The Mirador (70 page)

Mehitabel

Later, I had no memory of the performance. Absolutely none. All I remembered was, in the second intermission, getting a note in Felix’s looping scrawl, written on cheap paper with a cheaper pen, saying, Tabby, thank you, midnight is the best time, will you come?

I hadn’t been sure he would want to see me, really hadn’t been sure he would want me there. But I wasn’t about to turn him down.

We had to meet in the Verpine, there being quite drastic limits to what Josiah was willing to do. I’d never been there before, and I found myself hoping profoundly I’d never have to go there again as Josiah’s friend Cleo—massive, scowling, but perfectly comfortable with the idea of laying a ghost—escorted me down the stairs to the room where Felix and Mildmay were waiting.

After a single, searing glance, I couldn’t look at Felix. His hands were manacled, ringless. His shirt was torn and his hair was hanging in lank tangles. I had never seen him so disheveled, so far from his usual state of catlike neatness. His face was gray beneath the streaks of dirt. His eyes were red-rimmed and sunk in their sockets, his lips bloodless. In his blue eye I read crushing grief, in the left a darkness that might have been fury or simple insanity.

Mildmay was behind him, looking just as disheveled but much calmer. His head was up, his eyes bright and intent, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen him this focused since . . . since we’d brought him out of the Bastion. He didn’t seem at all thrown by seeing me, either, simply gave me a nod and turned his attention back to Felix.

Felix was looking at me; it took him two tries before he could manage to say, “How did you know?”

“Know what?”

“How much this mattered.”

“You told me, sunshine,” I said, and watched bewildered as he flushed a painful red. “In any event, it was Vincent’s idea. I just organized.”

“Vincent?”

“He wrote to me.”

"He would understand,” Felix said, sounding vague and rather lost.

“We should get going,” Josiah said uneasily. “’Less y’all’re gonna change your minds.”

“No,” Felix said. “This needs to be done. Mildmay?”

“Can’t you take the manacles off first?” I said to Josiah. They were ugly, crude things, and I could see the welts they were rubbing against the bones of Felix’s hands.

It was Felix who answered, his voice unwontedly gentle: “Thank you, Tabby, but they can’t. These keep me from— what’s the word you used?”

“Hexing,” Mildmay said.

“Thank you, yes. Hexing everyone in sight and . . . well, I don’t know what I’d do then, but no doubt something ghastly.”

“But if you can’t do magic . . .”

“This isn’t about magic.”

Even Mildmay was staring at him, and he made a noise that might almost have been a laugh. “We really do need to get going. And I promise you don’t want to hear the theory involved. Especially since it’s fifty percent guesswork.”

“Powers,” Mildmay said. “Well, c’mon then.” He didn’t go back up the stairs, but led us—Felix and me together, with the two guardsmen bringing up the rear—through a series of storage rooms and out again into a hallway I’d never seen before. At one point during our progress, as Mildmay nonchalantly forced the lock of a three-quarter sized door hidden in the shadow of a flying buttress, Cleo muttered, “Fuck me hard.” I pretended not to hear, not wanting to embarrass him, but I was a little heartened by the evidence the guards hadn’t known about this route either.

Felix asked Mildmay about the buttress, and Mildmay said promptly, “There’s a bunch of ’em. Holding up the Vielle Roche. They didn’t want to fuck with it, so they just built around ’em.”

“You mean that was once the outer wall?” I said.

“Yeah. Vielle Roche is the oldest part. The Tiamat”—with a wave around to indicate that was where we were now—" ’s Ophidian.”

“How do you know?” I knew better than to ask, of course, but there had been so many times I hadn’t asked, and I’d regretted it when I’d thought I’d never get another chance.

And Mildmay just shrugged, the movement stiffer and truncated from what I was used to because he was leaning on his walking stick, and said, “I learned a lot of stuff when Kolkhis was training me.”

Which wasn’t an answer, but I let myself be distracted. “I’ve never heard you say her name before.”

That got me a glance over his shoulder, just enough lift to his eyebrows that I knew he was teasing—or as close as he got— when he said, “I been practicing.”

He led us easily, steadily. Josiah and Cleo clustered up closer and closer, and we had to stop several times for one person or another to recover from a sneezing fit. The dust and cobwebs and mikkary were painfully thick in these abandoned rooms, and Felix said, “I’m glad Vincent isn’t here.”

“He would have come,” I said, uneasily uncertain whether that comment was meant to be taken at face value, “but Lord Ivo’s household is still—”

“Lord Ivo’s household?” Felix interrupted me, his voice suddenly sharp. “What’s happened to Lord Ivo?”

“Powers,” Mildmay said resignedly. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

It was strange to hear the thing from Mildmay’s perspective, described in blunt, brutal words and with the eerie flat finality of fact instead of the breathless murmur of speculation. Felix listened to it all, his face going blanker and blanker in the light of the lantern Cleo carried, and when Mildmay was done, he said, “You must have been making excursions into the Lower City for weeks.”

“Only a couple times,” Mildmay said.

“And you didn’t tell me any of it.”

“I didn’t want to upset you.”

“Yes, and you picked such a foolproof method of going about it, too.”

Josiah, Cleo, and I all pulled back involuntarily from the bitterness in Felix’s voice, but Mildmay said, just as bitterly, “If I’d told you, you wouldn’t’ve let me do it.”

“Of course I wouldn’t let you do it, you suicidal half-wit! ”

That might be as close as Felix would ever come to saying I love you, and I could tell from Mildmay’s startled, reflexive glance at Felix’s face that he knew it.

“Oh never mind,” Felix said after a moment. “You seem to have saved the city while I wasn’t watching. I shouldn’t be churlish about it.”

Felix’s rather rueful admiration seemed to distress Mildmay even more than his anger had. “It ain’t like that.”

“No? How would you describe it, then?”

“Um,” Mildmay said, and then with obvious relief, “There’s the stairs to the crypt.”

It was a mark of how hard Felix was working to keep his façades in place that he let Mildmay redirect his attention without another word. I’d watched them do that particular dance more times than I could count, and while Felix often accepted the new topic, I’d never seen him do it without a pointed comment—a warning that he would be returning to the uncomfortable subject later. And then I remembered, looking at the rose-entwined skeletons serving as caryatids at the stairhead, that there might not be any “later” for Felix.

And honestly, the knowledge that I’d done everything I could was no comfort at all.

Mildmay

Josiah and Cleo didn’t like the crypt. They stayed by the door— Cleo stayed in the doorway, like he was afraid he’d get locked in if he gave it the chance to close.

Josiah tossed me a box of lucifers, though, and I lit the candles somebody’d put around Amaryllis Cordelia’s tomb. It wasn’t like it was enough light, but I didn’t figure broad daylight would be enough light for this place, and the candles were better than nothing. And better than trying to talk Cleo out of the death grip he had on the lantern, too.

Felix went prowling up and down the rows of tombs. Mehitabel came and stood next to me. After a moment, she said, “I did the best I could. I told Stephen everything.”

“Everything?”

“Oh God,” she said, and she told me, barely whispering so Josiah and Cleo wouldn’t hear. It didn’t take her long, and I listened and thought about how much it explained.

When she was done, I said, “You gonna be okay?”

“I’m sleeping with the Lord Protector,” she said, and I was surprised at how bitter she sounded. “I’ll be fine.” She glanced sideways at me and burst out laughing, her real laugh, making everybody else jump. “I love the look you get when you’re trying to decide if you have to ask someone a personal question. I’m fine—in no danger, and Stephen’s promised to see if he can help Hallam.”

“Is Hallam your fella?” I asked, and I guess we were both surprised at how jealous I didn’t sound, because she gave me a really beautiful smile and said, “Yes. I’m sorry, you know. I should have told you—”

“You couldn’t. I get that. And, I mean, I figure I was worse, calling you Ginevra and everything.”

“I shouldn’t have told you that.”

“Yes, you should,” I said, and suddenly I really wanted to make her understand. “It was a shitty thing to do to you, and you shouldn’t’ve had to put up with it. And I think I needed my ass kicked about it anyway. You know, to get over it.”

“Have you?”

“I’m getting better. Getting better about a lot of things.” And without even meaning to, I was looking for Felix.

He was standing by one of the tombs, resting his hands on it to take the weight of the manacles off his wrists, and when he saw me looking at him, he said, “Can we move the candles over here?”

“Sure,” I said, and me and Mehitabel moved them. Felix just stood there, head down, until we were done, and then he said, in this nice even voice, like he was talking to the kids in the Grenouille Salon, “Ephreal Sand calls the world of the spirit manar, and magic is only one of the ways to reach it. I don’t think I’ve ever actually used magic to disperse a ghost.”

“But that big maze we drew down here—”

“Was ritual. Like I said, another way to channel manar. Maybe even a better way.”

“It didn’t do Magnus no good.”

“There’s a blockage,” Felix said. “In the flow of what Ynge calls noirant energy. I learned how to see it from observing Vincent. ”

“Who doesn’t do magic at all,” Mehitabel said, like this was all starting to make sense to her.

“Exactly.” Felix gave her a tired smile. “Now if I had access to my magic, I could remove the block by brute force, but I don’t. I’m almost glad of it—I think a ritual will be less disruptive.”

“Disruptive to what?” Mehitabel said.

“Remember what Vincent said the last time we were here,” Felix said, and Mehitabel shut her mouth in a hurry. “Tabby, do you have a stickpin or the like?”

Mehitabel did—pretty thing set with citrines—and handed it over. I decided I just wasn’t going to wonder if Lord Stephen had given it to her.

Felix looked at it a second, and then jabbed it into the vein in his left wrist.

“Good God, Felix, do you have to?” Mehitabel said, and she sounded every bit as spooked out as I felt.

“I think so,” Felix said, watching his blood drip onto the top of the tomb. “I need power to remove the block, and, well, this is what I’ve got at hand. So to speak.”

“But isn’t that dangerous?”

He shrugged a little. His hair had fallen forward, so I couldn’t see his face. “I’ve done worse things.”

“Not what I asked, sunshine.”

“It doesn’t matter. Just let me do this.”

And Mehitabel held her tongue.

After a little while, he started using the pin to draw patterns in the blood, muttering under his breath. He was using his right thumb to stanch the bleeding. Me and Mehitabel were both trying like fuck to look somewhere else, so I didn’t see most of it, but I knew when it worked all right, because, powers and saints, it was like a thunderclap, and then there was just this afterimage, blurring into nothing almost before it was there, a hawk-faced boy, trying to smile, his hands spread like he was giving Felix a blessing.

Felix just stood there, rubbing his fingers like they hurt, and blinking hard. After a long, long moment, he said, “I’ll have to remember that one. So as not to do it again.”

“It worked, though, right?” I said.

“Oh yes. He’ll rest now.” Felix brought up his hands to rub his eyes, wincing as the manacles shifted on his wrists.

“That’s good,” Mehitabel said gently.

“Yes. Will it make you think of me more kindly, Tabby, when . . .”

When I’m dead, he meant, but he couldn’t quite make himself say it.

“I think kindly of you now, sunshine,” Mehitabel said, still so fucking gentle, and Felix’s calm cracked like an eggshell.

The next second he was back in control, just daring us to try and say anything. Mehitabel kind of looked at me like she was waiting to follow my lead, but I didn’t have the first fucking clue what to say.

Felix only gave me about a heartbeat anyway before he said, “I expect we’d better get back. I don’t want to get our guards in trouble.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Josiah and Cleo were both staring at Felix like he was gold-plated, and I wondered how long it’d be before the story was all over the Mirador. But that was okay—maybe it would balance out all the other shit.