Maledicte (48 page)

· 45 ·

G
ILLY PASSED BY THE PALACE,
his collar turned up high around his face. Despite himself he looked up, stared at the sad remnants tattered by wind and rain. He had been there when they were hung; Ma Desire hadn’t been able to dose him with Laudable enough to keep him away.

Swaying on his feet, heart numb, Gilly had still found a faint surprise in him as the body was exposed. So ordinary. Just an assembly of ruined flesh and bones, the personality gone with the breath. And yet—some suspicion so small he couldn’t name it had surfaced and sunk without ever coming to light. All he knew was that the body displayed was the body of his master, fed on by the rooks and ravens that had once followed him. Outrage had welled in him at that, the anger that Ani allowed Her feathered disciples to feast on one of Her own.

He had picked up stones, intending to knock them away, but Ma Desire had tugged him back to the brothel, kept him there for days, drunk and despairing. Kept him there through the outcry of Mirabile’s body being found, kept him there through the state funeral for the infant earl. Gilly couldn’t imagine attending anyway, couldn’t stomach the idea of seeing Janus standing at the king’s side.

“He was a wrong one,” Ma Desire said. “You’re better off without him.”

Gilly had nodded in polite obedience, but inside, he rebelled. The infant—he couldn’t imagine Maledicte killing the infant, no matter how hard Ani had ridden him. Especially after his triumph over the shadow boy, his baser self. That quiet belief, bitter in the face of the charges laid to Maledicte’s account, slowly woke Gilly from his stupor. Antyre held nothing for him now, and the
Virga
shipped out soon. He meant to be on it.

It had taken some time, collecting money from the banks, careful in case the Kingsguard sought him. Wasted care, Gilly realized after the first few transactions. He was only a servant, after all, in a city full of servants, invisible.

The wind shifted, bumping the ragged body against the tower with a faint rattling as of wind chimes. Some children shrieked and laughed beside him, jumped to their feet, letting their ropes reach hand to hand.

“Maledicte lived and Maledicte died

Only at his birth did anybody cry

How many people did he kill?”

The young girl tripped on the third skip and they all switched places, started again.

“Maledicte snooped and Maledicte pried

Not a soul escaped the notice of his spies

How many secrets did he buy?”

The boy kept the rope moving so long that Gilly, after the first flinch, tuned them out.

“Maledicte fought with a blade so black

Can’t be beat with Ani at his back

How many duels did he win?”

Another girl took over the chanting, her voice as sweet as Mirabile’s, as sweet as poison. Gilly watched her skip, her curls flying.

“Maledicte fled and sought the sky,

Ended bent and broken, hung on high

How many times can Maledicte die?

One!”

She stopped immediately and burst out laughing.

Gilly felt the tears start in his eyes, realized that a guard was looking at the playing children, at his distressed face, and he tugged his coat closer and turned away.

One. Even with Ani’s aid, he was only mortal. Gilly made his way down the main street, past Vornatti’s town house, still closed and dark, waiting the pleasure of its Itarusine owners. He let himself in, forcing the lock on the kitchen door, and drifted through the empty house, thinking,
Here I told him stories, and made him supper, and here I played the spinet and watched them dance. Here he made me try on all of Vornatti’s clothes, for fit. And here, I killed a man for him.

But the house stayed cold and shadowed, refused to be peopled with his ghosts of memories. He left the door open, walked down to the docks, sat on the quay where he and Maledicte had sat once watching the
Virga
come in. Then he rose, and went to the shipyards to buy his ticket to the Explorations.

He left the harbormaster with his ticket and a tight throat, fighting the urge to return and request a second, pretending just a little longer that Maledicte might be coming with him.

A blue-lacquered carriage passed him by, and he turned to watch it go even as he stepped into a shadowed alcove. Janus, in town? Since the murder, Janus spent all his time at Lastrest, so much so that rumor whispered he’d been banished there. Gilly followed the carriage at a distance, watched Janus hand Psyke down and follow her into the DeGuerres’ estate house, smiling.

“Is he visiting?” Gilly asked the driver, stopping to pet the horse’s nose.

“He and his wife. Stopping for a fortnight. Though he’ll hare off home soon enough. Doesn’t like to leave Lastrest, he don’t. But she’s like all wives, wants the city life, the shops, the culture.”

“I see,” Gilly said, handing the man a luna. A fortnight. The
Virga
didn’t leave for three days. Time enough to go to Lastrest. One final pilgrimage. The place where Maledicte had found rest, even briefly.

W
HEN HE REINED THE HORSE
to a halt, he saw children skipping in the courtyard, as they had outside the palace. The children of farmers and house servants took the opportunity of Janus’s departure to play over the grounds unhindered.

Gilly caught only a fragment of their skipping song, enough to know it was the same one making the rounds of the city. A housemaid in a starched apron came out and slapped the eldest boy. “You know how Lord Last feels about that one,” she said.

“He’s not here, is he?” the boy said.

“You’ll forget and sing it when he’s back and then we’ll be out of a job. Mind your tongue.” She marched back to the house.

Gilly swung down from the horse; the boy rushed up to hold it. “The master’s not here.”

“That’s all right,” Gilly said. “I haven’t come to see him.”

“You’re one of the Kingsguard, aren’t you?” the boy asked. “They come every time he leaves, and snoop around. Don’t know what you’re looking for, do you?”

“No,” Gilly said. “Not really.” He walked up to the front door, lifted the latch.

“Hey, mister,” the boy said. Gilly looked back.

“Watch out for that ghost. It’s a mean one. Ripped up the master’s room something awful….”

“Just watch my horse,” Gilly said. He went inside; with Janus and Psyke gone, the main hall was dark and silent, all the liveliness of the house behind the scenes in the servants’ quarters. Gilly drifted up the stairs; the long portrait hall had a new picture now. Janus and his wife, the frame chipped at one edge. Gilly turned his face away, wandered into the study where Maledicte had first shown his talents for petty burglary.

For spite, Gilly palmed a letter opener, and then, reconsidering, put it back. If the servants decided he wasn’t a kingsguard, he didn’t want to be found a thief, either. He went upstairs along the central hall, and opened a door, one of two master rooms. This was a lady’s chamber, Psyke’s: fussy, ornate, and boring. He closed the door, opened the opposite door.

“Ripped it up something awful.” The relish in the boy’s voice came back. Gilly stared. The window glass was cracked, the drapes sagging down in long tatters. The decanters on the dresser had been unstoppered and tipped over, allowed to spill into opened drawers, over clothes and furbelows. A chair, its tufted back sliced open, oozed stuffing. Gilly turned at a whisper of sound, almost expecting to see Maledicte, sitting shamefaced in the midst of his wreckage, tidying after his tantrum.

But it was only the shuff of pale feathers blowing across the floor, tangling in the bed curtains like fish in nets. Gilly pulled back the bed curtains and nearly choked.

The sword. Ani’s sword. Gilly found his hands shaking. The sword was driven through the mattress, feathers bleeding out of the ticking, snowing the room.

Janus kept the sword, Gilly thought, aghast. He touched the hilt, and twitched as if a spark had touched his skin. The sword was warm to the touch, and fluttered against his palm. Whispering.

Gilly could almost hear the words. Something of pain, something of loss, of love torn away—if he listened harder, maybe he would hear what had driven Maledicte. If he listened long enough, maybe Ani would hear his pain as well. The cage of the hilt warmed, shifted, making room for his fingers and palm.

Gilly smiled, imagining taking the blade to Janus, destroying the smug, golden monster with a single stroke and erasing the raw burn in his chest that cried protest that Janus survived when Maledicte did not. Slow images trickled behind his closed eyelids, a visual parade of encouragement—Janus, on his knees before him, that gas-flame blue of his eyes dulling, as Gilly pulled the sword back. In a sudden flash, the image forced itself wider, not Ani’s doing, but Gilly’s own, showing him more—the carcasses strewn behind him, casualties of his quest.

He jerked his hand away, scraping his knuckles and bloodying his hand. He wouldn’t share his hate with Ani, or his pain, wouldn’t let it twist and distort his mind the way it had Maledicte’s.

He licked the blood from his hand, turning around and around in the room, tracking Maledicte’s presence. It seemed so strong in the room, a scent, a warmth lingering, here in this place where his sword stood, here where he never was in life. It drove Gilly to melancholy wonderings of Janus haunted as the boy said. Janus deserved it, but Gilly wished—

His horse whickered outside and he fled the room. The boy looked up at his approach. “Did you see the ghost?”

“No,” Gilly said. “I saw nothing.” He hesitated. The boy holding the horse looked at the other children, a little distance away, and lowered his voice.

“I bet I know what you really want to see.”

“What is that?” Gilly said.

“Where they dug up the murderer. I’ll show you for two lunas.”

Gilly closed his eyes. Did he want to see that? The pain in his heart said finish it, see it all, and go. But touching the sword woke an anger in him, raising the numb curtain he had been living behind. He wanted to leave a mark here, something to hurt and sting, a last message to Janus.

“One luna,” Gilly said, reminded of haggling with Maledicte. “And another verse to your skipping song.”

The children stepped closer. “You know the song?”

“All the verses by heart,” Gilly said. “Including the real end one.”

“What is it?” the boy said. “If it’s good, I’ll show you the grave.”

The girls lowered the rope, started it spinning. A small boy jumped into it, and Gilly spoke his lines.

“Maledicte loved and so Maledicte died.

He never saw the truth behind his lover’s lies.

How many lies can blue eyes hide?

One, two, three—”

The children picked it up, chanting it, skipping its measures into their memories. It would pass on, Gilly knew, from one voice to the next. Even the palace wouldn’t be exempt. Faintly, Gilly smiled.

The boy holding the horse’s reins watched the skipping with a thoughtful gaze. “But what does it mean?”

“It means there are two sides to every story. Even this one,” Gilly said. “Show me the grave?”

The boy tied the horse to the gatepost, beckoned Gilly into the shadows. The site was not too far from the curve of the drive, within a stand of trees, and within sight of Janus’s bedchamber window. Gilly drew his lips down. Even dead, Janus didn’t want Maledicte out of his sight. A stone marker lay there, left in the dirt. The boy went as far as the shadow of the trees, then balked, obviously afraid to go closer. Gilly went the rest of the way alone.

Gilly touched the stone. It was plain basalt with only a name carved into it, and some wearing of the stone that looked like feathering. “I wish you were coming with me, instead of your memory,” he said, voice rough. “I always hoped you would.” It wasn’t enough; like an altar, the gravestone expected offerings.

Fumbling in his pockets, Gilly found the receipt for his berth on the
Virga,
and a stub of a pencil. He hesitated, then put the words to paper that he had never been given a chance to say. He folded the parchment and put it at the base of the marker, weighing it with a rock.

The horse, restless, pawed at the ground. Behind him, the children sang the song again, starting at the beginning. Gilly looked over and up; he caught a faint movement in the window of the bedchamber. If he pretended, it could have been a dark-eyed, pale face, but the thought of Maledicte linked to Janus even in death was bitter, and he looked away. He unfastened the horse’s reins, and swung into the saddle, left the children practicing their song with careful volume, wary of adult chastisement.

G
ILLY RETURNED THE HORSE TO
the tavernkeeper, and asked when the next coach to the city was coming through. When the answer was dawn, he chose not to take a room, not wanting to be alone. He sat in the main tavern room until the hour grew late, and then settled himself on the bench outside, sleeping among the others too poor to take a room, or too thrifty.

When he woke to the sound of the team’s hooves, his coat was wet with morning dew, and stiff with chill. He stretched, watching his fellow passengers loom out of the morning dimness. They gathered slowly, drawn from inside the inn and from the nearby fields by the music made in the jingling harnesses and stamping hooves. The coachman and his assistants unharnessed the first team, changing horses for the trip to the city. The youngest assistant crept inside. Gilly saw him coaxing bread from the innkeeper and returned his attention to the coach, looking toward the future, and not the past.

A young family waited, one whining child shifting from foot to foot until his mother picked him up and held him. A young man, either tutor or clerk, stood stiff and self-conscious in a shiny new coat. Two young men waited, dressed like the nobility, and muttering about the cost of the coach. Gilly surmised a country romp, maybe a gaming hell, and their pocket money all but gone. They’d learn better, or not; Gilly couldn’t find it in him to care.