A few moments later, the door opened. Felix was wearing a dressing gown clearly meant for a much shorter man, with a good couple inches of his shirt showing at the cuffs; I didn’t want to know if he was wearing anything else. “So,” he said, one eyebrow up, Felix at his worst, “what is it that is so terribly urgent?”
“Have you seen Gideon tonight?”
“Gideon?” Both eyebrows up now. “Darling, surely you noticed the very messy and unpleasant end of our affair?”
“Cut it out,” I said impatiently. “Have you seen Gideon? Yes or no.”
“No, of course not.” He was frowning now, quite like Mildmay. “What’s this about?”
“Well, the thing is, sunshine, Gideon left Simon and Rinaldo’s suite several hours ago—to meet you.”
“To meet me? But I—”
“Apparently, you sent him a note.”
“I didn’t!” And that bewildered, almost childlike indignation I judged was genuine. “What in the world is going on?”
“Let me in, and we can try to figure it out.”
“What? Oh. Yes, of course.” He stepped out of the way.
Isaac Garamond’s suite looked as uninhabited as a hotel room, and Isaac himself looked dreadful, his face almost gray and sweat standing on his forehead and lip. I felt a sinking certainty that I hadn’t been wrong, that this was malice, and he was at the back of it. He’d taken the opportunity to get dressed, and he shoved Felix’s trousers at him as soon as the door was closed. Felix put them on by reflex and shrugged out of the borrowed dressing gown, still frowning at me. “Why don’t you explain things from the beginning? What does it have to do with you anyway?”
“I was worried about you,” I said, and he had the grace to look a little ashamed of himself.
I told him the whole; he listened attentively, his frown deepening, while Isaac fidgeted around the room, growing visibly more anxious by the second.
“And I got a servant to show me the way here,” I finished. “I’m sorry I was right.”
Isaac flinched; Felix didn’t even notice. “But how did you know?” he said, his gaze moving from me to Isaac and back again, and that was when someone began pounding on the door like the drummer for the Day of Judgment.
“Felix!” Mildmay’s voice, raw and frantic. “Felix, open this motherfucking door!”
Felix moved like a puppet toward the door, and for a useless, cowardly moment, I wanted to tell him to stop, as if there were any way we could hold off the catastrophe and grief I could hear in Mildmay’s voice.
Mildmay
Mehitabel’d got there ahead of me, and it wasn’t ’til a lot later that I even started wondering how. Right then, I didn’t care, except hoping she’d already explained things because I couldn’t. All I could say—all I could get out around the stone wedged in under my breastbone somehow—was, “Gideon’s dead.”
Felix’s face slammed shut like a door. “If this is a joke—”
I said over him, “He’s dead. Somebody strangled him in Strych’s old workroom.”
“Malkar’s workroom? But I—”
“Yeah, I know. You hexed the door. Somebody unhexed it.”
“But—”
Mehitabel’s breath hissed in hard. She was looking at Mr. Garamond, and he’d gone this funny clay sort of color.
Felix—powers and saints, I couldn’t stand to look at him, because he knew he had to hold himself together, and at the same time, I could see the howl building up, and it was going to win sooner or later. But he looked at Mr. Garamond, too, and said, “Isaac? Is there something you ought to tell me?”
“Nothing. I didn’t expect—”
“Your hands were burned,” Mehitabel said. “You said it was a spell.”
“Did he?” Felix said, and it would’ve just been the tone he used when he was baiting people, except there was this edge in it like splintered wood. “Well, Isaac?”
“I don’t know anything about Messire Gennadion’s workroom. I didn’t even know he had one.” And he added primly, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“You liar,” Mehitabel said, and I hadn’t even thought she knew Isaac Garamond, never mind hating him like black poison. The funny thing was, she didn’t faze him a bit. He just smirked at her, like it didn’t matter what she thought.
But there was something else. “Felix,” I said, to get his attention back on me, “whoever did it’s trying to frame you. They left stuff to make it look like it was you. Can you prove where you been all evening?”
Powers, the look in his eyes. He was about an eyelash away from just completely losing his shit. But he tried to answer me: “I was with Mehitabel. And then I came here. I don’t know what time . . . ?”
He looked at Mr. Garamond, and Mr. Garamond said, still prim and nasty, “I have no idea. And I certainly don’t know what you might have been doing beforehand. You didn’t want to talk.” He sneered at Felix, and I wanted to kill him for it.
But that sneer—that look on his face—I’d had Strych in my head all damn day—and now I wasn’t fighting the binding-by-forms no more, and I don’t know if that was what did it, or it was something else, but all at once the whole fucking thing came back at me, and I knew.
I probably would’ve passed out on the spot, but I had about half a grain of sense left in my stupid head and sat down. Hard. Staring at Mr. Garamond and not thinking about nothing except my breathing, because it was too hard and too fast, and there was this ugly sort of hitch in it.
“Mildmay?” Felix said, and powers, I could hear the worry in his voice, even though he shouldn’t’ve been bothering about me at all. He touched my shoulder. “Mildmay?”
My throat was locked up, and my hands were balled into fists so tight you could see every scar on my knuckles standing out against the bone. And I wrenched my head over and heaved a breath in somehow, like trying to breathe rocks and broken glass, and got out, “He killed him.”
Felix’s fingers cramped on my shoulder, hard enough to bruise. “How do you know?”
“ ’Cause . . .” Another breath, worse than the first one. “’Cause he was with Strych, in the Bastion.”
“I thought you didn’t remember any of that.”
“It just came back at me. Fuck it, Felix, d’you think I’d tell you if it wasn’t true?”
“No.” But he wasn’t thinking about me anymore. “Was spying not enough for you, Isaac?”
“Spying? What are you talking about? Good God, Felix, can’t you recognize a farrago of lies when you hear it?”
“Oh, I definitely can,” Felix said. “Did you murder Gideon?”
“Of course not!”
But he was lying. We could all hear it—even Mr. Garamond himself, because when I finally quit being such a fucking coward and looked at him, I’ve never seen a guy with more guilt on his face.
“You murdered Gideon,” Felix said, in this horrible, quiet, perfectly calm voice.
“I swear to you . . . I was with you!”
And that was when his nerve broke, once and for all, and he bolted for the door.
I was moving probably before he was—enough knife fights’ll do that for you—and I took him down hard. Got him pinned, twisted to look at Felix and see what he wanted, and Felix said, still in that horrible, quiet, perfectly fucking calm voice, “Kill him.”
It was a command, all the binding-by-forms behind it, and my hands were closing on Mr. Garamond’s throat before I even caught up with myself. But then there was Gideon and Bartimus Cawley and even, Kethe help me, Vey Coruscant, all dead and strangled, and I thought, clear and cold and about as calm as Felix, I ain’t doing that no more.
I said, “No.”
Mehitabel said, “Killing him won’t help anything,” and she almost pulled off her old governess-voice, too.
“I want him dead,” Felix said, between his teeth, and Mr. Garamond was lying limp as a rabbit with his pulse hammering against my fingers, and I wanted him dead, too. I wanted him dead so bad I could taste it, copper and
bile in my mouth, and it would’ve been the easiest thing in the world to just let my hands close that fraction of an inch more.
I said, “No.”
Felix’s voice went up into a shriek, “I want him dead!” and the binding-by-forms was falling on me like a wall, and it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but I straightened my fingers away from Mr. Garamond’s throat and said, “No,” for a third fucking time.
“Damn you!” And he was there, trying to shove me aside, to get at Mr. Garamond himself, and that was when the Protectorate Guard broke down the door. Guess they figured it wasn’t no time for good manners. They yanked Felix off me, and me off Mr. Garamond, and Mr. Garamond up on his feet, and there was Thaddeus de Lalage in the middle of them, looking smug enough to bust. And I saw Esmond, who hated Felix, and Thibaud, who hated me, and just in case that wasn’t enough, there was Agnes Bellarmyn kind of hovering in the doorway.
“Felix Harrowgate,” Thaddeus said, trying to sound sort of grand and awful, but it came out spiteful and way too happy, “you are under arrest for treason against the Mirador and the murder of Gideon Thraxios.”
And they were kind of shoving us toward the door, and I was trying to turn to get eye contact with Mehitabel, along of how they were way more likely to listen to her than me, when Mr. Garamond opened his stupid fucking mouth and started shouting, “They were going to kill me! They killed Gideon Thraxios and—”
Felix turned. Me and the guards all ducked on reflex, that’s how bad his eyes looked. But I don’t think he even saw us. I can’t do magic and I can’t feel it, but I swear I felt something, like getting pushed out of the way by the biggest fucking invisible hand you ever heard of, and I know I saw it hit Mr. Garamond. He stiffened all over, lurched backwards half a step, and then fell down, not like a person but like a tree. And then I think he went into convulsions, but there were too many guards in the way, and I ain’t sure.
“Oh my God,” Thaddeus said, and at least he didn’t sound happy no more. “What did you do to him?”
“What he deserved,” Felix said like death.
I saw the look the guards gave each other, but I couldn’t move fast enough.
“Sorry about this, m’lord,” Thibaud said, not sounding sorry a bit, and thumped Felix across the back of the skull with his sword hilt.
Felix went down.
I went batfuck insane.
Mehitabel
Thaddeus de Lalage, that stupid, self-righteous asshole, would not listen to me. After the guardsmen had subdued Mildmay— it took six of them and two were limping and one nursing a sprained wrist when they finally dragged him out—I tried to tell him the truth about what had happened. He had his own ideas, though, and everything I said was met with the same superior smile and condescending, “Felix is a very plausible liar, you know.”
Actually, I knew no such thing. I’d watched Felix hide and evade and dance around various truths for all the time I’d known him, but I’d almost never seen him outright lie. And when he did, he did it badly. But Thaddeus wasn’t going to listen to that, either. And when I insisted, he said, “Josiah, would you escort Madame Parr to her chambers and see that she rests? I believe she’s a little overwrought.”
“What Lord Thaddeus means,” I said to the politely hovering guardsman, “is that I’m confusing him. All right, I’m coming. ”
The guardsman, Josiah, was a nice young man; he obeyed orders but didn’t make a fuss about it. I caught him glancing at me sidelong once or twice, and at my door, I stopped and turned to face him. We were of a height. His eyes were brown and steady, and they seemed kind.
“Did you have something you wanted to ask me?” I said.
“You said Lord Felix didn’t do it,” he said.
“He didn’t.”
“You got proof?”
“Oh, do I ever,” I said bitterly.
“You think Lord Stephen’ll listen to you?”
I gave him my best and most dubious look, and he offered me an apologetic half-smile.
“Mildmay and me are sort of friends. And I ain’t got nothing against Lord Felix.”
I considered him a moment longer, but there was no guile in his round face, and, really, it wasn’t like I could make things worse. “I think Stephen may listen to me. If I can get to him.”
Josiah nodded once, sharply, like a man making up his mind. “Come on then.”
“You can get me in?” I said, having to break into a trot for a moment to catch up with him.
He grinned at me, a sweet, sunny grin missing half a dozen teeth. “Don’t tell nobody, but I got an in with the guards.”
Mildmay
In case you were wondering, the Verpine ain’t no luxury hotel. It’s deep enough in the Mirador that you can feel the Sim, and it’s all bare stone, and oh yeah, they don’t give you light unless you got somebody wanting to talk to you. And it smells just exactly like the Kennel.
It was a while before I came ’round, and it would’ve been longer if it hadn’t been for the obligation d’âme jumping up and down on me. Felix was in trouble—I mean, I knew that, because it didn’t take no brains to see it, but the binding-by-forms was telling me all about it, too. They’d done something to his magic, which I supposed—making myself think about it logically because otherwise I was just going to beat myself to death on the bars like a sparrow against a windowpane—actually made some sense. Without his magic, Felix wasn’t no kind of a threat. But the binding-by-forms didn’t care if it made sense, and it didn’t care about the bars and the walls and the locks. It just kept clanging in my head like an alarm bell.
They’d taken Jashuki—at least, I couldn’t find it, and I wouldn’t’ve left it where I could reach it if I’d been them, either—so I had all the time in the world to test my bad leg. Thanks a lot, Thaddeus. Upshot was, I could get by without a cane, but I was going to get by a lot better with one.
And, you know, every fucking time I let my guard down, even a little, I’d find myself pressed against the bars of the cell like I thought I could push my way through them or something.
The fifth or sixth time that happened, I gave up and just stayed there, grabbing onto the bars so hard the rough iron of them bit my hands. I kept seeing Gideon, the smile he’d given me when he left the Lady’s Lapdog, kept thinking that while I’d been scaring the shit out of poor, stupid Hugo Chandler, Gideon had been dying, choking and strangling with Isaac Garamond’s wire around his throat. And, Kethe, I knew just exactly how it would’ve happened, the way his fingers would have scrabbled at the wire and at Mr. Garamond’s hands, the way he would’ve twitched and struggled and then gone limp, just another sack of dead meat.
If I’d thought I could’ve run into the bars hard enough to knock myself out, I would’ve done it.
But finally—I don’t know how long it was, my time sense was fucked to Hell and back—the door at the end of the hall, the one where you could see the light around its edges so you knew you hadn’t gone blind, opened, and two guards came in, kind of half dragging and half carrying Felix between them.
“Away from the door, Fox,” one of them said, and I backed up. They unlocked it, and shoved Felix in, and they didn’t even stop to sneer before they went back out and shut us in the dark.
Where we belonged, I guess.
I could hear Felix breathing, unsteady and harsh, and when I was sure the guards were gone, and not going to come bouncing back in or something, I said, “Felix? You okay?”
“They think Gideon was a spy,” he said in this thin little voice, and powers, he sounded lost. “I kept trying to tell them he wasn’t, and they wouldn’t listen.”
“But why would Gideon be spying? It don’t make no sense.”
“I don’t know. Some notion of Thaddeus’s, I think. They think—” He broke off, and I could hear him trying not to giggle. We both knew if he started, it wouldn’t stop ’til he was screaming. “They think Gideon suborned me, that he was like a spider, sitting and waiting, and I w
as running around finding things out for him and trying to recruit other spies. They think that’s why I was interested in Isaac. And they think . . . they think—” It nearly got away from him, but he fought it back down. “They think I killed him because I didn’t know any other way to get free of him.”
“How fucking dumb can you get?” I said.
“Oh, my past history more than supports the theory,” he said, his voice dry now but still shaky and still full of splinters and shards.
“You mean, because of Strych?”
“And certain . . . aspects of my relationship with Lord Shannon. ”
“It’s still dumb.”