When the neat, quiet child who served us had poured tea and departed again, Xanthippe said, "And what would you like to do now?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Do you intend to rush immediately back to your homeland? Or would you like to stay and study in the Gardens?"
"May I?"
"We should be pleased to have you."
"Because of Methony?"
"Damn Diokletian for a fool," she said without heat. "No. Nothing to do with Methony. Don't imagine that we can't see how powerful you are—and my Terrestrials are all as pleased as dogs with two tails about healing you. You might have to put up with being stared at a bit, but you can be assured your welcome would be warm. And from what you have said of your school of magic, I think there is much you could learn here—and much we could learn from you."
"Then I would be delighted to stay," I said, and she beamed at me over the strong, dark Troian tea that tasted to me of sunlight and clarity.
Mildmay
The prick was awful quiet the next half decad or so. I didn't mind. I didn't mind nothing so long as Astyanax didn't come back. The weather got warmer, then colder. I went out to the Three Serenities when I could and just stayed by the window staring out at it when I couldn't. Some days I heard Thamuris go past, and once or twice he even knocked on the door to say hello, but he was so sick, and on the laudanum to boot, and we didn't have nothing to say to each other. I was mostly just as glad the days he didn't stop. The prick started jumping like a scalded cat when I asked after Felix, and after three or four days of it, I got sick of it and said, "Okay. Just cough it up and get done with it."
"What?"
But he was a shitty liar, just like me. "You know. Come on. Has Felix gotten worse or something?"
"No. They…" And then, in a tiny voice like he wanted to say it without me actually hearing him, "They healed him."
"They
healed
him? And you were keeping the surprise for my birthday?"
"I didn't know how… I didn't want…"
"Can I see him?"
Big silence, like a drowning well.
"What?" I said. "They healed him, right? That's what you said. He's okay, isn't he?"
"Yes, yes, he's fine. It's just…"
"What?"
"He doesn't want to see you," the prick said in a tiny, tiny voice and just about ran out of the room, slamming the door with his usual bang. I think I rattled right along with the window.
Felix
I took to the library of the Gardens, as if it were a second home. Though the archivists there spoke even less Midlander than I did Troian, we shared the language of books, and could have quite remarkably long and satisfying conversations that, if transcribed, would probably have looked like nothing more than a catalogue of books on particular branches of magic. They sought out books that would help me with my Troian; in return, and to their patent delight, I agreed to look at their small collection of books in Midlander and write up catalogue entries for them. I was the first visitor to the Gardens in over a century who had both a scholar's grasp of Midlander and a practical familiarity with it.
And thus it was, on the third day, that I found myself faced with a leather-bound volume, rather battered
and having suffered at least one inundation of salt water, the title page of which read
De Doctrina
Labyrinthorum.
As was common for Midlander codices of this one's apparent age, the author's name was not given in the front—it would be at the end, a symbolic signature attesting to the document's truth—and so I was deeply bewildered to find the author's name in my head as clearly as if I had read it off the page: Ephreal Sand.
I had never been particularly interested in the theory of labyrinths—leave that to the architectural wizards, dull sticks that they were—and I had certainly never read any Midlander works on the subject. I had never seen
De Doctrina Labyrinthorum
before in my life; I was perfectly sure of that—as sure as I was that the author's name was Ephreal Sand.
I must have read a reference to it somewhere, I reasoned uneasily, but I couldn't remember doing that, either. Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps I just made up the name "Ephreal Sand." There was an easy way to check that, although I found myself reluctant to do so. I didn't want to look; I was afraid of what I would find.
"This is
stupid,"
I said, just under my breath, and turned savagely to the back of the book. And there it was, in plain, clear letters, unmistakable: EPHREAL SAND.
I stared at it for a span of time that felt like an hour, but was probably no more than a minute, then carefully, gently, shut the book. And then I sat there and stared at the front cover, trying to imagine how in the world I had heard of Ephreal Sand.
It wasn't something Malkar had told me; he had even less patience with architectural thaumaturgy than I did. It wasn't anything I had come across in my own studies. None of the Cabalines I had worked with in the Mirador were interested in labyrinths. I could feel my fingers going cold, because I did know—or, at least, I knew why I didn't know.
I shoved back my chair with violent suddenness and fled the library for the bright sunshine of the gardens.
For the next few days I worked around the
De Doctrina Labyrinthorum
, throwing myself into the study of Troian, the cataloguing of the other Midlander books, in order to avoid it. It sat on the desk in my carrel, mute, reproaching, and I told myself it was just another book, an obscure treatise on an obscure subject. But every time I looked at it, I felt the muscles of my shoulders and neck tensing. There was no one I could ask about it, no one here who would know any more than I did, and I was afraid that I would betray myself with my questions.
But on the fourth day, I could stand it no longer. I did not wish to admit that I was afraid of a mere book. After breakfast, I walked into the library, sat down at my desk, and defiantly, savagely, opened the book to a random page and stared at the text.
It was a melodramatic gesture, and one from which I expected nothing save the severance of the hold the book seemed to have over me. But my eye was caught by a word three-quarters of the way down the recto:
Nera.
For a moment, my vision went black, and there was the stench of burning and blood in my nostrils. Then my eyes cleared and I was staring at
De Doctrina Labyrinthorum
again, my heart racing and my fingers clenched against the tabletop as if I were in danger of falling.
"Not now," I heard myself say, in a whisper. "Not now. I can't…" I closed the book, shoved it to the back of the desk, and opened an alchemical text from Ithaka. Cowardly, yes, that I would grant, but my cowardice hurt no one but myself. And that pain I could deal with.
Mildmay
He didn't want to see me. Stupid, useless shithead that I am, I hadn't thought of that. I'd thought if his head was cleared up, he'd know I wasn't no monster. But I sat there by the window, and I thought of how I'd treated him all across Kekropia, how I'd bullied him and yelled at him and hit him. I remembered the way I'd gotten him on the
Morskaiakrov
, and I thought, Maybe his memory's perfectly good. Maybe he's right.
But that thought—I couldn't stand it. I couldn't stay still with it hanging around my neck, like the albatross in one of Ilia's stories. I got to apologize, I thought. I got to tell him I'm sorry, tell him what it was like. And if he can't forgive me, I won't blame him, I'll just ask him to help me get the fuck away from here. And maybe he'll do that. I mean, it is kind of because of me that he got here without being dead. It's better than nothing.
And anything was better than sitting here with that thing bumping around behind my eyes like a wasp. I got up and dragged my stupid, aching self out the door and down the hall to the right, to where there was a portrait hanging on the wall.
I can't read Troian, so I can't tell you who the old goat was. I can say I didn't much care for him, and it wasn't no penance to take him down and turn him to face the wall. What I wanted was the wire holding him up, because it was heavy and stiff, and if I couldn't get through the hall door with it, I'd just wait until the prick brought my dinner and saw open my wrists with the table knife, because it would be all I was fit for.
Step-clunk-drag, step-clunk-drag, all the fucking way back down the fucking hall to the door. I got there without having to rest, which I decided was a win for me. Then I stopped, kind of leaned myself against the door, and started fooling around with my piece of wire, bending it into shape, testing it in the door, bending it a little different, trying again. Any real cracksman, say Sempronias Teach or Barthilde Coster, would've been just howling, watching me fuck around, but I got there in the end. The lock made this big, hollow, clicking sound, and I opened the door.
Now, of course, I didn't have the first fucking clue where I was going, just that I had to find Felix, and I was betting he hadn't been stuffed in no backwater cul-de-sac like I had. And I didn't have no feel for the geography of this place, neither. But in a weird sort of way, I'd been trained for this, and aside from the fact that it was daylight and I was a crip, it wasn't no different than doing a job for Keeper.
That's what I kept telling myself.
And I did pretty good. Nobody spotted me, although I had a close call or three. I got to the main drag—and powers more redheaded people than I'd ever even imagined—and actually for a while things were really easy, because they'd been hiding me so hard that most people in the Gardens couldn't know what their pet murderer looked like, and I figured I could risk pretending I was just another patient as long as I kept my head down. That was okay, because I sure didn't feel like leaving my feet to do whatever the fuck they wanted on all this marble. There were guys there as short as me, and I figured they probably had some Merrow blood. That was for sure my story if anybody asked.
But nobody did. Nobody looked at me twice. I worked my way down a flight of wide, slick, shallow marble stairs that was like being chewed to death by mice. I got out onto a kind of porch—I know that ain't the right word, 'cause it was too big and grand to be a porch, but I don't know what I ought to be calling it. I stood there, looking out at the gardens, and I could see now why the place was called the Gardens of Nephele, because there seriously wasn't anything else in view, and I thought, I am fucking never going to find Felix in this mess.
And that's when I heard his voice. Kethe's kind of coincidence, the kind you'd be better off without.
I knew it was him—there couldn't be another guy in this place talking Midlander with a flash Marathine accent, and besides, I recognized his voice—and I was about to start forward or wave or something when I got a good look at him.
There was another flight of steps here, these a little less nasty. He was standing at the bottom, with a crowd of redheaded people around him, and I swear by all the powers and saints if it hadn't been for his voice I wouldn't have known him. I mean, he was still skew-eyed, and his hair was about as wild as I remembered it, but he wasn't the same guy. Even the nasty-tongued Felix I'd got used to in Kekropia, that wasn't nothing but a bad imitation of what this guy was. I could feel the charisma baking off him from where I stood, even if I hadn't been able to see it in all them Troians staring at him. No wonder he didn't want to see me. Guy like him wouldn't have no use for a guy like me.
Oh Kethe, I thought, I can't. I backed away, got inside without him seeing me, and headed back to my room, hurting so much inside that I didn't even realize how bad my leg was until I got back to my hallway, and jiggered the lock again, and was just turning away from it—murderer locked in, all safe and sound—when my leg went.
Simple as that and I was on the floor. Hard. Though at least I'd twisted so I came down on my left side. Small fucking favors. I figured it was the stairs had done it, not that it mattered, and I knew, cane or no cane, there was no way I was standing up again. So I started crawling. My head was aching, my ribs were aching, my left hip was throbbing—and my right leg, dragging along behind me like a ball and chain… I wished it would just go ahead and fucking fall off, and then I could lie here and bleed to death and not have to worry about the prick or Felix or nobody. But it wouldn't. It just kept dragging back there, and before I'd gone a septad-foot, I was cursing it under my breath, all the nastiest things I could think of, because it was either that or start screaming, and screaming wouldn't get me back into bed where I could rest.
I crawled and crawled, and after about an indiction, somebody said, "Um."
Kethe, I just about died on the spot. My head jerked up, I jarred my bad leg, and my left hand shot out from under me, so I ended up sprawled across the hallway, staring up at the prick, who was standing in the doorway of my room, staring back at me.
"Oh fuck me sideways 'til I cry," I said and started laughing. And from there it turned into hysterics—I heard it coming and couldn't stop it, there was just too much, and every time I tried, I saw Felix again, standing down there at the bottom of them steps like he hadn't ever been crouched in the middle of a road in Kekropia like a frightened kid, and like he wouldn't know me to spit on me, and I just lost it. Once, for all, for good. I was sort of crying and screaming at the same time, because it hurt too much, all of it, and there was a voice saying, "Mildmay? Mildmay, come on. Let me help." And there was something cool and wet against my face, and I started being able to breathe again, and there were hands helping me up, and somebody basically carrying me, because my right leg had gone right out the other side of not-working, and I couldn't feel nothing except the glass shards in my thigh, and then, oh Kethe, blessed relief, I was laying down, and it wasn't on the floor.
And after a while, I pulled myself together again, and there was the prick standing by the bed looking down at me.