On the other hand, it wasn't like I'd been prepared for this jaunt into the middle of fuck-all nowhere. So what we had to eat was a couple winter apples I had in my coat pocket, and they weren't going to get us very far. If Felix hadn't been the way he was, I would've said, Fuck it, let
him
starve, and lit out on my own. But I couldn't ditch him now. It would be as good as murder.
Which kind of left us with stealing, and I wasn't feeling none too happy with that, neither, because burgling farmhouses was
way
outside my line of work, and I was having these terrible visions of getting caught red-handed with a cheese or something. And then all them questions—who are you? where are you going?—start up again, only with a nastier tone of voice and probably the wrong end of a pitchfork, too.
I pushed the heels of my hands against my eyes. I felt like that story Keeper had dreamed up for Phoskis way back when was coming true. I
was
losing my nerve. I'd been losing it for months like a sandbag with a slow leak, going back to Ginevra's death—or maybe even before that, maybe even all the way back to the Boneprince and that terrible voice in the dark saying as how Brinvillier Strych wasn't able to make the party.
There's this game they play in Gilgamesh. I used to be pretty good at it. You got this kind of tower built out of little sticks, and the game is you remove sticks until the tower falls down, and the more sticks you got in front of you when it finally goes, the higher your score. I felt like I was one of them towers, and that night in the Boneprince was when somebody pulled out the first stick—the one that wouldn't matter at all if they didn't go on to pull out more sticks and more and more—and now it was Kethe knows how many sticks later, and I was starting to topple.
And then Felix said in this little, scared, whispery voice, "Mildmay? Are you all right?"
Can't fall apart now, Milly-Fox. You got responsibilities.
"I'm okay," I said, and for once I was glad of my scar because it meant I didn't have to try and fake a smile.
I knew what I had to do. I felt the way I'd felt back in Brumaire, heading for the Anchorite's Knitting, knowing it was the wrong thing to do, but just not seeing that I had any options. Kethe knew how much longer we were going to be wandering around out here. We had to eat, and I wasn't no nature boy like Sir Ursulan in the stories, to make snares for rabbits out of my own hair. If we were going to get food, it was going to have to be from somebody else. And I'd got this thing in my mind, like a splinter buried so deep you can't dig it out, about not letting nobody see Felix and not giving nobody a chance to ask questions. I ain't a good liar anyway, and I knew there wasn't no story I could come up with that wasn't going to look as much like a lie as if I'd gone ahead and labeled it. But if I could get into somebody's larder and back out again without nobody the wiser…I had some money still, and I figured I could leave it on a shelf or something and it wouldn't be quite so much like stealing.
Going moral on me, Milly-Fox? Keeper asked in my head, in that particular drawling voice she used to let you know as how she hadn't thought you were sissy enough or stupid enough to get hung up on something like this. She'd used it on me when she'd told me she was going to start training me to kill people, and I'd never quite lost the sting of it, like salt on raw skin. And even though I'd seen her do it to other kids and even though I'd left her, just knowing that was what she'd say and how she'd say it was
still
enough to make me do stuff I knew better than to touch.
But another thing I learned from Keeper was even when you were doing something stupid, you had to do it right. So I caught Felix and made him look me in the eyes and said, "Okay. Here's what's gonna happen. I'm gonna go over there"—I pointed at the nearest farmhouse—"and find us some food. You're gonna stay right here 'til I get back, and if anybody but me comes snooping around, you're gonna hide. You got that?"
He nodded.
"Tell it back," I said, like I was Keeper and he was some half-bright kid I was sending on a job.
"You're going to find food." He pointed at the farmhouse. "I'm going to stay here and hide if I see anybody."
Not the world's best plan, but I didn't figure I was going to come up with nothing better. "Right," I said. "Good. You okay with that?"
He nodded and gave me that smile that he only got when he was about halfway down the well and I said something nice to him.
"Okay," I said, and then I set out to do what I thought at the time and subsequently learned for sure was the stupidest damn thing I'd ever done in my life.
Felix
I waited for hours, and he didn't come back. The sun set; the stars came out. I saw a man come out of the farmhouse and saddle a horse and ride away very fast. But he went the other direction, not toward me, and there was no one else.
Something had gone wrong. Mildmay had fallen down a well or been gored by a bull. Or been captured. He had told me to wait, but if he was hurt or trapped, I had to do something. There was no one else.
I picked up the valise that held our clean clothes and started toward the farmhouse. It wasn't a long walk.
I learned more about farm animals and equipment in the next half hour than I had ever wanted to know, but I did not find Mildmay. I was afraid that they had him in the house. There was still a candle burning in one of the upper rooms, and I could not imagine that I could get into the house unnoticed, much less get Mildmay and myself out.
I identified and avoided the henhouse; Mildmay would not be in there, and I remembered enough from my childhood in the Lower City to know just how difficult my life could become if I alarmed the hens. My circuitous path brought me up to the side of the house farthest from my starting point, and there I found the doors to a root cellar, with the shaft of a hoe shoved through their handles as a crudely improvised lock.
Here at last was the sign of a prisoner. I slid the hoe out of the door handles and opened the left-hand door as quietly as I could. The musty pungency of root vegetables rose to meet me. I descended the stairs cautiously, wishing more than ever for my witchlights, for if Mildmay was down here, they had left him without so much as a candle, and—mindful of that light in the farmhouse window that indicated someone was awake and listening—I did not dare call out.
I felt my way from step to step, my right hand maintaining a death grip on the banister. When I finally reached the cellar floor, I took a hesitant step away from the stairs, wondering if it was safe to say Mildmay's name very softly. But before I could make any kind of a noise, I was flat on my stomach on the floor, my assailant's weight pinning me down, one of his hands over my mouth, the other trapping my wrist in such a way that if I moved, something was going to break. I could hear my heart clamoring in my chest.
"I can kill you before you have time to blink," Mildmay's voice said in my ear, in Midlander, low and flat and hideously truthful. "And don't think I won't. Now tell me how long I got."
His hand released my mouth, and I gasped sideways against the floor, "Mildmay, it's me, Felix!"
"
Felix
?" All at once, his weight and hands were gone, and the relief was like cool air after the heat of a furnace. I sat up and gingerly flexed my wrist. "What are you
doing
?"
"I thought you had to be in trouble, so I came." I stood up, since nothing seemed damaged, although I was a little short of breath. Now that I knew where he was, I could see shreds and wisps of color against the dark, but I could not read them. "You
are
in trouble, right?"
"Oh, fuck, yeah," he said, with something that might almost have been a laugh. "C'mon, let's bail, and I'll tell you the whole fucking fairy tale later. If we hang around much longer, we're both liable to get lynched."
Mildmay stopped only long enough to close the cellar doors and stick the hoe back through the handles, then led me swiftly and unhesitatingly away from the farm buildings. We must have gone a mile and a half before he stopped and said, "You want a turnip?"
"A what?"
"Turnip. I was planning on throwing 'em at the sheriff's men, but, you know, at least they're something to eat."
I accepted the hard, bulbous object he offered, and asked, "What happened?"
"I got caught," he said, and I didn't have to see him to know that he had shrugged. "Now which way to your crying people?"
"What? You… but I—"
"You still want to find 'em, right?"
"Well, yes, but—"
"I got in a real nasty jam on account of them," he said, his voice as flat and hostile as it had been in the root cellar before he'd known who I was, "so don't go telling me that now they ain't important. Which way?"
The question was as hard as a slap. "That way," I said. "Away from the moon."
"Okay, then. Eat your damn turnip." He started walking, and I followed him. I ate the turnip without enjoyment; although I longed to lob it into the darkness and be done with it, I knew he would never forgive me if I did.
It wasn't until the sun rose that I got any idea of what Mildmay meant by "a real nasty jam." But the first daylight, even as it brought the red and orange and shamed magenta into full clarity around him, also showed me that he was sporting a magnificent black eye. And the stiff, cautious way he was moving suggested that there were other bruises beneath his shirt.
Then he raised one hand to push his hair out of his eyes, and my breath caught in my throat. His wrist was raw with scabbing welts. "What
happened
?" I said.
"Huh? Oh. Well, 'course they tied me up."
"Those should be washed out. And the bloodstains on your cuff."
He gave me a look, indecipherable as all Mildmay's looks were. "Okay," he said, and we turned aside to find a stream.
It didn't take long, and I remembered that we were nearing the ocean, Mildmay stripped out of his shirt without protest, and I saw the angry red and black and purple bruises along his side.
"Are your ribs all right?"
He craned his head to see them, then prodded his side experimentally. "They ain't broke," he said, then made a strange, twisted grimace that I recognized after a moment as a wince. "This 'un might be cracked."
"I don't think we have anything to strap them with," I said, looking futilely in our single valise.
"Oh, it don't need nothing like that. Just don't make me laugh for a day or two."
I decided that was mostly a joke and smiled at him.
After stretching cautiously, he turned and knelt by the stream to wash his wrists, the left being just as torn and bruised as the right.
I watched him, trying to decide if he was lying about how badly he was hurt, and suddenly, like throwing open a pair of shutters, I saw the muscles of his back moving beneath his skin, the strength of his shoulders, the long-fingered grace of his hands. I had always known that Mildmay, despite being a good half foot shorter than I, was as muscular and agile as an acrobat, but now I saw that he was beautiful.
Longing and fear hit me together like a lightning bolt, and I said hastily, "You said you'd tell me what happened."
"Powers, I guess I did." He pushed his hair away from his face again, but now I saw both grace and weariness in the movement.
"You don't have to. I mean, if…"
"I got worse stories," he said, and while he cannibalized our last clean handkerchief for bandages, he proceeded to give me a brutally unvarnished account of the night.
"It was my own damn fault," he said. He did not look at me as he spoke, but his voice was perfectly clear and steady, and he seemed to be making a particular effort not to let his words slur as badly as they usually did. "I knew it was a bad idea, and I did it anyway, and I guess I got what paid for.
"I went in like I owned the place—they didn't lock their kitchen door. There wasn't nobody around, so I found the larder and started checking out their supplies."
His face was getting redder and redder, and I saw that his casual tone was a deception. He had not been pleased with himself even before disaster struck.
"Dunno why I didn't hear her coming—I'm slipping, I guess—but all at once there was this scream from a lady with a powerful set of lungs, and I was on my way out the door when I met these five goons on their way in. They wouldn't let me try and explain. They just jumped me. I had money I would've given 'em, but I ain't rightly sure they'd've took it. They was yelling things about monsters and heathens and decent women. I think they thought I was planning on raping her. Which I wasn't. So one of 'em says as how he's going for the sheriff, and the rest of 'em chucked me in that damn root cellar, where I sat and cussed 'til you came and let me out."
He turned to look at me; I could see shame coiling round and round in the depths of his eyes, but his gaze was steady as he said, "I'm sorry if I hurt you."
"You didn't," I said, a prompt lie and safe, since I didn't think he would be able to see bruises through my tattoos. There was something he wasn't telling me, probably something else the "goons" had said that rankled even more deeply than the rest of it, but if he didn't want to tell me, I had no right to ask. I felt guilty enough for prying the story out of him in the first place.
"Give me a hand?" he said after a moment. He'd rendered the handkerchief neatly into strips, but even he was not quite dextrous enough to wrap them properly one-handed.
"Of course," I said, feeling my face flood with color, and moved over to follow his careful, patient instructions about how to get the most use out of what we had. He smelled of sweat and dirt, as I did, and also, faintly and lingeringly, of the root cellar. There were old, thin scars on his hands, and I remembered he'd said the scar on his face came from a knife fight. His palms were callused, and I could feel the strength and heat of his hands even as he held them still for me to work. I imagined what they would feel like in the softness of a caress, and bent my head hastily so that Mildmay would not see the tangle of desire and terror twisting my face.