The Virtu (55 page)

I didn’t mean to say nothing about it to Felix, either. I didn’t want to talk about it, and I was pretty sure he didn’t want to talk about it, and anyway he already knew what Lord Shannon thought. But I came through the door, and he looked up from his books and said, “What’s wrong?” and the simple stupid fact that he sounded like he cared made me blurt it out like I didn’t have no more sense than a little woolly lamb myself.

“I know what you and Lord Shannon were fighting about.”

“Oh,” he said. He’d gone very still. “Damn. Someone told you.”

“Kind of on accident,” I said, almost like I was apologizing for it, and how fucking stupid is that?

“How does someone
accidentally
… No. Never mind.” He gave me a look, kind of half-exasperated and half-helpless. “I suppose I must admit it was foolish to imagine I could keep you from finding out.” Like I’d done it on purpose or something. He rested his face in his hands for a moment, and I really did feel like shit about it, because, powers and saints, didn’t he have enough in front of him already?

You and your big fucking mouth, Milly-Fox.

“I’m sorry,” I said, but he waved it off without raising his head.

“You have nothing to be sorry for. None of this petty, sordid mess is your fault. Shannon knows me too damnably well.”

I didn’t want to talk about it. Kethe bless my stupid head, did I not want to talk about it. I said, “You wish it was true, don’t you?”

His head came up, spooky eyes wide. Last thing in the world he’d expected me to say. I was kind of surprised myself. I stood there and watched him think about lying to me, watched him decide not to. I hoped, kind of sideways on to anything else, that he didn’t fancy himself a cardplayer, because he’d get skinned alive, a face like that.

He said, “Yes, I suppose I do.”

My heart was slamming against my ribs like it wanted out, and my mouth had gone dry as cotton. “Ain’t it incest?” I asked, because I needed to hear what he’d say.

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Afraid I’ll get you pregnant?”

“Oh, fuck you,” I said and winced, but he didn’t jump on it.

“Yes,” he said. “It would be incest. That’s what makes it such good gossip.”

Neither of us said anything for a minute. He was watching me like right then I was the only thing that mattered. Only thing ever.

“Um,” I said. “What d’you want me to say?”

“What you think,” he said. He sounded tired. “That’s all I ever want. It bothers you, doesn’t it?”

“Which part?” I said, and I was so relieved when he laughed that I laughed with him.

But he quit laughing pretty quick. “The fact that it’s incest, for a start.”

“Don’t it bother you?”

He shrugged, and something about it made me remember he’d been a Pharaohlight whore before he’d finished his second septad. “I wouldn’t let it stand in my way, no.”

“Powers,” I said, real quiet along of not having any breath to get some sound behind it. My shoulder hit the door, which was the first I realized I’d been backing away from him. “I ain’t molly.”

“I know that,” he said.

Sacred fuck, I couldn’t breathe. I was pressed up against the door like it was going to save me, and part of me wanted to bail, just bolt out of the room like a racing dog. But I couldn’t run away. Couldn’t do that to him.

“I’m not going to rape you. I don’t deny that I desire you. I’ll even admit that I think I could make it good for you. But you don’t want to. And therefore, I will not. I am not Porphyria Levant.” A pause while he heaved in a breath. “Now tell me truthfully. Do I disgust you?”

“No,” I said, pure reflex. “You scare the shit out of me, but that ain’t the same thing.”

He smiled, and I thought he meant it. “No, I suppose it isn’t.”

I put it off as long as I could. Even after Mildmay told me he thought he could find the place I needed, even after Mavortian had grudgingly said that the work we’d done on repatterning the Virtu ought to hold, I kept seeking reasons, excuses, the flimsiest and frailest of rationalizations—anything to keep away the inevitable.

And no one said anything to me. I was sure they could see my reluctance, and Mildmay at least knew of my fear, but not even Mavortian demanded to know the reason for my delay. And I knew why. Neither Mavortian nor Gideon believed it would work.

The knowledge was like lead, to add to the ice of my helpless, irrational terror. And I could not bring myself to open the subject, to ask if they had reasons beyond the fact that it had never been done before—to ask for their help. Not just their assistance, but their support. I could not do it; I could not beg.

My dreams got steadily worse, and that first nightmare became a grim prophecy: I could not concentrate, awake, asleep, or in between, and thus I could not find the Khloïdanikos. All I could find was the Sim.

I knew I had to break this paralysis, and yet I did not know how. I had always dealt with my terror of the Sim by staying away from it; with that strategy denied me, I was simply at a loss.

And thus I blurted at Mildmay one evening, when I should have said good night, “What are you afraid of?”

“Sorry?” He turned, eyebrows rising, hand frozen in the act of opening his bedroom door.

I hadn’t meant to sound so accusing, especially in the wake of that jagged, dreadful conversation when he had admitted he was afraid of me. “I mean, what things frighten you? And how do you… how do you deal with it?”

“Dunno,” he said, predictably. It was his first line of defense. But I waited, and he seemed to decide I was serious, for he came back toward the table where I sat surrounded by books.

“Don’t like ghouls much,” he said, and got a smile out of me. “Afraid of a lot of things, I guess. Most people are. And you deal with it the best way you can.” He hesitated, those green eyes watching my face as if what he truly feared was that I would bite him. “D’you want to talk about it?”

I supposed I had been rather transparent. “No,” I said, “but maybe it would help.”

He nodded; then, still watching me, he pulled out a chair and sat down. And waited—no fidgeting, no impatience, and I had no idea what was happening behind those watchful, beautiful green eyes, though at least I’d disabused myself of the notion that nothing was happening at all. He would wait as long as I needed him to, and he would still be here when I was ready to speak.

Something in that realization, some shame, some comfort, acted as a spur. I opened my mouth and heard myself say, “I grew up beside the Sim—on top of it, really.”

Mildmay said nothing, but I could see that he was listening; that pin-scratch frown was already between his eyebrows, and I thought he knew he wasn’t going to like what he heard.

“My keeper,” and saying those words was still hard, after all the years of not saying them, of denying they were there to be said, “he—well, I don’t know if he owned them or not, to tell you the truth, but he used the Paladin Warehouses, in Simside.”

“I been there,” Mildmay said grimly.

“Then you know about the basement.”

“That ain’t a basement at all, yeah.”

It seemed unfair that this should get harder as it went along. “You’ve seen my back.” Not a question, since I knew he had: an awkward moment in a wretched hotel in the middle of the Grasslands, and why I should have forgotten so much and yet have to remember
that
… I’d lied to him then, but I’d told the truth later. “And I told you that was Keeper’s second-worst punishment.”

“You said he’d hold you under.”

I nodded once, convulsively. “But I don’t think I… do you know how many of us he drowned?”

Mildmay shook his head, his eyes never leaving my face.

“Neither do I,” I said, and bit the inside of my lip hard against a sob. Against remembering.

“Kethe,” Mildmay said softly, and I knew he understood—or was starting to.

“I don’t know how many times I earned the river,” I said, to my hands now, staring at the rings and tattoos that reminded me I had escaped Keeper, that I wasn’t that weeping, terrified little boy any longer. “But I know I
almost
drowned five times between the time I was six and the Fire when I was eleven. When Keeper died.” I could still remember the way the river tasted when it rushed in, filling nose and mouth, throat and lungs and stomach. And I remembered how much worse it tasted afterward, as I lay on the bank, coughing and vomiting and sobbing, and none of the other children daring even to offer comfort. “And… he made us all watch, you know. Whatever the punishment was. If it was the river, we all had to go down there and stand and
watch
. I watched him drown Ursy. And Rhais. And Belinda. We all did. We stood there and watched him murder our friends, and we didn’t do
anything
.”

“You were little kids.”

“If we’d all rushed him at once,” I said. “We could have pushed him in. Big as he was. And he couldn’t swim, either.
We could have stopped him
.”

“You were little kids,” Mildmay said again, even more gently. “And you were scared to death of him.”

“I still am.”

I looked up then, in the silence; Mildmay was watching me, eyes anxious. He’d been a kept-thief, too, and in that moment I saw the child he had been, just as he probably saw the child I had been. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said. “The river is just the river. If I fall in, I’ll drown. But it won’t…” I managed a laugh, although it was shaky and unconvincing. “It won’t reach up and drag me in. I know that. But I… I’m afraid of
him
.”

“You told me he’s dead.”

“He is. He died in the Fire, in the Rue Orphée.” I stopped, dragged a breath in through my tight and aching throat. “Just like Joline.”

“Your friend,” he said, and it astonished me that that brusque, slurred, drawling voice could be so kind.

“We told each other stories where we were brother and sister. And they always felt like they were true.” I forced myself to meet his eyes, forced myself to drag in another breath. “You remind me of her.”

For a moment, there was no jade hardness in his eyes at all. Then he looked away and said, “I do my best.”

“If… if I did fall in the river…”

“I’d jump in after you. Done it before.”

And he had. When I thought of the river beneath Klepsydra, I mostly thought of that moment of scalding humiliation when I had betrayed my desire to him. But it was true. I had fallen in, and he had come after me. And saved me.

And somehow that helped. Remembering that one time at least I had come out of the river before Keeper let me up. Quickly, while I still had this momentary bravery, I said, “Tomorrow, then. After court.”

“Tomorrow?”

“I can’t put it off any longer. I shouldn’t have put it off this long.”

He thought about that. “Okay. And if you fall in, I’ll be right behind you.”

I smiled at him and thought, although I could not bring myself to say: I love you, too.

Mildmay had sensibly chosen not to explore the uninhabited depths of the Mirador alone, so he, too, walked our path for the first time. The Mirador is a labyrinth, I thought again and shuddered, a hard spasm that made Gideon look at me anxiously, although he said nothing. I knew that he was wary of intruding and that I would have to reach out to him first, but I felt flayed and brittle with what I was about to attempt; I could not let my defenses down now.

We descended through dust and cobwebs, past the tiny bones of mice caught and slain by long-ago cats. Mildmay carried no map with him, but it was clear he did not need one. He solved this labyrinth as easily as he had solved the one in Klepsydra.

And the deeper we descended, the stronger the smell of the river became. I saw water damage on the paneling of the walls; brackish silt gritted the floor beneath my feet. I wondered how often the Sim flooded these halls, with no one to notice or care as they drowned. I realized that the noise at the edge of my consciousness was the voice of the river, not the full-throated roar I had been expecting, but a more delicate sound, the noise of a thousand tiny streams braided together. To distract myself from it, I said, “How long has it been, do you think, since these levels were used?”

“Dunno,” Mildmay said, “but this is old shit. I mean, Thestonarius old.” And the Thestonarii were the kings and queens who had built Mélusine’s walls.

“Are we even
on
the maps any longer?”

“Nope,” Mildmay said cheerfully.

“You mean we’re lost,” Bernard said from behind me. He was supporting his brother—carrying him when the going became too treacherous—and I supposed he had reason to be ill-tempered, although I did not like his tone.

“Nope,” Mildmay said again, just as cheerfully. “This is like some pieces of the Arcane. I got the hang of it.”

“I wish I found that comforting,” Mavortian said.

“You should,” I said. “He knows what he’s doing.”

“If you say so,” Mavortian said, and I bit my tongue against an intemperate reply. Quarreling with Mavortian would serve no purpose, and Mildmay would not thank me.

The sound of water was growing clearer, the scent and feeling of it in the air stronger, heavier. “Down here,” Mildmay said, and led us down a narrow spiral staircase; in the light of lanterns and witchlights, the carvings of water lilies and koi along the walls almost seemed to move.