Maledicte (31 page)

“Mal?” Janus came out of the light, into the shadows on the balcony, and Maledicte rose from his crouch.

“Here.”

“And hale? Gilly spun me a tale of poison,” Janus said, setting the glass on the balcony railing. It chattered and clinked against the stone. The velvet quality to his voice was ruffled. “I should have known he lied.”

“Gilly so rarely lies,” Maledicte said, picking up the glass and draining it. His raw throat eased.

Janus sucked his breath in, grabbed Maledicte to him, touching his damp skin and peering into his eyes. “You seem well enough.”

“Yes,” Maledicte said, curling into Janus’s arms. Their hearts beat steadily against each other’s: Janus’s slowing as his fright eased, and Maledicte’s speeding up from the dirge it had been dragged into by Mirabile’s poison.

Janus sighed into Maledicte’s hair, bent to kiss him, and finding the mask’s black beak in his way, pushed it off.

Maledicte moved into Janus, pressing against him as if they could become one creature. Give up love for power? Mirabile was madder than he thought.

Too soon, Janus broke the embrace. “I must return.”

“I have not touched you in weeks. A single kiss is all you spare me? Was this only an interlude in your quest for social acceptance?” Maledicte’s fear made him bitter. The poison came too close, woke fears long dormant, reminding him that the world could separate them at any time, and still, Janus chose to play games. “Should I thank you for the time you’ve condescended to grant me?”

“Mal,” Janus said. “I’m only trying to keep tabs on what is being said regarding Last, assuring Aris that you are blameless in Last’s disappearance. And with Echo replacing Love as Counselor, I have much to defend against. But I’ll come home tonight. I’ve missed you.” He tugged Maledicte’s hands to his chest, pressed them to his heart. Maledicte brought Janus’s mouth to his again. The kiss lingered, but once more Janus broke it, this time walking away into the court.

Maledicte stared after him for a hungry moment, wishing he could make Janus see that they needed none of this. Let them retire to Lastrest, out of Mirabile’s threats and entreaties, out of sight of Aris and his attempts to continue the line. But he had sworn to aid Janus, and Janus wanted the court, the title—Aris would likely reward a marriage with the title, once Last’s death was accepted, and though that was what they wished, the idea of it woke some slow-burning worry in Maledicte’s chest that he couldn’t understand.

Spying Janus’s earlier dance partner, the tiny girl dressed as a wood nymph in green and gold, with a veil instead of a mask, Maledicte deserted the balcony abruptly.

He made his bow before the wood nymph’s chaperone and took the nymph’s hands. A mask was no aid to the little doll girl; her lack of inches made her obvious.

They danced in stifling silence for a full four measures before Maledicte said, “If you hate me so much that you can’t be bothered to be civil, I wonder why you agreed to dance at all. Surely no one would fault you for turning me away.”

She looked up at him and flushed, the redness visible through the fine pale linen of her veil. Maledicte waited until the color had faded, then provoked it again. “Can’t you answer me? Or were you never trained to talk?”

“Mother’s desperate,” she said in a breathless rush. “I have six younger sisters waiting for me to wed.”

“Does she think to attach me?” he asked, incredulous. “I might as well be the plague for a chit like you.” Compared to these noblewomen, Ella was an amateur schemer when it came to profiting from her daughter.

She lowered her head and mumbled some words that, though unintelligible, made her flush again.

Impatient, he tilted her head up, his bare fingers beneath the delicate veil. Her heart raced beneath his fingertips. “Be brave, girl. You’re masked. Perhaps I don’t even know who you are—as improbable as it seems.”

The girl either took heart or umbrage, it was hard to tell, but the result was the same. She raised her head, a grim determination settling on her blurred face, and said. “She wants me to wed Lord Last.”

Maledicte’s temper turned in his belly. “Brazen or desperate indeed. To use Janus’s lover to meet him. Does she want me to tell you what pleases him? What makes him sweat and cry out? What his skin feels like under my lips? What he says to me while we’re abed?”

The girl’s breathing quickened in shock. Such plain speaking was hard enough to hear for a maiden; for Maledicte to speak with such venom undid her composure completely. Her shoulders shook, and the veil over her eyes grew damp and dark with tears.

“Stop that,” Maledicte said. “I will not have you start another scandal with me at the heart of it.”

She stopped struggling, and he loosened his painful tourniquet on her arm. They took another round of the dance without any speech; the spots of moisture on the veil shrank and dried, leaving only quivering lips and shaking hands to convey the shock she still felt.

“I think your mother must be mad,” he said, though mad brought to mind not a matchmaking aristocrat, but Mirabile with her red eyes and bloody nails.

“Why—” The girl paused, then continued, her voice gaining strength, “Why are you so cruel? I’ve never said a thing to hurt you. But you’ll say anything to hurt me. You have every reason to be kind. You’re handsome, and rich, and no one tells you what to do.”

“You’ve never met my Gilly, if you think no one dictates to me,” Maledicte said.

The dance ended and he bowed, but stayed at her side. She blanched as he drew her toward one curtained partition, a seat at the nexus of three mirrors. “Your virtue is safe,” Maledicte said. “I merely want a word with you.”

She nodded, biting her lips so hard that he thought the veil might darken with blood. He tugged it away from her face entirely, watched her eyes widen like morning-glories at sunrise.

He sat down in one of the quilted chairs, still holding her arm so that she had to bend with him. He drew her closer, put his lips by her ear. “Your mother may want Janus for you. Aris may want the same. But if you take Janus from me—” His breath hissed out at the very thought. “If you take him, I’ll kill you. Best say no, should he come courting.”

She whimpered and he said, “We are understood?”

Backing away, she stumbled and nearly fell, stepping on her skirts in her haste to be out of his reach. Heads turned as she floundered across the floor, toward the shelter of her abigail and the cluster of debutantes drinking toasts to the dawn, safely arrived.

Mirabile passed through the debutantes with a word here, a touch there, and a smile for Maledicte cast over her shoulder as she bypassed the nymph sobbing in her chaperone’s arms.

“That was not well done of you,” Gilly said. “Besides being a cousin to Westfall, Psyke Bellane is a gentle, inoffensive girl.”

“Gentle, yes. Inoffensive?” Maledicte said, “No. But killing her would be like crushing a sparrow, so easy as to arouse more pity than satisfaction. By warning her off, I’ve done both of us a kindness.”

“Only you could argue that way,” Gilly said.

Maledicte pulled his mask off, dropped it to the marble floor. “I’ve had enough. I’m going home.”

Gilly’s response was drowned in the sudden tolling of deep bells. This close to the palace, the sound was as powerful as the tide and as inexorable. Maledicte turned to catch Janus’s eyes and met Aris’s instead, and saw the quick shattering in them. Maledicte flinched.

“Last,” Gilly whispered. “The unshriven dead.”

“Hush, Gilly,” Maledicte said, taking his hand. “Hush.”

On the dais, Adiran, startled by the clamor, clapped his hands over his ears and wailed, his voice rising over the low pitch of the bells like a descant. Aris pulled him into his lap, soothing him. Jasper and Echo moved toward Aris at a trot.

The bells faded into silence though the mirrors still shivered with their echoes. In the sudden hush, a startled shriek rang out as a debutante fainted in her escort’s grip. Gilly stepped closer to Maledicte, and Maledicte tightened his grip on Gilly’s trembling fingers. “Shh, Gilly.”

The girl’s abigail fanned her face, and her escort chafed her wrists, ever more frantically. He looked up with wide eyes. “She’s not breathing.”

Before his words stopped sounding, a second girl fell, an heiress of some repute. By the time her people converged around her, the first debutante was dead.

On the dais, Aris stood and started as if he could see Death walking the floor. Jasper gestured madly and the Kingsguard enclosed the king, surrounding him. Hela barked, long, deep, and hoarse, the sound reminiscent of the death bells, and Janus closed her muzzle with his hand. Aris nodded his shaky thanks and they fled the court. As the king’s doors sealed tight behind him, the chaos spread unchecked, as a third, then fourth girl collapsed.

In the doorway, shadowed by the rising sun, Mirabile smiled at Maledicte, and dropped the tiniest of curtsies, a performer acknowledging praise.

· 28 ·

A
RIS LOOKED DOWN AT THE
wreck of a body resting on the marble slab, lying between Haith’s sculpted hands, sheltering in the grasp of the god. Though pains had been taken with the corpse, the worst of the torn and waterlogged flesh hidden beneath the blue cloak, still the face was barely human. Only the chill of the winter sea had kept flesh and bone together, and Aris, remembering his first horrified look at the sea dreck his brother had become, knew that beneath the softening cloak were sections of bare bone.

“Sire,” a kingsguard said, “the courtier Maledicte has arrived. Where will you receive him?”

“Bring him here,” Aris said.

The guard’s sandy brows rose nearly to his hairline, but he merely nodded. Aris turned his attention back to his brother’s body, barely hearing the man leave.

“So it came to this,” he said. “Nearly alone, our family winnowed by time…You should have been the older, Michel,” Aris said, feeling as if a weight had settled over his neck and shoulders, sinking toward his heart. “You would have made a better king than I, I think, shortsighted and reactionary though you were. Antyre loves me not, and more, respects me not. You would have forced respect on them. Or fear. And I would not be left with this—” Footsteps echoed in the hall, the shuffle of feet on stone.

Aris raised his head. Few enough people came down the winding, dark hallways toward the chapel that he knew who it must be.

Maledicte dropped a bow. “You sent for me?” Behind him, a guard lurked.

“Yes,” Aris said, his throat rough. Maledicte’s eyes were heavy-lidded, his hair loosely and hastily tied back. Small jet feathers sieved from them, and Aris remembered the two dancers, one black, one white, whirling around the ballroom, heads bent close together. His hands fisted.

“Come and see what has befallen my brother,” Aris said, stepping away from the bier.

Maledicte came forward, wavering like one of the shadows in the dimly lit room. He leaned over the ruined head, and stepped back, his pale face expressionless.

“Does it satisfy you to see him dead?” Aris said. “I know you hated him, though never the why of it.”

“Yes,” Maledicte said.

“Give me your hand,” Aris said.

Maledicte proffered his right hand. Aris seized it and tugged him back to the edge of the bier. The sickly sweet odor of putrefaction washed over them, driving Maledicte’s perfume back. His hand in Aris’s struggled. Maledicte turned his face away, leaving Aris to speak to the wing of dark hair sheltering him.

“Touch him,” Aris said, voice ragged. The guard leaned forward to watch, witness. Maledicte resisted, and Aris yanked his arm forward, stretching it toward the body. Tears started in his eyes.

Maledicte turned, caged Aris’s prisoning hands with his free hand, stopping him. “A learned man so wild with grief,” Maledicte whispered, his voice meant only for Aris’s ears. Maledicte’s dark lashes lifted; the black eyes met Aris’s and Aris shivered. “Which superstition are we chasing, sire? Is Last supposed to bleed at my touch?” He freed his hand from Aris’s grip, as gently and precisely as a pickpocket liberating coins.

“I doubt you can claim squeamishness.”

“Why don’t you ask me?” Maledicte said.

“You must do it,” Aris said, looking away from the sweet mouth turned down in distaste, hardening his ears to the intimacy of that raspy voice, so close, sounding so caring. False or not, it made Aris tremble.

Maledicte stepped forward and touched his fingers to Last’s forehead, then touched the sodden fabric over Last’s heart. Then he spread his hand to show Aris the unmarked flesh. “I did not kill your brother.”

Aris no longer knew what to believe, his mind as cold and as numb as Last’s corpse. As cold as the fallen debutantes, awaiting their spring burials. He only knew that death had come to his country on Maledicte’s heels, that any member of his court must be an able liar, well versed in apparent sincerity, and that Maledicte had an unsavory reputation as a swordsman and blackmailer. The one Aris could testify to, thinking of the damning Antyrrian audit ledgers kept hidden by this boy’s pale hands, weapons more worrying to Aris than the blade.

As for the sword—those delicate hands were smooth, barely callused, and Aris knew that reputations were often based on gossip. Neither Aris, nor any of his guards, had ever seen Maledicte dueling. Even Echo, ready to condemn, had qualms imagining Last taken by Maledicte’s sword. Last himself granted no aid; though he had spoken out against Maledicte in life, his body, caught up in the
Fleur
’s anchor and dragged along the keel before breaking free, was too mangled to make any mute accusations.

Aris covered his eyes as if he could blot out the images, blot out the panic surging in his blood.

Aris shivered as Maledicte put his hand on his arm, unasked. He heard the guards shifting uneasily, but said nothing, instead allowing Maledicte to tow him away from the bier. He opened his eyes to see what expression he could catch on Maledicte’s face, as if he could sneak up on verity when it eluded words, but learned nothing new, save that compassion sat uneasily on Maledicte’s clever face.

“I thought you meant to question him, sire,” Echo said, arriving in the doorway on an upswing of anger. Aris put another body width between himself and Maledicte.

Maledicte said, “Ask at will. I will give you no more difficulty.”

“The debutantes,” Aris said, his words overriding Echo’s attempt to take control of the room. “Had you anything to do with their deaths?”

“No,” Maledicte said, startled and frowning. In the background, Echo scoffed, and it was to him that Maledicte addressed the rest. “I am no killer of feckless girls.”

“Whispers speak of a evil pact between yourself and Mirabile,” Echo said, coming closer.

“Are you serving as counselor of gossip?” Maledicte asked, his customary acid eating into his tone.

“You danced with her,” Echo said, “your heads bent close as if you shared secrets and schemes—”

“Never with her,” Maledicte said. “She’s quite crazed. Send for her, Echo. I doubt she’ll deny her wrongdoing.”

“I sent Jasper to collect her,” Aris said, noting the lack of concern in Maledicte’s gaze. “Echo, it’s early. Let us continue this later, after we’ve spoken to Mirabile…” He drew Maledicte away from Echo, closer to himself, and lowered his voice. “I will see you out of this, but you will repay me with your discretion and silence this winter. I want no gossip to reach my ears of your doings.”

“Such a thing you ask of me,” Maledicte said. “Surely, it is not within my power to still idle tongues—”

“Enough,” Aris said, in no mood for banter, not with his brother’s corpse so near, not with the young man suspected of killing him. “The court is closed. Until spring comes and wipes away death with life, there will be no balls, no celebrations, no masques. The nobles will rusticate in their country homes, or in town estates should they feel inclined. You will do likewise. Do so and I will give you Janus.”

“He’s not yours to bestow,” Maledicte said.

“But his absence is mine to command. I could see him mewed at Lastrest, trapped in mourning clothes and customs. Or I could keep him at my side exclusively—” Aris trailed off. In the dimly lit room, cold with death and pain, Maledicte’s burgeoning anger felt huge, a looming, dark presence. Echo moved closer, hand dropping to his sword hilt.

“Little fool,” Aris said, seizing Maledicte’s shoulders and shaking him with all his pent-up frustrations. “Do not force me to heed the whispers.”

Maledicte suffered the shaking meekly, his hair falling from its loose queue and hiding his face. His harsh voice came like a whisper of scale on stone. “I will be discreet, sire, to the best of my ability, which is not inconsiderable, you’ll agree?”

“Aris,” Echo objected. “Better to hold him until we see what Mirabile has to say—”

“Are you so eager to keep me from my luncheon and my books?” Maledicte asked. Aris felt like one of his dogs gone to point. The specter of the ledgers had been in the room since Maledicte’s entrance. He had expected Maledicte to invoke their power sooner, and more bluntly. This reminder, so gently spoken, could be a threat, or merely a reminder that Maledicte could, indeed, be discreet.

“Go then,” Aris said. His hand, still resting on Maledicte’s shoulder, lifted and twined the dark hair around his fingers, turning his face up for study. It wasn’t innocence that greeted him; Aris would have distrusted such an expression on Maledicte’s face, but there was no triumph either. Its lack softened Aris’s offense. “Go on then. Off with you. Let me hear nothing of you but praise, and come back in the spring.”

Maledicte bowed, his hair slipping through Aris’s grasp.

“Sire—” Echo objected, but never had time to finish. Jasper returned, white-faced, two guards walking behind him, their hands on their pistols, their gazes nervous, as if they had seen devils.

“Jasper?” Aris asked, his voice unsteady. “What’s happened?”

“Westfall’s dead…his house afire—”

“The antimachinists? They dared to—”

Jasper wiped a hand over his mouth and his sweating face as he interrupted his king. “Not them. Mirabile’s run mad, sire. She’s killed them both, poisoned Brierly and murdered Westfall. She took his eyes and heart.” He shuddered. “We saw her, gown bloodstained from hem to hip, as if she’d been wading through blood. But before we could lay hands on her, she was gone, like a shadow disappearing under the noon sun.

“Gone,” Aris repeated, dumbly.

“It’s witchcraft, sire, I swear. No matter that the gods are gone…she’s found some way to touch power, and no one will be safe until she’s stopped.”

Aris sank onto the bench, looking up at the painted gods, and for the first time in thirty years offered a whisper of a prayer to Baxit, praying that reason would return to his kingdom.