The Mirador (39 page)

I walked down to the other end of the hall and back, slowly. Then I stood and waited and tried not to think about anything in particular. That was getting harder, too.

Felix came slamming out the door at about the third hour of the night. Like I said, he was pissed. He gave me one look, like he was daring me to say something, but I wasn’t that dumb. He sort of snorted and started down the hall. I followed, laying odds with myself about how drunk he was going to get.

The closer we got to the Hall of the Chimeras, the slower he walked, and he finally ducked aside into the Puce Antechamber. I went after him like a dog on a leash.

“Is my coat straight?” he said. He was wearing a deep violet-blue coat over a green and white striped waistcoat. The combination made his gold sash and garnet-and-gold rings stand out like a shout. I was in my usual black—trousers, waistcoat, coat—and a plain white shirt. Felix had kept trying for months to get me to wear ruffles at cuffs and collar, but that idea was nuts, and I’d told him to go put garlands on a pig. He’d been mad at me for days, but he’d quit hinting.

“Your coat’s fine,” I said, “and you know it.”

I thought he was going to say something nasty, and so did he, but then he sighed and said, “Yes. What about my face?”

“You’re a little pale, but you ain’t blotchy. Nobody’ll notice. ”

“With the crush in there, I’ll be beet-red in two minutes,” he said, and he faked cheerful pretty well. He gave me the once-over. “You’ll do. Come on.” I followed him back out of the Puce Antechamber and into the Hall of the Chimeras.

We’d missed all the formal stuff, so the Hall of the Chimeras was just a big clump of people talking and drinking. In an hour, they’d clear the middle of the floor, and there’d be dancing. Felix would probably be drunk enough by then to dance, which he was good at if he wasn’t thinking about it. I couldn’t dance no more, so I’d sit somewhere out of the way and watch all the pretty ladies and wish I could get a game of Long Tiffany going. It was what usually happened.

Powers, I hate this, I thought, and I was only glad that I wasn’t Felix and didn’t have to smile. Although, if I’d been Felix, I would’ve been able to get drunk, because I would’ve known my boring little brother would get me home okay. I don’t like being drunk and never have, but at the Lord Protector’s soirées, it always seemed like a better deal than being sober. Being at home in bed would’ve been better still.

Sure enough, when we got to the bar, there were Maurice and Rollo behind it. Master Architrave had done them a high-class favor, because that was the one place in the Hall of the Chimeras where they were guaranteed the flashies would notice them. They both looked guilty when they saw Felix, like a pair of foxes with feathers in their mouths, but he just said, “Bourbon please. Two fingers, straight.”

“Yes, my lord,” Rollo managed. As he handed Felix the glass, Felix said, “I’m glad to see you get liberated from our corridor once in a while,” and sauntered off into the crowd. Maurice gave me a weird look, sort of half-panicked and half-grateful. I shrugged back and kept after Felix. I didn’t want to lose him until he’d found somebody safe to talk to.

He came up on a knot of hocuses talking about Lord Stephen’s marriage. We’d missed the beauty pageant, too, which I figured was at least one good thing I’d gotten out of the evening. Andromachy Sain and Elissa Bullen were just disgusted with the whole thing, and this mousy little lady wizard who was a connection of the Tamerinsii was trying to make them see how wrong they were. Fleur and Edgar and Simon were working out a pool. Edgar didn’t even say hello before he wanted to know what Felix thought the odds were of Lord Stephen marrying a Polydoria.

“Thousand to one,” Felix said.

“Even a pretty one?” Fleur asked.

“Just like his mother?” Felix said and bared his teeth at Fleur.

“Well, they’re all cousins anyway,” Simon said.

“It would be bad politics,” Felix said.

“And Stephen won’t do that,” Edgar said. “I agree with Felix, little flower.”

“Don’t call me that,” Fleur said. “You know it gives me hives.”

“Who are the other candidates?” Felix asked.

Edgar rattled them off: “There’s a Valeria, a Novadia, the youngest Lemeria chit, an Otania—horse-faced—a Severnia, and of course the Polydoria. Those are the only real contenders. ”

“Apparently, you can scratch the Polydoria,” Simon said. “That brings it down to five.”

“Poor little thing,” Fleur said. “She can’t be a day over fifteen. ”

“Then it’s a good thing Stephen isn’t going to marry her, isn’t it?” Felix said.

Fleur said, “Felix, you’re such a blight. Pick your favorite and quit sniping at me.”

“Oh, the Lemeria,” Felix said. “Stephen’s thick as thieves with that pompous twit.”

Fleur and Simon would keep him from getting in a fight if it could be done at all. I faded back. He’d get annoyed with me if I stuck around too much longer, said he didn’t like me breathing down his neck. Of course, it wasn’t like I had anybody else I could go talk to, but I think that was part of what pissed him off.

So I did what I’d been getting damn good at and just moved through the crowd. I tried to stay in sight of Felix’s red hair, but otherwise I didn’t even care where I went. It didn’t matter. The trick was to keep people from noticing me particularly. That had been really hard at first, when everybody acted like I had plague or lice or something, but I’d been trailing around after Felix for quite a while now, and I hadn’t bit nobody yet. People were getting good at ignoring me, and I sure as fuck wasn’t listening to them, just trying to keep moving so I wouldn’t have to think.

Finally, my bad leg aching, I stopped and leaned against King Richard’s pedestal. I figured a maybe-fratricide was good company for me. That’s where Thaddeus found me.

“Mildmay! There you are!” So he’d been looking for me, and that was worrisome for a start. Him and Felix had been friends once, but they weren’t no more, so what the fuck did he want with me?

But it wasn’t like he’d tell me if I asked, so I just said, “Evening, Lord Thaddeus,” and tried to sound more or less like I meant it.

“I’ve been wanting to ask you—how is Gideon taking the news from the Bastion?”

Like we were all friends or something. “You mean General Mercator croaking?”

“And the promise of amnesty.”

He hadn’t even looked disapproving at my language the way hocuses always did. He wanted something. I said, careful-like, “Well, he ain’t in no hurry to go back.”

“No, I’m certain he’s not.” He tried again. “What has he said about it?”

“Nothing to me.”

“But surely you’ve heard him and Felix discussing it.” Bright, bright eyes, like a buzzard waiting for a coyote to die.

“They don’t do most of their talking out loud.” Which was only sort of true, but it’d do for Thaddeus.

He gave me a look, like he was wondering if I was really that stupid or if I was blocking him on purpose. You go on and wonder, asshole, I thought. I could play this game all night if I had to.

One thing you could say about Thaddeus de Lalage. He wasn’t a quitter. He said, quiet and pretending to be casual, “They’re all spies, you know.”

“Um,” I said.

“Eusebian wizards. They can’t help it. You shouldn’t trust any of those who haven’t taken our oaths.”

Meaning Gideon, of course, who hadn’t taken the Mirador’s oaths because Thaddeus had made a ruckus and got half the Curia on his side with it.

Now, I didn’t know what Thaddeus’s thing with the Bastion was—why he hated ’em so much he couldn’t see straight. And I didn’t want to know. What I did know was about witch-hunts and Keeper teaching us all how to recognize hocuses from the Mirador and what we should do if we saw one. The first thing was to get the fuck out of the way. The second was to run—and when she said run, she meant it—to the nearest hocus we knew and tell ’em to get their head down. Keeper charged for most everything she did in the Lower City, but never for that. And it didn’t seem to me like there was enough space between They’re all spies and They’re all filthy heretics.

But it also didn’t seem like that was a smart thing to say to Thaddeus. So I just nodded and kept my mouth shut.

“Gideon lies like an angel,” Thaddeus said, and his hand caught my biceps. Hard. Now, I could’ve made him let go of me, but that was asking for a whole different kind of trouble, and with Felix in the mood he was in, I didn’t think more trouble was what anybody needed. Besides, I knew what the Mirador thought of me. Some days it was like I could feel the smug ghost of Cerberus Cresset padding around behind me, a knife sticking out of his chest and blood all over everything. So I stood there and listened to Thaddeus, knowing he was only talking to me because he didn’t dare say this shit to Felix. “It was why Major Goliath valued him so highly. And maybe still does.”

He was watching me now, slyly, wanting to see his bolts hit home. Even if I had believed him, I wouldn’t’ve given him that, so I just looked back at him. He hadn’t actually asked a question, and I wasn’t volunteering nothing.

After a moment, he let go of me, almost with a push. “I’m watching,” he said, and he was angry, so he must’ve figured out I was stonewalling after all. “And you can tell him that.” He stalked off, as mad as if I’d been insulting his friends instead of the other way ’round.

I reckoned it was a good time to go find Felix. Because suddenly I felt like I really needed just to see him. They were getting ready to start the dancing anyway, and I wanted to be sure my spot on the sidelines would be okay with him. For all that he didn’t want me with him, it really pissed him off when he couldn’t find me. So we went together along the lines of spindly Jecquardin chairs, and I was just about to say, “This one’ll do fine,” when I realized he wasn’t paying attention.

He’d stopped dead in his tracks and was staring at two men arguing a little farther down the line. One was a tallish, heavy-set flashie, with one of them blank well-bred faces that don’t mean nothing. I didn’t think he could be the one Felix was staring at like a sheep. The other man was clearly one of the fancy hookers who cater to the flashies. If you asked me to explain how it was clear, I don’t think I could, but he wasn’t a flashie and he wasn’t a hocus, and he sure as fuck wasn’t an ordinary servant, since the coat he was wearing, mulberry with silver embroidery, cost at least as much as Felix’s.

Even at this distance, he looked a little old for a hooker. I was guessing he was Felix’s age or better. He was a small guy, no more than five-foot-six, and he looked about as heavy-fleshed as a bird. He’d braided his hair down to the nape and then let it fall to his waist, black as sin. The ribbon tying it was mulberry, too, a couple shades lighter than his coat. His skin was pale, like Kolkhis’s, with those cold blue undertones that made her look some mornings like the world’s most beautiful corpse. This guy just looked tired. Kolkhis always claimed— and I never had decided if she was joking or not—that her coloring showed she descended from the ancient Emperors of the West.

I was just thinking, Oh come on, Felix, please don’t know this guy, when the hooker turned away from the flashie, full-face to us. His eye caught Felix’s. And then he was staring, just like Felix was.

Felix snapped himself out of it and said, in a perfectly normal, cheerful voice, “Well, I’ll be damned. Vincent, is that you?”

The hooker’s eyes widened. Then he came toward us. “Felix! Merciful powers, I never imagined I would see you again.” He extended his hand. His nails were long and lacquered black, another sign of a high-class hooker.

The two of them shook hands. Then Felix laughed and said, “Damn propriety!” and hugged him. The hooker hugged him back, his eyes bright.

“I thought you were dead,” he said to Felix. “I couldn’t imagine that you would survive that man.”

“I nearly didn’t. But what happened to you?”

The hooker sighed, and his shoulders sagged. “It is a very long and boring story and certainly not suitable for a soirée.”

“Could you come visit me tomorrow afternoon?”

Shit, I thought. That was his research day, and normally nobody could fuck with that.

The hooker stood and thought it over. “I am in the service of Lord Ivo Polydorius. I would have to ask.”

“I could send you a fancy invitation,” Felix said, teasing and serious both at the same time, “on my best gilt-edged paper. If I can find it, I’ll even seal it with my signet.”

The hooker gave him a smile, and for a second he looked way younger. “That would be a great help.”

“Done. I’ll send Mildmay with it—gracious, my manners! Vincent, this is my brother, Mildmay Foxe. Mildmay, this is Vincent Demabrien. I knew him when we were boys.”

“Charmed,” said Vincent Demabrien.

“Yeah,” I said. Felix kicked my right ankle, hard. “I mean, it’s nice to meet you, Mr. Demabrien.” We shook hands. I didn’t think Mr. Demabrien had missed the byplay, but he didn’t say nothing about it. Good manners, anyway.

“I have to get back,” he said, with a jerk of his head to where the flashie was standing. “If the invitation arrives before court, I may have time to talk him around.”

“Marvelous,” Felix said and gave him the full-force, five-alarm smile—not to charm him, but just because he liked him. Felix had never smiled that way at me.