The Virtu (57 page)

I woke up—some dream about trying to drag chests out of the Sim before the water got into them, and sometimes I’d look at the chest and it’d be a little kid instead—and Felix was in the doorway, holding a lantern.

He looked like shit, to be perfectly frank. He said, “Let’s finish this now.”

“Finish… oh.
Now
?”

“Now,” he said.

I sat up. “You sure? I mean, ain’t you done enough today?”

“Now,” he said again, and powers, I was scared to argue with him.

“Okay, give me a second.”

I ran both hands hard up my face, dragged on yesterday’s trousers and shirt, was looking around for socks when he said, “You won’t need your boots.” I saw he was barefoot, wearing just a nightshirt and his beautiful quilted dressing gown.

“Felix? You, um, wanna put some clothes on?”

“This won’t take long,” he said, and there I was again, scared to argue with him. I wasn’t scared of what he would do to me, exactly. More scared of what he might do to himself. That was how bad he looked.

So I followed him, and let me tell you, wandering around the Mirador at night is not the way to find a good time. Felix didn’t seem to notice anything, but, Kethe, I felt it. Didn’t know what it was, mind, but I felt it all right. Felt it in every separate bone of my spine, and ended up walking about as close to Felix as I thought he’d let me, spooked right straight out of my skin.

He didn’t go round to the big bronze doors of the Hall of the Chimeras. Instead, he took a way I hadn’t known about before, and we came out through the door that Lord Stephen used. And, no, I wasn’t happy about that, neither. But I did figure it was the least of my worries.

“Shouldn’t you at least have Mavortian with you?” I said. “Or Gideon? Or
somebody
?”

He stopped right by the big stone pillar the Virtu sat on. It was the right shape again—him and Mavortian had done that, got it back to being a globe instead of an ugly set of teeth. Felix said, “You’re all the help I need,” and his witchlights were all around his head like a crown, and the way they made his eyes shine was nothing I ever want to see again.

“Me? But I’m, I mean, I’ll do anything I can, but—”

“It isn’t a matter of magic,” he said. “I have
that
. I need…” He stopped, seemed to look at me properly for the first time that night. “If you are willing to help me, that is.”

“You don’t need to ask that.”

“I know. But I’m asking anyway.” He smiled at me, a real smile and meant for me. “Will you help?”

“ ‘Course. Tell me what to do.”

“I need your strength,” he said. “I felt it earlier, through the obligation d‘âme. And I wouldn’t want to try this with another wizard. I might inadvertently do to them what Malkar did to me.”

“Oh.” After a second I got the part he wasn’t saying. Whatever exactly it was—and I didn’t want to understand it better than I did—he couldn’t do it to me. I’m annemer. Nothing for him to take, whether he wanted to or not. My voice was pretty steady when I said, “Okay. Tell me what to do.”

“Give me your hands,” he said. “And don’t let go, no matter what happens.”

I would’ve felt better about the whole thing if that hadn’t been an echo of what Thamuris had said to me when he was doing his pythian casting, and, fuck, Felix didn’t look much better than Thamuris had, even figuring for the consumption and all. But he trusted me, and I knew for him to ask for help meant he needed it, and not in no half-assed way, neither. And I was still scared of what might happen to him if he couldn’t do this. He looked like he was about half a step from completely losing his shit.

“Okay,” I said.

I put my hands out, palms up. He took them, held them a moment, his hands warm when I’d expected them to be icy. He said, “Thank you,” very quietly, and then locked his grip around my wrists. Not sure if it was right or wrong, I did the same, and he nodded.

“Don’t let go until I tell you it’s all right,” he said, and then his hands clamped down and he was gone from behind his eyes.

The bands on his rings bit like double-jointed alligators. I couldn’t help the way my breath hissed in, but I’m pretty sure Felix didn’t notice, and I didn’t flinch or try and pull away, and that’s what counts.

I wish I knew the first thing about what he was doing, so I could explain it right. But I don’t. I couldn’t even tell anything was happening, except for the grip he had on my wrists, and after a while I started getting a headache. Not much at first, but it kept getting worse and worse until it was like some fucker had gotten an ice pick and was jabbing it between my eyeball and the bone behind my eyebrow, right in time with my heartbeat. I tightened my hold on Felix’s wrists so I didn’t do something stupid, and just hung on. It was all I could do, all he’d told me about. I kept my gaze down, on our hands, because I couldn’t stand looking at his face with nobody in it, and a second after I felt something wet on my upper lip—right side, same as that fucking ice pick—I saw the blood land, bright red, on the joint of my thumb.

I hoped like fuck there wasn’t a connection, but you know, I wasn’t doing real good convincing myself. Come on, Felix, I thought. Hurry it the fuck up already.

Nothing happened for a while, and I watched blood drip from my nose onto my hand. Then Felix’s fingers clamped down even harder, and, powers and saints, I’d been seriously underestimating how strong he was. I could feel his rings all the way to the bone. He yelled something, and it might’ve been a language I don’t know, or no language at all, and then, Kethe, like a body blow, the Virtu lit up.

Bright blue everywhere. Bright fucking blue. I made some kind of a noise, I think, but I couldn’t even hear myself. It was too fucking blue. I had just enough time to wonder if it had struck me blind and this fucking blue was all I was going to see for the rest of my life, before it started backing off again, and I could tell that me and Felix were still standing on the dais just like we had been, with our hands locked together and his rings digging into my wrists and blood dripping down my face.

He said, “There,” in this nice normal voice, like nothing weird had been happening at all. “You can let go now.” I looked up and was just in time to see his eyes roll back in his head.

He went down like he’d taken a sledgehammer between the eyes. I managed to catch him, but he was so much taller than me that there wasn’t much more I could do than just slow him down so he wouldn’t hurt himself. And then I found a handkerchief in my trousers pocket and sat down under the Virtu to try and get my damn nose to stop bleeding before I dragged the dead weight of my brother back to his bed.

The first thing I heard when I woke up was Mildmay and Bernard shouting at each other. My immediate impulse was to bury my head under the pillows and go back to sleep, but I rolled over to look at the clock, and half a second later was out of bed, standing in the doorway, demanding, “What were you thinking to let me sleep this late?”

Mildmay turned. Bernard glared at me. Mavortian, in my favorite chair, did the same.

“Well for one thing,” Mildmay said in his slow drawl, “I didn’t think I’d be able to wake you up.”

“What do you mean? I never…” My voice trailed off as I took in his appearance. Neat as ever, but he was haggard, the lines too strongly marked around his mouth, eyes bloodshot, especially the right one. “What happened to you?”

“From what little he’s said,” Mavortian put in, “I gather
you
did.”

“I…”

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“We cast the foundation on the Sim,” I said. “Came back, had a well-deserved dinner, and…” I felt my eyes widen, felt one hand go up to my mouth in a pantomime-cliché gesture of distress. “I didn’t.”

“Look,” Mildmay said. “I been telling them. It’s no big deal. I said yes.” He sounded exasperated, but the shadows under his eyes, the lack of color in his face…

“How badly did I hurt you?”

“You didn’t.”

“Those bruises on your wrists say otherwise,” Bernard said.

Mildmay gave him a venomous glare, but I said, “Show me.”

“Felix, it don’t—”

“Yes, it does.
Show me
.”

I didn’t use the obligation d‘âme, although we both knew I could have. He sighed, shrugged off his coat, and removed his left cuff link. He pushed his sleeve back and held his arm out.

My breath caught. Livid purple and yellow bruises in an uneven ring around his wrist. I took his hand, turned it over gently; the soft skin of his inner wrist was even worse, with scabbed-over tears like the marks of tiny, vicious teeth, “
I
did that?”

“You didn’t mean to. And I ain’t mad, so it don’t matter. Okay?”

I let go of him and turned away. “What an abysmally,
damnably
stupid thing to do.”

“At least you admit it,” Mavortian said.

“He didn’t do no better for himself,” Mildmay said. “You been sitting here same as me the past two days, so it ain’t like you don’t know that.”

I doubted Mavortian had caught one word in five, but something else took precedence. “Did you say
two days
?”

“Two days,” Mavortian said, not pleasantly. “Well over forty-eight hours.”

I looked at Mildmay, who shrugged. “I went in and checked you were breathing a couple times. I couldn’t make you wake up, and I didn’t think you’d want anybody knowing. Couldn’t keep
them
out”—with an eloquent jerk of his head toward Mavortian and Bernard—“but I told everybody else you were resting and didn’t want visitors.”

“Everybody else?”

He pointed at the table. “Can’t keep people from noticing you fixed the Virtu, neither.”

Letters on every color of paper imaginable swamped one end of the table. “Goodness,” I said and moved past Mildmay to open the first one.

“A singularly inappropriate word,” Mavortian said, “when what you did is the rankest kind of…”

I let him harangue me, since it was clear I could not stop him, but I did not listen. I had heard the same, over and over again, from Giancarlo and Victoria, from Vida and Thaddeus and all those other wizards who’d thought they had the right to tell me what to do. Though not from Mallear, who had had his own methods of making his displeasure felt. I continued opening letters, one after another, congratulations from wizards, and annemer courtiers, a stiffly polite little note from the envoys of the Coeurterre, a letter from Stephen so charmingly begrudging that I thought I should have it framed, a letter from Master Architrave “on behalf of the domestic staff of the Vielle Roche.” An announcement of a soirée to be held in honor and celebration.

“What’s the date?” I said without looking up.

“Knew you’d ask that,” Mildmay said, sounding almost pleased with himself. “So I got Rollo to give it in the flash calendar. Dai twenty-sixth.”

“That’s tonight, then.”

“Have you heard a word I said?” Mavortian demanded.

I gave him a perfectly insincere smile. “Of course.” And gave his words back to him verbatim, a trick I’d learned in self-defense as Malkar’s creature, although it was far more satisfying as an offensive weapon. I continued opening letters as I recited, checking off names against the mental lists I had of allies and enemies. My lists of course were woefully out-of-date, but there was interest and information still in how these letters matched up with where I thought I stood.

And then I opened a heavy cream paper, sealed with blood-red wax, and an enclosure fell out. I picked it up, glanced at it, and dropped it, my fingers suddenly nerveless and my voice charred to ashes in my throat.

“Felix?” Mavortian said.

“What’s wrong?” Mildmay came around the table, though he did not quite reach to touch me.

“Malkar,” I croaked.

“Fuck,” Mildmay said. “Here. Chair.”

I sat down heavily; it was only barely not an uncontrolled fall. I told myself it was ridiculous, childish, to be this badly affected by the mere sight of his handwriting, but I could do nothing about my shaking hands or the way I was having to fight to keep my breath from shortening.

“Food,” Mildmay said. “Powers, I’m an idiot. Be right back.”

He left, and Mavortian struggled to his feet. “He’s very protective of you, you know. Charming, if rather misguided. I imagine you find it very useful.”

“I don’t…”

“And Malkar Gennadion. I admit I’ve become quite curious…” He’d reached the table and picked up the letter. My instincts screaming, I was already standing up to reach for it when I realized his voice had died just as mine had, the color draining from his face.

“Mavortian?” Bernard, and I thought that if anyone should know about being the object of protectiveness, misguided or otherwise, it was Mavortian.

Mavortian ignored Bernard completely. He looked at me, eyes blazing in his pale face. “Do you know whose handwriting this is?”

“Of course,” I said. “I told you—”

“Beaumont Livy’s.”

We were still staring at each other, trying to make sense of it, when Mildmay returned.

He stopped just inside the room, his gaze going from my face to Mavortian’s, wary as a fox inspecting a trap. “What’s going on?”

“We’ve made a very interesting discovery,” Mavortian said, “and found the answer to a riddle that has been plaguing me for a very long time.”

Mildmay looked at me. I said, “It seems that Malkar Gennadion and Beaumont Livy are one and the same.”

“What?
Your
Beaumont Livy?”

“His handwriting is distinctive,” Mavortian said.

Mildmay was silent; I saw him exchange a glance with Bernard that I could not interpret. Finally, he said, “So what’re you gonna do?”

“Well,” I said, “the first step must be to find out what Malkar feels he has to say to me.” I held out my hand for the letter, and Mavortian yielded it.

I knew Malkar too well to make the mistake of reading his letter out loud. After the first two words, I got up and moved over to the fireplace so that I could burn it as soon as I finished reading.

My darling foolish child
—
 

Vey has brought me word of your latest exploit and promises she will enclose these few words of mine in the congratulatory letter she herself intends to send.