Maledicte (24 page)

Maledicte smiled. “You hate her.”

“Utterly. Set your heart at rest.” Janus bent Maledicte over his arm to kiss his throat. “Gilly, give us a waltz.”

“Please do,” Maledicte added.

Gilly thumped out a waltz, ignoring his mistakes and the pitch of the untuned spinet.

Janus and Maledicte tussled for a moment, hands shifting and regripping, until Janus laughed and said, “Stop trying to lead, Mal.” He raised his voice, carrying the tune himself, humming, a warm, intimate sound in the room. Maledicte leaned into Janus’s arms.

When the waltz ended, Maledicte said, “Play something else, Gilly. Something that doesn’t want an in-tune instrument.”

“You don’t ask for much,” Gilly said. But he searched his memory for a folk jig of single notes at a time.

Janus shifted his grip, and Maledicte laughed, and then they were swinging each other like children, clasping each other’s wrists, pulling and spinning until there was no dance, only the dizziness and laughter, Maledicte’s voice disappearing under stonethroat’s leash. Then Janus stumbled over the sword and swore. “Damn thing. Enough, Gilly.”

Janus limped over and settled himself on the edge of the stage. “Why do you carry that in the house?”

“I like to,” Maledicte said.

“Savage tastes, my dark cavalier,” Janus said, rubbing his shin.

Maledicte rejoined Gilly and touched the keys with curious fingers. “We really should have it tuned.” He tugged Gilly’s hair. “Maybe even hire an instructor.”

Gilly laughed. “Is that your subtle way of telling me I’m an abysmal player? I’m not used to such from you.”

“Say better than some, worse than many,” Maledicte said. “A thing of no moment since you are perfection itself in all other fields of endeavor.” He tucked his legs up beneath him and sat on the floor.

“A compliment and a sting at once. I applaud you,” Gilly said.

“Gilly, it’s not too soon to invite the Lovesys to Lastrest, is it?” Janus said, interrupting their banter. “I intend to ask them to Lastrest tomorrow.”

“Sudden, but acceptable,” Gilly said. “They will be aware of Aris’s command to wed.”

“How long will you be gone?” Maledicte said, laughter wiped away as quickly as blown sand.

“The standard visit is a fortnight,” Gilly said. “Add time for travel, laden with luggage and the stops noble ladies insist upon? Three weeks.”

Maledicte said nothing, still curled up like a boy on the floor. Janus went to his knee. “Mal?”

“I will go with you,” he said, his voice a bare whisper, as if he recognized the impossibility even as he said it. Gilly heard Maledicte’s breath coming faster, realized that somehow this step had caught him unawares. Maledicte would have to release Janus from his side, and Gilly, looking at Maledicte’s stricken face, wondered if Maledicte would allow it.

“It won’t be straightaway. Not only must I inform Lastrest’s staff, and Father, but the spoiled chit probably will require a week to pack,” Janus said, kissing the dark hair, tilting the pale face and kissing the tight lips. “But I cannot bring you while I court her. For a title so close to king, the duke and duchess seem willing to overlook you, but that is far easier if you’re not nearby.”

Gilly caught Janus looking not at Maledicte, but at him, and with an expression very close to hatred. “Gilly will be here. He can tell you stories, play the spinet badly for you, make you laugh. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Rats take it, love, how long can I stand to be apart from you? You may have me running back within a week.”

Maledicte’s shivering passed to Janus. Gilly saw their past in their trembling bodies, the pain that Maledicte felt when Janus was stolen from his side. Gilly was dwarfed by it, his own uncomfortable urges made irrelevant. He could not see himself anything but an unwelcomed interloper, and it was left to Janus to soothe Maledicte while Gilly sat, trapped at the bench.

· 21 ·

G
ILLY WALKED INTO THE COOLING EVENING,
seeking to clear his head, and found his steps taking a familiar path into the city. At Sybarite Street, he turned toward the brothel with the ship drawn above the door. As it catered to sailors, Gilly found more than simple carnal amusement there; his fantasies of the Explorations were fed. But tonight he bypassed the salon, with its laughing, drinking sailors, and headed upstairs. He tapped on a closed door. It was the night he usually reserved, but he hadn’t let her know he was coming. Just as he decided she was with someone, the door opened and Lizette stood there, rubbing her red hair out of her face and yawning. “Gilly, I thought you weren’t coming.” She kissed his mouth. He leaned into her warmth, her encircling arms.

“But you look so sad tonight,” she said, drawing him into the room. “That love of yours giving you trouble?”

“Not mine at all,” Gilly said. “Never was. There’s someone else.” He kissed her neck and stroked her shoulders beneath her silken robe.

She took herself out of his reach and lit the candles by the bed while he set lunas down on the dresser. “Well, she’s a right fool then. You’re sweet and gentle and generous.”

Paid compliments though they were, Gilly relaxed under them. “My employer already gets those things from me, without needing my love.”

Lizette drew back. “Your master’s that courtier, ain’t it? Why would you want someone like that?”

“I didn’t know you followed the court,” Gilly said, settling himself onto the smooth sheets. He paid extra for clean ones on his nights, and she’d been sure enough of his custom that they were freshly laundered, smelling of nothing more than the iron and a faint trace of her perfume.

“Not the courts, Gilly. Just you. I saw your man once. At a distance and all. Thinks he’s a king, don’t he, the way he walks. But pretty enough to be a girl.”

“Watch yourself,” Gilly said. “He’s fast with a sword and doesn’t like being called a girl. No matter his tastes.”

“Mmm, well maybe he’d make a bad girl at that. Too scrawny. Not like me.” She guided his hand to her voluptuous breasts. He bent his head to greet them with a kiss.

“Lizette,” he murmured.

“That’s it, Gilly-boy. Don’t waste your thoughts on the likes of him.”

He stopped her mouth with his and she tickled his ribs until he laughed. She rolled him over, teased him with her trailing hair until he growled and tangled his hands in her locks, pulling her to him, merging his body with hers, thinking yes, Lizette was right. This was simple. This was easy. This was welcoming and warm, and the only shadows in the room were those from flickering candle flames, not unseen gods. But he kept his eyes open, to make sure he didn’t trade the vision of her warmth and curves for the cool, austere, and oft-imagined lines of Maledicte.

Still, once they’d finished, Gilly left her side after only a cursory attempt at sleep, haunted by the premonitory instinct that warned him he would only dream of Black-Winged Ani. Better awake than that. He slipped out into the night, wending his way home through the back streets, and came across Echo’s Particulars rousting a drunken man from his stupor at the base of a fountain.

After a passing glance, Gilly paused and went back, exchanging coins for the drunken man’s freedom. Briskly, he walked the man back and forth until he moaned, “At least in a cell, I could have obtained rest.”

“I’m only trying to help,” Gilly said.

“Help? Buy me a drink,” the intercessor said, staggering away toward the nearest pub. Gilly hesitated before following; he had heard the old man speak, had seen his eyes when he recognized Ani in Maledicte; this might be his only chance for answers beyond his books and pamphlets.

Gilly sat down in the seat opposite him, wincing at the smells of old stew and drunken leftovers. The intercessor sighed. “The servant in Dove Street, correct?”

“Yes,” Gilly said, “Your name, Intercessor?”

“Not that anymore,” the man said. “I’ve given up shouting the truth to a city of the deaf and forgetful. I’ll join them in their willful oblivion.”

“I need your advice,” Gilly said, gesturing to a barmaid when it looked as if the intercessor would walk away. The barmaid brought two ales to the table and the intercessor settled back.

“No one listens,” the intercessor said, raising his drink, draining half of it.

“I listen. It’s my job,” Gilly said.

“It was mine once,” the intercessor said. “I spoke for the gods. Filtering their words until my ears bled. And now—I’m forgotten along with them. You—do you understand how it was? To be like a child, forced to hear his parents come to blows? Months of strife and no surcease—only the visions of the gods battling each other. Intercessors died in their sleep. Others avoided sleep and went mad. Madder. Then came blessed silence—a silence that rendered our lives without meaning, except to bear the blame of Baxit’s final message. On Xipos, we were stoned. In Itarus, Grigor rounded up the intercessors, sick, mad, despairing, and plunged them into a frozen sea. So now, when the gods stir again, there’s none to hear….”

“I hear,” Gilly said, his voice ragged, remembering Ani claiming Maledicte in his dreams.

The intercessor paused, set the drink down, and looked at Gilly. “You do. But then, you should have been one of us. I can see it in your face. Do you dream of tombs, boy? Where the occupants lie sleeping, but restless?”

Gilly took a gulp of the sour ale, and said, “I do.”

The intercessor pushed his empty tankard aside, and when Gilly would have gestured the barmaid back, the man shook his head, looking weary. “What would you know?”

“They’re not dead, are they?” Gilly asked.

“They’re gods and immortal,” the intercessor said. “They’ve only withdrawn. Was that your question, because I believe you knew the answer already.”

“I need to know how to break a compact between Black-Winged Ani and Her follower.”

The intercessor gaped, then said, “She’s a god, and Her compact is more binding than anything mortal man can understand. There is no escape save in fulfillment. Oh, perhaps you could distract Her with charms asking for Baxit’s aid, Her opposing force, but even if He bestirred himself from His indolence, it would only buy you moments. It would not undo Her will.”

“Nothing can be done?” Gilly asked, aware of the desperate edge to his voice. He hadn’t understood how much he had hoped for another possibility until the intercessor scoffed at it.

“If you truly have a care for your friend, you will help him accomplish Her bloody goal and complete the Compact.”

“He’ll die,” Gilly said. “I can’t allow—”

“Die?” the intercessor said. “You’ve been reading
Vengeances
by the sensation-monger Grayle. Nothing but corrupt scholarship there.”

“He’ll survive then?” Gilly said, the relief enormous.

“Quicker he acts, the likelier it is. But Ani’s compact takes a toll. She grants gifts. Grayle will have told you that in his own hysterical fashion. But She also takes. I once visited a woman who is kept walled in a country asylum. Years ago, she climbed a turret in her wedding gown, carrying a dagger in one hand. She should have fallen. She didn’t. She killed her husband, waiting for his lover. But she was left with the mind of a child. Ani is a creature of instinct and emotion, violence and passion, not intellect.

“In Elisande’s case, it was a kindness, I think. Her mindlessness. Others have taken their own lives after, unable to bear the remorse, the grief. Ani feeds on their triumph and leaves them nothing. Aid your boy or not, care for him after, but do not expect him to remain the same.”

“There must be some way to fight,” Gilly cried.

“There is none,” the intercessor snapped. “Do not treat the gods as if they are human.” He snagged Gilly’s ale and gulped it down, then when Gilly continued to sit in mute misery, said, “Boy—let me warn you of one thing further. I have seen several compacts play out, and never have I seen Her shadow so strongly as I did in your master. Grayle, for all his melodrama, is right in one thing. A certain type of follower, strong-willed, fierce-natured, clever, might be enough to let Her manifest, creating Her Avatar, a mingling of god and man. A creature who could destroy the city.

“Most of Ani’s children hunger and kill, the compact finished before danger ever arises. But the longer they delay, the more Ani invests of Herself, and the greater the gifts: Immunity to poison. Immunity to hurt. Witchcraft. Finally, transformation of the flesh. If your master is as strong as I fear, you’ll not only lose him, but likely your own life, and the lives of all those around you.”

Gilly fled the man’s bleak eyes and sought the tranquil dark waters of the nighttime pier, contemplating flight. But his panic paled in the memory of dark eyes and a mouth coaxed to sulky laughter. When dawn crept over the sea in streaks of gray and yellow, he turned his steps back toward Dove Street and Maledicte.

The house was silent when he returned, creeping through the kitchen door. The sun just risen, even Cook was barely awake. Setting the tea to steep, she jumped at the sight of him, and the teapot clattered from the hearth.

“Sorry,” Gilly said, recovering it before it spilled.

“So you should be, sneaking up on a body like that,” she said. “Where’ve you been, Gilly lad?”

“Out,” Gilly said. Without his asking, she poured him tea. Gilly took the kitchen mug in his hand. He drank it in one scalding gulp, then tipped the cup over.

It was not what he wanted to see, but in the wake of his conversation with the intercessor, he was not surprised to find that again the leaves gave him no shape but the gallows. He shivered in the warming kitchen. There would be nothing but the gallows tree until Maledicte’s vengeance was done. He knew that now. Another death approached?
Let it be Last,
he thought,
and the end of it.

“You’re too levelheaded a lad to believe in such things,” she said, wiping the leaves up with a dishrag.

“Thank you for the tea,” he said, escaping her scolding.

A light limned the edge of the library door, spilled a faint dusting of gold over the dark, carpeted hall, and Gilly paused before pushing the door open.

“Maledicte?”

“Come look at this, will you?” Maledicte said, bent over the desk. “Vornatti’s solicitor, Bellington, brought it over last night after you’d gone. He wanted coin for it. I’m not used to paying for information, Gilly. I gave him what he asked without haggling. If you’re going to be gone all night, you need to teach me such things.” The look Maledicte sent him was faintly accusatory.

“How much did you give him?” Gilly asked.

“Ten lunas,” Maledicte said.

Gilly winced. “Oh, he’ll be back then. I hope the information was worth it.”

Maledicte took his hand from the scroll of paper and it coiled again. “It’s from Vornatti’s spies abroad. The same ones who told us of Janus’s return. Read it, Gilly.”

Gilly did so, fighting through the tight script. “Vornatti’s cousin, Dantalion, has an agent in Antyre?”

“A solicitor, supposedly. Janus and I are torn on what it means that, though we know he’s in the kingdom, he’s made no attempt to challenge the will that disinherited his client. No one’s heard of him at all.”

Gilly sat down, nerves singing.

“Gilly, what do you call a solicitor who shirks the law in favor of secrecy and prying?” Maledicte said, eyes dark. “I have a word in mind.”

“Assassin,” Gilly breathed. “Mal, you must be careful. An Itarusine lord is a dangerous foe on his own, and Dantalion is a crony of Last, and so will know more about us than perhaps is safe. Last could tell him your haunts and your favorite pasttimes.”

Maledicte said, “Should I mew myself up behind these walls? I do not want to be a prisoner, kept away from all my hard-won freedoms.” He was weary; Gilly saw it in the droop of his mouth, the pallor of his skin.

“We will hire agents of our own to find this man. Once found, he’ll be no threat. Assassins thrive on secrecy, and Dantalion will have to find another route to recoup his losses,” Gilly said, taking the letter. “I’ll send runners out, and you—go back to bed.”

“I could crawl into his arms and stay there forever, were it not that our enemies would find us,” Maledicte said. “I know the path I’ve taken, and yet it galls me that I have nothing but enemies at my back. Even I weary of the fight.”

“You may have enemies to spare, but you have allies as well. Janus, myself, even the king.” Gilly tugged Mal to his feet. “It will be well, how can it not be? Are you not the scourge of the court, the terror of Last?” He cupped Maledicte’s face in his hands, and allowed himself to kiss Maledicte’s forehead. “Go to bed.”

Maledicte rubbed his cheek into Gilly’s palm like a contented cat, then stiffened and freed himself. “I trust you are right, that finding the man is as good as killing him. Because I intend to do so. I have no time for Dantalion’s nonsense. I have an earl to kill, and an earl to create. Fortunately, though I may tire, Ani does not, and Her blade is sharp,” Maledicte said, with a sudden surge of strength, an angry glitter in the black eyes.

Gilly, chilled again, watched Maledicte leave the room, and thought of the gallows tree and blood spilled beneath.