by Lane Robins
She limped over to the edge of the street and fell, her blood dampening the dirt. She waited for the strength in her legs to come back, and she turned the tarnished ring over and over and over in her hands, peering in to see the words within. Only each other at the last. Heart pounding, breath seizing in her chest, refusing to cry, she clenched the ring in fisted hands and curled herself around it.
WHEN HER BREATH RETURNED, she rose and stumbled home—a room with two women, one old bed, a press of mismatched clothing, and some few bits of furniture salvaged out of some refuse bin closer to the civilized parts of the city and hauled back to the Relicts.
Nearest the door, a pale, enervated woman swayed in her seat, her hand loosely caging a bottle of Petal, a potent mixture of Laudable syrup and cheap spirits that turned any grief to a distant dream. She stared into the air as if she could see her past unfolding behind her, her days as the pampered daughter of a lord. Before Janus. Before the stigma of bearing a child, unwed, sent her to the Relicts to find a new life as occasional whore and mother, though she was dismal at both. Her customers only ever visited once, and that for the novelty of fucking an aristocrat. Her sole act of generosity had been to teach the children to read and write, though she leavened that by raining stinging slaps whenever their accents faltered into Relicts cant.
The other woman, Ella, sat on a rough footstool near the fire, coaxing it into life with callused hands. She had been at her peak of attractiveness when she birthed Miranda, fourteen long years ago, and her looks had faded to nonexistence. Her hair, coarse, gray, and unconfined, stood out in rough snarls. But unlike Celia, she could at least manage a gap-toothed smile and a bit of routine coquetry for her progressively more infrequent customers.
Miranda banged the door shut and came in, leaning on her stick. When Miranda moved into the dim glow of the fire, Ella’s mouth twisted in dismay. “Not your face. What have you done, child?” Ella cried.
Miranda’s rage simmered. Both women were too worn to be successful whores. But Miranda was meant to be a courtesan, meant to pass her earnings on to the older women.
Ella rushed to the clothespress and pulled out a wooden box. In a different world, it might have held a lady’s less valuable jewels. Here it held the tricks of a whore’s trade: powders and cosmetics, abortifacients, and a scattering of remedies. She dragged Miranda before the footstool, tutting and fretting.
Miranda yanked her arm free. “Celia, they took him.”
The pale woman roused herself to a reluctant semblance of life, setting the bottle on the earthen floor. “And who took him from you?”
“A town buck in a blue and gold carriage with a crest.” Miranda kept her voice calm, but tears welled with the effort. She was only waiting for the vital information—a name. Without an identity, there was no one to fight.
“Last, it seems,” Celia said, picking up her bottle and letting the thick fluid trickle into her open mouth.
“Last?” Miranda said. The name meant nothing, a word in a ring. It should have sounded in her ears like a clarion. But her enemy’s name meant nothing. Ella took the opportunity to pull her close, dabbing the long rip along Miranda’s jaw with powdered alum before packing it with saved cobweb.
“How do I get him back?” Miranda asked, breaking in that instant years of tradition. She and Janus had learned long ago that their mothers had no answers to the slightest of dilemmas.
“Hush,” her mother said. “Don’t you talk while I’m cleaning this out.”
“Get him back?” Celia repeated. “Why? He only caused us pain and trouble. Let he and Last spite each other and spare us.”
“’Tis a pity about the scarring there’ll be,” Ella said, finishing her ministrations and turning Miranda’s face in her hands, judging the results. “Still—such eyes, such a mouth…what a price you’ll command and never mind the scar. And with Janus gone, well, you’ll get over that stubbornness of yours and do as I say.”
Miranda screamed, an animal cry of wordless rejection and rage. She shoved her mother with enough force to send the older woman to the floor. Celia’s hooded eyes widened even in her drug-induced haze. Miranda dropped her hand to the rough-edged knife her mother used to shave bits of wood for the fire, knotted her fist around the handle. How dare they simply dismiss him as if he were of no more importance than a customer? She would make them regret their callousness. She stood, hand shaking, body tensed, waiting for release; then, unclenching her fingers, she let the knife fall.
Why kill them? she thought. At this moment, they were dead to her, and she knew that without Janus, without her, the two women would fade away. The rage faded as fast as it came, leaving contempt. She despised their sickening passivity, their languid acceptance of their decaying lives. She would not accept the same.
Miranda paused in the doorway, taking a long last look. She was leaving now. She would never see these women, this room again. She would not rue it.
Night had folded over the Relicts, and the only lights were the small fires set by the desperate, conflagrations of wood and burning cloth. Miranda felt her way down the street with her stick, tapping before her like the blind beggars who worked the boundary between moneyed and poor.
A name was all she had, and it was not enough, but she headed for the border of the Relicts as if she were welcome on the other side. In the worst section, while climbing over fallen masonry, she put her foot through a toppled door, spiderwebbed with rot, and tumbled headlong. She plummeted down the heap, scraping her hands, her shins, and landing with a painful crash against a stone slab. She fought tears, tried to rise, but stumbled and fell to one knee. Her breath labored and the wounds of the day, so long suppressed, made themselves felt with belly-wrenching intensity. Clawing at the stone slab, her fingers caught on rough frescoes, and she drew herself up, found it was a wall. Leaning close, she made out wings and knew what the building was, though she’d never seen it before.
The room was even more damaged than most Relict buildings; the walls had all fallen inward, making a precarious lean-to of stone, but then, this was a temple to Black-Winged Ani, She who had spread ruin through the Relicts. Carved wings created a slanted tunnel, which Miranda crept through. Her destination was the altar. But not to pray for a dead god’s aid. Even in this extremity, Miranda was not stirred to begging.
The altar was the sturdiest place in the temple, sheltered deep within the wreckage. Miranda crawled beneath it, let her body relax. In the darkness, the grinning face of Black-Winged Ani stared down at her from every angle. Miranda tucked herself into a ball, wrapping herself around the stick, missing Janus’s warmth with an ache greater than the throbbing wounds. She fell asleep to the whispering mutter of prayers, trapped like memories in the stone, fell asleep to Ani’s looming scrutiny.
Outside, a cold wind rose.
· 1 ·
Maledicte lived and Maledicte died
And only at his birth did anybody cry.
How many people did he kill?
One, two, three…
—Children’s skipping song
B ARON VORNATTI WAS AN OLD MAN, hunched in his chair, staring at the wonders of his extensive library with a jaded and bleary eye. A sable pelt poured over his wasted legs. Absently, he ruffled the furs while he flipped pages of the book of pornographic woodcuts on his lap. A hedonist and a sensualist, he was much withered by time and pain; on a cold winter’s night, he fondled old memories as he once did flesh. But all his precious memories, of women’s softly rounded shoulders and mounded breasts, the sweet juncture at their thighs, of young men’s ripe buttocks, greedy mouths, and strong square hands, all these could not distract him as they used to do.
His back flared and spasmed. His glassy eyes flew to the old grandfather clock by the door. “Gilly,” he roared. “Time!”
Grinding his teeth, Vornatti sagged forward in the chair to ease the strain. The book fell to the floor, splayed on opened pages. He wanted a distraction, something beyond the torment of his bones and
illusory remembrances of the flesh. Once, he had found engrossment in the bloody game of court intrigue, but even that had palled with his mastery of it.
In the distant recesses of the library, beyond the firelight, beyond the lamps, glass broke with a sound like cracking ice. Slow, crunching footsteps echoed.
A chill serpent of air wound around Vornatti’s ankles, hissing with blown snow.
“My lord?” Gilly said from the doorway. The large silver tray of drug and drink was dwarfed in his hands. His voice put a temporary stop to the footsteps.
“We have an intruder,” Vornatti said, straightening with a wince.
“Who’s there?” Gilly said, as the footsteps resumed their slow progress, now thudding against the bare wooden floor. He squinted against the glare of the built-up fire, set the tray down on the thick carpeting beside Vornatti.
The footsteps gained the carpet and disappeared in the muffling softness. Gilly lifted a book pole, holding it across his chest, the hook facing the shadows.
“Put it down, damn it, Gilly. Put it down, and give me my Elysia. Let the bastard wait.”
Gilly hesitated, but finally set the book pole back against Vornatti’s chair.
He bent, turning his back to the shadows, and cradled Vornatti’s withered arm against his own. He drew the Elysia into the glass syringe in a cloudy swirl that held something of its origin in it, the elixir left in Naga’s serpent-scaled wake. Letting it settle long enough so that the contents stopped their eddying, Gilly pushed the needle into the old man’s ropy veins. Vornatti closed his eyes as Gilly worked the plunger, hissed against the bite of it in his blood.
When Gilly looked up, they were no longer alone in the circle of firelight. The intruder shared it with them. It was only a boy, shivering in his thin shirt, blue at the lips. He had shadowed eyes, made darker by a cropped tumble of black curls that seemed to spread shadow out behind him. A thin scar sliced along the left side of his jaw, and he held his right hand behind his back.
Vornatti’s eyes opened and he smiled as if a bit of his past had come back in salacious detail.
“What young toothsome have we here?” he murmured, lazy on a release of pain and burgeoning euphoria. “Gilly, only look what the gods have brought me.”
“Be silent, old man,” the boy said, drawing his arm from behind him. In his hand was a sword.
And such a sword. It was black-bladed, black-hilted. The pommel was a burnished mirrorstone, and the edges were so sharp as to seem blurred in human sight. The cross-hilt was made of stilled, dark wings with wickedly edged feathers more reminiscent of daggers than of flight. Like some remnant from the god-touched times, the sword radiated presence beyond its workmanship.
“Are you Last?” The boy raised the sword, its glitter matched by the wildness in his eyes.
Vornatti wheezed into laughter, slapping Gilly’s arm, startling him. “Last.”
The boy’s face grew red temper lines around the jaw and nose. The scar flared to whiteness. “Don’t laugh at me.” He pushed the blade forward; Vornatti parried with the book pole, still laughing despite the slice the sword had carved in the wood.
Gilly stepped between Vornatti and the blade, and Vornatti stilled his laughter. “There is more than one noble house in Graston. No, boy, I am not Last. Look here.” He thumped the end of the pole on the carpet. “Gilly, get your big feet out of the way and fetch us all drinks.”
He stabbed at the floor again. “See that, boy?”
The carpet was burgundy and blue, and in the center a fantastical creature writhed in golden embroidery.
“I am Vornatti, Baron Vornatti, since you are not likely to know that. An Itarusine subject, now living in Antyre; Aris’s brother-by-law, and accountant. The winged serpent is my crest; Last’s crest is a twisted hourglass, and his motto is ‘only a Last at the last.’ Smug bastard.”
“Who’s Aris?” the boy said.
“Our king,” Gilly said, carrying the tray to the table.
“Oh. Him.” The boy studied the elaborate embroidery on the carpet, the slippers Vornatti wore, the crest imprinted on the spine of the long-forgotten book.
“Are you listening, boy?”
The boy didn’t answer, but his dark eyes flickered to Vornatti’s face, studying the sagging, spotted flesh, the dark rheumy eyes. He let the sword point lower to threaten the floor. “Where do I find Last?”
“What sends you seeking him, blade in hand? Answer me that, first.”
The boy frowned, but visibly needed the answer too badly to play coy. “Last took Janus from me, and left me for dead. I will return the favor, reclaim Janus and leave Last dead. Though I will be less careless and see his heart stop before I go.”
So much emotion was invested in the reply that it seemed a cantrip or incantation, and as rote as a nightly prayer. It silenced Vornatti, and the only sound was Gilly and the chinking of crystal as he poured the requested drinks.
“I doubt that was Last himself,” Vornatti said. “He so rarely soils his hands, and is far more dedicated to a task once undertaken. If it were Last, make no doubts, you would be dead, boy. But who is Janus to warrant such attention?” Vornatti took the goblet Gilly offered him, sipped at the steaming negus. He gestured to Gilly, and Gilly turned the second goblet, the glass meant for him more usually, toward the boy.
Distrust furrowed the boy’s features, and he finally said, “The earl of Last’s bastard son.”
“Last has no living children,” Vornatti said.
Gilly pressed the cup into the boy’s left hand, spoke to Vornatti. “There were rumors. You remember. Celia Rosamunde, the admiral’s daughter.”
“Oh. Her.” Vornatti mocked the boy’s earlier words. “That weak-willed, wanton wench.” He laughed at his own wordplay, and to Gilly’s surprise, even the boy flickered a bitter smile.
“I thought she died,” Vornatti said.
“She was disowned and abandoned when her condition became evident. I heard she made her way to the Relicts and died there.”
“Not yet,” the boy said. Across the room, the boy’s stomach growled audibly. He raised the goblet, and swallowed three great gulps of the sweetened, spiced wine, throat working. Making a face, he dropped the goblet to the carpet.
Vornatti shifted his slippers away from the spreading stain. “If you didn’t want it, all you had to do was give it to Gilly,” Vornatti said, without heat, his mind occupied. “He reclaimed his bastard son? I had heard that Last’s newest wife died of childbed fever and the babe of milksickness.”
“This talk means nothing,” the boy said. “Tell me where to find Last.” He dragged the sword point up to menace Vornatti once more.
“Let’s have less of that,” Vornatti said. “It grows wearisome. I will tell you what you want to know, for all the good it will do you. Last’s estate is yet ten miles from here. Will you walk it in ice and snow?”
The boy’s face sagged into momentary despair, and then the determined mask slid back into place. He started for the door.
Vornatti caught his arm with a sudden movement, surprising in a man so seemingly infirm. “Stay the night,” Vornatti said. He stroked the boy’s scarred cheek.
The boy jerked free, no longer listening, caught up in his own thoughts, bent on following some inner drive that denied obstruction.
“Gilly,” Vornatti commanded.
Reluctantly, Gilly roused himself to comply, though had he a choice, he’d be relieved to see the boy’s back. Still, obedience was ingrained, and he stepped before the boy, keeping a wary eye on the boy’s sword hand. “Come on then. Humor the old bastard and stay.”
The boy halted, staring at Gilly. “Get out of my way.” Shadows danced in the depths of his eyes, and Gilly stepped out of easy harm’s range. Still, he balked the boy at the door.
Gilly was good at anticipating his Lord’s requests. From the moment that Vornatti smiled at the intruder, Gilly knew he desired the boy. Other intruders had been summarily and unpleasantly dealt w
ith, the pistol fished out from beneath Vornatti’s lap furs, not teased to flushing. With that in the forefront of his thoughts, Gilly had drugged the boy’s negus, the Laudable’s sticky sweetness masked by the honeyed spice of the heated wine. Gilly was surprised the boy still stood. A single mouthful should have been enough to incapacitate one skinny youth.
Still more surprising was the force of the boy’s presence. Gilly found it harder and harder to keep himself blocking the boy’s egress. Only Vornatti’s expression of cupidity and interest kept Gilly still. Vornatti’s mood could shift like the tide; he’d grow bored soon enough with the filthy, bad-tempered lad, but until that moment occurred, Gilly had best obey or suffer Vornatti’s own bad temper.
“I’ll pay you,” Gilly said, inspired. “Enough to rent a hack to Lastrest in the morning.”
The boy put out a hand, palm upward, waiting.
“In the morning,” Gilly said.
His hand clutched the black hilt. “I should trust you after you’ve drugged the wine?”
Gilly saw it now, the slackening mouth, the loosening fingers. The signs he had expected long minutes ago—but the boy was fighting the effects of the drug with the considerable force of his will. Gilly wondered how much longer the boy could stay standing.
“I’m tired, Gilly. Show our guest to a room and be done with it.” Vornatti leaned forward, creaked out of his chair, and reached for his fallen book. “The painted room, mind you.”
Gilly nodded. He bowed to the young savage as if he were truly a guest, and said, “Follow me.”
His back was tense with his concern that the boy was not following, and tense with the cat-feeling that the boy was following, albeit on footsteps too silent to hear. Gilly turned and found the boy paused in the long stone-paved hall.