Mehitabel wouldn’t be alone tonight ’less she wanted to be.
By the time the curtain went up on Berinth the King, it was too late for the story to save me from my own stupid head. The best it could do was distract me for a while, but everything was waiting for me when the play was over, right where I’d left it.
We did go backstage for a minute, but it would’ve been smarter of me not to. You get in moods sometimes where you have to prove to yourself that the world is a pile of shit. So Felix and Gideon hung around in the stage-lobby while Felix flirted with Corinna Colquitt—she knew it wasn’t going no place, but it didn’t do her no harm to be seen flirting with him. And Gideon just watched, smiling a little. Madame Colquitt wasn’t no threat to him.
I went back to Mehitabel’s dressing room. Something about the play had pissed her off. I knew that as soon as I walked in the door, just in the way she was pulling the pins out of her hair. Probably Madame Dravanya, because so far as I could tell everything about Madame Dravanya pissed Mehitabel off.
So I went and opened my stupid mouth. “Surprised I beat the rush.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Usually, I can’t see you for all the boy-toys.”
Her back was always straight—it was the way she carried herself, like a queen—but I saw it go stiff. She didn’t turn around, just gave me a look like pure black murder in the mirror and said, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were jealous.”
Meaning, don’t pull this shit on me. Because, powers and saints, we’d had that fight, gone round and round ’til we were both dizzy and sick with it. And what it all came down to was, I couldn’t marry her, and she wouldn’t’ve had me if I could. I knew I should be glad she was willing to have anything to do with me at all—even if it was mostly fucking—and, you know, if I didn’t like it, wasn’t nobody forcing me to keep showing up to get kicked in the teeth. I just, I don’t know, I wanted her to want me for more than my cock, and I wasn’t sure she did.
Right now, from the look on her face, she didn’t want me at all. “Were you like this with Ginevra, or did she pander properly to your masculine vanity? Before she dumped you, of course.”
My breath hitched in like she’d hit me, and, powers, I kind of felt like she had. And sacred bleeding fuck I must have caught her on the raw, because she’d never said nothing that nasty to me before, and we’d never talked about Ginevra at all. Mehitabel’d always pretended like she didn’t know, even though we both knew she did.
I opened my mouth, shut it again. Mehitabel said, “You call me by her name in bed sometimes. When you say anything at— oh for God’s sake! Would you just go away already?”
Somehow, it seemed like good advice. I went.
Mehitabel
Mildmay shut the door behind him carefully—a tidy-minded man, he was—and I made a face at my reflection. “Oh, very well played. What will you do for an encore, kick him in the crotch?”
It wasn’t that I’d lied—he did sometimes call me Ginevra. It was just that I’d never meant to tell him. Unless of course, I thought, disliking myself intensely, I’d just been saving it. Because I knew exactly why I’d said it. I was scared and angry and needed to lash out at someone. And Mildmay was safe. I knew he’d forgive me. The worst of it was that I actually felt calmer, better able to attend to tonight’s business with a clear head.
Corinna and Susan between them had the Empyrean’s ushers and prompt-boys well trained, and I hadn’t hesitated to take advantage of that. The prompt-boys in particular loved the sense of intrigue—God only knows what stories they told each other about our goings-on. So there’d been no difficulty in finding out which boxes were being used tonight.
Lionel Verlalius had come, but he’d brought his fiancée—an insipid creature and I hoped he’d be as happy with her money as he thought he would. Barnabas and Harcourt Malanius were in their family box, but I really wasn’t in the mood for a threesome, and picking one over the other wasn’t worth the resulting aggravation. Arthur Lelius, Rudolph Novadius . . . Felix, who was not himself a problem—or even a factor—but I hadn’t needed an exasperating and time-consuming scene to know that Mildmay was a problem.
I’d been right about that.
But the prompt-boy had also told me that Lord Peter Jessamyn was attending the play, and I’d spotted him myself: Peter Jessamyn, sitting alone and meek as an anchorite’s cat in the box he and several other wizards had gone shares in for the season.
Peter Jessamyn was ideal for my purposes; I’d sent him a primly worded note in the first intermission, to which he’d responded, equally primly, in the second. And since Peter could hardly be expected to be enthusiastic with Mildmay playing Eofor Henning all over the place, I’d cleared the stage the quickest—and dirtiest—way I could. I’d told the doorman to stop everyone else.
I was glad of the knock on the door; feeling guilty about something you’ve done on purpose is a terrible waste of time. And I liked Peter: middle-aged, nondescript, soft-bellied and soft-handed, and a keen and cynical observer of the Mirador’s politics. Also a considerate and imaginative lover. Not as good as Mildmay—no one was as good as Mildmay, who sometimes seemed to forget that he, too, had a right to climax—but a charming bed-companion. And he liked having me on top.
We went to The Harpy’s Kiss, where Peter had thoughtfully bespoken the Rose Room and a late supper. We talked about the play while we ate; Peter nearly made me choke with a wickedly accurate imitation of Susan Dravanya, and I retaliated by describing, and even acting out bits of, the mimed and furious cat-fights that were an inevitable part of life backstage. “One of these days, Drin is going to murder Bartholmew and then go shooting out on stage with his hands covered in blood. Because it will never occur to him to wash them.”
“Well, as long as he waits until the fifth act,” Peter said reasonably and grinned at me over the rim of his wineglass.
I grinned back. It was easy with Peter. We enjoyed sex with each other; we enjoyed gossiping with each other. He appreciated the cachet of being my paramour—Mildmay’s scornful cant term “boy-toy” echoed unpleasantly in my head—and I quite liked having a lover who wasn’t high-profile, who didn’t have to please anyone but himself. And who didn’t want anything from me except bone-rattlingly good sex.
We managed that all right, and in the aftermath, lying together companionably to wait and see if Peter was going to be good for a second round—sometimes he was, and sometimes he wasn’t—it was easy for me to trace one of the swirls of his tattoos and say, “Did these hurt very much?”
“Oh, you know. Not much more than setting yourself on fire.”
“Why do you do it?”
“Become a Cabaline? Well, the alternative is to be a heretic and get set on fire for real.”
I shuddered and I wasn’t entirely faking. “You could leave.” He shook his head. “Wouldn’t want to. And being a Cabaline is worth a little pain.”
“Why? I don’t understand why anyone would want to . . .”
“You’re annemer. You can’t understand.”
“Try me. Why is it better to be Cabaline than to go to the Coeurterre or the schools in Norvena Magna?”
“You really want to know,” he said, half skeptically.
“It puzzles the living snot out of me,” I said promptly, and he laughed, distracted.
“Different wizards will give you different answers, of course, and the Virtu has a good deal to do with it, too.”
“I don’t understand that, either.”
“My sweet, if you want me to explain thaumaturgic architecture to you as well, we’re going to be here all night.”
Thaumaturgic architecture was his specialty; he probably wasn’t exaggerating. “No, I don’t,” I said firmly. “Just tell me why you wanted to be a Cabaline.”
“That question’s not much better. But all right. When I was young, I thought I wanted to be powerful, and all I knew about power, growing up in Breadoven, was that th
e Mirador had it. By the time I was actually ready to swear the oaths, I knew I wasn’t powerful and wasn’t going to be. So one answer to your question is that becoming a Cabaline offered protection. The warding spells, you know. And a chance to do my work in peace. And . . .” He was frowning. “I don’t think I can explain the rest of it. But I suppose I like feeling that I’m part of something much larger and much older than myself.”
“You’re right,” I said, smiling at him. “I am no wiser than I was.” A lie, since protection was a very good reason indeed for Gideon to want to become a Cabaline. I kissed Peter’s nose. “Are there lots of wizards who feel that way—I mean, did you have a lot of competition?”
“Competition?” he said blankly.
“Well, they don’t take everyone who asks, do they?”
“Powers, no!” That was genuine, appalled horror; I let myself laugh.
“So how do they decide? And who does the deciding anyway? ”
He told me about the Curia and the complicated systems of sponsorship and patronage and the list of criteria—some of which seemed exceptionally nebulous and vulnerable to interpretation—and I listened and wished I could take notes.
When I’d heard enough, it was very easy to shut him up. And it turned out he was good for a second round after all.
Mildmay
Oh, I was in a shitty mood. It was just as well Felix and Gideon wouldn’t have noticed me if I’d got up on the table and started dancing, because I would have picked a fight with Felix, just because I could. That kind of mood.
I went into my room and threw myself on the bed. I sat there and stared at the wall—the other side was Felix and Gideon’s bedroom and Kethe knows what they were doing in there, I didn’t want to—and spun my butterfly knife, first one way, then the other. I’d used to do it for practice, when I was a knife-fighter— and for swank, too. And then it got to be a habit, and I’d never got around to making myself quit.
And powers and saints, it was better than thinking.
But sometimes, no matter how much you don’t want to, you get to thinking anyway. And after a while, a thought got in my head. If I was calling Mehitabel Ginevra—and no matter how mad she was at me, she wouldn’t make up something like that—then there was something wrong. Something very fucking wrong.
And it wasn’t Mehitabel’s problem, neither.
See, Ginevra was dead. She’d been dead for indictions. We’d been lovers, and we’d crossed Vey Coruscant, who was boss of Dassament and a blood-witch besides. And when the Dogs got on my track, Ginevra walked out on me, walked straight back to her stupid poet. And a decad later, she was dead. Somebody’d told Vey Coruscant how to find her. And the cade-skiffs had dragged her out of the Sim with her throat cut.
All at once, I had to move or I was going to start screaming. It was past the septad-night so I wasn’t likely to meet anybody else wandering around. I let myself out of the suite and started walking. I didn’t care where I was going. Truth to tell, I didn’t notice. I was thinking about Ginevra, like a knot you can’t untie and you can’t fucking leave alone.
I hadn’t realized it had got so bad. I know how stupid that sounds, but blessed saints, if I’d known I was calling her Ginevra, I wouldn’t’ve fucking done it. I’d known I was still dreaming about Ginevra, but I’d kind of got used to it—got to where it seemed like it was normal, and maybe that was the problem.
I was dreaming about a dead girl maybe two or three nights in the decad. That couldn’t be good, could it? I mean, I ain’t big into dream-casting or nothing, but you didn’t fucking need to be. And so what I was doing while I limped around the Mirador was trying to figure out how to shut it down. Which, yeah, I should’ve been working on a long fucking time ago, but I couldn’t do nothing about that.
“So what is the big fucking deal?” I said out loud in the Buried Rotunda because there wasn’t nobody around to hear. It wasn’t like I’d never known anybody dead before. And sure, I’d loved her, but I couldn’t hardly remember her no more. I mean, I remembered things about her, but I didn’t remember her, and I knew it.
Well, what did you do when somebody died?
You went to their grave. But I didn’t know where she was buried. Probably out in the Ivorene where I’d never find her.
You made offerings, burned a lock of their hair or something of theirs you still had, to a saint or the god they’d particularly followed or Phi-Lazary or Cade-Cholera. But I didn’t have nothing. Not nothing.
You got together with other folks what knew them and had a wake, but even if any of Ginevra’s friends were still alive, they sure as fuck wouldn’t want to talk to me.
You settled your debts with them. You did things they hadn’t gotten finished. You found answers to questions they’d been asking.
And there, finally, I caught hold of the end of something I could use. Because there were questions, oh fuck were there questions, and they all clustered around when Ginevra had died. Somebody’d sold me to the Dogs. I didn’t know who. But it got me out of the way real neat. Somebody’d sold Ginevra to Vey Coruscant. I didn’t know who’d done that, neither. I didn’t know if it was the same person had done both. Or not. And I didn’t know which idea I hated worse.
And well, fuck, Milly-Fox, if you got questions, then you need to talk to somebody with answers.
I knew right where to go, too. There wasn’t no problem about that. The problem was that it meant going down in the Arcane and, well, me and the Lower City weren’t exactly on speaking terms no more.
How bad you want them answers, Milly-Fox?
But I knew ways to go—secret or forgotten or just not used— and I figured I could get where I was going without getting lynched.
I could probably even get back again.
Felix
Gideon sighed, his body tensing in climax, his hands knotting in the sheets. He was very good; he never tried to touch my head when I did this for him. I swallowed copper-salt warmth, my throat muscles working around him, and then eased slowly back, kissing his thigh, the line of his hipbone, buying myself what time I could.
Gideon touched my shoulder gently, almost shyly. :Do you want to . . . ?:
Neither of us ever said the word.
I didn’t want to, particularly, but saying so would only lead to another of our increasingly frequent, futile arguments, and I wanted that even less.
I went carefully, slowly, biting the inside of my lower lip when the urge for power got too strong. Gideon was sacrificing as much of his autonomy as he could in submitting to me—and he could not think of it in any other way. I could not be so ungrateful as to tell him it wasn’t enough, especially when the one time I had dared hint at the ways of tarquins and martyrs, his revulsion had been all too palpable.
Gideon thought submission was demeaning. I knew it disturbed him that he enjoyed it, that I could make it good for him. He never asked me to submit in return, and it was something I could not offer. The words jammed and died in my throat even in imagination.
He achieved no more than half-hardness, although I kissed the knobs of his spine, stroked him, used clever caresses I’d learned at the Shining Tiger. Finally, he said, :Don’t bother about me. Once is all I’m good for tonight.:
:Are you sure?:
:Please. Just go ahead.:
My teeth sank into my lip until I tasted blood. Bright pain kept my hands gentle against Gideon’s hips as I thrust and strove and finally climaxed. We cleaned up silently, and then, finally, I could escape into sleep.
In my mental construct of Mélusine, Horn Gate was now bound open by wisteria vines. It led to the Khloïdanikos and nowhere else. I kept the other gates closed and tried to ignore the so-called Septad Gate, where even in my construct, the truth bled through and the Sim exited the city. The Khloïdanikos was the only oneiromancy I was interested in.
Thamuris and I had been meeting for two years, and the Khloïdanikos’s geography was warping itself very slowly around us. Horn Gate had a stable location
now, a brisk walk past a ruined orchard wall to the bench which Thamuris and I had chosen as our meeting place.
I stopped, as I always did, to check on the mostly dead perseïd tree that stood against the ruined wall. I didn’t know if the tree still retained any symbolic connection to the waking world, but it had been linked to Mildmay, to the huphantike that Thamuris had cast and that I, in my blind arrogance, had enacted. It might have been superstition or it might have been penance—either way, I could not enter the Khloïdanikos without making sure that the perseïd still had some life in it, even if only a bare handful of green leaves.
I had learned not to hope for more.
The tree looked as bleak as ever tonight, and I did not linger. Thamuris was waiting, stretched out on the bench and staring up at the stars. He preferred the Khloïdanikos at night, when myriad paper lanterns stood beside the path, hung from the bridges, floated on the koi pond, nestled in the branches of the perseïd trees. The moon did not wax and wane here, but bloomed always full and beautiful in the sky; the stars, against the velvety blackness of the sky, glittered in constellations that neither Thamuris nor I could recognize.
The astrologia of the Khloïdanikos was an abiding mystery, one we returned to again and again. “Any progress?” I asked, by rote.
“Well,” Thamuris said, swinging upright with an ease he hadn’t had in the waking world for three years or more, “I found Astrape.”
I goggled at him unbecomingly. “You’re joking. Where?”
“Where Hydrastra should be.”
“You are joking.” But I looked south, to where the cluster of seven stars should have been, and sure enough, recognizable now that I knew what I was looking at, there was the bright cruel light of Astrape, named for the lightning the ancient Troians had thought she governed.
“And Hydrastra?” I said after a moment.
“Yes. Where Astrape should be.”
“So they put the sky in upside down.”
The Mirador Page 2