Archive of Our Own

Mildmay

When I first caught sight of him crossing the rainy inn courtyard, awkward as a cat in a farthingale, I didn't pay no mind to it. I mean, I saw the skirts, and I saw him fail to manage them, but I thought most likely he was a eunuch sent out to turn his first trick and they'd given him the skirts for a penance. Every trade's got its way of baiting the newborn-to-the-craft. You should hear the tales of what they do to cade-skiffs their first night in the boats. I might have felt sorry for a new-clipped son of St. Origo, if I wasn't busy feeling sorry for myself.

We were two days out of Mélusine and it felt like two indictions. I was sick of Felix, he was sick of me, and the horses were sick of us both. Saints and powers, I think the ruts in the road were sick of us. Lord Stephen had found me a saddle that was supposed to take the pressure off my leg. I hadn't wanted the fucking thing, cause I didn't want to have to be grateful to him for it. As it turned out, it wasn't that great of a saddle, and mostly it just offended the horse.

As for Felix, he'd got that lightning-glitter in his eyes again like he was fixing to die of consumption and Kethe help anyone who tried to stop him. He kept shoving the map under my nose and asking me if I thought we were halfway to Hays Cross. I kept telling him that I'd know that if I'd ever been to Hays Cross, which I never had, on account of it was a shit-hole market town half a decad's ride north of the Corundum Gate where they'd probably string you up as soon as look at you. The only reason I even knew the place existed was I used to know a girl by the name of Achsah Rosmarine who was in the habit of walking out of Pharaohlight every four or five decads, or sooner if she argued with her pimp, selling the dress on her back to one of the old-cloth men in Verdigris under the bookshops and buying a ride out to Hays Cross with the carrier. Then she'd come back through the Corundum Gate the next decad sitting on the back of the same carrier's cart, looking all rosy and demure in mouse-coloured linen, and sell her maidenhead all over again.

I don't know what Felix thought there was at Hays Cross, he never told me. I doubt he was hunting maidenheads, though he probably fractured a couple just by walking past them. I doubt he was looking for Achsah Rosmarine either, on account of her having died of a septic cough in the Kennel at about the time we were fleeing for our lives the last time. I dunno as he was looking for anything in particular. I think it was just the map. He didn't have nothing else to cling to, so he made himself a fucking religion of the map Lord Stephen gave us, and a whipping-acolyte out of me.

I folded my arms on the balcony and looked down at the inn's square courtyard. There wasn't much down there but cobbles and horseshit and rain. There wasn't much up here neither but dripping thatch and a narrow balcony, and a door with Felix behind it in a foul temper. It was a piss-poor inn, which was still at least two steps better than the innkeep thought I deserved, and he let me know it every time he crossed my path. There was the arms of the Bercromii over the gate, but I didn't reckon Lord Pelham Bercromius had favoured this place with his personal patronage in a fuck of a long time.

The innkeep came by just then and gave me a look like he knew I'd been thinking of him and he didn't appreciate the courtesy. He had that Grasslands look about him, all fat dun face and black fish-eyes. "What you looking for?" he said sharpish.

"Fuck, I don't know. Game of Long Tiffany, or a drink, or to watch some mummers," I said, which was Kethe's own truth, but he thought I was mocking him for a yokel.

"The mummers aren't expected till next Jeudy," he said, finicky-like, though I knew as well as he did that he counted by decads and indictions in his own head.

And that got rid of one explanation for why there might be a man in a dress hanging around the stables; he wasn't no fucking mummer. More I looked at him, more he didn't fit.

He took a step towards the stable, step towards the tap-room, like a frog on a griddle; then he decided on the stables, but didn't have the guts to go in. He was scared of horses, for all I knew. Scared of that saddle, maybe, the fucking thing looked like an instrument of torture.

"Does your master want anything?" said the innkeep.

That word master caught me like sweat in an open cut, though I dunno why it should have done, seeing as it was nothing but the pure truth. "Not off you," I said, and he flinched, and I could see he thought I'd said it to make him flinch, and Powers, maybe I had.

That was the Felix effect all right. Put him in the Mirador and he'd charm the hocuses out of their eyries; put him in Cade-Cholera's own pisspot of an inn out on the northern road and he'd charm some poor bastard of an innkeep in his seventh septad, with ringworm-scars on his neck and about as much hope of Felix ever noticing him as there was of Felix suddenly waking up tomorrow morning, riding back to the Mirador, and proposing marriage to Lord Stephen Teverius, them to take turns doing their hair in a chignon and wearing the big brocade frock.

And, Kethe, but I didn't want to be having that conversation no more. "Scuse me, friend of mine," I mumbled and pointed down at the eunuch. The innkeep gave me a look that said he thought he knew my tastes and he didn't think too fucking much of them neither.

I'd left my stick behind in the room and I didn't fancy going back for it. I took the steps cautiously, one at a time, down into the courtyard. My leg hurt more with the cautiousness than it would if I'd just let it go the way it wanted and taken the pain in my hip later by way of payment-in-kind, but I didn't want to trip over.

It ain't that I'm scared of falling in shit, you understand, which is one fuck of a lucky coincidence considering that Felix regularly drags me through enough shit to fertilise every market garden between here and Hays Cross. It's that there ain't much stupider than a broken-legged killer-for-hire, but a broken-legged killer-for-hire lying in a pool of dilute horsepiss sure as the Emperor's snot-rag qualifies.

I wasn't Keeper's clockwork bear any more. I kept telling myself that. Didn't make it true.

There weren't no one in the courtyard but me and the eunuch. The door to the taproom was to my left, and I could hear someone singing Lord Marigny's Paycock in there, and smell bourbon. I thought about going in, and then I thought about the place going quiet as everyone took a fucking long look at my scars, and I decided to take my chances with the eunuch instead. He still hadn't got the trick of the skirts. It ain't something women do natural, but it's something women who put themselves in the way of wearing dark blue double-dip-dyed silk at a demigorgon the yard generally find a way of learning.

He looked round at me over his shoulder. "Excuse me, my good – " he began. His voice could have been a woman's, sweet and husky, which is more than most mollies with an itch for wearing skirts ever manage.

The rest of what he said might as well have been horsepiss splattering down onto the cobbles, because that was when I saw his face, framed in rusty dark silk and artificial cherries and the yellow of his ringlets. Blue eyes, determined little chin, even his nose was prettier than most girls'. I hadn't seen Lord Shannon Teverius since he gave me Felix's rings outside the Corundum Gate, but I knew his face like I'd been dreaming Felix's dreams.

"Fuck me sideways with a – poke bonnet?" I said, because the poke bonnet had just about knocked the train of my thought off its mule and followed it over to stamp on its throat and make sure it stayed down.

I didn't know what Lord Shannon Teverius was doing in the courtyard of that flea-bitten inn – it was called Queen Trinovante's Departure, but I didn't know nothing about Queen Trinovante nor where she might have departed from nor why that should make the inn put up a sign of an ape on horseback – and I didn't know why he was dressed up as a woman, and I didn't know what the fuck Felix was going to make of it except that I sure as shit didn't expect him to be pleased, but one thing I did know, and that was that the expensive rustling dark-blue silk dress didn't belong with that tired black bonnet.

And that gave me thoughts I wished I hadn't got, and the only comfort I could find in 'em was that I really doubted Lord Shannon had heard of that particular custom, him not having been brought up in Simside or the Cheaps that I'd ever noticed.

"It's Mildmay Foxe," he said in his usual voice, "isn't it?" Like he thought I'd be pleased he'd remembered.

"What the fuck are you doing here, m'lord?" I said.

He looked at me with those big speedwell-blue eyes, and I could see he was trying to work out some gentlemanly way of saying that he hadn't understood none of that but fuck and maybe m'lord, because that was a word the Teverii were always real good at understanding.

"They said – " he began. He might have gone on to tell me what they'd said, but then a solid lump of the thatch on the stable roof gave way behind him and dumped half a barrel's worth of stinking water into the yard, soaking the hem of the silk dress. I thought he'd jump, but he didn't. He looked round with a weary look on his china-perfect face, like he was relieved it was nothing worse. Like there was something he was expecting, something bad, and a septad and three quarts of straw-water didn't even qualify.

"Felix won't want to see you," I said, like he didn't already know that for fuck-a-dead-duck certain.

He didn't answer, just squared his pretty little jaw and took a death-grip on his reticule, and asked me where Felix's room was. So I told him. Fucked if I thought I had any choice.

He waited for me to climb the steps in front of him, like he was being polite about it. I waved him ahead. Kethe kick me in the balls if I wanted to be the one tapping at Felix's door with this. Lord Shannon saw he wasn't going to get any help from me, and he went ahead and knocked on the door himself.

I caught my foot wrong on a nail sticking up out of one of the boards of the balcony. My bad leg skewed round sideways, losing purchase in the rain, and my knee hurt like all the fires in Breadoven. Lord Shannon looked round all well-bred concern, but I noticed that he didn't think to come and help or nothing. Not that I'd have thanked him if he did. I was nearly righted again, when my other foot juddered through the rotten wood of the last step.

"Fuck!" I yelped, as I stuck out a hand on pure reflex and steadied myself on the railing.

"My thoughts almost exactly," said Felix, opening the door and looking down his nose at the top of Lord Shannon's bonnet like a bird had shat on the brim.

Felix was wearing that red-violet coat – I'd packed it in the end, I knew he'd want it, and if he didn't, we could always sell the bullion-lace – and the fucking thing looked even brighter in the light of the fire, all colours of plum and candy-apple and the burnished copper of his hair.

Lord Shannon caught his breath. I felt sorry for him, and Powers, I wished I didn't. I didn't reckon he'd appreciate it no more than I appreciated being treated like a crip.

Felix looked down at Lord Shannon and Lord Shannon looked up at him. If this was a story I was telling, I'd have said I saw the air between them glow with alchemical sparks, or some such. But this ain't no story. And the truth of it is, between them there was so much dead nothing that I don't think even the firesmoke or the smell of piss and rain could get in. Whatever used to be between them, they'd burnt it out like a half-centime votary candle.

But Lord Shannon wanted something. And Felix, well, Felix wanted something to strop his temper to a sharp edge on, same as ever-loving usual.

"Aren't you going to announce my visitor, Mildmay?" he said. "I must confess, I had no idea whatsoever that the Golden Bitch bore twins. The family chin looks better on your brother."

"I need your help, Felix," said Lord Shannon, and I could see how much it cost him to say it.

"You've needed a lot from me, over the years, darling," said Felix, cold and sharp. "You may remember that lately I've been disinclined to give it to you."

"This is different."

Felix slid his eyelids down in that artful way of his, hooding his eyes. The one I could see clearly was the yellow one, and it looked as dead as a broken glass bead.

"Mildmay," he said again in that oiled-whip voice he kept for when he wanted to be real unpleasant, "explain once more to Lord Shannon that I may have been discarded by the Mirador, and I may be reduced to a bad room with a worse bed in an absolutely repellent inn, but that I am not reduced to keeping company with him."

I felt the binding-by-forms catch and pull me. I jerked a thumb at Felix. "What he said," I mumbled, and Lord Shannon looked at me like he purely hated me.

"You don't understand," Lord Shannon said, desperately. I didn't think there were many people who'd resist him with that look on his face. Most of the time he looked too perfect, like de Rumsford's glass statue in the story, but now there was sweat on his brow and tense muscles in his jaw, where no one would go looking for muscles when there were lips and skin to look at instead, and Powers, I could see for once why it was that Felix wasn't interested in going to bed with anyone until he knew what they looked like when they'd been slapped in the face first.

I wished I couldn't see it, but I did, and I was glad I wasn't molly, else it'd most likely have caught me by the vitals worse.

Felix looked bored. "Explain to Mildmay whatever it is that I fail to understand, and then I suppose it's up to him whether he admits you," he said and made to shut the door.

Oh, you right bastard, I thought, and I could see Lord Shannon thought it too. It was just like Felix to set us against each other, like a bored man left alone in a room with a chess set trying out gambits with the pieces. He'd have liked it even better if chessmen bled.

"You're the only one who can help me," said Lord Shannon before Felix could shut the door. His voice was loud and desperate, loud enough that I looked down to see if it had brought anyone out of the taproom. "I need you to help me save the Mirador."

Felix

I saw it the moment I opened the door, of course. I looked at Mildmay to see whether he'd spotted it too, but he was doing his usual best to resemble the sort of paving-stone that other paving-stones didn't ask to dinner. It was just like him not to be any help; he had been sulking ever since we left the Mirador.

Shannon sat down in the only good chair in the room. I had no idea what he had been treading in, but he had apparently brought several quarts of it into the room on his skirts. He looked tired to death, which I supposed was not surprising considering that he had been a recent recipient of the helpful attentions of Lord Ivo Polydorius and Robert of Hermione.

"You are wearing improbable clothes to confuse the luck," I said, leaning against the mantelpiece, "and therefore I must assume, my lord, that you are troubled by ghosts."

"Don't you my lord me, Felix, after all we've – " he flared up, his eyes all blue fire like burning driftwood; and then he realised that it was no good, and let his hand fall back into his lap, and looked at me.

"I'm the only one who can see her," he said simply. "I mean, I always have been."

From over by the doorway, Mildmay grunted, as if he didn't like the sound of that always. I saw his point with the utmost clarity.

"I think," I said carefully, "that perhaps you should expand on that."

"She's been with me ever since I was a child," Shannon said flatly. "I see her behind me in my own reflection. I always have. Her hands on my shoulders, her lips in my hair."

I knelt down in front of him and took his hand in mine. His voice flowed on drearily past my ear, like an old libertine confessing himself to all and sundry in a bar. "Some of it's my fault, I think. I used to want her to come and comfort me. Sometimes I think I made her come."

I rubbed his hand. It was cold. "Go on," I said, my voice a fragment of breath.

"When I was first orphaned, after they'd executed my first nurse and before they appointed me another one, I couldn't sleep in my own chambers, so I used to creep round through the passage past the Shrike and the Vaulderine to Vicky's rooms and see if she'd take me into her bed. And then I'd curl up against her and shut my eyes, and pretend as hard as I could that Vicky was her."

I knew the rooms called the Shrike and the Vaulderine. They weren't used much, except for the occasional committee meeting. Now I knew why. Shannon looked past me at the fireplace, and after a moment I was glad that the inn was not the sort of place that ran to mantelpiece mirrors.

"They found me another nurse, and she locked me into my room at night to stop me roaming. It didn't matter. I didn't need Vicky by then. I mean – " His hand clenched in mine. It was as empty of rings as my own. "I mean, she was there, whether I wanted her there or not. Not Vicky. I..."

"I know you don't mean Victoria," I said, quiet as an executioner.

"She smelt of smoke. She – felt – " He made a little gesture like a child leaning his head against a shoulder, and I was glad he didn't finish his sentence. "I hate every wizard who ever burned incense in a public room and didn't bother to clear the air afterwards, did you know that? Sometimes I would see her in the smoke, the curls of it turning gold like her hair. It was always worst in Vicky's rooms. At first I thought it was because she first – "

"Manifested there?" I said unpleasantly. It felt as if the ground-waters of the Sim were flowing cold and mucus-thick over my spine.

Shannon nodded gratefully. His skirts shook, releasing a waft of their previous owner's vinegary lavender perfume. "Manifested there, yes, but now I think it was probably because she hated Vicky most. She hated her much more than Stephen. Stephen was – just business, I think. She loathed Vicky personally. I think it was something to do with the way Vicky behaved when she and Father were..."

I suppose, given my luck, it would have been too much to hope for that Shannon had been haunted by the spirit of a simple-minded parlourmaid. "You mean her, don't you?" I said wearily. "Gloria Aestia. Your mother. The Golden Bitch. Damn it all, Shannon, why didn't you ever tell me?"

He looked at me. I could see that he was trying hard not to mention all the things that I had never happened to tell him. Given our previous acquaintance, I was surprised he didn't throw it in my face after he found out about Malkar, and my past, and the gimcrack nature of both my accent and my antecedents: look, I've got a secret too.

But then, given our previous acquaintance, I was beginning to wonder whether I'd ever known Shannon at all.

"What's changed now?" said Mildmay. Shannon blinked at him, having evidently forgotten that my brother was in the room, and being unable to disentangle his accent. I didn't blame him; Mildmay could mangle the simplest vowel sound into a bastardised diphthong at the best of times, and at present he sounded like he had the St. Grandin Swamp stuck in his throat.

"Mildmay has a point," I said silkily. "Leaving aside the interesting question of how you had the gall to pay musicians to sing the Lai Of Mad Elinor when you'd been curling up in bed with your own dead mother – "

"Yes, let's leave that aside," he said coolly, though his hand clenched in his lap. It was only a confirmation, in any case; I'd always known it was him. The cold and simple fact of it was that Shannon Teverius had never got over seeing his mother on a pyre, and he'd never get over the urge to nudge his lovers towards a traitor's execution, either, even if he wouldn't admit it to himself.

" – why have you suddenly come to confess it to me of all people, and why now? If you are attempting to win me back by looking bruised and interesting – "

"I'm not trying to win you back," he said. I didn't believe him about that, in the same way I hadn't believed him when he flat-out asked me to come back, in front of Gideon and Mildmay in my rooms at the Mirador. "I don't see her in mirrors any more."

"Then isn't the problem solved?"

"No. I see her in other people's faces. Just fleeting – a look – and then she's gone, and there's nothing but the smell of smoke in the air. I've seen her in Elissa Bullen, and Phegenie Brome, and in a woman called Leinette Chilperic, who attends on my brother's betrothed – "

"And?"

"And my brother Stephen's mistress, Madame Parr," he said as if it were a death-sentence. "For whom, as you know, I have the greatest respect."

"She's probably just rehearsing for a part in a tragedy," I said with a lightness which I didn't feel.

He didn't take the cheap shot and say we all are. He just smiled, wearily and charmingly, for all the world as if he wouldn't betray me as soon as look at me. For once I could almost believe he was related by blood to Stephen Teverius.

"I think she's growing stronger," he said. "I don't know what she wants. To steal a little of their strength and nudge them with her will, perhaps. Or to find someone to possess – permanently."

I thought of Malkar. Of Brinvillier Strych. I knew, better than anyone, what was possible to the truly determined dead. "Even if this is true," I said in my most formal tone of voice, "what do you suggest we do about it? Your mother was annemer, and all the rituals with which I am familiar require the regalia of wizards."

"I have this." He reached into his reticule. It was the first time I'd paid attention to the reticule besides noticing that it was a pallid green. Now that I looked at it, I realised that my former inattention had been rather akin to failing to notice a party of dancing resurrectionists drumming upon each others' backs with human thigh-bones. Someone had informed Shannon that the way to confuse a ghost was to dress incongruously, and he had played it to the hilt.

The reticule was made of cardboard cut out in the shape of a cabbage and covered in green silk, and then embellished with rows and rows of careful silk-floss embroidery; knots and crosses, and an improving quotation on one side and a picture of a lopsided ship on the other, and handles made of more embroidery-silk wrapped painstakingly around bamboo. It looked as if it had first seen light at a cathedral bazaar. I almost liked Shannon for surprising me so.

And then he took the sapphire out of the bag, and the moment passed. I'd heard of that sapphire – though not, by the look in Mildmay's eyes, to the extent that he had - and I'd seen Malkar's rubies, and that was enough to make a positive identification. One side of the gem still gleamed, brightly faceted, in the twisted remains of a setting; the other was stuck to a soot-greasy nub of something that I thought might have been a knucklebone.

"Two," said Mildmay.

"What?" said Shannon and I almost at the same instant.

Mildmay coughed and looked at the dirty floor, and deigned to expand on his point a little. "There's supposed to be two of them. Her sapphires. So they say. A ring and a necklace. They say she saw the future in 'em, swimming like clouds."

"Well, she didn't," said Shannon sharply, and then looked embarrassed. "I mean – I'm sorry, Messire Foxe. It was a fair question. Yes, there were two."

Mildmay looked about as graceful about accepting the apology as a man who had just been handed a live snake, but that was Mildmay for you, and if Shannon had never troubled to learn that, that was his problem. I bounced the sapphire in my palm. "Do you have any idea what happened to the other one?"

Shannon hesitated. "I believe it to have been in the possession of Robert of Hermione."

I wasn't going to ask him how that happened. Stupid, grasping Robert, with a moral range as narrow as a weasel in a maze; of course he would have bought a memento of the Golden Bitch. He probably thought it was an investment, and would go up in value once Shannon was Lord Protector. For all I knew, he'd wrenched it from around the woman's neck at the time of her trial, though I thought it more likely he'd bribed a prison guard.

I remembered the ritual I had performed over Malkar's rubies. For some reason the one thing that remained for me of that day was the look on Mildmay's face when he realised exactly what those clotted lumps in a bag were. I could well believe that Robert of Hermione had performed a similar ritual over the Golden Bitch's sapphire pendant, and thought her banished.

But she wasn't. Because he'd only had one of the foci, because when it came to compelling the restless dead the Mirador hadn't taught anyone more than a few useless scraps of doctrine in centuries, because Robert of Hermione was an overconfident prick – any of those reasons would have done, and I trusted the last one most. The spell that had pinned the Golden Bitch between the heavens and the grave had failed, and now she was pissed.

I thought the one good thing to come out of being banished from the Mirador was that at least I'd never be called on to save the place again. I was, evidently, wrong.

"And you brought this to me," I said to Shannon viperously, "because – what? Because I was the only necromancer of your acquaintance? Because you thought I had been put on trial for my life so many times that it could not matter a scrap to me if it happened once again?"

Shannon looked up at me out of the bonnet. I was minded to tear it off him, but he'd only have taken it as a gesture of affection. "Because Stephen said you were banished from the Mirador and its territories until you were summoned. If you saved us again, he'd have to summon you."

"I was right about you all along," I said. "You have no understanding of intrigue whatsoever."

"But you will help me?" he persisted.

He and Mildmay were looking at me like lost puppy-dogs, the silky-eared thing with a ribbon round its neck and the runt that gets drowned in the gutter, and I couldn't argue with them both.

"I suppose if I must I must," I said. "Darling."

Mildmay

We didn't eat nothing that evening, because Felix said he had to fast, and he didn't see why Lord Shannon and I should make pigs of ourselves in the taproom whilst he was up here mortifying his spirit. I didn't fancy the taproom much myself, and I couldn't see my way clear to it being Lord Shannon's kind of place neither. They had mirrors in there all right, and a big one over the bar with a picture of a naked lady on it etched in oak-gall. I don't know whether the Golden Bitch would have fancied appearing in that, but I was fucking glad not to have to find out.

I was the one who got the honour of pushing the bed back against the wall and sweeping underneath it so that Felix could draw his diagrams and cantrips on the floor. Felix was too busy preparing, and Lord Shannon was busy changing into a pair of Felix' breeches and one of my shirts. Felix made sure Lord Shannon knew he wasn't looking, and that made Lord Shannon blush worse than he would have done if anyone else had looked.

I watched whilst Felix drew the sigils on the ground. Lord Shannon watched him, too, all the time, and especially when he was pretending he wasn't watching, which he did about as well as a fourteen-year-old girl who'd just taken a sharp ding round the head from a coalscuttle.

"Stand there," Felix said, to me, and "Stand there," in just the same tone of voice, to Lord Shannon. I stood there amidst the twining knots of the design. It looked part star-chart and part anatomical drawing. Saints and powers, it ain't like they weren't both the same to me. He didn't look to see whether Lord Shannon did as he was told, he just knelt down and started chalking angel-names round my feet.

"But I'm annemer," said Lord Shannon blankly.

"Do you think I never noticed that?" After spending the whole afternoon not smiling at Lord Shannon, Felix gave it to him with a smile like the bells of every cathedral in the city pealing all at once. I was surprised he didn't melt to the ground like a puddle of honey. He looked straight at Felix instead, challenging-like, as if he was saying you have that smile but I have this face, and did what he was bid without arguing.

I felt what Felix was doing, a bit, through the binding-by-forms. Best way I can describe it is, it felt like when you're swimming to the gills in roseblood and someone's trying to set a broken bone; you can tell something in there don't like being wrenched about like that and it's going to ache like poison tomorrow, but you don't fucking care no more. He laid out some of his cards on the floor. I'd never seen him do that before, but I felt every one, like a pinprick-anchor, holding the magic.

Felix raised his arms. His hair came spilling out of the scarf he'd bound it up in and flowing down his back, bright copper between his shoulderblades where his shirt was stuck to his skin with sweat.

I thought nothing was happening. Then I saw Lord Shannon had gone sickly-pale and looked like a cat about to vomit, and I started smelling smoke.

It wasn't just smoke from the inn-room fire. This was the greasy smoke with the catch-in-your-throat bitterness at the back of it that tasted of bones. I'd smelt it a hundred times, drifting over the roofs and down the crumbling tenement-alleys, and I'd never forgotten it neither.

The memory of Cerberus Cresset came into my head. Times like this, usually I'd move, go for a walk, anything to get away from what I was thinking, and never mind that what I was thinking would tag right along with me like a lush I'd promised a bottle. This time, I had to stand still, and look at the drift of smoke that was rising in the centre of the triangle that Felix had marked on the floor. There was another little upside-down triangle joined onto one of the points, with the sapphire lying innocent as a smut in the middle of it. The smoke kept leaning and coiling towards it like there was a draught in that direction.

I knew there wasn't no draught.

I reckoned I was the best off of the three of us. I couldn't see her distinctly. Felix most likely could, and I was damn sure Lord Shannon could, even though he'd shut his eyes. All I saw was an outline wavering in the smoke, with a gold edge where it coiled in the air and looked like the tips of her hair. I remembered how Felix had made me see the ghost of Grendille Moran, and I was grateful.

"Tell me who you are," said Felix conversationally to the smoke, for all the world like she'd dropped in for two fingers of bourbon and a hand of Long Tiffany.

All I heard was a kind of confused hissing, but Lord Shannon's head snapped back like he'd been slapped in the face.

"I will not give you my blood," said Felix, still with that dead calm in his voice. "Nor my brother's. And most certainly not your son's."

The hissing got more like a screech, and I couldn't look away. I mean, I couldn't, same's someone had pinned back my eyelids and didn't care none if they got dried out from the smoke.

"Your line would have ended with him in any case," said Felix precisely.

The smoke rushed away from me, over towards him and Shannon, and I got a backdraft of cold smoke and the smell of boiled dead flesh that set me coughing. At least my eyeballs were my own again, even if it did feel like someone'd smoked them. I looked down at the nearest card on the floor. It was the Wheel, which might have made sense if the Golden Bitch had been broken on one, but anyone who could smell that smoke could tell how she'd met her end. Powers, I ain't never understood hocuses, and now was a fuck of a bad time to try to start learning.

Felix was shouting something else – something about Robert of Hermione, I thought, and then he was speaking a language I didn't know, which ain't saying much. This one had a lot of ululating in it like a Kekropian funeral. Lord Shannon looked like death's leftovers, and I didn't think Felix would get much help from him.

I looked at the shadows in the corner of the room, and thought about how this would be a fucking bad time to get a cramp in my leg until I gave myself one, and that gave me something else to think about besides what Felix was doing trying to do magic without his rings, and whether it was going to get us all eaten by demons, or thrown in prison in fucking manacles again.

I don't rightly recall when I realised the shadows were moving. Sneakily at first, their edges frilling chrysanthemum-like, and then with great leaps towards the centre of the room. Towards the frail little triangle of us.

"Fuck me sideways till I cry," I muttered to myself, and then the shadows leapt through me, and sacred bleeding fuck but that is something I never want to feel again. She must have drawn strength from them. The pillar of smoke snapped into shape, that's the only way I can put it, like it was a puzzle I was looking at through one of those little prisms they sell as curiosities in the glass-foundry shops in Shatterglass.

She looked much about how I expected for a woman who'd been burnt to death. I'd seen beheaded ghosts and decayed ghosts and ghosts that you couldn't tell how they'd died, and she was about the worst. And then I saw her concentrate, with her dead strained lips moving like you'd see the tip of her tongue poking out if she still had one – and then she was herself, and that was worse.

She had the exact same hair as Lord Shannon, and the exact same nose and chin and arch to her eyebrows, and on her it was all fined down and strengthened like he was the clay before firing and she was the bone-china afterwards. I ain't never been one for blondes and I knew she was dead, and I still nearly took a step towards her into the circle. Because, fuck, she was just that beautiful. Lord Shannon looked like he might be going to cry. Even Felix looked impressed, though he made damn sure he had a comeback.

"Your clothes are a generation out of date," he said boredly. "What do you want, madame?"

"I want what's mine," she said, and her voice was cream and honey and the sun on the gilt pillars of the Ivory Gate. "I want the throne for my son."

"He neither wants nor is suited to it. It is past time for you to continue beyond."

She actually laughed. "And meet my husband again? Oh, no thank you very much."

"You have no choice," said Felix and flung all his magic at her. I could feel it like an itch behind my eye-sockets. It gave me a bitchkitty of a headache.

She turned a bit smoky about the lower half again and her hair fell down in rivulets of golden steam, but she wasn't defeated, not by a long shot. "Vey Coruscant herself could not control me," she said, her lovely voice all sweet reason. "What makes you think you can?"

"Because I'm all that's left of you," said Lord Shannon, with a scrape in his voice that made him sound older than he was by three septads. "And I'm nothing like the Golden Bitch you were. However hard I tried, I never was."

It felt like a thunderstorm was about to break over our heads. All I could think of was that we were going to die, or something a fuck of a lot worse than dying, and I pitied the snot out of whoever the innkeep sent in here to clean up.

The sapphire rocked on the floor. The cards turned over, neat as someone flipped them. The sapphire cracked from side to side.

The Golden Bitch looked at Lord Shannon like she was seeing if he meant it.

Fuck me, but he meant it. I reckoned he meant it harder than he ever meant anything in his life.

The Golden Bitch screamed and flung her hands upwards, the fingers trailing away into smoke, and vanished in a stink like someone set fire to the Sim.

Lord Shannon looked like he might faint. He staggered sideways. Felix caught him in his arms and grinned down at him like he'd just seen his firstborn son totter three steps forward and grab the tablecloth. Lord Shannon looked up at Felix and clutched him by the dirty collar of his shirt, and I wondered why I'd thought the thunderstorm-feeling had anything to do with magic.

I didn't stick around to watch them kiss. I ain't got no problem with mollies, but I ain't got no particular interest in watching them neither, and specially not when one's my own brother. I took myself off down to the taproom. The musicians were playing jigs for a party of drovers, turn-about with ballads for a finicky Norvenan merchant and what looked like his spinster sister. I didn't know what persuaded that pair to stop here when they could have pushed on to Mélusine, but I figured maybe they were working up the courage. One of the drovers nodded at me, but none of the rest gave me no trouble, which suited me just fine.

The innkeep came by to see what I made of the soup. "Your brother and his lady friend, then," he said, leaning against the table.

"Yeah," I said, since there didn't seem much point in saying no more.

"Yeah. Well," he said, and gave me an extra plate of bread without me asking, which I was grateful for, because the soup was fucking atrocious and the cold meat wasn't much better, and the headache got worse every time I moved my jaw.

Felix

I had trained myself to be careful with Shannon, but this time he wanted what I wanted and no arguing about it. He fought me as if he were fighting himself, and surrendered as if I were the wave that carried him from shipwreck to shore. The world narrowed to the heat of flesh, and the taste of his sweat and his seed, and the firelight on my tattoos and his hair. I let myself be inventive with the inn's cheap candles, and Shannon answered me with his defiance and pride, and kissed me like he wanted to suck my tongue out.

We ended up lying beside the bed rather than on it, not that there was a great deal of difference. The floor had splinters instead of straw. I was lying half on a pillow, but it was a poor sad flour-bag stuffed with husks, and it made little odds.

The patchwork coverlet had tumbled off the bed with us. Shannon pulled the edge of it over me, and lay warm and spent against my side. I could feel the sated quiver in his muscles. I stroked his cheek tenderly with the side of my knuckle. "Why did you dress up in that contemptible bonnet?" I asked him.

"To disguise myself. I didn't want people following me, and – and getting you into trouble. I mean – covering the crest on my carriage obviously wasn't going to be enough. Not this time." His voice was husky. "And, like you said, to confuse the ghosts."

"However did you know about that?"

"My nurse told me."

I locked my arm about his shoulders. My fingers traced the shapes of his topmost vertebrae. I supposed it made sense that one of his nurses might have disguised her accent and made her way up from the Lower City, though I'd never given it any consideration before. "The nurse who was executed, or the nurse who locked you in your bedroom?"

"At least I had the comfort that she locked herself on the other side of the door," he said with a trace of astringency. "It was a different nurse, in any case. I have my suspicions about her previous occupation. I think Stephen might have hired her because I was almost fourteen and he didn't want me falling prey to some designing lady about Court, or worse, some designing virgin who might have induced me to marry her."

I peeled a spot of translucent candlewax off his shoulder and kissed the red mark beneath. "Stephen has no idea, does he?"

"He didn't, back then. Or perhaps he did, and hoped she'd persuade me out of it." Shannon propped himself up on an elbow. He was beautiful, all porcelain and gold, and broader across the shoulders and chest than he looked with his clothes on. The first few lines were coming in under his eyes, like sketch-marks of a face that would be even handsomer, in its prime, than it was beautiful now. He'd even shown signs of beginning to grow a spine when he stood up to his demented fantôme of a mother.

Of all the hundreds of things I'd wanted to do to him over the years, I couldn't think of a single thing I wanted to do to him now. It wasn't just because I'd had him every way I could think of. There was no way forward for us. We hadn't made love on this floor or kneeling over the bed or up against the wall with him gasping and tight around me; what we'd made was an ending.

"I thought I could make you come back," he said. "But I can't, can I?"

The muscles of my neck and shoulders were full of a soft delicious well-used ache. I arched upward to stretch them, and shook my head. "You're free of your ghosts now, Shannon. All of them."

"Oh, fuck you, Felix," he said without heat.

"Been there. Done that. Put your bonnet on when you go." I closed my eyes. The firelight shimmered between my lashes. "You can't sleep here. Mildmay would only go and curl up in the stable with the horses, and it wouldn't be good for his bad hip."

"There are people waiting for me, anyhow," he said in some embarrassment. Maybe he had learned the rudiments of intrigue. He hesitated. "Could we at least part friends?"

"I've already parted you more often than the Akhaian Sea, my friend," I said with matter-of-fact ruthlessness, and licked my own lip where he'd bitten it. "For what it's worth, I no longer bear you malice."

For what it was worth, I meant it. Every maze has its shining centre, and every affair its ending.

"You have to be sarcastic, don't you?" He was gathering up my breeches and Mildmay's shirt and putting them on. I watched him through the half-dazzle of my lashes, because you don't let an arse like Shannon's slip out of your view without watching it go, as the saying goes. He hesitated by the sapphire on the floor, amidst the dead chalk-marks that we had blurred with our bodies and hands. "What should I do with the sapphire now?"

"I'll dispose of it."

"Oh. Well. Thank you." He looked back round the door. "Goodbye, Felix. I'd say, the Powers keep you, but I think that's Mildmay's job."

"Powers help him," I said.

Shannon smiled the most heartbreaking smile, and closed the door behind him.

A scatter of footsteps outside on the balcony, and he was gone. It felt like a burden lifted. I didn't care to analyse why.

He left the reticule and the dress behind, and also the hideous bonnet.

I almost felt a fondness for the reticule.

Mildmay

Felix was asleep when I went back to the room after midnight. I slept and didn't dream. When I woke up, he'd gone. I found him out in the stables
feeding the artificial cherries off Lord Shannon's hat to a horse.

"Don't do that, it's not good for them," I said, and meant it both ways.

He turned the smile on me. "He's gone, you know."

I transferred my weight carefully over and leaned against the side of the horse. "You finally made yourself unpleasant enough?"

"I told him it was over. He finally believed me."

"Oh."

"Oh," he mimicked me, all upraised red eyebrows and parchment skin and sarcasm. "So. You think we can make Hays Cross by noon?"

I was about to tell him once and for all what I thought of Hays fucking Cross, when I realised he was teasing. He put his arm round my shoulder, and set off in the wrong direction for the taproom and breakfast. I turned him right again and followed the smell of eggs.

The Norvenan merchant was there with his sister. Both of them nearly fainted at the sight of Felix, which I suppose I should have been expecting. The merchant made an excuse to come over and ask Felix which way he was going, and nearly sobbed with vexation when he heard we were going northward and his path was set south. At least he knew a bit about the road. The next town was Hays Cross, and he didn't hold no high opinion of it neither, having arrived during the once-a-decad goose-market and being kept awake by the geese.

The sister just simpered from the corner and occasionally retrieved a snot-rag from a knotwork bag and dabbed at a leaking tear duct. After a while one of the musicians swanned downstairs, all dirty shirt and face like a sweaty custard. He saw the merchant's sister sitting on her own and started playing the fiddle over her shoulder hoping as she'd tip him to go away. That ain't a thing any woman should have to put up with over breakfast, and I had a down on musicians anyway, so I ducked my head down so I wouldn't have to see the look on Felix's face and went over there. The man with the fiddle cleared off.

"Thank you," the lady said, and blinked mildly up at me like my face was as pretty as Lord Shannon's. Maybe she had cataracts as well as the busted tear duct. "I hate that song."

I didn't know the song, and said so. She took yet another hanky out of her reticule, a heavy silk one, the sort they hang you if they catch you stealing, and dusted off a chair for me. "Maybe they call it something different down here," she said shyly. "I know it as Sigmilla's song from The Fall Of Kammerlstadt, but I always thought it must be a folk-song really."

Felix was still exercising his charm on her brother, so I figured it was safe enough to sit down and ask her about these von Kammerls. Kethe's cock, but it was a nasty story, and hearing it in the twittery gossamer voice of a respectable maiden lady from Norvena didn't make it no nicer. The start of it was that this flash bastard Thorleif von Kammerl pissed off a lady snow-hocus by boasting of his septad and two sons, and the end of it was Kammerlstadt burning down, and the last living son Nenlief riding off with his bride thinking he'd got shot of the curse.

Only he hadn't, on account of the woman he married turned out to be his niece by way of the third son, or maybe it was the fourth, marrying the snow-hocus by accident and abandoning the baby, and then the gods took a hand and you know that never ends well. There was more stuff in between about incest and werewolves and hanging about on the sides of mountains singing choruses about the life of a bandit, but that was the blood and bones of it.

The lady's brother came back and started fussing over her, asking did she need the lambskin blanket under her saddle and did she want him to complain about the coffee tasting like ground horsehooves and was she vexed by the light from the window. She was well on into her sixth septad and looked like she'd never been pretty, but she had money and knew about opera and her brother thought she hung the moon, so I figured she wasn't so bad off. As for me, I made myself scarce before the brother started complaining of the geese again.

"I don't like your inamorata much," said Felix sweetly. "Perhaps she has hidden depths. Do you think she would like it if I welcomed her to the family by making her a gift of the cabbage-reticule?"

"She's already got one."

"But this one has a three-masted schooner embroidered on it, which must make all the difference," he said winningly, and turned it over to try to piece out the improving quotation.

I was looking at the stitches and how they marched along, row after row like generations, some crossing up and some crossing down. For some reason that got me thinking about that sorry doomed bastard Nenlief von Kammerl, and how he'd have been a fuck of a lot better off if he'd only been born molly.

Like Lord Shannon.

"Son of a bitch-shittery snow-hocus," I mumbled to myself. "I pity any daughter of Lord Stephen's."

"Well, so do I, on general principles," said Felix, raising his eyebrows. "What are you talking about, Mildmay?"

Well, it couldn't be I'd seen what the Golden Bitch was shooting for and he hadn't, him being the smart hocus and all and me being the stupid fuck-up annemer tag-along, and I didn't want to make no more of a fool of myself explaining, so I just hunched down over my eggs and didn't say nothing.

Felix didn't push it, for a wonder. "What do you think laid this egg?" he enquired after a while, lifting a disdainful forkful.

I shook my head and tried to attend to him. "Alligator?" I offered.

"No doubt you are right. I was thinking of some kind of gravely lost, fish-eating sea-bird." The innkeep popped out of the kitchen, and Felix smiled across at him like he was Good Queen Barbary-Nell and the innkeep was some orphans. "Was this bread edible last night?" he asked me.

I crunched it. "I wouldn't take my oath it was the same bread," I offered cautiously.

"You're right, of course. It's not bread. It's some compound of solidified dog's vomit and gravel." Felix smiled even more benevolently on the innkeep and then looked at me. The smile turned off like the gaslights in the Empyrean the moment the crowd clears out of the stalls.

He looked concerned. I didn't know how much he meant it, but I couldn't help feeling a bit better. Which wasn't hard, seeing as yesterday I'd felt like congealed birdshit on a spoon. "You're happier out of the Mirador, aren't you, Mildmay?"

I couldn't lie to Felix. "Yeah," I mumbled to the dirty tablecloth. "You're not."

He looked down, in a lordly way, at his ringless fingers, and cracked his knuckles one by one. "I imagine I'll manage somehow."

"You're sure?" The voice I said that in wasn't anything even a mumble would call cousin.

"That chapter is closed. And to my extreme astonishment, we are neither of us dead." He was smiling. I could hear it in his voice.

I looked up and met his smile with my own. It made my scar ache. My hip already ached and so did the left-overs of yesterday's headache, and I wasn't looking forward to another day in the torturer's saddle. But leaving that aside, it was setting fair to be a better-than-average morning.

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, gotta be thankful for that."

"We might even get to Hays Cross in time to buy a goose."

"I aint killing no fucking goose."

"Am not."

"Well, if you ain't and I ain't, the goose'll outlive both of us. Luckiest goose in Hays Cross," I said, and Felix laughed.