The Mirador

  Court that Deuxième was bad. For starters, Lord Stephen stood up and said he’d decided to marry the Lemeria gal, and I swear you could’ve used Robert of Hermione’s face to pickle eggs. Robert was pretty much out the door, and he knew it, and that meant, if I knew Robert at all, that he was going to be looking round for something nasty to do—and he’d like it best if he could do something nasty to Felix, who he hated more than he hated anything else on the face of the world. So that gave me the jitters going one direction, and then when Lord Stephen asked if there was any business, Thaddeus stepped out and said as how he thought the Mirador ought to be more careful about the Bastion’s spies, that just ’cause they said they wanted to be friends didn’t mean they were going to be playing fair, and as how he, Thaddeus, thought they were all a bunch of liars and cheats and shouldn’t be trusted any further than a cat can sling a cart-horse.

  Right then I hated Thaddeus about as bad as I hated Robert, because anybody could see that if he’d just gone to Lord Stephen with his concerns, Lord Stephen could have sort of settled the thing without much fuss. But he had to get up and say it in the middle of the Hall of the Chimeras, and within five minutes there were people howling for the Bastion’s blood. It made me feel sick, and I wondered if Cerberus Cresset had been good at this particular move.

  Things were getting uglier, and I could see Andromachy Sain and the other Eusebian hocuses who hadn’t gone back to the Bastion clumping together tighter and tighter, when this voice beside me said, “Thaddeus, that’s arrant nonsense and you know it.”

  Felix pitched it to lift right over the babble clear to the other end of the hall. That trick don’t work all the time, but it worked fine just then. Everybody got quiet and was staring at him and I was wishing he could have picked something a little more tactful to say.

  Lord Stephen said, “Thank you, Lord Felix. Lord Thaddeus, I understand your concerns. A committee will be formed to look into the matter. Next!”

  By that time, one of Thaddeus’s friends had got ahold of him, and whatever she said at least made him shut up, although he stood there looking sulky the rest of the time. So now there were two guys out for Felix’s blood. Fucking marvelous. And— let’s face it, Milly-Fox—those are only the guys at the head of the line.

  Mehitabel

  Vincent Demabrien had proposed the hour of seven—a little early for dinner, but I gathered that Messire Demabrien had to be grateful for what he could get. In my message to Felix, I had told him he could come early if he wanted, primarily so that I’d have a way of judging how nervous he was. He showed up at six-thirty.

  I couldn’t have deduced his state of mind from anything else. He was beautifully dressed in a dull, lush periwinkle-blue brocade embroidered with bullion; I wondered if he had chosen it because it gave his right eye more color. Otherwise he wore the clothes of any Marathine courtier; trousers, boots, and snow-white shirt all complete. His waistcoat was unexpectedly sober, dark green without any embroidery at all, the gold wizard’s sash like a streak of sunlight across the forest floor. He hadn’t queued his hair—he almost never bothered—and the gold rings in his ears were all but lost in the flame. The rings on his hands, the rings that had undoubtedly caused the welts on Mildmay’s face, glowed like the eyes of dragons in the lamplight.

  He smiled at me as he came in, a wry, nervous quirk of his mouth that couldn’t have been less like the way he smiled when he was setting out to charm, and said, “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet, sunshine,” I said, smiling back at him with more warmth than I should have. “There’s still plenty of time for a disaster.”

  It got a better smile, and he said, “You can’t possibly make me more nervous than I already am, so quit trying.”

  “All right. Bourbon?”

  “Yes, please.” I poured sherry for myself, and we stood before the fireplace like strangers.

  “Will you tell me a little about your friend?” I said.

  “What do you want to know, beyond the fact that we knew each other as boys and he is the catamite of Lord Ivo Polydorius? ”

  “If I’m not to try to make you nervous, you aren’t to try to shock me. Out with it.”

  “I don’t suppose it will shock you,” he said with a sigh. “We know each other because we were managed by the same procurer. The term in Pharaohlight is ’stablemates.’ ”

  I didn’t have to fake a grimace, and he saluted me with his glass.

  “It could have been much worse,” he said, his breathy voice light, as if he were talking of someone else. “The Shining Tiger was what they call an upright house, and Lorenzo took very good care of his investments.” He took a deep swallow of bourbon. “Malkar found me when I was fourteen and took me to Arabel—which might as well be on the moon as far as Pharaohlight is concerned. Vincent assumed Malkar had killed me—a far from unlikely theory—and I assumed he had died in any one of the ways a teenage prostitute can die in Pharaohlight. Believe me, they are myriad. If Lord Ivo had not been fool enough to think his insipid little rat of a daughter could catch Stephen, we would never have known each other still lived.”

  “It’s like something out of a romance.”

  “Much of my life is,” he said wearily, not responding to my teasing tone.

  I picked up his cue and turned the conversation to Stephen’s marriage. Since both of us disliked Philip Lemerius intensely, it was a safe topic, and as Felix relaxed, an increasingly entertaining one. He was in the middle of a story about the one ghastly time he’d had the honor to be introduced to Philip’s late father when the knock came. Lenore ghosted out to answer the door.

  “Vincent Demabrien, m’lord, miss,” she said and vanished again.

  I hadn’t been able to get a very good look at Vincent Demabrien during the soirée, just an impression of a slight, feline body and ink-black hair. Now I saw he was a small man, several inches shorter than I, and fine-boned with it. He was as pale-skinned as Felix and Mildmay, and close up, I could see the lines starting to etch themselves around his eyes and mouth. He was older than Felix, and he looked it. I’d never seen a man who looked so tired.

  “Madame Parr,” he said and bowed out of pure, reflexive good manners; his attention was all for Felix. “I must thank you for your kind invitation.” He had no more accent than Felix did; his voice was pleasant, quiet, unremarkable.

  “Thank Felix,” I said. “It was his idea.” I drifted myself away, ostensibly to consult with Lenore although there was nothing that needed saying, leaving the two of them staring at each other as if their past had deprived them of language. By the time I returned, they’d managed to start a painful, limping conversation about the kings whose busts were in the Hall of the Chimeras. I thought, Mildmay could help, and then wondered where Mildmay was. He and Felix were bound-by-forms; he was supposed to be with Felix unless explicitly ordered otherwise. Yet both times Felix had come here, he’d come without Mildmay. Tact on Felix’s part was a possible but unlikely answer; I remembered the rumor that Mildmay had tried to protect Gideon from Felix and then shoved the entire subject hastily out of my head, stepping into the conversation with a question about why Michael Teverius had left the busts in the Hall of the Chimeras. Felix said promptly, “Superstition.”

  “Beg pardon?” I said.

  “Michael was superstitious. Yes, I know, it seems odd in a man who showed no qualms about personally executing the entire royal family, but the Cabal tried to get him to destroy the busts, and he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t take out the mosaics either, and for that, at least, I think we can be grateful. Or perhaps it was some perverted kind of family loyalty.”

  “You’ve lost me again.”

  “Michael’s mother was a Cordelia. The king he, er, replaced was his own cousin.”

  “Was he a madman?” Vincent asked.

  “Not so far as anyone’s been able to tell. He didn’t rule terribly long as Lord Protector—only nine years or so—but he ruled perfectly competently by all accounts, and he
died quite prosaically of the Winter Fever. No assassination, no suicide.”

  “But to kill all those people . . .”

  “People can do astonishing things when they want something badly enough,” Felix said, on which rather ominous note Lenore appeared to announce dinner.

  The food was magnificent, and I was grateful for my access to the Teverius chef. Vincent Demabrien relaxed, by infinitesimal but perceptible degrees; Felix expanded like a gaudy flower; and by the time we reached dessert, you could almost have believed it was a normal dinner party.

  We returned to the sitting room for coffee. I offered brandy, but neither of them would take it. I poured a jigger’s worth for myself and sat down to listen to Felix explaining in his light, polite, deadly voice just why Robert of Hermione was miserable to the point of madness about Stephen’s marriage. I was concentrating on what Felix was saying, hoping that it might be information that would please Isaac and thus distract him, so it took me a while to notice that Vincent’s attention was divided. He was certainly listening to Felix, but his eyes kept wandering from Felix’s face and expansive gestures to the stretch of wall between the fireplace and the dining room door.

  Felix noticed very shortly after I did; he twisted to look behind him and, seeing nothing, twisted back to look at Vincent. But instead of being perplexed or annoyed, he was wide-eyed with what might have been comprehension or even fear. “Vincent, do you still see them?”

  Vincent, for his part, looked even more alarmed—almost sick. But then Felix’s cryptic question seemed to reach him; he visibly relaxed and said, “I forgot you knew.”

  I’m as willing as anyone to let other people play out their dramas, but my patience has its limits. “Knew what?”

  They both flinched, almost perfectly in unison, and exchanged an unreadable glance. Then Felix shrugged—he had a particularly irritating way of shrugging that conveyed without any need of words his disavowal of responsibility for other people’s short-sightedness and stupidity—and said, “Vincent sees ghosts.”

  He was all but daring me not to believe him. I looked at Vincent, who made an odd, apologetic little grimace and said, “It is true, but I won’t be offended if you don’t believe me. Ivo thinks I’m mad.”

  “Yes, because the Polydorii are so noted for their sanity and mental stability,” Felix said.

  But I’d thought of something else. “Who do you see?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  I waved my hand at the wall. “You clearly see something. Who is it?”

  “Ah.” His head tilted in a listening gesture eerily reminiscent of Felix in conversation with Gideon. “She says she was very beautiful. Men wrote poems to her. She was Damian Teverius’s lover, and she killed herself when he put her aside. Her name . . . I’m sorry, Mehitabel. She doesn’t remember.”

  “Mildmay would know,” Felix murmured.

  “She killed herself? Here?”

  “She took poison. Widow’s tea, she calls it. I don’t know what that is.”

  “Hemlock,” Felix said.

  “It didn’t hurt. And then Damian had her removed with the rest of the trash and put a new girl in her place.” He shook his head once, sharply. “Sorry. She’s very . . . bitter. And she has you confused with the woman who replaced her. It’s the nature of ghosts.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “Is she going to—to do anything?”

  “She can’t,” Vincent said, almost sadly. “There’s not enough left of her. Just the bitterness.”

  “Well, that’s some comfort.” I tore my gaze away from that empty stretch of wall. Vincent didn’t look at all alarmed any longer, and I asked, “Does this happen to you often?”

  “I always see them. I try to ignore them, but sometimes it’s hard. I’m sorry, Felix. I really was—”

  But Felix cut him off. There was a wild look in his eyes, as if he’d just had a profound and revelatory idea. The yellow eye seemed to say it was magnificent, while the blue eye said it was dreadful. He said, “Vincent, how would you feel about a small experiment?”

  “What sort of small experiment?” Vincent said warily.

  Felix consulted his pocket watch. “It can’t be tonight. It’s late, and I’ve got other things to do. Jeudy? Could you get away Jeudy?”

  “Maybe. But to do what?”

  Felix smiled brilliantly. “To find out how you see ghosts.”

  Mildmay

  You know, I hated the fuck out of the fact I didn’t have nowhere safe to go in the Mirador except Mehitabel’s old room. Hated the ever-living fuck out of it.

  But that didn’t change nothing.

  I lay there on the bed and stared up at the ceiling and tried not to think about fucking Mehitabel. Which went about as well as you’d expect.

  But the third or fourth time I forced my jaw to relax, I realized something funny. It wasn’t the fucking I missed—there’s plenty of that around, and powers, I got hands, don’t I?—and it wasn’t even Mehitabel herself. Not exactly. I mean, I missed her, but I wasn’t lying here pining or nothing. What was wrong with me was that I didn’t have nothing to do and nothing to think about. Except me. And everything I’d fucked up.

  Because, you know, Mehitabel hadn’t trusted me, but why in the world should she have? I mean, sure, I’d fucked her brains out whenever she wanted, but powers and saints, I knew better than anybody that didn’t mean nothing.

  Hadn’t talked to her. Hadn’t talked to Ginevra, neither. What had Felix called it? A persistent motif. He was fucking well right about that. So what did I think I was doing, talking like I loved Ginevra? What the fuck did I think love was, anyway?

  I rolled over and punched the pillow instead of the wall.

  Well, okay, maybe I had loved Ginevra. Her death had fucked me up bad enough I could give myself that much. But I hadn’t acted like it. I hadn’t tried. And maybe it wouldn’t’ve worked if I had—there wasn’t no sense pretending Ginevra hadn’t been exactly what she was—but we’d never fucking know now. Because I hadn’t tried. I’d looked at it and decided it wasn’t worth the risk. No, Mildmay the Fox don’t stick his neck out for nothing. Except for money.

  Well, or Felix.

  But that ain’t the same kind of love, I said to myself, and then I couldn’t think of a reason why that ought to matter. If I didn’t care about somebody enough to take a risk for ’em, I didn’t have no business saying I loved them, whatever I thought that damn word meant.

  And I didn’t. I realized that, laying there. I mean, I’d thought I’d loved Keeper—Kolkhis like that. Thought I’d been in love with her. You know. And if that was what it was, I didn’t want no part of it. Certainly didn’t want to make nobody feel that way about me. I didn’t want power like that.

  Well, and you ain’t no good at it anyway, I said to myself and settled in to try and sleep. Maybe you should just leave it the fuck alone.

  I thought, I can do that. And it was such a huge fucking relief that I never even noticed when I fell asleep.

  Felix

  I’d worked out the thaumaturgy as well as could be hoped for. Once they’d quit insisting on Death, the Dog, and the Prison, the Sibylline had given me the Unreal City, the Nightingale, and the Wheel. Attempts at clarification had all been threaded through with Death, and I cursed Malkar in my heart. But the Unreal City, the Nightingale, and the Wheel were enough to show me how to proceed.

  If I’d read them correctly, of course.

  It was both the gift and the curse of the Sibylline, that its symbols, its semeia, could be interpreted in so many different ways. This property made it beautifully flexible as an instrument of thaumaturgic architecture, but frustratingly ambiguous when one was trying to use it for divination, whether of the future or of extant thaumaturgy. Mavortian had laughed at me and claimed that reading the cards was an art, requiring “card sense” just as ordinary card games did, but I had suspected then and suspected now that that had been a smoke screen intended to keep me from seeing that he was no more certain
than I was.

  But I could put the semeia together in a way that made sense for my purposes. The Unreal City was as good a description as there was for the Khloïdanikos. The Nightingale—“A gift from the night,” Mavortian had said. “Balance, generosity, unexpected strength.” And that was Thamuris, both in himself and in his relationship with the Khloïdanikos: it was almost always night for him.

  The Wheel was trickier. But I’d thought about it, in and around other things, and I thought I understood. The Khloïdanikos had a rhythm, a cycle—“a single day,” I had suggested, and that still seemed true, but it wasn’t strictly linear. It didn’t have to be, as long as the deeper rhythm held. The deeper rhythm was the Wheel, and if I could wed the rubies to the Wheel, it would hold them. If.

  I emerged into my construct-Mélusine holding the Parliament of Bees balanced on one palm. The bees were crystalline, faceted, glowing brilliant red as they caught the sunlight. They flew in wary circles around me, returning to their hive periodically: a dance, a ritual. I moved very carefully toward Horn Gate, concentrating on holding the beehive steady. Dropping it seemed like a truly terrible idea.