House of Sand and Secrets (31 page)

“Don’t,” I say. “I’m not like that.”

“Fine.” He steps away from me, taking with him his heat and magic. “Then stop acting as if you are.”

He’s leaving, and I am not yet ready to face Carien. “Stop,” I say to him. He waits, one hand paused on the handle. “You’re right. I don’t want to be the victim.”

Jannik’s third eyelids slide completely over his eyes.

“And I won’t let myself be.” I take a step toward him. “But I also won’t let the people I care for be hurt, and if that means I need to arm myself, then I will.”

“So you plan to use me anyway?”

“No.” I close the space between us, coming closer to him, close enough that his magic flutters against me. “Not if you don’t want me to.” I press my palms to my cheeks and take a small gasping breath. When I drop them, I am ready to say what I need to tell him. “I can give you up.” My smile is small and tight. “I don’t want to, but I can, so that you can live.”

“What are you talking about – oh.”

“I will go back to scriv, and I will never touch you again, as long as it means you live.”

“You live as long as I live,” he says. “Your bargain isn’t about me–”

“Jannik.” I put my hands to his face; the skin is smooth and slightly rough at the same time, like untreated silk. His magic prickles under my nails. “I’m not trying to force a bargain.” I lean forward, and wonder if this kiss will be the last one we have.

If it is, if it must be so that this new-made bond can falter and die, then I want it to be a thing I can carry with me forever. Like the minute glass pendants the jewellers make in Pelimburg, that open at the imprint of a lover’s thumb to reveal the preserved eye of a nightfish, glowing softly. I will let the memory be my bit of light. I can’t walk away with nothing. I can’t.

But I will use scriv if I have to, to save him.

He stands still, letting my mouth touch his, but does nothing in response. I nip at his upper lip and pull back a little. I can taste the blood just under his skin, and I wonder how much worse it must be for him. “Please,” I whisper my breath to his.

His mouth opens and there, the slide of warmth and tongues and the slightest danger of sharpened teeth.

We stand like this for longer than we should. The storm turns the air black, approaching on prowling feet, spitting white fire through the rain. I undo buttons, undressing him with a feverish demand.

The rain hammers louder, slamming on slate and glass and we repeat it in flesh and friction. The room smells of the electric blue of magic, leather and musk, the sweetsour of sweat. I am drowning under the sensation of silk on my back, skin slicked against skin. Taste and texture. I stop kissing him for one moment, just long enough to catch my breath and press my forehead against his. “Wait,” I say, even though I am the one holding him closer to me, as if we could turn into one creature for just a moment and know each other’s thoughts and wants and truths. All the things we seem incapable of letting our tongues spill. “Show me.”

He lets me slip inside his head, thought to thought. I have never seen this house of his, only ever felt its walls. Whatever I expected, it wasn’t this.

Where my one little room is a memory of something real, this place where Jannik keeps his secrets is malleable, a strange world of sand, a golden labyrinth of twists and tunnels.

The walls shift to rearrange their shapes. A window falls, widens, and the spilled sand on the golden floor hisses into a lintel and a frieze of vines and wide-eyed little night-monkeys.

Jannik is standing before me, dressed in shirt and trousers, barefoot and calm, completely at ease for the first time. I am seeing him as he really is. “Come on.” He holds out his hand and I take it. The warmth seeps into me, making me real. The sand crunches between my toes and the thin shift I’m wearing flutters in the warm breeze.

There is light everywhere. I look up; the roof is arched and solid, but as we walk, more windows grow, letting in sunlight and air. Others close, mourning our passing. The hiss of sand is everywhere, and under it, the trickle of streams and the liquid trill of birds.

“Look,” Jannik says, and points to a wall that grows a vast window. We step through together into another room. Streams flow across the sandy floor, and on their banks grow vines and flowers.

“This isn’t a house,” I point out. “You said, ‘build a house in your head.’”

“It depends on your definition.” Jannik lets go of my hand and crouches at the bank of one of the streams. A sly bittern peers out at him. He grins back at me and lifts one hand. “There are walls, windows, a roof over your head.”

“Yes.” I turn about, taking in the vast central room. “There’s also not a stick of furniture. You made me hide my secrets in my chest of drawers.”

“I did nothing of the sort,” he says. “I just told you to hide them.”

The birds arc and wheel. A small gathering of green-headed parrots are chattering at me from a tree made of sand. A lone ivory-winged ibis eyes me with disdain.

“So where are yours hidden then?”

“Felicita. In your head, you don’t have to do anything as prosaic as set your secrets on paper and stuff them in a locked drawer. It’s your mind. You can do whatever you want.” He stands, folds his hands behind his back. “The birds.”

I look again, just as a flock of bumble-bee sized finches hums past me to land on Jannik’s shirt. The whir and whisper at him in their high bee voices. “Every bird is a secret – a thought?”

He nods.

And now it makes sense, the sombre hulking pied-crows, the owls secretive in the whorls of the ceiling; the black gatherings of ravens – the dark thoughts, the happy ones, the scared and lonely, the night-time-never-spoken-aloud thoughts. I laugh. “So, show me something.”

“What do you want to see?”

I don’t know, and here, in this place where I am a guest, I don’t want to ask. “Whatever you want me to know.”

One of the little finches leaves Jannik’s collar and flies over to settle on my shoulder. It hop-walks along my shift, pin-sharp nails poking through the thin material. Its tiny heart is vibrating against my body – a thrumming that matches my own – and then the room is gone. The bird, Jannik, the heat. All obliterated.

I am standing in misty drizzle, breathing in salt-tinged air, looking at myself. A younger self, with my hair bound up and my dress damp despite the whalebone and oiled-silk umbrella I’m holding. The memory-me frowns, her face tight and wan as she pulls away from the crowd around her. The umbrella shivers, sending spray dancing in spirals as she folds it closed. And then she smiles, leans back against the wall of one of Pelimburg’s old buildings and she lifts her face to the clouds, and she doesn’t look like a spoiled House daughter but a girl in love with the rain.

The image of me greys, fades, and I am back in a golden room filled with heat and feathers.

Jannik is watching me, waiting. His hands are behind his back as if he doesn’t want me to see them. “So?” he says, but his voice is too controlled, too light.

“Memories.”

“I know what they are, Fil.” He smiles awkwardly. It is the first time he has called me anything but Felicita, or the fake name I used when I ran away from home. Something so small and intimate, and it destroys my desperation to not rely on anyone but myself, as if doing that would make me as pathetic as my brother thought I was.

My fear of weakness falls away from me. It is a strange and innocent truth, that although I can do things alone – we all can – together we are stronger. “You’ll help me?” I ask him softly.

“Of course.”

The little finch flies away from me to join the flock and I reach up just as it opens its wings, catch it as easily as a dandelion seed. The tiny creature goes still in my cupped hand and I think it into a new form. When I open my palm, the finch is blue, a strange dusky colour like the sea in the rain. I let it go and it flies back to its yellow-barred flock.

“And that?” Jannik says.

I shrug, and almost smile. “A thank you, of sorts.”

“Of sorts?”

We say the things we can’t say with memories.

* * *

Carien is still
here when we come back downstairs. Whatever was said in our absence, it has left her white-faced, her eyes glassy. She keeps twisting the woven silver at her throat, tangling her fingers in the fine chains.

I stand stiffly before her. Her fingers press against her neck as she goes still. My courage returns, and with it my knowledge that I must confront my own capacity for cruelty. “I apologize.” The words hang cold and stark in the room. “It was a vile action – an unworthy one. You did not deserve my anger.”

The room is silent with expectation and the vampires are watching her with a slit-eyed patience, like hunting animals.

She breathes in deeply through her nose then nods once, a curt little acceptance.

“It seems,” says Guyin slowly, almost as if he cannot believe it himself, “that the Lady Eline had no knowledge of her husband’s actions.”

She swallows and drops her fingers. “Please, just Carien.” Her eyes close slowly and deliberately. When she opens them again the amber is muted, a forest brown full of shadows. She’s in hiding. “The Lord Guyin – Harun–” She smiles thinly. “–told me that you have in your possession a bat that belonged to my husband. I would like to see it.”

* * *

Merril is barely
fit to walk. Just watching him stumble forward, wincing with every step taken, makes the guilt in me fester. He hurt Jannik, that is true, but all I can see is a child destroyed by a man who truly believed him nothing more than an animal. He’s a wild thing – a feral dog, starved and kicked. He took his chance when he saw it. It could have been anyone of us he attacked. Jannik was simply the closest. I check my thoughts. Is House Eline’s prejudice tainting even me? He’s not a dog. But something will have to be done and for now, I have no idea. We can’t keep him caged up forever. “Merril?”

He looks up at my voice, lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl. He lunges back as I reach out one hand to him.

“Felicita, what are you doing?” Jannik holds Merril still, keeping his grip tight on the boy’s bound arms.

Merril’s cheek is rough, slightly pocked and badly shaved. The hollows of his eyes are purple-black, the skin stretched too-tight over his bones. His broken nose is swollen and the bridge is skew, the bruise bloody. There are scrapes on his mouth where the flesh is raw. My fingers run lightly down his cheek, and I think of the child he must have been, bought and sold. This close I can hear the uncomfortable wheeze of his breath, smell the curious damp must, as if there is no way to scrub clean the taint of that cellar, and I realize what we have done to him. He is still a prisoner, but we have taken him away from his own version of safety. I can’t give him back, even if that’s what he wants.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him softly. And it’s for more than hurting him; it’s for being born one of them – a Lammer whose belief in my own superiority is so ingrained it never even occurred to me that others suffered merely so that I wouldn’t have to think. “I will make Eline pay for this.” I drop my hand.

He stares at me, eyes unguarded and dark.

Jannik looks at me over Merril’s shoulder and he smiles just slightly, enough to let me know he understands what I mean. Then, with a gentleness to match my own, he pushes Merril forward, nudging him into the room where Carien is waiting to see this relic of her husband’s perversities.

Her face doesn’t change when we enter. She looks Merril up and down, appraising him like a nilly at a market. Finally, satisfied, she takes out her small pipe and pinches poisonink into the bowl, and lights it with a match. She takes a long thoughtful drag on the pipe and hides herself in a cloud of iron-grey smoke before talking. “You belonged to my husband?”

Merril nods, and a small muscle in his cheek twitches, jumping under the discoloured skin.

“I see.” She blows more fumes around her, wrapping her indecision in the sharp smell of a high. I can almost see the questions she wants to ask him but cannot bring herself to say out loud – not here, not in front of us. None of us have had the cruelty to ask Merril how he has been used. I think we all already know. He is, after all, a rookery vampire. Perhaps that is another reason why Isidro hates and fears him so much. Merril is a reminder of his past, of what he has been and done. All the things he has tried to forget about himself. It’s harder to hate someone when you see through to their fears.

She sniffs, thoughtfully. “He likes to own things. It makes him happy. Did he make you sing for him, little lark?”

Merril bares his teeth.

There is an understanding between them. Harun looks out the window, preserving some kind of dignity. It’s easy for men to be weak and merciful when it suits them. The burden falls on me to stab the knife deep.

“So now, as awkward as this is, I must ask where you stand,” I say to Carien.

She draws her gaze away from Merril to stare at me with a mulish unblinking gaze. “With regards to?”

“This.” I sweep my hand across the room. “Us, and your husband. Are you for us, against us?”

Another deep drag on her pipe. Her teeth click against the ivory and the smoke pours from her mouth and nose. “I must admit that games have never taken my fancy. I always preferred to watch from the side lines.”

“This is not a game,” Harun says. “I’ve heard enough.”

“Is that so?” Carien lifts one arched brow. “And what then do you plan to do to me – am I to stay here a prisoner? I could have lied. But I offered you the truth. I am not interested in your bats, in who owns whom. Is that not enough for you?”

“You lie,” I tell her. I walk across the room, away from her and from Merril. Next to Jannik, I thread my arm through his. The warmth of his body through the wool of his jacket strengthens me. I have agreed to be cruel only for the sake of those I love. After this is done, I will scour out this beast from me, this part of my nature that wants to rise so easily, champing to destroy others under its sharp and pointed hooves. “You lie because I know the things you cannot ask Merril. I know you do not want to be tied to House Eline by the child you carry. If I were to offer you something that Eline cannot, would you choose a side then?”