The Mirador (22 page)

“You quit dyeing your hair,” she said.

“No point,” I said.

She sat down again and smiled at me. It was a full-force smile from Keeper, but it wasn’t a patch on what Felix could do when he put his mind to it, and from watching Felix for two indictions, I’d at least learned how to tell when a smile was meant to turn somebody’s knees watery. “Now,” she said, “what can I do for you?”

“You know what I want,” I said.

“Do I, sweetheart? Suppose you tell me anyway. I’m getting forgetful in my old age.”

Powers. Powers and fucking saints. You knew she’d do this, a voice said in my head. Give her what she wants and get it over with. I’d told myself that about Keeper for indictions, up until the day I realized I couldn’t stand giving her what she wanted no more, and I didn’t like the way the idea had crawled right back up to the top of my mind. But it was still good advice.

“Elvire gave me your message.”

“Yes?”

Kethe, I hated her. Hated her and her games—and I hated myself while I was at it for letting her play me. I said through my teeth, “You got some information I want.”

“Darling Milly-Fox, no one will ever understand you if you don’t at least
try
not to mumble.”

Powers and saints preserve me, I flinched. And said like a stupid bleating fuckheaded fool, “Stop it.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Stop what?”

I was red as a tomato. I knew it, and there wasn’t a fucking thing in the world I could do about it. “Stop treating me like . . .” Like you used to. Like a half-wit dog. “Like a kid.”

“Oh, I have
no
intention of treating you like a kid,” she said, and I flinched again. Because I knew what she meant.

“I ain’t doing that.”

“Doing what?” she said and smirked at me. She knew I didn’t have the balls to say it out loud. I never had done, not in all the time she’d been fucking me, and not when I left either.

Never put words to what we did in bed. And if I admitted it now, I was afraid she’d make me do it.

And she could make me. I wasn’t even trying to kid myself about that. She’d done it before.

Get a grip, I said to myself. Hauled air in, back out again. Said, “Tell me what the fuck you want.”

“You still have a mouth like a sewer,” she said, like she’d expected better of me.

“You always said I was too stupid to learn.” And then I said, slow and deliberate, “Get. To. The. Fucking. Point.”

“Very good. That was much clearer.” And the bitch smiled at me. “You want information. So do I. You get me what I want, and I’ll give you what you want.”

“Okay, so what is it you want?”

“On Dixième, Guinevere Dawnlight—you remember Jenny, don’t you, Milly-Fox?—was arrested in Laceshroud with a freshly exhumed corpse. I want to know why she was there, who sent her, and who she dug up.”

Yeah, I remembered Jenny. She wasn’t born with a name like “Guinevere Dawnlight,” but you knew that already. She tarted up her name when she joined the Green Dancers, which is one of them stupid packs in Dragonteeth that are about half kids from Havelock and Breadoven. They got funny ideas about what being in a pack means, like Ginevra had funny ideas about what being a cat burglar was all about.

Jenny loved it. Last time I’d seen her—about the time I was working myself up to leave Keeper, as it happens—we’d had this terrible fight, me wanting her to get out and get into one of the real packs if she couldn’t do no better for herself, her shouting that I was just envious and mean and couldn’t bear for anybody to be happy if I wasn’t. There for a month or two I was fighting with everybody I came across, because I knew I was going to leave but I wasn’t brave enough to just fucking get it over with. But I never mended my fences with Jenny. I didn’t want her using me to lord it over the other kids in her pack, and I knew she would. Jenny always had to be the most important person in any room.

But what the sweet sacred fuck was Jenny, of all people, playing resurrectionist for? Not for the Green Dancers, that was for damn sure.

I actually even kind of sympathized with Keeper for wanting to know what was going on. “And I find out, and you’ll tell me who got Ginevra Thomson killed.”

“Yes.”

“And who rolled over on me?”

“Oh, I’ll tell you that now, if you take down your hair.”

“What?”

“Take down your hair,” she said. “Oh, and wash that ridiculous soot out of your eyebrows.”

“You want me to take down my hair?”

“You’re slow, Milly-Fox, but you get there eventually.”

“
Why
, for fuck’s sake?”

Her smile was horrible. “Because otherwise I won’t tell you what you want to know.”

Give her what she wants and get it the fuck over with. I un-braided my hair, used the washrag she gave me on my eyebrows and hairline. Bared my teeth at her, and I wasn’t even pretending I was trying to smile. “Happy now?”

“Good boy,” said Keeper. “The young woman went by the unlikely name of Estella Velvet.”

“Oh.” I didn’t mean to make any kind of a noise. It just got out.

“She and another young woman left the next morning on the diligence for St. Millefleur.” Ginevra’s friend Estella. And her girlfriend, Faith Cowry. Estella must’ve cut a deal with the Dogs, traded Faith for me. I bet it hadn’t cost her so much as a sleepless night.

“Now, before you leave,” Keeper said brightly, “I need to introduce you to someone. His name’s Septimus Wilder. And, no, don’t you touch your hair.”

Oh shit. She’d never hit you once if she could hit you twice, and I knew that tone in her voice, too, the one that said as how she had your balls in a vise, and she thought she’d tighten it another notch, just to see what happened.

I figured I could guess who Septimus was, and I’d rather’ve gone out and jumped in the Sim than meet him, but that wasn’t something I got a vote on, so I didn’t say nothing—I fucking well knew better—and she got up and stuck her head out to yell at the nearest kid to go tell Septimus to get his ass down here. I sat still and kept my mouth shut, and concentrated on getting my face to where it wasn’t going to give nothing away.

’Cause I
knew
Keeper was going to be watching.

Keeper went wandering around the room, and it just about killed me, but I didn’t try to track her. It didn’t take long before there was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” she said, from right behind me, and maybe I should’ve been expecting her to knot her hand in my hair and drag my head back, but I wasn’t, and just as the door opened, she leaned down and kissed me, mean and nasty, and fuck me for a half-wit dog, I just sat there and
took
it.

And then she let me go and went back to her chair, and I couldn’t get myself to look away from her. “Mildmay,” she said, and she was smirking like a gator, damn her, “this is Septimus. Septimus, this is your . . . predecessor, Mildmay the Fox.” And then she just sat back to watch.

Bull’s-fucking-eye.

I turned my head like it was made of stone. Septimus Wilder was somewhere toward the end of his third septad. He was Keeper’s height and skinny and dark. He reminded me of a racing dog—all that energy and nowhere to put it. And he moved that way, too, sharp and finicky. You wouldn’t see a dog with eyes like that, though. I knew right off he had Keeper’s sense of humor. I didn’t recognize him, but that didn’t mean much. Those last couple indictions with Keeper, I hadn’t been paying no mind to the little kids, and if he’d kept his head down and his mouth shut, I wouldn’t hardly have known he was there.

Yeah, I know. And I’d got the same way—and oh powers and saints, this was no time to realize it, with him glaring murder at me and the taste of her like ashes in my mouth—after Strych. Not noticing nothing. Not doing nothing but what I was told. Not caring about nothing and not even being awake enough to see what I was doing to myself. With Keeper, I’d started to come up out of it once I started to think I was really going to do it, really going to leave—and had that horrible fucking fight with Jenny, too—but it wasn’t ’til maybe four or five months after I’d left that I realized how bad I’d been. And I’d sworn I’d never get that way again, too. I’m surprised I hadn’t been able to hear Kethe laughing at me.

Septimus Wilder looked me over real good, like he wanted to be sure he could describe me to the Dogs if he got the chance, and then he smiled, all teeth, and said, “Charmed.”

I said, “Likewise.” Both of us lying like rugs.

“Septimus is going to act as my liaison,” Keeper said, and I knew she was hoping to make me ask what that meant.

Sorry, sweetheart, you’re shit out of luck. I’d been going to Curia meetings for two indictions. I only wished I could smirk at her the way she’d been smirking at me.

“Okay,” I said, like it didn’t make no nevermind to me.

And what she did next was Keeper in a nutshell—if I ever started to forget what she was like, all I’d need to do was remember her right then. She didn’t get what she wanted from me, so she turned right around and went after Septimus.

“Septimus,” she said, sweet as poison, “can use the practice. ”

He was too dark to show a blush easy, but the way he said, “Keeper!” was just the same as me going tomato-red. And Keeper gave me a look I’d seen her give her friends over and over and over. Her
Isn’t he cute when he’s flustered?
look, and if I started trying to tell you how much I hated it, we’d be here all night.

I didn’t like it no better from this side, neither. I didn’t say nothing, and Keeper gave Septimus the eyebrow—and powers, I remembered
that
, too—and he said, trying hard not to let on she’d got him flustered as bad as a virgin in a tarquin bar, “We need to fix a meet.”

It hit me then, the trap Keeper’d laid for me and I’d walked right into. Because the last thing in the world I wanted was to talk about the binding-by-forms. With anybody. But especially not in front of her. I said, “Good fucking luck.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Keeper said, “I will suggest you
not
adopt Mildmay’s vocabulary. ”

“I’d have to be able to understand him first.”

I see why she likes you, I thought. But I didn’t say it. They could go on and be snarky at me ’til the end of time. I didn’t care.

But Keeper turned it back on me. “If you recall, you have a stake in this matter, too. You’d be wise to be helpful.”

She got me on the raw just like she meant to. “You know perfectly fucking well I can’t go making arrangements like that.”

“No? Why not?”

“You
know
.” I knew she did. Because the whole fucking city knew. And because she’d set this up. She knew me, knew just how fucking putrid this was going to be. And the look in her eye said this was what I got for walking out on her.

“Oh!” said Septimus. “You mean the binding-by-forms.”

“Yes, the fucking binding-by-forms!”

“Well, you came down here, didn’t you?”

He sounded like he honestly didn’t understand what the problem was, and I knew I shouldn’t hate him more for that.

“I got lucky,” I said. “I can’t . . .” But I didn’t know how to explain it, didn’t know the right words to use.

“What Mildmay is trying to say—and so eloquently, sweetheart—is that he is not his own master. Does your brother even know you’re here, Milly-Fox?”

“No,” I said, and powers, I could hear it myself—she’d got me right back where she wanted me, like I’d never fucking left.

“And I doubt he’d be pleased if he learned, would he? No, don’t bother to lie. You do it so badly. And anyway, I’ve met him.”

“You
what
?” And for all she wasn’t leaning on it, I knew blackmail when I heard it. For a moment, I thought I was actually going to be sick, but I swallowed hard, and it passed.

“We did business together a couple indictions ago. I’m surprised he didn’t mention it.”

No, you ain’t, you fucking bitch. I don’t know how I kept from saying it. My hands were clenched so tight the bones ached. And there was Septimus Wilder with his ears flapping.

It hurt like eating glass, but I talked myself back down. Keeper let me—she always did know exactly when to stop pushing if she wanted any use out of me. I wanted to tell her to go fuck herself, to just get up and walk
out
of there, but I couldn’t do it, may Kethe bless my stupid, stupid head.

Finally, I said, “How you getting in?”

“Sorry?” said Septimus.

I repeated myself.

He gave Keeper a kind of funny look. I said, “Oh for fuck’s sake. Whatever it is, I know about it already. Talk!”

He startled a little, but he said, “The shrine to St. Holofernes.”

“In the Altanueva, yeah. Okay. That’s as good a place as any. You be there every night at the septad-night. If I ain’t there in half an hour, I ain’t coming.”

“Every—”

“Septimus,” Keeper said, and he shut up meek as you please.

“You got what you wanted?” I said to her.

We both knew what I was asking. “For now,” she said, and I could still feel her smirk in the back of my neck—still fucking
taste
her in the back of my throat—when I slammed the warehouse door behind me.