Blood Spirits (70 page)

I said to Nat, “I thought Brother Ildephonsas healed him.”

“Body,” Nat said, tapping her chest. “But not here.” She tapped her forehead. “He won't rest, he wants some kind of assurance that apparently only you can give.”

Phaedra said in a low voice, “I told him, we all told him, that Jerzy is dead. But he keeps asking if we were there, and saying he won't believe it. We thought it better not to tell him about Ruli.”

Enlightenment hit me. After a lifetime of lies and half-truths, Tony couldn't trust anything third-hand. We walked quietly into the room. Tony lay in the bed, his hair tousled with sweat. I didn't know if that sweat was a good or a bad sign. His eyes seemed too bright, his face wan as he squinted up at Beka, who was in the same clothes she'd been wearing the day before, blood splashes and all.

“. . . long stay for a sociopath,” he was whispering.

“So it is,” she replied, smiling tenderly.

“Bek.” He tried to speak, then twitched restlessly.

“I know,” she whispered, though we could hear every word. “I know. Tony, I'm not going to wrap my life around yours until I can trust that you will wrap yours around mine. There must be two of us trying.”

“Bek,” he whispered.

She leaned down and kissed him softly on the lips, then turned her head. Her expression smoothed. “Kim is here.”

Tony's head turned, and he tried to lift it, his feverish face anxious. “Kim. Jerzy?”

“He's dead, Tony,” I said. “I saw it. I was there.”

The pain in his forehead eased, and his head dropped back to the pillow. “What. How?” One restless hand moved over the bedclothes.

“Your family secret? About Grandmother Rose? Well, that now includes Ruli. And she kept her own covenant with Uncle Jerzy, I guess you could say.” I made a gesture like driving a stake into my own heart, and watched his comprehension, followed by a slight grimace.

“World knows . . . my sister is one?”

“Not the world.” I shook my head. “Your family and mine know. Alec and Milo. Beka and Nat, now.”

The relief was back.

Alec stepped to my side. He reached down and took Tony's hand. “Milo sent this over,” he said as he slid something up over Tony's knuckle. He lifted his fingers away, revealing a very old-looking signet ring. “Suitable for harness.”

The flush spread across Tony's face as his cracked lips twitched in a smile, and I remembered what Tony had said so disparagingly after his attack on me with a sword. It seemed that this ring, and what it symbolized, meant something to him after all.

“That's it.” Nat elbowed her way in, but at least she was smiling. “I think he's got what he needed, so I'm kicking all of you out. Right now his job is sleep.” She turned her head. “You too, Beka. Go home and catch some Z's. I don't want you in here next. Bad for my rep.”

We retreated in good order. Phaedra lifted her hand in salute, saying, “Honoré and Gilles are at our place, waiting for a report.”

Alec said, “Tell them I'll be over as soon as I can.”

Phaedra dipped her head and strode out.

Beka faced Alec and me. “Thank you. Thank you for everything. Both of you.”

“Go catch those Z's, Beka,” I said. “Or we'll have Nat cracking the whip over us all. We can talk later.”

Alec and I walked out more slowly. Experimentally, I said, “
Love's mysteries in souls do grow/But yet the body is his book.”

“Donne,” Alec said promptly. “‘ The Ecstasy.' What made you think of that?”

“Gran and I were talking about it on the way to Mt. Corbesc. Blood spirits—Ruli. Vampires and the numinous. No. Wrong word for vampires. Liminal, I guess that's the word Beka used. Four languages, and I can't come up with the right word for the liminality of time and of reality here in Dobrenica. Oh, Alec, I hope Ruli can be happy, wherever she is—whatever she's doing, but I also hope I never see her again.”

As we started across the street, Beka, a few paces ahead, collapsed into an inkri to be taken the eight or so blocks up and around the river to her house.

I shook my head. “I hope those two work it out, but phew, I do not envy her.”

“So what he wanted seems to have been a debriefing,” Alec observed. “That would imply that the two of you found some kind of balance.”

“Balance—in the tightrope sense? Dealing with him is like . . . it's like driving that team of eight reindeer when the vampires were attacking, and the animals were on the verge of panic in eight separate directions.”

“I don't think Tony himself knows which direction he's going. But then, neither do I.” Alec took my hand as we walked up the street toward the Sofia Circle, afternoon traffic bustling around us. “Where I left off, Kim. What I want. I know what I'm offering—an endless train of problems.”

Here it was at last. Every nerve was singing. I said quickly, before another crisis could interrupt us yet again. “I love you, Marius Alexander Ysvorod. If it means I have to be hitched up to half a million people along with you, well, I think I sort of started doing that anyway.”

“I think you have, too,” he said. “And I love you, Aurelia Kim Murray. Deeply. Desperately, because I was honor-bound not to. But I gave you my heart up there on the mountainside last summer.”

“I know.” My voice was unsteady. Though I'd imagined it—over and over—I'd never let myself believe this moment would happen. “You got mine in its place.”

Except the moment was wrong, too, in that we were not alone. We were standing on the crowded street, with half a dozen outriders waiting for orders, and Kilber waiting next to Emilio as they chatted.

But Alec ignored them all. There was just the faintest quirk to his eyes, a suspicious curve to the corner of his mouth as he murmured, “In six months' time, I would like to formally request, in marriage, your—”

I stopped right there on the cobblestoned sidewalk, and put my hand on his chest. “No!
No
proposals in the middle of a street. This is not a proper, romantic setting.” Then I saw that the lurking humor had flared into a grin, and I said suspiciously, “What exactly were you about to request of mine in marriage?”

He whispered in my ear, “Bra-a-a-ins.”

I laughed, then in broad daylight, in view of the busiest street in Dobrenica, I took my revenge with a kiss.

 

ALSO BY SHERWOOD SMITH:

CORONETS & STEEL
BLOOD SPIRITS

 

 

The History of Sartorias-deles
INDA
THE FOX
KING'S SHIELD
TREASON'S SHORE

 

BANNER OF THE DAMNED
²