“Yes, my lord.”
“Well then,” he said.
“I’m sorry, I still don’t—”
“No, it’s my fault. Shannon and Vicky are always on at me about it. But this is simple enough, really. Vicky and Philip are driving themselves mad looking for eligible girls.”
I dared a smile, a wicked twinkle. “So you’re hoping to send them into an apoplexy by dining privately with an actress.”
“And I wanted to talk to you.”
For a moment, I’d thought I understood, but now he was talking a foreign language again. “To me?”
His eyes, gray and unfathomable and suddenly frightening, caught mine. “You seem interesting,” he said, and then the footmen came in to clear away the first course, and I couldn’t tell what he meant.
For someone who seemed so simple and direct, Lord Stephen was a nerve-wracking dinner partner. When the footmen had gone again, and I could ask, he pretended not to remember what he’d said, much less what he’d meant by it, and diverted the conversation into other channels: the theater again; my impressions of the court; what I, as a Kekropian, thought about the Bastion and its recent upheavals. I felt like I was walking on an imperfectly frozen pond, under whose thin skin of ice a hungry monster lurked. There was no way to tell from Lord Stephen’s manner what he knew or guessed or thought about my connections either to Felix or to the Bastion, but I was morally certain he was fishing for information about one or the other.
It was only after the footmen had wafted in and out one last time, leaving us with two snifters of brandy and a plate of sticky macaroons that I suspected were meant to appeal to my plebeian tastes, that Lord Stephen said, “You’re a patient woman, Madame Parr.”
“My lord?” I said.
“Shall we take the gloves off?”
“As your lordship wishes.” If he’d meant to catch me off guard, he shouldn’t have given me a whole dinner to get used to his conversational style.
“You’re not telling me everything,” he said, contemplating his brandy. “And that’s fine. No reason you should. But I asked you to dinner because I wanted to ask you about someone.”
“About whom, my lord?”
“Felix Harrowgate.”
“What about him?”
“Just tell me what you think of him.”
“Beautiful as daylight and knows it. Vain, self-centered, hot-tempered, and a born troublemaker.”
Lord Stephen said after a thoughtful pause, “You know, of course, how much I dislike him.”
“It’s hardly a secret.”
“No.” His gaze skewered me again. “I would rather you didn’t tell me what you think I want to hear.”
“I don’t know what you want.”
“I’ve gone about this all wrong,” he said sadly. “Madame Parr, I’m not trying to pry anybody’s secrets out of you. I just wanted the opinion of someone without quite so much . . . baggage.”
“What makes you think I don’t have baggage?”
“Well, you do, of course, but my impression was that it was more on the other side.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Nothing ever is.” He contemplated the brandy in his glass. “He worries me, you know.”
“Felix? But I thought you—”
I cut myself off, quite deliberately, as if I hadn’t meant to be tactless. It made him laugh.
“Hated each other? We do. But—Malkar Gennadion brought him to the Mirador the same year I became Lord Protector. I suspect now that the timing was deliberate. Certainly, there are a number of questions someone should have been asking that never got asked.”
“What do you mean?”
“Malkar Gennadion,” Stephen said with a grimace of distaste. “Brinvillier Strych. If we’d just been paying attention, he wouldn’t have been able to worm his way in, wouldn’t have been able to get close enough to destroy the Virtu. And my sister wouldn’t have had an affair with our grandmother’s murderer. ”
“Um,” I said, this time not faking uncertainty.
“Sorry,” Stephen said. “It rankles.”
“It must,” I agreed cautiously.
“Wasn’t my point.” He took a swallow of brandy. “It’s how Malkar always worked, you know. You started off on one thing, and somehow he’d get you going on something else. So you’d ask the question he wanted. And you wouldn’t ask all the other questions. Like what he did to Felix.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, lots of things,” Stephen said grimly. “But does he ever talk about him? About Malkar?”
“No, of course not.”
“Why ‘of course’?”
“Felix values his privacy far too highly to talk about anything that serious.”
Stephen snorted.
“No, it’s true,” I said. “Of all the things you know about Felix, how many of them really matter? To him, I mean?”
Lord Stephen’s expression grew blank and arrested. “Precious few,” he said, more to himself than to me.
When his eyes came back to me, something in them had changed, and I knew that the audience, for lack of a better word, was over.
“It’s been very kind of you, my lord,” I said, rising. He accepted the cue with something suspiciously like a smile, and escorted me to the door, where his butler, alerted by something I had missed, was waiting.
“This was fun,” Lord Stephen said as his butler opened the door. “Let’s do it again sometime soon.” When I looked up at him, I was more than a little alarmed to see that he wasn’t being ironic. He meant it.
Mildmay
By the time I got back to the suite, it was all crashing down on me again. There was nobody in the sitting room. I shut the door of my bedroom behind me like it was a magic door in a story that you couldn’t open without knowing the right word. I sat on my bed in the dark, staring at nothing, and just waited for time to pass. There wasn’t nothing else I could do.
After a while, there was a knock at the door. Felix came in without waiting for an answer. He was wearing his favorite mouse-colored dressing gown and had his hair tied with a faded piece of green ribbon. His eyes were clear again. He was back from wherever his head had been during dinner. Fuck, I thought.
“Mildmay, are you—” He stopped, called witchlights. “Why are you sitting here in the dark? What’s wrong?”
He sounded like he really cared. I turned away from him so he wouldn’t see how close I was to crying. “Nothing,” I said.
“Don’t give me that. You were upset earlier, too. Is it something I did?”
I thought of all the times he’d upset me and known it and been glad of it. “No,” I said. “It ain’t you.” I couldn’t think of how to put it, so I had to fall back on the way people said things like this in stories. “I’ve left Mehitabel.”
“Left?” he said. “Well, clearly you . . . wait. You mean left?”
I took a deep breath, like it would help somehow. “I told her I didn’t want to see her again.”
There was a long silence. I didn’t look at him. Finally, he said, “Why?”
“I had to,” I said. “Could you just leave me alone for a while?”
“If it’s what you want,” he said.
I couldn’t bear crying in front of him. I just nodded.
“All right.” He stopped in the doorway. “Would you . . . would you prefer to talk to Gideon?”
I was almost choking on the hard lump blocking my chest and throat. “No,” I said. “Just leave me alone.”
“All right,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper, and closed the door behind him.
And I sat there in the dark and rubbed the water out of my eyes as fast as it gathered and tried to figure out what was wrong with me anyway. I’d gone two indictions without asking Mehitabel how many other guys she had, so what the fuck had got into me that I went and asked her today?
I didn’t know. That was the bitchkitty and the Queen of Swords. I didn’t fucking know. Just
that I hadn’t been able to keep it down no more, and it wasn’t even that I cared if she was sleeping with other guys—I ain’t so stupid I think sex has to mean anything, and most times it don’t—it was that she wouldn’t even give me a straight answer. Because I knew how careful she ran her life. She knew exactly how many guys there were, and how often she’d fucked each one of ’em, and what she’d said to them when she did. And that didn’t bother me, neither. What bothered me was, she didn’t want me to know that. She didn’t want me to know who she was. Not really. Not down where it counts.
And, I mean, I ain’t keen on letting people know my private stuff, but I don’t try to pretend to be anything I ain’t. That was what it was, I figured. Not that she hid things, and not that she lied. But that she didn’t trust me with herself.
I got my clothes off and lay down and wished I could fucking well stop crying. It was a good long while before I got to sleep, and when I did, I fell straight into this nightmare I’d been having on and off for, powers, I don’t know, half an indiction at least. In the dream, I’m going again with Cardenio to see Ginevra’s body in the morgue underneath the Fishmarket, the cade-skiffs’ guildhall, except when we reach the table, her body’s gone. I look at Cardenio and I see that he’s dead, all blue and bloodless and horrible. He tells me that somebody whose name I can’t quite hear has stolen Ginevra’s body, and I have to get it back or they’ll put me in her place. So I’m searching everywhere but I can’t find her, and every time I look back, Master Auberon, Cardenio’s master, is a little closer. He’s dead, too, and he’s holding a very sharp knife. And it was one of those dreams you get sometimes where you know you’re dreaming and you can feel where the real world is, but like the old joke says, you can’t get there from here. I didn’t shake myself free of it until I was actually falling out of bed, a thing that hadn’t happened to me since I’d reached my first septad. I sat there on the floor, my bad leg singing its old stupid song at me, and I laughed until I cried.
It was a long time before I could calm down, and that was kind of scary. I’m losing it, I thought. I’m really, really losing it, and I don’t know what the fuck to do about it.
Pull yourself together, Milly-Fox, Keeper’s voice said in my head, cold and hard, like she got when I was about to fuck up something stupid and simple. It worked like a slap. I knew it wasn’t going to work for long—I didn’t trust Keeper enough now for her voice to do much—but it lasted at least long enough for me to think, I need to get out of this fucking walk-in tomb.
I found my lucifers and lit one. The clock said it was the last hour of the night. Getting up now wouldn’t be a sign of going crazy or nothing. I could go down to the public baths in the Warren—St. Dismas was their patron saint, so of course they were called the Dismal Baths—and maybe soak some of the jitters out. Felix wouldn’t be getting up for another two hours. I had plenty of time to get back so he wouldn’t know I’d gone. Felix didn’t like me using the Dismal Baths, although he wouldn’t ever say exactly why. But, then, he hated public baths just on principle because he was so uptight about the scars on his back.
The Dismal Baths were Lower City baths. I thought that was probably one of the reasons Felix didn’t like them. They were right on the border between the Arcane and the Warren. The Mortisgate was actually the entrance to the baths from the Warren side, and the guards watched real close about who used the Mortisgate—it was a shitty way to try to sneak in or out of the Mirador. There were other, better ways, if you knew what you were doing. Lots of people came up from the Arcane to use the Dismal, but none of them were stupid enough to try waltzing out the Mortisgate—or, at least, not stupid enough to try twice.
I knew the guys on duty at the Mortisgate—I’d gotten to the point where I knew most of the Protectorate Guard. They didn’t much like Felix, but they weren’t stupid enough to fuck with him, and they didn’t hold him against me. I don’t think they liked any of the hocuses much, and they knew all about working for people ’cause you had to, not ’cause it was anything you wanted.
Winn and Josiah gave me a wave, and I waved back and kept moving. I didn’t think I could talk to anybody like a normal person, not with that dream still banging around in my head.
At this time of day, it was no surprise to find the changing rooms full of whores. They all looked at me funny, but nobody said nothing. I wished I’d never let Mavortian talk me out of dyeing my hair.
But at least it was safe here. I didn’t have to worry about people trying to pick fights or nothing. Nobody did that kind of thing in the Dismal Baths—or St. Veronique’s Baths in Pharaohlight, or the Tunny Street Baths down in Gilgamesh. People wouldn’t put up with it. I mean, not only do you not want to worry about being knifed just because you want to wash your hair, you particularly don’t want somebody else getting knifed in the same water with you and your soap. Crime in the Lower City ain’t exactly organized, but it’s organized enough for that. Dunno what the flashies and the bourgeoisie do in their baths— the Caliphate Baths in Verdigris or the St. Nebular Baths in Shatterglass or any of the others—but people in the Lower City just use theirs for bathing in.
I paid a septad-centime for towels, and another three centimes for soap—you could fork over a half-gorgon and get the fancy soaps imported from the south, the ones that smelled like lavender or lemons or roses, but the common soap, the stuff people just called “pig,” was good enough for me. I’ve never been real big on perfumes. Felix wasn’t, either. I think perfumes brought back too many memories of Pharaohlight on him. He was such a dandy otherwise—and got such a kick out of twisting the flashies’ tails—that I couldn’t think of much else that would make sense of him not using ambergris or one of the other fancy flashie perfumes.
The calder at the Dismal Baths was a long, vaulted room with a walkway down the middle and the hot pools on both sides. There was a bench built into each wall. I found a place to put my towels and slid down into the water.
I scrubbed myself with the pig until my skin was red and I’d worn the cake down to a handful of slivers. Then I lay back in the water and floated for a while, but I get nervous when I can’t see everybody in the room with me, and I stood up again before long. I climbed out and went to the froy. A two-second plunge was about all I could stand, but I came out with my head feeling a lot clearer and not so much like I was working on four hours of bad sleep. I went back, got my towels, and put myself together to face the day.
When I was coming back through the Mortisgate, Josiah said, “Hey, Mildmay!”
Sunrise, I thought. They were coming off shift. Winn would be going into the Arcane to find that whore he was crazy about. I stopped and waited for Josiah.
“Hey, Josiah,” I said when he came up to me. “What’s new?”
“Not much,” he said. “How ’bout you?”
“You know,” I said. “Same old.”
He nodded and laughed. We started back up into the Mirador.
“I’m glad to be done for tonight,” he said after a while. “It’s getting weird.”
“Whatcha mean?”
“Oh, I dunno. Just weird. The news is getting out about the Bastion, and people are getting kind of twitchy.”
“Scared?”
“Nah, not scared so much. Just, like . . . twitchy.”
“Don’t blame ’em.”
“Me neither, but it gets on your nerves after a while. You hear about Lord Thaddeus?”
“What about Lord Thaddeus?”
“He says it’s all a trick,” Josiah said, and I saw his sideways look at me, like he wanted to see if I would say so, too. “He says the Bastion don’t want peace with us, they just want us to think they want peace with us, so we’ll do something dumb and they can get in.”
That sounded like something Thaddeus would say, all right. “I think Lord Thaddeus thinks too much,” I said.
“Yeah, but do you think . . . ?”
“I don’t know what to think. But Lord Thaddeus ain’t on the Curia.”
>
“That’s a fact.” He gave me another sideways look. “What does Lord Felix think?”
“You know Felix ain’t in no hurry to trust the Bastion,” I said. We’d reached Ucopian’s Cross by then—where Josiah had to head northeasterly to the guard barracks and I had to tack off northwest to get back to Felix’s suite—standing under the dome painted with a fairly hardcore take on the martyrdom of St. Ucopian. Our voices were echoing up and around, and the shadows made Josiah’s face look like a bad mask. I didn’t like to think what they must’ve been doing to me.
“Yeah,” he said, like he’d needed to hear me say that. “I know.” There was a little pause, prickly with things we weren’t saying. “Igny says the Tibernians are just about shitting bricks. In case Lord Stephen does start signing treaties and stuff.”
“Worried he’ll find a way to give ’em the boot.”
“Yeah. Igny says that Mr. Clef has a tongue on him it’s an honor to listen to. Him and that hocus going at it hammer and tongs, up one side and down the other.”
“Hocus’s a nasty piece of work.”
“Sorry?”
I said it again.
“Yeah. Seems like he wants us to be all grateful and shit, and it sure is getting up his nose that we ain’t. Igny says Mr. Clef says they got to find a way to make friends proper-like or Lord Stephen’ll throw ’em over for the Kekropians.”
“Powers. He ain’t a gal looking for a dance partner.”
Josiah laughed. “Well, he got people want to dance with him, that’s for sure.” We heard a clock strike, somewhere off in the dark, and he sighed. “Better be going.”
“Yeah, me too. See you ’round.”
“Later,” he said and headed away at a brisk march, his chain mail jingling and his boot heels smacking sharply against the flagstones. He turned a corner and was gone, swallowed by the Mirador.
“Where have you been?” Felix said the instant the door opened.
It was a good half hour before he normally got up, and I was so startled I said, “How the fuck did you know I was gone?”