“Lord Thaddeus, open your mouth out of turn again, and I’ll have you removed,” Stephen said. “Mr. Foxe, do you stand by your story?”
“Ain’t a story. But, yeah, I’ll swear it’s true.”
“Very well. We have other evidence, taken under Protectorate Seal, which confirms what Mr. Foxe has said. And—Lord Thaddeus, if you would not mind speaking now to tell us how you learned of the location of Gideon Thraxios’s body?”
“An anonymous message under my door,” Thaddeus said sullenly.
“And once you’d found the body, you went to Isaac Garamond’s rooms because . . . ?”
“I knew there were spies in the Mirador. One of my . . . former friends in the Bastion sent me a message with the caefidus. And I knew”—he finished in a burst of defiance—“they were trying to suborn Isaac Garamond!”
“And you did not come to anyone with your evidence,” Stephen said, dismissing Thaddeus de Lalage with one comprehensive glance. “Felix Harrowgate, from this evidence, you are guilty neither of murder nor of treason.”
There was a rustle of whispers among the Curia; they were thinking of the husk of Isaac Garamond. The envoys from Vusantine were in a huddle and seemed to be arguing.
“However, you have committed gross heresy on the person of Isaac Garamond. Do you deny this?”
“No, my lord,” Felix said, not looking up.
“The sentence for gross heresy is death,” Stephen said, and Felix agreed, “By fire.” He didn’t sound as if the idea upset him.
“Does anyone speak in defense of this person?” Stephen said.
Lord Giancarlo said, “Surely we must admit there are extenuating circumstances.”
“Would you say I was mad with grief, my lord?” Felix said with sudden savagery. “Will you send me to St. Crellifer’s with my victim?”
“Felix, hold your tongue,” Stephen said. “Lord Giancarlo, even if we admit extenuating circumstances, it doesn’t change what he did.”
“Not all heretics must be burned,” Lord Giancarlo said stubbornly.
“Yes, and Felix is living proof. However, there are no loop-holes here. What he did is gross heresy, and the sentence is death by burning.”
Lord Giancarlo coughed politely and said, “There is also the matter of what happens to the esclavin when an obligataire is executed under the Mirador’s laws.”
I saw Felix stagger, as if Lord Giancarlo’s words were a blow, and he said with sudden urgency, “There’s no need to enforce that particular law, surely? Given that he couldn’t have . . . that he didn’t . . .”
The principal among the Tibernian envoys stepped forward out of their huddle and said, “Lord Stephen, I propose, on behalf of the Coeurterre, an alternative.”
“You wh—” Stephen caught himself. “I beg your pardon, what did you say?”
The Coeurterre didn’t mark its wizards as the Mirador did, but they did wear rings, so the Tibernian who spoke next was their wizard, his gems flashing in the candlelight. “Felix Harrowgate is a noirant wizard of such great power that his sudden death—here, where he has done his greatest working—would do untold damage to the balance of energies.”
I remembered Felix explaining about noirant and clairant magic, so I at least had a very vague idea of what the Coeurterrene wizard meant, which put me several streets ahead of most of the other people in the hall.
“Then what do you suggest I do with him, gentlemen?” Stephen said, moving his glare from Lord Giancarlo to the Tibernians.
“Send me to Kekropia,” Felix said wearily. “The Eusebians will take care of the problem for you.”
“Felix, shut up!” Mildmay said, quite audibly.
“Well?” said Stephen, not even glancing at Felix.
“We recommend exile,” said the principal envoy.
“Where to?”
The principal envoy coughed politely. “The High King, Aeneas Antipater, has recently been in negotiations with the Convocation of Corambis. Their wizards are interested in our theories of magic, and their own orthodoxy does not regard the working of magic upon persons as anathema. They have ways of binding a wizard’s power, as well, so that you would not need to worry that this might happen again.”
“You wouldn’t need to worry about that anyway,” Felix said. “My lord, please, am I to be a performing bear now?”
“You have no room to object,” Stephen snapped at him, and Giancarlo struck in, “Remember the legal consequences of your execution.”
By which he clearly meant Mildmay’s fate, and Felix knew it, for he gave Mildmay a wide-eyed, unreadable look, then turned back to Stephen and said, “I am your lordship’s performing bear, then.”
“You certainly are,” Stephen said, with a kind of grim unwilling fondness that almost—almost—made Felix smile. “Very well. My judgment is this: you are stripped of your title and privileges as a wizard of the Mirador. You will travel to Corambis—you may have two horses and provisions for the journey, and I imagine we can find a map—and there present yourself to the judgment and discipline of the Convocation of Corambis and its wizards. You may not return to the Mirador or its territories unless summoned. Do you understand this judgment? ”
“Yes, my lord,” Felix said.
“Does anyone speak against this judgment?”
No one did.
But at least Felix was alive.
Felix
How did one pack to go into exile?
The guardsmen stood stolidly by the door, distancing themselves from me with every breath they took. Mildmay, ever-practical, had said, “I’ll deal with the clothes. You’re gonna want some books, aren’t you?”
I supposed I would.
I stared at the shelves blankly for some time, then went into my bedroom. “How many?”
“What?” said Mildmay from one of the wardrobes.
“How many books?”
“Um.” He straightened up to look at me. From the frownline between his eyebrows, he didn’t like what he saw very much. “Well, you can’t take them encyclo-whatsits.”
The Encyclopédie de la Philosophie Naturale in twenty-eight volumes. The first thing I’d bought with my stipend as a wizard of the Mirador.
“No, of course not,” I said.
“Well, a septad. If they ain’t too big. Is that okay?”
“Seven,” I said.
“Yeah. Seven. Felix? That okay?”
“What? Yes. Yes, that’s fine.”
I went back to the bookshelves. Seven books.
I went back to the bedroom. “Do I count the Sibylline as a book?”
“Do what?” said Mildmay.
“The Sibylline. My cards. Do they count as a book?”
He stared at me for a second, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Then he said, “Nah, they ain’t that big. I can always stick ’em in my coat pocket or something. You don’t have to count them as a book.”
“Okay,” I said, and went back to the bookshelves.
Seven books.
I touched the spine of the Geomantica, the book Mariam Lester—one of the original Cabalists—had finished on her deathbed. But it was a quarto volume and nearly seven hundred pages long. The Ynge I could take, though, and I put it on the table.
That was one.
Six left.
I stared at A Treatise upon Spirit.
I went back to the bedroom. “What about Gideon’s books?”
"Gideon’s books?” Mildmay said. “Felix, do we got to take this coat?”
Red-violet and lavish with bullion. “I don’t care. What about Gideon’s books?”
“What about Gideon’s books?”
“What happens to them? If I don’t take them?”
“Well, fuck, Felix, why’re you asking me? I don’t know. What’s gonna happen to your books?”
“They’ll . . . they’ll be put in one of the libraries. Probably the Archive of Cinders. That’s where they put heretics’ books.”
“Then that’s what
they’ll do with Gideon’s books.”
"But ...”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said and went back to the bookshelves.
To punish myself, I put Ephreal Sand on top of Ezrabeth Ynge. There. That was two. I could take five of Gideon’s books.
I picked the Principia Lucis because Gideon had considered it the greatest theoretical work on thaumaturgy ever written; A Treatise upon Spirit and the Psukhomakhia because I had made him happy by finding them for him; the new Concerning the Thaumaturgy of Wood because it was the book he had been reading when . . .
That was six. I searched the shelves, looking for the book that Gideon himself would most have wanted to take. And I knew, my breath hitching with something that was not quite pain, when I found it. Nahum Westerley’s Inquiries into the World’s Heart. I’d never seen Gideon reading it; he didn’t need to. He could quote long passages of it from memory. But he’d insisted on buying a copy all the same, and I knew, I knew, that that was the book he would have chosen.
I put it with the others and sat down at the table to wait for Mildmay.
I did not open any of the books.
Mildmay
It was raining when we came out into the Plaza del’Archimago, and it rained on us all the way down the Road of Corundum, out Corundum Gate, and onto the road going north that the map said would probably get us headed the right way for Corambis. Probably. Felix rode ahead of me, and I let him. I had the map and the money. It wasn’t like he could ditch me even if he wanted to.
Every septad-foot farther we got from the Mirador, I felt like another length of chain fell off me. Or like there was somebody in my head, going along a row of windows and throwing the shutters open. Even the rain was the most purely beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
Three miles or so beyond the city gates, about the time it stopped raining, there was a carriage drawn up at the side of the road and a man standing beside it. Somebody’d hung an overcoat over the crest on the door, but I hoped Lord Shannon didn’t think he was in disguise or anything. Not with hair like that.
I didn’t think Felix was going to stop, and maybe he didn’t want to, but he reined in just opposite the coach. “Lord Shannon. ” There was absolutely fuck-all nothing in his voice.
“Felix,” Lord Shannon said, “I brought you your rings.”
There was a long silence. Felix said, “Why?”
“Restitution. Atonement. Because they are yours, and I would not have them destroyed or worn by another.”
“I am no longer a wizard of the Mirador,” Felix said in his dead stone voice.
“These were not given you by the Mirador, and we have no right to take them away. It is all that I can do for you, Felix. Will you not accept it?”
“Give them to Mildmay. Or take them back and give them to your boyfriend. I don’t care.” And he rode on.
Me and Lord Shannon traded a look. We’d never liked each other, and now we never would, but that wasn’t what mattered here, and we both knew it.
I could see him brace himself before he said, “Will you take Felix’s rings, or will you spurn me as I deserve?”
“I ain’t no good at holding grudges,” I said.
“Thank you.” Shannon handed me up a small, neat, oilskin packet, tied and sealed like he was planning to send ’em to the Emperor in Aigisthos. “I strung them on a chain, so I know they’re all there.”
I stuck the packet in an inside pocket, where it’d be safe. “M’lord,” I said.
“Ride on,” he said. “He needs you.”
I gave him the best kind of bow I could and rode after Felix. I glanced back once. Shannon was still standing in the road, watching. I raised a hand, and I saw him wave before I had to look back ahead.
Felix didn’t wait for me, so it took me a while to come up with him. And he didn’t say nothing, and I didn’t say nothing, and it started raining again, and suddenly, I thought, Fuck it. “Felix.”
“What?”
“Just making sure you’re in there.”
He didn’t even twitch.
Come on, you prick. Give me something. “It could be worse, y’know. Lord Stephen could’ve decided to burn you anyway.”
He looked at me then, and his eyes were like lightning. “And I would have said thank you. So just shut up about how things could be worse, all right?” He drove his horse forward again.
And I followed him.
There wasn’t nothing else in the world I could do.
Mehitabel
I went back to my suite, not because I wanted to go there, but because if I went to the Empyrean with this much time before the performance, I’d have to talk to people. And I couldn’t bear the thought.
Lenore must have been listening for me, because she came out into the hall to meet me. “Miss, I hope I done right, but that Mr. Demabrien who visits you?”
“Yes?” I said. And here was another whose life was in ruins.
“Well, he came and he said he didn’t know where else to go, but Lord Crowell threw him out, and he thought . . . Well, I reckon he didn’t know what he thought. So I said he could sit by the fire, and I got him some tea. Is that okay?”
“Thank you, Lenore,” I said, and meant it. “That is absolutely ‘okay.’ You did the right thing.”
She gave me a shy, brilliant, stunning smile. “You want some tea, miss? And I can see if they’ll make sandwiches or something.”
I supposed I should eat. Vincent probably should, too. “Yes, please. That’s a good idea.”
And she bobbed me a curtsy and darted away. I went in to face Vincent.
He looked dreadful, his face naked of maquillage and a livid bruise starting on the right side of his jaw. He dredged together a smile as I came toward him and said, “I promised not to apologize again, but I do hope you don’t mind.”
“Not a bit. Who hit you?”
He shrugged a little. “I was only a proxy for Ivo. It doesn’t matter.”
“Is that the extent of the damage?”
“Oh, yes. It was a blow in passing.”
“Were you at the trial?”
“If I hadn’t been, I would’ve been out of the way faster, and Crowell wouldn’t have had to suffer the indignity of having to throw me out.”
“Vincent—”
“I know. Sorry. Yes, I was at the trial. No, I don’t have the least idea what I’m going to do now.” His smile twisted and became ghastly. “Do you suppose, if I’d said yes to Felix, this might not have happened?”
“It doesn’t help to think that way.”
“No, I know that.” He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes.
“Have you slept?”
“Powers, since when?”
“Last night will do for a start.”
“No. I was too busy being questioned.”
“Vincent, they didn’t—”
“Oh, I’m exonerated,” he said. “They decided I was an innocent cat’s-paw in Ivo’s machinations against—for? it’s very hard to tell—Lord Shannon. Which is fortunate, since it’s the truth. Ivo kept his life in a series of very small boxes.”
“So you’re free,” I said.
He snorted. “I suppose that’s one word for it. I’m thirty-five, I’ve been a whore all my life, and I may wish myself the very best of luck in finding a new patron. Who’s going to want Ivo Polydorius’s leavings?”
He had a point. “Well, what would you do if you had the choice?”
“Cut off my sex and go into a monastery,” he said, with such weary disgust that I was afraid he wasn’t joking.
“You’re not obliged to explain yourself to me,” I said, and held up a hand when he opened his mouth to apologize. “But you can’t sit in front of my fireplace forever unless you’re willing to earn your keep.”
He became perfectly still, as wary as a cornered cat. “And what did you have in mind?”
For a moment, I heard Felix in my head, so clearly it was almost as if he was in the room: D
arling, please. I’m not that desperate. But I didn’t say it. I said, “I’m thinking I need a secretary.”
“A . . . secretary.”
“Between the Empyrean and the Mirador, yes. Someone to make sure I’m on time for things, handle correspondence, block importunate would-be suitors. You know, the usual.”
“And you think I’d suit you?”
“You write a fair hand. And good God, Vincent, what else do you have to do?”
“I’ve never—
“You’ll learn,” I said, and managed to say it cheerfully.
“Do you make a habit of taking in strays?” he said as Lenore came in with the tea tray.
“Huh,” I said, thinking of Lenore, and Mildmay, and Semper and Gordeny. And even Corinna. And Hallam—please, God, let Stephen be able to help him. “You have a point.”
We dealt with the tea and sandwiches; I was appallingly hungry, now that I thought about it. Lenore ghosted away again.
Vincent said, “Are you quite sure?”
“If it doesn’t work out, you’ll at least be in a better position to find some other job. And, yes, I like you and I believe I can trust you. Which I think are more important in a secretary than prior experience.”
“You’re a determined woman,” he said—dryly because he was trying to distract me from the fact that he was blushing.
“Mule-headed is the word you’re looking for,” I said kindly, and nearly made him choke on his tea. “Come on, Vincent, are you betting on the dogs or the ponies?”
“All right!” he said. “I’ll quit fighting against the miracle.”
“Good man,” I said. “Come with me to the theater tonight, and I can introduce you around. Corinna Colquitt will flirt with you, but don’t mind that. She always flirts with Felix—”
My voice broke, as sudden and hard as the descending blade of Mélusine’s vicious sanguette.
“Mehitabel,” Vincent said gently, “there’s nothing we can do.”
“I know that.” I sniffed hard. “And I can’t afford the luxury of a good cry right now, but God . . .”
“He won’t be burned,” Vincent said. “And his brother is with him.”
I sniffed again and got out my handkerchief. “I know. Dammit. All right. I need to get ready—and I have your first task for you.”