The Virtu (7 page)

“Sorry. What?”

“Here. In the Gardens. This isn’t my covenant, you know.”

“Yeah, I got that. But, I mean, I thought—”

“I am dying of consumption. Yes. But I could do that anywhere.”

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure I should admit that the Arkhon had told me and Felix about him. “I, um—”

“I am here so that I would not do exactly what I did. The celebrants of Hakko decided I was not trustworthy, and I have proved them right.”

“Thamuris, it don’t—”

“Yes, it does.” But he’d worn himself out. His head fell back against the pillows, and there was sweat on his forehead.

“I should go,” I said and got up.

“Yes,” he said. “But, please…”

I looked at him a moment, and then said, carefully, “If you need to know that I forgive you, then, yeah, I do. It’s good between us. Right?”

“Yes,” he said, in a voice like a half-dead cat. “Good.”

“Okay,” I said. And there was no wish I could make for him, “be well,” or “think of me,” or nothing, because all there was ahead of him was him dying, and it would be stupid and mean to say anything pretending otherwise. So I just touched his hand and said, “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Mildmay,” he said.

I turned and limped out of the room without looking back. I kept on not looking back, all the way to my room, and then I shut the door behind me and sat down on the bed, and then I rubbed the water out of my eyes and tried real hard to think about something else. And I don’t suppose I need to tell you how well
that
worked.

If there’d been any way in this world, Hell, or anywhere else, I could’ve got out of going to that fucking party, I would’ve taken it. But Felix wanted me there, and I was finding out real fast that I sucked at saying no to anything Felix wanted. Besides which, Khrysogonos was all over me about would I go, and it would be good for me, and on and on, all that fucking bullshit pretending like he cared.

So I went.

And I hated it.

They had the common decency to leave me alone, which meant I could stand in a corner by myself with my ugly cane in case I fell down or something, and watch all these red-haired people laughing and talking and drinklng, and Felix in the middle of it. I could see Khrysogonos somewhere near him, staring at him like—well, let’s be honest, Milly-Fox, like you do when you’re sure nobody’s looking, like he hung the fucking stars. So I was hating Felix for being the way he was, and hating Khrysogonos for being able to look at him like that and not fucking
worry
about it or be afraid that Felix would use it like leverage in a wrestling match, and especially hating everybody else who could look at Felix any damn way they pleased. I was watching for Astyanax—the way sometimes you’ll pick at a scab, you know, because you
want
it to hurt—but I didn’t see him. Which was probably a good thing because the way I was feeling I would’ve done something stupid.

So I stood there and kept my face blank and wondered how long I’d have to stay to make Felix happy. Wondered if he’d even notice if I left. Nobody else would, that was for sure.

Then all at once, everybody was getting quiet, and the Arkhon was standing next to Felix, smiling and saying shit about colleagues and friends and blood ties and success and on and on, and Felix was watching her with an expression on his face I couldn’t quite make out, and then she took a box out of her coat pocket, a jewelry box, long and narrow, and handed it to him.

He looked like he thought it might bite him, but he opened it. And Kethe, the thing that happened to his face then—I felt sick for a second, just knowing that no matter what I did, I’d never be able to get that look from him, that wonder and happiness and just… I don’t know.

And he turned to the Arkhon and said, stammering a little which wasn’t like him, “I—I can’t.”

“Of course you can,” she said. “We are all in agreement.”

And he looked around at all them red-haired people, all of them just grinning like fools, and I ducked sideways a little to be sure I wasn’t in his line of sight, although he wasn’t looking for me and I knew it. Then he said, “I shouldn’t… I know I should give them back… but I can’t!” And he laughed, purely with delight, and I felt even worse.

I edged back to where I could see him, and watched him take rings out of that box, ten rings, one at a time, and slide them on his fingers. They were gold and garnet, each the length of the first-finger joint, sized exactly, and I wondered if they’d taken his measurements when he was crazy or if it was some kind of spell. And when he was wearing them all and tucked the box into his own pocket, he held up his hands so everybody could see, and they laughed and cheered and clapped, and I was glad I had a wall to lean against because otherwise I would have ended up on the floor. Because the rings and the tattoos, and oh Kethe he was a Cabaline and for the first time since I’d known him, he
looked
it. And I realized I could never tell him that I looked at him like that and all I thought of was my friend Zephyr being burned because the Cabalines had decided to believe he was a heretic.

Nobody was going to notice if I left. This little gift-giving was all about him, like everything else here—and what would they have given me anyway, a new knife to replace the one I’d lost when the
Morskaiakrov
went down?—and nobody was watching me. Even if they did notice, I wasn’t stupid enough to think even Felix would care.

I slipped out and went back to my room. We’d be leaving tomorrow, and I held on to that thought like grim spooked-out death.

It was strange to have rings again, strange and wonderful, and these heavy, archaic, beautiful rings were like something out of a fairy tale. I knew I should have refused them, and I had not been able to.

It was not that I did not need new rings, now that I was sane and free and had my power again. My own rings, silver set with moonstones, had most likely been melted down after I was convicted of breaking the Virtu. Even if they hadn’t been, I could never wear them again, not after what Malkar had done. And it was not that I did not want these, beautiful thorny serpents that they were. But I knew full well I did not deserve rings like these. Xanthippe had told me they were patterned after the rings of Idomeneos, the Celebrant Celestial who had founded the Gardens unimaginable centuries before, and they did not belong on the hands of a badly trained, heretical prostitute whose greatest magical ability had proved to be as a pawn in betraying everything in which his school of magic believed. Everyone was smiling, though, delighted to have surprised me, to have found something that they were sure I would want, and in the end my desire was stronger than my scruples, as indeed it ever had been. I kept catching myself glancing, faux-casually, at my hands, and being shocked and thrilled all over again at their barbaric splendor.

I felt as if I was standing at the center of a blood-red and gold kaleidoscope; although I’d had only a single glass of wine, I felt dizzy, light-headed, almost effervescent. I lost track of the people I talked to, could no longer tell whose names I knew and whose I didn’t. And then, all at once, there was a hand gripping my upper arm, dragging me, not gently, out of the kaleidoscope and into a narrow, dark hallway.

“I want you to see this,” Diokletian said.

I freed my arm from his grip. “See what?”

“Your mother.”

I was following him reflexively while my brain struggled to make sense of his words. “
What
did you say?”

“Just for once in your life hold your tongue and come with me.”

The rawness in his voice silenced me more than the command. I followed him into a part of the Nephelion I had never seen: narrow back corridors, cramped, twisting staircases. It looked more like the Mirador than anything I had seen in Troia, and I was conscious of my pulse accelerating, my mouth going dry.

“Where are we?” I said and hoped Diokletian would believe I had intended the words to come out in a whisper.

“These are the acolytes’ quarters,” he said. “What? Did you think they slept out on the grass?”

“No, of course not,” I said, annoyed to feel my face heating. “I just hadn’t…”

“Furnished with castoffs, memories, the history that no one wants to speak of. I’ve often thought it a mercy that the acolytes are too preoccupied with becoming celebrants to stop and look around themselves. Here.”

He halted in the middle of a corridor, no different to my eyes from any other, and called witchlight, sending it to illuminate one of the pictures on the wall. “This is your mother, painted the year before you were born.”

Whoever the portraitist had been, they had had a gift. The young woman in the portrait, eighteen or nineteen at a guess, seemed so vividly alive that I almost expected her to step out of the frame, or at least to push back the strands of hair falling in her eyes.

She looked almost exactly like me—or, rather, I looked almost exactly like her. Save for my slightly heavier bone structure, save for my one blue eye, I could have been looking at a mirror instead of a picture. My resemblance to Mildmay was close enough to be startling, but this… this was uncanny.

“Are you sure I had any father at all?” I murmured. “Are you sure she did not create me entirely from herself?” Cheekbones, nose, that slight sardonic hitch in one eyebrow that said louder than words how little value she placed in having her features recorded for posterity.

“Only the laws of nature stand against your theory,” Diokletian said. His voice sounded easier, as if seeing me here, seeing me with the portrait, had purged something that had been festering in him. “And if anyone could find a way around that, it would be she.”

“Tell me about her,” I said.

He glowered at me. “You talked to Xanthippe, you said. So you already know.”

“That in my mother’s case, it was not a matter of
sinking
to prostitution?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Then what
was
it like? This is your chance. Tell me who she was. Make me believe she was something better than a whore.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, almost growled.

“No,” I said in exasperation. “I don’t. That’s the problem I’m inviting you to rectify. I’m told she slept with so many men that no one knows who my father is, and yet you say she wasn’t a whore. You do see the paradox, don’t you?”

His expression was mistrustful, and suddenly I understood. He had been defending Methony for twenty-seven years, defending her to people who would not listen to what he tried to say, who took his words and twisted them—as he undoubtedly felt I had been doing—so that they came around again to
slut, harlot, whore
.

“I was a prostitute,” I said, still calm. “I know it isn’t the worst thing one can be.” No, because I’d found that worst thing for myself. But Diokletian didn’t know about that, and he wasn’t going to. “Tell me.”

He must have wanted to, must have put the words together over and over, in different ways, with different inflections, because this time, when he started to talk, it all came spilling out.

Methony had been the daughter of a Celebrant Major of little power but tremendous organizational skill: Periander of the House Demetrias. Her mother, Theseia, a daughter of the House Leontis, had died when Methony was barely five, leaving Periander to raise his daughter alone.

“He did a bad job of it,” Diokletian said. “He couldn’t control her.”

My eyebrows went up, and he smiled, very slightly. “I know, I know. Certainly it’s not the verb I’d want to use with
my
daughters. But it was how he thought, and it was the worst way he could have chosen. She was… if I say willful, it gives entirely the wrong impression. She was the most obstinate woman I have ever known. And it was more than that. She would not
let
him control her.”

“I think I understand. It seems to be a familial trait.”

He could not understand the source of the bitterness in my voice as I remembered the things Malkar had done to make me obey him, how I had fought against him and been defeated. But after a moment’s puzzled look, he went on. “Her… wantonness was, I think, aimed partly at her father, in defiance of his ideals, his plans for her. But it was also a way—maybe the only way, I have thought since—that she could reach the celebrants as an equal.”

“You’ll have to say that again.”

He grimaced, but now it was only because he could not find the words he wanted. “She had power, but only a tiny amount, even less than her father. And I do not truthfully know whether she was interested in entering a covenant, ours or one of the others. But it drove her mad, to be surrounded by wizards who talked to her as if she were annemer. And so she seduced them. I don’t know when she started, or who her first target was, but by the time I came here as a Celebrant Minor, she was already…” He stopped, started again. “I don’t think the Celebrants Terrestrial knew, or any of the wizards her father’s age. But we younger ones… she could have any one of us she wanted, with nothing more than a raised eyebrow. Men, women, the Tetrarchs know
she
didn’t care. Never the same lover two nights in a row. And so when she announced she was pregnant… everyone asked, of course—everyone who
could
have been the father—and she just smiled and said, ‘If you needed to know that, I would have told you.’ That’s what she said to Periander, too.”