Corambis (37 page)

Cyriack Thrale led me to a place I wouldn’t’ve found on my own, but that was just fucking perfect for me and Felix. Big old brick apartment building, with a courtyard with a tree in the middle, and an apartment that was twice the size of anything I’d ever had in the Lower City, and if I was doing the math right, it cost about half as much. And it came furnished.

I made the deal with the landlord Domenica afternoon. When I got back, Felix was sleeping like a dead thing. I didn’t know if that was okay or not— because he hadn’t fucking
talked
to me, the secretive son of a bitch— but I figured finally that his body needed the sleep anyway. So I watched in case something bad happened— well, something bad I could recognize— and when he woke up, he said the fantôme had been “dealt with.”

“That a permanent kind of ‘dealt with’ or the other kind?” I said, and he hunched up a little and said, “I’m working on it,” and I left it at that because he still didn’t need the extra grief from me and it
still
wasn’t like there was anything I could do. I figured my best bet was to give him a distraction, so I told him about the new place, and he chewed me out about not telling him, and we were okay again.

Lunedy morning, we moved ourselves in, us and our carpetbags, and Felix was unpacking our stuff into the closet and the big ugly bureau when he suddenly stopped and said, “You know, this really won’t do.”

I looked up. He was standing in the middle of the room, holding his dark green coat out in front of him and looking at it like it was a cat he’d just dragged out of the milk jug. And, you know, seeing it in bright midmorning sunlight, I knew what he meant.

Back in the Mirador, I’d packed two of his coats, the dark green and a dark blue. They were the plainest coats he had. I didn’t feel like getting bashed over the head so somebody could pick the bullion out of Felix’s sleeves.

The blue coat had lasted until just past Fiddermark, when we hit a patch of the nastiest weather I’ve ever been out in. We’d both ended up soaking wet and covered in mud. And then we’d gotten in this kind of tangle with the gate of the hotel courtyard and somebody else’s nasty- tempered horse, and the coat had ended up with a hole in it you could put your hand through. I’d expected Felix to yell at me or yell at the guy who owned the horse or just plain yell, but he hadn’t. He’d stripped out of the coat and given it to the hotel- keeper’s wife for her patchwork and hadn’t said a word. Two days later, he
had
yelled at me, gone off like a string of firecrackers over Kethe knows what, but I’d known it wasn’t about what ever the newest thing I’d done wrong was and it wasn’t even about the coat. It was about Gideon and being exiled and the whole fucking mess that he just couldn’t talk about.

But anyway, that was the end of the blue coat. The green coat, which Felix didn’t like as much for reasons I didn’t even try to understand, had made it the rest of the way, across the mountains and everything, and it was still perfectly decent— I mean, any secondhand store in the Cheaps would jump at it— but there was a button missing and the color was going in places and my darns weren’t what you might call invisible. “Shabby” I guess is the word I want, and not how you want to look when you’re getting ready to stand up in front of a roomful of strange kids and convince them you’re worth listening to.

“And you’re no better,” Felix said, giving me a frown like he’d only just noticed.
“Hey,” I said. “No one’s gonna expect me to look flash.”
His frown got heavier. “You know I have no more social standing here than you do.”
“Sure you don’t,” I said, and I was being snarky for sure. “You’re a hocus and you talk right and—”
“You could learn,” he said, cutting me off so sharp that I guessed he’d been looking for an excuse to say this for a while. “You’re learning to read. You could learn—”
“Don’t,” I said, cutting him off as sharp as he had me.
He gave me this look, sort of bewildered and a little hurt, like I’d slammed a door in his face he’d thought I was going to hold.
Oh fuck me sideways ’til I cry. But we were going to have to do this sometime. “Say I did. What d’you think it’d change?”
“I don’t—”
“It wouldn’t make this fucking scar go away, would it? I’d still sound like a half- wit.”
“You don’t—”
“Felix,” I said, and he stopped. “I know how I sound, okay? Kolkhis used to—” I shut my mouth, hard.
“No, go on,” Felix said, and now he was watching me instead of the coat, his eyes bright, like he was hunting me. “What did Kolkhis do?”
“Don’t matter. Point is, I can’t change the way the words come out. And I’d rather . . .” I didn’t know how to explain it, something I’d been doing so long I never thought about it anymore.
“You’d rather play to people’s expectations than challenge them,” Felix said. He sounded sad, like I’d disappointed him. “Well, it is your prerogative. I just wish—”
“Do I embarrass you?” I said, and it came out nastier than I’d meant.
He went red like a sunrise, right up to his hairline. “It isn’t that.”
“You’re a fucking terrible liar,” I said, and he went redder. “No matter how flash I talk, I’m still going to embarrass you. You know that.”
I could see him wanting to deny it. But he
was
a terrible liar, and we both knew it, and he was smart enough to know that lying to me here wasn’t going to help.
And because I’m a mean son of a bitch, I sat there and watched him struggle and didn’t do nothing to get him out of it.
Finally, he dropped the coat and said, “Maybe I need to be embarrassed then.” He was still red in the face, but his chin was up, and he met my eyes like he was daring me to say he was lying now.
“But you hate . . .”
“Maybe it will be good for me. I told you, a long time ago, that I can’t change what I am. And maybe that
is
true. But I want to try.”
“You been thinking about this.”
He shrugged. “On and off. It’s easier, out of the Mirador.”
“I thought you were homesick.”
“I was. I am. But just because I want something, doesn’t mean it’s good for me. Rather the reverse, in fact.”
It took me a moment, but I thought I knew what he meant. “Phoenix?”
“And Malkar. And Shannon, for that matter. I have a long and inglorious history of wanting what hurts me.” He laughed, though not like anything was funny. “I was trained as a martyr. As I think you’ve already gathered.”
“I’d sort of guessed.”
“I have preferred the tarquin’s role,” he said, his voice chilly now, kind of distant. “But that’s just vanity.”
Which, okay, not the word I would’ve used. But I didn’t say nothing, and he must’ve been wanting to say this for a while, too, because he kept going. “You see the pattern, don’t you? I want to be hurt. And if I can’t get it one way, I find another.”
“Um,” I said, because I wanted to argue with him and couldn’t.
“Sometimes,” he said, still chilly and real far away, “I think I am very,
very
stupid.”
And powers, I had to ask. “Is that what happened in Bernatha? You wanted them to hurt you?”
“No! I didn’t want that. I didn’t want any of that.” But his color was up, and there was something wrong here. I waited, because silence was the one thing Felix just couldn’t stand. And sure enough, after a moment he started pacing. “Do you think I wanted it?”
“No,” I said, because I knew he hadn’t. Except he had. He’d wanted to be hurt. To be punished. But he hadn’t wanted what they did to him. I’d known that as soon as he’d tried to distract me from the bruises on his face. And then it hit me, and the words got out before I could stop them: “That’s why you let them put that fucking binding on you, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“The binding- by- obedience. You
let
them. Because you
didn’t
let those fuckers in Bernatha . . .”
It was the look on his face that shut me up. He’d gone paper- white, and his mouth was flat and hard. And his eyes were fucking wild— not angry, the way I was used to. This was something else. “You want to know what they did?” he said, and his voice wasn’t much more than a whisper.
I didn’t— really fucking didn’t— but I would’ve had to be blind, blind and deaf and fucking dead, not to see that he needed to say it. “Tell me,” I said.
He did. He told me the whole thing, flat out, no fancy words, no dancing around things. Started with the hecate and the blindfold and just kept going. He didn’t even fucking blush. And I listened to the way his voice changed, the vowels getting longer and darker. I’d heard him slip before, maybe once or twice, but this wasn’t the same thing. This was more like him pinned under me at Nera, screaming curses at me. This was what he’d been before Strych got him. This was the part of him that was my brother all the way down to the bone.
He was trying to shock me, too. There was something— I don’t even know the right word. But he told me how they’d made him come, and he was watching me with his wild, spooky eyes, and I knew what he was looking for. Good thing I had a lot of practice in not giving it to him. And besides, if there was one thing I’d learned from Kolkhis, it was just how much you couldn’t control what set your cock off. Didn’t mean fuck all about what you wanted. He finished, still watching me, still waiting for me to scream or puke or run away or what ever the fuck it was he thought I was going to do, and I said, “They hurt you.”
Short, choppy nod. Still waiting for the sanguette blade.
I said, “They hurt you, and you didn’t control it.”
It was more like a flinch than a nod, but it was a nod.
“And you didn’t control what your body was doing, neither.”
He finally looked away from me, and there was the blush. Some of it was shame, even though he had to know the same thing I did, that what they’d got his body to do didn’t mean nothing about nothing. But most of it was . . . I knew the word Felix would use:
fury
.
“So you set it up to happen again.”
That got him looking back at me in a hurry, and about half a step away from murder if I was reading him right. “Yes, you did,” I said before he could think of the words to tell me I was full of shit. “You showed them hocuses what you could do and you gave ’em Lord Stephen’s letters and you went in there and you told them every fucking thing you could think of to make them do what you wanted. They hurt you, but you controlled the whole fucking thing. And you got what you wanted.”
“I don’t want this,” he said, although his voice wasn’t much more than a whisper.
“You were right,” I said. “I see the pattern.”
He turned away, shoulders hunching, hands going up to his face, and I said the only thing I could: “I’m sorry.”
He shuddered, and it was a moment before he answered me. But when he did, he’d got his vowels back: “You, of all people, have nothing to be sorry for.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I
was
right,” he said, and he straightened up and turned back to smile at me. It wasn’t a great smile, but I thought it was real. “I am very,
very
stupid.”
“You been hurt,” I said, because I understood all about how that made a person do stupid shit.
His eyebrows went up, and he stared at me a moment. “You don’t have the least taste for tarquinage, do you?”
“I don’t—”
Powers and saints, I’d been looked at like that before, but only by brothel madams weighing me up to see what I’d go for and how much it was worth.
“I ain’t into pain.”
“Pain is only part of it,” he said.
I had chills going up and down my spine, and I couldn’t keep my voice quite steady enough when I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Because I knew how this went. I’d seen him hurting, so he turned around and hurt me. Like a clockwork bear. Wind him up and watch him go.
But this time he didn’t. He kind of shook himself, and his face changed somehow, some way I didn’t have words for, but that dark unhappy thing was gone. “Power, darling,” he said, drawling it out to make fun of himself. “It’s what everyone wants. Didn’t they tell you?” Then he bent and picked up the green coat and said, “I think it’s time I became a Corambin gentleman. New clothes, get my hair cropped—”
“Your hair?”
“Don’t sound so shocked.” His smile twisted a little. “I prefer not to appear before the students of the Institution as some kind of exotic savage. And after all, it’s just hair.”
“Right. Course.”
He paused, fidgeted, gave me a sidelong look. “Do you want to come? I promise not to be dreary anymore.”
Yes, of course I went with him. What the fuck else was I gonna do?
And he was right. He wasn’t dreary at all.

On Mercoledy, Isobel arrived as Springett was clearing away my breakfast and announced that I was coming with them to meet Vanessa Pallister’s train.

I descended the stairs on my sister’s arm and hoped she was not— as I most excruciatingly was— remembering that other, infamous time we had walked together, her on my arm, when she was given in matrimony to Ferrand Carey. Gerrard had begged the sacrifice, and I had given it, although Isobel had been furiously derisive of my right to do so. And yet it would still have been worthwhile, the wedding together of Murtagh and Rothmarlin, if only Isobel had been fertile. If only there had been a child in the long sere years before the Insurgence. Perhaps the Insurgence would not have happened at all.

Perhaps cats will spread their wings and fly to the moon, I mocked myself.
Isobel did not take me the same way Julian had, and I bestirred myself to ask, “Where are we going?”
“The stables,” she said and added condescendingly, “We do not walk to Fornivant, Kay.” For a moment, I wished to be sighted again purely for the vicious plea sure of boxing her ears.
Were more stairs down, and then the surface beneath my feet changed, and were echoes, strange ones. I slowed, and Isobel said impatiently, “Is a tunnel. Between the house and the stables.”
“It sounds . . .”
“Brick. Is just brick. Now come on, please, or we will be late.”
“And Murtagh will be so very vexed.”
“Actually, yes, he will, and I would prefer not to spend the day with
both
of you bristling like porcupines.”
“I do not—”
She laughed, and the echoes were distressing. “Hast been a porcupine since thou wert but two hours old, Kay my lad.”
She knew me too well. We knew each other too well, in sober truth, and it did occur to me, as Isobel led me up the stairs into the stable, that perhaps a wife would be a mercy, for then I would not be in my sister’s care.
The stables smelled as clean as it was possible for any stable to smell, and mercifully they did not echo as the tunnel had. Murtagh’s carriage smelled of leather mostly, though inevitably also of horses. I felt his presence as Isobel and the footman guided me in, smelled the sharp citrus of his cologne. He waited until I was seated to say, “Good morning, Kay.”
“Good morning, Your Grace,” I said, as Isobel climbed in and the footman closed the carriage door.
“Have we not had this discussion? We are as brothers. Can you not unbend sufficiently to have done with the ‘Your Graces’?”
“As you wish,” said I.
“Is Julian joining us?” Isobel asked, her voice too light to be trustworthy. “Yes,” said Murtagh. “He is, of course, late.”
Isobel’s sigh was deliberately audible.
I said, “Who was it he met at the cathedral on Domenica last? Did he tell you?”
“He did not tell me,” Murtagh said, “but I know quite well who it was. Cyriack Thrale, a student- magician at the Institution, whom Julian met somehow through the University. Julian is a trifle foolish about Mr. Thrale.”
“If by ‘foolish’ you mean ‘soppy,’ ” Isobel said.
“My dear,” Murtagh said reprovingly. “Julian takes after his mother in the, ah, ferocity of his enthusiasms. He values Mr. Thrale’s friendship very highly.”
“He behaves like a milkmaid. It’s unseemly.”
“He is very young. And I believe Mr. Thrale is very kind to him.”
“As long as it’s nothing more than kindness,” said Isobel. I kept my head bent, my hands folded in seeming tranquility.
“Julian may be a mooncalf, but he will not disgrace his name,” Murtagh said, and at that dreadfully opportune moment, the carriage door opened again, and the carriage shifted, springs groaning, under Julian’s precipitous entrance.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” he said, joining me on the bench. I realized that the citrus smell on him was the same as on Murtagh and wondered if Murtagh had given it to him, or if he used it on the sly.
“I’ve spoken to you before about punctuality,” Murtagh said. “Kindly take the lecture as read and do better next time.”
“Yes, sir,” Julian muttered.
A sharp rapping sound: Murtagh telling the coachman to go. We lurched; I discovered that I was on the backward- facing bench. After a moment, I was able to compel myself to straighten my shoulders, to relax my hands.
Julian isn’t the unnatural one,
I wanted to tell my sister. I bit my tongue, hard enough to sting, and blessedly, Julian launched into some convoluted complaint about his music teacher— unless the complaint was about the piano on which he practiced. I could not tell, and did not exert myself to discern, although I listened carefully and attentively to Julian’s diatribe all the way to the railroad station.
I had fought to keep the railway out of Rothmarlin. Even on campaign against the Usara, I had written letters; in the winters, when I could spare time to go to Barthas Cross, I had pled my case to Gerrard. And he had laughed and promised that Rothmarlin should remain unsullied, a promise which he had kept— although was cruelly moot now. I did not know what the Convocation had planned, and I was not going to demean myself by asking. I knew what Cecil’s response would be.
“This time, Julian,” Murtagh said as the footman steadied me out of the carriage, “you will stay with Mr. Brightmore. I can threaten you with further dire punishments if you think it will help.”
“No, Uncle Ferrand,” Julian said, as resentful as a smoldering slow- match.
“He was very kind and attentive on Domenica,” I said, and in the disbelieving silence, I heard Isobel snort.
But Julian whispered, “Thank you,” and gave me his arm; we followed Murtagh and Isobel into Fornivant Station.
Was like being trapped in a sounding belfry with a flock of mad crows. I could make no sense of what I was hearing, could only grip Julian’s arm tighter and go where he led. He did remember to warn me of stairs, and when we stopped, he was kind enough to say, “Uncle Ferrand has gone to inquire about the Whallan train. We’re to wait here.”
Was a wall at my back, and although I could hear the crowd, no one brushed against me. I breathed, carefully, forbidding the flickers of panic that wanted to fan themselves into a fire.
And then a voice said, “My lord? Is that you?” A man’s voice, a strong Caloxan accent. “My lord Rothmarlin?”
Oh, no. No. But the voice was already close to me, already saying, “My lord Rothmarlin, do you not know me?”
“I cry thy mercy,” I said, “I am blind, and I do not know thy voice to give thee name. Who art thou, I pray thee?”
They were soldier’s hands that caught my own, big and square and rough with calluses, missing the tip of one finger. “Ah, my lord,” said he. “I had heard, but I prayed I had heard wrongly. I am Lucas Atford. I served with you seven summers in the mountains.”
“Seven summers” was only a formula, but I did know the name. And those hands. “Lucas Ironhand, art thou?”
“Yes, my lord,” and it hurt to hear the delight in his voice, as if I had granted the dearest wish of his heart merely in remembering him.
I floundered for a moment, drowning in all the questions I did not dare ask: what was he doing here? was he well? did he blame me? Lucas stepped even closer: sweat and soot and the cloying, musty scent of horehound. He said, his voice barely more than a whisper, “My lord, are you all right?”
That question was unanswerable. Lucas said, “We have feared for you, my lord. We would have come to you, had we known how.”
Oh Blessed Lady, Murtagh was right; there were people foolish enough to follow me if I tried to wake the Insurgence from its deathly sleep. Were people who would die on what they believed to be my behalf, and the thought was so unbearable that I wanted to scream at Lucas, here in Fornivant Station, a pointed symbol of Corambin wealth, Corambin power, wanted to rip my clothes off so that he could see me for what I was: a man, neither more nor less than himself, scarred, maimed, broken, nothing worth his death, nothing worth
anyone
’s death.
Did not, of course. He would not understand; no matter what I did or said, he would see the Margrave of Rothmarlin when he looked at me, and was as the Margrave of Rothmarlin— and cruelly, I found myself hoping it was for the last time— that I had to answer this challenge.
I said, as carefully as I walked among naked swords, “Is good in thee to worry, Lucas. But thou needst not. I live in my sister’s house, and she cares for me.” Lady, if you love me, let Isobel not be in earshot, for the sound of her laughing like a dying cat would surely make matters even worse.
“My lord?” Lucas said doubtfully.
It is over,
I wanted to say.
Half the young men of Caloxa are dead. Gerrard is dead. If thou canst not see that I might as well be dead, then I pity thy blindness even more than thou dost pity mine.
I said, “I am well, Lucas. I hope that thou art well, also.”
“Yes, my lord,” he said, still puzzled but obedient to the cues I was giving him. “Well enough.”
“Good,” I said, as heartily as I could. I could not ask him about others who had served with him, lest he take the question as code for something darker.I hesitated for a moment,and then blessed Julian Carey wholeheartedly, for he said, “Uncle Ferrand is waving, Mr. Brightmore. We need to go.”
“If you need anything,” Lucas Ironhand said in a hoarse whisper, “you just send a message to me.”
“I thank thee, Lucas,” I said and let Julian drag me away.
He demonstrated unexpected tact: he did not ask. I wondered how much he had overheard. And then my sister’s sharp voice was in my ear: “The train’s on time, for a wonder. Come, Kay, we don’t want to keep Vanessa waiting.”
No, of course not.
There were more stairs going up. I fell over them, because Isobel did not warn me. Was Julian who helped me up again, who whispered, “Sorry,” in my ear and again sounded like he meant it.
At the top of the stairs— and Julian kept his grip on my arm, remembered to warn me— the racket was even greater and more mechanical. “Is the train here?” I asked, needing information more than my pride.
“Yes. I think Uncle Ferrand’s gone in search of . . .”
I had no better idea than he did of what he ought to call the lady. I knew her name, but not her title, since I was uncertain of the rank that accompanied the position of Warden of Grimglass, and I had been too busy pitying myself to ask the correct questions. “Vanessa,” I said, because Julian could not, and because I could not force the words
my fiancée
out of my mouth.
“Yes,” he said. “And I think— yes, he’s found her. He’s bringing her this way.”
“Splendid,” I said faintly. “Where is my sister?”
“She’s bull— I mean, she’s engaging a porter.”
And then there was Murtagh’s voice: “. . . and this is Kay Brightmore. Kay, may I introduce Vanessa Pallister?”
Because I had to, I extended my hand. She wore kid gloves, and when I lifted her hand to my lips, as I was constrained to do, she smelled of lilies.
“I’m very pleased to meet you, Kay,” she said. She was a soprano, her voice very clear. She was taller than I, but almost everyone was.
“Likewise,” I said, untruthful but courteous. “Was the train journey very difficult?”
“Only because the train didn’t go fast enough,” she said and laughed, a perfect chiming trill that set my teeth on edge. “I’ve been buried alive out at Grimglass for the past three indictions. I thought I was never going to get to see civilization again.”
Not a grieving widow, then. And I reminded myself that was a mercy, since a grieving widow would have had every right to see me as the symbol of her husband’s murderers. But I could not keep myself from saying, “It must be hard to be parted from your son, though.”
“Richard is a good boy. He’ll mind his uncles.”
Isobel arrived then, with porters in tow, and the resulting chaos saved me from having to find an answer. By the time we were all returned to the carriage, Vanessa had entirely forgotten what we had been discussing and was eagerly plying Murtagh and Isobel for the three indictions’ worth of gossip she had missed.
I had learned, as I learned in my blindness to listen more truly, to hear both what was and what was not said, and I noticed that Vanessa’s answer—
Richard is a good boy. He’ll mind his uncles
— had little if anything to do with what I had actually said to her. I had asked if she missed him.
Well, clearly, she did not.
My mother had not missed me when I went to war at the age of fourteen. I wondered if I could persuade someone— Springett? Isobel? Julian?— to write a letter for me to the little boy in Grimglass whose mother did not miss him, either.