The Mirador (46 page)

And, you know, there wasn’t a thing in the world I could do for him anyway. I couldn’t make Gideon come back, even if I’d wanted to try. And I didn’t, because, as awful as it made me feel, I thought Gideon was right to go.

I had to hunt up Maurice to get my face dealt with. Maurice was all agog to find out what had happened, but I said it was an accident and stuck to it, even though we both knew he knew I was lying.

To get his mind on something else, I said, “You ever go back, Maurice?”

“Back?”

“You know. You got family?”

“Them?” Maurice snorted. “I wouldn’t go and they wouldn’t thank me.” I thought he’d turn the subject, but he went on, almost like it was my fault, “I got out when I was ten. My father was drunk so much of the time he didn’t know I was there— even if he’s still alive, I doubt he’s noticed I’m gone. My mother was no better. My sisters were already whores, and all but one of my brothers was dead, missing, or in the Kennel. That one brother broke three of my fingers once for getting in his way. I walked up here—I would have crawled—and I found a man in the stables, and I said, ‘Anything you want me to do. I don’t care so long as I don’t got to go back.’ And he said, ‘We ain’t looking for a boy, but there might be need in the kitchen.’ So they sent me ’round and Geburon said, ‘I’ll find you work but you won’t be here long.’ He knew what he was talking about. I ain’t rightly been kitchen staff since I was thirteen.”

He stopped, hearing the Lower City rising up in his voice.

He reminded me of Felix, or, I guess, gave me a look at what Felix had gone through getting his voice to where it was.

“Shit, I’m sorry, Mildmay. I didn’t mean to dump all that on you.”

“I asked, didn’t I?”

“I guess.” He gave my face a critical look. “Well, you’re no beauty—”

“Never was.”

“It’s done bleeding, anyway. Just don’t go tearing it open on any more ‘doors.’ ”

Powers and saints, I am a shitty liar. “Thanks, Maurice,” I said. At the door, I thought, C’mon, Milly-Fox, you owe him this much. I turned back and said, “You and Rollo—don’t say nothing to Felix except ‘yessir’ and ‘nosir.’ I mean, if you don’t want your heads bitten off.”

His eyebrows went up.

“Gideon left him.”

Maurice’s jaw sagged open. “You’re kidding,” he said.

“Nope. Straight up honest.”

“Almighty fuck.”

“Yeah,” I said and got the hell out of there.

It was damn clear that whatever favors Maurice might do me, going to the Lower City for anything wasn’t one of them. And since I couldn’t very well drag Simon along to a necromancer’s house—even if he was still speaking to me, which I doubted like fuck—that meant I was going to have to look someplace else. And Jean-Tigre owed me one and knew it.

I hate cashing in on favors. Generally it makes things worse than they were before. The blood I owed Margot was never going to be off my hands, even if Margot would’ve let me do anything about it, which she wouldn’t. But when you can’t solve one problem, you got to think about another. I couldn’t do nothing for Felix, but maybe I could figure out what the fuck was going on with Jenny and get Kolkhis and Ginevra off my back along with it.

Jean-Tigre had been one of Kolkhis’s buys the same indiction she bought me, a skinny little gnome of a kid. He’d been great as a pickpocket. He had light, fast hands and a sort of—I dunno— invisibility about him. It wasn’t that cits didn’t suspect him, it was that they just plain didn’t notice him. He didn’t think much of the life, though, and when we were near our second septad—about the same time I was getting my stupid face laid open—Nikah got caught by the Dogs and hanged. That was it for Jean-Tigre. I’d never known what had happened to him until I came to the Mirador and found him already in place, the valet of Lord Gerald Malanius. He’d looked long and careful right through me the first time we happened to bump into each other, and that told me clear enough where I stood, namely nowhere in Jean-Tigre’s sight.

I didn’t blame him for that. I didn’t think I’d have wanted to know me, if I’d had a choice about it, and I didn’t feel like I needed to push myself on him. But I’d never told Keeper Jean-Tigre was skimming, although I knew about it for a good indiction and a half before he cut and ran. She would’ve flayed him if she’d caught him, and then she would’ve flayed me for not telling her. He’d begged me to keep my mouth shut and I had, even though I’d had nightmares, up until the day he left, that she’d found out anyway. It don’t sound like much, I guess, but between kept-thieves, it was a pretty big sort of a thing. I knew it and Jean-Tigre knew it, and the way he kept looking through me like I wasn’t there said that he didn’t want to know it but couldn’t quite turn the trick of forgetting about it either.

I knew where to find him at this hour of the afternoon. Lord Gerald was a dandy, and I’d heard more than once from the servants about how he wouldn’t let nobody but Jean-Tigre touch his clothes with an iron. The laundry maids were all miffed about it, although they allowed as how it cut down on their work. They didn’t like Jean-Tigre, neither, said he put on airs and talked down at them, even though they knew where he was from. Lord Gerald might not know, but flashies don’t got to know those sorts of things. From the top, I don’t suppose one level of down looks much different from another. But the laundry maids were respectable gals from Breadoven and Archwolf and Dimcreed, and they didn’t like a little snip from Britomart sneering at them. If I’d wanted to make Jean-Tigre’s life a pure misery, I knew right who to go to.

That wasn’t what I was after, so I didn’t go hunt out Jeanne-Arlene and Taffy. Instead, I took a wander by Lord Gerald’s suite, and sure enough there was Jean-Tigre in his shirtsleeves, ironing away on a set of ruffles you couldn’t have paid Felix enough to wear. I knocked on the door after I’d closed it, and his head whipped up.

“You’re getting slow, Jean-Tigre,” I said.

“What do you want?” He was sweating, which was probably just the iron, but I didn’t think the heat and the weight had anything to do with the way his face was changing colors. By reflex, he’d brought the iron up, though I don’t think he knew he had it in his hand.

“I dunno. To talk?”

“You’re nuts. I’ve got nothing to say to you. I’ve gone straight.”

“And I haven’t? I ain’t an assassin or nothing no more, Jean-Tigre. Just a servant boy like you.”

“You are not like me!” For a second, I understood why Felix loved baiting people. I couldn’t have hit Jean-Tigre more squarely on the raw if I’d meant to, and there was a mean kind of satisfaction in it. But it wasn’t what I wanted.

“Okay,” I said. “All I’m saying is there ain’t nothing wrong in being seen talking to me.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“No.” I stood there and waited for Jean-Tigre to work it out. Which he did.

“What do you want?”

“A favor.”

“What kind of favor do you think I can do you?”

“You can get back down in the Lower City without getting lynched, is what.”

“I’m not going there!”

“Jean-Tigre—”

“No! I don’t care what you do to me or who you tell or anything—I’m not going back there.” He meant it, and I had an awful feeling that if I pushed he was going to try and brain me with the iron.

“Okay,” I said, and opened the door.

“That’s it?”

“If you think it’s worse than anything I can do, you’re probably right. Sorry I asked.”

“Wait. Mildmay—”

But I’d already closed the door.

There was one more person I could try. I mean, it wasn’t what you’d call likely, but from what Josiah’d said, it’d just been me making Hugo twitchy. And, well, maybe he’d be less twitchy if I owed him a favor. Some people are like that.

So I hauled myself over to the Mesmerine, where Hugo wasn’t in his room. Fuck, I thought, and went looking for musicians. I found a whole bunch of them together in a big room that might’ve been a ballroom once. It was their practice room, so there were instruments and pages of music lying around everywhere and music stands like weird wooden flowers. They got real quiet when they saw me. They knew who I was, all right. So I asked ’em as polite as I could where Hugo was. There was another silence. I was wondering if maybe I should point out that I’d find him anyway, sooner or later, or if maybe I should tell them I didn’t want to skin him alive, when a fat gal holding a flute said, “He and Axel went to the Queen Madeleine Garden. Hugo’s composing.” She said that like it was sacred or something.

Fucking perfect, I thought. I thanked them for the information and left. I was halfway up the Mesmerine’s funny half-flight of stairs when I heard them start practicing again.

I’d always been grateful that Felix didn’t like the Queen Madeleine Garden. We’d been there once, early on, because he said it was famous and beautiful and I should see it. I suppose it was—beautiful, I mean—but the stairs up to it were killers, worse than the stairs to the Crown of Nails, and there were more of them.

The Queen Madeleine Garden was part of the great project of Gustavus the Architect, the second to last Ophidian king. He’d wanted to get out of the Hall of the Chimeras, along of having seen his mother, Queen Eugenie, executed there on a trumped-up charge before he’d hit his second septad. And you can kind of get behind him for feeling that way. So he’d built this new throne room—torn down and rebuilt half the St. Idris to get it just like he wanted it—and he’d put a garden in on the new roof and then given it to his wife to show as how he wasn’t going to be like his father. There were stories said he’d even bricked up the Hall of the Chimeras, but they were lies. He just wouldn’t use it. So he’d used his throne room, and his son had used his throne room, and then the Cordelii had come along and moved everybody right back where they came from. They used the New Hall for a ballroom for a while, and then they just quit using it.

But the Queen Madeleine Garden had got popular with the court by then, and so Gustavus’s throne room, that he’d meant to replace the Hall of the Chimeras, had turned into a kind of waiting room, where people could sit who wanted to catch somebody important but didn’t have the nerve or the energy to go hiking up all them fucking stairs and find ’em among the flowers. There wasn’t no law that said you couldn’t go up there, whoever you were, but lots of people acted like there was. So there were merchants and landlords all sitting around, sunk in gloom. I walked through them to the staircase and started up.

The stairs to the garden were made of marble. They were slick. I was glad for Jashuki. The stairs went around in a kind of square, and every few flights there’d be a bench so you could sit down and catch your breath. When I had to stop, twice, I thought about how I’d’ve run up these damn stairs once—and not all that many indictions ago.

You can’t go back, I thought when I caught myself glooming about that again. Ain’t that what Rinaldo was saying with that remember you are lame crack? It happened. Pretending like it didn’t ain’t going to get you past it. So maybe you better fucking quit pretending.

Problem was, neither me nor Felix seemed to be any good with that at all.

The Queen Madeleine Garden, I admit, is quite a piece of work. Brumaire ain’t its best time, but you can see how things are laid out, and where the flowers would be if it was spring. It was cold today, and the flashies were all strolling in their fur-lined coats and their muffs. It wasn’t windy enough to be really uncomfortable—the St. Idris is lower than the other parts of the Mirador, so the wind gets blocked—but it still wasn’t where I’d’ve wanted to go to write music. I figured Hugo probably had a reason, and when I came in sight of him, I knew what it was.

Josiah’d said Hugo’s new flame was a blond boy from Skaar who didn’t cause trouble. And there’d been that crack about him being too pretty for his own good. But anybody young and not bad-looking who was in any type of service in the Mirador probably got some of that, and so I hadn’t taken what Josiah said quite the right way. But I got myself straightened out in a hurry. Axel knew how pretty he was, and he knew just how to use it. Axel had wanted to come up here with a lute, because he looked all romantic and melancholy sitting with it under a bare tree, dressed in dark brown and with his hair hanging around his face in long curls. The court ladies were eating it up. You could tell by the number of them who were sauntering, like they had just come there by accident, up and down that particular stretch of path. Hugo was up here because that was how he got about people he was in love with. I remembered the way he’d come out to Dragonteeth from Nill, just to sit and stare at Austin and get laughed at when he dared to open his mouth.

Hugo was on a bench, about three septad-foot from Axel, with his wax tablets and stylus. He wasn’t looking my direction and didn’t see me. That was fine, since I decided I didn’t want to walk past Axel and through all the promenading ladies to get to him. I retraced my steps, back around the lily pond that had already been drained for the winter, and came up from the other side.

“H’lo, Hugo,” I said.

I hadn’t been trying to be quiet—fuck I wasn’t quiet, between Jashuki and the gravel—but he jumped a foot. He managed to say in a kind of a squeak, “Hey, Mildmay.” And when I didn’t move on, he even said, “Would you like to sit down?”

“Wouldn’t mind,” I said. Hugo’s face said he’d wanted me to say no, but he piled his tablets all to his side of the bench, and I sat down on the other half. I hoped I was hiding what a relief it was. “I wanted to talk to you.”