The Virtu (30 page)

So bail, stupid. Go to St. Millefleur. Or Cypriot.

And then what?

That was the bitchkitty, and it had been the bitchkitty for… I didn’t even know how long. I couldn’t reckon the months. Since Ginevra had died. I’d let myself be carried along, first by Mavortian and his plans and then by Felix needing me so bad, and there’d always been something else to worry about, some new horrible thing. And no time to think. But now I had all the fucking time in the world.

So what do you want to do, Milly-Fox?

Keeper’s voice, pretending to be interested. And of course I didn’t have an answer, the way I’d never had an answer when Keeper asked me something. I’d never imagined I’d end up lame, never thought about what I’d do if I couldn’t do what I’d been trained my whole life for. And now that I was thinking about it, it didn’t seem like there was anything I
could
do. Be hired muscle. Be somebody’s errand boy. Let somebody else tell me what to do and where to do it. Fuck, at that rate, I might just as well go and see if Keeper would take me back. Because it wouldn’t be all that different. And something sick and cold in the pit of my stomach knew that she would.

Up ahead, Felix laughed at a comment of Miss Parr’s. I thought helplessly, He’ll leave. And it seemed like just too much to bear. It would be like bleeding to death, only nobody else would ever see the blood. And there’d be nothing to keep me from crawling back to Keeper like a half-dead dog, nothing to keep her from using me, using me up. Nothing to keep me from dying for real.

But I didn’t see what else I could do, and the more I thought about it, the less I knew anything, and within a couple of days you could’ve dyed all the laundry in Lyonesse black just with the mood I was in. I fought it as much as I could, at least to where it didn’t show. And I was pretty sure Miss Parr didn’t notice anything wrong. Felix was starting to look at me funny, but he didn’t say nothing, and that was just fucking fine.

So that’s where we were at, the day I got all the information I wanted and more about the Duke of Aiaia and his plans. We were walking into a town called Ogygia, a couple days north of Aiaia. I’d just been congratulating myself on how we weren’t going to have to get any closer to Aiaia than this, and I should’ve known better. Should’ve felt Kethe leaning over my shoulder and laughing.

If it’d been just me, I wouldn’t even have noticed it. A handbill, stuck up on one of those damn milestones. Miss Parr didn’t notice it, either, but Felix—well, I’d figured out by then that if there was words on something, Felix would read it. Nothing weird about that. What was weird was the way he stopped dead in his tracks, went back half a step, and ran into me nearly hard enough to knock us both on our asses.

“Sacred
fuck
,” I said, but Felix wasn’t even paying attention. He was staring at that fucking handbill like it was a swamp adder.

“What?” I said.

“Felix?” said Miss Parr.

He waved at us to shut up without even looking around. Miss Parr gave me a
what the fuck
? look and I gave it right back to her. And we stood there and waited for Felix to get back on board with us.

I think he read it twice before he turned around, and when he did turn, he looked like a man having a good close gawk at a ghoul’s teeth. He said, in a jittery little voice that was mostly breath, “Mildmay, you said… the Kekropian we knew before… before… never mind. You said his name was Gideon Thraxios?”

Oh fuck. Everything in my head went cold and sick. Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck. “Yeah.”

Felix jerked his thumb back at the handbill.

He didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to.

We found a hotel in Ogygia, booked our rooms. Without discussion, we crammed ourselves uncomfortably into the room Mildmay and I would share, which would not have been generous for one person and verged on the morbidly claustrophobic for three.

Then I said, my voice harsher than I wanted, “Is there anything we can do?”

Mildmay, sitting on the bed with his lame leg stretched out, looked up at me. “You know what they’ll do to you if they catch you? It’ll make whatever they got planned for Gideon look like a hangnail.”

“Are you saying we should just leave him to be burned?”

“They’ll
kill
you,” he said, as if I didn’t know that.

Mehitabel said, with heavy patience, “Would one of you like to tell me what’s going on?”

Mildmay and I stared at each other. I’d grown so accustomed to Mehitabel as a traveling companion, so used to the idea that she knew the secrets we were guarding, that I had forgotten there were things she did not know. Mildmay, who still did not like her and did not trust her, had of course not forgotten, but he had stopped fighting with me about it. I knew that look, that very slight hitch in his eyebrow that said he knew I was going to do what I wanted anyway, and he wasn’t going to waste his breath on me. I did not care for that look, but it was better than another quarrel.

I said to Mehitabel, carefully, picking my way around the things I did not want to discuss, “When we started east, we had traveling companions. We were separated from them. One of them is the man whom the Duke of Aiaia apparently plans to burn in a week’s time.”

Mehitabel nodded, her pretty, deceptively childish face unreadable. “The perverted cultist Eusebian defector described in that handbill, you mean?”

I winced.

Mildmay said, “So what?”

“I just like to be clear,” she said, although her face was still stony. “And you want to rescue him?”

“Yes,” I said.

“
Can
you?” she said, looking past me at Mildmay.

He shrugged.

“Well, it wasn’t an outright no,” she said, and he gave her a flat look that I could read as bottled murder.

“We can think of something,” I said.

“Hold on,” she said. “Not ‘we,’ sunshine. He’s right about that.”

“But—”

“No. I’ve seen witch-hunts in the duchies. They’ll
smell
you. Mildmay and I will be safer on our own.”

“Who said you were going?” Mildmay said.

“Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “Whether you can rescue your friend or not, you certainly can’t do it by yourself.”

“It ain’t right,” he said.

“Worried about my reputation?” she said. “Or yours?”

He flushed an unattractive brick red that clashed with his hair, and I said quickly, “But how will I find you again?”

“We pick a place to meet,” Mehitabel said. “The next big town west of Aiaia is Julip. Get there however you can.”

“And then?”

“Pick a hotel near the east gate,” Mildmay said. “I’ll find you.”

“If we get there.”

“It’s your fucking plan.”

“I don’t like indulging in undue optimism,” said Mehitabel Parr.

We left the Grass-Widow’s Harp in the middle of the night. I still felt sick about the whole thing, but both Miss Parr and Felix had laughed at me for trying to argue. I didn’t want her to think I was any stupider than she already did.

Miss Parr and Felix had worked out the story, and I was sure Felix could carry it off. He could carry off most anything when he wanted to, not just how come the people he was traveling with had up and left. I did what I was told and followed Miss Parr south out of Ogygia. Shank’s mare through the Grasslands again, and I wished it was Felix with me this time. Felix thought everybody was stupider than him, not just me.

We didn’t say nothing for a couple hours, but then out of nowhere Miss Parr said, “Why’d you let him bully you into this?”

“What?”

“You didn’t want to do this. Do you always do what he wants you to?”

“I don’t remember you saying nothing against it. Seems to me you was raring to go.” Kethe, Milly-Fox, could you mind your fucking grammar? I could feel the wallop of Keeper’s hand across my ear.

“Oh, so it’s my fault?” Miss Parr said.

“Just leave me the fuck alone,” I said.

“Gladly,” she said like a mousetrap snapping shut.

We had to stop when the moon set—there was no point walking into a ditch. We sat by the side of the road. I stretched my bad leg out and wished I was back in Ogygia with Felix.

Miss Parr sighed loudly and said, “We need a cover story.”

I hated the fact that she was right. “So I guess you’re my wife then.” Because nobody but a blind man would believe we were related.

“Dearest,” she said, and she probably batted her eyelashes at me, too, although I couldn’t tell in the dark. “Now why are we going to Aiaia? Aside from the execution, that is?”

I didn’t say nothing.

“A wedding,” Miss Parr said. “People always like a wedding, and the end of the Trials is a good time for them. My sister, I think. Girls with your coloring have a hard time getting married in the far southern duchies. And maybe… yes. You’re looking for work. It’ll give you an excuse to be surly and not say much. And for goodness’ sakes, mumble! We’ll be completely in the soup if anyone recognizes your accent. Besides, it will give me the chance to hint about
other
reasons I might have to want to be near my family, and that should distract anyone who gets curious.”

I hadn’t meant to say nothing, just let her run the whole show since it was what she wanted, but I couldn’t stand that. “Kethe!” I said. “Miss Parr, I can’t…”

“I’m not asking you to
beat
me,” she said.

“No, but…”

“And I won’t
tell
anyone you beat me. I do wish I had a bruise or two to show, but I can manage without. Why on earth are you so shocked? Does it go against your principles to hit a woman?”

“Not one that deserves it,” I said before I could stop myself. “Oh, powers, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… I wouldn’t ever…”

She was laughing at me again. “It’s a good story,” she said. “People will believe it.”

Yeah. People will believe anything of this fucking scar. I kept my mouth shut.

“We need names,” she said. “It adds conviction.” She lay back, staring up at the stars. “Zenobia, I think. Zenobia Wainwright. That sounds convincingly uneuphonious—especially as all the girls I’ve known with the name Zenobia have gone by the unfortunate nickname of Nobbie. Nobbie Wainwright sounds like the downtrodden wife of a ne’er-do-well to me. What about you? What shall we call you?”

She was talking like it was a game, and she wanted me to play along. “I don’t care,” I said.

“Ananias, then,” she said, like she’d had it waiting. “Ananias Wainwright. Will it do?”

“Sure,” I said. In the Lower City, any kid named Ananias would’ve been called Nanny and bleated at. But I just wanted her to shut up and leave me the fuck alone.

When it was light enough to see, Miss Parr started in on her clothes the same way she’d done on our names, ripping loose the ruffle from her cuffs and writhing out of her two petticoats. Her dress sagged without them. She took her hair down, and then pulled a palm-sized mirror and a comb out of her skirt pocket and put it up again in a different style, wound in two braids around her head. She tugged off the blue satin ribbon that had trimmed one of her petticoats and caught the ends of her braids with it at the nape of her neck. Then she took her spectacles out of her pocket—the ones she hadn’t been wearing since we left Klepsydra—and put them on, pushing them up on her nose with an awkward gesture I had absolutely never seen from her before. And she did look like a different person. The brown dress looked dowdy instead of smart, and her heavy braids practically made her chin disappear. There was something different about the way she was wearing them spectacles, too. She didn’t look teachery at all, more like a not-very-bright gal who was blind as a mole. Even the blue ribbon helped. It was the kind of thing women did when they were too poor to buy a new dress.

She gave me a once-over that made me want to hide. “You don’t grow a beard, do you?”

“Nope.”

“No matter. People round here are used to what they charmingly call the Taint, and that scar would make up for any amount of good grooming. But I’m afraid your clothes are simply too tidy, and Ananias just wouldn t have your nice taste in waistcoats. In fact, Ananias and Nobbie probably have only the vaguest idea of what a waistcoat is. Out here they’re called vests and sneered at as things for sissified cityfolk to wear.”

Felix had picked that waistcoat out. I unbuttoned it and took it off, remembering at the last second to save Florian’s letter. Miss Parr watched me stuff it in my trouser pocket, but she didn’t say nothing about it.

Instead, she had more orders: “Unbutton the top two buttons of your shirt and roll up your cuffs. The shirt really should be older, but at least it does look lived in.”

“Just say I stole it.”

“Unnecessary, I assure you. Ananias is a well-recognized type in the Grasslands.” She looked me up and down. “I believe you’ll do. Just remember to glower.”

“That won’t be hard,” I said, watching her dump her petticoats and ruffles, and my waistcoat, into the drainage ditch, where they sank into the muck.

She ignored me. “Now, come on. There’ll be people on the road soon.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, but enough under my breath that she could pretend like she hadn’t heard that, either.

About two miles later, we were taken up by a farmer on his way to Hyle, the next big town along the southern road. I sat in the back with the bags of turnips and listened to Miss Parr being Nobbie Wainwright. She was an actress, sure enough, and a good one, although I would’ve eaten coals rather than tell her so. She had the local dialect nailed—she could have been the farmer’s sister, they sounded that much alike—and she chattered away to him like she’d known him all her life.

She didn’t tell him much of that story she’d made up, but I could see her using it and sort of understood why she’d insisted on having it. It was there in everything she said, and every so often she’d look back over her shoulder at me, like I made her nervous. Which I fucking hated. But I held up my end. When the farmer looked back at me, concern for Miss Parr all over his moony face, I gave him the worst glower I could. He actually went pale.

The farmer set us down in the market square of Hyle. We bought sausages there from a street vendor and ate them walking south. We left Hyle just as the church clock was striking the septad-day, though with the wrong number of strokes, of course, and walked for most of the afternoon. Near sundown, we were overtaken by a traveling tinker, and he gave us a ride to Merops. We couldn’t afford lodgings, so Miss Parr said good night to the tinker, and we walked another mile or two until we found a haystack that it didn’t look like nobody cared too much about.