I woke up to Ginevra saying, "Powers, Mildmay, you've got all the blankets again." And I did, tangled around me in this kind of knot.
"Sorry," I said. Ginevra didn't ask about my dreams, and I didn't tell her. It seemed fair.
We kind of wrangled all the time she was getting ready for work. I mean, we weren't fighting or nothing, just going back and forth over the same dreary half acre of land we'd been going over since she'd come home the night before and I'd told her Faith was in the Kennel.
She didn't want to believe it. She said Estella liked to tell elaborate lies to get people worried about her. I said Estella hadn't been lying. She said nobody would want to hurt Faith, that she was a healer. I said that didn't matter when the Mirador was witch-hunting. She said I was horrible, and besides I couldn't've understood Estella right.
I knew what she wanted. She wanted me to say, yeah, Estella lied, or, yeah, I didn't hear her right, or even I guess, yeah, I'm lying to you just to be mean. She wanted me to tell her everything was okay. And I couldn't do it. Because everything
wasn't
okay. The whole Lower City was fucked, and I just couldn't tell lies about it, even though I knew that was what Estella'd been getting at when she told me to keep Ginevra happy.
I thought when she was going out the door, I bet Austin would have told her what she wanted to hear. Austin would have made her feel safe and like he'd take care of her. And I didn't know whether that made me of him the better person.
Felix
The Hospice of St. Crellifer was run by the order of St. Gailan, and the order of St. Gailan believed that work was the best cure for all ills. Most of them also believed that lunacy was nothing more than weakness of will..
Brother Orphelin did not subscribe to that philosophy, but seen through Brother Orphelin's stonelike eyes, the world was a madhouse, a leperhouse,
and
a reservoir of the damned. He did not care if we were sane or not.
Every patient in St. Crellifer's who could understand Marathine and be trusted not to bite anyone was put to work. I had suffered through a humiliating interview with Brother Orphelin and Brother Lilburn, the sub-warder, my first morning there, in which they had determined I had no skills at all. I had wanted to protest, but realized in time that my skills were limited to sex and magic, and kept my mouth shut. They set me to scrubbing floors. There was nothing else I could be trusted with, and it was certainly the case that the floors needed scrubbing. A brother came by occasionally to see if I was working. If I wasn't, he'd box my ears or knock my head against the wall, more or less in passing. The casual violence reminded me inescapably of Lorenzo, the owner of the Shining Tiger, who had sold me to Malkar when I was fourteen; I found it harder and harder to remember where I was and what had happened to me. Once, I came back to myself with a jolt to discover I'd spent some unknown length of time searching for Joline.
Joline's dead, I told myself firmly. You saw her die.
And I had—I had dragged her out of the burning tenement, only to have her die, choking and gagging, in the street. But if I could just
find
her…
But even that wasn't as bad as when I did.
I was scrubbing a hallway on the third floor. Every door along the hallway was locked, and I did not want to know what lay behind them. I kept finding blood on my hands—caked under my fingernails, smeared and sticky across my palms—and I couldn't touch anything with blood on my hands. Then Brother Dillard would come by and clip me over the ear, and the blood would be gone.
And then I would look down and my hands would be bloody again.
I didn't hear her, but I felt something behind me and turned, and there she was, skinny and dark in that cut-down dress she'd begged from the madam of the Black Swan's Promise, the gap in her front teeth showing when she smiled at me.
She didn't say anything—I couldn't have answered her if she had—merely watched me for a while and then walked away. I saw her vanish just as she began to turn the corner.
I never, after that, saw anyone I knew; that brief, unhappy vision of Joline Was merely a transition, a bridge away from normal sight and into the world of ghosts. Like the colors I saw surrounding people, filling even empty rooms in St. Crellifer's with a red-purple tinge like spectral blood, the ghosts were clearly manifestations of my madness, but I was never comfortably sure that was all they were. One of Lorenzo's other prostitutes, a tired boy named Vincent, had been able to see ghosts; he had never gotten any joy out of the ability that I could observe, but that made the thing more rather than less credible.
Mostly, I saw the ghosts of the mad. They clustered in the corners weeping and shrieking as they had when they had been alive. I saw that even in death they were frightened of Brother Lilburn, that female ghosts followed Brother Clayton from room to room, their nakedness an accusation and an imprecation. I tried not to watch them. Brother Clayton would hit me for staring at nothing; Brother Lilburn's attention was infinitely worse, those perfectly cold, perfectly righteous eyes like a burning brand against my face. Brother Lilburn led us madmen in prayers every day, and if anyone disrupted prayers, he would not eat until Brother Lilburn was satisfied that he had "repented." What repentance looked like in a madman was anybody's guess; in Brother Lilburn's lexicon, it looked like fear and weeping. Brother Lilburn frightened me even more than Brother Orphelin did.
I also saw ghosts of former friars, still walking their rounds. And there were other ghosts, from even longer ago, when St. Crellifer's had been some nobleman's town house: two little children playing tag through the halls; servants on cryptic errands; a woman in cloth of gold who sat by a window on the second floor, weeping as if her heart had broken and was still breaking, into smaller and smaller pieces, into a pile of fine dust, like the dust on the windowsill that did not register the pressure of her elbows. I wondered who she was, but I knew nothing of the history of the city; I did not even know which family had donated their sprawling house to the Order of St. Gailan. All I knew of her tragedy was what I saw: her dress, her jewels, her endless weeping.
Mildmay
I had to get out of there. I mean, if I stayed sitting in my front room all day, with things going 'round in my head like they were, I was going to end up barking, and they'd have to come and take me away to St. Crellifers Hospice in Spicewell, where they take all the crazy people. And the dream I'd it made me remember something I'd had sort of crawling around at the bottom of my mind for months. And today was a good day for it.
24 Prairial is St. Vivien's day, and St. Vivien is one of the Witnesses, the septad of saints who petition Phi-Kethetin on behalf of the dead. So, round about the septad-day, I went out and bought flowers from a street vendor on Rue Rachevin. The flower-seller was an old lady, and her forehead was tattooed with the blue aversion-signs people had used to try to protect their kids with during the plague nine septads ago. It had worked, for her anyway.
I asked for trumps.
"Wouldn't your young lady like the roses better?"
"They ain't for a lady."
Her eyebrows went up, wrinkling the aversion-signs into nonsense, but she tied up my trumps for me without no more lip. I gave her a quarter-gorgon I didn't have to spare and took my trumps. Ginevra would be pissed if she found out, but I wasn't planning on telling her.
Trumps are big bright flowers. They grow in the St. Grandin Swamp, south of Queensdock and the Septad Gate, and they bloom all summer and on into fall. During the Trials of Heth-Eskaladen, Lower City mothers pick them or buy them and weave them into crowns for their kids. The first Trials after the Fire, Keeper bought trumps and made crowns for all of us. I only had five indictions then, but I've never forgot it.
I walked through Pennycup and Ruthven, trying not to think about the last time I'd been over in the east end of Ruthven. Nobody'd heard nothingfor certain from Vey Coruscant since 12 Pluviôse, which I thought was a bad sign. You couldn't get no sense from the stories coming out of Dassament, but, powers, that was nothing new. People in Dassament are all liars.
And you should've heard the people who thought it was Obscurantists trying to get all the pieces to make sense. Claudio Draper—the Claudio who'd been supposed to kill me if I moved—was dead for sure. The cade-skiffs had dragged him out of the Sim near the end of Ventôse, and if they knew what he'd died of… well, anyway, Cardenio wasn't saying. And that all by itself didn't mean nothing. There were all sorts of ways to end P dead in the river that weren't nothing to do with Vey Coruscant. Only thing I knew for sure was I was staying the fuck out of Dassament.
There was nobody in the Boneprince. There almost never is. But I could feel the dead people, like water in the air.
"I brought you flowers," I said to the unmarked graves along the Road of Marble. "Trumps." I sat down on the path and untied my trumps I started weaving them into a crown. I could feel the kept-thieves, little ghosts hiding behind the tombstones, watching. I didn't look up, just sat there working with the flowers and thinking, Why didn't they ask their names? Didn't nobody care? Didn't nobody see that they were just kids, that the stuff they were trained to do wasn't their fault?
But nobody'd seen that. If they'd seen it, the kept-thieves wouldn't be buried here with the grown-up monsters.
She might've thought I was crazy, but the old lady had been generous When I'd finished, the crown was too big for a kid to wear, but, Kethe, it was bright and gorgeous, and it made me remember how I'd felt when Keeper had put her trumps on my head. I hoped the little ghosts had something like that they could remember.
I put the crown beside the path, where I knew their graves were. I said, "It's for all y'all. I hope you like it. And I hope St. Vivien prays for you."
I turned and left. I didn't look back. I knew better.
I walked around a while after that. Not doing nothing, not thinking nothing, either. Just walking. Trying to get my head on straight, get rid of the dreams and that dark, prickly feeling I'd been having for days, like being watched by gators. It must've been near the eleventh hour of the day when I sort of woke up, took a look around, and figured out that I'd got myself into Havelock, up near Nill.
"Kethe," I said. I found Ver-Istenna's dome, south of me and some east, and started home again. I thought about flagging down a hansom—you could, in this part of the Lower City—but the cabbies wouldn't like where I wanted to go, and they wouldn't like my face. And my feet would get me there just as good. So I walked, and when I thought about it later, I figured that walking might have saved my life. I don't know. You never
can
know with the luck Kethe throws at you, whether you got it 'cause you did the right thing, or whether he was looking out for your ass anyways.
But what happened was, I turned the corner onto Madrigal Lane, and Scabious came running up. He'd been watching for me, like he did, only this time his face was white as paper, and he grabbed my arm and said, "There's Dogs in your rooms. Gilroi, what—"
"Fuck," I said. "Scabious, d'you know where Ginevra works?"
"Yeah, I think, but Gilroi—"
"Will you go and tell her not to come home tonight? Please?"
"Oh. Yeah. Yeah, I'll go right now!" He took off running, but he was smart enough to loop the block, starting back the way I'd come from and hanging a left, so if the Dogs waiting in my front room happened to glance out the window, they wouldn't see my landlady's kid running like a racing dog along the street, I was gone before he'd turned the corner.
I headed for the Arcane first, pure stupid instinct, like a fox booking it for his den when he hears dogs. But I caught myself, remembered that the door under the Hornet and Spindle was pretty common knowledge, and if the Dogs wanted me bad enough to be laying in wait like this in my rooms, they might want me bad enough to have a guy in the Hornet and Spindle.
You got to understand, my life in the Lower City was pretty precarious. "Precarious" was Zephyr's word, what he'd said when I asked what it was like being a hocus in Gilgamesh. And I'd asked him what it meant—you could with Zephyr, he wouldn't get snotty about being smarter than you or nothing—and he'd told me, and I'd thought it was a damn good word for a lot of things. Like the way I lived.
The Dogs wanted me. The Mirador wanted me. What was standing between me and them was that the Mirador didn't know it was me they wanted, and the Dogs knew it was me, but didn't have the first clue where the fuck I was, and they didn't have the money to go knocking door to door through the Lower City. And they couldn't arrest every guy five-foot-eight with a scar on his face—there's a lot of guys like that, and maybe some of em deserve a visit to the Kennel, but most of 'em don't, and anyways, none of 'em but me deserve it on the strength of being Mildmay the Fox. But me staying out of the Kennel depended on the people who knew I was Mildmay the Fox not saying anything about where I was to the Dogs. That's why I used all the fake names—Gilroi Felter and Dennis and Jean-Thermidor and Esteban Ross and Umberto and the rest of them. And mostly the people who knew what Mildmay the Fox looked like, and knew where I was—and there weren't many of 'em—were people on just as bad terms with the Dogs as me, and they weren't going to say nothing to nobody.
Except that somebody had. I ducked down an alley, monkeyed my way up Onto the fire escape, and started for the roof, wondering all the time if it was Ginevra. I knew she hadn't turned me in—
she
didn't have a clue about Mildmay the Fox, even though I'd been fuckheaded enough to tell her my real name, and if she'd figured it out, I knew she couldn't have hid it from me. But I didn't know what she might have said. That was another reason for going to the Blue Cat, along with being poison-sick jealous I didn't trust Ginevra to keep her mouth shut, not to drop hints about the exciting, secret life her boyfriend led. And all it would take was a couple of those hints getting to somebody who'd grown up in the Lower City and could use the money the Dogs gave their snitches. I'd tried to tell her it was dangerous, not exciting, but standing on the roof, sighting on Ver-Istenna's dome and starting that way, I could admit that I knew she hadn't listened. She thought she was in a romance, like the one she said her aunt got her name out of. She thought nothing bad could ever really happen to her or anybody she knew. She hadn't been in the Lower City long enough to learn better.
