Mélusine (47 page)

We found a stream easy enough. The water was clear and cold and tasted okay, and I figured that there couldn't be nothing nastier in it than we'd already found in the drainage ditch. So I washed out my socks and took a drink, packed moss around Felix's toes and heels and got his shoes back on him, and then found that by some absolute miracle, my handkerchief was still in my waistcoat pocket. So I cleaned the blood off Felix's forehead, and the thing turned out to be more a graze than a cut. I figured it probably happened somewhere about the time I was yanking him onto the roof of the stable. It wasn't serious anyway, and I could move on to worrying about the rest of our problems.

Which were considerable. First off, we'd lost the people in our party who really knew what they were doing, and if Mavortian was right, we'd lost our protection against the Bastion noticing Felix. I figured I'd better hope Mavortian was wrong, because there wasn't a single fucking thing I could do except keep my eyes peeled for dragoons. And I'd be doing that anyway. Then there was Felix being crazy and me not being able to sleep and all the rest of it. Merciful powers, I thought, how did I get into this?

Could be worse, Milly-Fox. Could be back there in Yehergod with them goons, trying to explain how come you never noticed your brother was a hocus. No, instead I was out in the middle of nowhere with my nutcase hocus brother, neither of us knowing more about how to get across Kekropia than a pair of woolly lambs. Kethe was looking out for me about like usual.

"Need a map," I said.

Felix just looked blank.

"You still want to go east, right?"

He nodded, even though it looked like he thought I was going to whop him one for it. The longer I was around him, the more he reminded me of Devie, one of Keeper's kids who hadn't been all there. She was strong as an ox, mind you, and she wasn't crazy or nothing. But she had a bitch of a time understanding what people said to her and what they wanted her to say back. She had that look a lot, the one like she wasn't sure if she'd said the okay thing or the really not okay thing. And with Keeper, if you didn't say the okay thing, you
would
get whopped. I wondered if them hocuses had been the same way.

I said, "Then we need a map."

"How are you going to find one?"

"Fuck, I don't know. We need a stationer's. Or a bookseller's, maybe. So a good-sized town. And some money."

"Yeah. Me, neither."

We sat there a little while in silence. I think both of us were hoping the other guy was going to come up with something. If it had been one of Felix's good days, I'm pretty sure he would've. And, I mean, he was doing okay, considering as how he'd been doing a screaming freak-out less than an hour ago, but I could tell he wasn't really all the way with me. So finally I admitted it really was up to me, and if I got Felix caught by the Bastion, then there just wasn't going to be anybody else to blame for it.

I said, "About all we can do is keep moving east and hope we find something. And, oh Kethe, we got to do something about your hands."

Felix looked at them, backs then palms, then looked up at me.

"You don't got your gloves, do you?" I said, not 'cause I was hopeful or nothing, but just 'cause sometimes you got to ask the stupid questions.

He shook his head.

"Better find you some. But 'til then, we gotta keep 'em hidden." Gideon had said—about the only piece of information he offered, and he'd said it for Felix's sake, not for the rest of us—that once we got past the Bastion itself, it would be pretty unlikely that anybody would recognize Cabaline tattoos. But we still had to be at least a decad off from that, and the people on this side
did
recognize the tattoos, and they'd know what to do when they saw them, too. "What the fuck does the Mirador want with these damn carnival tattoos anyway?"

"It is a great honor to be named a wizard of the Mirador," Felix said, sort of dreamy-like.

"Fine. Can you just keep your hands in your pockets? Stand up and let's see if that'll work."

He stood up meek as a lamb and put his hands in his pockets. He was still pretty down, then, 'cause when he was topside he wouldn't do nothing without you argued a half hour first. And it worked okay, aside from looking a little funny 'cause of him being so tall it was hard to find stuff in the secondhand shops that fit him, and the only coat we'd found that wasn't too small must've been made for a giant or something. There was sleeve to spare.

"Okay," I said. "It'll do, but you
got
to remember not to take your hands out of your pockets, or we're both gonna be fucked. Okay?"

"Yes," he said. "I'll remember."

"Okay then." I got up and shoved my hair off my face. Between our hair and my scar and Felix's height and eyes and being obviously crazy, we were going to be about as inconspicuous as a pair of flamingos, but there wasn't a single fucking thing I could do about
that
, either. "And keep your mouth shut." He spoke Midlander okay, but his Kekropian was lousy, and either way you could have buttered bread with his flash accent, and anybody caught on to what
that
meant, and there we'd be, right back in the trouble I was about killing myself to keep us out of.

"I won't say anything," Felix said.

"Good," I said, and I don't suppose I sounded very nice about it.

Kekropian just fine, he just couldn't speak it for shit—and he obliged: "Here begins the Duchy of Medeia. Long life to the Emperor Dionusius Griphos."

"Oh boy," I said.

"Yes, rather," said Felix. And he sounded, thank the powers, like himself again.

"We'd better watch our step."

"Your command of the obvious is awe-inspiring," he said. I flipped him the finger like I would anybody being that snarky, and he just grinned.

What I really wanted about then was just to bolt into the bushes and forget about this whole stupid thing, but that wasn't going to come up with no workable long-term plan. "Come on," I said. "We can't do nothing about it."

"
Anything
," Felix said, just enough under his breath that I could pretend I hadn't heard him.

And we walked into Medeia.

It was the biggest town we'd seen since we left Hermione—although still nothing but a medium-sized anthill next to Mélusine—but what was really weird was that it was all
new
. We didn't see anything over a Great Septad old until we were right in the middle of the city, where we found old buildings being torn down so bigger ones could be put up.

"Medeia is doing well for itself," Felix said in my ear.

"Yeah," I said and wondered what there was out here in the middle of fucking nowhere for people to get rich off of.

By then we'd hit the marketplace. People were looking at us a little funny, but I'd got used to that over the past decad and a half, people staring at me and Felix like we were carnival freaks. I guess I even understand it, because, I mean, I'd never known anybody else with natural red hair until I met Felix, and so there were the two of us, side by side, and I wasn't noticing red-haired people thick on the ground in Kekropia neither. I'd always wondered where my mother's red hair came from, and never found nobody who could tell me.

And you've probably seen this coming from like a septad-mile off, but believe it or not that was the first time it hit me that there was a pretty fucking major hitch in my plans. See, what you want for pickpocketing is to be just this side of invisible. You don't want nobody to notice you, and you don't want nobody to be able to remember you an hour later, much less describe you to the Dogs. That's why Keeper'd started teaching me other things when I got my face laid open, because I was going to be worse than useless for shearing the flats. I'd gone back to pickpocketing on and off once I was grown, along of it being not nearly so surprising to see a man with a scar on his face as it is a kid with two septads, and I'd gotten good at always keeping my face kind of turned, or kind of down, or just so nobody was going to get a good head-on look at me. I'm a little shorter than average, and that helps, too.

But that had all been when my hair was black. Now it was bright fucking red, and I called Mavortian some nasty things under my breath. I dragged Felix off to one side, so as not to be standing like a pair of statues in the middle of the sidewalk, and said, "You got
any
money?"

"Fuck it, I ain't joking. You got any money?"

"No."

"Fuck."

"What?"

I yanked hard on a handful of my own hair. "This."

"What?"

"Kethe!" I said and just barely remembered to keep my voice down. "Ain't you caught on yet as how your hair that color is as good as shouting?"

The look on his face was as blank as a cloud, and I realized, with his funny eyes and how tall he was and along of being a hocus, maybe he'd never learned about not being noticed in a crowd.

I took a deep breath, let it out, counted a septad. Said, "Up 'til about a month ago, I dyed my hair black."

"Oh," he said, but he still wasn't following me.

"The poor man's grope," I said, that being part of an old joke about how if you couldn't afford a Pharaohlight whore, there was still something you could do with them, and about as near as I wanted to come to saying "picking pockets," even in Marathine. He looked over my shoulder at the crowd, then back at me, and finally got it.

"I see your difficulty."

"Thanks so very fucking much. Got any
ideas
?"

"It's been… that is, why would I know anything about such matters?"

He was trying to pull a fast one. I mean, he was a pretty good liar, but this one must've been too raw even for him, because he was blushing. And if we hadn't been in the middle of a crowd of Kekropians giving us both the hairy eyeball, I would've gone after it. But this just wasn't the time. And after a minute, he said, "Maybe a hat?"

"No money, remember?"

"Damn," he said, instead of any of the stronger things I would've chosen. He didn't ever swear—nothing worse than "damn"—and I guessed that was what the Mirador did to people.

I shook it off, although I couldn't help a sigh. "I'll do my best. You stay here—and stay
put
, you hear me?"

"No, I thought I'd wander off, find a lynch mob, and show them my tattoos," he said, in a voice so low it was barely a whisper, but the poison in it came through clear as a bell. When he was topside, he hated me talking to him like he wasn't.

"Have fun." I didn't give him another look—'cause we could stand there arguing until sundown—just turned and sauntered off.

sweating peach pits the whole time. I had the twitches something terrible by the time I went back to Felix and said, "C'mon, let's bail."

"And where are we going?" he said, like I was some idiot trying to get him to go out on a picnic in a thunderstorm.

"Thought we'd find a hotel room."

He followed me then, although I knew he was itching to find some way to make it look like his idea. I picked a medium-sized hotel with a sign about halfway along between fresh paint and bare wood. It called itself The Swan's Lover, and I knew the story it was talking about. I figured that was a good omen.

The room was cheap and clean, and the only problem was Felix wouldn't stay put in it.

"There's no reason I can't come with you."

"Are you out of your fucking mind? You got reasons all over your fucking hands!"

"But you're going to buy gloves."

"So?"

"So there's no reason I can't come. You buy gloves, I put them on, and no one's the wiser."

"Kethe! No, it's just stupid. There's no reason—"

"I'm not staying in here like a parcel left to be called for."

He meant it. I'd learned all about that particular look in his eyes. And the longer we argued, the more likely it was the shops would start closing.

"Okay, fine. You fucking well win. But when we get arrested, don't bitch at me."

"I won't," he said and gave me the smile that made chambermaids go weak in the knees.

"C'mon," I said, like a curse, and we went out.

Got his gloves, got a map—I found out all at once that I loved maps, and I could've stayed in the stationer's for days, but I could feel Felix itching to leave. Went back to the hotel, noticing how many people were staring at us and wondering if any of them were snitches for the Imperial dragoons. We were staying in tonight. That much I was sure of.

Mildmay spent the afternoon poring over his map. It was only when it was really too dark to read that he got up and said, "We'd better see about dinner. And a bath."

"A bath?"

"Yeah. You know. If you can't be good, be clean, my keeper used to say."

The casual reference to having been a kept-thief almost stunned me. I had to decide how to answer him, to admit to knowledge or to pretend ignorance. Blindly, desperately, I chose the lie.

"I was a kept-thief down in Britomart," he said on his way to the door. To him it was nothing important; he wasn't annoyed or embarrassed or ashamed. For a moment, I hovered on the brink of saying, "I was a kept-thief in Simside," but I could not do it.

He opened the door, said, "Don't go nowhere," and was gone, taking with him the moment when I might have confessed the truth.

He locked the door behind him, which was nearly enough to make me climb out the window. Even if I was insane, I wasn't a child, and he didn't need to treat me as if I were too stupid to take care of myself.