The Virtu (45 page)

I reflected on Damon Turncoat as I prepared for my reinvestiture, as a way of keeping my nervousness at bay. I had felt a certain kinship with him when I was younger and thought myself free of Malkar. He had been ganumedes, as I was; he had been the lover of one of the bright children of the annemer court, as I was. The story of his love for Gabriel Otanius was a favorite with poets and novelists, for a more star-crossed pair of lovers they could not have invented. I had never been fool enough to wish for the trials that beset Damon and Gabriel, but I did remember wondering if it took that kind of suffering to create true love.

By my own example, the answer was no, and I shoved away my memories of Shannon.

My wardrobes had been left untouched, which was both gratifying and faintly disturbing. I found my favorite red-violet coat, my second-best trousers and boots. But not my best boots, and not the trousers that I had bought only two weeks before…

A flash of memory, freezing cold water and a monster laughing.

I shuddered, my shoulders hunching involuntarily, and knotted my cravat, shrugged into my coat. My hands were
not
shaking, and I defied them to start. My rings were cold and heavy on my hands; I could wear them because they had not been given to me by the Curia and thus were not the Curia’s either to bestow or to withhold. Surrounded by witchlights, I stared at myself in the mirror. My hair was not yet long enough to queue properly, even if I had wished to; my earrings were bare glints of gold, lost in wild curls that were aggressively inappropriate to the sleek decorum of the court. The vivid contrast of my hair against the red-violet coat made my skin look even paler and made my eyes unearthly. That was good. I did not want them to be able to ignore me.

I emerged into the sitting room, where Mildmay and Gideon had been playing Long Tiffany for the past hour. They both turned; Mildmay blinked, and Gideon said, “Isn’t that coat a little bright?:

“Very,” I said, finding myself suddenly and unreasonably cheerful. “Shall we?”

“Do we got a choice?” Mildmay said, dragging himself to his feet.

“Not particularly, no.”

“What I thought.” He looked tired, his skin almost gray in the light of fire and lamp.

“Stay with Gideon,” I said, invoking the obligation d‘âme just strongly enough that he would know I meant it.

“But I thought—” Mildmay started at the same time Gideon said, :I do not need a minder.:

“
After
the ceremony,” I said and glared at Gideon. They would reinstate me anyway; they needed me more than I needed them, and we all knew it. But I could not abide the delay that this revelation would cause if produced untimely. I had heard the Virtu singing all night long, even in my dreams.

“Okay, okay!” Mildmay raised his hands in a gesture of surrender and defense. “You’re the boss.” Gideon made no further protests, either, although his expression when I glanced at him was coldly thoughtful.

We proceeded unhurriedly and in good order to the Hall of the Chimeras, where Mehitabel was waiting.

“May common Kekropians attend?” she asked me, her voice heavy with irony.

I gave her my best smile and said, “No, only uncommon ones. Keep my brother out of trouble, would you?” And leaving her indignation and Mildmay’s weary resignation behind, I swept into the Hall of the Chimeras.

The court was out in force, the wizards’ gold sashes gleaming among the dark and sumptuous grandeur of the nobles. I’d timed my arrival carefully so that there would be no need for any awkward period of lingering and chatting. I reached the end of the long central aisle just as Stephen took his seat beneath the Virtu and Giancarlo moved into place on the steps of the dais. My bow honoring the Lord Protector matched perfectly with the court’s.

The first time I had gone through this, the ceremonies had taken most of a day, and what I chiefly remembered about the investiture was the burning pain of my freshly inscribed tattoos. This time things proceeded in a much more businesslike fashion. I advanced, exchanged ritual words with Stephen and Giancarlo, swore the sevenfold oath that I had repeated so many times I could say it in my sleep—and according to Shannon, sometimes had. Then Giancarlo descended two steps, I came forward, and we clasped hands, left to left and right to right, our rings making cold and hostile music against each other.

I felt it, like a dislocated joint popping back into its socket. Something I hadn’t even known was missing returned to its proper place. The Virtu’s song was suddenly much clearer; I understood now what Thamuris had been trying to explain to me. I could hear the emptiness where other voices ought to have been.

I must have looked strange, for Giancarlo hesitated a moment before releasing my hands. “Are you all right?”

“I’m beginning to be,” I said.

I was beginning to understand what the Virtu needed me to do.

Gideon could talk to other hocuses.

I mean, I’d known he could talk to Felix, but I hadn’t realized that he could do it with anybody who didn’t happen to be annemer. Between them, him and Mehitabel got quite the little social circle going after Felix had finished with his hocus-thing and the party started.

I faded back—once the ceremony was over, and I didn’t have the binding-by-forms breathing down my neck like a hired goon—and left them to it. I wasn’t no use at that sort of thing anyway, and I was sick of being stared at. People wanted to know who I was and what the fuck I was doing there, and I didn’t blame them.

I just didn’t want to be around when Felix told them, and that was past praying for.

So I kind of skulked around behind the busts of the old kings and didn’t meet nobody’s eyes and tried to keep moving. And wished Felix would come find me and say it was time for bed.

But that wasn’t happening neither. He was easy to spot, being so tall and with all that red hair, and every time I looked, he was surrounded by flashies and hocuses and looking happy enough to bust.

I kept moving, kept my distance from the Virtu and the Lord Protector, and after a while I came around to the alcove where they’d stashed the musicians. Glanced in, and fucking near swallowed my tongue.

Hugo Chandler, large as life and twice as natural.

I did have the sense not to say nothing while they were playing, but as soon as the song was over, I said, “Hugo!”

He looked up, saw me, and for a second I thought he was going to pass out on the spot. Then he turned and said something to the gal beside him and edged out to shake my hand.

“Gilroi! I thought you were dead! And what happened to your hair?”

Powers, I was glad to see him. Glad to see anybody from back before my life went to shit. “Quit dyeing it, is all. And my name ain’t actually Gilroi. It’s Mildmay.” I bit my tongue and managed not to say, “Mildmay the Fox.” I gave him the name Felix’d come up with and been so pleased with himself about: “Mildmay Foxe.”

“Oh,” Hugo said, and tried it out under his breath, like he needed to see how it tasted. Then he said, “Everybody thinks you’re dead.”

“Nope. Just went away for a while.”

“Austin is. Dead, you know.”

With Ginevra. “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.”

“I’m glad you’re not, though. But what are you doing here?”

Fuck, that was a good question. I was opening my mouth to tell him so when somebody cleared their throat, real politely, just behind me. Hugo took one look and melted back into the musicians. My heart sank. I turned around.

It was Felix’s lady hocus friend, the one with more guts than common sense. Fleur, her name was.

“Will you walk with me?” she said.

Oh shit. “Yes, m’lady,” I said, along of really not seeing that I had a choice, and after a moment I realized she wanted me to give her my arm.

So I did, and we walked, back behind the kings where nobody came. She was about my height, and she smelled good. And after a while, she said, “I am not perfectly sure I understood Felix’s explanation. He is so very bad at them. You are his brother?”

“Half brother, yes, m’lady.”

“And you met him in Hermione?”

“Yes, m’lady.”

“But you’re from Mélusine.”

Well, fuck, it wasn’t like I could hide it. “Britomart.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m from Britomart.”

“I see,” she said, in a way that made it all too clear as how she
did
see. “And you came with him to the Mirador because… ?”

“He let me.” Which was the truth.

“Not quite what I meant,” she said sharply, but I cut in before she could think of a better way to put it.

“Anything else you gotta ask Felix.”

I said it too fast, and I was just trying to gather myself to say it again, slower, when the thing happened that I’d been dreading since we rode into Mélusine.

“You
what?”
A man’s voice, pitched to carry.

Me and Lady Fleur both turned. A hocus I didn’t know, talking to Felix. And from the way he looked, like he’d just swallowed a live frog, and from the way Felix looked, like a cat that’s got itself locked into the creamery, it didn’t take no genius to see that Felix had just told the whole fucking Mirador about the obligation d‘âme.

“Fuck me sideways ‘til I cry,” I said. And I didn’t care if Lady Fleur heard me or not.

The temptation had been too great to resist, and the look on Robert’s face was all the gratification I could have hoped for.

And then, of course, there were the consequences, which I knew I would be suffering in one form or another for years to come. The most immediate was Giancarlo’s sputtering and incoherent fury. For a moment, it was a near-run thing whether he would murder me on the spot, in the middle of the Hall of the Chimeras with all the court as witnesses.

But by then, Mildmay was there, and Giancarlo harrumphed at him and said to me, “You certainly picked an unprepossessing specimen,” not as if that excused me, but simply as if it was the final straw and he couldn’t even maintain his wrath in the face of my folly.

Mildmay gave me one of his flat, unreadable glares, and that was when Stephen came up behind Giancarlo like a cloud of doom.

“I imagine you must be quite proud of yourself,” Stephen said in a mild voice that wouldn’t have deceived a child of seven. It certainly didn’t deceive Mildmay, whose face had taken on its most masklike quality, which meant (I had theorized) that he was having to make a conscious effort not to let anything show. But he didn’t try to escape or to hide, and it occurred to me that I was proud of him for that.

“No, my lord,” I said, even though I was.

“You always were good at that sort of lying by withholding. Did you learn it from Malkar?”

“Probably,” I said, making my own effort now to keep my voice level. “He is to blame for most of my bad habits.”

“You give yourself too little credit.” A different voice, the one voice beyond all others I had hoped not to hear this evening.

The voice of Shannon Teverius.

“I was forgetting your excellent tutelage, my lord,” I said.

Shannon went white; Stephen went red.

“In any event,” I said, “and irrespective of my morals or lack thereof, the thing is done and cannot be undone.”