keep him.”

  “He’s not a dog,” Gilly said. “You can’t keep people.”

  “Kept you, didn’t I?” Vornatti said. “Found you, liked you, took you home, and here you stay.”

  “You bought me,” Gilly said, watching the red coals of the fire dim further, the room grow more chill.

  “And what’s keeping me from buying him? Who knows what he’d do for food, for warmth?” Vornatti stroked the fur coverlet in a speculative fashion.

  “What would you do with him?” Gilly asked.

  “You saw his face and form and need ask? But don’t fuss yourself; he won’t replace you,” Vornatti said, splitting his lips into a malevolent grin. “I’ve trained you to a nicety.”

  “Another pet then?” Gilly said, flushing.

  Vornatti sighed and closed his eyes. “You know my sentiments regarding Last. Do you think I would turn that boy away? When his desires so mirror my own?”

  Gilly paused in his restless tidying to sit on the bed, shaken. “You plot treason….” Gilly was hushed by Vornatti’s fingers tightening on his thigh, by the malevolence in his dark eyes, unwinking.

  “Plotting? I do no such thing. If I aid a starveling boy, that’s charity. If I give him information, that’s education. All I am doing is putting the piece in play.”
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  F ULL DAYLIGHT SEEPED beneath the heavy, pooled draperies in Gilly’s room, waking him from a familiar dream turned nightmare. He clawed free from the winding cloths his linens had become, shuddering at their clammy touch, reminded irresistibly of the catafalques. As was not uncommon, Gilly had dreamed deep and dark, and found himself alone among the tombs of the five dead gods. Familiar, the sight of the white-shrouded coffins, the vast room around them smelling of ancient dust and decaying opulence. The carvings beneath the restless shrouds peeked through as the linens shifted with his approach, revealing the aspects and symbols he understood only while dreaming, shaping the great names: Baxit, Ani, Naga, Espit, Haith. The dead gods.

  Familiar and yet—Some tremor lingered in the silent mausoleum, as if something had run through, leaving stirred air in its wake, as if something stood in the shadows of the tombs, holding an indrawn breath, preparing to speak. A single sudden thought took life in his skin, as chilling as ice water: What if the sound had been the gods Themselves, the echoes of Their final words?

  The threat had been enough to wake Gilly into gasping awareness. To dream of the dead gods was a chancy thing at best; to hear Their words was a burden few mortals could bear. Gilly’s mother had once lamented the timing of Gilly’s birth, assuring him that such dreams should have seen him an intercessor. But the gods were gone, and Gilly’s path had led him not to the contemplative life, but to a life as Vornatti’s companion.

  A groan shivered into the day-lit silence; the sobbing of tortured wood, and Gilly’s breath seized while he tried the sound against the one he hadn’t heard. The echo offorced wood, a coffin shifting…. Sense reasserted itself. His room was next to the prisoned boy’s. That was all he heard, the boy hunting a way out of his cage. Ignoring the bed steps, he dropped to the floor and hastened to pull back the curtains.

  The old woman who acted as their housekeeper had been about her rounds. The fire was newly laid, but unlit; the morning tray of tea and toast was chill to the touch. Gilly sighed. The old woman had her way of making her disapproval felt. Baron Vornatti kept city hours—late nights and later mornings. Chrisanthe might work for Vornatti’s coin, but she would not compromise. The tray had been deposited with the dawn, many hours ago. Gilly hadn’t seen dawn light since the time he attended court with Vornatti and they returned home with the paling grayness. The last time he woke with the dawn was before Vornatti, back on the farm, when he had dreamed in torn sheets, shared with the two brothers closest in age.

  Gilly drank down the tea in a gulp; cold and overbrewed, it did nothing to soothe his nerves. Not for the first time, he considered dismissing Chrisanthe. He would do so in a heartbeat, were it not that Vornatti’s reputation precluded a household of competent servants. The country servants were afraid of Vornatti; reputations were all servants had, and scandals lingered. A lad or girl who worked for Vornatti would find no other position after. The thought made Gilly shiver. Vornatti was an old man, after all, and Gilly still young. What would happen to him when Vornatti gave in to mortality?

  But scandals, though they discommoded their household, also kept it a power in the king’s court. One of Gilly’s chores, when Vornatti could bear to part from him, was to ferret out the latest gossip, faint whispers of things not yet known. Vornatti used such information to keep himself a player in the game of politics. Bartered information and his considerable fortune kept Vornatti a welcomed presence in the Antyrrian court, rather than a shunned creature, the hated Itarusine warden.

  A longer, more shuddering moan drew Gilly’s thoughts back to what he had been avoiding. The boy.

  Vornatti would still be sleeping, unconscious with Elysia and drink; it fell on Gilly to care for this strange guest. Gilly poured another cup of tea, lifted the tray. Hunger had been the boy’s downfall last night. He would still be hungry.

  Inside the room, the activity had stopped. Gilly set the tray down and listened. Silence. Gilly fished out the key, slipped it into the lock. The latch drew back with a protest. Gilly pushed the door but it refused to budge.

  Shoving, Gilly pitted his not-inconsiderable strength against it. The door yielded a scant inch, and yielded it with the shuddering groan of shifting furniture. Gilly peered through the crack into the dimness beyond, jerking back as the blade slid toward him with a slow shine.

  “You’ve barricaded the door,” Gilly said.

  “A prison can also repel,” the boy said, his voice fierce and quiet.

  Gilly sighed with enough force that his shoulders rose and fell. “And here I’ve brought you tea and toast.” Exasperation laced his words. Overnight, he had forgotten the boy’s bloody-mindedness, his irritability. Had he really expected to find the boy meekly waiting, grateful to be let out, and willing to help entertain Vornatti over a long winter? Gilly chastised himself because he had. Had thought only of the boy’s hunger and obvious poverty, and not of his pride.

  “You can’t stay in there forever,” Gilly said. He slid down and sat on the exquisitely tiled floor of the hall, tracing the leafy patterns, green and gold, with a forefinger, listening for a reply. Patience, he thought, would be the only way. As patient as he must be during Vornatti’s worst megrims. But cautious, too; he took care to sit beyond the reach of the sword.

  He heard a faint sound, the wild-animal complaint of a starving body, and said, “You’ll get hungrier if you don’t come out. And you’re too thin to miss meals.”

  “I can live at least a week on the mice you let infest this place. Crack their heads, drink their blood, chew their flesh. Gnaw their tails, their feet when there’s no meat left elsewhere. I’d last at least a week, maybe a fortnight without any aid from you.”

  Gilly fought a reluctant smile, a little charmed by the boy’s manifest obstinance. “You’ll waste that blade’s edge on mice? Don’t do that. Come on out,” Gilly said. “Have tea, have toast; we’ll see what old Chrisanthe has left for us in the chafing dishes. There is no need to barricade yourself away.”

  “I don’t know who you are or what you want,” the boy said.

  “I’m just a servant,” Gilly said. The usual burn touched his throat at the admittance. “I don’t want anything, except for you to come out. And you have not been forthcoming yourself. Have you no name, no history?”

  “None to share with a servant,” the boy said.

  Gilly flinched, flicked on the raw, and peered through the crack in the door again. The boy sat, wedged in between the wardrobe and bed steps that barricaded the door. He had added strength by ripping down the drapes and tying them around the blockade. He sat now in a dim cavern of cloth and wood, just barely big enough to fit him, and shivered with cold and hunger in the thin bar of light that streamed in over Gilly’s shoulder.

  Silently, Gilly passed a piece of toast through the crack, felt the boy take it, and waited for the complaint about the coldness of it. But either the boy’s bravado was lacking, or his knowledge didn’t go so far as to encompass toast and heat. He ate it in three silent bites.

  “You owe me silver.”

  “Do I,” Gilly said. “Will you trust a servant’s word then?”

  “You promised,” the boy said.

  “I did,” Gilly said. “Lunas enough to get you to Lastrest, but they won’t help you.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s winter, and Last will be abroad, in the Itarusine court. It is his habit. Supposedly, he loves the ice and snows, but it’s an open secret that he visits only to keep abreast of the Itarusine king’s schemes. Last will have emptied his house of all but a few servants, taken the rest with him. He will not be there.” Gilly smiled, getting a little pleasure in the boy’s body curling tighter on itself; the lad wasn’t the only one who could wound with words. “You’ve chosen the wrong season for your hunt.”

  “Lies.” A faint breath of air.

  “I just hate to see lunas go to waste. When you could use them to buy food.”

  “Stop talking about food,” the boy said,
his voice cracking.

  Repenting, Gilly passed him the rest of the toast. “I will take you to Lastrest if you must go, but you will see that I am telling the truth.”

  There was nothing but silence from the boy’s side. Pity flared in him suddenly, seeing the boy’s unwelcome choices: starvation or servitude. Was it any wonder he was uncivil?

  “Stay with us,” Gilly said. “The old bastard’s not so bad to work for. Feeds me well, and I sleep on warmed sheets.”

  “Not a whore,” the boy whispered, going quieter, his words fading into a bare susurration. A hissed name? Janus.

  “I’ll call for Vornatti’s coach. It will take you to Lastrest, faster than the stagecoach, faster than a hack, and you can see that I am only telling you the truth. Then it will bring you back here.”

  “No,” the boy said.

  “Where else will you go?” Gilly said. “Even if I gave you silver, it wouldn’t last you the winter.”

  “A ship,” the boy said.

  “Go abroad? After Last?” Gilly said. “I don’t have enough lunas for that. And even if you did get there, it’s colder there, snow all year round, and they’d kill you for your sword. Listen, boy. Listen. Vornatti would see Last ruined. Vornatti sees his vengeance in you.”

  Furniture stuttered into reluctant movement, and after a time, the boy eeled out the widened crack. His face was dusty and blanched beneath, his hands shaking with the effort of moving the furniture again. Gilly swallowed. Another thing he had forgotten—the uncanny effect of those dark eyes against the pallor of his skin. Vornatti would devour him entire. The sword, unsheathed at his side, twitched as if it had read Gilly’s thought. The boy leaned against the wall, raised his head, and said, “You owe me lunas, still.”

  “How do you figure that?” Gilly said, grateful for the distraction. “I am loaning you Vornatti’s coach.”

  “Your promise was enough lunas for a hack, without reliance on whether I took one or not.”

  Gilly paused a moment, surprised to find that even after what must be a severe setback to his hopes, the boy could haggle like a merchant and reason like a solicitor. Then he laughed, pleased at such an agile wit; he fished into his pocket and passed three lunas to the grimy hand.