The Mirador (28 page)

Both Felix and Gideon were in the sitting room. My first step away from the support of the door damn near ended with me flat on my face, and I heard Gideon’s breath catch. Felix started to get up, but I said, “Don’t,” between my teeth, and he sat back down. I lurched across to the table, where I could lean on one of the chairs. I got my hands on the chair back, and my fingers dug in like they thought somebody was going to try and take it away from me.

“You look dreadful,” Felix said, trying to sound like he was talking about the weather. “Are you going to be able to stand all through court?”

“No,” I said, the truth getting out before I had a chance to snatch it back. “I mean, maybe, if I can—”

“Gideon says you should be in bed,” Felix said.

“Be better if I keep moving.”

“Well, a fine picture you’re going to make dragging that chair everywhere you go.”

I said back the same way, “Oh fuck off, would you?” And he actually gave me about a quarter of a grin.

He looked over at Gideon, listening. “Gideon says that although he’s not keen on helping you kill yourself, it occurs to him that we might ask Rinaldo if you could borrow a walking stick. Would that work?”

Powers and saints. Right back to the Gardens of Nephele and hobbling in circles in the Three Serenities Garden. But better that than stuck in bed. “Yeah,” I said. “Anything up to Rinaldo’s weight should do me just fine.” Some days Rinaldo could heave his bulk around on his own, but some days he couldn’t. Rheumatics, he said.

“We’ll send Rollo with a note,” Felix said, making a long arm for the inkstand on the other side of the table. “Now sit down before you pass out on the floor.”

“Yessir,” I said, but I couldn’t even make it snarky.

While Felix wrote his note, I sat and made my breathing even out, and then I looked up at Gideon and said, “Sorry.”

His eyebrows went up.

“For the things I said.” I could feel myself going as red as a tomato. “You know. On Deuxième.”

He shook his head and made a kind of gentle pushing-away gesture, like he was saying it didn’t matter.

“I kind of think it does matter.” I wished like fuck Felix wasn’t sitting there, but I couldn’t put it off no longer. “And I’m sorry.”

Gideon looked at me a moment, and then he smiled, warm as sunlight, and poured me a cup of tea. Which I figured meant I was forgiven.

If Rollo minded playing messenger boy, he didn’t show it, and he was back fast enough that we weren’t even running later than usual. The stick he brought was almost as thick around as Gideon’s wrist, made of some wood I didn’t know, knotty and dark, the color of really strong tea. The foot was iron-shod, and the grip was carved with a smiling animal’s head—a dog or a bear or something, broad and ugly, but friendly, too.

There was a note. Felix ran an eye down it, more or less on our way out the door. “Rinaldo says it was imported from Imar Elchevar, though he suspects it was made even farther south. The beast is Jashuki, an Imaran guardian spirit. He says you should consider the cane a gift.”

“Nice of him.”

He gave me a funny look. “Rinaldo isn’t about to forget . . .” And then I could see him decide to drop it. “Oh never mind. Come on.”

Whatever he’d been going to say, I didn’t want to know about it. I just followed him and let Jashuki hold me up.

When I reached the Empyrean that morning, around ten o’clock, there was a letter waiting in my pigeonhole. I reflexively recognized both paper and wax as the highest-possible quality, and then identified the seal: the tower and sunburst of the Teverii. The letter was addressed to me in a jagged masculine scrawl that would have shamed any secretary in Marathat into ritual suicide.

I broke the seal. Looked first at the signature.
Stephen Teverius
. Then read the letter, which was an invitation to dinner. He would send a page at noon for my reply.

It was nice of him, I supposed, to pretend there was any doubt about my answer.

Inevitably, hard on the heels of Stephen’s panting but intrigued page came Vulpes.

“Quite a coup, Cressida,” he said when we were immured in my dressing room. “My sources in the Mirador say this is the first time he’s dined twice with any woman but his sister since his wife died.”

“He’s just trying to annoy the people who want to find him a wife,” I said.

“Lover of the Lord Protector is nothing to scoff at.”

“No, lieutenant.”

“But that’s your lookout, Cressida my dear,” he said with a peculiar kind of gaiety. “All I care about is how much information you can get out of him.”

“What
kind
of information?”

He raised his eyebrows at me.

“I’m serious. What topics are you interested in? His childhood illnesses or his foreign policy?”

“I’m interested in what the Lord Protector really thinks about wizards, especially the various, er, factions of current and former Eusebians. I am interested in his relations with his family and particularly with Robert of Hermione. I am interested in what his real opinion of the Bastion is, and if he believes General Parsifal’s offer. I am interested in how he envisages the Mirador’s future. And I want to know more about what he thinks about Felix Harrowgate. Messire Harrowgate is very important to the structure of the Mirador’s magic, and it is well known that he does not get along with the Lord Protector. I find the discontinuity . . . provocative.”

Of course you do, I thought. Anyone wanting to cause trouble in the Mirador should be fascinated by Felix. But if Vulpes didn’t think I was smart enough to figure that out on my own, that was just fine. “All right,” I said. “I’ll do what I can.”

“There’s no great hurry,” he said—a thing Louis Goliath would never have admitted to any of his spies. “All we’re doing now is collecting information.”

He left then, and I sat alone for a long time with the implications of his statement. Sat and pondered until Jean-Soleil came pounding on my door to ask, had I died or could we, for the love of all the saints and powers, please start rehearsal? I went out, but I was still wondering: if all we were doing
now
was collecting information, what exactly was it that we were going to be doing
later
?

Felix said under his breath, just before it was our turn through the big bronze doors, “Don’t forget it’s Lundy.”

Which of course I had.

Lundy was Felix’s day to teach, which had turned out in a funny way to be almost the most important thing in his schedule. He’d joke about bailing on Curia meetings, although he never did, but he didn’t miss Lundy afternoons. Except for last Lundy, when Lord Stephen got in the way.

I’d just about swallowed my teeth, back at the beginning of winter, when Lord Blaise came and asked Felix if he wanted to teach. There’d been a funny kind of silence, and then Felix had said, “I won’t take apprentices.” His eyes were glass-hard, and I knew he was thinking about Strych.

“You needn’t if you don’t want to,” Lord Blaise said. He was in his tenth septad, a nice old man with long white mustaches. “We have many young wizards who aren’t ready for an apprenticeship, and they are my principal concern.”

“What is it that you want?” Felix said.

“I am trying to find six or seven wizards who would take an afternoon a week to talk to these students, to help prepare them to
become
someone’s apprentice. I naturally had hoped that the wizards who came to teach might be willing to take on the students as they became ready, but if you don’t wish it, I respect that. I will make it clear to them that you are not to be asked.”

I didn’t think they’d be brave enough to ask anyway, but I kept that to myself.

Felix had asked for a day to think about it, but he’d agreed. I remembered now what he’d said about Iosephinus Pompey, who’d taught him, and wondered if that had anything to do with it. And it’d turned out, after a couple decads for him to find his range, that he was a better teacher than anybody, including him and Lord Blaise, had expected.

The kids were scared of him, but I think they liked him, too. There were ten of them, four girls and six guys, and they were kids from the Lower City and the bourgeois districts in the west and from the outlying villages—kids who were lucky if they’d made it through grammar school. Which is more education than I got, but it ain’t much if you’re setting out to be a hocus.

Felix said Lord Blaise was right to be worried about them, that the system in the Mirador favored kids from rich families or noble families, or kids who’d made a long journey. Kids who came from Monspulchra or farther west, or who came up from the islands—those kids got all kinds of attention, lots of hocuses looking out for them and helping them. It was the local kids that nobody paid much mind to. A lot of them never got their rings and tattoos, just dropped out to go back down the city and learn from the hocuses in Candlewick Mews and Sunslave. And I knew if they learned from the wrong people down there, they’d probably get hunted to death by the same hocuses in the Mirador who hadn’t bothered to help them in the first place. But I didn’t say that, either. After the fight me and Felix had had in Nivôse, we didn’t talk about the witch-hunts no more.

I went with him when he taught. I’d tried suggesting maybe that wasn’t necessary, but he said, “No, if they’re going to be wizards in the Mirador, they’re going to have to get used to you sooner or later. You can just sit in the back, and no one will mind.”

Well, that was a lie. The kids weren’t mean or nothing—or at least they weren’t stupid enough to lip off to Felix Harrowgate— but they knew I was there, and I’d catch them glancing back at me every so often when they thought neither me nor Felix would notice. But that did get better as time went on. Felix ignored me completely while he was teaching, and I think that helped. And I didn’t mind sitting back there and watching. Got some thinking done when I needed to. Learned a little bit about magic, some afternoons, although mostly the sort of stuff that made me glad I was annemer.

That afternoon, I got myself as comfortable as I could— which wasn’t very, if anybody was wondering—and tried to put my mind to work on Jenny Dawnlight and her corpse in Laceshroud.

It wouldn’t stick.

I kept getting hung up on something Felix had said two nights ago. Well, not just one thing. Between us we’d pretty much said everything and then some and most particularly the things we shouldn’t’ve. But he’d been shouting about how come I’d had to go down to Britomart in the first place and Kolkhis didn’t seem to have to get into the Mirador when she wanted to talk to people, and he’d said something about “your little musician friend.” I’d gone after it, because even as fucking mad as I was, I knew I had to keep him away from what I’d gone to talk to Keeper
about
. And it turned out that Cardenio’d come to see him when Strych got me, and he’d gotten in because Keeper sent him to Hugo.

And powers and saints, that didn’t make no fucking sense. I mean, at the time, I’d been screaming at Felix about Cardenio and him not telling me, and he’d been screaming back about how I wouldn’t listen to anything he said anyway if it was about Strych and how was he supposed to know this was different, and anyway I’d kind of lost track of Hugo.

But now—what the fuck did Hugo have to do with Keeper? It occurred to me that maybe me showing up on his doorstep had made him twitchy for some other reason than just, well, me. If Keeper had some kind of hold over him . . . that was nasty shit, and no mistake. And it made me nervous, because it would be just like Keeper to get me all focused on Septimus Wilder while my real problem was Hugo Chandler sneaking up behind me. Or, not Hugo himself, because he wouldn’t have the guts, but whatever it was he’d been all twitchy about.

And that wasn’t no nice thought.

Your own stupid fault, Milly-Fox. Traipsing down to Britomart like that. And all for what? A dead girl. She ain’t gonna get no less dead just for you finding out who got her killed. It’s too fucking late for that. It was too fucking late for that before you even knew she was dead. It was
too fucking late
for that the moment you let her walk out without—

I dropped my cane.

Felix said, “A little louder next time, Mildmay, if you please. You almost woke up Calvert.”

The kids laughed, Calvert with them, though kind of sheepishly. He was a soft, clumsy boy, a shopkeeper’s son from Dimcreed, and he had a crush on Felix so heavy I could feel it clear across the room. Felix didn’t like him—Calvert
did
sleep in class, sometimes, and it made me wonder what he was doing with his nights—and though Felix did his best not to pick on Calvert, he didn’t always succeed.

“Sorry,” I said. Felix waved a hand—
no big deal
—and went on with whatever he was saying. Something about the history of the Mirador’s magic. I set myself to listen to it, and listen hard. It was better than thinking.

“What was the
matter
with you?” Felix said when he’d got free of the kids.

“Just clumsy,” I said.

“Yes, but you
aren’t
. Clumsy, I mean. Is your leg cramping again?”

“No,” I said. “I just ain’t used to having a cane to fiddle with, okay?”

“All right,” he said, but I could tell he didn’t believe me.