The Mirador

  The weight of history in the Mirador rarely bothered me, but Stephen’s casual familiarity with the doings of a woman who had died more than a century before his own birth was uncomfortable in a way Mildmay’s stories never had been. It could be worse, I told myself. He could have picked Grendille Moran’s suite. And I walked through the door.

  I had more than half expected to hate it, although I wouldn’t have said so. But the suite was charming.

  All the furniture had been taken out, so there was nothing to observe but the shape of the rooms and the beauties of the parquet floor. The first room was octagonal; the ceiling arched into a miniature vault on which someone had painted a night sky, complete with accurate constellations.

  It was a larger suite than Felix’s, with a room on each side of the octagonal one, each with another room beyond it, and a third room opposite the door to the hall, exactly the width of the wall. I looked at Stephen. “Closet? Or oubliette?”

  “Anything you like it to be,” he said. “You can have carte blanche.”

  “How blanche?”

  He raised his eyebrows at me. “I’m friends with Phegenie Brome,” I said, “and I’ve seen what happens when Lord Edmund gives her carte blanche. I don’t intend to behave like that, thank you very much.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” he said.

  “You should be. So what do you mean by carte blanche?”

  “Don’t decorate in cloth-of-gold.”

  “That’s it?”

  He shrugged a little. “You’ve got good taste, if your clothes are anything to go by. Use it.”

  Absurdly, I was flattered.

  Mildmay

  I knew—I’d learned the hard way—that the only way to do something that scares you is to just go up to it and do the fucker. You don’t want to pussyfoot around looking for the right angle and the right kind of light and all that other shit. That’s just excuses not to do it, and if you give into enough of ’em, sure enough, whatever it is, you ain’t gonna be the guy doing it. And mostly that’s worse than just going and doing it when you got the chance.

  So we’re up on the Crown of Nails in the middle of the night, me and Felix, him in nothing but his dressing gown but not even seeming to feel the wind, pacing up and down and kind of growling under his breath, and me just standing there, saying good-bye to my chances of getting over to St. Holofernes tonight, and it hit me that we were never going to get more private than this. And the thing about Felix and his temper was, if you could keep him from turning on you and mauling you half to death, his armor was already down, and if you could get through to him, he’d hear what you were trying to say.

  So, after a while—dunno, maybe a septad-minute—I said, “Felix?”

  “Mildmay.”

  “Can I, um, talk to you?”

  He stopped pacing, looked around in a what the fuck? sort of way. Shoved his hair off his face and gave a kind of raspy little laugh. “Well, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do. What is it?”

  I took a deep breath, although it didn’t seem to do me no good, and said, “I’m worried about you.”

  He waved it off. “Gideon and I are just having—”

  “Not that.”

  Witchlights are crap for actually seeing anybody by, so I couldn’t make out his expression.

  “Then what?”

  “Well, I mean . . .” And then I thought, fuck this for the Emperor’s snotrag, and just came out with it. “You’re drinking. And you’re fighting—not just with Gideon. And it’s ugly. And you ain’t talking to me no more. And, well, I’m worried about me, too.”

  I think it was the last one that brought him up short. He’d’ve laughed off me worrying about him—and done it in a nasty way so as to be sure I’d never bring it up again—but I threw it back on myself before he could, and that meant he thought before he opened his mouth.

  “Why are you worried about yourself?” he said.

  “I been pretending—I think maybe we both been pretending—that I ain’t lame, not really, I mean, not to matter, but we can’t go on pretending that.”

  I stopped, hoping he’d want to say something there, but he just said, “Go on.”

  “So I was thinking about that, and then I was sort of thinking about all the other things you and me pretend, about how there ain’t nothing wrong with me, and there ain’t nothing wrong with you, and I thought how maybe we really needed to quit pretending about all of it. And you must think so, too, ’cause you were trying the other night.”

  I stopped again, but he was just staring at me now, spooky as fuck in the witchlights, like he’d never seen me before.

  “We’re brothers,” I said, like I was wrenching my heart out of my chest. “We should help each other. I don’t know if I can help you, but I want to try. And . . .” I stopped and took another huge breath, “and I think I need your help, too.”

  After a long, long silence, he said, “How long have you been working out that little speech?”

  I couldn’t make out his tone or his expression. “Dunno, exactly. ”

  “You’re very eloquent. I hadn’t expected it of you.”

  Why the fuck had I even bothered? How many times do you got to be kicked, Milly-Fox? “Yeah. Funny, ain’t it.”

  “I didn’t mean that.” He didn’t sound amused or defensive— either one would have meant he was lying. He just sounded sad. “I was serious. I hadn’t expected you to be able to speak so eloquently. This suggests, I suppose, how little I know you. Do you think we can talk to each other, Mildmay? For myself, I fear that we cannot.”

  “Why not?”

  “What common ground do we have? What do we share?”

  “The binding-by-forms,” I said. It made him flinch.

  “That’s unnatural,” he said. “Forced intimacy means nothing. I ask you again: what do we share?”

  “How’m I s’posed to answer that? I mean, no, I ain’t like you. I ain’t a hocus and I ain’t educated or nothing, and I don’t understand most of the stuff you talk about with your friends. But is that it? Ain’t there nothing but magic and words?”

  “Sex,” he said tiredly. “It’s the only other thing I know. But you don’t want that from me.”

  “No,” I said. Because I didn’t.

  “So what else is there? What alternative do you suggest?”

  “I don’t know. I ain’t the smart one. And maybe I am too fucking dumb for any of this to work, but could you just fucking try?”

  I’d lost him somewhere. The shutters had come down across his face. He said, “I will consider what you’ve said. We’d better go in.”

  I followed him, and we didn’t say nothing more all the way back.

  My dreams that night were something else. Ginevra and Strych standing together in the Bastion, watching Felix cut lines in my skin. Felix had that awful, fiery look he got on his face when he was working hard magic. And I knew in the dream—the way you do—the magic he was working was going to bring them back to life, and I kept trying to tell him not to, that it wasn’t worth it, but no matter what I said or screamed, he didn’t seem to hear me, or even know it was me.

  I was so glad to wake up I could’ve cried.

  I lay there for a while in the dark, but the thing I can’t do when I wake up like that is get back to sleep. I’m always afraid the dream will come back and find me, and I didn’t want to dream about Strych no more. Or Ginevra. So I lit the lamp and got up and got dressed and went out into the sitting room.

  Felix was sitting there, in his chair by the fire, staring at a spread of the Sibylline he’d laid out on the side table. He didn’t look like he’d slept. I startled back, like he was a snake or something, and damn near dropped my cane. He raised his head, but didn’t say anything, just sat there and watched me.

  “Good morning,” I managed to say finally.

  “Good morning,” he said. No inflection, no smile, no clue what was going on behind his spooky eyes.

  “You’re up early,?
?? I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  By then I had a hold on myself, enough not to go on babbling like a fool since it was clear he wasn’t going to help out none. I sat down in the other armchair, got my foot up on the footstool— it made things some better—and waited. If he wanted to say something to me, he would, and if he was out here looking like leftover death for some other reason, then he wouldn’t want to talk to me anyway.

  After a long silence, he said, “Do you remember Methony at all?” He was staring into the fire, like he didn’t want to look at me.

  “No,” I said.

  “I do, a little. I wonder what she would think of us.”

  “Prob’ly that we’re both wicked sinners. I mean, based on my name.”

  “Your name?”

  “Powers, ain’t I told you that? She named me Mild-may-your-sufferings-be-at-the-hands-of-the-wicked. She was in some kind of a cult.”

  “Methony?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Named you that?”

  “Yeah. Kolkhis axed it, first thing.”

  “I can’t say that I blame her. Methony must have been out of her mind.” He was finally smiling a little, and I was glad to see it.

  “Yeah, well. But that’s all I know about her, except that we both look like her.”

  We were quiet for a while until he said, “Do you remember anything about your childhood before your keeper bought you?”

  “Not really. I mean, I think I sort of remember the brothel, but it’s just colors. I remember sitting on a wooden floor with a toy duck on wheels. But that’s it. No people or nothing.” I stopped and got some courage together and said, “Do you?”

  “A little,” he said. “I remember her singing to me. And the other girls liked me, I think. I remember feeling, I don’t know, cherished, as if everywhere I went, I would be safe.” He shook his head. “Madame Poluphemie cherished no one.”

  We sat there for another while, and he said, I think more to himself than to me, “Those memories get very hard to find. They’re so thin and fragile and small, and the other memories are so strong. I’m almost afraid to look at them, as if they might disintegrate under the weight of my gaze or get contaminated by other things. But perhaps that’s foolish.”

  “I dunno,” I said.

  “Neither do I, more’s the pity.” He sighed, and then I could see him throwing the mood off, like it was a coat he’d decided didn’t suit him. He said, “I’d better go change,” and left the room. I sat and waited and wondered if maybe that conversation meant he’d decided he didn’t have to fuck me to know me after all.

  Mehitabel

  Stephen’s steward Leveque had a suggestion.

  He came in while I was pouring a last cup of tea before taking myself back to the Empyrean. I wasn’t attending court. I had told Stephen so, emphatically if not defiantly, and he’d just said, “Powers, I wish I didn’t have to.”

  So I was in his private dining room, wearing a ridiculous trailing lacy wrap over my shift. Stephen had given it to me, almost shyly if you could say that about a man of his temperament; it occurred to me that he’d probably sent Leveque out to buy it.

  Leveque was a smallish man, wiry, dark, Mélusinien to his bones. He had the ability I’d noticed in other liveried servants in the Mirador, to make it plain he wanted to talk to you without so much as clearing his throat. Some of my lovers had ignored that with the arrogance of men born to privilege. I set my teacup down and said, “Yes?”

  Leveque gave me a nod and said, “His Lordship said as how you’d be needing a maid.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Did you have a suggestion?”

  He coughed a little, nervously. “Not so much a suggestion, miss, as maybe a request?”

  Doing Stephen’s steward a favor could only benefit me in the long run. “What is it?”

  “Well, you see—” Oh, he was uncomfortable. “I have a kind of agreement with one of the brothers at St. Crellifer.”

  I was irresistibly reminded of Jean-Soleil and the prior of St. Kemplegate. “Go on.”

  “When Torquil has someone he thinks might be able to cope with service here, he lets me know, and if I’ve got anything . . . It’s worked out so far.”

  “So you’re doing this Brother Torquil a favor,” I said cautiously.

  He shrugged it off. “It doesn’t hurt anything. And they’re good workers. Don’t want to go back, do they?”

  I thought of the little I’d heard about St. Crellifer’s, most of it bad. “I can’t blame them. And you think Torquil’s latest might suit me?”

  “She was apprenticed to a modiste, Torquil says.”

  “And she’s not likely to take after me with a cleaver or anything? ”

  Leveque looked horrified. “Even if Torquil would, miss— which he wouldn’t—I would never—”

  “No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. If you think she’ll do, I’ve no objections.”

  “You could meet her first, miss, if you wanted.”

  “At St. Crellifer’s?”

  He looked horrified again. “Powers, no. She’s waiting outside. If you want.”

  “Bring her in,” I said, since there didn’t seem to be much alternative. And I was curious.

  Leveque slipped back out through the servants’ door, and reappeared in a moment, ushering in a young woman dressed with painfully respectable neatness, tall and without enough flesh on her long-boned frame, but with lovely skin the warm color of bronze and great luminous dark eyes. She didn’t look mad, although she didn’t meet my eyes, nor, indeed, look any higher than my collarbone.

  “This is Lenore Nevillson, Miss Parr.”

  “Miss,” Lenore said, in a frail, half-drowned voice, and dropped a curtsy. She did it easily, gracefully, and I could see that she would do well answering my door, fetching and carrying, which was all I needed a maid for. Appearances.

  “It’s fine with me, Leveque,” I said. “Honestly.”

  “Good,” said Leveque. “I’ll get her on the rolls. When would you like her to start?”

  “Tonight,” I said. And had to swallow hard against a sudden choking feeling. “I’m moving into the Mirador tonight.”

  Mildmay

  More meetings that afternoon. I wondered sometimes how Felix kept track of them all, but we didn’t talk about hocus business. I think he felt like it would be betraying the other hocuses if he told me what he really thought of them. I’d also wondered why he put up with it all, but I thought that afternoon that maybe I knew the answer to that one. I mean, whatever else you could say about the way Felix and the other hocuses got along, they knew what he was worth to them. Now, personally, I thought that was a shitty replacement for being cherished like he’d talked about, but Felix wasn’t very smart about stuff like that sometimes. I’d seen that in the Gardens of Nephele, the way he didn’t seem to want to see the difference between people liking him for himself and liking him for other reasons. I didn’t think that Felix had had a lot of practice at being liked for himself. It wasn’t something Strych would have taught him.

  Mr. Garamond bounced up again out of nowhere after the committee meeting. They talked for a little bit, and then Felix said, “All right, Isaac. Mildmay, we’re invited to dinner.”

  Mr. Garamond looked taken aback, but I could see Felix daring him to say he hadn’t meant me.

  “You don’t want me along,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” Felix said. “Isaac is forever telling me he wants to get to know you better, aren’t you, Isaac?”

  I didn’t like Mr. Garamond, but I wanted all of a sudden to get him aside and tell him not to play Felix’s games. You couldn’t ever win. But Mr. Garamond didn’t seem to have picked up on that. He pulled a smile together from somewhere and nodded and said, “I shall be enchanted to have your company, Mr. Foxe.”

  “That’s settled then,” Felix said. “Shall we say eight? Splendid. We’ll see you then. Come on, Mildmay.”

  Powers. I’d rather eat so
ap. I went after him, wondering if even that would be a good enough excuse for Felix. Probably not.

  Felix

  I had known Gideon would be incandescent with jealousy, and I bore his tirade as long as I could. But finally, I said, “He invited me to dinner. What was I supposed to do, tell him my lover won’t let me go?” Gideon didn’t dignify that with a response, which had been my intention. Anything to get him to shut up.