“Well, then, what do you know of Ivo Polydorius?”
“Very little, Lieutenant Vulpes.”
He glared at me. “Felix seems to be very familiar with Lord Ivo’s protégé.”
“Oh, please. The word you want is catamite.”
And that flustered him all over again.
“It’s common knowledge,” I said. I’d heard the story several times—with varying levels of frankness and innuendo—both last night and this morning. “The man’s name is Vincent Demabrien. He was a prostitute in the Unicorn’s Mirror—it’s one of the top-end brothels, about two blocks from here as a matter of fact—and Lord Ivo found him there and, um, bought him.”
“Bought him? Like a slave?”
“More like than not,” I said. Marathines insisted, with great indignation, that there was no slavery in their country, but I couldn’t see any difference to speak of between that and the system of contracts and indentures in the Pharaohlight brothels.
“Is that how Felix knows him?”
“I didn’t ask,” I said quellingly and hid my amusement when it worked. Isaac changed the subject.
“What sort of man is Lord Ivo?”
“I haven’t heard anything good about him. He’s kept himself and his family sequestered at Arborstell for years and years. He only came back because Lady Zelda is just old enough to be put forward in this marriage nonsense.”
“Is that his daughter?”
“Yes. I don’t know anything about his wife—if she’s here, if she’s still alive. I don’t think she was at the soirée. I’m pretty sure Lionel would have pointed her out to me.”
“Why did Lord Ivo leave the court?”
“I don’t know. I got lots of conflicting stories about that. Some people were saying he’d quarreled with Lord Gareth, others that his son had bankrupted the family.”
“He has a son?”
“Yes. He’s here, too. I get the impression Lord Ivo wants him under his eye. His name is Manfred, and he’s a friend of Lionel Verlalius’s. From what I can tell, he’s weak and silly, and Lionel runs with a very expensive crowd.”
“Isn’t it strange for a nobleman to stay away from the Mirador for so long?”
“There are lots who never come near it, except for the investiture of a new Lord Protector. Many of them don’t find the politics worth the expenditure.”
“Yes, but if Lord Ivo was—”
“Perhaps he and Lord Stephen don’t get along.”
“Perhaps. But it still seems strange.”
“Most things about the Mirador are strange.”
“I suppose so,” Isaac said, but he still looked dissatisfied as he left.
Mildmay
Simon had things to do, so me and Gideon went back to the suite. Felix wasn’t back from wherever he’d gone, and I figured that was okay.
I shut the door. Gideon touched my arm. I looked at him, and he pointed at my leg, and raised his eyebrows.
“It’s okay,” I said.
He gave me a look, sort of impatient and disgusted, and pointed at my leg again.
“No, really, it’s okay. It don’t hurt too bad.”
He flapped his hand at me, like it wasn’t worth arguing about, and pointed me at a chair. I sat down and waited. He sat down across from me and got out his tablet. Wrote a word on it and pushed it across the table.
JENNY?
“You’re curious.”
He nodded with a sort of apologetic shrug.
“We were kids together. I mean, Keep—Kolkhis ran her like she did me.”
He made a go on sort of gesture.
“There ain’t no more. She started hooking ’bout the time I was getting good at killing people.”
He took his tablet back and wrote another word. He pushed it back at me. Now, under JENNY? it said: FRIENDS? He was good about making the letters regular and not using hard words. It was still a fucking awful way to run a conversation, though.
“Me and Jenny?”
He nodded.
“I dunno. I never liked her much.”
He yanked the tablet back and wrote in big letters: WHY? And he jabbed with his stylus more or less in the direction of the Lower City.
“Can you explain everything you do?”
He shook his head, but the way he kept his eyes on me told me he wasn’t letting me off the hook.
I wasn’t getting into the whole thing about Ginevra and Keeper with him. And even if I didn’t like it, there was another side to the thing. Because I kept thinking about Jenny being in the Kennel, and it wasn’t making me happy, neither. So I said, “Maybe ’cause there’s so few of us left. I mean, there’s Margot, and she hates me, and there’s Jean-Tigre, and he don’t know me to spit on me no more. Lots of ’em I just lost, and the rest are dead. So it’s like I can’t just pretend Jenny don’t exist, ’cause I remember her when we were little and we worked together.”
He nodded. He seemed to understand what I meant.
I’d been meaning to tell him about Thaddeus anyway, and now seemed like a perfect fucking time to distract him away from me. I said, “I mean, that don’t work for everybody. You and Thaddeus were kids together, weren’t you?”
He nodded, but his face went wary.
“He, um, said some stuff at the soirée.”
Gideon fished a piece of paper out of his pocket and pushed it across the table. This one was one of his savers—the things he would’ve been writing so often it made more sense to just keep ’em—a little square with a big question mark on it.
“Same old. About you being a spy.”
Gideon made a face.
“Well, you know, I don’t think he really believes it, or he wouldn’t be saying it to me. I mean, of all the people he could pick. But he is saying it.” I looked at him, wishing I had a better idea of what happened in his head. “He don’t seem to like you very much.”
Gideon thought that was funny. He didn’t really laugh anymore—he wouldn’t open his mouth—but you knew when he was laughing just the same.
“Felix says Thaddeus helped you get to the Mirador.”
Gideon shrugged widely and then nodded.
“You got something on him.”
He grinned at me. It was a sharp, nasty grin. Mute or not, Gideon wasn’t somebody to fuck with. I had to remind myself of that every so often, because it was easy to be sorry for him and forget just how hard he could bite if somebody pissed him off. Him and Felix were well matched.
“He ain’t a spy, is he?”
He shook his head.
“Then it ain’t none of my business, I guess,” I said. “But if you got a leash on him, you might want to give it a yank.”
Gideon waved that away.
“You sure?”
Gideon nodded.
“Then I won’t ride you about it. But Thaddeus’ll do you a mischief if he can.”
Gideon shook his head, and I knew what he meant: He can’t.
Felix
Finding a copy of Ezrabeth Ynge’s Influence of the Moon on the Energy of Souls was simplicity itself compared to some of the treasure hunts I’d gone on for Gideon. It had taken me over a month and visits to three different booksellers to replace the copy of Chattan d’Islay’s A Treatise upon Spirit he’d lost in Aiaia, and I wouldn’t have found Edmond Sang’s translation of Matthew Nausikaaïos’s Psukhomakhia at all if I hadn’t quite literally fallen over it in the Archive of the Seven Queens. The Ynge only took me the better part of an afternoon.
I found it in the Starlings’ Archive, up under the roofs of the Tiamat. The reek of smoke lingered, even three years on, and the carved pillars were blackened, although I saw no signs that the fire itself had reached this far. I had to make a conscious effort not to hold my breath as I scanned the shelves, and when I saw the Ynge, wedged among a collection of almanacs from western Tibernia, I grabbed it and frankly ran— three flights down and two hallways south to the Archive of the Chamberlain, where I could no longer smell old smoke,
no longer hear the echoes of Malkar’s laughter still dying in my ears.
The Influence of the Moon on the Energy of Souls was also smoke damaged, the edges of the pages crumbling to the touch, but the text was undarkened and the binding still held.
I didn’t have time to read it properly—Gideon would no doubt imagine I was out propositioning half the Mirador if I was late for dinner—but I skimmed the exordium and flipped through the body of the book, reading the chapter headings and examining Ynge’s diagrams. She was using “noirant” and “clairant” at least in part to talk about necromancy and the dismantling of its workings; that much I could tell at even a cursory glance, and I took the book with me when I went back to my rooms, stopping along the way to leave Giancarlo a note that the cost of a four hundred twenty-nine page octavo volume published in Ormaut should be deducted from my stipend. The privilege was one I was careful not to abuse, but the state of the Starlings’ Archive showed plainly enough that no one would miss any of its books.
Gideon greeted me with a scowl, which lightened quite perceptibly when he saw the book in my hand.
:No,: I said, :I was not indulging in an afternoon assignation, with Isaac Garamond or anyone else.:
:I didn’t think you were. But I’ve noticed how careful you’re being not to be alone with me since last night.:
:Less than twenty-four hours hardly constitutes evidence of anything,: I said, more sharply than I meant to because he was right.
:Don’t forget that I know you,: he said, and I irritated myself immeasurably by blushing.
Dinner was not a comfortable meal, and afterward, Gideon said bluntly, :Let us adjourn to the bedroom.:
I could think of few things I felt less like doing. But I could not say so. It was so rare for Gideon to instigate sex, and after the fight we’d had before the soirée . . . I couldn’t reject him.
I put the Ynge aside and followed him into the bedroom.
We undressed in the dark and lay down together. I spun the foreplay out as long as I could; Gideon loved kissing, loved having my tongue in his mouth. I found the sensation more disturbing than erotic, and if I sometimes imagined what it would be like to have his mouth, that warm wet emptiness, engulfing my sex, I never said so. Gideon was not a whore, to make such cruel demands of. But still, I would kiss him for as long as he wanted.
But he was also intensely self-conscious about his desires—embarrassed by them. I had tried, once, to tell him he shouldn’t be; he had told me furiously not to patronize him. I had not mentioned the matter again except, of course, when we fought.
So I didn’t demur when he pulled away, although I was still not aroused. I moved down the bed. He was only half-hard, but he responded well to my mouth and fingers. My own body remained sluggish; even a calculated, clandestine brutality got no more than a flicker. With the right erotiques, I might have been able to remedy the problem, but I kept no such toys. I had not, I thought bitterly, anticipated the need.
I would not be able to sustain the active role tonight. I drew back, lay down on my stomach beside him, deviating from our usual practice, a series of actions as formal and measured as a ritual, and felt Gideon’s surprise, even before he spoke.
:Felix?:
All the words I knew for this were ugly.
I said, :You wanted . . . more. More of me.: I reached, found his hand in the darkness, placed it on my left buttock. Surely that was explicit enough, invitation enough.
But Gideon did not move. After a long, deathly pause, he said, :Why now?:
:What?:
His fingers tightened, very slightly, forbidding me to move. :We’ve been lovers for two years. Why now?:
:You said—:
:This,: he said, with a stinging slap to my haunch as he released me, :isn’t what I meant, and you know it.:
“You don’t want me?”
:That’s not the point here.:
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, sitting up. “Seeing as how we’re in bed together, I think whether you want me or not might be very much to the point.”
:No, the point is whether you want me.: I flinched away from his hand cupping my genitals. :You don’t, do you?:
“Gideon, it’s not—”
:Oh, but it is. Darling.:
I snarled back, “Well, forgive me for not finding self-sacrifice arousing.”
:What’s that supposed to mean?:
I got up, called witchlight in a hard glare, dragged on my dressing gown. “It’s not like you’ve taken any particular pains to hide the fact that you’d rather read Coeurterrene theory than come to bed with me.:
:And how am I supposed to feel, sharing you with—Felix! Don’t you dare walk out in—:
I slammed the bedroom door open.
On the other side of the sitting room, Mildmay startled so violently that a half-finished layout of the Queen of Tambrin cascaded gracefully to the floor.
“Come on,” I said.
He’d already been halfway to his feet, but he froze, staring at me. “Where?”
I bared my teeth at him in a hard, savage smile. “The Crown of Nails. Now.”
:Felix!:
I ignored Gideon; Mildmay picked up his cane and said, “You catch the Winter Fever and die, don’t blame me.”
“Oh, I won’t.” I called to Gideon, “Don’t wait up, darling,” and set out into the Mirador. If we happened to meet anyone, that would be their problem.
Mehitabel
I dined with Stephen. Ironically, we were more awkward now than we had been before we’d entered into the formal agreement. I was second-guessing everything in sight, unable to tell what Stephen wanted from me—bright chitchat or compliance with his taciturnity? For his part, he seemed to feel he no longer needed to act as my host; although he responded to my gambits, he made none of his own, and his answers were terse.
Dispirited and uncomfortable, I gave up, and we finished dinner in silence.
He seemed to come awake as he poured brandy, and said, “I told you, I think, that as my lover, you’re expected to make your residence in the Mirador.”
“I remember.”
“At my expense. There’s a suite. Tradition, and all that.”
“Of course there is.”
“Would you like to come look at it? You don’t have to stay there, if you don’t want to.”
“Actually, I would like to see it. I’m curious.”
He handed me a brandy snifter and said, “This way, then. Hemminge has the keys.”
Hemminge was Stephen’s butler; he had a branched candelabra as well as the keys, and he led the way, not back out to the public hallways, but through a side-door into a maze of narrow corridors.
“Where are we?” I said.
“Good question,” Stephen said, and to my astonishment, kept talking. “There aren’t any maps of this part of the Mirador. We think one of the Cordelius kings must’ve had them destroyed. Paranoia.” He stopped at a T-intersection; Hemminge obediently paused as well. “My father’s suite is down that way,” Stephen said, gesturing to the right with his snifter, “along with my mother’s and Gloria’s. The nursery of the Cordelii is somewhere under our feet. I’ll take you to see Grendille Moran’s suite some other time. I don’t like to go there at night.”
“Who’s Grendille Moran?”
“Come this way,” he said, and started walking again. “It isn’t far. Grendille Moran was one of the court poisoners. Reigns of Laurence and Charles. She probably poisoned Laurence. And then a few years later, her maid found her decapitated on the floor of her sitting room. Whoever did it took the head with them, but it was found about a week later somewhere unlikely— I can’t remember where.”
“What a charming story,” I said, and got a grin for my irony.
“Mirador’s full of ’em,” he said. I remembered Mildmay saying something similar. “Here we are.”
Hemminge had to wrestle a little with the lock, and the hinges groaned when he pushed the door open.
“No o
ne’s been here in years,” Stephen said. “Gloria was never here . . . I think the last person to live in this suite must have been my great-great-grandfather’s lover. Can’t remember her name.”
“And no one’s been in here since?”
“Well, my great-grandmother, Helen, hated her father’s lover—Sophia, that was her name, Sophia Vesperia—and she threw Sophia out when Malory died. She used it as a sitting room for a while. And it gets aired out once a year. Go on in.”