The Mirador (37 page)

All at once, he was up in my face. “Don’t you tell me what to do! You ain’t my boss, you ain’t nobody’s boss, so don’t you go giving me orders like you owned the world!”

“Kethe!” I broke his hold on my coat collar, pushed him back a couple steps. My cane hit the floor with a clatter, and I realized, about an inch and a half shy of where it’d be too late, that making any kind of a move was going to end up with me down there, too.

We both froze for a moment, Septimus and me. Then I leaned down real careful to get the cane, and said, "Y’know, you want to watch that temper, or Ke—Kolkhis’ll have you so you don’t know your ass from next Thermidor.” I straightened up, got myself braced. “I remember how that goes.”

“You don’t know nothing about it,” he said, but his sneer had a kind of wobble in it.

Powers and saints. “See you later, then,” I said. I’d wasted enough time on pissing contests with Septimus Wilder.

He made a noise, like he’d started to call me back before he remembered he didn’t want to talk to me anyway.

I just kept going.

Before I’d turned Semper back over to Jean-Soleil, I’d promised to take him along to the Engmond’s Tor Cheaps, where I was headed the next day to buy an assortment of sudden necessities: ribbons to match the dress Corinna and I had chosen, a fan, perhaps a pair of beaded gloves if I could find a bargain. We’d ended up agreeing to go in the morning, early. Waking up, therefore, at seven o’clock, I decided that I did not want to spend the morning alone with Antony’s seventeen-year-old bastard half brother; I dragged Gordeny out of bed and made her come with us. She didn’t grumble as much as I had expected, either because she liked the Cheaps, too, or because she’d gotten a good look at Semper waiting for us on the doorstep before she got her mouth open. Semper didn’t bat an eye at her accent, and my opinion of him went up.

We took a fiacre because I insisted on it. From their different perspectives, neither Semper nor Gordeny saw anything wrong with walking halfway across the Lower City. Gordeny was from the far south of the city, which even I knew was the roughest part; probably walking through Ruthven and Ramecrow didn’t seem dangerous at all to her. Semper, on the other hand, when I asked, said that he had been raised in a village called Moldwarp near Copal Carnifex, the seat of Antony’s branch of the Lemerii. Semper had lived in Moldwarp until he was seven; then he had been brought to St. Kemplegate, and he hadn’t left it until the previous day.

“Didn’t you go out at all?” Gordeny said.

“Of course we went
out
,” Semper said. Gordeny was only a year or two older than he, and her strangeness was quickly wearing off. “We weren’t cloistered monks. But mostly we didn’t go out of Shatterglass, except to visit the Academy or to sing in the Mirador.”

“Have you been in the Mirador often?” I asked.

“A few times,” he said, with a fairly unconvincing attempt at nonchalance. I wondered if the blush was because of his father or because someone had made a pass at him.

“What’s it like?” Gordeny said, her eyes big as saucers.

I let him tell her. I’d be just as happy not to be at center-stage all morning, and it furthermore would be all to the good if Gordeny and Semper, our youngest as well as our newest members, could forge some sort of alliance before Drin saw Semper.

What a professional choirmaster describes disparagingly as “a very nice baritone” translates for ordinary people to a lovely voice. For speaking, at least, I didn’t think Semper could be faulted. His voice was deep and clear, and his accent, unlike Gordeny’s, unexceptionable. Add to that his exquisite bone structure and the grace I had already observed in his movements . . . if the boy had any acting ability at all, Drin would be complaining about upstaging in a week or less. He’d done it to Bartholmew, and Bartholmew, poor thing, had a face like a fish.

You’ve got enough trouble without going borrowing, I said to myself, and put it out of my mind. That was easy to do, because Gordeny and Semper were both pestering me to tell them more about the bits of Ramecrow we were seeing through the fiacre’s windows. I laughed and reminded them I was Kekropian and knew less than they did.

“But you—” Gordeny began and stopped.

“Yes? I what?”

“Nothing,” she said, “only I would have thought somebody going out with Mildmay the Fox would know all about the Lower City.”

“Really? Why?”

She thought I was teasing her; I could see it in the look she gave me. “I’m perfectly serious,” I said. “Why?”

“You ain’t never heard the stories?” Gordeny said.

“Grammar, Gordeny,” I said.

“Sorry,” she said; unlike Mildmay, she cheerfully went back and corrected herself: “I mean, haven’t you heard the stories about him?”

“He doesn’t tell stories about himself,” I said, thinking of the astonishing range of stories I
had
heard from him and how they were all either purest fiction or at least a century old.

“Oh,” said Gordeny. “Well,
I
can tell you stories . . . I mean, if you want.”

“Please,” I said.

So Gordeny told me Mildmay the Fox stories for half the morning, and they were a series of painful revelations. I’d known he was infamous, but I’d always assumed that was simply for the murder of Cerberus Cresset, which had seemed like enough infamy for any three people. Mildmay had somehow never gotten around to telling me that he had been Mélusine’s most feared assassin when he was in his teens. It was hard for me, and only got harder, to match up the Mildmay I knew with the stories Gordeny told. He was one of the calmest, gentlest, most levelheaded people I knew, and one of the least violent; I couldn’t imagine him killing three men in three different ways in three different districts of the city in one night. Nobody knew, Gordeny said, if it had been one commission or three.

“Why did he stop?” I said finally. We were standing in a fan shop, waiting while the proprietress fetched a selection of painted fans from Imar Eolyth out of her back room. Semper was across the lane, drooling over chess sets.

“Nobody knows,” Gordeny said. “Just one day he wasn’t there anymore. I dunno, like he got tired of it or something.”

“Or something,” I said, and the proprietress came back.

Yet another of Felix’s meetings that afternoon. I never tried to keep them straight, except to know which days were the Curia. He was twice as likely to pick fights at Curia meetings as at the others, don’t ask me why. But this was one of the safe ones, just a bunch of hocuses sitting around talking about hocus-stuff. I’d come to find it kind of nice, actually, because nobody gave a rat’s ass whether I was paying attention or not. In Curia meetings, I never dared relax, but here things were pretty much okay. Felix even put his foot down and got me a chair, so I could sit back against the wall and—as far as the hocuses were concerned—disappear. And that was fine with me.

Rinaldo was a member of whichever committee this was, and after the meeting when Felix was gossiping with Orson and Zoë Meredith, he came over to me and said, “I see you are using my cane.”

“Yeah,” I said and got up, to be polite. “Thanks.”

“Jashuki should serve you well, I think.”

“Sorry?”

“The
koh
—the guardian spirit. Jashuki’s principal domain is friendship, and his prime attributes are courage and loyalty.”

“Oh,” I said, and looked at the smiling face on the cane again.

“He’s also supposed to ward against poison. The islanders of Imar Esthivel say that this includes the poison of slander.”

“Thanks, Rinaldo.”

“It’s what friends do. Help each other.”

I felt myself go red and didn’t say nothing.

“Keep using the cane,” Rinaldo said. Marthe de Croupier was waving at him across the room, and he had to go. “Exercise your leg. And for the sake of Jashuki, remember you are lame.”

That last stung, like he meant it to. I watched him waddle off, my fingers running over Jashuki’s smiling face like there was some secret he could tell me if only I knew how to ask.

Chapter 9

Mehitabel

Gordeny and Corinna helped me find the dress I needed: heavy tea-colored velvet, its only adornment the pearl buttons down the back and sleeves. It draped me as if I’d been measured for it. I braided my hair back and caught the mass in a lace snood the same color as the dress. The effect was unexpectedly stunning; I looked austere and regal, like an Ophidian queen stepped down out of her portrait frame.

Stephen’s butler actually bowed slightly to me this time, almost involuntarily. He handed me over to a footman, who escorted me into a part of Stephen’s apartments I hadn’t seen before. This room was much larger than the parlor I’d rated on previous visits, and I guessed it was what Keria Gauthy would have called a drawing room. Stephen, standing before the mantel, under a portrait of a dark, square-faced man who had to be his father, Lord Gareth, turned when the footman announced me.

“Every time you come, I have to think of a new adjective,” he said. “Tonight you are magnificent.”

“Thank you, my lord,” I said and swept a low curtsy.

“You’re the first to arrive,” he said, another of his tiresomely gnomic statements. Was it supposed to be a fact, a warning, or a commendation? I said, choosing brisk rather than nervous, “Who else is coming?”

“No one’s going to denounce you as a scarlet woman,” he said, perfectly deadpan, so that I couldn’t tell whether he was teasing or reassuring me. I let a little exasperation show.

“Sorry,” he said. “My sister and brother, Lord Philip Lemerius and his daughter Lady Enid, and Lord Robert of Hermione.” I thought of Semper, laughing with Gordeny over our impromptu lunch of sausages and spiced chick peas. Thought of Antony savagely dissecting court mores. Of all the people I didn’t want to meet at Lord Stephen’s dinner table, Semper and Antony’s father was near the head of the list.

“Lady Victoria Teveria,” said the footman.

I turned as Lady Victoria came into the room. “Good evening, Stephen,” she said. “Madame Parr.” She gave me a small, stiff nod.

Victoria Teveria was the eldest of Gareth Teverius’s three children. She was taller than Stephen, and they looked very little like each other, except for the gray eyes. Victoria wasn’t beautiful, but a stern regularity of feature made her uncompromisingly handsome. The words “stern,” “uncompromising,” and “regular” also did well to sum up her character. She was a wizard (she, like most of the female wizards of the Mirador, scorned the feminines that people persisted in trying to make up: wizardess, wizardine, or even just wizarde). Her dress was gray and severe, tailored to the point of resembling a military uniform. She wore the gold wizard’s sash as the men did, diagonally from right shoulder to left hip. Her rings were made of sapphire and silver; they looked odd and slightly unearthly against her dark, brooding presence.

It was immediately obvious that she wasn’t pleased with Lord Stephen, and the cause of her displeasure wasn’t far to seek. Lord Stephen just smiled and listened to us talk—or, more accurately, listened to his sister unfurl her flags and make the first maneuvers in what was clearly going to be a very polite and very bloody war. Happily, before she’d found her range, more guests were announced, this time Lord Philip and Lady Enid, and Lady Victoria deserted me for them with only the barest apology.

Lord Philip—and oh the idiocy of the Mirador’s peerage, in which the head of a cadet branch of a middle-rank family had the identical honorific to the Lord Protector—was a dull, pompous, closed-minded man. He looked choleric this evening, and I saw him glaring at me over his daughter’s head. You are a remarkably black pot, my lord, I thought. And what will you think when you learn of your son’s new occupation?

This was the first time I’d seen Lady Enid, though Antony had told me about her; she was his youngest sister, and the only unmarried one. She was a pretty girl, much resembling Antony, but without the dour lines that marked his face. She was properly and becomingly dressed in yellow, tall and slender and straight, with bright dark eyes far warmer than those of either her father or her full brother. Her swan-daughter was more natural than mine, the result of careful training rather than deliberate artifice. And as befitted a young and unmarried lady, she was staying quiet and grave and graceful; even when she laughed at some remark of Stephen’s, it was a brief, trilling chuckle, as decorous as a laugh could possibly be.

She took her introduction to me gracefully as well, and I suspected she had been coached. Enid was not, of course, permitted to attend the theater, but she had read Berinth the King in the classroom, and if I thought there was genuine wistfulness in her voice when she said, “I would have liked to see you perform Aven,” it might only have been my imagination.

It did, however, give me an opening. “I would be very pleased to give a private recital, if you’d like.”

She began to smile, but then glanced at her glowering father and schooled her face. She was about to refuse when Stephen said, “I think that’s an excellent idea.”

For a moment, we all stood frozen in tableau, and at exactly that moment, the butler announced Lord Shannon.