The Virtu (61 page)

Or hear anything but Malkar’s voice in his head, most likely, I thought, remembering the times Malkar had done that to me. My heart was thudding nauseously in my chest, the feeling too raw to be described as anything as clean as guilt.

I should have known, a thought so heavy, so massive, that I could barely breathe around it, could barely keep my shoulders straight, my face composed.
I should have known
.

Mercifully, although it was not a mercy I deserved, there was not much more to the story. The Kalliphorne had followed the boat at a careful distance until the current carried it out of Mélusine. Then the monster, with a concern and effort that were surely the opposite of monstrous, swam back to the cade-skiffs’ guildhall to find Cardenio. And Cardenio, having discharged his portion of the cade-skiffs’ duty to the remains of Vey Coruscant, had gone to Britomart and indebted himself to Mildmay’s former keeper for a way into the Mirador.

“But you’re a cade-skiff,” I protested. “You could have come openly.”

“I couldn’t have gotten to you without stating my business, and the Kalliphorne begged me not to tell anyone except the people who could help him.” He frowned. “Mr. Terrapin must have some sort of hold on it.”

“But to go to Mildmay’s keeper—!”

“Madame Kolkhis has connections,” he said, with a pragmatic ruthlessness that sat oddly with his nondescript face and gentle eyes. “She gave me a letter of introduction to a musician named Hugo Chandler, and he brought me to Miss Parr—”

“Who brought him to you,” Mehitabel finished. “Sometimes clandestinely
is
the best way to get things done.”

“Oh, and Madame Kolkhis gave me this to give to you.” He handed me a sealed paper, which I held, feeling as if it was poisoning me through the skin of my hands.

There was a pause, an awkward stillness. Cardenio said, “Lord Felix, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and to Cardenio’s frown, Mehitabel’s incredulity, I could only say again, helplessly, “I don’t know.”

To get away from their eyes, I opened the letter from Mildmay’s keeper:

Cardenio Richey tells me that Mildmay the Fox is in trouble, and that it is serious, although he will not tell me what the trouble is. Although I am fond of all my children, I have loved few of them as I loved Mildmay. If there is anything I can do to help him, a message to the Stag and Candles in Britomart will find me.

Like Malkar, Mildmay’s keeper did not sign her correspondence.

I said, bewildered, “She says she will help him if there is any way she can. But I thought… I thought she hated him?” It twisted into a question, and I looked at Cardenio.

“
Hated
him? No, m’lord. Not Madame Kolkhis. We reckon she’d do just about anything to get him back.”

“He doesn’t speak of her with any fondness.” When he spoke of her at all.

Cardenio grimaced. “I don’t know how he feels, m’lord. You never do, with him. But she was crazy about him. Nearly scared her kids to death, the fit she pitched when he left her.”

“Wait,” I said, feeling bludgeoned again and terribly stupid. “ ‘Crazy about him’—are you saying they were involved
romantically
?”

“They were lovers for indictions,” Cardenio said. “After he… you know, after his face.”

“When he was
fourteen
?” My voice had risen, and part of me wondered cynically—considering what I’d been doing when I was fourteen why I was so shocked.

Cardenio blinked at me in alarm. “I thought you said he talked about her.”

“He didn’t mention that part.”

“Oh. Well, I guess he wouldn’t. I know she hurt him, but he’d never talk about that, either.”

“Of course he wouldn’t.” I shook myself. At the moment, Mildmay’s past, and what he had or had not told me about it, did not matter. “When Kolkhis says she will help,” I said carefully to Cardenio, “can I trust her?”

“Dunno what she can do, but yeah. She keeps her word.”

“Would we could all say as much,” Mehitabel said; I managed not to flinch.

“I’ll help, too, m’lord, if there’s any way I can,” Cardenio said, getting up. “Just send to the Fishmarket—they’ll know how to find me. But I got to go. There’s, um. Well, with Madame Coruscant dead, there’s stuff we’ve got to do.”

“I can imagine,” I said. “Thank you.”

He bowed to both of us and left. I wondered for a moment if I should have summoned someone to show him the way, but then remembered he was a cade-skiff. He could take care of himself.

Mehitabel stood up, shook her skirts out sharply. “Nothing I say to you will have the slightest effect, so I’m not going to bother.”

The door closed decisively behind her, leaving me alone with myself. She was right; nothing she could have said could have hurt as much as that.

I managed to avoid Mavortian for four days, largely by the simple expedient of never being in my rooms. I did not want to talk to him, did not want to look at him. I did not want to see my own evil reflecting at me from his eyes. And I did not want to face how successfully he had manipulated me, how witlessly I had danced to his tune. I sent a note, brief, impersonal, detailing the facts of Vey Coruscant’s death, Mildmay’s capture, and Malkar’s flight, and then did my best to forget that Mavortian von Heber even existed.

But he ran me to earth in the end—or had Bernard run me to earth, which was very much the same thing. I had been working in the Février Archive, searching for some way that I could use the obligation d‘âme to find Mildmay, when a shadow fell across my notes and Bernard said, “
There
you are.”

I put down my pen. “Yes,” I said. “Here I am.”

“He wants to talk to you.”

“I’m not surprised.” I looked up at him; I hadn’t been sleeping more than two or three hours at a time, and I saw him with the clarity of exhaustion: the gray in his mustaches, the frown line worn between his eyebrows. “What do
you
think of all this?”

“Me?” He was visibly taken aback.

“You’re neither an automaton nor a beast of burden, regardless of how Mavortian treats you. You
must
have opinions.”

“You’re a fine one to talk,” he muttered.

“About having opinions?”

“About treating somebody like a beast of burden.”

“You think that’s how I treat Mildmay?”

He snorted. “There’s no
think
about it. I’ve watched you. And I’ve watched him. Powers know, I don’t like him, but you want my
opinion
, my
opinion
is, I wouldn’t wish you on my worst enemy.”

“Thank you for your candor,” I said. I wanted it to be bitter, venomous, and was horrified at how tired I sounded, how sick. I had no right to pity, had no right to sound as if I pitied myself. I shut my eyes for a moment, took a deep breath. “But truly, I want to know. What do you think of your brother’s grand scheme of vengeance?”

“Half brother,” Bernard said, and there was all the bitter venom I hadn’t been able to put into my own words. “I don’t think anything. That’s not what he pays me for.”

“He pays you?”

“I’m the hired help, like my mother. And that’s as far as I go. Now, come on. He wants to talk to you, and it’s my job to be sure he gets what he wants.”

I could have refused him; we both knew he couldn’t actually force me. But I was too tired to continue to fight against the inevitable. I was a monster; denying that fact would not change it.

“All right,” I said, gathered up my pen and quire of notes, and accompanied Bernard silently back to the Filigree Corridor, where he and Mavortian had been housed.

Mavortian was laying out his cards by witchlight, his engraved silver focus pressed between the hollow of his thumb and the deck.

“Bernard found me,” I said. “What did you want to say?”

“We need to decide what our next move is going to be,” he said, without taking his attention away from the cards.

“Our next move?”

“Now that Messire Gennadion has been driven out into the open, we must decide how we are going to confront him.”

“ ‘Driven out into the open’? Is
that
what we did?”

The look he gave me was just barely short of rolling his eyes. “I regret as much as you do Mildmay’s bad luck—”

“Somehow I doubt that.”

“
But
,” he continued over me, “we cannot change what has happened. Therefore, it only makes sense to consider how we may best turn it to our advantage.”

“We
have
no advantage.”

“Maselle Coruscant is dead.”

“And if you think that isn’t exactly what Malkar wanted, you’re even more stupid than I am.” Mavortian frowned at me, and I continued, “He intended me to get rid of Vey for him. He probably drafted that letter she sent. He was
there
, Mavortian. If he hadn’t wanted her dead, she wouldn’t be.”

“You talk about him as if he were a god. He’s as fallible as any of us.”

I hesitated on the brink of arguing, but I knew I would not be able to make Mavortian understand. It was quintessentially Malkar—as I
had
told Mavortian, listening to my own words no more than he had—to pit one follower against another, telling each a different lie, and now that I had had time—more than enough time, long, cold hours of the Mirador’s sleepless darkness—to think the thing through, the story about emulating Brinvillier Strych was thin. Malkar did not follow in other wizards’ footsteps, and I wondered what his real use for Vey Coruscant had been. Clearly, whatever it was, it had been of limited duration.

Instead of any of that, I said, “Regardless, we don’t know where Malkar is, we don’t know what he’s planning, and he has a hostage. Where, exactly, do you see our advantage?”

He scowled. “I had not expected that you would run craven.”

“And I hadn’t realized you were a madman. So I’d say we’re even.”

He opened his mouth, but I cut him off. “I don’t want anything more to do with your revenge, or with you, and I should greatly prefer it if we never spoke to each other again.” I turned to go, turned back to say, “
Don’t
send him after me.”

I left then, and although Mavortian shouted, “Felix! Damn you, come back here!” he did not send Bernard.

Court was a penance. No one knew, of course, that it was my doing Vey Coruscant was dead, and my feeble explanations of Mildmay’s absence were accepted—because no one cared. They were grateful an embarrassment had been removed, and not at all concerned about what I had done to remove it. They wouldn’t have cared if I’d killed and eaten him; they probably wouldn’t even have been shocked. I saw the truth in every face I looked at; I was a monster, and no one expected anything better of me.

It was on the sixth morning since I had woken to the realization of my own terrible, arrogant stupidity that I left the Hall of the Chimeras alone, chin up, avoiding eye contact, and heard Robert of Hermione’s voice calling, “Lord Felix!”

I knew better than to pretend I had not heard Robert; he would only follow me. I stopped, waited. Did not turn, and was gratified by the hint of annoyance in Robert’s voice when he said, “Good morning, Lord Felix.”

Then
I turned. And smiled and said, “Good morning, Lord Robert,” as if there were no hostility between us at all.

Anything to disconcert him.

It did not faze him for long; he smiled in return, the wide unpleasant smile that I had hated for years. “Dear me, you look dreadful.”

“I
beg
your pardon?”

“I really begin to wonder if Giancarlo is right to be so sanguine about your stability.”

“I am perfectly stable.”
As stable and resolute as an aspic
, Malkar’s voice said mockingly in my memory. I did not flinch.

Robert raised his eyebrows in a parody of polite skepticism, but something else had caught my attention. “When were you talking to
Giancarlo
about my stability?”

“I was worried,” he said, as if that were any sort of an explanation. “You don’t look like you’ve slept more than five hours in the past week. Have you?”

“It is no business of yours.”

“Considering what you’re capable of, that’s a remarkably naïve thing to say. Would you say the same to your friend Sherbourne Foss?”