House of Sand and Secrets (11 page)

“Why?”

The question hangs between us. “Because I do,” I mumble lamely. “Someone should.”

“Charity and compassion for those less fortunate were always the hallmarks of good breeding. Congratulations, I think perhaps you’ve almost clawed your way back up to being a lady.”

I grit my teeth, and breathe deeply through my nose, but it seems that finally I can’t control the anger rising in me. “Fuck you.”

I storm out, but not before Jannik gets in his final dig.

“Or perhaps not,” he calls out after me, and my cheeks heat as I march away from his cold, clean, emotionless side of the house.

PROPOSALS

I’m meeting Eline
Garret in a set of comfortable offices on a tree-lined avenue on the Mallen side of the river. Everything about the area is lushly understated. The grandeur of the buildings is subtle, even the tree branches that meet overhead seem to have been pruned just so, to give them a look of effortless elegance.

A secretary leads me to a small waiting room lined with bookshelves and leaves me there to wait. A time piece ticks out the minutes, and I am brought a pot of tea to show me my place. Of course Garret will make me sit as long as possible. It’s traditional. All part of the bloodless war between the Houses.

Finally, the secretary beckons for me to follow him, and I am led through the wide hall ways, to a room with an empty desk set before vast floor to ceiling windows, the curtains swept back. The sun pours through the glass, silhouetting Garret in the centre. He keeps himself still for a moment, giving me ample opportunity to be awed by his presence, I suppose.

The room is heavy with scriv and I wonder what futures he was trying to predict, what paths he hopes to manipulate from this meeting. Saints leave nothing to chance.

I have to stand in one corner to be able to see him clearly against the glare. He’s a blond and neat man, with the fine features of his house. On the Eline women it makes them look fragile and small, on him it just looks foppish. Appearances are never to be trusted though, especially in Eline, with their Saints and their calculated coldness.

“Pelim Felicita, I knew you’d come.” Eline Garret greets me with almost suffocating warmth as he walks around from behind his desk. I manage not to roll my eyes. Oh he
knew,
did he? The man is a Saint, telling the futures with scriv, and like all those blessed with Sainthood, he is never able to let people go unreminded.

Perhaps he expects that I am so humbled by being allowed near him I will forget he sent me an invitation

I take his outstretched hand. His grip is firm and hot, and he pumps my hand with a hearty viciousness before releasing me. He’s mocking my status as House head. Women don’t shake hands; women don’t attend business meetings with other House heads. My fingers feel like they’ve been crushed between two rocks but I pretend to feel nothing.

“Well met, Eline Garret,” I say, trying not to wince. “And thank you for the invitation.”

His upper lip twitches. “Think nothing of it. Carien told me that you’d be worth the time, and I believe she was right.”

I smile in cold politeness, and wait.

He eyes me slowly before he smiles back. “I’m afraid I have never done this before – conducted business with, well, with a woman. If I make some awful social gaffe I will expect your forgiveness.” He’s trying to steer us into friendly waters, and I let myself be manoeuvred. There is still the prospect of doing what I can to raise my House, and to see what I can glean about the vampires.

I take my seat, and the glass of chilled wine he has brought for me, and I let my mask slip into blushing nervousness and idiot female trust. He laps up my gratefulness, my stammering admittance that I’m floundering in my new position.

Carien or one of her coterie would have seen through me in an instant. That is why Readers are always more dangerous than people realise. If Garret hadn’t underestimated me, he would have had a Reader here to watch me, to mark my weak spots.

He talks a lot, and I let him. The deals he’s offering are poor at best, but I nod and smile and exclaim my gratitude. Jannik will draw up counter-offers; I’m just the pretty face right now.

It takes vast reservoirs of self-control to not scoff openly at some of the things he suggests. Garret sees Pelim as a lame nilly – one they’re going to skin and quarter rather than help recover. Obviously, no one’s explained to House Eline exactly how dangerous we can be when pressed. Let him think what he wants. I’ll make sure my House comes out the better – that’s after all, what House Pelim does. We rise from our battles, scarred and stronger.

Garret and I draw the meeting to a close, with promises of deals and mutual goals. “I’m afraid that while I’d love to agree to everything that you’ve said,” I say as I stand, “I’ll have to get my husband’s signature for these.” I tap at the binder on his desk.

For the first time in this meeting, Garret’s face betrays a flicker of irritation. “I was led to believe you had autonomy.”

“Oh, oh I do, really. The bat merely has to make his mark.”

Garret frowns. Whatever his Vision showed him about this meeting, it has betrayed him.

True pleasure lets my smile show more warmth than I’d previously allowed. “It’s nothing,” I assure him. “He’ll sign where I point my finger.” If I know Jannik, he’ll be reading through these and countering just about every point, shaking his head, and ranting about how people must think we’re idiots.

“You’ve got him well trained, then.” Garret winks at me.

“Oh, definitely.”

“My wife finds them fascinating.”

“Really?”

“She’d love to meet it,” he says. “Perhaps you’d be willing to bring it out one day. A private dinner, nothing formal.”

“Oh.” I take the binder and clutch it my chest in a perfect mimicry of indecision. “I-I don’t know–”

“She did, after all, bully me into meeting with you. Think of it as reciprocation.”

“Well then,” I say. “I can hardly refuse.” There, we will be in the sphynx’s nest itself; at their own invitation. Surely if House Eline has anything to do with the deaths, they would not invite strangers into their home. Perhaps Carien and I may allow our awkward friendship to flourish. The smile I give him is the only sign of my victory.

* * *

Jannik is not happy. I almost expected him not to come tonight. We sit silently in the carriage as it clatters toward the Eline mansion. It’s close to the Mata palace, and like that quartz-and-glass monstrosity it is a layered fortress of glass turrets and spindle-thin walkways. The main trunk of the house is made from aventurine and it glitters grey and green. The glass towers are dark, almost black, although I can just make out the occasional smoky shape walking from place to place.

Serving Hobs take our coats and lead us to a room with cold, rough walls. The drabness makes an excellent foil for the many glass-work furnishings. Deep glittering colours twist and fold in on themselves; antiques by Defrin and Narlet are used here as casually as if they were the work of minor War-Singers. Narlet’s work has always left me uncomfortable, with its pointed spikes as wide a woman’s wrist. By all accounts he was a vicious man, and it shows in his work. They are like underwater forests of twisting blades.

They are also priceless.

Eline has money. I knew that, of course. Enough money to buy vampires and murder them for sport.

The servants bring us warmed wine flavoured with desert spices, then leave. Of Carien and Garret, our erstwhile hosts, there is no sign. The only other living thing in the room is a mountain mynah in a glass cage. The bird is as big as a rooster and watches us with its liquid black eyes. They are sometimes trained to talk, but this one says nothing.

“Why exactly did you drag me out to this?” Jannik sets down his wine glass on a blue-and-green table made to look like overlapping pieces of sky and sea. In the clear legs, tiny bubbled fossils are hidden; glass snails in cadmium coils, turquoise sanddragons, skeletal black leaves.

“I don’t know if you should put your wine on that,” I murmur, keeping my own glass clutched tight. I take a hesitant sip. It’s familiar, some Pelimburg vintage. It makes me think of my mother, and a sad clutching loss folds around my heart. I take a deeper drink to drown it.

“You’re not answering the question.” He stalks the room, pacing back and forth, stalling every now and again to squint at the details on some new piece.

“You were invited.”

“How very unlikely,” he snaps back.

I will not let him make me feel guilty. “House Eline are extending the hand of friendship. It would be churlish to refuse.”

“And this has nothing to do with your-” He waves one hand vaguely.

I raise a brow. “My what?”
“Your thing, your whatever.”

“I have a great many things and whatevers,” I tell him, one corner of my mouth twitching. “Which one would this be?”

He pauses in his pacing to shoot me a particularly glaring scowl. “It’s very convenient that we receive an invitation
now
from one of the Houses on your little list. Stop scheming.”

“Me.” I widen my eyes. “Scheme? You wound me.”

“Or is this about the wife?” Jannik says.

“Perhaps,” I say, though I keep my tone guarded. Jannik is more perceptive than I would like. And he’s right. This is as much about her as it is about him. Carien is difficult for me to understand. There are moments when it feels like I could tell her everything; she is wild and unHouse-like, she is filled with a seething mockery of everyone’s status, including her own. And I don’t quite trust her. In that, I suppose, she is also like Dash.

“Ah,” says a man from the arched entranceway. Eline Garret. “I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting.”

It’s more probable that he kept us waiting on purpose, in order that we understood our place in this affair. After all, it seems to be Garret’s preferred tactic. He uses the same weapons and therein is his flaw.

I smile serenely. “We hardly waited a moment,” I say. “And with such a fine collection to peruse, even a moment was too short a time.” I take the smallest sip from my glass and watch Garret carefully.

He’s wearing Ives Blue and turquoise, and against them his pale hair looks almost silver and his eyes all the bluer.

Behind him Carien is standing like a scarlet shadow, her dress deeper than wine, her dark brown hair swept up. “Ignore him,” she says. “It’s all part of the game.” With that, she marches past her husband and takes my arm in hers. “You look beautiful,” she says. Before I can stutter a reply, she turns to Jannik, and smiles. “And you, oh there has been so much talk of you.”

Jannik takes a small step back. In his drab blacks and dark green neck tie, in his Pelimburg dullness, with his chalk skin and cave-black hair, he is a rumpled crow in a gathering of peacocks.

“Did Felicita put my proposal to you?” Her voice is light, bantering, but there’s a tightness around her eyes. They’re puffy, as if she has been crying. The powder she has used to cover her imperfections sits chalkily in the slight creases at the corners of her eyes.

“Proposal?” Jannik looks to me. “Not that I’m aware of.”

“Really, Carien, allow our guests some reprieve from your idiotic hobbies.” Garret smiles as he says this and Carien snaps back to heel.

We are offered more drinks and led to an intimate dining room. The food is excellent, and Jannik even does more than merely push his thin shavings of egret around his plate. Red egrets from the eastern parts of Oreyn – they must have been shipped here at great expense. People have tried to cultivate them here, but they stay sickly and die soon after, far from their tropical jungles.

There are other courses, each finer and more expensive than the last. No one mentions business or politics. Instead we stay on the safer ground of art and extravagance. There is a new opera that Garret wants to see, an artist he recommends for fine portraiture, an auction of glass-work from some minor House fallen on ill times, a play that has received glowing reviews. I might as well be reading the Courant, the talk is so banal.

And then Iynast. Garret dismisses his work with a sneer. “Barbaric. The man can barely hold a brush,” he says and stabs at his dessert. “No better than the trite nonsense you manage to slap onto a canvas,” he says, nodding at his wife.

She places her fork neatly down. “You’ve been to the exhibition, then?”

“Hardly. I heard enough about it.”

“Ah.” Carien glances at me. We’ve finished our meal. In a normal House this would be our cue to retire and leave the men to talk. I fumble with my napkin. Carien stands and walks away from the table.

I sit with Jannik and Garret, and the three of us stare uncertainly at one another.

“Your wife needed your signature for some papers I had drawn up,” Garret says.

A servant stealthily clears away the dishes, while another brings in a bottle of vai, and another of distilled wine. My cue to leave has long since passed. Am I supposed to now stay and watch over Jannik’s interaction with Garret as if he were a boy-child? If I stay, I humiliate him; if I leave, Gris knows what could happen.

“The papers, yes.” Jannik allows a serving Hob to pour him a snifter of the distilled wine. “There are certain points we should discuss further.”

I make my decision and exit as surreptitiously as I can. Jannik gives me a parting glance then continues talking to Garret. Their voices buzz into silence and I look for Carien.

She’s not in the ladies’ drawing room. A serving girl shows me the way to a glass balcony on the second level of the house. Carien is standing against the rails, her face to the night wind. Her hair has been pulled ragged by the breeze and flies about her head in a snaky confusion. “You left them,” she says. “For a while there I thought you were going to hold his hand while Garret spoke with him.” She laughs. “Do you see him as a child? Or a trained beast?”

“Neither,” I say, too quickly.

She doesn’t turn to look at me and the silence between us is torn at by the rising wind.

“For all you know now, Garret could be slitting his throat.” Her voice is thick with unhappy laughter. “Or perhaps he will try to seduce it.”