The Mirador (31 page)

“I don’t like talking,” I said and looked at my hands.

“I know that.” We were quiet for a while. Then he said, “I’ve probably got things all wrong, but can I ask a question? I promise I don’t mean it to be cruel or glib.”

“Go ahead.” My head was too heavy to lift.

“Did Ginevra ever
ask
you?”

“What?”

“Did she ever
ask
you about Vey? Did she ever say, ‘Tell me about that woman who tried to kill us both’?”

I was staring at him now. “No. I mean—I
did
tell her, but not much. And she . . . she asked about what Vey had been trying to do, but she didn’t ask about
Vey
. I don’t think she wanted to know.”

“Then she is at least as responsible for her death as you are. If someone wants to be blind, Mildmay, you can’t make them see.” There was a pause where I probably should’ve said something. He stood up. “I think I’ve done enough pontificating for one night. Unless . . . do you want me to stay?”

“I . . . no, I need to think.” But I wanted to give him something, because he’d cared enough to help, and he hadn’t been mean. “I think you said something important, but I gotta work it through.”

“I understand.” He went to the door, then stopped. “You know,” he said. “You know, if you ever want me to ward your dreams, I will. I won’t even ask any questions.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll remember.”

“Good night, then.”

“Yeah, good night.”

He went out and shut the door. I was left staring at it, like it could tell me something important. I’d’ve liked to get up—to leave the suite and go walk around the Mirador while everything settled inside my head—but even with my new stick, I didn’t think that was a smart idea.

If someone wants to be blind, you can’t make them see.

That was Ginevra all right. It was a lot more
her
than her looks and her figure, which was all anybody, including me, had ever seemed to care about. She hadn’t been stupid, but if Ginevra didn’t want to see a thing, then that thing just plain was not there. Ever.

I remembered the one time I’d tried to tell her about my childhood, about growing up a kept-thief. She’d asked one day in Thermidor, and I’d known she’d been thrill-seeking, but I’d been mad in love, and I’d tried. I’d really tried to tell her the truth. She’d believed all the things I told her, but I remembered now the way her attention had skipped past the things I’d tried to say about Keeper and about the other kids. She wanted the stuff that sounded romantic to her, that fit in with her ideas about herself and about me and about what I was doing in the great romantic story of Ginevra Thomson.

How had that conversation ended? I racked my memory, staring at the damn door like I’d find the answers there, and finally remembered. I’d lied. I’d been desperate to distract her before she pissed me off and I told her what it was like to strangle somebody and feel their clawing, heaving body become nothing but a dead, stupid sack of meat against you, and so I’d started this huge, elaborate lie about Keeper sending me to steal the great Black Crown of the House of Tamerinsius. It took Ginevra a while to realize I was lying. By the time she did, the story was rolling, and it did its job. When I’d finished—well, actually, a little before the story was really over—we’d made love. It had been good, and by the time we were done, I’d managed to forget how Ginevra had made me feel.

She never listened to you, Milly-Fox, a voice said.

That ain’t true! I twisted around and slammed my fist into the pillow, like it was the one saying stuff I didn’t want to hear.

She never listened to
you
. She liked being the lover of Mildmay the Fox, the greatest cat burglar in the Lower City, but she wasn’t interested in
you
, you poor, stupid son of a bitch. She was as blind to who
you
are as she was blind to Vey.

I hadn’t told her, but odds were she wouldn’t have listened if I’d tried.

Whatever she’d loved, it hadn’t been me.

Chapter 8

The morning was actually going pretty good for once. I hadn’t slept much, but I wasn’t no ray of sunshine anyway, and Felix and Gideon seemed to have mended their fences, from what I could tell. I’d thought sometimes that it was Gideon’s special curse that he couldn’t stay mad at Felix. No matter what Felix did, they never stayed on the outs for long. And maybe Felix
hadn’t
done anything with Mr. Garamond. I didn’t know and wasn’t asking.

So, no fights, nobody running late—we even sat down for breakfast together, which we managed maybe about twice a month. Felix was buttering a biscuit and telling us the latest rumors about Lady Mirabel Valeria and her lover—this gal was supposed to have climbed out a convent window to be with Lady Mirabel—when there was a knock at the door.

“Expecting someone?” Felix said to me.

“Nope,” I said.

Him and Gideon shrugged at each other, and he said, “Come in.”

It was Rollo, and he was unhappy.

“My lord,” he said, “I beg your pardon, for it is no doing of mine, but there is a person who insists on seeing you. He says if you will not see him, he will have no choice save to go to the Lord Protector.”

“What sort of a person?” Felix said.

Rollo all but wrung his hands. “A
City Guard
, my lord.” Rollo was from Archwolf, and in Archwolf they didn’t call ’em Dogs. Though the way Rollo said “City Guard,” it meant about the same.

“Did he say what he wanted to see me about?”

“No, my lord. He said it was not my business.”

“Well, we certainly don’t want him bothering Lord Stephen at this time of day,” Felix said. “Show him in.”

“
Thank
you, my lord,” Rollo said and whisked himself out.

“Are you sure you aren’t expecting anyone?” Felix asked me.

“Maybe I ain’t surprised he’s here,” I said, thinking about the goon who went through the window and the goon who was missing a couple of fingers and Kethe knows what all I might’ve done to the rest of ’em.

“Indeed,” Felix said.

The door opened again, and Rollo—showing with every line of his body that he completely disowned the guy and this wasn’t none of it
his
fault—showed the Dog in.

The Dog was somewhere around his sixth septad, square-built and big. He was running to fat now, but I was willing to bet he must have been quite something when he was young. His eyes were brown, small, and sharp like needles.

He bowed sort of generally, said, “My lord,” and waited. His little bright eyes went from me to Felix to Gideon.

“I am Felix Harrowgate,” Felix said. “I am afraid you have the advantage of me.”

“My lord,” the Dog said again, with a deeper bow this time, aimed directly at Felix. “I’m Sergeant Abelard Morny of the City Guard.”

“Sergeant,” Felix said with a little nod in return. “What can I do for you?”

“As to that, my lord, I’m not rightly sure.” He rocked back on his heels a little. “See, there was a fight down in Gilgamesh the other night, and a boy ended up in the Hospice of St. Latimer. Nasty deep cuts—he got thrown through a window.
He
says”—and the bright little eyes darted from Felix to me and back to Felix—“that his assailant was a redheaded man with a scar on his face—a thing there aren’t too many of in this city.”

“True,” said Felix. He didn’t look at me. “What is your point?”

“Well, I’m curious, my lord, about how that boy ended up going through a window, and I was wondering if anybody in this room could tell me anything about it.”

Sergeant Morny had done his homework. He knew about the binding-by-forms, about how he wasn’t supposed to talk to me without being invited. He knew it, and he’d worked his way around it as slick as you please.

“Will you excuse me one moment, please?” Felix said, rising.

“Of course, my lord.” Sergeant Morny’s little dark eyes were twinkling, and I could feel him watching me limp as I followed Felix into his and Gideon’s bedroom.

Felix shut the door. I was proud of him for not slamming it because I could see how bad he wanted to. Then he gave me a nervous little sidelong look. “Did you really throw someone through a window?”

“It ain’t the way it sounds,” I said, and I wondered if he’d believe me.

Whether he did or not, he let it go. “We don’t have many choices. We either show him the door, or we let him talk to you.”

“I think he meant it when he said he’d go to Lord Stephen.”

“I do, too. So we show him the door, he goes to Lord Stephen, and I get ordered to cooperate. The only advantage I see is that it would buy a little time.”

“It don’t matter,” I said. “I ain’t gonna lie to him. I mean, there ain’t no point. But there ain’t time for it before court.”

“
Isn’t
, not
ain’t
,” said Felix. He stood a moment, his eyes blank and inward-looking, then opened the door and strode back into the sitting room. Sergeant Morny and Gideon hadn’t moved an inch, both looking like the taxidermists had been at them.

“Sergeant,” said Felix, “we will be enchanted to assist you with your inquiries, but I wonder if you would be so kind as to make an appointment for this afternoon. Court convenes in rather less than an hour.”

“That’s very kind of you, my lord,” Sergeant Morny said, “and more than I expected. I’ll come back around the eighth hour of the day, then?”

“Splendid,” said Felix and got him out the door with one of his five-alarm smiles.

I wasn’t surprised when my dreams that night were horrid. They evaporated as I woke, leaving only the foul aftertaste of worry and an image, unpleasantly vivid, of Hallam crouching over a dead cat and weeping like a child.

“I can’t change what happened,” I said, and the sound of my own voice brought me fully awake.

I had just finished buttoning my dress when Corinna tapped on my door. She handed me a cup of tea and said, “So?”

“So what?”

“So! The Lord Protector, dummy! For the
second
time! How’d it go?”

I took a sip of tea. “He made me an offer.”

Corinna froze halfway down into the chair. “He what?”

“He made me an offer.”

Corinna settled back in the chair, her improbably blonde hair and green calico robe combining to make her look like an opulently overblown yellow rose. “You’re not going to stop
there
, are you?”

I hesitated, but Corinna knew the Mirador, had years of experience navigating in and out of the beds of lords and wizards and servants. So I told her what Stephen had said. She listened intently, and when I was done, said, “He’s serious then.”

“He certainly seems to be.”

“The Teverii,” she said with a grimace, “are not known for their sense of humor. What are you going to say?”

“Yes,” I said and shrugged. “What else
can
I say?”

“This may be a little higher than you want to fly, lovey.”

Not with Vulpes watching from the ground, I thought. I told her a different truth: “I’m tired of scrabbling.”

“Top of the heap once and for all?”

“Something like that. But let’s not talk about me. Any luck with Lord Ignace?”

“He sent me a poem. It’s really bad.”

“They always are.”

“He’s a sweet boy. I just wish I wasn’t old enough to be his mother.”

“You aren’t.”

Corinna sighed, then shook it off. “Drin’s going to be sick as a horse, you know.”

“That’s Drin’s problem,” I said. I finished my tea, set the cup down, and picked up my comb. It was time to gird myself for the day. I was in front of the mirror before Corinna’s silence registered on me. I turned to look at her. Her face was unexpectedly serious, almost sad.

She said, “What about Mildmay?”

“What
about
Mildmay?” I turned back to the mirror.

“Is it really over, then?”

“Corinna, it couldn’t be more over if we’d given it a funeral. ”

“Just like that?”

I began unbraiding my hair. “Please don’t start a melodrama over it.”

“You seemed so happy,” she said wistfully.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Mildmay really happy.”

“How about you?”

“Me? Do I seem unhappy to you?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know. But, I mean, you came here because of him . . .”

“I came here
with
him. That’s quite different. And my God, there’s more to my life here than Mildmay Foxe.”

“Of course there is. But do you really not miss him at all?”

“How could I not miss him? But that’s not the same thing as loving him. You know that.”

“Powers,” Corinna said with a grin. “You wouldn’t believe how long I spent
not
getting rid of Osram Lelius, who was dull as ditchwater and a pig to boot, just because he was familiar and that was more comfortable than change.”

“Speaking of things that don’t make sense,” I said, both to change the subject and because I wanted to know, “what in the world is the matter with Drin?”