Mélusine (12 page)

There was a little silence. My heart was thumping in my chest like it wanted out. She touched my wrist, light as a butterfly, and said, "Don't you think we should celebrate our good luck?"

I couldn't believe my ears. I mean, just could not fucking believe she'd said it. I looked up, and she was leaning toward me. Her eyes were as blue as the sky, no clouds, no smoke—just a blue you could die for. Kethe, maybe she meant it. I leaned in and kissed her, real careful in case she changed her mind—it had happened before. Her hand moved up my arm and tightened around my biceps. She knew what she wanted, and I wasn't anywhere near stupid enough to start asking questions.

"Kethe," I said, "the Tunny can wait," and she laughed like a cat purring.

My shirt hung loose on her. I slid my free hand underneath it. Her skin was warm and smooth. I started to lift the shirt off her, and then it was like we got caught in a cyclone or something, both of us pulling clothes off as fast as we could.

When we were naked, we lay down together on the daybed. Kethe, she was beautiful, beautiful like a queen. I kissed her breasts, and she made a noise way back in her throat, like a growl. Her fingers were tracing patterns across my back.

"No scars," she said.

"I don't care."

I wouldn't start wondering 'til later whether she meant she didn't care that my face was scarred, or she didn't care that my body wasn't. Right then, I didn't care, and that was a fucking miracle all by itself.

Somehow, I did not fall again. I was still on my feet when we passed under the grim lintel of Livergate. I stood, shivering, my breath coming in sobs, while the monsters dismounted, and other, meeker monsters came and led the horses away. They did not look at me at all. I raised my bound hands to my face and managed to wipe the blood out of my left eye.

The guards on duty at Livergate had swung the doors closed behind us—the silence was gray and terrible and absolute. I could feel it encasing me hardening like layers of ice. No one said anything; the guards stood around Stephen and Vida and me like statues. Stephen took his gloves off, tucked them carefully behind his belt, all his attention on the task as if it were the answer to some vital question.

I could see the bear around Stephen like a mantle, its jaws dark with old blood. "Bring him," he said, with a curt jerk of his head, and strode across the courtyard, letting the arched brick mouth of the passway swallow him back into the Mirador. Vida followed him without a backward glance; she was cloaked and crowned with shadows.

Two of the monsters with the heads of owls took my arms, one cold claw above my left elbow, one cold claw above my right. They took me into the Mirador after the bear and the black lady.

The Mirador was closed against me. I saw that in the blurred, hostile faces of the people who watched us pass; I saw it in the texture of the floor, slick like glass, impervious. I felt it in the silence, like the silence in a mausoleum after the doors have been riveted shut. I had no sense of life, no sense of power, no sense of warmth. I was cast out. I walked across the Mirador's surfaces, denied entry to its heart.

The bronze doors of the Hall of the Chimeras were standing open. I could see the crowds within, their eyes glittering like jewels. I would have tried to stop, not to go in, but I knew the owls would drag me. We passed through the doors, and I saw the Virtu. I did stop walking, and they did drag me, but I no longer cared.

I stared at the Virtu all the way from the bronze doors to the place before the dais where the accused traditionally stood. Great shards rose on its plinth still, like the teeth of a wounded animal, but they were twisted, petrified bones where once had glowed beauty and strength and power. I had never seen anything so annihilated. The great poison tide of madness, ebbing away across the black sand, left exposed the wreckage of my guilt.

Stephen said, his voice like a clap of thunder, "Felix Harrowgate!"

I looked away from the Virtu, down to where Stephen sat beneath it. They must have cleared the glass off the dais and the throne. "Yes, my lord?"

"You stand accused of breaking the Virtu of the Mirador. Do you understand?"

"Yes, my lord."

"Do you deny the charges?"

"Do you have anything to say in your defense?"

The silence stretched out, like wool spun of grief. The briars of Malkar's compulsion twisted round and round me, gouging me, mocking the truth I could not speak, mocking my pain.

"Well?"

"No, my lord," I said.

"So. He admits his guilt. Does anyone speak in defense of this person?"

Behind me I heard a rustle, a murmur, like tree branches in the wind. But no one spoke.

"For the second time of asking, does anyone speak in defense of this person?"

And then someone said, "Not in defense, but the Curia petitions that execution be stayed until we understand how it is that he has done what he has done."

"Haven't you figured that out yet, Lord Giancarlo?" Stephen sounded annoyed, and I wanted to tell him it was unfair to expect miracles from anyone. Only Malkar could make miracles happen on demand, and Malkar's were all miracles of evil, miracles of madness, miracles of hate.

I lost the rest of the debate between Lord Giancarlo and Lord Stephen; my hearing shredded away from me again, and all I could hear was the roaring of beasts. And beneath it, a thin strand of threnody, the song that the broken Virtu was singing to itself. I listened to that song, quiet and hurt-filled, and the Hall of the Chimeras faded away, becoming as distant and unimportant as the vanities and schemes of the person I had been.

The voice hit me, like a bar of iron between the eyes. I flinched back, my hands going up reflexively, uselessly. The bear sat enthroned beneath the Virtu. I thought for a moment I saw dead kings standing around him, their faces white and proud and desolate, but I shook my head, and they went away.

"My… my lord?"

"You are on trial for your life," the bear said, dry as salt. "I suggest you pay attention."

I looked down. Beneath my feet, a chimera's paw curled around a globe of the heavens. "Yes, my lord."

"Can you explain, Felix Harrowgate, how you broke the Virtu?"

I opened my mouth, and the compulsion whip-cracked across me. "No, my lord."

"No?"

"I cannot."

"Your point carries, Lord Giancarlo," the bear said. "And I admit that I agree with you. If we're going to keep this from happening again, we'd better understand how it happened to begin with."

"More than that, my lord," Giancarlo said, "much though I hate to say it. If we are to mend the Virtu, we must understand how it was broken."

Harrowgate!"

I looked up, because the bear demanded it. It regarded me, its mad red eyes unfathomable. "You are to be stripped of your powers, title, and privileges as a wizard of the Mirador. You will be kept under guard and ward, subject to the examinations of the Curia, until such time as the destruction of the Virtu is fully understood. At that time, your fate will be decided. Do you understand?"

"Yes, my lord."

"Victoria," Stephen said. "If you would."

She rose and came down from the dais. She stopped in front of me. Her face was like granite. "Extend your hands," she said. I wondered if she had asked for this duty, wondered how much Malkar's decampment hurt her. I remembered his parting gift—the kiss, the compulsion, the terrible lie—and knew that someone had told her. Malkar breaks whatever he touches, and laughs.

I lifted my hands, and she stripped the dead rings off my fingers. I looked over her shoulder, avoiding her face, and my eyes met Shannon's. They were sapphires set in the living flesh of his face, faceted and brilliant and soulless. I shut my eyes. I felt Vicky's fingers brush across my forehead. I knew she was binding my powers, subjecting me to the will and whim of the Curia, but I felt nothing.

Felix

The darkness is solid. It presses in around me; the weight makes it hard to breathe. I have to get up sometimes, touch the walls, touch the angry iron of the bars, to be sure that they have not moved, that there is still space for me.

They have taken my earrings, my watch, my boots, my sash, my coat and waistcoat, my rings. I have nothing but my trousers and shirt, and the darkness is cold. There is one blanket, and I wrap myself in it, but I still shiver. I am afraid to ask for another blanket. I already know they will not let me have light.

I can feel the Virtu, like a distant ache; I can feel it when they try to mend it or to work with it, and then I curl up on the narrow cot and try not to make any noise as I cry.

That Neuvième, I went to see my friend Cardenio. Cardenio's a cade-skiff and I spent a while cooling my heels on the Fishmarket's long marble porch before he could get away. Neuvième's supposed to be his half day but the master cade-skiffs always seem like they got to squeeze it down to a quarter. But then he came out, grinning all over his shy, mousy face at seeing me, and we walked over to Richard's Park, where we could sit and talk.

Cardenio'd made journeyman not long before, and he still wore the I big black hat and the long coat like they were about the greatest things since they started minting gorgons. I don't think he really believed, even then, that they'd really let him in, that he'd really passed the ordeal and sworn the oaths and gotten a master to teach him their mysteries. Cardenio'd never had much use for himself, and it was weird for him that somebody else did.

He said while we were walking, "I hear you got a new ladyfriend."

Cade-skiffs know everything. Ain't nothing to be done about it. "Powers, ain't nothing sacred? Yeah, I got a new 'ladyfriend.' She's a shopgirl over on the Road of Carnelian."

"You're moving up in the world," he said. I looked sideways at him, but he was smiling, and his face had gone red, so I knew he was just teasing.

"Yeah," I said, "pretty soon I won't know you to spit on you no more, so you better watch your step."

"I can just see you cutting me dead, all lah-di-dah with your lace and expensive perfume."

"Shit, Cardenio, d'you mind? I got
some
pride."

He giggled for the next block and a half after that.

We had our bench in Richard's Park that we specially liked, and that afternoon it was free. So we sat in the middle of the formal garden, where nobody could sneak up on us, and I said, "I, um, I got you something. For making journeyman."

His eyes got big. "Do you mean it?"

It was a little box, but the shop assistant had wrapped it up pretty, Cardenio held it and stared at it, but didn't open it. "Mildmay, really, you shouldn't—"

"I'm flash this decad," I said. Me and Ginevra hadn't got round to figuring out my cut, but I knew what kind of money I was looking at. "And I wanted to. Go on and open it."

He worked real careful, like the paper was precious. I sat and watched, feeling kind of shy myself. He opened it, and his eyes got big as bell-wheels. "Powers. Mildmay, you
really
shouldn't—"

"Put 'em on," I said. I would've been grinning, except I don't do that. Not ever. "Anna Christina at The Sphinx Was A Lady says they're old. Maybe even Cymellunar work."

"Powers." He untied the loops of silk ribbon in his ears and slid them out. Then, so carefully I could tell he was holding his breath, he put the earrings in. Gold rings with jade beads carved like dragons. Then he turned his head gently to feel them move.

"Okay?" I said.

"Yeah. Really okay. I mean, nobody's ever given me this good a present before. Thanks."

"Hey, you're the only person I know's ever made it to journeyman cade-skiff. That's gotta be worth something."

He blushed like a girl, and I let him off the hook by asking him to tell me what kind of thing he was learning this decad. We talked the way we always did, about everything under the sun. Cardenio was maybe the best listener I'd ever met. With him I didn't feel like I had to worry about my scar. We had an early dinner at the Wheat-Dancer and then started back toward Havelock, where he'd disappear back into his guildhall and I'd see if I could flag down a hansom to get me to the Blue Cat in Dragonteeth, where Ginevra wanted me to meet her.

After a few blocks, I said, "Cardenio?"

"Yeah?"

"You know anything 'bout Brinvillier Strych?"

"What kind of anything?"

"Dunno. Just, you know, like what happened to his body."

He gave me a look. Cardenio was shy, but he wasn't stupid. You don't make journeyman with the cade-skiffs if you don't got some fucking grand machinery up top. "This got anything to do with what happened in the Boneprince on Deuxième?"

And he
still
sandbagged me, even though I knew better. "What happened in the Boneprince on Deuxième?" I said, just like I should, only I said it a beat too late, and Cardenio knew it.

But he was a friend. He let it go. "Nobody knows for sure. The necromancers in Scaffelgreen say it was something big, and as far as we can tell nobody's seen Vey Coruscant since."

"Fuck," I said, not faking. "What do y'all think?"

"Yeah," I said, and I knew that Cardenio was putting stuff together even if he didn't say nothing about it. But it was okay. Whatever he said to his masters, he wouldn't tell 'em I was part of their headache.