Maledicte (17 page)

“You always were the clever one, Mir—Maledicte, was it? Quite a mouthful, love. But tell me, do you know that Kritos is dead now? Do you know that?” Janus said, settling back. “Struck down by an unseen hand, left for rat food.” A smile played about his lips, the same secret communication in his eyes that Maledicte had missed so sorely.

“He took you from me. Should I have let that go unrevenged?” Maledicte said. Ani grumbled beneath the joy in his blood, and he said, “But let’s not talk of vengeance now.” He put himself into Janus’s lap and kissed him again and again.

· 15 ·

M
ALEDICTE SECURED HIS BEDCHAMBER DOOR
while Janus’s teeth teased his nape. Janus raised his head, looked around at the sumptuous room, at the fireplace, still faintly red with burning coals, the wide chair beside it, the tall windows with their heavy crimson drapes, the plush, high bed. “Your baron treats you well.” The question lurked in his tone.

“For a price,” Maledicte admitted, then skirted the pointed truth for a few lesser ones. “The keeper of my secrets, and my own personal blackmailer. If I displease him, he threatens me with exposure in the court.”

“Would that be such a dreadful thing?”

“I would be ruined. A woman in Vornatti’s house, unchaperoned? A woman with a sword? Not even Vornatti’s novels tell such audacious tales. Besides,” Maledicte said, “I’m rather attached to my persona and the freedom it brings.” It was all the explanation he could give on the matter, and he shivered, wondering what Janus thought, to find Miranda in a circumstance she had always sworn she would never be in.

Janus kissed the silk cravat on Maledicte’s throat once more, then loosed the knot with careful fingers. “They truly believe you a man? With your sleek skin and smooth throat—” He traced the bared lines of chin and neck and collarbone. “I expected a scar to match your voice. It is not an affectation.”

“No,” Maledicte said, “stonethroat.”

Janus kissed the pale skin at the base of Maledicte’s throat, touched his tongue to the hollow there, a tiny flicker of warmth that sparked likewise in his veins. “Such a gamble.”

“Risks are necessary when one seeks a prize of inimitable value,” Maledicte said, opening Janus’s shirt, finishing the job begun in the carriage, easing the stiff, formal vest off, then the silken lawn. In the low-lit room, Janus’s skin gleamed like gold, and heated Maledicte’s blood like fine brandy. Maledicte shoved him toward the wing chair, and once Janus was seated, pulled off his boots, glad beyond measure that Vornatti seemed to have faded from Janus’s thoughts. Maledicte looked again at Janus, at the lazy, hungry expression in those familiar eyes, and gave himself to the moment—more, to their future, for the first time feeling he had more than a tentative grasp on it. He found himself smiling again.

Janus tugged him into his lap, unbuttoned Maledicte’s shirt, slipped the silk away, and paused, amused. “A corset?”

“Padded,” Maledicte said, touching his sides, his belly, his back. “Throughout here, to bulk up my waist, flatten my breasts. This masquerade would be less successful otherwise. Unhook me.” He presented the elaborate back to Janus’s waiting hands.

“How do you manage to lace this by yourself?” Janus laughed. “Every lady I’ve met needed a maid or a man.”

Maledicte moaned as the hooks parted with faint pops and the corset fell free. “Practice. Necessity. And it needn’t be as tight as the ladies’ corsets. It needs only to disguise,” Maledicte said into Janus’s hair, nipping at his ear-lobes.

Janus slid his hands around the exposed narrow waist, the curve of spine and hip, the small, soft breasts. Maledicte sighed, and leaned into his hands, arching back as Janus kissed each tender tip. Things did change, he thought a little deliriously. Janus had changed, grown taller, broader, stronger, harder. Maledicte basked against him, the scent of his skin rising over the court colognes, and smiled hungrily.

He stroked his hands down Janus’s ribs, the sleek, muscle-padded heat of them, trailing light fingertips down Janus’s belly. Janus’s breath grew a little more rapid, and Maledicte chose to slide away from a more intimate touch, even as Janus shifted his hips toward his hands. A delightful thought occurred: This time, they had all the time in the world—no stolen moment made fragile by Ella’s importunate callers, by Celia’s drunken rages, by Roach’s jealous dogging of their heels. This time was theirs alone, and he intended to savor every moment, to relearn the feel of Janus’s skin against his own.

“What’s this?” Janus asked, stopping his caresses to touch the red lines on Maledicte’s left arm and side.

“Sword strike from the Marquis DeGuerre.” Maledicte studied it again, briefly bewildered by a history not shared.

“And this one?” Janus traced the long, serpentine scar that wrapped her left hipbone, veered around her back, and licked the base of her right breast.

“Whip,” Maledicte said. “Kritos, in the Relicts.”

“Bastard,” Janus muttered, bending to kiss the upward curl of the weal, a wash of breath and heat that made Maledicte gasp, draw him closer.

“Just another dead aristocrat now,” Maledicte said, clutching Janus’s shoulders as his lips left the scar and moved down the pale, soft skin of Maledicte’s belly.

Janus untied the laces in Maledicte’s hair, setting it tumbling free, framing Maledicte’s face and shoulders in whispery tendrils that made him shudder with sensation. “None so blind…” Janus murmured. “You look like no man I’ve ever seen.”

Maledicte preened. “Gilly calls it vision driven by expectation.”

“Gilly knows?” Janus asked. His lips paused in their brushing over Maledicte’s skin, tightened in a frown.

“No,” Maledicte said, flushing at the very thought. “The fewer to know this secret, the fewer to tell it.”

“Are you so sure he is unaware?” Janus asked. “If he has mentioned—”

“He was referring to cheating at cards, and simple sleight of hand. He has not thought to apply his rule to me, I assure you.” Maledicte ran trembling fingers through Janus’s hair, admiring the sparks of sunlight captured in the golden strands.

“He’s aided you, acted your partner,” Janus said. He slipped away from Maledicte, paced across the room to poke at the coals, sending sparks upward in swirls of angry heat.

“My partner on my path to retrieving you,” Maledicte said. “You must be my partner now as well.”

“Like secrets, partners are often best kept to two,” Janus said. “Vornatti knows—”

“Janus,” Maledicte said, impatient with the subject, only aware of the flickering firelight over Janus’s skin, and the answering heat in his own. “Come here and free me of these boots and breeches, unless you fancy taking me as if we were gentlemen in the stables, fumbling and baring only what we must.”

Janus grinned, mood sweetened. “Another time, perhaps.” He knelt, and tugged Maledicte’s boots off; he ran his hands up the thin leather of Maledicte’s breeches, began sliding them down, lingering to kiss the inside of his bared thighs. “Very nice legs…for a gentleman of the court.” The words tickled against his skin, made him shiver, made him writhe.

“I admit the court finds me a rather girlish young man in appearance.” But his good spirits chilled. First Vornatti, now this. He felt that every moment exposed pitfalls he hadn’t imagined, every moment revealing a threat to this fragile joy. He touched Janus’s mouth, halting further banter, and stepped out of the entangling leather. “But Janus, they do believe me a man, and while it is understood, so says Aris, that some men have appetites only for their own, it is not a fashionable thing. And I will not give up this role. I am Maledicte now, and so I think myself male, all evidence to the contrary aside.” Maledicte gestured, encompassing bared flesh. “Your reputation may suffer if you are seen in my company overmuch.”

The last words were pained; only now did Maledicte realize the trap he had laid for himself. To become female again was unthinkable, and yet his guise could cost him Janus.

He turned, studied himself in the mirror, distracted from worrying in the shock of self-exploration. It had been so long since he had taken the risk of loitering unclothed, or even thought of himself as Miranda; though he had all her desires, her dreams, he spoke truly to Janus when he declared her dead. Maledicte could not put himself back in her position, could not re-make time, unable to remember how it felt to not carry this secret.

“I suppose I should be grateful I don’t resemble Ella,” Maledicte said, “or this rebirth would have been impossible. My lines are more male than female.”

Janus laughed, snaked an arm over her shoulders; she shivered in relief and want at the sight of his form alongside her in the glass. “You are blind yourself. You are barely taller than most women of the court. Your voice is your most believable attribute, but this—” He cupped one breast, then the other, stroked his fingers over her nipples, making them stiffen. “This is purely female.”

Maledicte’s heart raced; he leaned back against Janus’s chest, playing now, directing his attention. “My hips are not broad enough.”

Janus slid his hand downward, splaying his fingers down Maledicte’s belly, lingering, teasing, his voice furred by desire. “The women of the court wear corsets, boning, bustle, and padding to make them shapes different from their own.”

His fingers slipped into the warm cleft of her thighs, moving in gentle patterns, growing warm, her skin growing slick against his touch, and Maledicte trembled. “Do you still think yourself male?” Janus whispered. “Do you fear I will leave you at the say-so of the court? What care I for their approval when I have you in my arms again?”

Again Maledicte flushed, the pale skin staining pink over cheeks and throat. Maledicte turned in Janus’s arms, kissed him as if to devour the taste of him. Maledicte guided Janus’s steps until he tumbled backward onto the bed, a golden expanse over rich crimson. Maledicte crept up Janus’s body, touching, kissing, tasting, with the same greedy, gloating hunger a starving man mustered for a sudden feast.

Janus arched his body into a bow, let Maledicte slide his breeches off and to the floor. Maledicte nestled warmly between his legs and allowed himself a leisurely reacquaintance with Janus’s body. Measuring tongue tip by tongue tip how Janus had grown, how he continued to do so, until Janus gasped and strained against Maledicte’s teasing kisses. Janus drew him up, and they tangled, each trying to map the other in touches and kisses and the shiver of skin against skin. Janus licked the shell of Maledicte’s ear, stirred gentle fingers through her heat. In return, Maledicte lapped at Janus’s throat, tasted their mingled salt, and chased the taste up to his jaw. Janus obliged him, tilting his head back, and then erupted into choking laughter. Maledicte raised his head.

“There are some quite perverse cupids watching,” Janus said.

“Vornatti’s obscenely fond of them. He had them commissioned for every private room of the house,” Maledicte said, flinching even as Vornatti’s name slipped his lips.

“Vornatti,” Janus breathed, catching Maledicte’s hands, stilling the caresses. “What are we to do with him? I gather he will not be pleased to share you. Come to think on it, neither am I.” Though the words were indifferent, the tone was not.

Again, Maledicte hovered on the brink of explanation. Again, he slid away—what could he say? That to regain Janus, Miranda would have done far worse than forswear oft-stated avowals and barter her body? Surely Janus knew that already. So instead of an explanation of how this came to be, he found himself murmuring an explanation of why it would continue, sweetening the sting of it with a meandering touch that teased nipples, traced ribs, delved into his navel, and wrapped warmly around his shaft.

“I have no name of my own, no funds that he has not granted. To leave him would be to leave with nothing save what we could carry.”

Janus laid his hands over Maledicte’s, slowing the pleasure so he could find words. “I have no funds either, save for what I won from Kritos. And we can’t risk your exposure, so you say—still, something must be done. You killed Kritos….” Janus lay back, rested his head on his hands, silently urging Maledicte’s caresses to resume.

“A gambler with a multitude of foes,” Maledicte said, frowning. He traced swords and feathers across Janus’s skin.

“One old man should prove little challenge. Especially one who grants you such access to his person.” Janus’s jaw tightened; Maledicte licked; the tension in Janus’s face traded anger for pleasure.

“True enough,” Maledicte said slowly, letting his thoughts turn dark, his movements still, sifting memories of Vornatti’s demands, his threats, comparing rewards and chastisements, against the lure of money to hand. He shuddered a little and climbed up to nestle into Janus’s strength, soaking in his surety, the pleasure of scheming with him once again.

“Is there any reason to wait?” Janus asked. “If not—”

Maledicte kissed him again, stopping his words. “He’s promised me an inheritance. I’m minded to collect it.”

“Then I’ll not stop you. Not when you look so fierce. So mercenary,” Janus said, toying with the black curls that lay over Maledicte’s shoulder. He raised the lock to his mouth, kissed it. “So bewitching. I’ve missed you….” He rolled them both over, pinned Maledicte between his arms, under his thighs. “But inherit soonest, Mal.”

Maledicte drew Janus’s head down to kiss him. “Anything for you.” He gasped, parted his thighs, and lost his hold on his courtier’s mask. This physical definition was so much more real than the shadowy grasp of personality and will.

With Janus sliding in, possessing her, there was nothing left but Miranda, clawing Janus still closer. “Janus—” she breathed, her voice caught by the damage in her throat, muted.

“Shh,” Janus said, “my love, my courtier, my dark cavalier…”

Maledicte’s fingers tensed and dug into Janus’s back, scraping the sleek indentation of the spine between muscle, the gas lights streaming and filtering through the pale gold mesh of Janus’s hair, the cherubs watching, coaxing, laughing. Maledicte closed her lashes against the incandescent blue flame of Janus’s eyes, lost in this blissful heat of touch and friction, of scent and sound. Janus’s panting was in her ear, and for a brief moment it sounded like the rasp of feathery wings, and Maledicte’s eyes flew open, trading quick startlement for rushing pleasure in the wash of blue and gold and velvet voice that was Janus in ecstasy.

Janus’s moan gave way to a breathless laugh, his blond hair drifting like spiderwebs. “And they think you a man….”

Maledicte ran speechless fingers up Janus’s chest, tugged him down to lie beside her, and slowly reassembled the guise she lived within.