Corambis

by Sarah Monette

  But anyway, that was the end of the blue coat. The green coat, which Felix didn’t like as much for reasons I didn’t even try to understand, had made it the rest of the way, across the mountains and everything, and it was still perfectly decent—I mean, any secondhand store in the Cheaps would jump at it—but there was a button missing and the color was going in places and my darns weren’t what you might call invisible. “Shabby” I guess is the word I want, and not how you want to look when you’re getting ready to stand up in front of a roomful of strange kids and convince them you’re worth listening to.

  “And you’re no better,” Felix said, giving me a frown like he’d only just noticed.

  “Hey,” I said. “No one’s gonna expect me to look flash.”

  His frown got heavier. “You know I have no more social standing here than you do.”

  “Sure you don’t,” I said, and I was being snarky for sure. “You’re a hocus and you talk right and—”

  “You could learn,” he said, cutting me off so sharp that I guessed he’d been looking for an excuse to say this for a while. “You’re learning to read. You could learn—”

  “Don’t,” I said, cutting him off as sharp as he had me.

  He gave me this look, sort of bewildered and a little hurt, like I’d slammed a door in his face he’d thought I was going to hold.

  Oh fuck me sideways ’til I cry. But we were going to have to do this sometime. “Say I did. What d’you think it’d change?”

  “I don’t—”

  “It wouldn’t make this fucking scar go away, would it? I’d still sound like a half-wit.”

  “You don’t—”

  “Felix,” I said, and he stopped. “I know how I sound, okay? Kolkhis used to—” I shut my mouth, hard.

  “No, go on,” Felix said, and now he was watching me instead of the coat, his eyes bright, like he was hunting me. “What did Kolkhis do?”

  “Don’t matter. Point is, I can’t change the way the words come out. And I’d rather . . .” I didn’t know how to explain it, something I’d been doing so long I never thought about it anymore.

  “You’d rather play to people’s expectations than challenge them,” Felix said. He sounded sad, like I’d disappointed him. “Well, it is your prerogative. I just wish—”

  “Do I embarrass you?” I said, and it came out nastier than I’d meant.

  He went red like a sunrise, right up to his hairline. “It isn’t that.”

  “You’re a fucking terrible liar,” I said, and he went redder. “No matter how flash I talk, I’m still going to embarrass you. You know that.”

  I could see him wanting to deny it. But he was a terrible liar, and we both knew it, and he was smart enough to know that lying to me here wasn’t going to help.

  And because I’m a mean son of a bitch, I sat there and watched him struggle and didn’t do nothing to get him out of it.

  Finally, he dropped the coat and said, “Maybe I need to be embarrassed then.” He was still red in the face, but his chin was up, and he met my eyes like he was daring me to say he was lying now.

  “But you hate . . .”

  “Maybe it will be good for me. I told you, a long time ago, that I can’t change what I am. And maybe that is true. But I want to try.”

  “You been thinking about this.”

  He shrugged. “On and off. It’s easier, out of the Mirador.”

  “I thought you were homesick.”

  “I was. I am. But just because I want something, doesn’t mean it’s good for me. Rather the reverse, in fact.”

  It took me a moment, but I thought I knew what he meant. “Phoenix?”

  “And Malkar. And Shannon, for that matter. I have a long and inglorious history of wanting what hurts me.” He laughed, though not like anything was funny. “I was trained as a martyr. As I think you’ve already gathered.”

  “I’d sort of guessed.”

  “I have preferred the tarquin’s role,” he said, his voice chilly now, kind of distant. “But that’s just vanity.”

  Which, okay, not the word I would’ve used. But I didn’t say nothing, and he must’ve been wanting to say this for a while, too, because he kept going. “You see the pattern, don’t you? I want to be hurt. And if I can’t get it one way, I find another.”

  “Um,” I said, because I wanted to argue with him and couldn’t.

  “Sometimes,” he said, still chilly and real far away, “I think I am very, very stupid.”

  And powers, I had to ask. “Is that what happened in Bernatha? You wanted them to hurt you?”

  “No! I didn’t want that. I didn’t want any of that.” But his color was up, and there was something wrong here. I waited, because silence was the one thing Felix just couldn’t stand. And sure enough, after a moment he started pacing. “Do you think I wanted it?”

  “No,” I said, because I knew he hadn’t. Except he had. He’d wanted to be hurt. To be punished. But he hadn’t wanted what they did to him. I’d known that as soon as he’d tried to distract me from the bruises on his face. And then it hit me, and the words got out before I could stop them: “That’s why you let them put that fucking binding on you, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “The binding-by-obedience. You let them. Because you didn’t let those fuckers in Bernatha . . .”

  It was the look on his face that shut me up. He’d gone paper-white, and his mouth was flat and hard. And his eyes were fucking wild—not angry, the way I was used to. This was something else. “You want to know what they did?” he said, and his voice wasn’t much more than a whisper.

  I didn’t—really fucking didn’t—but I would’ve had to be blind, blind and deaf and fucking dead, not to see that he needed to say it. “Tell me,” I said.

  He did. He told me the whole thing, flat out, no fancy words, no dancing around things. Started with the hecate and the blindfold and just kept going. He didn’t even fucking blush. And I listened to the way his voice changed, the vowels getting longer and darker. I’d heard him slip before, maybe once or twice, but this wasn’t the same thing. This was more like him pinned under me at Nera, screaming curses at me. This was what he’d been before Strych got him. This was the part of him that was my brother all the way down to the bone.

  He was trying to shock me, too. There was something—I don’t even know the right word. But he told me how they’d made him come, and he was watching me with his wild, spooky eyes, and I knew what he was looking for. Good thing I had a lot of practice in not giving it to him. And besides, if there was one thing I’d learned from Kolkhis, it was just how much you couldn’t control what set your cock off. Didn’t mean fuck all about what you wanted. He finished, still watching me, still waiting for me to scream or puke or run away or whatever the fuck it was he thought I was going to do, and I said, “They hurt you.”

  Short, choppy nod. Still waiting for the sanguette blade.

  I said, “They hurt you, and you didn’t control it.”

  It was more like a flinch than a nod, but it was a nod.

  “And you didn’t control what your body was doing, neither.”

  He finally looked away from me, and there was the blush. Some of it was shame, even though he had to know the same thing I did, that what they’d got his body to do didn’t mean nothing about nothing. But most of it was . . . I knew the word Felix would use: fury.

  “So you set it up to happen again.”

  That got him looking back at me in a hurry, and about half a step away from murder if I was reading him right. “Yes, you did,” I said before he could think of the words to tell me I was full of shit. “You showed them hocuses what you could do and you gave ’em Lord Stephen’s letters and you went in there and you told them every fucking thing you could think of to make them do what you wanted. They hurt you, but you controlled the whole fucking thing. And you got what you wanted.”

  “I don’t want this,” he said, although his voice wasn’t much more than a whisper.
/>   “You were right,” I said. “I see the pattern.”

  He turned away, shoulders hunching, hands going up to his face, and I said the only thing I could: “I’m sorry.”

  He shuddered, and it was a moment before he answered me. But when he did, he’d got his vowels back: “You, of all people, have nothing to be sorry for.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I was right,” he said, and he straightened up and turned back to smile at me. It wasn’t a great smile, but I thought it was real. “I am very, very stupid.”

  “You been hurt,” I said, because I understood all about how that made a person do stupid shit.

  His eyebrows went up, and he stared at me a moment. “You don’t have the least taste for tarquinage, do you?”

  “I don’t—”

  Powers and saints, I’d been looked at like that before, but only by brothel madams weighing me up to see what I’d go for and how much it was worth.

  “I ain’t into pain.”

  “Pain is only part of it,” he said.

  I had chills going up and down my spine, and I couldn’t keep my voice quite steady enough when I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Because I knew how this went. I’d seen him hurting, so he turned around and hurt me. Like a clockwork bear. Wind him up and watch him go.

  But this time he didn’t. He kind of shook himself, and his face changed somehow, some way I didn’t have words for, but that dark unhappy thing was gone. “Power, darling,” he said, drawling it out to make fun of himself. “It’s what everyone wants. Didn’t they tell you?” Then he bent and picked up the green coat and said, “I think it’s time I became a Corambin gentleman. New clothes, get my hair cropped—”

  “Your hair?”

  “Don’t sound so shocked.” His smile twisted a little. “I prefer not to appear before the students of the Institution as some kind of exotic savage. And after all, it’s just hair.”

  “Right. Course.”

  He paused, fidgeted, gave me a sidelong look. “Do you want to come? I promise not to be dreary anymore.”

  Yes, of course I went with him. What the fuck else was I gonna do?

  And he was right. He wasn’t dreary at all.

  Kay

  On Mercoledy, Isobel arrived as Springett was clearing away my breakfast and announced that I was coming with them to meet Vanessa Pallister’s train.

  I descended the stairs on my sister’s arm and hoped she was not—as I most excruciatingly was—remembering that other, infamous time we had walked together, her on my arm, when she was given in matrimony to Ferrand Carey. Gerrard had begged the sacrifice, and I had given it, although Isobel had been furiously derisive of my right to do so. And yet it would still have been worthwhile, the wedding together of Murtagh and Rothmarlin, if only Isobel had been fertile. If only there had been a child in the long sere years before the Insurgence. Perhaps the Insurgence would not have happened at all.

  Perhaps cats will spread their wings and fly to the moon, I mocked myself.

  Isobel did not take me the same way Julian had, and I bestirred myself to ask, “Where are we going?”

  “The stables,” she said and added condescendingly, “We do not walk to Fornivant, Kay.” For a moment, I wished to be sighted again purely for the vicious pleasure of boxing her ears.

  Were more stairs down, and then the surface beneath my feet changed, and were echoes, strange ones. I slowed, and Isobel said impatiently, “Is a tunnel. Between the house and the stables.”

  “It sounds . . .”

  “Brick. Is just brick. Now come on, please, or we will be late.”

  “And Murtagh will be so very vexed.”

  “Actually, yes, he will, and I would prefer not to spend the day with both of you bristling like porcupines.”

  “I do not—”

  She laughed, and the echoes were distressing. “Hast been a porcupine since thou wert but two hours old, Kay my lad.”

  She knew me too well. We knew each other too well, in sober truth, and it did occur to me, as Isobel led me up the stairs into the stable, that perhaps a wife would be a mercy, for then I would not be in my sister’s care.

  The stables smelled as clean as it was possible for any stable to smell, and mercifully they did not echo as the tunnel had. Murtagh’s carriage smelled of leather mostly, though inevitably also of horses. I felt his presence as Isobel and the footman guided me in, smelled the sharp citrus of his cologne. He waited until I was seated to say, “Good morning, Kay.”

  “Good morning, Your Grace,” I said, as Isobel climbed in and the footman closed the carriage door.

  “Have we not had this discussion? We are as brothers. Can you not unbend sufficiently to have done with the ‘Your Graces’?”

  “As you wish,” said I.

  “Is Julian joining us?” Isobel asked, her voice too light to be trustworthy.

  “Yes,” said Murtagh. “He is, of course, late.”

  Isobel’s sigh was deliberately audible.

  I said, “Who was it he met at the cathedral on Domenica last? Did he tell you?”

  “He did not tell me,” Murtagh said, “but I know quite well who it was. Cyriack Thrale, a student-magician at the Institution, whom Julian met somehow through the University. Julian is a trifle foolish about Mr. Thrale.”

  “If by ‘foolish’ you mean ‘soppy,’ ” Isobel said.

  “My dear,” Murtagh said reprovingly. “Julian takes after his mother in the, ah, ferocity of his enthusiasms. He values Mr. Thrale’s friendship very highly.”

  “He behaves like a milkmaid. It’s unseemly.”

  “He is very young. And I believe Mr. Thrale is very kind to him.”

  “As long as it’s nothing more than kindness,” said Isobel. I kept my head bent, my hands folded in seeming tranquility.

  “Julian may be a mooncalf, but he will not disgrace his name,” Murtagh said, and at that dreadfully opportune moment, the carriage door opened again, and the carriage shifted, springs groaning, under Julian’s precipitous entrance.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” he said, joining me on the bench. I realized that the citrus smell on him was the same as on Murtagh and wondered if Murtagh had given it to him, or if he used it on the sly.

  “I’ve spoken to you before about punctuality,” Murtagh said. “Kindly take the lecture as read and do better next time.”

  “Yes, sir,” Julian muttered.

  A sharp rapping sound: Murtagh telling the coachman to go. We lurched; I discovered that I was on the backward-facing bench. After a moment, I was able to compel myself to straighten my shoulders, to relax my hands.

  Julian isn’t the unnatural one, I wanted to tell my sister. I bit my tongue, hard enough to sting, and blessedly, Julian launched into some convoluted complaint about his music teacher—unless the complaint was about the piano on which he practiced. I could not tell, and did not exert myself to discern, although I listened carefully and attentively to Julian’s diatribe all the way to the railroad station.

  I had fought to keep the railway out of Rothmarlin. Even on campaign against the Usara, I had written letters; in the winters, when I could spare time to go to Barthas Cross, I had pled my case to Gerrard. And he had laughed and promised that Rothmarlin should remain unsullied, a promise which he had kept—although was cruelly moot now. I did not know what the Convocation had planned, and I was not going to demean myself by asking. I knew what Cecil’s response would be.

  “This time, Julian,” Murtagh said as the footman steadied me out of the carriage, “you will stay with Mr. Brightmore. I can threaten you with further dire punishments if you think it will help.”

  “No, Uncle Ferrand,” Julian said, as resentful as a smoldering slow-match.

  “He was very kind and attentive on Domenica,” I said, and in the disbelieving silence, I heard Isobel snort.

  But Julian whispered, “Thank you,” and gave me his arm; we followed Murtagh and Isobel into Fornivant Station.
r />   Was like being trapped in a sounding belfry with a flock of mad crows. I could make no sense of what I was hearing, could only grip Julian’s arm tighter and go where he led. He did remember to warn me of stairs, and when we stopped, he was kind enough to say, “Uncle Ferrand has gone to inquire about the Whallan train. We’re to wait here.”

  Was a wall at my back, and although I could hear the crowd, no one brushed against me. I breathed, carefully, forbidding the flickers of panic that wanted to fan themselves into a fire.

  And then a voice said, “My lord? Is that you?” A man’s voice, a strong Caloxan accent. “My lord Rothmarlin?”

  Oh, no. No. But the voice was already close to me, already saying, “My lord Rothmarlin, do you not know me?”

  “I cry thy mercy,” I said, “I am blind, and I do not know thy voice to give thee name. Who art thou, I pray thee?”

  They were soldier’s hands that caught my own, big and square and rough with calluses, missing the tip of one finger. “Ah, my lord,” said he. “I had heard, but I prayed I had heard wrongly. I am Lucas Atford. I served with you seven summers in the mountains.”

  “Seven summers” was only a formula, but I did know the name. And those hands. “Lucas Ironhand, art thou?”

  “Yes, my lord,” and it hurt to hear the delight in his voice, as if I had granted the dearest wish of his heart merely in remembering him.

  I floundered for a moment, drowning in all the questions I did not dare ask: what was he doing here? was he well? did he blame me? Lucas stepped even closer: sweat and soot and the cloying, musty scent of horehound. He said, his voice barely more than a whisper, “My lord, are you all right?”

  That question was unanswerable. Lucas said, “We have feared for you, my lord. We would have come to you, had we known how.”