Mélusine (52 page)

He said, "What happened to your hands?"

I thought for a panicky moment he meant the bruises I had denied, but I looked at my fingers and saw the lumped wrongness of them. "My fingers were broken," I said, and now that he had drawn my attention to them, I could feel the stiffness, like the echo of pain. "When M—when the Mirador burned. Gideon set a healing spell on them, but I'm afraid it didn't take very well. There." And my hands jerked back from him as if he were burning. "That's the best I can do."

"Thanks." He pulled his shirt out of the stream, wrung it out, and swapped it for the clean shirt in our valise. We had had to compromise between what would fit him and what would fit me, so that extra shirt hung on him like a tent, whereas it left an inch and a half of my wrists showing at the cuffs.

He stood up, stretched again, warily, and said, "Let's go."

The crying people pleaded and sobbed, and I started toward them.

Mildmay

About sunset, Felix finally stopped walking. I came up the last of the hill to stand beside him and said, "You done stopped for a reason?"

"We're here."

"Where?"

"Nera," Felix said.

"What?"

"This was anciently the city of Nera." He wasn't talking to me; he sounded like somebody reciting a poem, and his eyes were wide and dreaming and stark barking mad. "It was the summer palace of the last great Emperor of Lucrèce. Until the Sunlings came."

"The Sunlings? But I thought they were just, you know, in stories."

For a minute I thought he wasn't going to answer me at all, but then he said, "Where did you think those stories came from?"

If he'd been topside, he would've sent that question straight through me like a skewer. But he didn't mean nothing nasty by it now. The way he was looking, I wasn't even sure he knew he'd said it.

"The Sunlings came," he went on. "They landed in their fierce, sharp-nosed boats, and they came up to the city in their shining armor, and they destroyed it."

"How… how d'you know?"

"They told me," he said and pointed down into the valley.

"
They
?" I asked, and I swear my voice had gone up an octave and a half.

"Sacred bleeding fuck," I said, because, I mean, it's one thing to know your crazy hocus brother sees ghosts, and a whole different thing when you find out they're telling him bedtime stories.

I don't think he even heard me. He just went on staring at that valley, with this look on his face kind of like a statue—you know what I mean, almost blank but with this little hint of a frown. I couldn't even guess at what he was thinking, and I wasn't all that sure I wanted to. Powers, he was spooking me out something fierce.

And then he said, "We have to help them. They want a maze."

"Okay," I said because I'd gone right out the other end of where it looked like any kind of use in saying this whole thing was nuts. "How're we gonna do that?"

He was in some kind of state I'd never seen before. Because I knew he was down the well—there wasn't nothing looked like
him
in his eyes, if that makes any sense—but he didn't seem scared. Not of me, not of the ghosts—it was like he'd found some place where the fear couldn't get at him. He said, "Someone told me once about mazes made by dancing. Could we do that?"

"Um. Did they tell you how?"

"No," he said like a kid admitting they ain't washed behind their ears.

"Then that ain't much good." And then I couldn't help it. My fucking curiosity reared up and made me ask, "What do they want a maze for?"

"One of their goddesses, the goddess of the underworld, was worshipped with mazes and labyrinths. If they want to come to her realm, the realm of the dead, they must trace a maze. And the Sunlings destroyed their maze with the rest of the city."

"You mean they worshipped Cade-Cholera?"

"No, of course not," he said and was himself for a second. Then he went all dreamy again. "She is the goddess of death, despair, stagnation, abandoned places. They say she is the only god who will protect them now, but they cannot reach her without a maze."

"Spooky," I said under my breath, meaning the goddess. But I was remembering the Boneprince and the dream I'd had about it and the way I'd felt when I was sitting on the Road of Marble making a crown of trumps. There wasn't nothing more I could do for the kept-thieves. I didn't know how to lay them, and, Kethe, I might never make it back to Mélusine even to give them another crown. But Felix was looking at the same sort of thing here, and he did know what to do. And he was going to do it. I could see it in the way he was looking at the valley. Where ordinary people—even ordinary crazy people—would've run screaming, he was going to do what these people needed so they could rest. And, I mean, he was my brother and everything, but I think that was where I figured out he was worth it, even if he was a pain and a half when he was down the well and a real prick when he wasn't. Because he was going to help these people who needed help, even though they'd been dead for Kethe knows how long and had seriously fucked up our already fucked-up lives besides.

But I still had to look after him. "Look," I said. "It's getting on for night, and we can't make no mazes in the dark. Sleep on it. Maybe we'll think of something."

Our big problem of course was food, namely us not having none. And seeing as how it was way early in the spring, there wasn't much just laying around. I'd discovered one of the times he was topside that Felix knew most everything about plants, and I got so damn desperate that night that I finally just uprooted this thing with a long stem and kind of wheat-looking stuff at the top and shoved it at him.

He looked at it like maybe it would bite him, and I said, "Can we eat it?"

I thought for a moment it wasn't going to do no good, and, Kethe, I just about sat down and cried. Then he pinched the bridge of his nose, like he was really trying to pull himself together, and gave the thing this glassy-eyed frown that was seriously spooky. And after a long, long pause, he said, "I think so."

"You
think
so?" I said, and he flinched back from me like now he thought I was going to bite him. And I got to admit, I kind of felt like it.

But I stopped and counted a septad and said, quiet and nice-like, "D'you know what it is?"

He nodded.

"Is it poisonous?"

He shook his head.

"Okay, then," I said, stripped the grains off the stalk, and ate them. I ain't got nothing nice to say about the way they tasted, but most anything'll beat starving to death, and whatever that stuff was, there was a lot of it around. I even got Felix to eat some, although it took some pretty basic bullying.

We were good for water, at least, and the stalks of the stuff that wasn't quite wheat ended up being useful as bedding. I made Felix promise he wouldn't go talk to the crying people until daylight, got him settled, got myself settled, looked up, and saw about a million and a half stars.

"Sir Ursulan here I come," I said, and I don't know how it happened, but then I fell asleep.

Felix

I dream of a burning city. My throat is raw with smoke, and shapes come and go in the lurid darkness like the salamanders who are said to live in volcanoes. At first I think I am in Mélusine, trapped in the Fire of 2263, but the buildings do not look right, and when someone rises out of the darkness and clutches my arm, he has red hair like mine and glaring yellow eyes. This is not Mélusine, but in the dream I know it is my home.

The red-haired man drags me after him down a narrow alley and out into the Forum Imperatoris Quirini X; to the stench of burning is added the stench of death. I struggle against his grip as he drags me toward the terrible ramparts of bodies, headless and limp like the massacred dolls of a cruel child. But the invader is stronger than I am, and all I can do is curse him.

As we near the steps of the palace, I can hear women screaming. I see foreign men crouching on the steps, struggling bare limbs visible between the ugly masses of their bodies. I realize what is happening and look away, fighting not to vomit. My captor notices and laughs.

My captor drags me to a halt before the Emperor and barks something in his harsh, cruel language. I try again to free myself from him, but his grip is like granite, and he is much bigger than I. I have no more chance against him than a fly does against the web of a spider.

The Emperor raises his head. For a moment, we look at each other, not as Emperor and subject, but as two human beings afraid and in pain. My captor barks something. The Emperor spits at him, then screams with pain. The invader's grip tightens on my arm, and he drags me away, leaving the Emperor screaming at the sky.

We are walking on blood. I am coughing and gagging; my captor seems not even to notice the stench. He jerks me to a halt. He is looking over my shoulder. I turn my head just in time to see the sword before it bites into my neck.

I am screaming. I can hear myself screaming, but I cannot stop. I can still taste smoke, still feel the imprint of the invader's fingers on my upper arm. I am dead, I am dead, but I cannot stop screaming.

I feel the weight and heat of hands on my shoulders, shaking me; I hear a voice, but I can't understand it. I try to bring my hands up to free myself, but I can't seem to move. My arms, my legs, my throbbing head… with the force of panic, I open my eyes. There is just enough light in the sky that I can see the red hair of the man shaking me, and my paralysis breaks.

I flail away from him, falling over my own legs in my effort to get to my feet. I catch myself against the ground, find my balance, and run. But I have barely gone a dozen steps when a weight crashes into my back, slamming me to the ground and knocking all the breath out of my body. I know it is the red-haired invader, and I try to throw him off, but my lungs are like stone, and he pins me easily.

For a moment, brief as an eye-blink, I am in a dank stone room, naked, and the weight pinning me down belongs to the man I hate most in the world. And then I am back in the dawnlight, facedown in dew-cool grass, and I can hear the short, panting breath of the man holding me, and his voice, cursing in a slurred mutter, in Marathine.

"Who am I?" I sob into the grass.

"The worst fucking shit-for-brains pain in the ass I've ever been saddled with. What the fuck is
wrong
with you?"

"Who am I? Please, just tell me who I am!"

There is a long pause, as fragile as blown glass, and then he says, in a small, deeply worried voice, "Felix, are you okay?"

"Felix? Is that my name?"

"Yeah. Felix Harrowgate. You're a hoc—a wizard. In the Mirador. You're my half brother." And in an even smaller voice, "I'm Mildmay."

"Oh!" I say and burst into tears.

shoulders, but I lean away from it, and it is gone. "It's okay. That must've been some nightmare, I guess. I'm sorry I yelled. But you're okay. Sun's coming up and everything."

I am so grateful to be alive, so grateful that he is not the man I fear and hate. I cry until my eyes are swollen and raw. He sits nearby, as patient as earth, until I have myself under some sort of control again, and can dry my face and steady my breathing.

"D'you wanna talk about it at all?"

I look at him cautiously and see the fox-headed man, whom I know and trust. "It was Nera," I say. "The burning city and the bodies and the Emperor and… and they killed me."

"Kethe. Was it… I mean, are they pissed 'cause we ain't helping 'em fast enough? Making that maze like you said?"

"No," I say, shaking my head to dispel the cloudiness of dreaming. "No, it's not like that."

"Okay," he says dubiously. Then, "Oh, fuck." He stands up, looking at the sky.

I look, too, and see the clouds massing like armies on the western horizon.

Mildmay

We'd been lucky with the weather, not getting rained on above maybe three or four times, and I figure I should've been expecting my luck to run out. Which, I mean, sure, okay, gotta have rain, I know that. But it was like with Vey in the Boneprince—it couldn't've picked a worser time.

I got Felix back to our half-assed sort of camp, and I got him to eat some more of them nasty wheat-type things that was all we had in the way of food. But both of us kept looking at the sky like it was a clock and we were afraid we'd be late—which I guess ain't so far off. If we were going to do anything, it had to be before that storm hit us. And maybe it was the storm, or maybe it was wanting to get the fuck away from this freakshow place, or maybe it was just the way Felix was looking at me, like he knew I had all the answers soon as I cared to tell him, but all at once I had an idea.

"We could do it with the grass!"

Felix gave me this worried look.

"Oh, come on. Like gardening, right? We just pull up the grass where we want the maze to be. That'd work, wouldn't it?"

It took him a long time to answer me, like he had to translate what I said into some other language he wasn't very good at, and then translate back what he wanted to say. I got to admit, if I'd thought there was any way in Hell I could've pulled it off, I'd've hit him over the head and dragged him away from Nera as fast as I could. It was doing something to him. At first I'd thought it was maybe okay, because it seemed like it was helping him keep himself together and kind of clearer-headed than he mostly was when he was down the well. But that dream he'd had—Kethe, I think about all I want is never to see nothing like that again in my whole damn life. And nothing that could do that to him was okay. I didn't care how nasty these people had died or how long they'd been trapped out here in the grass. They still weren't folks I'd've wanted to turn my back on—if I could've seen 'em, that is, which of course I couldn't.