The Mirador (44 page)

“I dunno,” I said.

“Neither do I, more’s the pity.” He sighed, and then I could see him throwing the mood off, like it was a coat he’d decided didn’t suit him. He said, “I’d better go change,” and left the room. I sat and waited and wondered if maybe that conversation meant he’d decided he didn’t have to fuck me to know me after all.

Stephen’s steward Leveque had a suggestion.

He came in while I was pouring a last cup of tea before taking myself back to the Empyrean. I wasn’t attending court. I had told Stephen so, emphatically if not defiantly, and he’d just said, “Powers, I wish I didn’t have to.”

So I was in his private dining room, wearing a ridiculous trailing lacy wrap over my shift. Stephen had given it to me, almost shyly if you could say that about a man of his temperament; it occurred to me that he’d probably sent Leveque out to buy it.

Leveque was a smallish man, wiry, dark, Mélusinien to his bones. He had the ability I’d noticed in other liveried servants in the Mirador, to make it plain he wanted to talk to you without so much as clearing his throat. Some of my lovers had ignored that with the arrogance of men born to privilege. I set my teacup down and said, “Yes?”

Leveque gave me a nod and said, “His Lordship said as how you’d be needing a maid.”

“Yes, I suppose so. Did you have a suggestion?”

He coughed a little, nervously. “Not so much a
suggestion
, miss, as maybe a request?”

Doing Stephen’s steward a favor could only benefit me in the long run. “What is it?”

“Well, you see—” Oh, he was uncomfortable. “I have a kind of agreement with one of the brothers at St. Crellifer.”

I was irresistibly reminded of Jean-Soleil and the prior of St. Kemplegate. “Go on.”

“When Torquil has someone he thinks might be able to cope with service here, he lets me know, and if I’ve got anything . . . It’s worked out so far.”

“So you’re doing this Brother Torquil a favor,” I said cautiously.

He shrugged it off. “It doesn’t hurt anything. And they’re good workers. Don’t want to go back, do they?”

I thought of the little I’d heard about St. Crellifer’s, most of it bad. “I can’t blame them. And you think Torquil’s latest might suit me?”

“She was apprenticed to a modiste, Torquil says.”

“And she’s not likely to take after me with a cleaver or anything? ”

Leveque looked horrified. “Even if Torquil would, miss— which he wouldn’t—I would
never
—”

“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. If you think she’ll do, I’ve no objections.”

“You could meet her first, miss, if you wanted.”

“At St. Crellifer’s?”

He looked horrified again. “Powers, no. She’s waiting outside. If you want.”

“Bring her in,” I said, since there didn’t seem to be much alternative. And I was curious.

Leveque slipped back out through the servants’ door, and reappeared in a moment, ushering in a young woman dressed with painfully respectable neatness, tall and without enough flesh on her long-boned frame, but with lovely skin the warm color of bronze and great luminous dark eyes. She didn’t look mad, although she didn’t meet my eyes, nor, indeed, look any higher than my collarbone.

“This is Lenore Nevillson, Miss Parr.”

“Miss,” Lenore said, in a frail, half-drowned voice, and dropped a curtsy. She did it easily, gracefully, and I could see that she would do well answering my door, fetching and carrying, which was all I needed a maid for. Appearances.

“It’s fine with me, Leveque,” I said. “Honestly.”

“Good,” said Leveque. “I’ll get her on the rolls. When would you like her to start?”

“Tonight,” I said. And had to swallow hard against a sudden choking feeling. “I’m moving into the Mirador tonight.”

More meetings that afternoon. I wondered sometimes how Felix kept track of them all, but we didn’t talk about hocus business. I think he felt like it would be betraying the other hocuses if he told me what he really thought of them. I’d also wondered why he put up with it all, but I thought that afternoon that maybe I knew the answer to that one. I mean, whatever else you could say about the way Felix and the other hocuses got along, they knew what he was worth to them. Now, personally, I thought that was a shitty replacement for being cherished like he’d talked about, but Felix wasn’t very smart about stuff like that sometimes. I’d seen that in the Gardens of Nephele, the way he didn’t seem to want to see the difference between people liking him for himself and liking him for other reasons. I didn’t think that Felix had had a lot of practice at being liked for himself. It wasn’t something Strych would have taught him.

Mr. Garamond bounced up again out of nowhere after the committee meeting. They talked for a little bit, and then Felix said, “All
right
, Isaac. Mildmay, we’re invited to dinner.”

Mr. Garamond looked taken aback, but I could see Felix daring him to say he hadn’t meant me.

“You don’t want me along,” I said.

“Nonsense,” Felix said. “Isaac is forever telling me he wants to get to know you better, aren’t you, Isaac?”

I didn’t like Mr. Garamond, but I wanted all of a sudden to get him aside and tell him not to play Felix’s games. You couldn’t
ever
win. But Mr. Garamond didn’t seem to have picked up on that. He pulled a smile together from somewhere and nodded and said, “I shall be enchanted to have your company, Mr. Foxe.”

“That’s settled then,” Felix said. “Shall we say eight? Splendid. We’ll see you then. Come on, Mildmay.”

Powers. I’d rather eat soap. I went after him, wondering if even that would be a good enough excuse for Felix. Probably not.

I had known Gideon would be incandescent with jealousy, and I bore his tirade as long as I could. But finally, I said, “
He invited me to dinner
. What was I supposed to do, tell him my lover won’t let me go?” Gideon didn’t dignify that with a response, which had been my intention. Anything to get him to shut up.

Mildmay was next, trying to weasel out of accompanying me. I had no intention of going without him—it would serve Isaac right—and was on the verge of warning him that I would invoke the obligation d’âme if I had to when I saw Gideon catch his eye, and Mildmay subsided.

That was how it was, then.

Very well.

I dressed with particular care, collected Mildmay without a glance in Gideon’s direction. Mildmay trailed me like my own black thundercloud of disapproval to Isaac’s rooms, where he sat wearing the dullest look in his arsenal like a shield. It infuriated me, that he would not even
try
, that he sat there and glowered and gave Isaac no reason to think him any brighter than a dray horse.

Not that I cared what Isaac Garamond thought, but he was one of those men who considered themselves far smarter than anyone around them—far smarter than they actually were—and I wanted, savagely, to see him taken down in his own estimation. His attempts to manipulate me were childish, his attempts to seduce me laughable. I had let him do it, partly out of curiosity, partly because it was such a relief to be able to have sex with— to
fuck
, to use the ugliest word I knew—someone for whom I did not care in the slightest. The martyrs in the Arcane deserved my attention and mindfulness. Isaac Garamond did not. I could be myself with him in a way I never could with Gideon—Gideon, who claimed he did not want to change me, but who would not accept me as I was.

And now, with Mehitabel’s information that Isaac was spying—or trying to spy—for the Bastion, I no longer even needed to wonder what it was he wanted, for surely I had never in my life seen a man more inept at seduction, or one who desired less my company in his bed. I had taken a great, perverse pleasure in submitting to him—
exactly
in the sense Gideon meant— when he’d clearly expected to have to debase himself for me, an even greater pleasure in making him
want
me, making him beg, making him climax. I smiled at him over my wineglass, watched him lose the thread of his conversation.

And still Mildmay sat there like a block of stone, as if he couldn’t even be bothered to admit I was in the same room with him.

I could change that, I thought, and let my smile sharpen.

Felix said, out of fucking nowhere, “Mildmay, Isaac wants to know more about the witch-hunts.”

“What?” I said. They’d got to the brandy stage, and I’d relaxed a little, thinking that things were nearly over, so he caught me completely flat-footed. I’m sure he meant to.

“I’m really very interested,” Mr. Garamond said.

I looked at Felix.

“I thought,” Felix said, “since you’ve said so many times that
I
don’t understand them, that you would prefer me
not
to explain them to Isaac.”

Sure you did, you prick.

“What d’you want to know?” I said to Mr. Garamond.

He laughed a little, but I wasn’t sure whether it was at himself or at me. “They really happen then? The Mirador hunts wizards in the streets of the Lower City?”

“And the Bastion don’t hunt down hocuses and kill ’em?”

“But those are traitors.” After a second, his face turned an ugly dull red. “Like me.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what the Mirador says about the nature witches in the Lower City.”

“That they’re traitors?”

“Close enough.”

He looked at Felix. Felix smiled and shrugged.

I said, “The Mirador don’t like hocuses who don’t do as they’re told.”

“But what are these nature witches doing?” Mr. Garamond said.

“I ain’t a hocus. Don’t know.”

“They’re practicing blood magic,” Felix said, like a dagger sliding between my ribs, and made me admit I did know after all.

“No, they ain’t. They just ain’t practicing your kind of magic, is all.”

“Some of them follow Eusebian precepts,” Felix said. I couldn’t tell whether that was aimed at Mr. Garamond or me, but I think it hit both of us.

“Why does the Mirador fear them?” Mr. Garamond asked.

“We don’t fear them,” Felix said, lazy as a cat with its claws sunk in a half-dead mouse.

“But then why . . . ?”

I said, at Felix, “It’s heresy, ain’t it? That’s what you do with heretics. You hunt ’em down and burn ’em.”

“Blood magic is a terrifying force for evil,” Felix said in this nasty, prim voice like he was a witchfinder himself.

“There ain’t no blood magic in the Lower City. There was only Vey Coruscant, and nobody ever came after her anyway.”

“What about Celeste Clovis? Benedick Humphrie? Zephyr Wolsey?”

“Zephyr Wolsey wasn’t no blood-witch.”

“Surely you are forgetting the evidence at his trial.”

“I wasn’t
at
the trial. But he was a friend of mine, okay? Quit baiting me.”

Felix laughed. “You see what a dreadful person I am, Isaac? I can’t have so much as a simple disagreement with someone without
baiting
them.”

“Dreadful,” Mr. Garamond said, and they smiled at each other.

“You can’t disagree with anybody without turning it into a war,” I said. I knew I should’ve kept my mouth shut—I’d gotten off pretty light, considering—but I just couldn’t lay down under it no more, not in front of Mr. Garamond.

“A violent metaphor,” Felix said. “I begin to be frightened of myself.”

“Maybe you should be.”

“Should I? And why would that be?”

I looked at Mr. Garamond, but he wasn’t going to help. He was just watching, his eyes bright and greedy.

“’Cause you do things like this,” I said. My eyes were starting to get hot, and I knew Felix would be able to hear how upset I was. “’Cause you’re a prick for the fun of it. Can’t you just leave me alone?”

“But you said you wanted us to talk more. When I try to talk to you, you just tell me to leave you alone. What am I supposed to do?”

“If this is your idea of talking, it ain’t worth the bother. Just treat me like a fucking dog and be done with it.”

Felix opened his mouth and closed it again. You could feel what he had almost said in the air, like the smell of smoke. He said, “Suppose you go on back to the suite.”

My heart skipped a beat because I’d heard the Lower City in his voice, plain as plain could fucking well be.

“Okay.” I stood up, grabbed my cane. “My lord,” I said and bowed to Mr. Garamond, even though he wasn’t a lord and didn’t rate it. Then I limped to the door.

As I was leaving, Felix said, “Don’t wait up.”

I walked back alone.

When I came in, Gideon looked up from a diagram he was making with three different colors of ink. His eyebrows went up.

“Yeah,” I said. “He sent me back.”

Gideon pointed at the chair opposite him. I didn’t want to be alone. I sat down.

Gideon made a kind of
come on
gesture.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what he’s pissed off about or why . . .” I thought a second, said carefully, “You know he don’t care about Mr. Garamond, right?”