The Virtu (8 page)

“I see,” I said. I wasn’t quite sure how I felt now; it wasn’t as if I had any warm, glowing memories of my mother to be trampled into the mud by these revelations. And certainly this story was no worse than what I had believed to be the truth. But it was still strange, unsettling, like looking at myself in a distorting mirror—or perhaps a mirror that did not distort at all.

I glanced at him. He was staring at the portrait with a rueful smile; he seemed almost to have forgotten about me. After a moment, he said, still not looking at me, “How did she die?”

“I don’t know exactly,” I said. “I was… not living with her. But there was a fire.”

“A fire.”

“Oh, that doesn’t even begin to convey it. It was…” I made a frustrated gesture with my hands, and then had to laugh at myself. I could taste ashes and smoke again, as I had for weeks when I was eleven. “Almost everyone I knew died. The… the place where she worked,” the brothel, but we both knew that and I did not need to hurt him by saying it again, “it burned to the ground. No one got out.”

“An ugly death,” he said softly, flatly.

“Most deaths are. But yes.” I remembered Joline, dying of smoke inhalation and burns in the middle of the Rue Orphée while I held her and wept and all around us the city burned and raved, writhing in agonies that were still not enough to kill it. I remembered that for a long time afterward I had wished I had died with Joline.

Diokletian heaved a sigh that seemed as if it came from the bottom of his soul. “We should go back,” he said. I wondered if he would lie awake tonight, tormented by images of my mother choking, screaming, the flesh burning off her exquisite bones.

“Yes.” I checked the instinctive reach for my pocket watch. “It’s getting late.”

“Yes,” he said, answering many things neither of us had said aloud, and silently started back the way we had come.

When we returned to the party, I looked for Mildmay and did not find him. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen him and couldn’t. It was clear without necessity of experiment that there was no point in asking any of the celebrants. But I caught Khrysogonos and said in his ear, “When did Mildmay leave?”

“He’s gone?” Khrysogonos frowned. “I know I saw him just before the Celebrant Lunar started speaking, but I’m not sure…”

That was Mildmay; one moment he was there, and the next moment he had simply evaporated. “You know where he’d be likely to go in the gardens. Will you check? I’ll look in his room.”

“Of course, but… is there something wrong? Do you think he—”

“I don’t know. It’s probably nothing.” But I didn’t like the fact that he’d left without telling me. It wasn’t
unlike
him, exactly, but there was just something…

“Nothing,” Khrysogonos agreed, smiled at me, and hastened toward the garden door.

I said good night to Xanthippe—remembering to be gracious, charming, serene—and left. I walked through the dark, silent halls of the Nephelion without noticing anything beyond the swiftest route to Mildmay’s room.

I wanted to find him and assure myself that he was all right. I knew that the most likely explanation was that he’d gotten tired and gone to bed, but some part of me simply refused to believe it. I was a wizard; I had been trained to listen to my instincts, and they said something was wrong.

I let myself through the door of Mildmay’s corridor and was instantly aware of raised voices. I recognized Mildmay’s deep curt tone without thought, but my relief was tempered by the other voice, shriller, aggressive. Who was that?

Mildmay’s door was open. The shriller voice overrode Mildmay’s, too quick for my comprehension of spoken Troian, although I could hear the ugliness and anger in every syllable and the words I could catch, I did not like:
murderer
was one,
parasite
another. I stopped in the doorway, staring. Mildmay sat in his favorite armchair by the window, expressionlessly watching Astyanax, who stood in the middle of the room, holding Mildmay’s cane as if he intended to use it as a weapon.

Mildmay’s eyes flicked past Astyanax to me, and I saw his shoulders relax infinitesimally. Relieved that he was counting me as an ally, I pitched my voice to carry and said, “What, exactly, is going on here?”

Astyanax whipped around, dropping the cane with a clatter. For a long, horrid moment, we stared at each other, and then he looked away, making a show of straightening his cuffs.

Mildmay said, his voice level and uninterested, but I could see the pinscratch frown between his eyebrows, “He thinks it’s my fault you’re leaving.”

I resisted my first impulse, which was to throttle Astyanax on the spot, and merely raised an eyebrow at him.

“He has been poisoning your mind,” Astyanax said.

“I
beg
your pardon?”

“He is a liar,” Astyanax said, with a depth of unexpected venom; I hadn’t thought he’d noticed Mildmay any more than anyone else here ever did.

I looked past him at Mildmay. “Are you?”

He shrugged a little. “Sometimes, I guess.”

“He doesn’t want to stay here,” Astyanax said, his voice sharp and jealous, demanding my attention. “You could be happy here, Felix, you know you could, if you just didn’t have
him
to worry about.”

I could feel Mildmay’s gaze like hot coals. “No.”

Astyanax’s eyes were eating up his face. “What has he told you about me? What lies has he infected your mind with?”

“Gracious, what rhetoric. Mildmay hasn’t said anything about you to me. Should he have?” I looked back at Mildmay. “Anything you want to tell me about Astyanax?”

I said it only to bait Astyanax, but the way the color drained from Mildmay’s face, the way that pin-scratch frown deepened for a moment before he smoothed it away completely, indicated that I might have hit on the head a nail I hadn’t even known was there.

“Nothing,” Mildmay said.

“By the Tetrarchs, you are a hypocrite! You’ve told him already. I can see it in your face.”

Then I should be taking lessons from you, I thought, because all I can see in Mildmay’s face is that he really doesn’t want to talk about this. “Shut up, Astyanax,” I said out loud. “Mildmay, what is he talking about? There’s got to be a fire somewhere under all this smoke.”

He shook his head; I couldn’t tell if he meant that he wouldn’t tell me, or that there was nothing to tell, or perhaps something else entirely.

“I can tell you,” said a voice from the door.

We all three jerked around.

“
You
,” Astyanax said, with loathing.

It was Khrysogonos; not finding Mildmay in the gardens, he must have come here to check with me. He ignored Astyanax, looking from me to Mildmay with his eyebrows raised.

“Go ahead,” I said; Mildmay sank back in his chair as if at news of some terrible defeat or betrayal.

Khrysogonos sighed a little, as if he didn’t want to say any of this, either, and then said, “Astyanax laid a compulsion on your brother to gain information to help with your cure.”

And here I had thought Mildmay vanished whenever Astyanax was around because he was repulsed by my sexual preferences. I could feel something inside myself freezing, hardening, could feel darkness rising like a tide. “I see,” I said, my voice remote and uninvolved. “Is this true?”

Astyanax said, “Felix, you can’t—”

“I wasn’t asking you. Mildmay? Is this true?”

Mildmay’s face was ashen, but he nodded, a tiny jerk of his head.

“Thank you. Would you excuse us just one moment?” I grabbed Astyanax by the arm and dragged him out into the corridor, kicking the door shut as we passed. I slammed him up against the wall, watched with satisfaction as his eyes widened in a mixture of surprise, pain, and fear. I waited until I was quite sure his entire attention was focused on me, and then said in a pleasant, conversational voice, “Where I come from, you would be burned at the stake for doing something like that.”

He wanted to justify himself, to explain, to excuse; I saw it in his face, just as I saw his resolve crumbling away when he met my eyes. When the silence had held long enough that I knew he was not going to speak, I said, “Fortunately for you, it isn’t heresy here. And fortunately for you, we’re leaving tomorrow morning. Because if you
ever
came near him again, I wouldn’t bother with the stake.”

His face worked, crumpled. “It was for you!”

“You think that makes a difference?” I released my hold on him, stepped back. “Go on. Clear out.”

He stared at me for a moment, vanity and rage and wounded, throbbing, screaming self-love contorting his face. Then he said, feigning disdain, “I hope for your sake he’s as good in bed as I am.”

I let myself smile, sharp, wicked. “Darling, that wouldn’t be hard.”

He was frozen for a moment, not believing I could say such a thing, then turned and bolted, the thump of his running feet, the slam of the corridor door, like the curse he hadn’t spoken. I let him go. He would find one of his clique, and they would tell him lies until it sounded like truth again.

I leaned against the wall for a moment, staring at nothing, trying to rein my temper in, trying above all not to admit how much of myself I had seen and recognized in Astyanax’s eyes. Then, because I could do nothing else, I opened the door to Mildmay’s room and went back in.

Khrysogonos and Mildmay had clearly been frozen in silence, like an unlikely pair of waxworks; Khrysogonos said gratefully, “I’ll just be going then,” and whisked away.

I shut the door and turned to look at Mildmay. He was still sitting, unmoving, staring out the window at the night. I wondered if he was really seeing anything, or if it was just an excuse to avoid looking at me.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

His reply was unintelligible.

“What?”

He raised his voice, spoke slower, but did not turn his head. “I said I didn’t think you’d care. If you believed me.”

“You didn’t think I’d
care
? What kind of monster do you think I am?”

“Not like that. Just… you seemed happy, and there wasn’t no harm done—”

“The fuck there wasn’t.”

His head turned then, an unguarded jerk. I had to shut my eyes for a moment, swallow hard. We’d both heard Simside in my voice, and although I could pretend I’d done it on purpose, done it to make him look at me, it would be a lie. It had just happened, and that told me how precariously we were balanced. Mildmay did not deserve my rage, my darkness, the lust for pain surging in my blood. I opened my eyes again, said slowly, distinctly, every consonant and vowel a separate brick placed in the wall between me and the thing I had been, “He hurt you. I don’t know of a single compulsion spell that doesn’t hurt more than all the beatings in the world. I don’t agree with the Mirador on everything, but there is a reason those spells were pronounced anathema. You should have
said
.”

“It ain’t heresy here. It wouldn’t‘ve—”

“If I’d known he’d done that to you, I would never have slept with him.”

I hadn’t intended to mention that, hadn’t intended to bring sex into this discussion at all. My nerves still raw from the confrontation with Astyanax, I was burningly aware of Mildmay’s beauty, his bones, his grace, the walls and shadows in his eyes. Burningly aware that he was my brother and, more than that, he did not want me.

“Oh,” Mildmay said, a beat too late to pretend it didn’t bother him.

“I told Astyanax that if he came near you again, I would kill him, and I meant it.”

He looked away, down at his scarred, lumpy-knuckled hands.

“Mildmay.”

He raised his head reluctantly, but his green eyes met mine steadily. And the words died on my tongue, the easy glib words to charm and manipulate, to make him give without giving anything of myself in return. I knew, all at once, what he’d meant when he said he didn’t want my gratitude, knew what it was he wanted instead, but could never ask for.

I said, “I do care.”

He blushed brilliant scarlet, and I knew I was right. He might not desire me, but that did not mean he did not love me in his own way, although the realization made me as uncomfortable as it clearly made him. After a moment, he managed to mumble, “Thanks.”

It was late; we were both tired, and it was a miracle I’d made it this far without yelling at him. Or kissing him. I shoved that thought away. “Do you need… anything? Your cane?”

“Nah. I’m good.” He stood up, limped across to the bed. “I ain’t taking that thing tomorrow.”

“You aren’t? Are you sure?”

“Don’t need it,” he said, starting to undo his shirt buttons, and if I didn’t get out of the room soon, I was going to do something unforgivable. “Hate it.”

“It’s your leg.” I was already halfway to the door. I wasn’t sure he was making the right decision, but staying to argue tonight would not help anything. We could buy him a cane in Kekropia if we had to—and I didn’t like that cane either. “Good night,” I said, and barely waited for his answering “ ‘Night,” before I fled.