The Mirador (43 page)

“Oh, I won’t.” I called to Gideon, “Don’t wait up, darling,” and set out into the Mirador. If we happened to meet anyone, that would be their problem.

I dined with Stephen. Ironically, we were more awkward now than we had been before we’d entered into the formal agreement. I was second-guessing everything in sight, unable to tell what Stephen wanted from me—bright chitchat or compliance with his taciturnity? For his part, he seemed to feel he no longer needed to act as my host; although he responded to my gambits, he made none of his own, and his answers were terse.

Dispirited and uncomfortable, I gave up, and we finished dinner in silence.

He seemed to come awake as he poured brandy, and said, “I told you, I think, that as my lover, you’re expected to make your residence in the Mirador.”

“I remember.”

“At my expense. There’s a suite. Tradition, and all that.”

“Of course there is.”

“Would you like to come look at it? You don’t have to stay there, if you don’t want to.”

“Actually, I would like to see it. I’m curious.”

He handed me a brandy snifter and said, “This way, then. Hemminge has the keys.”

Hemminge was Stephen’s butler; he had a branched candelabra as well as the keys, and he led the way, not back out to the public hallways, but through a side-door into a maze of narrow corridors.

“Where are we?” I said.

“Good question,” Stephen said, and to my astonishment, kept talking. “There aren’t any maps of this part of the Mirador. We think one of the Cordelius kings must’ve had them destroyed. Paranoia.” He stopped at a T-intersection; Hemminge obediently paused as well. “My father’s suite is down that way,” Stephen said, gesturing to the right with his snifter, “along with my mother’s and Gloria’s. The nursery of the Cordelii is somewhere under our feet. I’ll take you to see Grendille Moran’s suite some other time. I don’t like to go there at night.”

“Who’s Grendille Moran?”

“Come this way,” he said, and started walking again. “It isn’t far. Grendille Moran was one of the court poisoners. Reigns of Laurence and Charles. She probably poisoned Laurence. And then a few years later, her maid found her decapitated on the floor of her sitting room. Whoever did it took the head with them, but it was found about a week later somewhere unlikely— I can’t remember where.”

“What a charming story,” I said, and got a grin for my irony.

“Mirador’s full of ’em,” he said. I remembered Mildmay saying something similar. “Here we are.”

Hemminge had to wrestle a little with the lock, and the hinges groaned when he pushed the door open.

“No one’s been here in years,” Stephen said. “Gloria was never here . . . I think the last person to live in this suite must have been my great-great-grandfather’s lover. Can’t remember her name.”

“And no one’s been in here since?”

“Well, my great-grandmother, Helen, hated her father’s lover—Sophia, that was her name, Sophia Vesperia—and she threw Sophia out when Malory died. She used it as a sitting room for a while. And it gets aired out once a year. Go on in.”

The weight of history in the Mirador rarely bothered me, but Stephen’s casual familiarity with the doings of a woman who had died more than a century before his own birth was uncomfortable in a way Mildmay’s stories never had been. It could be worse, I told myself. He could have picked Grendille Moran’s suite. And I walked through the door.

I had more than half expected to hate it, although I wouldn’t have said so. But the suite was charming.

All the furniture had been taken out, so there was nothing to observe but the shape of the rooms and the beauties of the parquet floor. The first room was octagonal; the ceiling arched into a miniature vault on which someone had painted a night sky, complete with accurate constellations.

It was a larger suite than Felix’s, with a room on each side of the octagonal one, each with another room beyond it, and a third room opposite the door to the hall, exactly the width of the wall. I looked at Stephen. “Closet? Or oubliette?”

“Anything you like it to be,” he said. “You can have carte blanche.”

“How blanche?”

He raised his eyebrows at me. “I’m friends with Phegenie Brome,” I said, “and I’ve seen what happens when Lord Edmund gives her carte blanche. I don’t intend to behave like that, thank you very much.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said.

“You should be. So what do
you
mean by carte blanche?”

“Don’t decorate in cloth-of-gold.”

“That’s it?”

He shrugged a little. “You’ve got good taste, if your clothes are anything to go by. Use it.”

Absurdly, I was flattered.

I knew—I’d learned the hard way—that the only way to do something that scares you is to just go up to it and
do
the fucker. You don’t want to pussyfoot around looking for the right angle and the right kind of light and all that other shit. That’s just excuses not to do it, and if you give into enough of ’em, sure enough, whatever it is, you ain’t gonna be the guy doing it. And mostly that’s worse than just going and doing it when you got the chance.

So we’re up on the Crown of Nails in the middle of the night, me and Felix, him in nothing but his dressing gown but not even seeming to feel the wind, pacing up and down and kind of growling under his breath, and me just standing there, saying good-bye to my chances of getting over to St. Holofernes tonight, and it hit me that we were never going to get more private than this. And the thing about Felix and his temper was, if you could keep him from turning on you and mauling you half to death, his armor was already down, and
if
you could get through to him, he’d hear what you were trying to say.

So, after a while—dunno, maybe a septad-minute—I said, “Felix?”

“Mildmay.”

“Can I, um, talk to you?”

He stopped pacing, looked around in a
what the fuck?
sort of way. Shoved his hair off his face and gave a kind of raspy little laugh. “Well, it’s not like I’ve got anything
better
to do. What is it?”

I took a deep breath, although it didn’t seem to do me no good, and said, “I’m worried about you.”

He waved it off. “Gideon and I are just having—”

“Not that.”

Witchlights are crap for actually seeing anybody by, so I couldn’t make out his expression.

“Then what?”

“Well, I mean . . .” And then I thought, fuck this for the Emperor’s snotrag, and just came out with it. “You’re drinking. And you’re fighting—not just with Gideon. And it’s ugly. And you ain’t talking to me no more. And, well, I’m worried about me, too.”

I think it was the last one that brought him up short. He’d’ve laughed off me worrying about him—and done it in a nasty way so as to be sure I’d never bring it up again—but I threw it back on myself before he could, and that meant he thought before he opened his mouth.

“Why are you worried about yourself?” he said.

“I been pretending—I think maybe we both been pretending—that I ain’t lame, not really, I mean, not to matter, but we can’t go on pretending that.”

I stopped, hoping he’d want to say something there, but he just said, “Go on.”

“So I was thinking about that, and then I was sort of thinking about all the
other
things you and me pretend, about how there ain’t nothing wrong with me, and there ain’t nothing wrong with you, and I thought how maybe we really needed to quit pretending about all of it. And you must think so, too, ’cause you were trying the other night.”

I stopped again, but he was just staring at me now, spooky as fuck in the witchlights, like he’d never seen me before.

“We’re brothers,” I said, like I was wrenching my heart out of my chest. “We should help each other. I don’t know if I
can
help you, but I want to try. And . . .” I stopped and took another huge breath, “and I think I need your help, too.”

After a long, long silence, he said, “How long have you been working out that little speech?”

I couldn’t make out his tone or his expression. “Dunno, exactly. ”

“You’re very eloquent. I hadn’t expected it of you.”

Why the fuck had I even bothered? How many times do you got to be kicked, Milly-Fox? “Yeah. Funny, ain’t it.”

“I didn’t mean that.” He didn’t sound amused or defensive— either one would have meant he was lying. He just sounded sad. “I was serious. I hadn’t expected you to be able to speak so eloquently. This suggests, I suppose, how little I know you. Do you think we
can
talk to each other, Mildmay? For myself, I fear that we cannot.”

“Why not?”

“What common ground do we have? What do we share?”

“The binding-by-forms,” I said. It made him flinch.

“That’s unnatural,” he said. “Forced intimacy means nothing. I ask you again: what do we share?”

“How’m I s’posed to answer that? I mean, no, I ain’t like you. I ain’t a hocus and I ain’t educated or nothing, and I don’t understand most of the stuff you talk about with your friends. But is that it? Ain’t there nothing but magic and words?”

“Sex,” he said tiredly. “It’s the only other thing I know. But you don’t want that from me.”

“No,” I said. Because I didn’t.

“So what else is there? What alternative do you suggest?”

“
I don’t know
. I ain’t the smart one. And maybe I am too fucking dumb for any of this to work, but could you just fucking
try
?”

I’d lost him somewhere. The shutters had come down across his face. He said, “I will consider what you’ve said. We’d better go in.”

I followed him, and we didn’t say nothing more all the way back.

My dreams that night were something else. Ginevra and Strych standing together in the Bastion, watching Felix cut lines in my skin. Felix had that awful, fiery look he got on his face when he was working hard magic. And I knew in the dream—the way you do—the magic he was working was going to bring them back to life, and I kept trying to tell him not to, that it wasn’t worth it, but no matter what I said or screamed, he didn’t seem to hear me, or even know it was me.

I was so glad to wake up I could’ve cried.

I lay there for a while in the dark, but the thing I can’t do when I wake up like that is get back to sleep. I’m always afraid the dream will come back and find me, and I didn’t want to dream about Strych no more. Or Ginevra. So I lit the lamp and got up and got dressed and went out into the sitting room.

Felix was sitting there, in his chair by the fire, staring at a spread of the Sibylline he’d laid out on the side table. He didn’t look like he’d slept. I startled back, like he was a snake or something, and damn near dropped my cane. He raised his head, but didn’t say anything, just sat there and watched me.

“Good morning,” I managed to say finally.

“Good morning,” he said. No inflection, no smile, no clue what was going on behind his spooky eyes.

“You’re up early,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

By then I had a hold on myself, enough not to go on babbling like a fool since it was clear he wasn’t going to help out none. I sat down in the other armchair, got my foot up on the footstool— it made things some better—and waited. If he wanted to say something to me, he would, and if he was out here looking like leftover death for some other reason, then he wouldn’t want to talk to me anyway.

After a long silence, he said, “Do you remember Methony at all?” He was staring into the fire, like he didn’t want to look at me.

“No,” I said.

“I do, a little. I wonder what she would think of us.”

“Prob’ly that we’re both wicked sinners. I mean, based on my name.”

“Your name?”

“Powers, ain’t I told you that? She named me Mild-may-your-sufferings-be-at-the-hands-of-the-wicked. She was in some kind of a cult.”

“Methony?”

“Yeah.”

“Named you
that
?”

“Yeah. Kolkhis axed it, first thing.”

“I can’t say that I blame her. Methony must have been out of her mind.” He was finally smiling a little, and I was glad to see it.

“Yeah, well. But that’s all I know about her, except that we both look like her.”

We were quiet for a while until he said, “Do you remember anything about your childhood before your keeper bought you?”

“Not really. I mean, I think I sort of remember the brothel, but it’s just colors. I remember sitting on a wooden floor with a toy duck on wheels. But that’s it. No people or nothing.” I stopped and got some courage together and said, “Do you?”

“A little,” he said. “I remember her singing to me. And the other girls liked me, I think. I remember feeling, I don’t know,
cherished
, as if everywhere I went, I would be safe.” He shook his head. “Madame Poluphemie cherished no one.”

We sat there for another while, and he said, I think more to himself than to me, “Those memories get very hard to find. They’re so thin and fragile and small, and the other memories are so strong. I’m almost afraid to look at them, as if they might disintegrate under the weight of my gaze or get contaminated by other things. But perhaps that’s foolish.”