The Bone Palace (28 page)

“But some day. You will.” She swayed against him and he held her carefully away.

“We’ll see.” He removed his hand and stepped back.

She smiled again, then licked her finger clean and turned back to her bird. After a few more coos and caresses she opened the window, through which it vanished with a flurry of black wings. When she sat her movements were unusually heavy—almost clumsy.

“Are you all right?” Kiril asked. As much as her demon grace unnerved him, its absence was more unsettling.

“Weak,” she admitted. “Tired. I had thought to postpone it, but I need to hunt tonight.”

“Hunt?”

“Living blood regenerates. Dead blood doesn’t. I need a living source every so often, and I didn’t imagine you wanted to bleed for me.”

“So you hunt, like a vrykola. With them?” Her silence
was answer enough. Her quiet journeys into the underground had intrigued him when they were at the Arcanost together. Without her work, he would never have formed his own fragile ties to the catacombs. But now her renewed involvement brought only trouble, and his unease hadn’t faded. Varis’s schemes were dangerous enough—who knew what plots the vrykoloi whispered in her ear?

“Do you stalk the slums like they do,” he asked, his voice inflectionless, “taking those who won’t be missed, or whose families have no recourse to search for them?”

“You wanted me to be discreet. Would you rather I stalk the Octagon Court?”

“I didn’t realize you were making such a habit of murder.”

She flinched, then stiffened. “Will you play games of conscience with me, spymaster? How many other women disappeared because of you? How many other murders did you clean up for him?”

“None. None like you, that is.” Dozens of murders for king and country, hundreds, but never any so personal. And thank the saints for that—he didn’t think he could have done it more than once, not for any love or loyalty. “You… He was mad for you, as I’d never seen. Whatever alchemy was between you was a powerful one.” Kiril shook his head. “But you’re quite right—I have no place to be your conscience.” He rose, simultaneously annoyed and amused that he was ever the one retreating from his own home. “Do what you must. But try not to leave any more bodies in plain sight.”

He felt Phaedra leave the house not long after. But then, she never really left him anymore. He sat awake well
past the final terce, turning a glass of whiskey between his palms and turning memories over in his head. He took them out every so often to keep them polished—he was the only one who carried them now, and he felt he shouldn’t lose them. The sight of Phaedra’s bird triggered his last memory of her as she had been. The one that should have been the end of it.

No one could survive the fall, no matter how powerful a mage. Phaedra certainly hasn’t. Kiril hopes and fears that the river might have claimed the body, denying them confirmation but sparing them the sight, but they receive no such mercy.

She sprawls on the rocks beside the ice-edged water, close enough to soak her skirts. Grey and crimson splatters freeze on stone, clot and crust in the unbound darkness of her hair. Her limbs are broken twigs, neck grotesquely twisted. Birds take flight in a rush of black wings as Kiril and Mathiros approach. They made short work of her; her hands are already picked to the bone, eyes and tongue gone, lips ripped free to bare a white rictus of teeth. They even took her glittering rings, and lesser gems and gold thread from her girdle.

The sight of her bare hands gives Kiril a moment’s unease, but no trace of life or unlife lingers in her shattered corpse, no hint of a ghost.

“Leave her for the beasts,” Mathiros mutters, his voice raw and hollow.

At another time, Kiril would have shot him a pointed glare. Now he doesn’t want to look his liege in the face. “That would be unwise, Highness,” he says instead.

Mathiros grunts and nods. “Do as you see fit, then.”
He turns and strides back to the path, boot heels ringing on the stones.

When the prince is gone, Kiril kneels beside the body. He might have closed her eyes, but the lids are ruined, and straightening her limbs is out of the question. Instead he calls spellfire. It licks cold and silent around his fingers, flaring brighter when he touches Phaedra’s frozen gore-stiff gown, running and pooling as if the damp fabric were soaked in oil. The blue-white flames grow only colder as they burn, but cloth and flesh char and crumble all the same, till all that remains is greasy ash and a few blackened nubs of bone.

The ashes freeze Kiril’s hands to aching as he scatters them into the river.

A
pleasant side effect of necromancy was that Isyllt’s magic warded off any foreign life that tried to take root in her flesh, from plagues like the bronze fever to the little coughs and colds that spread through the streets every day. But even that required a modicum of strength and self-preservation.

Which was how Isyllt found herself bedridden and feverish for days after she summoned Forsythia, coughing and sneezing and choking on phlegm. Her former disregard of the influenza quickly vanished, leaving her weak and aching and wishing for death. She might have asked the landlord’s daughter to put her out of her misery when the girl came with soup and ginger tisane, but if so her request was ignored.

The fever brought dreams. Strange, dark dreams, full of wings and towers and the smell of cinnamon. And blood, always blood, oceans and messes of it. Slit throats and torn veins and the thick black vomit of fever victims.
More than once she woke gasping in the dark, the taste of copper in her mouth, certain that the slickness on her skin was more than sweat.

On the seventh day she woke to afternoon sunlight and the feeling that she’d been beaten with truncheons and dragged behind a carriage. Her eyes were crusted with grit, and the taste in her mouth didn’t bear contemplating. Despite a head stuffed with snot and dirty rags, she knew someone else was in the apartment. She croaked a question that even she didn’t understand.

A rattle of dishes answered from the other room, followed by soft footsteps. The smell of something full of salt and garlic cut through the clinging reek of sweat and sickness, and Isyllt flopped back on her clammy pillows with a sigh.

“For a powerful sorceress, you whine a lot when you’re sick.”

She started, sticky eyes opening again. The voice, and the shadow that fell across the bed, belonged not to the landlady’s daughter but to Dahlia.

“What are you doing here?”

“The girl downstairs let me in. I told her I worked with you, but mostly I think she was tired of listening to you moan.”

Isyllt snorted and propped herself up on the pillows. The bedding stank, and her nose had cleared enough to remind her of it. Her scalp and back and breasts itched with dried sweat. Only sweat. Though from the ache tightening beneath her navel, her courses would begin soon. “You can make yourself useful, then. Is that lunch?”

Dahlia handed her a tray of bread and soup; the garlic and ginger in the broth were enough to sting her sinuses.

“You’re lucky,” the girl said. “People are dying of the influenza.”

“They always do. The young and the old, the weak and the starving.”

“It’s worse this year—the fever is worse. I heard a man in Harrowgate died vomiting blood two days ago.”

That made Isyllt flinch. Her spoon shook, spilling broth back into the bowl. She sopped bread instead and forced herself to chew and swallow. It burned the back of her throat, but she felt more alive after a few mouthfuls.

“So you work with me now?” she asked, trying to put aside thoughts of plague.

Dahlia shrugged, perching on the edge of a chair. Her eyes flickered around the room; Isyllt hoped she wasn’t casing it. “I convinced Meka to help you. And you might need more help, looking for Forsythia’s killer.” She lowered her voice at the words, and Isyllt didn’t blame her. The memory of Forsythia’s sobs was enough to steal warmth from the room.

“I might,” she mumbled around a mouthful of bread. Isyllt didn’t insult the girl by mentioning the danger. She’d come back after witnessing an unpleasant summoning, and risked a sickbed; that didn’t speak of cowardice or squeamishness. She swallowed and studied Dahlia more closely. “You want more than a few weeks employment, don’t you?”

The girl’s jaw tightened. “I’m not asking for anything besides what my time is worth. Forsythia was kind to me—I want to see her avenged.”

But Isyllt had seen the desire in her at the Arcanost. And she had come back now, when any fool knew that necromancers weren’t safe or pleasant company. “Shiver or spark?” she asked.

Blue eyes flickered and met hers. “Shiver.” Her chin rose with the word.

Sparks, as those with the talent for projective magic were often called, were accepted at the Arcanost no matter how poor or connectionless, if only because an untrained pyromancer was a threat to everyone around them. Shivers—those who could sense magic or hear spirits—were eight for an obol, and without something else to recommend them would go untrained, or find work as hedge magicians or ghost-whisperers. Or go mad from voices they couldn’t stop.

Isyllt shrugged, setting the tray and empty bowl aside. “That doesn’t mean you can’t learn to do more. A well-trained sorcerer can do a little of almost anything.”

“Can you?”

She snorted again and shoved back the covers. “I’m too well-trained. Overspecialized. I’m so steeped in death and decay that my magic isn’t good for much else. But I can teach you theory. If you want to learn.”

Dahlia watched her, eyes narrow and wary. Isyllt remembered that chariness. Was her need to learn worth the possibility of hurt and betrayal? She looked away before the girl was pressed to answer, concentrated on getting out of bed. The room had grown while she was ill, or at least the wardrobe seemed much farther away than she remembered. “Are you an orphan?”

Dahlia shrugged. “I don’t know who my father was, or where he might be. My mother is alive, but all she cares about these days is opium. Since I wasn’t going to steal to help her buy it, I left home.”

“She named you Dahlia.”

Another shrug, this one almost fierce. “It was her name
when I was conceived. The Rose Council took it away later, before I was born, when her habit started interfering with her work. She said it would save me time choosing one when I grew up.” Her mouth twisted, pinched white.

“Charming,” Isyllt muttered. She made it to the wardrobe, leaning heavily on the carved oaken doors. “You don’t have to keep it.”

“Why not? She was right, after all. I’ll be back in a few years, no matter what else I do.”

The bitter resignation in her voice distracted Isyllt from clean clothes. “It’s hardly that bad. Even if you don’t want to study magic, there are plenty of trades that will let you work off apprentice fees. The temples, if nothing else—”

Dahlia laughed, sharp and startled. “You don’t know, do you?” When Isyllt raised expectant brows she laughed harder. “I’m androgyne. Not a boy or a girl. I’ll be hijra when I turn sixteen.”

Isyllt blinked, closed her mouth on whatever words had died unspoken on her tongue. She had seen skirts and a lanky adolescent prettiness and given it no more thought. But now, studying the length and weight of bone, the shape of her face, she supposed Dahlia would make an equally pretty boy. She had glimpsed the veiled and marked hijra and heard the normal rumors, but knew next to nothing of the truth.

“And that leaves you with no choice but to be a prostitute?”

Dahlia raised her hands. “It’s what they do.”

“The Pallakis Savedra doesn’t. If we’re being charitable, anyway.”

The girl—Isyllt would be hard-pressed to change that
thought now—snorted. “She’s the prince’s mistress, and one of the Eight besides. She doesn’t have to do much of anything. Some of us need money. Food. A place to be.” A hint of wistfulness threaded the last.

Isyllt tried to quash an upswell of sympathy. There was only so much she could do. But she could offer something, at least.

“You have a few years to decide, at least. I’ll hire you as an assistant until I catch this killer, and my offer of instruction stands. Are you interested?”

Dahlia chewed her lip, twisting her hands in her skirts. “All right,” she said at last. “For Syth. I’ll help you.”

“Good.” Isyllt smiled and gathered an armful of clothes. “For your first job, you can run me a bath.”

“I’m sorry,” Savedra said, not for the first time. She lay propped in her own bed, into which the court physician had scolded her after inspecting her stitches and changing the dressing on her arm. A bottle of opium-laced wine sat on the table beside her, as yet unopened—she needed her wits more than a surcease of pain at the moment.

Nikos and Ashlin had traded their normal places. He paced the length of the carpet at the foot of the bed, and she leaned against the doorframe, arms folded tight. Savedra couldn’t bring herself to look at either of them. “I never should have put the princess at risk,” she said to her lap, to her scabby white-knuckled hands. “It was foolish and thoughtless and—”

“I take my own risks, thank you,” Ashlin snapped. The talon scratches were stark and red on her cheek and brow. She was pale, despite her unabated temper, eyes shadowed. “None of this is your fault.”