The Virtu (43 page)

I took a deep breath, said, “I was apprenticed to Malkar when I was fourteen.” A statement as much lie as truth, for I knew what these wizards would understand when I said the word “apprentice” and it was nothing,
nothing
like what Malkar had made of me. “I did not then understand the teachings of the Cabal, so I did not understand that what he did was wrong.”

“Mr. Harrowgate, you are not on trial for heresy,” Giancarlo said. “All we ask is an explanation.”

“Yes, my lord. He… he cast spells on me.”

It was hard to say, partly because it was heresy, partly because Malkar had taught me so brutally never to speak of these matters, partly because what Malkar had done to me was not so different from what I had done to Mildmay in Farflung. Not so different? In all honesty, very much the same. And the wizards all gasped and murmured, like startled doves. I could feel something slowly shredding itself within me at how innocent they were, at how little of what Malkar had done to me they would be able to comprehend, even if I were able to describe it to them. I found that I did not want to hurt them by showing them their own blindness; this was all in the past, anyway, and it would do me no good to shock them with it.

“I don’t know what all of them were,” I said, and that at least was true. Malkar had not explained himself to me, and by the time I had learned enough to put together what I remembered with what I had read, I was much too afraid of him to ask. “And I thought I had rid myself of all of them before I took my oaths, but…” I shrugged helplessly. “It would seem that I was wrong.”

“Can you describe these spells in greater detail?” Giancarlo said, although he sounded as if he was ashamed of himself for pressing me.

I hesitated. “Not in any way that would be of help to you. Lord Giancarlo, if I knew how he had done it, I would tell you.”

“I believe that you would,” Giancarlo said. I felt slightly sick at the knowledge of my own deception, of the obligation d‘âme chaining me to Mildmay, but if I confessed it now, they would not reinstate me, and I would not be able to mend the Virtu.

Malkar had taught me the value of only answering the question asked.

“Mr. Harrowgate,” said Lindsay Bethonius, “did Malkar Gennadion habitually commit heresy, to your knowledge?”

“He was not Cabaline,” I said, “and he did not consider it heresy. But, yes.”

They muttered darkly to one another, and I bit the inside of my lower lip, hard, to keep from either shrieking with laughter or giving them the catalogue of the spells Malkar had cast on me that I
could
identify—and cast in my turn.

“Mr. Harrowgate.” Lord Selewine, a contemporary of Giancarlo’s, a gentle, good-natured old man with an enormous white mustache. “Do you truly believe you can, ah, restore the Virtu to its former state?”

“My lord, I believe I can.”

“Which is more than any of us can say,” Vida remarked, speaking for the first time. She looked up and down the table. “What do we have to lose?”

“You can’t be serious!” Agnes, with all the predictability of a striking clock.

“I’m deadly serious, Agnes,” Vida said. “If Felix thinks he can do it, I think we should let him try.”

“We have no assurance that this isn’t some new trick of Gennadion’s,” Johannes Hilliard said.

“You have
my
assurance,” I said, and he sneered back at me.

“Mr. Harrowgate has less reason to love Malkar Gennadion than any of us,” Giancarlo said. He heaved his breath out in something between a sigh and an exasperated snort. “At its simplest the question is: do we believe Felix or not? If we do, then Vida is right. If we don’t…” He gave me a slow, thoughtful look under his bushy eyebrows.

“If you don’t, you might as well carry out that death sentence,” I said. “Or exile me to the Myrian Mountains. You won’t be able to let me stay here.”

“Thank you, yes.” Giancarlo collected the other twelve wizards’ attention without apparently moving a muscle. “Does anyone have any reasoned arguments against reinstating Felix Harrowgate as a wizard of the Mirador?”

He was a better diplomat than I; he did not stress the word “reasoned.”

“How can we?” said Johannes. “We haven’t even had time to think. And if you were expecting to have him show up again, Giancarlo, then you must have known something I didn’t.”

“It is not a complicated question, Johannes.”

“But one with very complicated consequences,” said Lord Selewine.

“The Virtu won’t get
more
broken if you allow the Curia members a day to consider,” Hamilcar Nashe said reasonably, and my heart sank.

“That seems fair,” Giancarlo said, and I did not say anything because it
was
fair, and my protests would serve only to alienate those members of the Curia who were suspicious but not yet hostile.

I held my tongue and looked pleasant.

There were murmurings of agreement around the table, and when Giancarlo put it to a vote, it passed unanimously.

We would reconvene at two o’clock the following afternoon, and until then, all I had to do was keep from exploding with frustration and pent-up truth.

The Mirador’s servants looked at me like I was a two-headed carny freak.

It was the accent mostly—well, and the hair and the scar and me riding in at Felix Harrowgate’s tail and all. They knew what I was, and I got to say I didn’t care for it, being looked at like I was one of them big Queensdock alley cats—the kind that mostly think people are just really big rats—dropped in the middle of a bunch of house cats. Like I had fleas and probably a septad really nasty diseases.

And those were the ones that would look at me at all.

I let Mehitabel do the talking.

They looked at her a little funny, too, but, I mean, a perfectly nice Kekropian lady or an alley cat? Which would
you
pick?

So she got rooms for her and Gideon and Mavortian and Bernard, and if she thought like I did that Gideon probably wouldn’t be using his room much, she didn’t let it show. And she did way better than I would’ve with saying Felix wanted his old rooms back and not making it sound like he’d just assumed they’d been saved for him. Which, if she’d said it, would’ve been the truth.

And it turned out they had been. I wasn’t sure if it was because the Mirador was so fucking big that nobody’d noticed, or just that nobody’d wanted Felix’s rooms. In the Lower City, moving into somebody’s rooms who’d killed themselves or gone crazy or murdered their wife or something was the worst kind of bad luck and you didn’t do it at all without you hired a priest to come and say a blessing. I didn’t know if hocuses felt that way or not.

But anyway, nobody was using those rooms, and the head guy—Architrave was his name and he seemed decent enough—sent a couple of gals off to dust and air them out and everything. I almost asked how you aired out rooms in the middle of the fucking Mirador with no windows and Kethe only knows how much stone between you and actual daylight, but I figured the answer was magic and I didn’t want to know.

And I was just wondering if there was somewhere I could sneak off to for an hour and just, I don’t know, sit still and not have to worry about nothing, when Mavortian caught my eye and said, “We need to talk.” And that answered that.

I’d done everything I could not to get stuck alone in a room with Mavortian since we’d made it out of Aiaia. There were too many things I didn’t want to talk about with him, and I had this uneasy feeling, sort of like invisible caterpillars crawling up and down my spine, that Mavortian had things he wanted to say to me, and they weren’t going to be things I wanted to hear.

But I couldn’t tell
him
that, so I followed along to the room him and Bernard had been given and stood and watched while Mavortian got himself settled in the only chair and Bernard started unpacking.

I knew Mavortian was waiting, spinning out the silence to try and make me nervous. But I liked the silence better than whatever it was he was planning on saying, so I just propped myself against the wall and waited him out.

It pissed him off—which, I got to say about Felix, he never let it bother him when he tried something like that and it didn’t work. He just tried something else. But Mavortian never liked admitting he was trying to play you, and he snapped at me, “Why did you let your brother cast the obligation d‘âme on you?”

“Didn’t,” I said. “I asked him to.”

Bernard had been pretending I wasn’t there, but he turned around so quick he nearly fell on his ass. Mavortian went kind of gray and said, “What?
Why
?”

“I got my reasons,” I said, and wished it had come out kind of no-nonsense instead of just sullen.

“Whatever he told you, Mildmay, you didn’t have to do it.”

“He didn’t tell me nothing. I made the choice, nobody else.” And sure, maybe it’d been a mistake, but that was part of the whole making-a-choice thing. And I thought about how I’d be feeling right about now if I was on the way to St. Millefleur, and I knew it might have been a bad decision, but it hadn’t been a mistake.

I added, because they were both still staring at me and I was tired of everybody assuming everything was Felix’s fault, “He tried to talk me out of it.”

“Bet he didn’t try very fucking hard,” Bernard muttered.

You weren’t there, you prick. But I wasn’t going to give either one of them the satisfaction. I said to Mavortian, “What’d you want to talk about?” and, powers, I sounded like I was back at my second septad and Keeper’d been chewing me out for something that wasn’t my fault. She did that a lot.

Mavortian leaned back and steepled his fingers and said, like it was all the information I should need: “Beaumont Livy.”

No fucking surprise there. I waited.

He said, kind of half-snarling, “Your brother’s purposes, while noble, get us no nearer my objective.”

“Us?”

“I hired you.”

“Yeah. Almost an indiction ago, and you ain’t paid me enough to keep a cat alive.” It was really satisfying watching him go red. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out right away, and I said, “ ‘Sides, you know about the obligation d’âme. You know what it means.”

He went an even uglier color, and I realized that
he’d
known, but he hadn’t thought I did. How fucking flat do you think I am? But I didn’t say it. Didn’t say nothing, and after a minute he looked at me and said, “I thought you understood.”

“Understood what?”

He kept looking at me steadily. “I told you about Anna Gloria Pietrin.”

“Yeah. So?”

I knew what he was trying to do, namely fuck me over without lifting a finger. But I’ve never been real keen on revenge, and it certainly wasn’t no good reason to let Mavortian keep using me for free.

“I thought you understood,” he said again, sad as a kicked puppy.

“Try it on Bernard,” I said, and Bernard gave me a glare that could’ve melted glass. “Look. Things have changed. I work for Felix now, so anything about Beaumont Livy, you’ll have to take up with him. Was that all you wanted?”

“Get out,” Mavortian said, and he didn’t have to tell me twice.

Out in the hall, I figured I didn’t really want to talk to Mehitabel, and there wasn’t no point in me trying to talk to Gideon, so I might as well go see if the maids were done with Felix’s rooms and if maybe he was back yet. Down to the end of the hall, turned left, and slammed into a little guy in livery carrying a stack of cravats. I just barely kept my feet—and it felt like someone’d run a red-hot wire through my leg—and the little guy ended up on his ass with cravats all around him like big dead leaves.

“Powers, I’m sorry,” I said and offered him a hand up. “I didn’t hear you—”

I ran out of voice. Because the little guy looked up, and it was Jean-Tigre. I went back a step without meaning to, and my bad leg just went out from under me, and I thumped back against the wall.

Jean-Tigre had run from Keeper just after I finished my second septad. And I’d known he was going and not said nothing, although Keeper would have skinned me alive if she’d caught on. And then it had been like he’d fallen off the face of the world. Not in a pack, not in a brothel, not in a guild. I’d figured he was dead.

But here he was, in the Mirador, in fucking livery. And I’d just knocked him flat.

I’d heard about the Mirador being this way—about how coincidences fucking collected in the hallways—but I’d never imagined it happening to me. And that’d been dumb, but, you know, that was pretty much business as usual these days.

Jean-Tigre pulled himself together first, although his face was as white as the cravats he was picking up. He said in a voice like frozen rain, “I beg your pardon, sir,” and looked straight through me like I wasn’t fucking there.

I may be dumb, but I can take a fucking hint. I got my bad leg back to where I needed it, went around Jean-Tigre, and headed off down the hall.

And no matter how much I wanted to, I didn’t step on none of them nice white cravats.

Powers and saints, Felix was pissed off when he showed up. You could feel it coming off him like heat off an oven or stink off a skunk. He said in this tight, cold, furious voice, “The Curia requires twenty-four hours to make up what it claims to be its mind,” and slammed into his bedroom like a bear with a sore ass.