The Mirador (6 page)

Most of them deserved to be called boy-toys; they hardly had two thoughts in their heads to rub together, much less anything to say that
anyone
would find interesting. I was thinking that Ashley Demellius might be the best of a bad lot—he was a featherwit, but also a gossip—when the door opened and like the saturnine answer to my prayers, Antony Lemerius came in.

He didn’t bother to hide his impatience with the young men blocking the door, and I carefully didn’t smile at the haste with which they got out of his way. Antony wouldn’t find it funny.

I shifted my weight, dropped my shoulders a little, became the Mehitabel Parr Antony would want. Antony, thank God, was bored by stupidity rather than threatened by intelligence; he’d been one of the first to transfer his favor from Susan to me. But his sense of his own dignity was smothering, like the air on a really humid day in the Grasslands, and if you didn’t measure up, he’d have nothing to do with you.

He was very like his father, whom he hated in the particularly venomous fashion reserved for those whose good graces we must cultivate. And his father, Philip Lemerius, was one of Lord Stephen’s cronies. If there was anything stirring in the Mirador’s inner circles, Antony would know about it.

And even if I didn’t get a thing out of him, Vulpes couldn’t accuse me of not having tried.

Set in the proper role like a custard in a form, I turned from my mirror, rationed out a smile of delight, and extended one hand toward Antony, letting my wrist carry the motion. “Lord Antony,” I said, as he bowed over my hand, his lips brushing dryly against my skin. “I did not know you would be in attendance this evening. ” Carefully implied, that I would have dispensed with my untidy rabble of beaux if I
had
known.

“A last-minute impulse,” Antony said, straightening but keeping his gaze on my face. “Rewarded sevenfold, if I may say so. You were magnificent.”

“Thank you,” I said. I didn’t simper—Corinna did that, although I was trying to break her of the habit—but did lower my eyes briefly before meeting his again, as if I were modest enough to be a little flustered by the compliment. Susan always took praise, no matter how lavish, as no more than her due.

It took maybe a quarter hour to get the last and most ardent of my admirers to take himself off, but I was finally able to close my door with only Antony and myself on the right side of it. If it had been Peter, or Mildmay, I would have leaned dramatically against the door and said, in my best imitation of Susan, “At last, we are alone.” As it was, I said merely, “Now we may be more comfortable,” and crossed the room—a matter of five paces—to where he sat on the lumpy chaise longue.

I sat down beside him, slightly sideways, knees together, spine perfectly straight, letting the long skirts of my dress cascade and pool around me. I lowered my eyes, demure as an ingenue, and said, “What is your pleasure this evening, my lord?”

I held still when he brought his hand up to my chin, allowed him to tilt my head up. “You are my pleasure,” he said, dark eyes burning, and leaned close to kiss me.

It isn’t easy to participate in a passionate kiss when you want to giggle. But we could have come straight out of those luridly sentimental Ervenzian novels that Corinna devoured by the hundredweight: dialogue, stage business, and all. I quashed my sense of humor and indulged Antony in his desire to master me.

My sense of humor was controllable. What got away from me was the realization, as Antony’s hands moved to grip my skull, that he was serving, in a horrible, only half-metaphorical way, as a proxy for Vulpes. It wasn’t Antony who had made himself my master.

Antony pulled back. “Mehitabel?”

Oh God. He’d felt that sudden revulsion. I said, “I’m sorry. My head’s a little sore. Aven’s headdress is very uncomfortable.” All of which was perfectly true, if not precisely germane.

His frown deepened. “I’m sorry. I had no intention of hurting you.”

“I know,” I said and softened my expression. “It’s all right. Truly.”

His face cleared, although he said, “I shouldn’t have forgotten myself like that.”

I remembered, with sudden and visceral vividness, a day in the summer when Felix had, for reasons best known to himself, let Mildmay off the leash. Mildmay had come to the Empyrean, sat quiet and good as gold watching our rehearsal, followed me, uncomplaining as ever, back to this dressing room when we were done. He’d listened as I raged about Susan and her vanity and her petty games and her monumental stupidity, and when I’d finally run down, like an overworked clock, he’d said, “You done?”

“Bored?” I’d said waspishly. “Yes, I suppose so.”

“Hang on.” He hadn’t smiled, because he never did, but I’d seen the lightness in his eyes and trusted him.

He’d tipped the chair under the door handle, pointed me to this chaise longue, and proceeded to make love to me with his hands and mouth, and finally, when he had me so wild I was swearing at him in every language I knew, he fucked me, hard and deep, with all the power he usually kept carefully in check.

It wasn’t until afterward that I realized I’d been screaming like a hunting cat and that everyone in the building must have known exactly what we’d been doing.

Corinna’d made Mildmay blush like a rose, leering at him in the stage-lobby, but he’d said as he was getting into the hansom I’d flagged for him, “I don’t take it back.” And for a man as shy and private as Mildmay, that was something remarkable.

He had made me forget myself. This genteel clinch was nothing. I murmured something vague and soothing, and encouraged Antony to try again. This time, I kept my mind on what I was doing, and predictably, after another round of restrained passion, he invited me back to the Mirador for the night—and to attend court with him in the morning.

I wondered, though I’d never ask, what Philip had done to annoy him this time.

I had no illusions about my place in Antony’s life, no matter how courteously he might give me unnecessary help in rising from the chaise longue, how tenderly he might drape my wrap around my shoulders. I was a means to an end for him, just as much as he was for me. There was no doubt he enjoyed the sex, but what mattered to him was the next morning, when he could walk into the Hall of the Chimeras with me on his arm and see his father go dull crimson with rage. As it happened, Antony’s priorities suited me just fine.

He’d clearly expected to get what he wanted, for he’d brought his carriage. His driver looked a little rumpled, and I suspected he’d taken advantage of
Berinth the King
, a notoriously long play, to find some company for the wait. I couldn’t fault him—God knew there couldn’t be anything much more boring than the life of a nobleman’s coachman, being treated as an extension of the horses, three-quarters of the job comprised in waiting.

Antony, of course, would never descend to the crass vulgarity of necking in a carriage; we sat in constrained silence for several minutes before he said, “You’re . . . friends with Mildmay Foxe, aren’t you?”

His hesitation over the word “friends” told me that he knew exactly what Mildmay and I were to each other.

If I hadn’t needed to stay on his good side, I would have said,
Something like that
, and let him twist. I said, “Yes.”

Antony said, obviously choosing his words with great care, “It is said, in the Mirador, that Lord Felix and his brother burn offerings in the crypt of the Cordelii.”

I’d expected that sentence to end rather differently from how it did, and there was a more than slight pause before I said, “To the best of my knowledge, that isn’t true. I can’t imagine Felix doing such a thing.”

“Ah,” said Antony, and in the darkness of the carriage, I couldn’t tell whether it was disbelief or disappointment or something else entirely.

My curiosity got the better of me: “Why do you ask?”

The sound he made was as close as I’d ever heard him come to a nervous laugh. “I, ah . . . no reason, really.”

It wasn’t even worth calling that a lie. I waited, and he caved so fast I knew he wanted to tell me, even though it embarrassed him. “It was just that, if it
was
true, I was going to ask if you thought he’d be willing to show me the way.”

“To the crypt of the Cordelii?”

“For my research,” he said with prim stiffness, as if I’d accused him of necrophiliac urges.

“Of course,” I said. Antony was a historian—he had studied in Vusantine as a young man and would probably have stayed among the scholars of the great and venerable Library of Arx if his father hadn’t summoned him home. He was working on a history of the reign of Laurence Cordelius and spent most of his time in the Mirador’s scattered and chaotic libraries.

“But if you think the story untrue . . .”

“I’m sure they don’t burn offerings, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Mildmay doesn’t know where the crypt is. It can’t do any harm to ask him.”

“Would you?” he said, with a kind of eager gratitude I’d certainly never gotten from him in bed.

“Of course. I can ask him tomorrow.”

“It’s very kind of you.”

“It’s no trouble,” I said. In fact, I was glad to have something neutral to talk about, considering the things we’d said to each other the last time we spoke. “What is it you’re hoping to find?”

And the rest of the way to the Mirador, Antony was all too glad to tell me.

It was a good thing—I thought sometime later—that I didn’t mind the color of Antony’s bed canopy, because it was certainly all I got to look at. Not that he was an inconsiderate lover, but he knew where I belonged, and it was underneath him.

Afterward, though, he relaxed—as much as Antony ever did relax—and began to talk, like a boiling kettle venting steam. He hated the Mirador’s politics, in the same way—and sometimes in the same breath—that he hated his father, but his hatred seemed to force him to watch, and the malevolent precision of his observations was always fascinating.

And tonight it was more than that: Stephen Teverius was contemplating marriage.

“You’re joking,” I said, even though I knew he wasn’t.

“No,” he said, but he wasn’t offended. “His councillors have been encouraging him to remarry since—well, essentially since the moment Emily stopped breathing. But even Father had almost given up hope that he ever would.”

“Do you think he means it?”

“That kind of fakery isn’t in Stephen’s nature. He means it— if they can ever find a young woman who meets their criteria.”

“Criteria?”

“Extensive criteria,” Antony said. “Listening to them discuss the matter, you would imagine they were buying Stephen a horse.”

“Suddenly, I am very grateful to be beneath their notice.”

“Yes, you are,” he said grimly. “You are indeed.”

Near the septad-night, Fleur came over to me and said, “He’s drunk, isn’t he?”

“M’lady?” I said. I should have stood up, to be polite, but it just didn’t seem worth my while.

“Your brother,” she said. “He’s drunk.”

I looked at Felix. He was sprawled out in one of the chairs. Isaac Garamond was leaning on the left chair-arm, talking to him, but Felix was grinning up at Edgar like he’d won the moon in a raffle and had clearly just said something snarky beyond belief.

Yeah, if you knew what to look for, he was drunk.

I said, “So?”

“He never used to get drunk.”

No, I thought, liquor looks pretty damn boring next to phoenix. But I just said, “People change, m’lady.”

“I was wondering if there was a reason.”

“Sorry?”

“A reason he’s started drinking too much. Is there something wrong?”

Something wrong. Powers and saints. Did she want a fucking list? “Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She stared at me. “You can’t be that stupid.”

Depends, sweetheart. How stupid do you think I am? I didn’t say nothing.

“I want to help,” she said, fierce but kind of whispering. “Surely you can understand that.”

“Well, you can’t,” I said, too sharp and too ugly, but it was true. Maybe I was stupid, but I knew what Felix would do to me if I spilled my guts to Fleur, and I wasn’t anywhere near stupid enough to let myself in for that. Not when it wouldn’t do no good anyhow.

“Your jealousy isn’t helping him, either.”

Powers, I wanted to hit the silly bitch. But I couldn’t, so I just kind of stared at her. Because, I mean, what the fuck do you say?

“I don’t want to take him away from you,” she said. “Can’t you see that?”

I wished, mightily, for the roof to cave in and get me out of this. “Lady Fleur, I don’t own him. You want to try and help, you go on ahead. Just don’t come crying to me when—”

—he rips you a new asshole. Powers and saints, for a moment I thought I’d actually said that out loud. But I’d managed to get my fucking mouth shut in time. Small fucking favors.

Not that what I
had
said wasn’t bad enough all on its own, and she was getting ready to pin my ears back for it when a voice called, clear as a fucking bell, “Fleur, is my little brother annoying you?”

Felix was coming toward us. I knew that look in his eyes, and my heart and stomach all turned to mud.