by Lane Robins
Behind him, hands on the high back of the throne, was a dog-masked man with blue eyes. Adi looked up at him and barked, echoing Hela with a curious, imitative precision. Janus smiled and straightened his cousin’s mask once again. He raised his head and met Maledicte’s gaze, smiling.
“Will you dance?” a woman asked in Maledicte’s ear, her hands on his shoulders, her breath on his nape.
Despite the dulcet words, there was a edge to the voice that Maledicte recognized. He knew her, mask or no mask.
“What reason will you give me, lady?” he asked, taking in her costume, the twin to his own in spirit if not in shade. Where Maledicte’s feathers were un-seasonably black, Mirabile’s were unnaturally white, though more in tune with fashion. Her beaked mask had rubies crusted around the eyeholes, the only spark of color about her. Even her hair had been powdered to whiteness.
“Think how well we will look,” she coaxed.
“Is that more important than enmity and spite?” Despite his glibness, her presence made him wary. He had not forgotten his atypical docility alongside her in Jackal Park, the way he had bent to the certainty in her eyes. Time had not diminished that strength.
“Infinitely,” she said, holding out her hands. He had been wrong about the rubies being her only color. Her ungloved hands showed red nails, painted like any harlot’s.
Maledicte drew back, turned, and found his path thwarted by a swaying mirror. Reflected in it, Janus bowed over a young woman’s hand, drew her into a dance with a smile while Aris looked on approvingly. Mirabile ghosted up, a shimmer of red-eyed white in the mirror, and Maledicte found his hands entwined with hers as the dance began.
They danced in silence, Maledicte fighting the drowning sensation of being nothing more than her shadow, of having as little mind as a shadow—He forced through the numbness finally, his voice rough, “What do you want?”
“Found your tongue, I see,” Mirabile said. Her lips curled in approval. “I was sure you would.”
“Found my tongue, my will, and my senses,” Maledicte said. He forced his steps to a halt, and freed his hands. “I am done with you—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mirabile said, and fit herself back into his arms as if his rejection had only been a flirt within the dance pattern. “You ask me what I want? Nothing so dire as to make you frown so. I only wish to aid you. And in doing so, aid myself. Our common goal—” Her eyes darkened as his grip tightened, grinding the small bones of her hands together, but showed no other sign of pain.
Maledicte said, “What have we in common? Nothing.”
“Nearly everything,” she said.
Mask to mask, Maledicte faltered a step, seeing Ani mirrored in her, and made no reply. She smiled sweetly, savagely at him, and said, swaying close, her voice a whisper, “You think your task is done, your compact fulfilled? When Last’s death is not on your hands, but on those of your impetuous lover, who stole your kill?”
For one moment, Maledicte knew sympathy for Gilly, who preached caution with an ever-increasing avidity. For Mirabile to speak so in the king’s presence, among witnesses, for her even to know— Maledicte shivered, suddenly unsure of who he held in his arms, Mirabile, the vicious-tongued harridan, or Ani Herself. The pale feathers on her costume brushed his, whispering.
Mirabile leaned in, warmed his cheek with her breath, and said, “Intercessors dream of the gods through an imperfect window, but I am one of Ani’s chosen, and I…I dream of you. I saw you in the blurred shadows of sleep, you and Ixion, killing him.”
“How dull your wits have become,” Maledicte said. “To think to entertain me with past events that I experienced for myself.” His mouth dried with unease. Once he had chastised Gilly for dreaming of him; to have Mirabile doing the same was far less bearable. Were they not the cynosure of the room, he would claw her eyes out that she not see him, tear her tongue out that she not speak of him.
“Now, now,” she said. “Ixion favored you when he struck, whether you know it or not. To keep Ani close, clutched in your heart, can only be a boon. She grants such gifts—” Mirabile’s eyes fluttered, opened again, russet eyes red-tinted as if they had taken on some of the rubies’ bloody splendor. “Everything you ask, She grants, and all you need do is allow Her in as deep as She will go. You’ve asked so very little of Her, caught up in your petty obsession with Ixion. My advice is simple. Forgo this business of love and settle into power.”
“Such things you say,” Maledicte said. “I believe you are mad.” Over the wheeling of the dance, the flashing mirrors, the rustling of feathers meeting feathers, he saw Gilly watching, concern etched in his furrowed brow.
“Why play the fool?” she said. “We are kin, the children of the carrion crow. Be my complement, my comrade, and we will do as we will. Isn’t it seductive, my dark cavalier, to see the knowledge in their eyes—that their lives are in your hands or mine?”
“Your hands are too dainty for such work,” Maledicte said. “You’re only a spoiled aristocrat and delusional with despair. A gift of dreaming? Dreams are useless compared to a blade.”
She tensed her fingers on his hands, digging her nails into the skin until blood welled.
“Weakling,” she said. “Gifted and you do nothing with it. Take power for yourself—it will not satisfy you otherwise. Will you watch your lover rise, and stay weak as a woman, at his mercy?”
Maledicte stared at the distortion in her fine features as she shivered with rage. It touched ice to his bones, the realization that she was his mirror, or worse, his future. She had given herself wholly to Ani, and she was as terrible as a specter.
“Ani drives you mad,” Maledicte said. “I will not join you on that road. Your vaunted alliance would be only to lull me into complacency so you could stab me in the back.”
“Knife work is your métier. I prefer subtler arts. But you doubt me, doubt my skills?” She smiled, her eyes going distant. “The ice,” she said, “breaks under the ship’s prow. Shall I see what can be stirred to the surface? Bring your sins to light? I shall prove my skills to you, tonight,” she said, curtseying and disappearing behind the nearest partition.
Sweat broke out along Maledicte’s back and brow. Cold settled in his stomach. His hands shook, and he jammed them against his sides, striding purposefully for the doors and outside air. Gilly shadowed him, and Maledicte turned. “Back off, Gilly. I’m in a killing mood.”
“You’re bleeding,” Gilly said, flinching as Maledicte snarled.
Maledicte forced his temper down, the pain radiating up his torn hands, and said plainly, “I believe the bitch poisoned me. Tested me.” He moved onward to the balcony, shivering, hunching his shoulders against that spreading internal chill.
“Mal—” Gilly said, voice tight.
“I’m thirsty,” Maledicte said. “Bring me a drink.” His hand swung again and again to his sword hilt; droplets of blood flecked the marble floor. Maledicte leaned over the edge of the rail, panting a little, then recovered his poise. “Go on, Gilly. I’ll be here. I’ve got my mask, after all, to protect me from death.”
On the balcony, Maledicte watched the small wounds puff and swell with a near-indifferent eye, though he shook with chill and his feathers grew spiky with his sweat. Numbness swept over him, stiffening his legs, arms, and face, as if the chill in his veins had turned to ice. His breath labored. Then a convulsive shudder shook him and the small wounds spat back blood and something darker, something that trickled like a spill of greenish syrup. It pooled on the stone at his feet, and when it was done, he licked the scratches closed.
“Mal?” Janus came out of the light, into the shadows on the balcony, and Maledicte rose from his crouch.
“Here.”
“And hale? Gilly spun me a tale of poison,” Janus said, setting the glass on the balcony railing. It chattered and clinked against the stone. The velvet quality to his voice was ruffled. “I should have known he lied.”
“Gilly so rarely lies,” Maledicte said
, picking up the glass and draining it. His raw throat eased.
Janus sucked his breath in, grabbed Maledicte to him, touching his damp skin and peering into his eyes. “You seem well enough.”
“Yes,” Maledicte said, curling into Janus’s arms. Their hearts beat steadily against each other’s: Janus’s slowing as his fright eased, and Maledicte’s speeding up from the dirge it had been dragged into by Mirabile’s poison.
Janus sighed into Maledicte’s hair, bent to kiss him, and finding the mask’s black beak in his way, pushed it off.
Maledicte moved into Janus, pressing against him as if they could become one creature. Give up love for power? Mirabile was madder than he thought.
Too soon, Janus broke the embrace. “I must return.”
“I have not touched you in weeks. A single kiss is all you spare me? Was this only an interlude in your quest for social acceptance?” Maledicte’s fear made him bitter. The poison came too close, woke fears long dormant, reminding him that the world could separate them at any time, and still, Janus chose to play games. “Should I thank you for the time you’ve condescended to grant me?”
“Mal,” Janus said. “I’m only trying to keep tabs on what is being said regarding Last, assuring Aris that you are blameless in Last’s disappearance. And with Echo replacing Love as Counselor, I have much to defend against. But I’ll come home tonight. I’ve missed you.” He tugged Maledicte’s hands to his chest, pressed them to his heart. Maledicte brought Janus’s mouth to his again. The kiss lingered, but once more Janus broke it, this time walking away into the court.
Maledicte stared after him for a hungry moment, wishing he could make Janus see that they needed none of this. Let them retire to Lastrest, out of Mirabile’s threats and entreaties, out of sight of Aris and his attempts to continue the line. But he had sworn to aid Janus, and Janus wanted the court, the title—Aris would likely reward a marriage with the title, once Last’s death was accepted, and though that was what they wished, the idea of it woke some slow-burning worry in Maledicte’s chest that he couldn’t understand.
Spying Janus’s earlier dance partner, the tiny girl dressed as a wood nymph in green and gold, with a veil instead of a mask, Maledicte deserted the balcony abruptly.
He made his bow before the wood nymph’s chaperone and took the nymph’s hands. A mask was no aid to the little doll girl; her lack of inches made her obvious.
They danced in stifling silence for a full four measures before Maledicte said, “If you hate me so much that you can’t be bothered to be civil, I wonder why you agreed to dance at all. Surely no one would fault you for turning me away.”
She looked up at him and flushed, the redness visible through the fine pale linen of her veil. Maledicte waited until the color had faded, then provoked it again. “Can’t you answer me? Or were you never trained to talk?”
“Mother’s desperate,” she said in a breathless rush. “I have six younger sisters waiting for me to wed.”
“Does she think to attach me?” he asked, incredulous. “I might as well be the plague for a chit like you.” Compared to these noblewomen, Ella was an amateur schemer when it came to profiting from her daughter.
She lowered her head and mumbled some words that, though unintelligible, made her flush again.
Impatient, he tilted her head up, his bare fingers beneath the delicate veil. Her heart raced beneath his fingertips. “Be brave, girl. You’re masked. Perhaps I don’t even know who you are—as improbable as it seems.”
The girl either took heart or umbrage, it was hard to tell, but the result was the same. She raised her head, a grim determination settling on her blurred face, and said. “She wants me to wed Lord Last.”
Maledicte’s temper turned in his belly. “Brazen or desperate indeed. To use Janus’s lover to meet him. Does she want me to tell you what pleases him? What makes him sweat and cry out? What his skin feels like under my lips? What he says to me while we’re abed?”
The girl’s breathing quickened in shock. Such plain speaking was hard enough to hear for a maiden; for Maledicte to speak with such venom undid her composure completely. Her shoulders shook, and the veil over her eyes grew damp and dark with tears.
“Stop that,” Maledicte said. “I will not have you start another scandal with me at the heart of it.”
She stopped struggling, and he loosened his painful tourniquet on her arm. They took another round of the dance without any speech; the spots of moisture on the veil shrank and dried, leaving only quivering lips and shaking hands to convey the shock she still felt.
“I think your mother must be mad,” he said, though mad brought to mind not a matchmaking aristocrat, but Mirabile with her red eyes and bloody nails.
“Why—” The girl paused, then continued, her voice gaining strength, “Why are you so cruel? I’ve never said a thing to hurt you. But you’ll say anything to hurt me. You have every reason to be kind. You’re handsome, and rich, and no one tells you what to do.”
“You’ve never met my Gilly, if you think no one dictates to me,” Maledicte said.
The dance ended and he bowed, but stayed at her side. She blanched as he drew her toward one curtained partition, a seat at the nexus of three mirrors. “Your virtue is safe,” Maledicte said. “I merely want a word with you.”
She nodded, biting her lips so hard that he thought the veil might darken with blood. He tugged it away from her face entirely, watched her eyes widen like morning-glories at sunrise.
He sat down in one of the quilted chairs, still holding her arm so that she had to bend with him. He drew her closer, put his lips by her ear. “Your mother may want Janus for you. Aris may want the same. But if you take Janus from me—” His breath hissed out at the very thought. “If you take him, I’ll kill you. Best say no, should he come courting.”
She whimpered and he said, “We are understood?”
Backing away, she stumbled and nearly fell, stepping on her skirts in her haste to be out of his reach. Heads turned as she floundered across the floor, toward the shelter of her abigail and the cluster of debutantes drinking toasts to the dawn, safely arrived.
Mirabile passed through the debutantes with a word here, a touch there, and a smile for Maledicte cast over her shoulder as she bypassed the nymph sobbing in her chaperone’s arms.
“That was not well done of you,” Gilly said. “Besides being a cousin to Westfall, Psyke Bellane is a gentle, inoffensive girl.”
“Gentle, yes. Inoffensive?” Maledicte said, “No. But killing her would be like crushing a sparrow, so easy as to arouse more pity than satisfaction. By warning her off, I’ve done both of us a kindness.”
“Only you could argue that way,” Gilly said.
Maledicte pulled his mask off, dropped it to the marble floor. “I’ve had enough. I’m going home.”
Gilly’s response was drowned in the sudden tolling of deep bells. This close to the palace, the sound was as powerful as the tide and as inexorable. Maledicte turned to catch Janus’s eyes and met Aris’s instead, and saw the quick shattering in them. Maledicte flinched.
“Last,” Gilly whispered. “The unshriven dead.”
“Hush, Gilly,” Maledicte said, taking his hand. “Hush.”
On the dais, Adiran, startled by the clamor, clapped his hands over his ears and wailed, his voice rising over the low pitch of the bells like a descant. Aris pulled him into his lap, soothing him. Jasper and Echo moved toward Aris at a trot.
The bells faded into silence though the mirrors still shivered with their echoes. In the sudden hush, a startled shriek rang out as a debutante fainted in her escort’s grip. Gilly stepped closer to Maledicte, and Maledicte tightened his grip on Gilly’s trembling fingers. “Shh, Gilly.”
The girl’s abigail fanned her face, and her escort chafed her wrists, ever more frantically. He looked up with wide eyes. “She’s not breathing.”
Before his words stopped sounding, a second girl fell, an heiress of some repute. By the time h
er people converged around her, the first debutante was dead.
On the dais, Aris stood and started as if he could see Death walking the floor. Jasper gestured madly and the Kingsguard enclosed the king, surrounding him. Hela barked, long, deep, and hoarse, the sound reminiscent of the death bells, and Janus closed her muzzle with his hand. Aris nodded his shaky thanks and they fled the court. As the king’s doors sealed tight behind him, the chaos spread unchecked, as a third, then fourth girl collapsed.
In the doorway, shadowed by the rising sun, Mirabile smiled at Maledicte, and dropped the tiniest of curtsies, a performer acknowledging praise.
· 28 ·
A RIS LOOKED DOWN AT THE wreck of a body resting on the marble slab, lying between Haith’s sculpted hands, sheltering in the grasp of the god. Though pains had been taken with the corpse, the worst of the torn and waterlogged flesh hidden beneath the blue cloak, still the face was barely human. Only the chill of the winter sea had kept flesh and bone together, and Aris, remembering his first horrified look at the sea dreck his brother had become, knew that beneath the softening cloak were sections of bare bone.
“Sire,” a kingsguard said, “the courtier Maledicte has arrived. Where will you receive him?”
“Bring him here,” Aris said.
The guard’s sandy brows rose nearly to his hairline, but he merely nodded. Aris turned his attention back to his brother’s body, barely hearing the man leave.
“So it came to this,” he said. “Nearly alone, our family winnowed by time…You should have been the older, Michel,” Aris said, feeling as if a weight had settled over his neck and shoulders, sinking toward his heart. “You would have made a better king than I, I think, shortsighted and reactionary though you were. Antyre loves me not, and more, respects me not. You would have forced respect on them. Or fear. And I would not be left with this—” Footsteps echoed in the hall, the shuffle of feet on stone.
Aris raised his head. Few enough people came down the winding, dark hallways toward the chapel that he knew who it must be.