So he came in and said, "Oh," like he hadn't expected me to get that far. Then he said, "How are you feeling?"
"Fine," I said, and yes I was lying like a rug, but I wasn't about to tell him the truth.
"Good, good. Then tomorrow I'll show you the way out into the garden."
"The
garden
?" I'd been figuring they weren't going to let me out of this room until they couldn't keep me in it no more.
"Of course," he said, giving me this frown like even somebody as stupid and backward as me should've been able to figure
that
out. "You have to walk now if you want your leg to heal. And you won't bother anyone out there."
"Oh good," I said, but I know I didn't sound as snarky as I wanted to, because I was suddenly feeling like there was like twice as much light in the room or something. I mean, even with my fun new glass leg and everything, the idea of getting outside was just about enough to make me drool.
"Are you sure you're all right? You look a little pale."
"Nah, I'm fine. Little tired, maybe." Oh yeah, and my leg feels like it's liable to come to bits next time I move. But if I said anything like that, he'd take the stick back, and I wouldn't even be able to get to this armchair to look out the window.
"Don't overdo it," he said and then kind of came up short, like he'd forgot for a moment he wasn't
supposed to be nice to me.
" 'Course not."
"Do you need anything? Any… help?"
"Nope. I'm good."
"All right," he said and left like he'd remembered he had something else he had to be doing. But I was willing to bet it was just that he'd spooked himself by treating me like a person instead of a cockroach.
I sat and looked at the garden until sundown. Then, since there wasn't nobody around to see, I crawled back to bed on my hands and one knee, dragging my bad leg like a dead dog. I barely managed to get myself under the covers before I fell asleep like I'd been sandbagged.
Felix
Hands holding me down. Pain shattering my skull. Black anger exploding everywhere, drenching everything in the colors of bruises and blood. Voices like the meaningless soughing of the wind.
I cannot free myself. There are too many hands, too much pain. I cannot fight any longer, and I shut my eyes against the colors. I don't know where I am; I don't know when this is. I don't know, if I were to open my eyes, whether I would see Malkar or Robert, the workroom in the Warren or the basement of St. Crellifer's. I am afraid to look.
After a time, the pain ebbs away; the hands are gone. I lie, as limp as threadbare linen, and try to catch hold of something, anything, in the vertiginous darkness that can tell me where I am and what is happening to me. But even when finally, desperately, I open my eyes, there is nothing familiar, nothing safe, only a small room with moonlight streaming through the window.
I roll over to face the wall and cry with pain and loneliness and grief for everyone I have lost.
Mildmay
When I had a septad and three, I went four days once without telling Keeper two of my ribs were broken. The reasons don't matter now. I mention it because that was pretty much exactly how I felt the next morning. My leg was like a bad jury-rig, and, powers, it hurt. But I knew if I let on at all, the only thing that'd happen was I wouldn't get out into the garden. And he might say I was whining again.
So I'd got up before dawn and got myself to the water closet and back, because I figured I didn't want him watching me go up and down the hall, and I was right. It was like I was dragging a big piece of jointed iron after me instead of a leg. But at least I didn't meet nobody and I didn't fall down.
So I was waiting for the prick, and, powers,
that
was a weird feeling. I sat by the window and watched the sun come up, and then I just sat and stared and waited.
He was a punctual bastard, I'll give him that much. He always came in at what I figured was the second hour of the morning—nobody'd bothered with giving the murderer a clock—and sure enough, there he was, like a piece of clockwork himself.
He wasn't stupid, neither, least not all the way down. He'd seen how bad I wanted to get out of that fucking room, and he'd figured he could use that to make me eat more, which was something he thought I should do and I thought was stupid. I guess I should've been glad he cared enough to not want me starving to death, but I didn't think it was me he cared about so much as his own hide, and all the kinds of Hell he'd be in for if he let a patient die, even a patient like me that nobody much wanted. And anyway, I'd got this stupid thing stuck in my head, this story I'd heard when I was little, about a giant who caught kids and kept 'em in cages and fed them everything they wanted. "Like a farmer fattening hogs," Nikah'd said, all bright-eyed, and it didn't matter that I knew it was dumb, that was how I felt every time the prick said anything about me not eating—like I was being kept in a cage and fattened up for slaughter.
But he stood over me 'til I'd eaten what he called a proper breakfast, and then he made this big deal of thinking it over, whether he should let me go out there today or not. I sat there and hated him, but I didn't say nothing and I didn't let it show. I hadn't been on my guard yesterday, but he wouldn't catch me out again. And he was watching, all right, watching like a hawk to see if he could get any more leverage on me. I could forgive him a lot of things, but that one still sticks in my throat like a bone.
I think he had orders, though. I'd dealt with enough flunkies and hired goons in my time to know when somebody could really make a decision or was just putting on airs, and when all was said and done, the prick was just another goon. So I didn't rise to the bait. I just sat and waited and hoped he'd strangle to death on his own fucking smugness.
And after a while, he got bored and said, "Well? Let's go then." And I got up.
I didn't fall down and I didn't scream, and since he mostly tried not to look at me, he didn't notice if I went funny colors. I probably did—I sure felt as green as spring peas—but if he didn't notice, it didn't matter, right? And once I was up, I'd kind of got the hang of not falling down again.
So the prick headed out, and I followed him as best I could. Once out the door, 'stead of turning left toward the water closet, he turned right, and I didn't even care how bad my leg hurt because by all the powers at least I was getting to go somewhere new.
All the way down to the end of the hall, and me trying not to breathe funny and not to listen to the weird step-clunk-drag I was making on the flagstones, and there was a leaded-glass door with herons and irises worked into it, and the prick said, "This door is never locked. It leads only into the Three Serenities Garden, which has no other gate. You may come out here whenever you wish." He opened the door and waited.
I suddenly had like a Great Septad and six questions I wanted answers to, but I wasn't asking him. I pretended like he wasn't there and dragged myself out into the Three Serenities Garden. I heard the door slam, and when I looked back, the prick had gone.
I knew if I fell down right there, I'd never get on my feet again without a rope and pulley. But there was a bench a little ways off. You can sit on that, I said to myself. It ain't nowhere near as far as that fucking beach was, and you got there all right. Come on, you fucking sissy. And I dragged myself over to the bench, every step like walking on swords, and then I just sat there and thought about my breathing and didn't pass out.
And after a while the pain backed off some, and I could actually take a look around.
I wasn't in the mood to admire anything Troian, so when I say that the Three Serenities was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen, you can maybe understand that I really mean it. It was still pretty early in the spring—like maybe the middle of Germinal if I had to guess—but things were starting to bud, and the trees had this sort of green misty look to them, and, powers, the grass! I mean, the gardeners at Richard's Park do a bang-up job and everything, but the grass here was like they'd laid down velvet. I was so amazed staring at it that I finally hitched myself over to the very end of the bench and leaned sideways so far I damn near fell off, and I could just brush my fingers against the blades, and it was just as fucking soft as it looked.
The rest of it I can't describe so good, 'cause I ain't got the right kind of words. I mean, I know there was something about the way the paths went in and out around the trees, and the way the flower beds were arranged, but I don't know what to call stuff like that. But it was like, I don't know, cold water in the middle of Thermidor, and I felt better just sitting there looking at it all than I'd felt in I don't even know how long.
It was a while before I could make myself get up again, and I know I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't been twitchy about the prick catching me just sitting there. Because I knew what he'd say, and I didn't want to hear it.
The first few days, I just walked up and back about a septad-foot along the path in front of that bench. When it got too bad, I'd lurch sideways off the path and fall down on the bench and wait until the hornets settled down again, and then I'd get up and take it from the top. And then around sundown, I'd haul myself back to my room, so I could be waiting for the prick when he came and not be too sweaty or pale or breathing hard. To be honest, it wasn't the sort of life I'd've wished on a dog, but at least I was so tired I wasn't having trouble falling asleep, and I was mostly not even dreaming. And although I started waking up with leg cramps, at least I knew how to work them out without screaming the place down. But it still wasn't nothing I'd've wished on a dog I hated.
I thought for a while I was the only person who ever used the Three Serenities. I figured everybody'd been told there was a murderer wandering around and had decided they'd just go somewhere else. And I couldn't blame 'em. But then, the fourth or fifth day, I'd got out there and was sitting on that damn bench waiting until I was brave enough to get up again, and the door opened, and this guy came out.
At first I thought he was Felix, and my heart tried to crawl up into my throat. But he wasn't, which I'd basically known anyway, except for being stupid. He was older than me by some, but not by a whole bunch, and he was Troian, so he was tall and skinny with the red hair back in a knot and the spooky yellow eyes. And he was sick. He was moving real slow, like it was almost more than he could do to keep standing up, and he had this big white woolly shawl wrapped around him like an old granny. And his face was bone-white, with red along his cheeks like he was wearing rouge, only I knew damn well he wasn't. I knew a consumptive when I saw one. I was absolutely fucking amazed that they let him out alone.
He kind of came up short a little when he saw me, but after a second he came on again and said, "Hello," to me in Kekropian—which I guessed I had to start calling Troian, because probably it was their language first.
I said hello back, figuring he just had better manners than anybody else I'd met, but when he was in front of me he stopped and turned and said, "I don't know you, do I? Are you a new acolyte?"
Oh Kethe, this had to be the only guy in the Gardens who hadn't been told. I said, "No, I'm a… I guess I'm a patient."
"I'm sorry," he said, "I didn't quite…"
Fucking Kekropian and its fucking consonants. "I'm a patient," I said, loud and careful and spacing the words out good.
"Ah," he said. "Like me. I beg your pardon."
"No, it's me. It ai—it's not your fault."
"You're very kind," he said and gave me the first honest-to-goodness smile I'd gotten since I woke up in that fucking bread box of a room. "What's your name? I'm Thamuris."
Oh powers, here we go. "Mildmay," I said.
"Ah." But he couldn't have recognized my name or nothing, because he went on, polite as a preacher, "I am pleased to meet you."
"Likewise."
"Do you often come to the Three Serenities?"
"I'm s'posed to walk here. For my leg."
"I'm sorry. I didn't quite…"
I said it again, and he nodded to show he'd got it. "And what is wrong with your leg? May I…"
"Sure," I said and moved over so there was room for him to share the bench. He settled himself down careful, like he was afraid he'd break, and I said, "I don't know exactly. There was a curse on me, and it f… it messed my leg up pretty bad."
"A curse?" he said, and I nodded to show him he'd heard me right. "But how in the blessed names of the Tetrarchs did you get cursed in this day and age? I thought that had gone out with Kekropian bonnets."
"I'm not Troian."
"So what barbaric part of the world
do
you hail from?"
"Marathat. I'm from Mélusine."
"Mélusine. The Blind City. I've read of her in books. So in Mélusine they still cast curses?"
"Yeah," I said. I didn't much want to get into it, and he just said, "Huh," like it was weird but not real interesting. And after a minute he got up, and gave me a funny little nod, and kind of floated off like he'd forgot all about me. I was fine with that. 'Nother minute, and I was up and walking myself, and I'd mostly forgot about him.
But after that I kept seeing him. He'd come drifting by my bench, or, once I got brave enough to get out of arm's reach of the bench, we'd pass each other on the paths, or I'd go by him under one tree or another. He'd be sitting there bolt upright with his eyes shut, so I guessed he was meditating, and I didn't bother him. I didn't want to make small talk anyways. It was enough for me that he didn't hate me. And I guessed nobody ever talked to him, neither, 'cause he never seemed to catch on about who I was. Which, you know, was fine with me. I had enough other shit on my mind.
My leg wasn't getting better. I was getting better at dealing with it, so I could move a little faster and I wasn't falling down no more. But the pain wasn't going away, and it wasn't getting smaller, and I'd taken enough damage in my time to know that wasn't right. And besides everybody else thought I should be getting better, too. And I wasn't.