The Virtu (12 page)

“Are you okay? Mr. Vilker said you—”

“And you were worried. How touching.”

“I know you don’t like deep water.”

I wanted to scream at him, howl and curse and gibber. I said, “I’m
fine
. You don’t need to worry about me.”

“I won’t then.” And he left. I could have called him back, but I didn’t. I did not want to.

Well, look, Milly-Fox, you did
another
stupid thing. Big fucking surprise.

I shouldn’t‘ve got mad at Felix, and I knew it before I’d gone a septad-foot. I knew what he was like. I knew how much he hated anybody knowing he wasn’t perfect. I mean, I’d known he’d most likely be snippy when I’d gone down there. But it still pissed me off, and I thought as I was going back up on deck, Fuck him if he thinks I’m going to apologize for not doing nothing wrong. He wants to make up, he can come to me. And that was stupid, too.

‘Cause Felix wasn’t crazy now, and he didn’t need me. I saw that as soon as he came up on deck, and there was Mr. Vilker and Mrs. Gauthy and Mr. Gauthy and Florian and Phaëthon all over him. His laugh carried across to where I was standing, and I thought, Fuck me sideways ’til I cry, and pretended I was staring at the ocean.

And I couldn’t swallow my pride. I don’t know if it was the dream or the news about the
Morskaiakrov
or what, but I’d think about crawling to Felix, begging him to be friends again, and then I’d remember to unclench my hands. I couldn’t do it, no matter how miserable I got.

It probably would’ve looked funny to anybody who wasn’t a part of it, ‘cause day after day, there was that group of six people in their one particular place where Felix liked to hold court, and then there was me at the other end of the ship, staring out at the water. I was especially careful not to ask the sailors what they thought was going on, although I caught the way some of them looked at me, and I think they had a pretty good idea.

Meals were the worst. Meals were pure uncut Hell, and I was probably dropping weight again, and I didn’t care. I hate having people look at me when I eat anyway, and then the conversation—powers and fucking saints. Felix and the Gauthys and Mr. Vilker and Captain Yarth would just go off on history and literature and all that other stuff, and Phaëthon and Florian would listen, and sometimes ask questions. And you could feel everybody focused on Felix, like they were all sunflowers and he was the sun. I swear it was like a cult, because I watched the captain, that first decad, go from giving Felix the seriously hairy eyeball to talking and laughing with him like he’d completely forgotten Felix was a hocus.

I tried a couple times to join in, when they were talking about stuff I knew, but nobody but Felix could understand what I said to start with, and then either Mr. Vilker proved me wrong or Felix made an answer that took me so far out of my depth I might as well have just jumped overboard and drowned for real. So I kept my mouth shut and tried not to care.

In our cabin, Phaëthon wasn’t mean or nothing, but we didn’t have a thing in the world to say to each other besides “good morning” and “good night.” And although I didn’t have no more dreams as bad as the one I’d had the first night on the
White Otter
, I wasn’t sleeping well, and I kept dreaming about Ginevra. I felt like shit, and if Felix had been talking to me at all—besides correcting my grammar every fucking time I opened my mouth—I would have asked him to ward my dreams again, like he had back in the Gardens when he’d still liked me. But I couldn’t ask that, either.

So that’s how things stood. We were twelve days out, and I was standing at the stern, watching our wake, when Florian Gauthy came up beside me and said, “Why do you spend so much time looking at the ocean?”

I couldn’t help my reflexive glance back, but his parents were laughing at something Felix had said and hadn’t noticed Florian had gone. But that gave me time to kill my first answer, which was,
‘Cause it beats the shit out of my other options.
I just shrugged and said, “I like it.”

“Oh,” he said, like that wasn’t the answer he wanted.

We stood there a while, me looking at the water and him looking at me, the water, then back at me again. I kept expecting one of his parents to come drag him away, but they didn’t.

And finally Florian couldn’t stand it no more and said, “How’d you get that scar on your face?”

Powers and saints, I thought. “A knife fight.”

“Like a duel?” And he was all wide-eyed, like a little kid listening to a story.

“No, like a knife fight. I was about your age.”

“Oh,” he said, disappointed again. “Were your parents terribly cross?”

I really didn’t mean to laugh, no matter what Felix said later. But I couldn’t help it, and of course Florian wanted to know what was so funny, and I’m a shitty liar, so I told him the truth.

And then he wanted to know, if my parents weren’t around, who looked after me, and I tried to explain about Keeper without actually explaining, if you follow me, but I’m no good at shit like that, and nobody, not even a kid like Florian, was going to believe I’d been to a flash boarding school like they got in Ferrau, and so somehow I ended up telling him all about being trained as a pickpocket. I didn’t tell him none of the other things I’d been trained to do—I hadn’t gone
completely
batfuck—but I told him way more than I should’ve. I don’t know what the fuck got into me—maybe it was just that Florian was listening and interested and didn’t mind at all that sometimes he had to ask me to repeat things—but I stood there on the deck of the
White Otter
and spilled my guts to Florian Gauthy the way I’d never done with anybody in my life.

And Florian drank it all in and wanted to know more about the Cheaps and the cade-skiffs and the Trials. I don’t think he really believed most of the things I told him about the Arcane, but that was okay. Some of it I wouldn’t have believed myself if I hadn’t been there.

We were siting, leaning against the side of the ship, and I was telling him some of the tamer stories about Vey Coruscant, when Felix came up looking like the end of the world, and said, all polite and smooth and horrible, “Mildmay, could I talk to you for a moment, please?”

I think Florian caught the danger signals, because he stood up in a hurry and said, “I’d better be going. Thanks, Ker Foxe!” He bounded down the companionway, and I stood up. And when I was up, I looked at Felix, and he said in this low, controlled, fucking
petrifying
voice, “What were you telling him?”

“Dunno,” I said. “Stories.”

“You were telling him about Mélusine.
Weren’t
you?”

“Um, yeah. So?”

“
So?
” He was still keeping his voice down, but I almost wished he’d shout. Because he was reminding me of a steam-boiler about to bust. I’d seen people after that happened once, down in Lyonesse, and I think that was the first time I’d really understood that things could have been a lot fucking worse than my stupid scar.

“Yeah. Why’s it matter?”

“Why does it matter? We’ve been going around admitting we’re brothers all over the place and now you’re telling them you’re from Mélusine and you want to know why it
matters
?”

“Yeah. More and more, actually.”

He stared at me for a moment, then made a sort of growling noise and clenched his hands in his hair like he wanted to start ripping it out in handfuls. If there’d been anywhere I could’ve gone to get away from him, believe me, I’d already have been there. But, you know, I figured nothing he could pull could actually be worse than some of the stuff he’d done when he was crazy, and I’d come out the other side of that. And if he thought I was afraid of him, I’d
really
be fucked. So I just waited, and after a minute he fetched a deep breath and brought his hands down. And when he opened his eyes, I could see he was still royally pissed, but he didn’t look like he was fixing to explode. At least not right away.

He said, real careful like he thought if he went any faster I wouldn’t understand him, “The people on this ship know I’m a wizard, right?”

He stopped and raised his eyebrows at me, so I said, “Yeah.”

“Eusebians don’t have tattoos, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Nor do Troian wizards.
Right
?”

“Okay.”

“So how am I supposed to explain being a wizard and yet not being of any of the… acceptable schools?”

“Dunno.”

“No, I didn’t think you did,” he said, mean as a snake. “They may not recognize the tattoos, but they’ll recognize the name of the Mirador. I have to be from somewhere else.”

And he had lost me. “Huh?”

He rolled his eyes. “If they ask where I’m from or what school I practice, I can’t tell them the truth, or they’ll hand us straight over to the dragoons when we dock in Klepsydra.”

“Yeah, I told you as much back in Endumion.”

Me and my fucking mouth. You’d think me of all people could learn when to keep it shut, but I never do. I saw Felix’s jaw clench and thought for a second he was going to turn me into a frog or hit me with a lightning bolt or something. He said through his teeth, “
They already knew.
”

‘Cause you were wearing them fucking rings, I thought, but this time I managed not to say it.

He gave me this look like somehow he’d heard me anyway and said, “Since I can’t lie about being a wizard, I have to lie about where I’m from. And I can’t do that if you’re telling everybody on the ship heartwarming stories about growing up a gutter rat in Mélusine.”

“Well, if you’d
told
me—”

“I didn’t imagine I needed to. Clearly, I radically overestimated your intelligence, a mistake I won’t be making again.”

Septad and six nasty things I could’ve said, and I didn’t say ‘em. Didn’t say nothing, actually, because I
still
wasn’t going to crawl to Felix, and I figured that was about all he was going to want to hear from me. So I didn’t say nothing and he didn’t say nothing, and there were a couple sailors down on the main deck pretending like they weren’t trying to get close enough to eavesdrop.

Felix looked away first, muttering, “I suppose it is unlikely that Florian will repeat your stories to his parents.”

“Pretty safe bet he won’t,” I said, and it came out sharper than was maybe a good idea.

“So you’re entrusting our safety to the discretion of a twelve-year-old boy? Brilliant.”

“I’m just saying Florian ain’t gonna do nothing to get himself in trouble. Which he would do.”

He looked at me. I saw the spark in his eye and I knew what was coming. “
Is not going to do anything
, not
ain’t gonna do nothing
.” And, Kethe, his imitation of me was spot-fucking-on.

“Fuck you,” I said and turned back to the sea. Yeah, since you ask, I’d rather’ve left, but for all that my leg was better, those damn stairs were still an ugly scene, and it would just give Felix a whole new crop of nasty things to say. Turned out to work the same anyway, because after a moment
Felix
left.

I stood there ‘til the sun was almost down, saying a bunch of things to the water that I’d wanted to say to Felix. Ocean didn’t care.

That I had not murdered my brother by the end of the second week of our voyage was something of a miracle. I could feel his sullen, silent presence everywhere I went, and the ostentatious way he refused to join the social circle of the passengers irritated me nearly to screaming point. And then from playing the solitary, brooding misanthrope to turn around and tell Florian Gauthy the one thing we most desperately needed our traveling companions not to know… if I
had
murdered him, he would have deserved it.

I cursed Mildmay for being an idiot. I cursed Captain Yarth for separating Mildmay and me, meaning that we had no opportunities to speak together privately. Sometimes, for variety, I cursed the Mirador instead. Mercifully, Ingvard Vilker did not ask about the tattoos, anymore than he seemed to notice that he never saw me without my shirt. He displayed, in fact, a remarkable lack of curiosity, which I was both grateful for and a little unnerved by. Good manners, I said to myself. Just because
yours
are atrocious… I relaxed and talked history and literature with Ingvard and listened to his stories of working in the Gauthy household.

Theokrita Gauthy, it seemed, was a domestic despot, ruling children and servants alike with an iron fist. The housemaids were apparently sacked on a regular basis and for the most minor transgressions. Ingvard and the other higher-class employees, the boys’ tutor and the girls’ governess, had at least a modicum of autonomy, though the tutor and governess were required to sleep in the house, within earshot of the children. “They never have a breath to call their own,” Ingvard said.

“But your situation is different?” We were indulging in slow preparations for bed, dragging out the opportunity to talk without one or the other of the Gauthys hanging over our shoulders.

“I sleep out, thank you very much. And I have as little to do with the children as I can arrange.”

“Wise,” I said, laughing. “So you have lodgings of your own?”

“A very nice private flat. My salary is generous, and Keria Gauthy is not so concerned about my morals as long as I do not debauch anyone under her roof.”

“Do you make a practice of debauchery?”

He gave me a sly, sidelong look and said, “I wouldn’t call it ‘debauchery,’ no matter what Keria Gauthy thinks.”

“Is she very straight-laced then?”

“She is not a tolerant woman. She believes piety lies in rectitude.”

“Oh. One of those.”

“Yes, exactly,” Ingvard said with a grimace. “Fortunately, she is not observant.”

“What about her husband?”

He snorted. “Ker Gauthy’s energies belong to his business. In other matters, he lets his wife do his thinking.”

“A bad habit,” I said, moving past him toward the bunks.

At that moment, the
White Otter
pitched into a wave with unaccustomed vigor. I stumbled against Ingvard. He caught my upper arms—to steady me, I thought, but then he kissed me hard, almost violently, and I staggered back against the bunks. He followed eagerly, and I had to hold him off with both hands.