Camden brushed the insult away like a fly. He’d tried being a poet some years back, and enough people remembered it that he was used to being called illiterate. “It’s posted on the lamppost out front,” he said. “‘All persons seeking unfair financial and political advantages through the exploitation of the people are hereby declared outside of the law,’ etc. etc. Thermidor’s coming fast.” He lay down on the couch, just brushing Gaude’s knees with the golden strands of his hair. “Take the King at his word, Livy, and soon.”
And Gaude, the silly stupid bitch, giggled like he’d lipped the world’s funniest joke.
* * *
The Varlows were fresh off the boat, fresh enough that you half expected them to trail salt water. They wanted me to find them rooms, which wasn’t so bad, even though tramping up and down the stairs of every hot and rotting tenement between Greensleeve and Finn Street isn’t something I look forward to doing again. The problem was that young master Varlow had been playing politics back home in Kazaria, and now he wanted me to get him into the Assembly. Yes, that Assembly.
Shit.
So there I was, trying to explain—in Kazarian, because there was no way they could understand me otherwise—that the Assembly was an elected position, and a bunch of assholes besides—and there they were trying to convince me that I must have gotten my own politics wrong because Speaker So-and-So at the Ashersen’s house was so sweet and wonderful, and there I was again trying to remember which of the white-wigged featherbrains Speaker So-and-So was, when wham! opens the door and Gaude comes in.
She was still semi-officially settled in my parlor—which still looked like a garden only now it was dusty and wilted and cracked—and that made her think she had a part in my business. I don’t know how Acacey was holding up, honest, between the heat and their boss being a shithead.
“When are you going to meet the King?” she asked.
Which of course launched the Varlows, who only caught the last word. They had some pretty twisted ideas about royalty in Kazaria. Fortunately—praise and honor to you, Saint Lalage patron of ward bosses—ma’am Varlow broke out in a coughing fit and I was able to bustle the whole family down into the kitchen where Mama Stanislaw could take care of them. Only when that fiasco was finally settled did I get a chance to start chewing Gaude to ribbons.
“Silly Livy,” she cooed when I was finished. “Come on and let’s get you dressed for royalty.”
“Dressed for royalty” to me meant a black vest and powder blue cravat; to Gaude, it meant a sea of ruffles and a string of pearls long enough to strangle a horse. Guess who won.
* * *
By the time the carriage stopped at the Hôtel Camus the bleeding had mostly stopped. I dabbed at my lip with my cravat—burgundy instead of blue, my one fortunate concession to Gaude—and stepped out on the sidewalk with my head held high. Winning a fight always puts me in a good mood.
I won another fight in the waiting room of the Hôtel, where the little bespectacled secretary though he was going to make me wait, until my landlord-glare proved otherwise. I found the King in his dining room, which was way up on the third story overlooking the street. I didn’t know if he was happy to see me or not—I was beginning to think that apple-bite smile was permanent.
“Livia,” he said, bright and a little breathy. I think he wanted to shake my hand, but I remembered my manners at the last moment and bowed to kiss his. It made him blush like a bride.
He was beautiful, really and truly. It was the kind of beauty that would make some people desire him, and others envy him, and still others—the ones like me—hopelessly, horrendously lost. I didn’t know what to say to him, didn’t know if the mind behind those gorgeous eyes would comprehend anything I did say. I didn’t want him, not his looks and not his attention. I wanted to burst into Camden’s rooms, hand him the dagger from my boot, and tell him to do his own dirty work.
But I was a ward boss, and I was used to doing things I didn’t want to do.
We ate. I don’t know what anything tasted like, but it smelled like summer, grass and sky and blossoms. The dagger itched against my ankle, but I didn’t dare reach down to adjust it. The King told me stories—not personal stories, which he claimed not to remember and I wouldn’t have enjoyed anyway. He told me kid’s stories about the Assembly of Flowers and about the Lily Boss and the Weed Boss and what happened when they met on the battlefield, and a hundred other stories I had heard as a girl—only then it was the Court of Flowers, and the Weed Boss was calling herself a Queen.
In return, I told him about my childhood in Olimpia, about catching grasshoppers in jars in the abandoned lots on Gyre Street, about stealing apples from the trees in the back of Saint Banbury’s cemetery and selling them to mourners at the gate, about the blue-eyed boy who had bought me pastries wrapped in blue paper on the day they hung the king. He smiled and laughed, as I had at his stories. He treated Bastian’s death like it was nothing but a quaint dating convention, 1 Thermidor of Year I.
Then dinner was over, and the King came around to stand behind my chair, and I felt his soft warm hands on my shoulders and the back of my neck. I didn’t like it but I’d expected it, so I managed to grit out a smile and let his hands do what they wanted to.
His lips were at my ear, but instead of kissing me, he whispered, “You wanted to know my name. Well, the Assembly hasn’t decided anything official, but I’ll tell you the one I’ve always wanted.”
The conversation at the festival came back to me in a rush, and I just managed to save myself from answering the same way I had at the water bucket. I fluttered my eyelashes, the way Gaude would’ve, and made my breathing hard and kind of panting.
But I must have been doing it wrong, because instead of falling over me in passion or whatever the fuck he should’ve done, he straightened and walked back to his chair.
I cut the act fast. “What is it? Your name, I mean.”
“Sylvain.”
It was a blue name, deep green-blue like a forest. I looked at him and shrugged. “It fits, but we’ve already had a King Sylvain. Four of them, actually.”
“Then I’ll be Sylvain the Fifth.”
“No.” I reached for a grape from the bowl in the center of the table, just realizing at the last moment that it was wax. I let my hand drop roughly. “Too pompous. You need an epithet.”
“A what?”
“You know, an epithet. The Good, the Beautiful, the Flesh-Eater. Something descriptive. Something unique.”
We spent the rest of the night talking about kings and epithets and the more colorful stories I could remember to go with them. By the time I got home it was morning, and I didn’t remember what I had been doing out in the first place.
No, that’s a lie. I did remember.
I was supposed to be killing a king.
* * *
The next time we met, it was by the Rivermill, where I had just gotten a job for young master Varlow. I don’t know how Sylvain shook his keepers, but he had, and now he was standing in front of me with the river-spray in his hair and the smell of apple blossoms just everywhere.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “About kings.”
“Probably a good idea, you being one and all.”
He blushed at that. Beautiful little fool. “No, I mean…what you were telling me before. About Sylvain the First and Bastian and all them.”
“What about them?”
“Well, how did they do it? How did they get to be kings?”
“Shit, Sylvain, they were born into it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, their mommies and daddies—and on back for as long as anybody can remember—were royalty. That made them King. Or Queen,” I added, to be fair. Didn’t want to neglect Queen Parsifal the Flesh-Eater.
“Oh,” the King said in a teeny-tiny voice. “That’s not—I mean, my parents weren’t even—”
“Yeah, well, you’re different.” And I deserve a medal or something for keeping
my mouth from saying scapegoat. “The Assembly picked you.”
“I know that. But why, Livia? Why me?”
I shrugged. “Why did God pick the old kings the way he did? Trying to understand that stuff is like trying to stick your finger through a needle’s eye.”
He was quiet for a few moments—thinking. Shit, I felt like it was the first time anyone but me or Camden had done it, and for a moment I considered sharing that medal.
“Did God really pick the old kings?”
“That’s what they used to say. Only it’ll probably get you hung now, so I wouldn’t go shouting it or anything.”
He was bewildered, just fucking lost, like a kitten at the bottom of a well. You could see it in the way he was standing. None of it made sense to him. Most likely he’d learned all the Assembly’s catch-phrases about the crime of power, and everybody’s equal, equal or die—and now here he was, king because he was pretty and had a pretty voice and the people needed someone to hate, only he couldn’t rule and probably wouldn’t’ve wanted to if he could, and now I was telling him that God had gone and hand-picked his predecessors—it was just fucked up. Almost as fucked up as the fact that we were probably going to kill each other.
“Thanks,” he said at last, not like he meant it but like he’d trained himself to say it when he heard something he didn’t like. “You’ve given me a lot to think about.”
He went—not the way he’d come, but over the bridge by the water wheel. The blossom-scent went with him, leaving me with the heat and the fishy-green river. All I could think was stupid, like one of the sayings of the philosophes, and it went something like this:
Kings used to be made by God. This one was made by men. And I don’t know who I trust more.
* * *
Jaque was the only Assemblyman I knew in a personal way. He’d got himself voted up from Eustache about two years after Bastian died, so it wasn’t like he was a regicide or anything, but he was still a nasty piece of shit. He liked to quote the philosophes and the Encyclopaedia, even though he didn’t understand a word of them, and he dressed like nobody’d told him matching colors had been invented. Oh, and he hired a dumb kid to jump me in an alley once. That’s how we’d gotten to know each other.
After his kid failed the job—and really failed it, I mean, took maybe a nick out of my ear and that’s about it—Jaque had taken to dropping by my rooms and telling me how much of a stain I was on the robe of Liberty. Etc, etc, as Camden would say. Jaque was going to get himself lynched one of these days, but it wasn’t worth my effort to pay a plebe to do it. Anyway, his delightful little visits dropped out about the time they dusted off the crown for Sylvain.
So just imagine how pleased I was to come home and find him in my parlor with the flowers and the glass and the fucking stuffed birds.
“Where were you?” he prissed.
“I don’t owe you explanations,” I said. The Rivermill contract for young Varlow was itching me beneath my bodice, but I didn’t feel like showing it off to Jaque. “What are you doing here?”
Looking for a new job as the world’s ugliest gargoyle, judging from his face. “The Assembly requests that you keep your grubby warders away from the King.”
“And what does His Majesty say about this?”
“Nothing. He hasn’t been told.”
“Well.” I folded my arms across my chest. “The Assembly’s got a record of forgetting to do little things like that.”
“You’re not stupid, Livy. You know why we need him.”
“Oh, I know.” Damn this, but I wasn’t going to keep standing like a hire-girl in the middle of my own parlor. I sat down on the chaperone sofa and rested my elbows on my knees. “When are you going to kill us, anyway?”
“I don’t know what—” But he saw my face and quit that line in a hurry. “You’re already outside the law.”
And a stain on the robe of Liberty. Yeah, I remembered. “Come and talk to me when you have something to say. Now go teach the plebes how to play with their toys.”
He spat on the glass of the nearest display. “They like him, you know.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“And they like you.”
“Yeah. Your point?”
Two points, actually—his sharp little canine teeth, bared by the tug of his thin gray lips. “Which of you do you think they like more?”
That got me, but not the way he’d meant it. I let him get all the way to the door before I threw my dart.
“They shouldn’t have to choose, you know.”
Some philosophe had said that, that children shouldn’t have to choose between the nourishing parent and the loving one. I don’t know if Jaque understood me, but he slammed the door loud enough to shake the flowers in their glass.
* * *
If I wasn’t careful, it was going to become a routine.
I got up at dawn—typically to the sound of Gaude snoring on my sofa—and went down to Walischa’s Bakery, where they gave me a batch of day-old rolls for a quarter-penny each. I gave the rolls to the kids down by Philomel’s Park—some would eat them, some would sell them to the shop-girls for a halfpenny. Sometimes I saved one for myself, but the heat did nasty things to my appetite. Halfway through Messidor I wasn’t eating much more than fruit.
Then I checked in on my warders, making sure the pipes were working and the shops were paying and the kids had enough to eat. Sometimes I collected rent; other times I gave loans.
And I kept running into Sylvain.
I don’t know who tipped him off, or else how he guessed, that he could find me down in Olimpia. I don’t even know if it was me he was looking for. But he showed up like a wine stain, in all the weirdest places. Philomel’s Park, where I was handing out rolls. Saint Banbury’s Cemetery, where I was checking up on a warder who’d taken a job as a gravedigger. Even the jewelry shop where I’d stopped to buy a hairpin that didn’t have anything at all to do with being Boss Livy.
Like I said, I don’t know if it was because of me. He talked to everybody—bought rolls from the kids, flirted with the shop-girls, even left hyacinths and delphinium on the graves at Saint Banbury’s. He wasn’t acting like the Assembly’s toy. He was acting like a ward boss.
But not a boss like Gaude, who did what she had to and kept Acacey in her clumsy hands but wouldn’t go an inch farther, and not like Camden, who once had a woman shot because she couldn’t pay rent—and not even a boss like me, who argued with Gaude and got frustrated with the Varlows’ accent and sometimes bought ruby hairpins with rent money. He managed the people perfectly and didn’t even seem aware that he was doing it.
“What did you want to be?” I asked one day as we walked through the hedge maze in the park. I didn’t like mazes but he did, and besides, it was the only path that wasn’t hot enough to melt my shoes. “Before you became king, I mean.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I never really thought about it. It wasn’t as if—” He broke off with a soft laugh, like pebbles rolling against each other. “It wasn’t as if I had options. I’m an orphan, you know—no kind of family at all. The ward boss found jobs for me, but nothing…pleasant. And it wasn’t like I had any kind of skills. I liked to think.” He smiled so brilliantly it hurt. “But I was never any good at it.”
“Philosophe.”
“No.” He said it gently, but there was an edge to it. “Poor boys don’t become philosophers.”
“No, they just become kings.”
He laughed at that. We turned a corner and found ourselves in the center of the maze, where a gazebo covered in blue moss looked like a pillar holding up the sky. We sat on the bench inside and tossed pebbles into the green lily-ponds. It was real easy, times like that, to forget that we were going to kill each other.
* * *
Camden sent me a letter on 28 Messidor.
Darling Livy, it said in pretty sprawly letters, it has not escaped my attention that His Majesty is still a fucking pain in our collective neck. How much
longer are you going to wait to remedy this situation?
Yeah, you can bet on the answer.
Too fucking long.
* * *
So I opened the door, and there was Gaude looking like a hot and sticky pastry, and I was just thinking now where have I heard this one before when I saw that she was crying.
“Shit, Gaude, what is it?” I stepped back to let her in—she’d claimed the parlor, after all—but she didn’t move. “Camden wanting to see me again? Without you trying to jump him at every available opportunity?”
I swear I didn’t see her fist move. All of a sudden there was this wet crunch, and my face was stabbing pain and a sheet of blood was sticky across my lips. I caught myself against the door frame and shook there as Gaude pulled out a yellow handkerchief and wiped the blood from her knuckles.
“Camden is in jail,” she said, in the flattest voice I’d ever heard from her. “And your precious fucking little king is going to hang him.”
“No,” I said. Not because I didn’t believe it, but because I had to say something.
Gaude’s fist came up again, but half-heartedly, and this time I dodged it. “Yes,” she said, again and again. “Yes, yes, yes. And it’s your fucking fault, Livy. You’re a fucking coward and it’s all your fault!”
“I’ll talk to the King,” I said quickly. “It’s the Assembly that’s pulling this, not him. He’s not going to hang Camden. He knows Eustache needs a boss.”
“He doesn’t know nothing about bosses, you fucking bitch. Why the fuck didn’t you kill him? Why the fuck—”
I slapped her, because she was asking for it. It sobered her up some. “I’m going now,” I said, and wiped my lips with my sleeve. “Keep your fat ass in this room and don’t open the door for anybody until I get home. Do you hear me?”
“Yeah, I hear you,” Gaude said.
“Good,” I said. Not that it was but, well, let’s just say I ain’t stupid. I know when a house is on fire, and just then the flames were about to make a leap up to the roof.
* * *
Bribing your way into prison is a bad idea. I mean, really bad, like hand-feeding a rabid dog. It’s just too easy to close the door once it’s open, and with you on the wrong side of it. And there’s a reason the Assembly pays its guards like sin.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #59 Page 2