Maledicte (16 page)

Disgust flared in him, twisting his lips. Stay here? Limit his touches to Vornatti’s withered flesh when Janus awaited? Maledicte started to rise, patience gone, blood drumming in his veins; Vornatti tangled a fist in Maledicte’s hair, sent him to his knees by his chair. “Listen to me, boy. Bide your time. Last will keep until you are better established, or until I am gone and cannot watch you fall. My name grants you some safety but not enough for a direct attack. Such can only end in death or prison. Stay with me. Continue as we have been, and I’ll make it worth your while. You know you can trust me to keep my word. Haven’t I kept your other secrets safe, my
girl
? Stay and I’ll reward you. Make you my ward in truth. My heir.”

“Do you think I can be bought?” Maledicte asked, fisting his hands in his lap. The sword slid from the chest with a protesting scrape and fell to the rugs below.

“Haven’t I bought you once already? Now, all I’m buying is your time. You’re a young…man. Last, curse him, is a healthy man. And I, Maledicte, am an old man. My blood fails beneath my skin, but even dying men have favors to bestow. Wait and you’ll have money enough to escape from Antyre when they turn on you, teeth bared and bloody.”

Maledicte said, “You swore you hated Last.”

“And I am content to know you will destroy him. I have no need to see it. Perhaps my vengeance should have been taken when my blood first burned. However it occurs, that fire is cold now and I’d exchange chill for warmth. Yours would be preferable. If you persist on your impatient course, I will make do with Mirabile, and set you back to the streets.”

“You speak to me of vengeance fading, yet you would have me balk and delay? I have not that luxury. You had not the spur to act that I have.” Maledicte escaped from Vornatti’s anchoring hand, seized up his shirt, and shrugged it on.

“Janus,” Vornatti growled.

“Ani,” Maledicte countered to Vornatti’s scoffing laugh. He had woken, newly aware of Her, Her contentment that he had sealed their compact, satisfaction that more blood would be forthcoming. Vornatti’s prattling of delay made Her shift like a snake coiling to strike.

Vornatti leaned forward in his chair, hands clutching the padded leather armrests. “Forget the boy; he has surely forgotten you. What can he offer you? He’s only a bastard nephew to a dreaming king. He’ll never be earl, never inherit. Last will see to that, count on it. And he has never attempted to find you. Your desire is one-sided, boy. Stay your hand.”

Maledicte took refuge in the inane persiflage of Vornatti’s favorite literature. “Why sir, this is all so sudden.” The acid snarl to his voice removed all humor from the words.

Vornatti’s eyes squinched, peering at him. Maledicte stepped back farther into the shadows, out of Vornatti’s sight, given over to an uncontrollable shaking. He trembled like a spooked horse, from head to toe, while he thought. It was too soon to dispense with Vornatti’s patronage—and inciting his wrath so near the solstice ball—

“Is that a refusal?” Vornatti asked. “Casting you back to the streets not enough? I could expose you first, girl. Or cast Gilly out alongside you. He’s begun to bore me anyhow, and I know others who seek his services, though they would not treat him as kindly.”

Maledicte’s shivering ceased as quickly as it had come, his composure restored. “Won’t you even grant me the time to think on it? The heroines in your novels always have time to think on it.”

“You’re no heroine,” Vornatti said.

“And you’re no gentleman.”

Vornatti laughed. “Stay or go. Yes or no, Maledicte.”

“Damn you,” Maledicte said, plunged away from Vornatti as if he would flee, but then returned. “Yes, damn you.”

“As greedy and as fickle as I thought. After all, Janus is nothing but a boy you no longer know.” Vornatti leaned forward, took Maledicte’s hands. “Thank me, boy. You’ve learned something it has taken me years to learn: We all outgrow our pasts. Now kiss me and cry friends.”

Maledicte kissed his dry cheek, amazed that the choked rage within him wasn’t enough to scald Vornatti’s skin. “Shall I send for Gilly, let him dress you for court?”

Vornatti said, “Call Gilly by all means. We’ll let him know you’re staying. But first—” He drew Maledicte to his lap again, slipped the shirt away.

M
ALEDICTE SEETHED QUIETLY
while Vornatti tugged at the bell rope, his face carefully controlled while Gilly heard the news. He raised his eyes to see the expression on Gilly’s face: pure, unadulterated alarm. But then, Gilly believed in Ani’s presence, and Vornatti, fool several times over, did not. There was no future but vengeance for him.

Maledicte ascended the stairs, turning the gas lamps down as he went, leaving a smothering trail of darkness behind him, hoping to balk Gilly in pursuit. Though it had been his choice to stay, the easy temper in his blood also blamed Gilly.

But Gilly, with longer legs, caught him at the first landing, seized his shoulder. “What are you planning?”

“Don’t,” Maledicte said, Ani already an angry presence in his blood. To be manhandled was more than he could stand. Heedless, Gilly shook him. “Tell me why you agreed to put off your vengeance.”

Maledicte put his hand on Gilly’s chest, shoved him away without effort, watched Gilly fly back and hit the far wall. Maledicte’s hands shook, a resurgence of the eager trembling that had beset him in Vornatti’s room, spreading over his entire body.

“Maledicte?” Gilly said, rising, caution on his face.

Maledicte slid down the wall, crouched in the shadows, ashamed of himself. “Who else would I be?”

The name hung in the air between them. Gilly hesitated, then dropped to his knees beside Maledicte. “Lean on me. I’ll help you upstairs. I’ll bring you up some milk, warmed and scented with vanilla and almonds.”

“As if Ani can be cured like a cold, or Vornatti’s caresses made sweet,” Maledicte said, acid in his voice, then in a different tone. “Thank you, Gilly, my gentle Gilly….” He lapsed into silence as they made their way up the dark stairs, Gilly looking back over their shoulders, as if he expected to see Ani sweeping after them.

· 14 ·

O
N THE EVENING OF THE SOLSTICE BALL,
Gilly and Maledicte found themselves part of a line of coaches, wending their way through the city streets to the palace at so slow a pace that noblemen sauntered from coach to coach, visiting, chatting, flirting, admiring costumes. From his perch on the driver’s bench, Gilly watched it all, and couldn’t help but contrast the general giddiness with his passenger’s stillness. Costumed forlornly as the Heartsore Chevalier, that tragic figure of legend, Maledicte drew the coach curtains whenever nobles drew near, sulking into silence.

Gilly hated the costume, the sleek white wrappings of vest and coat and pants, hated the crimson touches at wrist and neck; most of all he hated the expression in Maledicte’s eyes, as if this moment might be too much to bear.

Gilly’s nerves were strung tight enough as it was; hadn’t they left Vornatti home, lost in a drugged sleep when he had meant to attend? Maledicte’s doing, of course, and done so swiftly that Gilly had not understood until he tried to rouse Vornatti. His remonstrance had died when Maledicte turned on him, raging. “Do you think I could have borne it? Hunting Janus with Vornatti draped over my skin? Touching me as if he had my welcome?”

At the ballroom, Gilly tossed the reins to a waiting stableboy, and opened the carriage door. Maledicte stepped out like a ghost, one hand on the sword.

Maledicte started up the stairs with Gilly behind, and paused at the great Book of Names. On the last page, recently scribed, his goal was marked.

Janus Ixion, Lord Last: the name was scrawled with such black finality that Gilly was not surprised to see the next names rough and surrounded by splatters. Janus had destroyed the nib.

Maledicte touched the ink with his gloved fingers. The ink sank in, still wet, black staining into the red silk gloves. Maledicte wiped his hand against his mouth, shoved past Gilly, and escaped into the night air, past the cloying sweetness of heaped violets and jasmine, lilies and heliotrope, and the slow-burning haze of beeswax candles. Gilly found Maledicte outside, pacing beside the ivy maze.

“Mal—”

“It stinks in there, like rot. Do you think anyone has ever told Aris that crushed flowers smell like a grave?”

Gilly held out a gentling hand.

Maledicte turned, retched into the leaves. Gilly stepped back when Maledicte looked up. His eyes were wild. His hands shook like those of a man with fever, and his voice trembled. “Comes the moment when everything changes. This idyll dies, and it has been an idyll, hasn’t it? Even with Vornatti’s tempers and demands and threats? I’m feared to see it end.” He stretched up and pressed his lips against the drawn corner of Gilly’s mouth.

Gilly could smell Maledicte’s skin, scenting faintly of lilac, could feel the smoothness of Maledicte’s cheek against the stubble rising on his own. “Feared of Last? Of Janus? I won’t believe either with the course you’ve set.”

“Not them. Last is a dead man, and Janus is neither alive nor dead ’til he speaks. I fear myself, Gilly, the brush of feathers in my mind. If Janus spurns me—Her feathers urge me to darker hungers, and Her wings smell of death and bloody iron.” He hid his face in Gilly’s neck, but shied away when Gilly reached up a comforting hand.

“If Janus spurns me, or remembers me not, there will be nothing left of me. Only Ani’s puppet. But still, there is no going back.”

“Would you go back, if you could?” Gilly asked, voice rough.

“No,” Maledicte answered immediately, without the need for thought, his eyes black and very cold. “Why are we standing in the dark, Gilly, when the ball awaits? I’ve killed one Last already. Let’s see how many this night holds.”

Gilly followed him inside, where the nobles’ ballroom had been doubled with the drawing back of the barriers between the king’s ballroom and theirs. While the nobles’ ballroom was painted in washes of blue and dust, Aris’s ballroom was all rose and gold, and so the dancers whirled from twilight to sunrise. Maledicte walked on, unaware, his eyes flicking from one bare face to the next. The Bright Solstice required costumes but not masks; those were saved for winter’s Dark Solstice, where one wore masks to shield identity from the hungry dead.

Gilly paced beside him, looking for a man he’d never seen, but felt sure he would recognize. As the moments passed, and Maledicte’s expression grew fixed, Gilly whispered, “Follow the gossip, the bent heads. A newcomer leaves such in his tracks. It will lead you to him.”

Maledicte granted Gilly a shaky smile, then stiffened like a hound on scent. Gilly followed his gaze.

The young man entering from the balconies could only be Janus Ixion; he was the butter stamp of Last, pale-eyed, gilt-haired, tall, and broad-shouldered. The brief impression Gilly had gleaned from the miniature had been of a vapid nobleman, but he had assumed it due to an artist overeager to please Last.

But the reality was no better; Gilly felt disappointment turn his stomach. This was the face that had driven Maledicte so far? This was Janus, this elegantly draped figure in blue velveteen and gold? His face was as empty as that of any longtime court roué. Where Maledicte still carried a rat’s wariness, Janus seemed pampered from birth, the perfect son of an aging aristocrat, with an expression as devoid of intelligence as it was of interest. Here, in the glittering heart of Antyre, Janus conveyed only boredom.

Gilly felt a shiver in the air, turned. Maledicte was no longer at his side, but had disappeared while Gilly gaped. He caught a glimpse of him, moving along the perimeter of the room, following in Janus’s idle path like his shadow.

Gilly hissed, watching the game begin. Cat catch mouse, with both men playing. Janus was aware of his shadow, acted the complicit mouse, limited himself to small turns of his neck and head, trying not to catch sight of his pursuer. If he spotted the shadow too soon, too obviously, the game would end, and interest and amusement sparked in those incandescent blue eyes, livening the mask of his face.

The court grew progressively more silent, watching in avid delight.

“Must we continue with this roundaboutation?” Janus spoke aloud, his voice laced with amusement, though he had yet to acknowledge his pursuer with even a glance. In his voice, Gilly heard the same careless arrogance that drove Maledicte’s speech, but layered in tones like sculpted velvet. “I’m but new come to this court, and fail to see how I have erred in your opinion. If I have offended your sister, mother, lover, I apologize. If it’s other than that, let it wait. We have affrighted the musicians to silence.”

“They sounded like cats strangling anyway, and I should know,” Maledicte said. His raspy voice was shocking after Janus’s polished one.

Janus, startled, turned to confront his shadow, and the amused smoothness of his face shifted. Even Gilly, standing so near, could not name the sentiment, the emotion fleeing too quickly to identify, like a ripple over deep water and gone.

Janus took a step toward Maledicte; the courtiers, the maidens caught between slipped away, and the whispering court found their eyes drawn not to either man but to the emptiness between them, the nexus of space that slowly closed.

Maledicte took another step. His face was as pale as his shirt.

“Have we danced enough?” Janus said. “So come, then, declare yourself and have at me.” His lips stayed parted after his words; his face tightened as Maledicte took the space between them and made it an illusion, not the impenetrable barrier it seemed.

“Janus Ixion—” Maledicte said, at the heart of the circle. His voice caressed the syllables, and again that flicker of emotion swept Janus’s face.

“Lord Last,” Janus said, dropping into a bow, his golden hair sliding, gleaming over sky-blue shoulders.

The sweeping arc of the black blade stopped his descent. He tilted his head up, pale throat like marble. “Not in the mood, hmmm?” Janus stood straight, spread his arms. “Have at me then; I will not fight you.”

Maledicte wavered, visibly unable to move forward or back. Janus’s arms closed; he caught Maledicte’s wrist, his other hand caught the shoulder of Maledicte’s embroidered coat and drew him closer. Then he released Maledicte’s sword hand, all as smoothly done as if it were only the steps of a dance and not a potential duel.

“Will you strike me?” Janus asked. His voice, which so far had been pitched for the horrified, fascinated, scandalized audience, dropped to a husk. There was the faintest sound of despairing entreaty in his words, as if Maledicte’s enmity was too heavy a weight to shoulder.

The black blade shivered in the light, a shadow chased by candle flames, moving. Falling. It clattered to the marble floor and Janus smiled. He slid his hand over Maledicte’s shoulder, into the dark hair, and bending close, put his kiss first on Maledicte’s mouth, then on the silk-covered throat. Maledicte threw his head back, in a movement as voluptuous as any woman’s.

Janus murmured something too low for the riveted crowd. Gilly strained, but even his clever ears missed the word. A name? A prayer?

What Janus said, of course, in his crushed-velvet voice, was
Miranda.

The silence faltered as whispers broke over the court like the tide. Janus stepped apart from Maledicte, dropped into a bow again, elegant and courtly. Maledicte returned it after a moment, and where Janus’s bow was all Antyrrian languor, Maledicte’s carried the stiff perfection of Vornatti’s teaching. Maledicte spoke a few quiet words, drowned in the hiss of the court, and turned away.

The courtiers flooded inward, erasing the stage Janus and Maledicte had created with their presence; scandalmongers sailed from one side of the room to another, tongues preparing to wag. Trying to follow who might have the most dangerous words to spill, Gilly lost sight of Maledicte in the mass. A faint whisper in his ear, a quick scent of lilac, and Maledicte slipped by him and disappeared with an eerie grace. Gilly turned, trying to track him, and instead caught sight of Mirabile standing, frozen, her face a mere mask. Shock, Gilly thought, and worse—
betrayal.
Janus fit nowhere in her plans for Maledicte.

Still near the epicenter of the storm, Janus accepted a glass from Westfall’s hand, smiled his thanks, and headed toward the balcony doors.

His cue, Gilly knew. Maledicte’s command ghosted through his mind.
Show Janus to the carriage. We’re stealing him away.

Except Gilly could think of nothing he would like less than to take Janus through the romantic tangles of the king’s maze where he had walked with Maledicte. He told himself it was relief that Maledicte was not launched on his erasure of self, his bloody vendetta without care for his own life.

A quick movement, checked, drew his attention to the dais, to Aris staying the Kingsguard in their search for Maledicte, and wearing a fine, high flush on his cheekbones. Anger, Gilly feared. The king’s eyes shifted to meet his. Gilly dropped his gaze immediately, caught staring at the king like a country fool. But more disturbing to his composure was the unwilling recognition of their shared emotion, the bite of unreasoning jealousy.

The voices of the court were roaring now, the musicians fighting to be heard, belaboring their instruments to make up for their earlier silences. Gilly, making his way out, collected comments like tiles from a mosaic. “Sword in the court. Again. And yet Aris does nothing—”

“Last will not be amused that his son set us such a scene.”

“It’s enchantment, I tell you.” Mirabile’s face was livening finally to well-controlled rage, taking Maledicte’s actions as an affront to her own charms. “First he claims Aris’s approval and now his nephew’s. But
how,
is the question. I have seen things he would not like me to tell, an altar, books of spells…”

“A devotee of the dead gods?” her hearer, Micah Chalefont, sneered. “Only fools believe in them.”

“Fools deny the evidence of their own senses. I am not so witless,” Mirabile said, snapping her fan closed. The certainty in her voice stifled Chalefont and made Gilly hasten his steps.

He found Janus waiting silently in the dimness; when Gilly approached, those blank blue eyes showed only disinterest. “This way,” Gilly said, gesturing into the maze, and Janus’s eyes burned with eagerness.

M
ALEDICTE PULLED HIMSELF
from Janus’s embrace, settled on the opposite side of the carriage, leaned forward and knotted Janus’s hands in his own. He laughed soundlessly, his constricted throat unable to voice the emotion. “I dreaded this moment, feared I’d never see you again. That you wouldn’t know me if I did…What a fool to forget how we fit together.”

“I’d know you anywhere, Miranda—”

“No,” Maledicte frowned, a fleeting thing, displaced by joy. “Miranda’s dead. Murdered in the Relicts like the rat she was.”

“That’s as Roach told me. That you were dead, and at my hand. Absurd. As if I could ever harm you….”

Maledicte was glad of the dimness of the carriage, the swaying that shadowed their faces and granted them a sweet intimacy, all too aware of the flush on his cheeks, the rush of pleasure at Janus’s careless words. “You went back?”

“Soon as the
Kiss
docked. Soon as I could convince Kritos that the voyage had made me ill. The only familiar face I found was Roach.” Janus laughed and kissed Maledicte with a greedy mouth. “And here we are.”

Their noses bumped, their foreheads jarred each other’s when the carriage bumped over rough stones. Janus, distracted, peered out the window at Dove Street passing by with its line of tall, trim houses and sculpted lawns. “Where are we going?”

“My town house.” Maledicte slid on the seat, pushing his back into the plush warmth of the cushions, his fingers slipping from Janus’s grip, then leaning forward again, unwilling to let go.

“This isn’t just some raid on the nobles’ court then?”

“I told you. Miranda’s dead. Despite the masquerade, I am much as you see me. I am Maledicte, ward to Baron Vornatti, a courtier and not a lady.” Maledicte gave a little half bow, constrained by the seat. “I warn you now. I am a known entity in the court, and you’ve undoubtedly blacked your reputation tonight.”