The Mirador (8 page)

He was fighting me, fighting his own body, and this was what I wanted, this panicked animal helpless strength, this hopeless struggle. I drove into him, snarling with effort, and he screamed like a lost soul, screamed and bucked and climaxed.

“Damn you,” I said, although I did not know which of us I meant, and spent myself inside him in mingled pain and relief. I dragged myself away as soon as I could move, washed sketchily, and put my clothes on. Then I returned to the boy where he lay sprawled on the flagstones, removed manacles and blindfold, washed the mix of oil and sweat, semen and blood from his belly and back and thighs. I was careful, though not tender, checking to be sure I had not inflicted more damage than I had intended.

I helped him stand, helped him dress, asked because I had to, “Are you all right?”

His smile was sweet and wholehearted. “Ah, m’lord, any time you want me again, you just come find me.”

I smiled back politely, but I wouldn’t. I never did.

And we parted. I felt saturated in my own monstrosity, but the darkness, the fury, was draining out of me as I left the Two-Headed Beast, and I could have sobbed with gratitude. It was nearly four in the morning; I went straight to the St. Dismas Baths and scrubbed myself almost raw in the futile effort to wash the reek of the beast out of my soul.

But at least when I walked back through the Mortisgate, the boy’s blood was not on me.

I woke up feeling like I’d died in the night and been dug up by resurrectionists with filthy, pox-festered hands. When I went out into the sitting room, Felix was wearing his wet cat look, the one that meant Gideon had taken after him for something he didn’t think was his fault. They went at it like firecrackers all through breakfast. I could tell by the glares they were giving each other, even though neither one was saying anything out loud. Finally, Felix burst out: “All right, damn it! Mildmay,
you
tell him. Was I flirting with Isaac Garamond last night?”

“Can’t you leave me out of this?” I said.

“Tell him,”
Felix said.

“I didn’t see you flirting,” I said.

Gideon snorted. He didn’t believe either one of us. He knew I’d lie for Felix.

“Gideon, I
swear
—” Felix started, but Gideon cut him off, and whatever he said was poison mean. It took a lot to make Felix flinch.

“We’d better go,” I said. “It’s getting late.”

The look Gideon gave me was one I could read. It said,
If he didn’t do nothing wrong, why are you bailing him out?
But Felix’s face went absolutely sunlit, and he said, “You’re right. Come on.” He was out the door before he even finished talking.

I said, “He really wasn’t.” Gideon didn’t look at me. I got up and followed Felix.

It had been a shitty start to the day, and things only went downhill from there. I really didn’t think Felix had been flirting with Mr. Garamond the night before, didn’t think he gave a rat’s ass about Mr. Garamond, to tell the truth, but when Mr. Garamond found Felix after court,
he
sure was—Mr. Garamond, I mean. He was better at it than poor Dominic Jocelyn, too, and Felix was sore enough at Gideon to start flirting back. I wished Gideon had believed me while I was still telling the truth.

As for me, the day had turned to complete and utter shit the moment I spotted Mehitabel on Lord Antony Lemerius’s arm. And then she caught my eye and gave me the little wave that meant she wanted to talk to me later. How many guys do you
need
on your string? I thought. And I knew damn well that if Felix let me, I’d go meet her just like she wanted. Watching Felix and Mr. Garamond, I didn’t think I’d have any trouble getting permission.

I made Antony come with me to meet Mildmay. I wanted an audience, and Antony’s scruples irritated me enough to drop character for a moment: “I assure you, he doesn’t bite.”

Antony bridled, but at least he quit arguing.

Mildmay and I had a system. The only thing he hated more than Felix teasing him was me telling Felix to shut up. So we didn’t meet in their rooms, but in the Stoa St. Maximilian, where there were benches to sit on and almost never anyone around. The benches by the north doors were decorated with dragons. I sat on one; Antony, being keenly conscious of propriety, took the one opposite. I checked my watch. A quarter to seven. If Mildmay could come, he’d be along in the next half hour. And Felix might be frequently appalling, but he was almost never so petty as to refuse to let Mildmay go.

I looked at Antony, sitting poker-straight, his discomfort written plainly on his face, and said curiously, “If Mildmay distresses you so, why didn’t you ask Felix?”

He gave me a look that was as much offended as anything else. “I am not on intimate terms with Lord Felix.”

I heard Felix’s breathless, mocking voice in my head:
Darling, I wouldn’t take you if you came free with a pound of sugar.
Squelched it, said, “This is hardly an ‘intimate’ favor. And Felix would understand about your work.”

“I want nothing to do with him,” Antony said, and I didn’t spoil the magnificence of his statement by pointing out that if that was the case, he was going entirely the wrong way about it. Instead, I asked, “Do his proclivities offend you so greatly?”

“Oh, it isn’t that, although Father gets quite exercised about the degeneracy of the court. But the Lemerii do not consort with wizards.”

“Oh,” I said, brought up hard against the lunatic schisms of court society. “Of course.”

Another awkward silence. I was about, in desperation, to start him talking about the Cordelii again, when I was saved by my other problem. Mildmay came through the door, with just enough hitch in his eyebrows to tell me he’d had another argument with Felix. The frown vanished from his face almost before I’d seen it, and he nodded at Antony, his compromise between the obligation d’âme and his own innate politeness. “Lord Antony,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“Mildmay,” I said; he gave me one of his indecipherable looks, green and sharp and waiting. “Lord Antony wants to examine the crypt of the Cordelii. We’ve heard that you know the way—will you show him?”

There was a pause; although Mildmay’s face didn’t change, I knew I’d startled him, and I was glad of it. Then he shrugged. “Yeah. Sure. When’d you like to go, m’lord?”

“Is now too soon?” Antony said.

“Nah. Suits me fine. Want to come, Mehitabel?”

“Are you kidding?” I said, getting up. “You’d have to beat me off with a stick.”

Nobody talked much on the way to the crypt, which was fine with me. Felix had picked a fight with Johannes Hilliard at the end of the committee meeting, because he knew Lord Johannes would give him what he wanted, and it was either his bad luck or just exactly what he had coming to him, depending on how you look at things, that Lord Giancarlo heard him. He had some things to say about it, too.

Felix didn’t fight with Lord Giancarlo—he wasn’t that stupid—so he stood and let Lord Giancarlo chew him out, and then Felix dragged me up to the Crown of Nails and chewed
me
out, and we ended up having a fight like we hadn’t had in months. He’d finally yelled at me to get away from him and leave him alone. I hadn’t waited for him to say it twice.

But there was this little voice in the back of my head saying, he’s getting worse. I mean, he was a nasty-tempered prick at the best of times, but these days it seemed like he was going out of his way to find fights. And he was leaving the suite at night, and me and Gideon didn’t have the least idea where he was going, although it wasn’t hard to guess what he was doing when he got there. And there was the drinking.

He ain’t drinking that much, I said to myself. I mean, he ain’t getting smashed or nothing.

But that didn’t even get a chance to make me feel better before I was thinking, Yeah, but he’s getting drunk enough that people are noticing. People other’n me. People who’ve known him longer’n me, and they don’t like it.
They
think it’s weird.

And then I sighed because it didn’t matter. Felix wasn’t going to listen to me, and if he’d wanted to tell me what was wrong, he would have. And maybe the binding-by-forms could’ve helped— there were stories that sort of hinted it might—but that would mean giving it more of me, and I wasn’t doing that.

Fuck this for the Emperor’s snotrag, I said to myself. Think about something else, can’t you? And that worked about as well as it ever does.

When we reached the top of the white marble staircase that me and Felix had found once, couple indictions back now, I guessed, I snagged one of the candles out of the nearest sconce. Mehitabel and Lord Antony followed suit. The door at the bottom of the stairs was still unlocked.

“How many people do you think know about this?” Lord Antony asked.

“Powers,
I
don’t know,” I said, and waved ’em ahead of me through the door. Old habits die hard. “I’d bet us and Felix are the first people been down here in at least a Great Septad. Prob’ly more like three.”

“Amazing,” Lord Antony said. He was trying to look everywhere at once. He started off down the first aisle. About halfway along, he dug a tablet and stylus out of his coat pocket and began scribbling, using one of the tombs as a table.

“He’ll be off in his own world until we drag him out of here,” Mehitabel said. “Are
all
of the Cordelii really in here?”

“Nah. Just the dynastic line.”

“So what’s the dynastic line?”

“The kings and their kids and their wives, and I think the grandsons.” I remembered something else I thought Mehitabel would like—something that might keep her looking at me instead of her flashie. “And the kings’ hearts are down in the Arcane. ”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Kings’ hearts went to Cade-Cholera. They’re down in the Arcane, in the Mausolée de Verre.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“Nope.”

It wasn’t my kind of joke, and she knew it. “What a grisly custom.”

“The Mirador had a lot of stuff like that before the Wizards’ Coup.”

“No,
don’t
tell me. Not in here.”

“’Fraid of haunts?”

She gave me a smile that was mostly teeth. “Morbidly imaginative. Shall we sightsee?”

“Sure, if you want,” I said.

But she only stayed with me a moment before she went off reading plaques. I stopped walking and leaned on a tomb to watch her, the way she forgot to behave like a lady and her eyes got wide.

She came back to me. “Do you know who all these people are?”

“Most of ’em.”

“Come tell me about this one. She looks interesting,” she said and dragged me over to one of the wall plaques.

The plaque she pointed to didn’t look no different from the others. Mehitabel read it out loud:

HERE LIES AMARYLLIS CORDELIA
17 PRAIRIAL 14.1.3 - 11 FLORÉAL 14.6.2
Her waking over,
may her sleep be dreamless.

“Who
was
she?”

“Fuck,” I said. “I dunno. I mean, I know about
one
Amaryllis Cordelia, but
she
can’t be here.”

“Why not?”

“Not in the dynastic line, though that ain’t from lack of trying. ”

“What do you mean? Who was she?”

“Let’s sit down,” I said and started toward the row of freestanding tombs behind us. “D’you mind?”

“All right,” she said, and sat with me on the nearest tomb. “Now talk. Who was Amaryllis Cordelia?”

“Gloria Aestia with guts.”

“Felix is right,” Mehitabel said. “You
do
talk in riddles.”

Powers, how many people was he saying that to? “Sorry,” I said. “But it ain’t a riddle. She was born into a cadet branch, and she wanted to be queen.”

“She didn’t make it, though.”

“Nope. Bad timing.”

She laughed.

“It’s true,” I said. “Too young to marry Laurence and too old to marry Charles. She got married off to an Emarthius before Charles was old enough to care about girls.”

“So what makes her like Gloria Aestia?”

“She seduced them both.”

“She
what
?”

“Her husband—poor bastard, I can’t think of his name—got some political appointment when Laurence was in his seventh septad, and—”

“Don’t give me that septad nonsense,” she said.

“Sorry. Laurence was older than forty-two and younger than, um, forty-nine. Charles was about sixteen, and the lady herself was, say, thirty.”

“All right. I’ve got that now. Go on.”

“She went after Laurence first, but he wouldn’t do her no good. He’d had lovers since he hit his second septad, if you believe the stories, and he knew how to keep ’em where he wanted ’em. So she gave up on him and went after Charles.”

“Well? What happened?”

“Ain’t clear,” I said. “Laurence died when Charles had two septads and four, um . . . eighteen. Maybe it was murder. Maybe Amaryllis Emarthia had a hand in it. Seems like Charles didn’t, since they let him on the throne. But he hadn’t reached his third septad yet, and everybody knew he was missing some of the top cards from his deck. Laurence had been careful about the way he set the regency up—and maybe that was Amaryllis’s fault, too. So by the time Charles came of age, his advisors had most of the power, and that’s where the Puppet Kings came from.”