The Virtu (2 page)

Thamuris said, “Love and betrayal, the gorgon and the wheel. The dead tree will not shelter you, and the dead will not stay dead. Though you do not seek revenge, it will seek you all the same.”

I know it sounds like complete bullshit, but the voice was cold and kind of bored, and those eyes were watching me like they wanted to see me flinch, and it might be Thamuris’s hands, but the power grinding my bones together wasn’t nothing to do with him, and I knew those words were the truth. I didn’t know what the fuck they meant, but I knew for sure I was going to be sorry when I found out.

I felt it leave Thamuris, because his shudder damn near broke my wrists. His eyes were shut and his face screwed up like something was hurting him, and he fell straight over backwards like he’d been poleaxed.

I stared at him for a moment, and then I realized he wasn’t breathing.

I was woken, from a confused and frightening dream of searching the Mirador for a pocket watch Shannon had given me and I had lost long ago, by the sound of someone knocking on the door. I was on my feet almost before I was awake; my first coherent thought was gratitude that I’d made Astyanax go back to his own room after we’d made love.

I called witchlight, snatched up my robe, shouted at the door, “What?”

Sudden silence.

I tied the robe, ran my hands through my hair, and flung the door open. “
What
?”

A small acolyte started back, her eyes wide. “Oh! Please, I’m sorry, sir, but I was told… the Celebrant Lunar said I ought…” I stood and waited, letting my eyebrows rise. She turned scarlet and said in an embarrassed mutter, “Your brother.”

“What about my brother?”

“The Celebrant Lunar said you should come.”

“Is there time for me to get dressed first?” I said and smiled at her, which caused her to turn an even more alarming color and back up a step, as if she was afraid I might ravish her then and there.

“Thank you,” I said, shut the door, and scrambled into yesterday’s clothes. If it had been truly urgent, Xanthippe would have told this silly child to tell me so; I knew that, but the residue of my dream, the almost-nightmare of looking for something that could not be found, tainted even that certainty. As I followed the acolyte through the stately maze of the Nephelion, I could feel the truth pounding in my heart: if something has happened to him, it is my fault. He is only here because of me. I know they don’t understand him; I know he hates them. I have done nothing to help him.

It had been a month and a half since the wizards and healers of the Gardens of Nephele had cured me of my madness. I no longer saw monsters in every shadow or imagined that those trying to help me were tormentors long dead. I was whole again, clearheaded, vital and focused in a way I hadn’t been since I was first learning magic, first learning to be free. On some days, it was almost as if the last year and more had not happened, as if my life before the Virtu of the Mirador had been broken—before Malkar had broken it, using me as his weapon—could truly be stitched together seamlessly with my life here in the Gardens. But on other days, I knew that was not true. And if I needed reminding, there was my half brother, lamed in trying to help me, apparently unwilling to move without me for all that we were nearly strangers to each other.

The door of Mildmay’s room was open, lamplight pouring out. At first glance, the room looked as if Troians had descended on it like locusts, but the impression resolved itself into Xanthippe, speaking in a low, venomous voice to a pallid young man I did not recognize; Oribasios, a Celebrant Terrestrial I knew vaguely, standing in the middle of the room performing something easily recognizable as a ritual dispersement; and Khrysogonos, the acolyte assigned to my brother’s care, kneeling by the armchair where Mildmay sat. I was peripherally aware of my little acolyte attaching herself to Xanthippe’s presence like a limpet.

I looked at Mildmay and was appalled; I had not been spending much time with him, but how had I not noticed how thin he was getting? His cheekbones were stark against his skin; his hands and wrists were nothing but knobs and staring blue veins. He was ashen, colorless except for the poison green of his eyes and his burnished fox-red hair; the scar that disfigured his face was a livid line of despair from his mouth to his left temple.

But his eyes were open, aware; I saw him note my arrival before he looked back at Khrysogonos. A weight of dread and guilt rolled off my shoulders, and I crossed the room to say to him, “You seem to have been busy this evening.”

Khrysogonos glared at me, but Mildmay just tilted his head back a little and said, “Yeah. Got bored.”

“So what were you doing?”

“Magic.”

“Magic?” I said and let my eyebrows go up. “
Really
? What branch did you choose for your maiden voyage? Necromancy? Geomancy?”

“Divination. I think.” I saw his gaze flick toward the pallid young man.

“Ah, yes. Your partner in crime. To whom I believe I have
not
been introduced.”

“That’s Thamuris,” Mildmay said.

“He is a Celebrant Celestial of the Euryganeic Covenant,” Khrysogonos said aggrievedly, although I wasn’t sure if he was mad at me, Mildmay, or Thamuris—or if he even knew himself.

“Which means?” I said.

“He should have known better than to do such an insanely dangerous, stupid, and selfish thing,” Xanthippe said behind me. Khrysogonos went nearly as white as Mildmay.

I turned around. The pallid young man was staring down at his hands; Xanthippe was almost crackling with fury.

“What exactly did he do?” I said.

Xanthippe glared at the bowed head of the pallid young man. “He used your brother as an anchor in a pythian casting.”

“And that is?”

“Pythian casting is the form of divination preferred by the covenant of Euryganeia. It requires four trained celebrants in addition to the diviner, and even then it is quite dangerous.”

“And he just used Mildmay.”

“Apparently.”

I turned back to Mildmay, “And you
let
him?”

Mildmay gave me a half shrug. “He trusted me.”

I bit back the first three responses that came to mind and said, quite levelly, “You could very easily have been killed.”

Another half shrug, an impatient jerk of one shoulder, as if he were throwing off an intrusive hand. “No big loss.”

“No big
loss
? Are you out of your
mind
?” They were all staring at me, and I realized that my calm, level voice had become a shriek. I turned on the pallid young man, made a conscious effort to modulate my voice, and said, “What did you think you were doing?”

His golden eyes were dreamy with fever and drugs, lambent in his white face. He was consumptive, and that explained a great deal. He said, “I didn’t hurt him. I would never have hurt him. I just had to…”

“Thamuris,” Xanthippe said gently.

He turned to her, wide-eyed, pleading, “Xanthippe, it was perfectly safe. I swear it.”

“You’ll forgive me,” I said, “if I am skeptical.”

Xanthippe shot me a
not now
look and sat down next to Thamuris on the bed. “I know you would never do anything intentionally to hurt anyone,” she said, taking his hands and making him look at her, “but you don’t have the strength you used to. If something had gone wrong, you couldn’t have controlled it.”

“But I
had
to,” he said, and I saw his dream-hazed eyes fill with tears. “Xanthippe, I
had
to.”

She sighed, touched his cheek, and said, “Khrysogonos, Oribasios, Hesione, would you see that Thamuris gets safely to bed?”

Acolytes and Celebrant Terrestrial, they helped Thamuris to his feet and half led, half carried him out of the room, leaving Xanthippe and me staring at each other and Mildmay slumped grayly in his chair, staring at nothing.

I pushed my hair off my face. “Xanthippe, what just happened here?”

She sighed, rubbing restlessly at the ache of arthritis in her hands. “Thamuris is dying.”

“Yes, I recognize consumption when I see it. That isn’t an explanation.”

She looked past me at Mildmay. “What did he tell you?”

He didn’t move, but he seemed to sink even lower into the chair. “He asked me not to tell anyone. He said it wouldn’t be hard. I was gonna be two things for him. Anchor and… and some word I didn’t know.”

“Querent?” Xanthippe said in a tone indicating she knew the answer and didn’t want to hear it.

“Yeah. That was it. And he was going to tell the future.”

“That’s it?”

“Um. Yeah.”

Xanthippe said some things under her breath that I politely pretended not to hear.

“He didn’t hurt me,” Mildmay said, and there was perhaps a hint of anxiety in his voice. “I’m really okay.”

“Then what happened to your hands?” I said.

“I bruise easy,” he said. He met my eyes as he said it and made no effort to hide the rising bruises on his wrists. I wasn’t going to be able to stampede him into giving anything away.

Xanthippe said in a slow, measured voice, “The fact that you are neither dead nor insane is a miracle. Thamuris should
never
have performed a pythian casting with an annemer.”

“Didn’t look like nobody else was helping him,” Mildmay said, with the first spark of real feeling I’d heard since I came into the room.

“Not helping him kill himself? No. No, we aren’t.”

Mildmay’s flinch was all in his eyes. He said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” Xanthippe said. “That was unkind. You had no way of knowing that the celebrants of Hakko sent Thamuris here precisely to keep him from doing what he has done.” Her mouth compressed, bitter, angry, helpless. “What they themselves trained him to do. In Euryganeic thinking, it is what he was
created
to do.”

Mildmay muttered something.

“What?” I said.

“Junkie,” Mildmay said in Marathine.

“I’m not sure the analogy of addiction is going to be a very popular one here,” I said, also in Marathine.

“It’s what it was like. Or maybe that was just the laudanum.” He sank back down into himself and shut his eyes.

Xanthippe was waiting politely, her eyebrows raised. “So what was this evening’s demonstration about?” I said to her.

“I don’t know, and it troubles me. Using an annemer as an anchor is not unheard of, but it has not been done since the ascendancy of the House Hippothontis, precisely because it is so dangerous.”

“Well, if no one else would help him,” I said, “and if he was as desperate as it seems he was—”

“He wanted it,” Mildmay said without opening his eyes. “Only thing I’ve ever seen him want.” And that, I thought, was essentially what he’d said to me in Marathine, merely stripped of the ugly metaphor. “He didn’t care if it killed him. Almost did, too. I had to—” He broke off with a sharp, painful shake of his head.

Xanthippe went over to Mildmay, touched his hand lightly. When he looked up at her, she said, “I do not know if you did the right thing, but you did the best thing it was in you to do.” The silence remaining when she had left, the heels of her shoes beating a slow but impatient rhythm down the corridor, was heavy and cold, like great blocks of ice.

Mildmay said, out of that coldness, “Don’t have to stay.”

“There’s no point in going back to bed,” I said. “I’m quite thoroughly awake.”

“Sorry,” he said, turning his head to look out at the dark-drowned garden.

“Mildmay.”

When he tilted his head back, I realized I was about to do something terribly wrong, and knelt quickly down beside him, so that our eyes were level. With the six-inch difference in our heights, it was not a vantage we had on each other very often. His face was expressionless; it was always expressionless, and sometimes it made me want to shake him until his spine rattled.

I said, very carefully, “You do know it would have been a, er, ‘big loss’ to me if you had died tonight.”

He didn’t even give me the twitch of an eyebrow, just sat there, watching me, silent.

“I haven’t forgotten,” I said.

“I know that.” Flat, heavy words; I had a momentary, ugly flash of stones falling from Diokletian’s mouth, a memory of my madness, and shook it away.

“I am… grateful.”

He looked away, muttered something I couldn’t understand.

“What?”

“Don’t want that.”

“Don’t want what?”

“I don’t want you to be grateful.”

“Then what
do
you want?”

I watched, fascinated, as a slow tide of crimson washed over his face; he said nothing.

“Tell me,” I said, as gently as I could.

He shook his head. “It’s stupid.”

“If you’re feeling suicidal, nothing’s—”

“I ain’t.”

“Then quit acting like it!”

“I don’t want to be a crip, okay? And I can’t have that and I know it and it’s stupid. So fuck off and leave me alone.”

The silence in the room felt like a bubble made of crystal, as if the slightest movement, even a breath, would shatter it. I reached out slowly and took his hands. They felt like bunches of sticks, and they were shaking with the fear and unhappiness he would not let anyone see on his face.

I had expected him to jerk away from me, but he did not move.

There were all sorts of things I could have said—
should
have said—but too many of them were things I didn’t want to say, or he didn’t want to hear. I said, “I think it’s about time we went home.”

His head came up at that, and I could see the darkness leaving his eyes like shadows fleeing from the sun.

“Okay,” he said, and after a moment, struck dumb and breathless by his sudden beauty, I remembered to let go of his hands.