The Virtu (34 page)

The hotelkeeper in Julip took a liking to me, even to the extent of running her own errands. One sunny morning, a fortnight after I’d signed the register of the Duelling Hares, she came up to my room and said that a person wished to speak with me.

“A person?” I said, and then I knew, like a sunrise, who she meant. “Red-haired, this person? Scar on his face?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, very dubiously.

“My brother,” I said, grinned at her expression, and breezed past her down the stairs.

Mildmay was waiting in the lobby. He looked considerably the worse for wear; his clothes were shabby, ill fitting, and not what he’d been wearing when he left Ogygia, and he didn’t look like he’d been getting much sleep. I did not wonder that the hotelkeeper had designated him as a “person.”

But he was still in one piece, and there was nothing about him to suggest that he felt himself to be in any imminent danger. When I said,

“Hello,” my voice was steady, not betraying any of the nightmares that had haunted the past week.

He turned and said, “Glad to see you.”

“Have you been looking long?”

“Nah. I know you.”

That was pure Mildmay and gnomic in the extreme. I decided I didn’t want to know exactly what he meant. “Where are the others? There
are
… that is, they are with you, aren’t they?”

“Yeah.” He tucked his hair back behind his ear on the right side, and my other concerns were immediately eclipsed.

“What happened to your hands?”

“What? Oh.” He looked at his hands, at the scabbed lines and pink new skin, as if they simply perplexed him. “Roses.”

“What?”

“It’s a long fucking story. And not here, okay?”

I wanted to press the issue, wanted to find out the extent of the damage and what had happened. But the harder I pressed, the less Mildmay would tell me. So I said: “Which brings me back to, where are the others?”

“Baths.”

“That has a certain pragmatic logic to it.”

“Mavortian wants—”

“Mavortian?”

“Yeah. We found him and Bernard, too. And, you know, we were already doing a rescue, so it seemed a shame to leave ‘em.”

His version of a joke, I thought. There were suddenly more questions than I could even find the words to ask. And Mildmay was not the person to give me useful answers. “Why don’t I come with you to the baths?” I said. “You could use one.”

He made that face at me that was as close to a smile as he came, and limped ahead of me out of the lobby.

The public baths of Julip were new, a pet project of the current duke, full of air and light. The water was heated by an enormous bank of furnaces, roaring like lions beneath the earth. Mildmay stripped in the changing room with a serene lack of self-consciousness; I stayed fully dressed. Like the various public baths in Mélusine, these were as much a place for meetings and commerce as they were for bathing; no one commented. Watching Mildmay pad through the high-ceilinged rooms, I was reminded of a panther I had once seen being portaged through Mélusine to be shipped up the Sim to Vusantine. That same sense of imprisoned power, although Mildmay’s cage was the twisted bone of his right thigh, not a structure of iron bars. And his cage was the worse, because there was no door I could open to let him out.

The baths were arranged in a cross: calder to the east, tepidary to the north, froy to the west, with the changing rooms and offices to the south. The center of the cross was an impluvium, with koi in the circular pool and benches all around.

“You wanna stay here?” Mildmay said. “Or come along?”

“I’ll stay here.” The realization was hammering home now that these people whom I barely remembered—Mavortian, Bernard, Gideon—were people who had last seen me at the height of my madness. That had seemed safely unimportant when it was only Gideon being rescued, and being rescued from something so dire that there was not even a thought of weighing options, consequences, benefits and deficits. Now, about to be faced with men I remembered only as monsters, I was conscious of a desire to turn tail and run, to deny that they had any connection to me. But I had tried that in the Gardens of Nephele when I was first healed, I remembered bitterly, and it had not worked. It had only hurt Mildmay. I would have to face whatever was coming.

I did not sit down, wanting the advantage of height if nothing else. It was an effort not to let my fingers knot together, but Malkar had taught me, via his own brutal and unscrupulous methods, to counterfeit a nobleman’s poise, and the old instincts were not lost.

I can do this, I thought, and that was when a short, skinny Kekropian emerged from the calder, wrapped in one of the togas Mildmay had disdained. My knees all but buckled, and I was lucky to end up sitting on one of the benches rather than on the floor. For a moment, all I could see was green, and there was the sound of a river in darkness and the smell of cloves. I locked my hands against the edge of the bench and held on grimly, held on to the cool marble and the slight pain of my stiff finger joints, to the sunlight on the water and the lazy, circling shapes of the koi. A voice said, in my memory,
He began to draw mazes that could not be solved
, and I knew now that it was the voice of Gideon of Thrax.

And then, as if in answer, a voice in my head that was not a memory, :Felix?:

I blinked, then squeezed my eyes shut hard and opened them again. The Kekropian, standing in front of me, dark eyes intent in a too-thin face, long wet hair like ink against the whiteness of the toga. He did not look familiar, except that somewhere in the darkness inside my head, I knew him. I
knew
him.

I could not find my voice, my composure. Could seem to do nothing but sit and stare at him. And then there was that voice again, :Felix? Are you… :

Neither memory nor imagination. In a sudden clutch of panic, I scrambled up, getting the bench interposed between us. “Is that you in my head?” I did at least keep my voice down, but I saw the vicious flatness of my tone hit him like a blow. He took a step back, raising his hands in a gesture that was half defense, half apology. :I’m sorry. I can’t… I can’t speak. Out loud.: The dark eyes were wide, pleading.

For a moment, I was on the verge of lashing out; I did not have to remember this man to wound him, and I knew it. But I caught myself, controlled myself. That I associated this particular wizard’s trick with Malkar was no fault of Gideon’s. I managed half a smile, said, “You startled me. Mildmay didn’t mention…” Anything, really.

:It does not work with annemer. And I cannot… : Another gesture, this one of frustration. :The Fressandran disciplines are too different, and too controlled. Even if I wished to speak to Mavortian in this way, I could not.:

“Are you… ?”

:All right?: His mouth quirked. :I am both alive and sane, which is more, I think, than I had any right to expect. So, yes, I am ‘all right.’:

“Gideon, I—”

:And you are also alive and sane.: He raised his eyebrows, inviting an explanation that I did not particularly want to give. I remembered Mildmay saying,
It’s a long fucking story
, and found myself suddenly more sympathetic to his point of view.

“The celebrants of the Garden of Nephele are both learned and skilled,” I said as neutrally as I could.

But his reaction was not what I had hoped for. :Then you
did
find them!: he said, his eyes lighting up.

I didn’t want to talk about this. And he saw that, for his face was suddenly shuttered again, and he said, :I beg your pardon. I did not mean to... : I could not lie and say it was no matter, and we were still staring at each other in bitter awkwardness when Mavortian von Heber and his half brother Bernard came into the atrium.

I remembered Mavortian von Heber far better than I wished to. I remembered those bright, cruel blue eyes; I remembered, before he opened his mouth, the sound of his harsh Norvenan accent.

He for his part seemed momentarily struck dumb by the sight of me, a reaction that I was beginning to find tiresome. Then he came limping forward on his canes—new, I could tell, by the pale rawness of the wood—and said, “So. Messire Harrowgate. I did not think to see you again, and certainly not to see you thus.”

“I have been fortunate,” I said, with a quick, insincere sliver of a smile.

“As have we all,” Mavortian said. “We should talk soon. And privately.”

“I’m staying at the Duelling Hares,” I said, “and we can hire the private parlor.”

“Excellent. Once we’ve cleaned up, we’ll meet you there.”

I found I did not like him better now that I was sane. I smiled again, slightly wider but with no greater sincerity, and said, “I’ll wait here for my brother, thank you.”

He made me a slight, mocking bow. “As you wish.” And by some art that I could not quite decipher, contrived to collect both Bernard and Gideon in his wake as he headed for the tepidary.

No, I did not like Messire von Heber. Not in the slightest.

We were a motley convocation that gathered in the private parlor of the Duelling Hares: Mehitabel, Mildmay, and myself on one side of the room; Mavortian and Bernard on the other. Gideon, looking uneasy and unwell, perched on the window seat, his gaze shifting restlessly between Mavortian and me.

Mavortian had wanted this meeting; I would let Mavortian open the conversation. I leaned back in my chair, steepled my fingers in front of me, and waited. The spark of annoyance in Mavortian’s eye said that he’d recognized what I was doing and didn’t appreciate it; I smiled back at him sweetly.

“Let me say, Messire Harrowgate, how very gratified I am to see you well,” Mavortian said with a smile as insincere as my own.

“Thank you, Messire von Heber,” I said, matching his formal cadences as if we were two knights in a Tibernian romance. If he thought it gave him an advantage, he was wrong. “I am gratified likewise to see you… alive. But I understood that you had something you wanted to say to me.”

One dark eyebrow went up. “Yes, indeed. I wished to ask you, since we have all been so fortunate, what you intend to do now.” Irony and condescension slashing like knives behind his words.

I shrugged in a way I’d learned from Mildmay. “I am returning to the Mirador.”

“Are you sure that is wise?”

He knew the conditions under which I had left the Mirador, of course. I kept myself from snarling at him. “Before I answer that question, I would appreciate it if you would tell me what right you have to ask.”

The room was perfectly still. Gideon had gone an even more unattractive color, and Mildmay gave me a black look.

“We do have a history together.” I could not tell whether he was affecting to remind me of something he thought I already knew or whether he had guessed that I had essentially no memory of him.

“And my debt to you is not canceled out by your rescue from certain and unpleasant death?” I said mildly, as if I were only curious. He went blotchy red and said nothing for a moment. Bernard gave me a look even blacker than Mildmay’s.

“Messire Harrowgate,” Mavortian said, with the air of a man who has gathered his patience together with extreme care, “I am hoping that you may be the answer to a problem that has been troubling me for a good many years. I believe you know a man named Beaumont Livy?”

And all I had to do to vex him to the greatest possible extent was tell the truth. “No, I don’t.”

People talk about being able to cut tension with a knife, and I’ve always thought it was a stupid sort of thing to say, but right then I knew exactly what it meant. Because things were that fucking thick. Mavortian was staring at Felix, and Felix was staring right back, looking pleased with himself. Powers, I wished they hadn’t decided to hate each other on sight, but I’d known it was coming—or would’ve if I’d had the basic brains to stop and think about it. You put a guy who wants to control everything in the same room with a guy who’d rather walk into a bonfire than listen when somebody tells him not to, and it’s your own damn fault if you’re surprised when things get ugly. Stick to the heavy lifting, Milly-Fox. All you’re good for. And I thought I might also keep an eye on Bernard, because, Kethe, the look on his face. If Mavortian decided he wanted Felix dead, Bernard was going to be more than happy to oblige. It was almost funny, how fast Felix had managed to get on the wrong side of both of them.

Of course, Mavortian had gotten on his wrong side first. I’d known that as soon as I came out of the calder and saw him standing there glaring red-hot murder at Mavortian’s back while Mavortian and Gideon and Bernard went into the tepidary. He didn’t say nothing about it, and I didn’t like to ask.

I knew what the real problem was here anyway, even if neither me nor Felix was ever going to say it. Mavortian had seen Felix when he was crazy, and Felix felt about that whole thing like a cat about a mud puddle. And would have even if he’d remembered it. I didn’t know if him getting that part of his memory back would make things better or worse, but it for sure gave him fits that he couldn’t remember and other people could. And being Felix, he liked to hand his fits around.