House of Sand and Secrets (8 page)

Harun stares at me, dark blue eyes almost black in the firelight.

“My marriage may be a paper one,” I point out, “but yours isn’t. You had nothing to run from – only heir of House Guyin – you were more privileged, and more free than I could ever dream of being. So you didn’t run from anything.” Harun consummated this relationship because he was not afraid of the consequences. Or because he didn’t care. Or because he cared more about his own wants.

He swallows, and reaches back toward the glass. Then he pauses and looks down at his wayward hand as if it is not part of him at all. He lowers it without taking another drink. Even from where I stand I can see the tremble he is trying to control. “Find them yourself.” He sits down into a well-worn seat; the one Isidro had so recently vacated. Harun drops his head in his hands, and he is no longer facing my questions. “Go on, then. I’m giving you the run of my house. You should feel honoured. Go sniff them out.”

“What are you not telling me?”

“I’m telling you everything I know,” he says, “about your
paper marriage
.” and I can hear the sneer, though I cannot see it.

I am thoroughly confused. He has never before been a man so open in his emotions. And now he acts like a betrayed lover in a poem – full of rages and despairs. A thread of apprehension darts under my skin, and I feel as if I have been stitched too tightly into my own body. “Harun?”

There is no answer. He’s clamped his hands over his temples, head bowed, and he will not look to me.

I don’t know what possessed me to think I could turn to Harun for help when the man can’t even bring himself to give me a straight answer to a simple question. “Fine,” I say with a sigh. “I’ll look.” My skirts and petticoats rustle, and it is the sound of silk and my own faint breathing that fills the passage as I stalk from the room. The house is that quiet.

The intense stillness and the darkness and Harun’s distracted behaviour have all combined to fill me with trepidation. My breath is constricted, and I put it down to the gloom of the strange house. I am flitting at shadows. “Jannik?”

The house echoes his name back to me, dusting it with cobwebs.

Wherever they’ve gone, they can’t hear me. I tread upstairs, the stairs creaking underfoot. The house is so empty with the servants gone, and the wood groans in a way that reminds me of the old Whelk Street squat that I stayed in when I first ran from my House and my name. I fell in with Dash and his tea-shop revolutionaries and the sound of the rising wind. There are no sea storms here to tear Harun’s house from its foundations, but the eerie feeling of transience is the same. Dash and the others hide in the shadows, laughing at me.

“Felicita,” I say to myself. “Control yourself.” My voice is too loud, and the ghosts and the memories fade. No, the silence is just emptiness and the echoes of an empty house.

On the first landing, I set out to methodically tick off each room. I walk down the left passage first to check all rooms on one side then return, checking all rooms on the right, circling back to the staircase. Most of the doors don’t even budge. They are locked and the brass has gone black with neglect.

Finally, I find a door I can shove open. The room is dark and cramped, and the furniture is covered in dust cloths. There’s no one here, but I’m curious now. My eyes adjust to the shuttered darkness and the shrouded furniture takes on familiar shapes. A few low couches, and something draped in a sheet. Carefully, I lift the dust-grey sheet. An armonica. Loathsome instrument. The armonica is a mess, most of the bowls smashed. Now that I’m looking for them, I see shards, small and large on the floor. Obviously someone else shared my taste in music. I run one finger against the edge of one of the intact bowls. It trembles, and stays quiet. I flap the sheet back and exit the music room.

Of the few other unlocked doors, I find nothing of interest and no sign of Jannik and Isidro. The third landing is more rewarding: a master bedroom, a small room filled with clockwork, a second library. All the rooms are devoid of life. The fourth floor is completely locked. I can’t even get into the hallway. Just as I’m about to storm downstairs and berate Harun for playing games, the whispers start.

They are soft, fading in and out, just brushing the edges of my hearing. Two men speaking, I’m quite certain of it. The low sound of their voices comes from behind the locked door. I press my cheek against the heavy wood. It’s cold, leaving an ache in my teeth. The voices rise enough for me to hear the tone, although not the words. Someone laughs, but it is a sound quickly smothered. It’s not Jannik’s laughter. Though I suppose I’ve heard that little enough to judge. There is a certain brittleness, a shallow quality to the laughter that makes me think I’m hearing Isidro. “Hello?”

The voices still. Then, quite clearly: “Did you hear that?” Jannik.

I breathe deep, let it go. Of course it’s the two of them. Isidro laughing at something Jannik said, while the pretty, vapid thing led my husband about the recesses of the Guyin house.
For what reason?

“It’s me. Felicita,” I add, feeling stupid the moment the clarification leaves my mouth. Jannik was making Isidro laugh, and I wonder what it was he said.

“The baggage,” says Isidro. I can hear them clearly now – they’re close to the door. Before this they must have been talking in whispers.

“Don’t call her that.”

“The fierce and faithless huntress, the witchbringer, the killer of brothers-”

“You don’t understand her,” Jannik says, but his is a weak defence. Does he also think these things of me? Are these his words Isidro is repeating? A desperate crying anger surges up. I feel betrayed, irrationally hurt that Jannik didn’t say more to defend me.

I step back as a key grates in the lock. It rattles as Isidro laughs again, this time a malicious, bitter little sound. He swings the door open and flashes his fangs at me. “Hello, we were just discussing all of your outstanding qualities.”

I don’t bother to answer him. There is someone else I hate right now.

Jannik actually has the decency to flush and drop the third eyelids. His collar is unbuttoned, his neck tie gone.

“You bastard,” I say to him.

“Technically,” Isidro interjects, “that would be me.”

Don’t look at him, don’t give him the pleasure.
I continue glaring at Jannik.

“I told him nothing,” he says, with a half-hearted shrug. “He already knew.”

“Ah – already guessed.” Isidro squeezes past him, and touches my collarbone lightly with his fingertips, like he’s contemplating shoving me down the stairs. “Now I know.”

“Get away from me.” My voice is a low hiss.

Isidro mock bows, flourishing an emerald neck-tie, before he pushes past me and hops nimbly down the stairs.

I look back up at Jannik.

He fumbles with his collar before he realizes he has no neck tie to knot. He lowers his hands and hides them in his jacket pockets. “He really did know, I just told him the details.”

“Are you an idiot?”

Jannik frowns.

“Before, everything anyone said was speculation – now you’ve handed House Guyin a sword to stick into our backs.”

“They won’t turn on you,” he begins, staring past me, down the now-empty stairs. “They’re like us; we’re their only friends in MallenIve.”

“They are nothing like us.” And they are not our friends, I want to say, but the truth is they are the closest we’ve come to friendship in this blasted city. “Don’t think you can trust them.” I certainly don’t, not when it seems that Isidro has his manicured little claws in Jannik. No wonder Harun is a mess.

“Why not?” The question seems innocent, but for all his flaws, Jannik merely plays at being naive. It’s a careful disguise he wears, and he uses it because it saves him from looking too invested, or revealing too much about how he really feels. He’s not stupid.

“Don’t pretend,” I say to him. “Circumstance isn’t a fertile ground for intimacy.”
You like him?
I don’t ask.
How – how could you like him?
Isidro is all those things I have learned not to trust, a trapped and beautiful thing, one looking for someone to blame for their own inadequacies. They don’t understand love – only how to use other people to get what they think they want. Then again, that may be the very thing Jannik likes about him. Perhaps he believes he can save Isidro.

“See, that’s where you’re wrong.” Jannik steps closer to me. “They are the ones who shouldn’t trust us.”

“Why’s that?” It’s ridiculous. I certainly have no plans to go and drag Harun further down into the mud. If anything, it’s we who could give them some glimmer of respectability.

He blinks. “You really don’t know?”

I shake my head. “Humour me, pretend I’m a fool.”

“Don’t make it too easy for me,” Jannik says, but he’s smiling crookedly, and I sigh in exasperation. “Because they managed without us. They were shunned and friendless.”

“Don’t make me pity them. That’s not going to work.”

“Of course it is. I know you.” He edges down to the next step, so that we are separated from each other by only silk, and a spider’s thread of air. “And now here we come, still fresh from Pelimburg, still interesting, still untainted, and we extend our hand.”

I hold his gaze. My back aches; the shoulders stiff.

“They have more to lose,” he ends, with a small, lopsided shrug.

“Isidro hates you,” I say after a while. There, let him mull on that.

“And you.”

“Maybe he just hates everyone.”

Jannik eases past me, and takes a few more steps downward then he looks back up. “We should go.”

Flustered, I brush my hands down my skirts, feeling sweaty-palmed and ill, although I’ve no idea why. “Yes. I expect Harun will be wondering why we’re taking so long–”

“No, I mean we should go from MallenIve.” There is such longing in his voice, running soft and slippery beneath it like kelp under the silk-tops of waves. It is the kind of longing that tangles in your legs and drowns you.

“Back ho – back to Pelimburg? But why – we can’t.” And damn him for making me want all over again. I miss the smell of sea air, the calling of the mews on the cliff-side.

“This city is sick, and it infects everyone in it. We stay here and we become like them.”

I could pretend I don’t know what he means but I’ve felt it too, the insidious way MallenIve breathes her disease into every living thing here. It’s so potent I can smell it – like scriv and rot – citrus combined with the reek of the filthy refuse heaps growing at her borders. I brush off his distress, and bury my own. “You’re being overly dramatic. Besides, we can’t go back.”

He sighs. “No. I suppose not.”

We have sins to atone for.

“Harun isn’t going to help us,” I say, thinking of the names on my paper, useless now.

“Whatever made you think that he would?” Jannik closes his eyes and slumps back against the one solid wall of the staircase. “Forget about this, Felicita, please. It’s not something for you and I to get involved in.”

“Give me a reason why not.”

He cracks open one eye, and waits for me to work it out myself.

“I don’t care any more if we draw attention to our House, if these MallenIve idiots don’t invite us – me – to their stupid parties–”

“It’s not about that.”

“What then – are you scared of them?” As soon as the words have bolted out my mouth, so casual and yet so damning, I feel myself flush.

“Yes,” Jannik says. “Now, we really should leave.”

For a moment, I don’t follow him. The vampire they found was mutilated, tortured. I picture Jannik’s arms ending in stumps at the wrist and his skin flayed, leaving only the meat and white skull. His fear flickers against my face like the wing of a startled bird.

STUDIES IN OIL AND INK

A new art
exhibition has been announced in the late Courant. The black-and-white flash on the Amusements page does the pictures little justice. The headline calls the work that of a savage and naturally, I am intrigued.

I try to ignore the little article on the opposite page about the body they pulled from the Casabi. Another nameless bat. It chills me to read the words, knowing Jannik wants me do nothing. I force myself to pay attention to the vicious review instead. It has a certain incensed bluster that means it can only have been written by some House toady who feels his heroes have been mocked. The artist’s name is Iynast. Just that. I have no idea if it’s his true name, or the surname of some long-forgotten minor House.

Jannik has left for the offices already. Despite Carien’s promise – or threat – I have yet to try to secure a commitment of any kind from House Eline, or be invited to meet with her husband. Jannik’s unwillingness for me to pursue the matter of the body – now bodies - stops me from extending my own small invitation. Just when I think I am finally ready to go ahead and do it anyway, I find another reason not to: I need to employ a better chef, I need to have the house redecorated, the timing isn’t quite right.

It’s not just Jannik’s fear that makes me cling to all these excuses. Carien fascinates me. I want to see more of her, to feel that strange thrill that comes from watching the way she walks, her coiled intensity, the flash of wildness in her amber eyes. But she is dangerous to me and mine, and I’m not quite ready to have a Reader invade my home.

How much of my past would she be able to winkle out of me, just by being in my rooms? Would she pull all the secrets out of my coiled heart and lay them like little twisted miscarriages on a platter before me?

My brother’s death was no unlucky accident and only two people alive know the circumstances. Dash, who was the only other one who knew what happened, is buried now. I don’t even know where. I think Jannik may, but even I am not so heartless as to ask. Owen himself is interred in the family mausoleum, next to my father. From my mother’s last letter it may not be long before Owen’s sickly daughter is placed there too. The disappointment in that letter announcing Allegria’s birth was palpable. With Owen dead, there is no male heir to my House. There is only me. The heiress presumptive. How that must gall my brother’s shade.