I couldn’t run, but I staggered down an alley, then got my feet sort of under me. I cut across two more streets, and then found a fire escape, and dragged myself up to the roof. From there I could get anywhere I wanted.
Right then, I didn’t want nothing except to sit down. So I sat and panted, and about half a heartbeat ahead of when he spoke, I knew somebody was there.
“So that was Mildmay the Fox in action.”
Septimus fucking Wilder, as I live and breathe.
“Fuck you,” I said.
“Very impressive,” he said, and it wasn’t a bad imitation of Keeper, if you didn’t still hear the real thing in your dreams. “Really something to aspire to.”
And I was still so fucking mad I could breathe it.
“All right, fuckhead,” I said. “You want it? Let’s do it.”
I came up hard and fast, and I knew right where he was, because he’d been running his stupid mouth off.
Now, he was good. Don’t get me wrong. Keeper knew what she was doing, and he was fast and agile like a spider and he knew how to use his reach. And he hadn’t just had a go-round with a bunch of goons, neither. But he’d never been a knifefighter—never had to do this for real where if you fucked up or blinked wrong, you might find yourself holding your guts in both hands. Or, you know, you might find yourself with one whole half of your face nothing but raw, screaming, sheeting pain, and your own blood fouling your grip on your knife. And I didn’t think Keeper’d actually sent him out to kill anybody yet.
It changes how you look at things.
So he was good, but I was mean. I got him down, my knife just nudging the hinge of his jaw and my other hand gripping his balls. Because I was not in a mood to fuck around.
“Now,” I said. “You were saying something before I went and interrupted you.”
“Nnnnnnn . . .” It wasn’t even a word, more like a groan that had gotten some letters tangled in it.
I waited, but he didn’t seem to have nothing more to say for himself. “Okay,” I said. “I can’t hold grudges for shit, so’s far as I’m concerned, this is over. D’you wanna go round again?”
This time, it did come out a word, although it sounded like it hurt. “No.”
“That’s good.” I like it when people ain’t stupid at me. “I’m gonna let go of you now, but the knife ain’t moving yet. Just so you know.”
“I ain’t gonna try nothing,” he said. It was the first thing he’d said didn’t sound like Keeper.
“Good plan.” I moved my left hand away from him, and he took a deep gasping breath. He’d probably been expecting me to twist, or at least squeeze real hard. Or maybe rip his balls off and make him eat ’em. And I ain’t going to lie and say I wasn’t tempted. But ’cept for breathing like a bellows, he didn’t move, didn’t try nothing, like he’d said he wouldn’t.
“Did you set ’em on me?” I asked—mostly just curious. And I wanted to know how twisty his mind was.
“No! Powers, I wouldn’t—”
“You just didn’t feel like helping.”
That shut him up. Finally, he said, “Yeah, I wanted . . .”
“You wanted to see me get my ass kicked.” I didn’t say it nasty or nothing, because, powers and saints, I understood how that went, but I felt him flinch, just a little.
Okay, so at least he could recognize he was a prick.
“I put my knife up,” I said. “What’re you gonna do?”
“What d’you want me to do?”
“Look. I ain’t into mind-games like Keep—like Kolkhis is. As long as you ain’t gonna go for me again, I don’t give a rat’s ass.”
“I won’t,” he said. “I swear. By the Septad Gate and Mélusine’s cunt.”
I wasn’t expecting that, and it hurt a little. Because it’d been something Nikah taught us to say. Before the sangerman got him. And it was just weird to realize that it hadn’t died with him. That kids who’d never even known his name were still saying it.
“Okay,” I said. “I believe you.” I folded my knife back into my boot.
He didn’t move for a moment, like he figured it for a trick. But then he was up and gone so fast I didn’t think I could’ve caught him if I’d wanted to. Which I didn’t.
I looked up the city at the Mirador. And I guess I was a little light-headed—Kethe knows I ached all over like I’d been rolled downhill in a barrel—because I caught myself thinking, if the Iron Chapel was Mélusine’s cunt, then the Mirador had to be her dick.
And somehow that just seemed so perfectly fucking true it was all I could do to keep from bursting into tears right there on that tenement roof in Gilgamesh.
Mehitabel
I left Simon and Rinaldo’s rooms well-freighted with tidbits of information Vulpes might find precious. At least I could prove that I was trying, and that was what concerned me. Louis Goliath was a reasonable man, whatever else he might be. He wouldn’t punish Hallam simply because the information gathered wasn’t the information he wanted.
If indeed it wasn’t the information he wanted, and I had no way of determining that. But that wasn’t my concern. I’d had my part in this black farce laid out for me very clearly, and I couldn’t afford to ad lib bits of business or change my lines to fit a better scansion. My safety and Hallam’s safety.
It was lumped up under my breastbone, the fact that we’d been in the Bastion, rescuing people left, right, and center, and I hadn’t been able to rescue Hallam. Hadn’t even been able to mention rescuing Hallam. And I knew it was because we couldn’t have, that no matter how lucky we got, nothing would have made it possible for him to survive once ripped free of the spells that chained him. But we’d saved Simon and Rinaldo. Saved Mildmay. And left Hallam there to suffer, to die one cruel inch at a time.
He might live to be a very old man in the Bastion. It wasn’t worth anyone’s effort to kill him.
“God and the thirteen crimson devils,” I said through my teeth, and looked up to find myself in a corridor I didn’t know. It was a narrow, twisting hallway, paneled and floored in elaborate interlocking patterns of light and dark wood. False windows flanked each corner, their frames elaborately carved and fretted; looking through one, I discovered a flat painted landscape like nothing I had ever seen—twisted trees and dark, jeering rocks and the gilt sun lying against the pallid sky like a counterfeit coin. I turned away, started walking again, and the Mirador, as was its nature, presented me with an excruciating coincidence.
Mildmay turned the corner.
If I could’ve retreated, I would have. But it was already too late. His head had come up, and he was staring at me, his eyes hard, over-bright, as unnatural as emeralds. It was the same way he’d looked in the Bastion when he’d nearly killed me—bruises and all.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” he said. He stepped around me and kept walking. He was limping badly; his coat was torn. His hair had come out of its usual neat braid and was hanging around his face and shoulders like fire.
“What happened to you?” I said, with the same stupid inevitability as Armet unlocking her husband’s closet in The Seventh Bride.
He stopped. He didn’t turn, but I saw him square his shoulders. “Got into a fight. In Gilgamesh.”
“What were you doing there?”
He looked over his shoulder, his face hard, unreadable, and more than a little inhuman. “None of your fucking business.” And then he turned and left, as if I wasn’t there at all.
Part Two
Chapter 6
Mildmay
That night I slept like I’d died. I woke when I normally did, the first hour of the morning, and I lay there for a while, counting up bruises and the sharp way my bad leg was hurting, but that wasn’t doing nobody no good. I got up and got dressed and tidied, and it was only the third time I had to step over it that I realized the heap of rags in the middle of the floor was Gideon’s coat. Well, what was left of Gideon’s coat after the fight. I’d lost Felix’s scarf completely.
F
or a second my breath stopped hard in my throat. Then I grabbed the coat off the floor and fumbled through the pockets, not really praying, just thinking, please, please, please. And it was there, where I remembered shoving it. The black ribbon Mehitabel had given me almost two indictions ago, after Strych. The only thing she’d ever given me.
By that time my hands were shaking so bad I couldn’t braid my hair. Fuck, Milly-Fox, it’s just a ribbon. And you ain’t seeing Mehitabel no more, remember?
But none of that mattered. I sat down on the bed again, my hands clenched on that ribbon like I thought somebody was going to try and take it away from me. There wasn’t nothing happening in my head, just this hard, jumbling feeling like big blocks of stone bumping at each other, and my heart was hammering.
And out of all that, this question pushed its way up to the top of my mind: what the fuck had I been doing yesterday? Haring off to the Lower City like it was picking buttercups in St. Millefleur, getting within shouting distance of Keeper, doing just what she told me like I was at my second septad again . . . Powers and saints and Kethe’s black-hearted mercy, getting in fights like I was at my second septad again.
“I must have been out of my fucking mind,” I said out loud without meaning to. Then I said, “Fuck,” and buried my head in my hands.
Because I knew why I’d done it, and I was out of my fucking mind. I’d done it because it beat sitting around thinking about Mehitabel. And it especially beat thinking about the fact that Mehitabel was not the one who’d fucked up here. If I wanted her to trust me, I could’ve gone about it a better way than calling her by some dead gal’s name every time I opened my mouth. I wouldn’t’ve felt like trusting me, either.
But I hadn’t wanted to think about that, so I’d thought of something else to do instead. Something really fucking stupid, as it happens. And I hadn’t let myself see what I was doing it for, hadn’t let the idea get up where I could look at it and how stupid it was and talk myself out of it. I’d just done it, like it made sense and was a good idea and didn’t have a thing in the world to do with Mehitabel Parr.
“Fuck me for a half-wit dog,” I said. But my hands had calmed down. I braided my hair and picked up Gideon’s coat and took a deep breath, trying to pretend like yesterday hadn’t happened.
It didn’t help, but I had to open the door anyway. I can’t even tell you how relieved I was when there was nobody there. There was a note on the table, Gideon’s handwriting: HE SAYS MEET HIM IN THE CERULEAN ANTECHAMBER. It took me a while to figure out “cerulean,” but I didn’t have to ask who “he” was or what the note really meant, which was, kindly get out before either of us has to look at you. And it was just like Felix to make Gideon write the note.
I was happy to oblige, though. After the scene we’d pitched at each other last night, I didn’t want to look at them, neither. I put the coat on the table. I would’ve liked to leave a note of my own, at least to say, Sorry about the coat, but I was afraid if I stayed long enough to do that, one of them might come out of the bedroom. So I left.
I went down to the kitchen. Properly, I guess, I have to say the Fifth Sub-Kitchen, since there are a double septad of kitchens— maybe more than that—scattered through the Mirador: the Great Kitchen, that does the banquets and soirées and all the official stuff, and then the sub-kitchens that cook for the flashies and the hocuses and of course for the servants. I’d been in a septad-worth of ’em, and I liked the Fifth best. It was all warm orangey-red brick, and the ovens kept off the cold. The Mirador was always cold. Felix laughed at me about it, but it was true.
It’d taken the servants a while to figure out what to do with me. Most of them were from the Lower City, or had lovers or friends or in-laws in the Lower City, and there was no sense pretending they didn’t know what I was. What I’d been. And they weren’t sure if I was a servant like them, or if they should treat me like a flashie, or what. I didn’t know either, and that didn’t help.
But we’d worked things out. I talked like them, not like Felix or Lord Stephen, and I knew too much about how hard they worked to be able to ignore them the way the hocuses and flashies did. Felix got pissed off at me about that, but I couldn’t help it. I knew kids who’d entered service, talking their way into a flashie household because it beat turning tricks in alleys, and I couldn’t help seeing them in the girls who did our laundry, the guys who carried breakfast trays up and down six flights of stairs without slopping the tea or letting the eggs get cold. And so I couldn’t help trying to find ways to make their jobs easier, like going through Felix’s coat pockets before giving the week’s wash to the laundresses—you wouldn’t believe the stuff he shoved in his pockets and forgot about—or warning Maurice, who brought around the breakfast trays, when Felix was in a particularly nasty mood. And after a while the servants decided I was more like them than like Felix, and that I was maybe sort of okay. The kitchen had quit going deathly quiet whenever I walked in, and if I happened to run into one of the maids in the hall, she didn’t immediately drop a curtsy to keep from having to look me in the eye. I don’t say they were comfortable with me, ’cause they weren’t, but they’d more or less decided I wasn’t going to bite ’em.
I even got a little chorus of “good mornings” as I came into the kitchen, and Jeanne-Citrine got me tea and a slice of bread and jam without batting an eye. They were all looking sideways at my face, but none of ’em had the balls to ask. Even Geburon, the Fifth Sub-Cook, a huge guy with a scar on his face as ugly as mine, didn’t say no more than, “Bring them dishes back when you’re done with ’em.” But at that time of day he didn’t have no time for a heart-to-heart anyways.
I didn’t go far—just down to a storeroom—and I ate as quick as I could. I didn’t particularly want to eat at all, but I knew I had to. Keeper—and oh powers, here I go thinking about Keeper again—had been careful about teaching us stuff like that, that even if you didn’t think you wanted food sometimes, your body needed it. I hadn’t eaten dinner last night, and it was anybody’s guess when I might be able to eat again. If Felix was as mad as I thought he was going to be, I’d probably be too upset to eat for most of the day.
Sounds funny, don’t it, grown man like me getting all hysterical over a chewing out? And it wasn’t that I was scared of Felix and the way he shouted and the things he called me, but he knew how to make me mad. He’d bait me sometimes for fun, because he was bored or just because he thought it was funny, I don’t know, and when I’d finally lose my temper and yell at him, he’d just grin and correct my grammar. And I mean, I hated that, but it was okay. But when he was mad himself, like I thought he was going to be today, anything I said he’d turn right back around on me, and he could talk so much better than me that I’d just get madder and madder, and I wouldn’t be able to get rid of it with words, and I’d want to hurt him, break his perfect nose or black both his creepy eyes or just get a good handful of his hair and rip it out by the roots. That was what scared me.
I had no idea what the binding-by-forms would do if I tried to hurt Felix, but I was betting it wouldn’t be anything nice. And more than that, I didn’t want to hurt Felix. When he’d been crazy, he’d thought I was his Keeper, who’d left whip scars on his back that he hated for anybody to see, and more than anything else I never wanted that to be true. I could hurt him—I never doubted that for a second, no matter what the binding-by-forms did to me afterwards. He wasn’t a fighter. And he was . . . not clumsy, exactly, but awkward. Like somebody’d taught him not to be clumsy by belting him one every time he dropped a book or walked into a chair. Like he was frightened of what might happen if he quit watching where his hands and feet went for so much as a second. I could hurt him, and hurt him bad, before he even knew I was thinking about it. But I wasn’t going to.
I took my cup and plate to join the already growing stack of washing-up and got out of the kitchen again without bothering nobody or giving them a chance to ask what was going on with me and Felix that I was down in the kitchen half an
hour after dawn with my face all black and blue. I could just imagine the rumors that were going to start, but I knew how gossip worked. Anything I said to try and keep them from thinking Felix had beat me up would just make them believe it more.
I went back up into the main halls—what Felix called the surface of the Mirador—and found an empty parlor, one of them little rooms where people can have a private discussion without nobody eavesdropping. There are lots of little rooms like that along the Wooden Hallway and the Pomgarnet Gallery, the two main corridors that lead to the Vielle Roche, the central core of the Mirador where the Hall of the Chimeras is.
I closed the door of the room I’d picked and moved the two chairs to one side. They were School of Jecquardin and would have fetched a pretty price from a broker I knew down in Midwinter. But what I wanted was the floor space. I ached all over, and most particularly in my leg, and if I was going to make it through today without driving Felix absolutely batfuck, I needed to get it stretched out. Felix was never mean about my lameness—never threw it in my face or made nasty jokes about it, the way he would sometimes about my scar—but he had long legs and he walked fast, and he hated having to slow down only a little less than he hated having to wait for me to catch up.
I took off my coat and waistcoat and shoes and did the exercises that Keeper had taught me, and some others that I’d learned in the Gardens of Nephele, working my right thigh especially, trying to get some heat into the muscles where it was needed, trying to get my leg to act like a leg. I couldn’t do as much as I liked because I wouldn’t make Felix any happier by showing up sweaty for court, but I was able to do enough that I thought I’d be able to fake normal pretty well. It’d have to do. I put myself back together, put the chairs back where they’d been, and took myself off to the Cerulean Antechamber.