They put a guard on duty at their barracks, one of the guys too old and crippled for regular duty. He had a chair, along of having only one leg, and his sword was down on the floor, but you’d have to be awful dumb to think that made him an easy target. Him and the guy on night shift, who was three septads younger but only had one arm, were the toughest bastards I’d ever met. I wasn’t real sure they were necessary—I mean, who’d be nuts enough to attack the Guard in the middle of the fucking Mirador?—but I was sure that if they ever were necessary, the guys they were up against were going to be sorry.
The day guy’s name was Lemuel. The night guy was Bruno. They were both glad to shoot the shit with me if I happened to stop by. Lemuel was about the only person in the Mirador who’d actually asked me, point-blank and face-to-face, what this binding-by-forms crap was. I’d told him as best I could, going light on the magic shit and leaving out how I felt about Felix, and after that the guards had gotten friendlier. They were used to the idea of being bodyguards to hocuses.
So Lemuel said, “Hey, Mildmay. What happened to your face?”
“Hey, Lemuel,” I said. “Got in a fight. Josiah around?”
“He might be. Whatcha want him for?”
“Gossip.”
“Well, if that’s what you want, why don’t you go on in? If’n you don’t find Josiah, there’ll be somebody else to make you happy.” He snorted. “Those boys gossip like a bunch of damn old maids.”
“Thanks, Lemuel.” I limped into the barracks. I felt conspicuous as hell leaning on my stick and with my left eye like a rainbow, but I didn’t exactly have a lot of other choices lined up.
Four guys near the door, playing Long Tiffany, invited me to join the game. I told ’em, thanks, but I had better uses for my money.
“What’re you doing here?” said another man, who was polishing his boots on the other side of the room. “Running errands for that molly hocus whore of yours?”
I looked at him. His name was Thibaud, and I already knew he didn’t like me. He’d been in charge of the guys assigned to figure out Cerberus Cresset’s murder, and he was still pissed at not having caught me—and even more pissed at the fact that now he knew who I was he couldn’t do nothing about it. There was a whole group of guys who hated me and Felix both—one of ’em, Esmond, hated Felix nearly as much as Robert did, but nobody would tell me why.
“Ain’t none of your business if I am,” I said.
“Thibaud, would you give it a rest?” said the oldest of the card players, a guy named Cleo who would have made two of anybody in the room. “Whatcha after, Fox?”
“Who ya gonna murder this time?” said one of Thibaud’s friends.
“You if you don’t shut up.” I said to Cleo, “I was just looking for Josiah.”
“Has Jo caught Lord Felix’s fancy now?” Thibaud again.
“Powers, Thibaud, will you shut your fucking trap?” Cleo said. He bellowed, “Hey, Jo, guy here for you!”
“I don’t see why you’re getting on my case, Cleo,” Thibaud said, going all injured. “I ain’t murdered nobody, and I ain’t catching flies for no moll, neither.”
“Well, very fucking good for you,” Cleo said. “All I’m looking for is some peace, and I can’t get that with you running your mouth. Jo! Move your ass, would you?”
Josiah came through the door at the back of the room, just as Thibaud said, “I ain’t the one came walking in here like he owns the place.”
"Shut up, Thibaud,” Josiah said on his way past. "C’mon, Mildmay. We can go to the Pav.”
The Pav’s practically in earshot of the barracks. It’s a big open room with this kind of lacy stonework like an indoor gazebo or something. It’s supposed to be haunted so nobody uses it much.
“You okay?” Josiah said when we’d got settled. “I mean, your face and all, and I ain’t seen you with a cane before.”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, although it felt like a lie.
“I’m sorry about Thibaud.”
“It ain’t your fault he’s an asshole.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I don’t got to be friends with everybody in the Mirador.”
“Thibaud’s just mad ’cause you beat him,” Josiah said. “He thought he was gonna make it to captain on the strength of finding the guy who waxed Lord Cerberus. But he didn’t find you, and he didn’t get promoted. That’s what’s up his ass.”
“Powers, I’m sorry I got in the way of his career,” I said, and we both laughed. Neither of us said nothing about Felix. “Josiah, do you know anything about Hugo Chandler?”
“The molly musician, right? The one that looks like a rabbit?” It occurred to me for a second how awful it would be to go through life where the first thing anybody remembered about you was that you looked like a rabbit. “Yeah.”
“What about him?”
“I dunno. Anything. Who’s he hang out with? What’s he do with his spare time? Does he leave the Mirador?”
“He crossed you about something?”
“Nah.” I thought for a moment about what it was okay to tell Josiah. “I used to know him, in Dragonteeth. I’m worried about him is all, if he’s, you know, getting along okay.”
“You could ask him,” Josiah said.
“He wouldn’t tell me.”
“Oh, like that, is it? He don’t get in trouble, I can tell you that much. We gotta go ’round to the Mesmerine couple times a dec—I mean, about once a week—but it ain’t never about Mr. Chandler. I think he’s got a pretty steady thing going with one of the other musicians, so he ain’t out getting drunk or chasing the serving girls or nothing like that. He’s got family in Dragonteeth, but I don’t think he even goes out to see ’em—just sends ’em money.”
The Protectorate Guard knows just about everything that happens in the Mirador. They have to. It’s part of their job. If Josiah said Hugo wasn’t leaving the Mirador, he wasn’t, because the one thing I was sure of was a rabbit like Hugo wasn’t ducking down into the Arcane to get past the gates.
“And nobody’s got a down on him?” I said. “None of the flashies?”
“I don’t think nobody’s noticed him. And the flashies that like music all like him just fine.”
“Well, that’s good to hear. Who’s his musician?”
“Boy from Skaar. Name of Axel. Tall, skinny, blond. He’s pretty new. He ain’t got in trouble, neither, so that’s about all I know, but Chilver says he’s too pretty for his own good.”
“Well, I ain’t trying to get his complete life story out of you. Just wondered.”
“So long as you ain’t gonna go causing trouble where there ain’t none, you can wonder all you like.”
“Nah, I don’t want Hugo in trouble. I just wanted to be sure he wasn’t in trouble.”
“Not with us,” Josiah said.
Mehitabel
Corinna and I raided the costumes again, and came up with a dark brown dress, patterned all over in a design of vines and leaves that looked black unless the light caught it at a particular angle, when it showed up a sort of rich puce color. “It suits you,” Corinna said, and I saw the truth of that in the eyes of the guards at Chevalgate, and the eyes of the pudgy blotch-faced page who led me to Lord Stephen’s apartments.
Lord Stephen rose when I entered his sitting room and, after a moment’s contemplation, said, “You are exquisite.”
I wished I could fake a blush.
I asked him early on, over the soup, about his family, some inanity about had they been close as children.
“Vicky and I were very close. After our mother died, we . . .” He made a circling gesture with his wineglass, as if to entrap an escaping word. “We had no one else.”
“You must have been very lonely.”
“No. We had our own private world. We didn’t need anyone else. I don’t remember being lonely until Vicky started learning magic. I couldn’t follow her there.”
“Do you blame her?”
“For being
a wizard?” He snorted. “Powers, no. Vicky wanted children.” He looked across at my expression, which I would have made blankly puzzled even if I’d known what he was talking about. “Oh, sorry. You won’t know about my cousin Cornell.”
“Your cousin Cornell?”
“My grandmother had two sons. My uncle Denis was the older. And a wizard. So he couldn’t inherit the Protectorship.” He raised his eyebrows at me, and I nodded. “But he got married— nice woman, cadet branch of the Severnii—and had an annemer son.”
“Oh,” I said. “Your cousin Cornell. I can see where this is going.”
He gave me a grimace. “When my father died, Cornell started making noise about his right to the Protectorship. And some people listened, and they agitated and made a fuss, and things got ugly. ’Til Cornell was found in the Sim with his throat cut.”
“That’s where I thought we’d end up,” I said grimly. Few if any stories in Marathine history had happy endings.
“It was eight years ago,” Stephen said. “We still don’t know who did it. Vicky says she’s not going to have children just to have them murdered for being politically inconvenient. I don’t blame her, but it makes her hard to work with sometimes.”
“Is it normal for a Lord Protector’s siblings to be, er, so high in the government?”
His eyes skewered me for a moment, but he chose not to ask why I wanted to know. “It depends,” he said. “Some are, some aren’t. I had to . . . show trust in Vicky and Shannon.”
“Because of Gloria Aestia?”
“Yes. We had to pull together, as Teverii. But I’d always wanted Vicky beside me.”
“Not Shannon?”
“Shannon and I . . .” He shrugged. “We’re brothers, but we aren’t what you’d call good friends.”
Stephen was well known not to like molls especially, and I wondered now how much of that was spillage from what was clearly a difficult relationship with his brother. Then I wondered how much of his dislike of Felix was because of Shannon. But before I could ask, Stephen smiled suddenly. “Powers. Horrible manners, boring on about my family. Here, you pick the topic.”
I could hardly tell him that his family was exactly what Vulpes wanted to hear about. Instead, I said, “Do you believe the envoy from the Bastion?”
“Believe how?”
“Well, you—I mean, the Mirador and the Bastion have been enemies for centuries. Do you really believe they want peace?”
“Funny question from a Kekropian.” He thought for a moment, choosing his words. “Yes, I think they must be tired of war. The saints know I am. I don’t trust them, but I believe them.”
A subtle paradox, especially from someone who seemed so bluntly straightforward. I asked, “How much do people here really know about the Bastion? Is it just a myth to frighten children, as the Mirador is in the Empire?”
“When Vicky and I were little, our nurse told us that the bad wizards from the Bastion would carry us off if we didn’t behave. And the defectors always tell the most frightful stories.”
“Yes,” I said. “We were terrified of it as kids—my grandfather threatened to tithe us when we’d been bad.”
“We?” said Stephen with an interrogative eyebrow.
You have to give if you want to take; I told him about Libbie and Damian, about my cousins Sasha and Eve and Quintus and the twins, Phineas and Geraint. I realized in the middle of one anecdote that Stephen was genuinely interested—he couldn’t be faking that expression—and with a sudden lightening of my entire spirit, told him the truly disgraceful story of what happened the time Uncle Kirby and Gran’père Mato got drunk in Semiramis. He roared with laughter, and for the first time in years I was able to remember things about my childhood besides my mother and Uncle René.
Again, Stephen waited until we’d been left with the hard liquor and sticky desserts to bring out his true purposes. “I am minded,” he said, “to take a lover.”
“Are you indeed?”
That got me a quirk of a grin. “I learn from my mistakes. I didn’t have lovers when I was married to Emily, and that gave her far too much power. Not over me necessarily, but in the court. My father made the opposite mistake—taking a lover after my mother died—and that landed us with Gloria.”
“You have thought about this a good deal.”
“Yes.”
“But why me?”
“Don’t be disingenuous.”
That stung. “You’ve never shown the slightest interest in me before.”
“Because I wasn’t getting married,” he said patiently. “And you were . . . occupied.”
“I have other lovers.”
“You won’t,” he said, face and voice suddenly hard. “He was the only one you cared about, and I will not share you.”
“You’re awfully possessive for a man who hasn’t heard the word ‘yes’ yet,” I said, both because I was irritated and because I needed to push this situation, find out what its limits were.
“Character flaw,” Stephen said. “If you turn me down, I won’t hold it against you. But if you accept, it will be exclusive until we tire of each other. I won’t hold you against your will, either.”
“I am relieved to hear it.”
“I’m jealous by nature,” he said. “Made more jealous by training. I’m not going to apologize for it, but I am telling you. I don’t like making uninformed decisions myself, and there’s no reason you should have to make them either.”
“Do you even like me?”
It was a ridiculous, childish question, but Stephen’s cold-bloodedness was unnerving me. That in itself was ridiculous, and I knew it, since I’d approached all of my affairs since Hallam with the same rigorous, dispassionate logic, but, no, I did not like being on the receiving end.
“Mehitabel.” He smiled. “If I didn’t want you in my bed, for company as much as for anything else, I’d hardly have gone this far. You aren’t an ideal choice by any means.”
“Being Kekropian.”
“And an actress. And damnably intelligent. Which I prefer, but it makes things more difficult.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Stephen, unlike Vulpes, wasn’t worried over possible irony. “It’s up to you.”
“If I say yes, I imagine it will be quite official?”
“Oh, yes. There’s a suite that belongs to the Lord—or Lady—Protector’s lover. It’ll be yours.”
“You won’t want me to give up the Empyrean.” I said it flatly, because I wasn’t asking.
“Of course not. Just your . . .” He was searching for a word, brows drawn down, and I knew suddenly what word he wanted. Boy-toys. Mildmay’s word. I wondered, not comfortably, how long Stephen had been watching and how long his jealousy had been festering.
“Quite,” I said. “I need some time to think.”
“I wouldn’t have expected you to answer right away. We— meaning the Mirador—will be holding a soirée on Mercredy. I’ll send you an invitation tomorrow. Yes to one is yes to both. Will that do?”
It wasn’t much time, but it wasn’t the sort of decision that was going to get easier for long contemplation. “Yes,” I said. “It’ll do.”
Felix
I couldn’t talk to Thamuris about ghosts. But there was another side to the problem, and maybe the Troian approach to the dead would help here. Because none of the Marathine approaches I knew of were any better than useless. Most of them were worse.
I had worked out what I wanted to say to him about Malkar and what I most emphatically did not. I said, “I have . . . a kind of relic of a powerful blood-wizard, and I need to put it somewhere. But I need it to be safe, and I have to find a way to nullify it thaumaturgically.”
“A relic?” Thamuris was frowning. “What sort of relic does a blood-wizard leave? And is a blood-wizard what it sounds like?”
“Yes. And just exactly as vile as you imagine, too. And the, um, the jewels from his rings.” Some schools of Troian wizards still used rings; although th
e diviners of the Euryganeic Covenant were not among them, Thamuris did at least understand the theory.
“And is there a reason you haven’t destroyed them?”
“He had these rings for a very long time.” As long as I’d known him, anyway. “And the consistent use of architectural thaumaturgy does some very strange things to gemstones.”
“Define ‘strange,’ please.”
Damn him for asking cogent questions. I ran imaginary fingers through imaginary hair. “They would be very difficult to destroy, and they would . . . well, think of it as staining the place where it was done.” Somewhere in the depths of the Mirador there was a bricked-up room in which Porphyria Levant’s emeralds had been destroyed. I had never sought it out, but I knew I had been close to it more than once. I had felt the stain of their magic, their mikkary, like the taste of burning metal in the air. It would disperse, given time, but no one knew how much time, and the Curia seemed determined to remain ignorant, as if refusal to acknowledge the problem could cause it to go away. All I could do, having argued myself hoarse on the subject until Giancarlo forbade me to mention it again, was not add to the problem. And thus I could no more destroy Malkar’s rubies than I could simply dispose of them. The mere thought of throwing them in the Sim made me feel as if my blood had been replaced by the river’s dark water.
“Ah,” said Thamuris. “You don’t want to talk about who they belonged to or how you got them, do you?”
“No,” I said, faster and harder than I’d meant to, and Thamuris controlled himself just short of recoiling.
“I wouldn’t tell anyone,” he said, and just as he had seen my semipanicked revulsion, I saw his hurt around him.
I shut my eyes, willing meaning into the gesture, using it to reassert my control over myself, both my construct-self and my own unruly emotions. It took me longer than it should have, long enough that when I opened my construct-eyes again, Thamuris was staring at me worriedly.
“Are you all right?”
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