The Mirador (27 page)

“He’s not particularly forthcoming. But he said he would invite me again.”

“At least that’s something.” He muttered something under his breath that was probably blasphemous and took another turn up and down the room.

“You seem edgy, Lieutenant Vulpes. Is something wrong?”

Louis Goliath would have given that question the answer it deserved, and I wouldn’t have asked him in the first place. Vulpes said, “Wrong? No, nothing’s wrong,” and changed the subject. “Are you doing anything tonight, Maselle Cressida?”

“I wasn’t.”

“Then go up to the Mirador. Talk to your friends. I want to know what people are thinking about the Lord Protector’s wedding. ”

“I can tell you that now,” I said, and relayed what I’d learned in the Painted Grotto and from Simon and Rinaldo.

He listened and nodded, but I could see that he was thinking frantically. Racking his brains for some other task to set me, was my guess.

“One of your lovers is a nobleman, isn’t he?”

“Antony Lemerius.”

“The same Lemerius . . . ?”

“I don’t know.”

He didn’t quite say
Ha!
“Then go find out.” And he left hurriedly, as if he didn’t want to give me the chance to ask him anything else. I changed into a slightly richer dress, did my hair, and headed doggedly for the Mirador.

The footman who opened the door of the Lemerius apartments seemed distinctly harried; I understood why, sitting in the foyer and listening to the muffled commotion. Antony came out after a few minutes and bowed over my hands with every evidence of delight. I raised my eyebrows expressively in the direction of the ruckus, and he made a pained face. “Father’s bringing Enid up from Copal Carnifex.”

“Enid?”

“My youngest sister.”

“Oh. For the . . . ?”

“Of course,” he said bitterly. “Father is slavering at the prospect of becoming the Lord Protector’s in-law. And powers and saints, he’s not alone in that.” He ushered me through the public rooms to his private sitting room, which an uninformed visitor could have been forgiven for mistaking for one of the Mirador’s official libraries. “At least Enid is old enough to handle it. Zelda Polydoria can’t have been fifteen for more than a month.”

“Polydoria? Isn’t that . . .”

“Distant cousins,” Antony said, clearing books and tablets and quires of notes off various flat surfaces, including a chair. “Nothing wrong with that. I imagine the real impediment to that match is the prospect of Ivo Polydorius as a father-in-law.”

I racked my mind, trying to find a face to put with that name. I failed, although I remembered Lionel Verlalius mentioning him. “I haven’t met him, have I?”

“I wouldn’t think so. He’s been living in seclusion for years and years. Had a big falling-out with Lord Gareth. There’s bad blood in the Polydorii, and it seems to have all come out in the dynastic line, more’s the pity. Nicoletta Milensia said she’d rather kill herself than marry Ivo, but in the end she didn’t have the nerve. Their children take after her, and people still argue over whether that’s unfortunate or not. But that sort of gossip”—he straightened up, having unearthed enough furniture that we could both sit down—“isn’t fit conversation.”

“Did you have a better topic in mind?” I asked, taking a seat.

“Have you dined? Would you care to join me?” He sounded almost embarrassingly hopeful.

I hadn’t even had to hint. “I’d like that very much.”

“Excellent. Just a moment.”

He stepped out. I occupied myself by trying to make sense of his notes; between the illegibility of his handwriting and my own ignorance of Marathine history, it was doomed to failure, but it was an amusing pastime. When he returned, he was neither surprised nor offended, but said, “I’ve been thinking about the date of Amaryllis Cordelia’s alleged death: 11 Floréal 14.6.2, the date on both tombs.”

“And when do you think she really died?”

“Late 14.5.7—Wilfrid lost his post sometime in Fructidor and was back at Diggory Chase to celebrate the Trials of Heth-Eskaladen by the end of that month. Between her real and her alleged death—that’s only two indictions, and what I was wondering was, what if there was no second Amaryllis Cordelia at all? Wilfrid returns to Diggory Chase in Fructidor of 14.5.7 and writes a letter to the Mirador at the end of Floréal two indictions later saying his beloved wife Amaryllis has died in childbirth and the child along with her, examined by our good doctor Grizzleguts and so on and so forth. Diggory Chase was out in the middle of nowhere in those days, and no one was going to check the facts.”

“They would have had to buy off the entire house of Emarthius,” I objected.

“No, actually. Diggory Chase was a small secondary residence. The dynastic line of the Emarthii was living at a place called Heligar. I found the records. Diggory Chase was given to Wilfrid on his marriage by his father. He and Amaryllis never went there, since she’d pulled strings to get him a post at the Mirador. The only people who had to be in the know were Wilfrid Emarthius’s liveried servants, and probably not many of them. I imagine one could have lived reasonably well at Diggory Chase for two years with only four servants: a valet, a housekeeper, a cook, and a groom. If one retires there in seclusion, having been disgraced by one’s wife, no one will be surprised at one’s failure to throw parties or invite guests.”

“It still seems unlikely.”

“Ah,” said Antony, and I realized I’d fed him the straight line he’d wanted, “but consider the career of Wilfrid Emarthius after his wife’s alleged death on 11 Floréal 14.6.2. Six months later, still dressed in mourning, he receives an even better post in the Mirador than the one he’d lost. Diggory Chase starts expanding like a mushroom—I suppose Wilfrid must have discovered he liked it. In 14.6.4 he marries again, this time to a daughter of the dynastic line of the Milensii—they’ve fallen on hard times, but in Wilfrid’s day Genevieve Milensia was a better match than Amaryllis Cordelia. Although Wilfrid himself is a member of a cadet branch, in 14.7.4, the year after Charles dies, he buys out the dynastic line of the Emarthii.”

“I’m sorry. What?”

“It was never a common practice—and it was abolished at the Wizards’ Coup—but Wilfrid was neither the first nor the last to manage it. If a cadet line of a noble house became substantially wealthier and more influential than the dynastic line, it could petition the king to have the dynastic privilege transferred to it.”

“Bolstered by a generous donation to the royal treasury, no doubt.”

“Exactly. Wilfrid died rich and happy and surrounded by grandsons at the age of eighty-one. I haven’t traced it, but I think the current House-holder is descended directly from him.”

“He was bought.”

“Yes. Wilfrid Emarthius was paid exceedingly well to live in obscurity for two years and to add verisimilitude to their lie— which, as you pointed out, is otherwise pretty thin. I don’t know if the fake tomb at Diggory Chase was his idea, but it was a nice touch.”

“But we’re still left with the question we started with,” I said after a while. “Who put up that inscription in the crypt?”

“I don’t know,” Antony said. He looked at his hands as if they did not please him, and then back at me. “I just don’t know.”

I came bolt awake sometime in the middle of the night feeling like some bastard with a grudge had driven an icepick through my right thigh and was twisting it around. I could hear myself panting for breath like a beaten dog. I reached down and there was nothing but rock from my knee halfway up my thigh. I couldn’t even twitch, just lay there, my fingers digging at my leg. I’d had cramps before, but nothing like this, nothing so bad I couldn’t even curse it.

Suddenly there was light, a flurry of Felix’s little green witchlights. I shut my eyes. The light seemed to make my leg worse.

“Mildmay? Are you—no, clearly not.” He was standing by the bed. His fingers touched my thigh, prodding gently. “Here,” he said. He shifted my hands and began to knead at the red-hot agony in my leg. I kept my eyes shut.

He worked at my leg for a long time. His hands were strong. I could feel where some of his fingers didn’t bend quite right anymore—they’d been broken before I met him and had healed a little funny—but he knew what he was doing. After a while, I was able to breathe again. A little after that, he pushed my leg into straightening.

“Better?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“What brought it on?”

“Dunno. Most likely the fight I got into yesterday.”

“And what was that fight about?”

“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time wearing the wrong fucking face.”

“That’s straightforward enough, I suppose, although dreadfully nonspecific.”

“The only specific thing there was me. Most anybody in the Lower City would have been glad to do what those guys were trying.”

“There’s one of my questions answered, then. Shall we try for another?”

“Powers, Felix, it’s the middle of the fucking
night
!”

“The best time for talking. You should get up and walk around some anyway.”

I scrambled out of bed. He had to catch me when my leg buckled.

“Steady, little brother,” he said, and I knew he was laughing at me. “The sitting room isn’t going anywhere.” He helped me out of the bedroom and then dropped into his favorite chair while I began lurching around the room, leaning on the walls and furniture to keep me upright. Three of his witchlights circled around me like tiny dancers. It hurt like fuck, but I kept walking.

“You know,” Felix said after a while, “I thought you were smarter than to go anywhere near that woman.”

“I made a mistake,” I said. Carefully. I didn’t want a repeat of last night, when he’d asked me why in the world I’d ever fucked Keeper, and I’d asked him why in the world he’d fucked Shannon Teverius. And it had only gotten uglier from there. I’d said things about Gideon I was going to have to apologize for just as soon as I got up the nerve.

“Yes,” he said.

We were silent a while longer while I walked and he watched me. Then he said, all of a sudden, “Do you really not remember anything about Malkar at all?”

I went hot, then cold. “I really don’t,” I said, as calm as I could, and made myself keep moving.

“That’s not . . . healthy,” he said, and I wasn’t about to look at him.

“My business, ain’t it?”

“You don’t get—” He cut himself off. I heard the breath he took. “Mildmay. I’m not trying to attack you. Or hurt you. I . . . I’m
worried
about you.”

Just when I thought I could deal with him, when I thought I’d finally learned not to mind the things he said to me, he’d do something like this. He’d come out from behind his wicked, spiked armor and say something that showed me he
did
care. And I fell for it every single time.

“Look,” I said finally. “I appreciate it. But it don’t
change
nothing. It’s not like you could make me remember it.”

“I could,” he said, very quietly.

“Binding-by-forms don’t work that way,” I said, and the words came out too quick and jumbled, but he understood me anyway.

“Not the obligation d’âme. Or, rather, not it alone. But I could make you remember.”

I swallowed hard, trying not to panic. Or at least not to let him see me panic. “You gonna?”

“No,” he said promptly, and the thing crunching my chest together eased up a little and let me breathe. “But I wanted you to know . . .” His rings flashed in the witchlights as he wrung his hands. “I wanted you to know that if you
wanted
me to, I could help.”

“I ain’t the one thinks there’s something wrong.”

“Then you’re lying to yourself.”

“Oh, and of course you know better.”

“I’m not the only one worried about you.”

That wasn’t no nice feeling. “Well, if I want help, I’ll remember you said that.”

“Mildmay—”

“What?”

“Nothing.” He stood up. “We both need to get some sleep or we’ll be worthless in the morning. Is your leg better?”

“Yeah.” I started back for my room. He was letting me go, and I was glad, but I couldn’t leave it alone. I’m stupid like that. “You sure it was nothing?”

He hesitated at the door of his own room. I wondered if Gideon was lying awake waiting for him. I thought he wasn’t going to say anything, and then it just kind of bolted out of his mouth: “Please don’t think of me as your enemy.”

“I don’t,” I said, and I didn’t do a very good job of hiding how startled I was, either.

He looked away, and I knew he was blushing up to his hairline. “Then you . . . I didn’t . . . well, that’s good then,” and he all but dove into his room. The door was shut behind him before I’d managed to drag my jaw up off the floor, and I picked my way back to bed in the dark.

Chapter 7

In the morning, it felt like my right thigh bone had been replaced with a jagged piece of glass. And let’s not even talk about my knee. My leg always dragged a little, even on my best days, but that Quatrième it wasn’t like a leg at all, but a ball-and-chain or something. I told myself to be grateful for small favors—it was at least able to hold me up. Sort of.