House of Sand and Secrets (14 page)

I need to do something. And whatever choice I take now will set me irrevocably on that road. If I go against Jannik, and carry on with my search into the vampires’ deaths then I may just push Jannik so far away from me that there will be no way to draw him back.

I think of him kissing Isidro.

Or we could pack our bags now and return to Pelimburg. Gris knows what will be waiting for us there. Certainly, it will do us no good to go back to our families, reeking of failure.

I think of him kissing Isidro.

Making promises that Isidro won’t allow him to keep, and of all the broken pride they hold between them.

Not Pelimburg, then.

“Why do you make these?” Riona asks. She has come bearing a tray of iced lemon water and a tea-pot. Her tone is enough to let me know that she thinks me no great artist.

“Thank you.” I take the offered lemon water and drink deeply. I’ve been sitting here for so long letting myself thirst. Perhaps I’m trying to punish myself. I don’t even know what for. “Call it a bad habit,” I say, and set the glass back. She pours me tea. “I like to have all these things set down – I don’t know why. It makes me feel more secure to keep a record.”

“And flowers are safer than histories.”

The saucer trembles in my hands as I accept the full cup. ”Something like that.”

“It’s not always true, you know.” She frowns, and hides her hands behind her back. “If you don’t mind me speaking out of turn.”

“Not at all.” I have tried to encourage the Hobs here to relax around me, but my endeavours have proved fruitless. I am the lady, a Lammer who thinks herself greater than all others. And I can hardly tell them I have also washed dishes and slept shivering under thin blankets. My moment of deprivation hardly compares to their lives. It would be insulting to mention it.

“There’s a language that flowers speak.”

I frown. “How do you mean?”

“We use them as words, to say things to each other without saying anything at all.” She flushes a little. Perhaps this is a Hob-secret we Lammers were never meant to know.

The idea is fascinating. Anything to distract me from playing the kiss and the corpse over and over in my head, to remember the burn of iron around the throat of the dead vampire. “So each flower has a meaning?”

“Each plant and part can say different things. Like this.” Ree points to the bush I have been working on today. It’s a low-lying shrub with silvery spiked leaves and bright yellow flowers. I’ve seen the house maids use the flowers in dried arrangements, and they let off a strong spicy smell. “Dogleaf.”

I nod. The kitchen staff warmed my interest in this one – they say it keeps cats from bedrooms, something they believe in quite strongly as cats are known to steal dreams while you’re sleeping. Or so they tell me.

“The flowers speak of a keen interest. But the leaves alone show only curiosity.”

I reach out to feather some leaves between my fingers, and they leave their fragrant oil on my skin. “I see, so subtleties of meaning contained within the same plant?”

“Just so.” Ree might not be calling me by name, but she has forgotten to use my title, a small victory.

I look up at her. “Would you be willing to come sit with me when you have time – and tell me some more?”

She nods a little uncertainly as she kneels to take my tray. “Is there anything else I can bring you?”

“No, no. I’m fine.”

Ree curtseys and leaves me alone in the sweltering garden. The yellow flowers are bright, hard little heads. I pluck a stem free and set the buds in my hair. There, let the world know I have a keen interest. I smile to myself. Even if it is just in botany.

* * *

Two days pass
before I see Jannik again. He’s sitting at the dining table as if he has never been away, flicking the pages of the evening Courant between his fingers.

“Welcome home.” The servants have set out slices of green summer melons and dusky grapes. I take one grape and crunch it, letting the tart juice fill my mouth. I have taken to wearing a sprig of dogleaf in my hair. Riona brought me this one with my morning tea and it makes me smile to think of our conversation.

“How could you even tell I was away?” Jannik snaps. He frowns and sniffs the air. “What’s with your sudden interest in perfumery?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That.” Jannik points at the flowers in my hair. “It’s a fixative for perfume.” He retreats back behind his paper.

I touch the flowers self-consciously. “They – that’s not what they’re for.” The little buds seem to be a repository of facts and feelings. Perhaps this is what Riona meant about flowers being no safer than history. They are full of stories and layers, half-truths and folk-lore.

But there is something more important than this. I have been waiting to ask Jannik something, and now that he is here I do not know how to broach it. I let my hand fall to my lap. “What do you know of iron collars?”

Jannik peers at me over the top of his Courant, his brow lined with suspicion, but he doesn’t meet my eyes, focusing instead on the silver dolphin pendant at my neck. “I was joking about the hound comment the other night.”

“No, you weren’t.” I sigh. Even if I wanted Jannik tied to me, I made that admission to myself too late. I have already lost him. The knowledge doesn’t lessen the hurt, merely grinds salt into my raw flesh. “Do you know of any Houses who collar their vampires?”

“Some.” He lowers his paper. “There were servants in my mother’s home who had been–” He looks to the side, away from my face. “–recovered, who sported iron burns.”

Recovered. And just what does that mean – that House Sandwalker did more than buy wray from the rookeries and set them free from their lives as kept whores, but also stole them from Houses? I file the thought away. “You’ve heard about the latest body the sharif pulled from the river?”

Jannik nods, slowly.

“It had collar burns.”

“How do you know?” He is unmoving, unmoved, watching me.

“Does it matter?” I echo his words to Isidro. My mind is finally made up. I can’t please Jannik, or keep him. Not anymore. Let Isidro have him, I have no claim. But I will not let more people die because of the laws and lies of MallenIve. Determination swaps out all my brittle bones for cold stone. “We’re going to House Guyin,” I say, standing and leaving my untouched plates for the servants to clear away.

Jannik looks pained at the suggestion. “Without an invitation?”

“Death doesn’t wait for our bells to chime to hers.”

PRETTY COLLARS

“Tell me about
the wray your mother recovered.” We’re walking up the wide steps to Harun’s door. The marble planters on either side have been left to dry in the sun, the plants desiccated and given over to weeds. At least this time there are no scrawled obscenities, no hurled excrement. “Not all of them were bought out from the rookeries, I take it?”

Jannik pauses before the door, but doesn’t touch the brass knocker. “She stopped all that when I was still very young. There’s little I remember.”

“Were they runaways?”

“Some of them, I suppose.”

“So what Houses did they run from?”

He’s being purposefully sulky and unresponsive, as if I am somehow to blame for his infidelity and it’s beginning to wear on my nerves.

“Mata,” he says, finally.

I raise one brow. “They kept their own–” I’m about to say whores, before I remember that the Houses who like to keep vampires mostly use them as untouchables – the servants who do the most revolting work. “I see. Only them?”

“Eline.”

Of course.

“There were others, I can’t remember them all. I told you, I was young.”

“Rutherook? Yew? Karin?” I name the Houses on the piece of paper I was given by the Splinterfist head. They’re minor Houses at best, and although she implied they’d bought wray from her, I find that hard to believe. Even a single vampire is an expensive thing to own. They wouldn’t be killing them as casually as if they were merely nillies.

“I don’t remember!” He pounds the brass knocker.

Nillies. The unicorns we’ve de-horned and made magicless. We use their horns as a replacement for scriv, we use it for the rush. My mind goes back to my first meeting with Carien, and her talk of sudors, of the magic inside vampires.

Who’s to say there isn’t more to it, that the magic doesn’t run deeper?
That’s what she said, and since that night I’ve listened and read more, Jannik and I have discussed their business proposals and looked into their successes and losses. I know about House Eline’s rivalry with House Ives, and their failed attempt to breed horned unicorns.

It’s Garret, it must be. How much cheaper would it be if instead of having to buy wray from the rookeries, Garret could set up breeding programs like House Ives has done with the unicorns? It would take years to buy the right stock, but once he had enough of them, breeding magic lines to magic lines like Ives does with unicorns. If he could convince the Houses that the vampires could be another replacement for scriv, he’d have cornered a market.

But Garret would need females, and the vampire feyn are powerful and few. My mind rushes from one thought to the next, trying to find a true path.

The door flings open, and Isidro scowls down at us. “Why are you here?”

“Could House Eline ever get hold of a feyn – buy one from the rookeries?” I ask in a breathless rush. “More than one, many – and how much would they have to pay for them?”

Both vampires look at me as if I had just vomited all over their starched shirts. “Is she actually insane, or is she merely trying to insult us?” Isidro says to Jannik.

“But is it possible?” I hope desperately to be wrong, that I can simply abandon this line of thinking. It is too awful and ugly to be possible. “Please – I need to know.”

Isidro stares at me, his eyes narrowed. “You’d best come inside.” His reluctance is palpable. “Stay out of Harun’s way,” he adds to Jannik, who merely nods silently. “In here.”

He seats us in the garden parlour. Sunlight falls through the long curtains that cover the glass doors leading out to the garden steps. I think of the last time I pushed open that doors and walked that dew-wet garden, all its twists and turns that led me only to a small play that I had no right to view.

Isidro is staring at Jannik, who is doing his best to study one knee of his black trousers. It hits me that I am standing here again as nothing more than an observer to their play. Only this time I am a known factor, and they have to pretend to be nothing to each other. It throws me from the desperate fear of my realization to an anger brittle with tears, then back again. I vacillate between the two extremes until I am sure that at any moment I am going to simply kneel on the floor and cover my head while I sob from the sheer overwhelming horribleness of it all. Probably, Isidro would find it amusing, so I stand very still and very solemn.

“I suppose you want wine,” Isidro snaps. He’s talking to me, though his gaze has not shifted. “Don’t expect me to play servants to you like Harun does.”

At the name, Jannik’s head dips. Just the smallest jerk. Good. Let him feel guilty.

“I want nothing.” I make the words come out calm and cool.

Isidro just snorts in humourless irritation. He leans back against a small table, his long fingers tapping against the brass edging. “Tell me what nonsense you’ve come up with this time, Pelim.” Finally, he has managed to tear his gaze away from Jannik, who is still doing his level best to pretend he is not in this house, and look at me directly.

“You’re–” I pause, uncertain. While it is the gossip that Isidro was a Splinterfist whore who somehow trapped the Lord Guyin Apparent, no one has ever actually come out and said this to either of their faces.

“I’m?” Isidro mocks back.

“Acquainted with the rookeries.”

He stops tapping. “Say what you mean to say.”

“If anyone here would know if a House had bought feyn, it would be you.”

“Feyn are not sold,” Isidro hisses at me. He turns to Jannik, “Explain this to her. You seem to speak her particular language of ignorance.”

“I’m not a fool,” I say to Isidro, “I realize what I’m saying, believe me, I’ve met Jannik’s mother, I know you all worship the bloody ground the feyn walk on.”

“With good reason,” Jannik mutters.

“Because she’s powerful. I get it. She’s also a sadistic bitch.”

Jannik swallows a nervous laugh, and jerks his head up. He looks from me to Isidro, half in panic. Then he sighs and drops his head into his hands. “Felicita’s right. And she wouldn’t be asking if she didn’t think it was important.”

“Look,” I say. “I’ve not yet met Glassclaw or Fallingmirror, but I have had the circumstance to meet with the head of the Splinterfist. What I want to know is would you trust any of them to not sell a feyn to a buyer, were the price right?”

“Riam Splinterfist would sell her own children if the price were right, twice if she could see a way to do it, so yes,” Isidro says softly, “I believe she would sell another feyn, if enough coin were offered. Why do you want to know this?”

“Because I believe that as soon as he gets the Mata to change your status, Eline Garret would set up a breeding program using the feyn and as many wray as he could buy. He would mate them like animals. There would be an excess of wray born, and Gris alone knows how long he would let them live before slaughtering them for bones and teeth and whatever else he thinks will be useful.”

I did not realize it was physically possible for vampires to look paler than they already are. Their needling game of abnegation and confrontation is forgotten.

I push on, needing to make certain that they see just how real this could be. “A whole unicorn horn fetches at least one silver, what then would the skull of a
bat
be worth?” I spit that word at them, reminding them that the rest of this city will not see them as anything more than monsters.

Jannik puts his hand on my arm, an absent-minded gesture. Heat rushes from his palm through my skin, and a shiver of magic flows with it.

I keep still as a lizard on a rock, hoping he does not notice what he’s done. This, this is what the Houses want, and Gris be damned but I want it too.