And there was fuck-all I could do about that now. If I could keep out of the Dogs' paws another couple days, if somebody in Margot's pack could write, I could send her a message. And maybe, if I got super-lucky and Kethe didn't feel like dropping another load of shit on my head, I could get back to her and try to talk to her. Maybe tell her
why
things weren't as safe and easy as she thought. Maybe tell her about the shit I'd done before I left Keeper.
That was a bad thought. I didn't talk about that stuff with nobody, tried not to think about it as best I could. But if you love her, this voice said in my head, you got to trust her. Either that, or you got to say you
can't
trust her, and then you got to let her go.
That was a bad thought, too. I brought myself up short. I was fucking with my concentration, and I wasn't safe yet, and nowhere close, neither. Shut it down, Milly-Fox, I said to myself, thought about my breathing while I counted a septad, and then started again toward Ver-Istenna's and the Badgers' territory.
I'd never called it in, but Margot wouldn't've forgotten the favor she owed me.
Felix
Brother Orphelin appeared in the doorway of the ward, as vast and improbable as the moon. "Felix," he said, "you have a visitor."
Everyone stared at me. No one in St. Crellifer's had visitors; it wasn't that kind of hospice. I floundered up through layers of darkness, obedient to Brother Orphelin's beckoning gesture, as I obeyed Brother Orphelin in all things. He had the whip hand, and we both knew it.
He had bided his time, an expert in his own peculiar game of cat and mouse. Every day for that first week, I had expected to be called to his office, a round room on the third floor with yellow, cracking plaster and an ineradicable stink of sweat. Every day for the second week, I flinched at the sound of his footsteps, kept my eyes lowered when he was in the room, hoping—as a child hopes—that if I did not make eye contact, he would forget about me.
Then, although I neither forgot nor ceased to fear, I began to drift, to sink. My madness, the colors and ghosts, the terrible intangibility of time, made it first difficult and then impossible to keep track of the calendar. So I had no way of telling how long it truly was before Brother Orphelin made his move.
I was in a hallway on the second floor, at the very back of the building. It was another hallway the uses of which I did not know and did not want to. The ghosts who thronged the corners and window bays were all shaven-headed, with terrible scars on their scalps. Many of them could not even weep or scream; they simply stared straight ahead with dull, burnt-out eyes. I had never been so glad that the ghosts of St. Crellifer's did not see me.
I had been having trouble that day with the echoes of an argument. I knew this hallway was deserted except for the dead; I had checked every room. But still the voices argued, just out of sight around a corner, or just behind the half-ajar door of one of the deserted rooms, or even somehow seeming to belong to men standing outside the window, arguing violently on empty air.
The argument made it hard to work; the voices hovered just on the edge of comprehensibility, so that I could never understand them but kept being drawn into futile attempts to make the words resolve into sense, only coming back to myself when the duty brother hit me. The third time he'd boxed my ears, he'd warned me that if he caught me shirking again, he would be obligated to tell Brother Lilburn, and I had grimly set myself to concentrate on the floorboards, the scrub brush, and the pail of water.
For some time I was able to stay focused, but then I caught a word: reprehensible. My head came up, and I strained to hear more; the argument would be easier to bear if I just knew what it was
about
. But it remained maddeningly muffled, as if the original sound had carried into the hallway from behind a closed door. I could hear their anger, their loathing for each other, the vituperative poison of their exchanges, but no other words, only a stray syllable here and there, rendered meaningless by lack of context.
I began to get up, turning to go back down the corridor one more time, to see if I could find the room in which the argument had first taken place' and found myself staring at the broad expanse of Brother Orphelin's robes I startled back, more horrified than I would have been to find the arguers behind me, tripped over the water pail, and came down hard on my back in a spreading lake of soapy, grimy water.
"Clumsy," Brother Orphelin said chidingly.
"I'm sorry," I said, scrambling to my feet. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean…" Malkar had punished me for clumsiness with an ever-fertile imagination.
"And you've gotten your clothes all dirty," Brother Orphelin said, as if I had not spoken. "We'll have to find you fresh. Come along."
I could feel the future before me, laid out with the strict unchanging formality of a minuet; what Keeper hadn't taught me about power games of this sort, Malkar had. I followed Brother Orphelin, misery a stone in my throat, and watched the violet and red and orange swirl around him like a cloud of carrion-feeding butterflies.
He took a different staircase down, this one even narrower and steeper, but we ended up in the same place: the storeroom in the basement.
"Now strip out of those wet things," he said, with a mocking parody or concern. I could feel his smirk, although I could not look him in the face.
My hands were shaking; I knew he could see that as I obediently took off my shirt and trousers to stand hunched and naked before his tiny, gleaming eyes. I realized I was running my hands across my scalp, the hedgehog prickle of hair against my palms, a parody of my own old habit, developed when I was a prostitute and my hair one of my great assets. dragged my hands back down to my side and deliberately straightened. I had stood naked before men I loathed, men I despised, men who disgust me. I told myself this was no different.
Brother Orphelin picked up a clean shirt and clean trousers from one of the shelves, but he did not give them to me. He walked slowly around me, like a potential buyer inspecting a horse. He stood behind me for a long time, staring. There had been a particular set among the Shining Tiger's clientele who always asked for me; I felt now the ghosts of their hot fingers and their repulsive breath and their hot, wet eyes, tracing the white web of scars across my shoulder blades. The scars continued down across my buttocks and thighs, hateful, ugly, shameful.
When he had looked his fill, he came back around to face me and said, "How did you get those scars?"
When Shannon had asked that question, I had lied. He was a scion of the House of Teverius, privileged, protected; he had never seen whip scars close, did not recognize them for what they were. I had told him that they were the result of a rare Caloxan plague that caused tremendous welts radiating outward from the spine. The only treatment was to lay them open, I said, although it caused dreadful scarring. I was careful that he never saw my back in good light—easy enough in the Mirador's perpetual gloom—and I told him the scars were painful to the touch, which was another lie. He never got any clear idea of the extent or the severity of the damage to my back. And he believed me, because he was younger than I, because he was annemer, because he loved me. And I'd never even felt guilty about it until now.
I kept my chin up, my shoulders straight, my eyes focused somewhere past Brother Orphelin's left shoulder, and did not answer.
He found that amusing. "Come now, Felix. You don't think you can hold out against me, do you? You have no idea of what I can do to you."
It can't be worse than Malkar, I thought. I said nothing.
"I should perhaps warn you," he said meditatively, "that my word is law in St. Crellifer's. No one will defend you."
I said nothing.
"And you realize, of course, if you don't tell
me
, I will have to commend you to the attention of Brother Lilburn."
Maybe, before the Virtu had been broken, I would have been able to hold out even then, but I was terrified of Brother Lilburn, and I knew that once he had noticed me there was nothing in the world that could save me, in the same way that as children Joline and I had known the Tallowman's waiting for us on the landing outside the dormitory door. It was the black, unreasoning fear, and my eyes flicked to Brother Orphelin's face before I could stop them.
"Oho, Brother Lilburn makes you nervous, does he? I can't say I blame you , Felix. He's a spooky bastard and no mistake. Do you know what Brother Lilburn does with sinners who resist confession?"
He told me, slowly, with a wealth of detail, his tiny, porcine eyes fixed gloatingly on my face. By the time he was done, my eyes were closed, and I was swallowing hard, trying to keep from crying. I didn't have the strength for this; I couldn't stand against Brother Orphelin's smothering weight.
I said in a choked whisper, not opening my eyes. "I was a kept-thief. My keeper beat me."
"There, see? That wasn't so hard. Look at me, Felix."
I did, staring at his round, pallid face, those tiny, cynical, glinting eyes I felt like a mouse or a shrew—some small, stupid creature being mesmerized by a snake.
"I think you'll find," he said, "that you feel better for having told me this of your own free will. Don't you?"
Another of Malkar's favorite games, forcing me to thank him for hurting me. "Yes, Brother Orphelin," I said.
"Good," he said and, unbelievably, smiled at me, a smirk like a round of rotted cheese. "What did your keeper use on you? A bullwhip?"
I felt the blood mounting to my face; even Malkar had never been quite so brutal in describing my back. I couldn't meet Brother Orphelin's eyes any longer. "A nun's scourge," I said. "It's not… it's not as bad as it looks." I had been lucky; Lorenzo, seeing my potential, had paid for a chirurgeon to treat my adhesions and Malkar had continued those treatments—mostly, I believed, because they were excruciatingly painful, and that had amused him—so that I reached adulthood still able to straighten to my full six-foot-two, still with a complete range of motion in my shoulders. Only the ugliness remained.
Brother Orphelin said nothing, staring at me until I looked at him again. Then he gave me another hideous smile and said, "You may put your clothes on now."
He handed them to me. I wanted to dress slowly, deliberately, to show him he hadn't affected me, but the scarred skin of my back was crawling with the weight of remembered stares, and I scrambled into my clothes as quickly as I could.
"Very good, Felix," said Brother Orphelin. "Your truthfulness pleases me." And with that cruelly ironic joke, my torture was over. Brother Orphelin had opened the door, and I had followed him back up to the second floor, my scrub brush, and my pail.
And here I was, following Brother Orphelin again, to meet a visitor I had not expected and truthfully did not want.
"You may talk with your visitor in here," he said, waving me into a parlor that was normally reserved for the brothers themselves. It had a carpet, and chairs that weren't broken or missing half their upholstery, and someone had cleaned the window within living memory. I was already in the room, Brother Orphelin's bulk blocking the door, when I saw my visitor clearly.
I stopped in my tracks, even went back about half a step. The person waiting for me had the gray-brown, scaly head of a snake. Its eyes were lurid yellow, and they fixed on me instantly, identifying me as prey. I remembered the legends of the basilisk, and looked down.
"Felix," said the snake. "It is good to see you… well again."
Robert's voice. I dared a glance at the monster's hands: Robert's rings, gold set with emeralds. "What do you want?" I said.
The snake must have shifted the flat malevolence of its gaze to Brother Orphelin, who said, "I'll leave you to your visit," and closed the door.
"Giancarlo sent me," Robert said.
"Why?"
"Come sit down. Let's discuss this like reasonable men."
"I'm not reasonable," I said, not moving. "That's why I'm here."
The snake chuckled; I knew the expression that would have been on Robert's face if I had been able to see it. "You don't have any bargaining power here, you know. Nothing you say is going to get you out of St. Crellifer's."
"What do you want?" I said again, despairingly.
"Just to talk," the monster said in Robert's voice, and I knew it lied.
I said nothing, and the silence stretched out. The snake was staring at me. I kept my gaze on the toes of its boots, glossy black and pointed. I told myself that I had once worn boots like those, but I could no longer believe it.
"Sit down, Felix," Robert said, and if I didn't look up, I could pretend that really was Robert, whom I had always hated but never feared, not a monster with a snake's head and Robert's rings. I sat down.
"That's better," the monster said. I felt those yellow eyes evaluating me. "Giancarlo still wants to know how you did it."
"I can't tell you," I said, barely whispering, skirting the edge of the truth as closely as I could.
"there are other ways to find out." The monster leaned forward suddenly too fast for me to avoid, and caught my wrists. "I wanted to do this all along, but Giancarlo wouldn't let me, the pompous old fool."
"Let me go!" My head was full of Malkar; I broke away, knocked the chair over, and retreated as far as the door, where I stood, trembling.
"Don't be stupid, Felix," the snake said. "It won't hurt if you cooperate."
But that was what Malkar always said. I clawed the door open and ran.
Mildmay
Me and Margot had been friends for more than two septads. She'd been one of Keeper's kids, too, an indiction to one side or the other of my age. She'd been the first of us to get out. I thought she still steered clear of Britomart, and I didn't blame her. Keeper had been pissed.