The Shattered City (28 page)

Waiting for you to make me Seer of the Creature Court. I've never received a gift so bitter, or so important.

I will save them if I can. My turn to put the pieces together. You can lay your burdens down, now. Be free. Sleep.

Thank you.

I
t had been a year and a half since Rhian last set foot on the docks, near the Noces Gate, on the far side of the river Verticordia. Little had changed in that time. The same faces were here, the same strong arms and merry grins, and the usual hubbub surrounded the new boats, where the shipments of flowers and fruits from Orcadia and Atulia had just come in.

She was jostled this way and that as she made her way to the boat where they were unloading crates of fresh clematis, violetti and lilacs, perfect for the holiday of slaves that only the finest of families would be celebrating this nox, in memory of a time when slavery was common in Aufleur.

The pampered sons and daughters of the Great Families would wear purple garlands on their heads and pretend to serve a fancy meal to their servants, who themselves would have spent all day cooking and preparing the false feast.

Every time someone bumped against Rhian, she breathed deeply and held herself together.
No harm. No harm done. All is well
. She was not ready for this, but if she did not start now, when would she be ready?

Her head was full of so many horrors, but she was learning control finally, and there was a freedom in that.

All her old friends and workmates were here, many dames and demmes and fellows who had known them in their apprentice days, or when they held a market stall in the Forum. Many of them seemed to know Rhian's story, or a version Delphine had spilled to them, because there was pity on their faces, and overly bright smiles at seeing her finally having the courage to climb out from her walls and face the world. No one knew about Velody, that she was gone, and it was a pain in her stomach every time one of them called out a greeting, or sent their love.

Rhian had not mourned. She missed Velody so much, but there was work to be done. Delphine was struggling to hold herself together, to make ribbons and to be a sentinel. Without Velody's commissions to keep them in grain and cheese, Rhian had to work.

She could do this. She was stronger now.

Rhian bought her blooms and walked across the city on steady feet, returning home. The autumn sunshine was bright in her eyes, and her cheeks were warm when she returned to the house with the sign of the rose and needle.

She took three steps into the kitchen, and the voices filled her head. Rhian staggered, dropping her laden basket. Flowers scattered across the floor as she pressed her hands to her temples, trying to make them stop.

Heliora's voice was the loudest. She had been there for market-nines, telling her own story like an old
ghost reciting words in an empty room, not knowing whether anyone heard. If it was just Heliora, Rhian could cope, but it was all of them — every Seer who had ever lived — talking all at once, and when it got like that she could make no sense of anything they said; it was just noise threatening to burst through her ears and nose.

Oh, but this time there were words that she recognised, one in particular, over and over, in dozens of voices.

Liar liar liar liar liar liar.

‘Stop it,' she commanded, shaken. For a miracle, they stopped. Rhian paused to catch her breath, and then busied herself in collecting all the flowers, straightening their stems, and arranging them in the basket once more.

Of course the Seers could see into her head. How could they not, if they were stuck in there? They knew her greatest, most awful secret. The thing she had not lied about, not really, and yet she had never told the truth about. She had let them all assume that they knew why it was so hard for her to leave this house, why the anxiety had swallowed her whole, this last year and more, since that awful Lupercalia.

She had let them weep for her, and imagine the worst. Every time they looked at her as if she might break into a thousand pieces, the lie had burned on her tongue, still unspoken but always there. Thinking back to that day, when it all began, she could no longer remember if there was a time when she could have spoken the truth.

‘Rhian, lass, is that you?'

She jolted in surprise and looked up as Macready sauntered into the kitchen. Of course he was here. ‘I bought flowers,' she said.

His face lit up. ‘Look at you,' he said so proudly. ‘No trouble in the streets? I would have come with you if you'd asked, so I would.'

Of course he would. He had gone out of his way to make sure Rhian was as easy as she could be about him all but living here now, and he had watched her baby steps into the world as if he were a protective brother.

Macready was making tea now — they had him well trained — and chattering about how Ashiol had gone missing again, and he had been hoping he might be here, though he knew as well as she did that Ashiol had not set foot in this house since Velody died. No, if Mac was here it was to check on her, for no other reason. Rhian wanted to be glad of his kindness, but instead she had acquired yet another person who would hate her if he knew the truth.

What would he do if she blurted it out in front of him right now, in the kitchen?
I was never raped
.

Rhian had been accosted by drunken men in the street that day, but it had not been rape that drove her to cut the hair from her head, to slice deeply into her skin and watch the blood well up through the wounds. Nothing so mundane.

Delphine and Velody had told the lie for her in their careful looks and silences. Rhian had jumped at every sound, flinched at every touch; she had felt the world disappear into blackness, out of fear and panic, and she had been grateful that their assumptions gave her an excuse for that.

She would have broken entirely, had she been forced to speak the real truth aloud. Later, when she felt stronger, the lie was already well in place. It was too late now to confess to Velody, and Rhian wished more than
anything that she had done so. Velody might have understood. Delphine never would, and Rhian curbed her impulse to spill the truth to Macready. He was not hers to unburden herself to.

She and the many voices of dead Seers in her head would have to keep their secrets to themselves.

 

Delphine found him in the Pretty Princel, slouched in the corner of a bar. Of all people, it had to be she who found him. She had no wish to scrape a drunkard out of a bar in the middle of the afternoon, but this was the world she lived in now.

It was all Macready's fault.

She ordered a bitter lime, which would in no way sate her craving for something stronger, and went to sit beside the wreck of a man at the bar. ‘Hello, Ashiol.'

‘Delphine,' he slurred, eyes dangerously bright as he raised his glass to her. ‘A pleasure, as always.'

She sipped, resenting that she was the one on best behaviour. Falling apart in a sea of booze and potions was her own way of coping with the unimaginable, or even the everyday. Being the good one was just short of abominable. ‘It's been a month,' she said finally, her mouth puckering around lime and salt. ‘Don't you think it's time you sobered up?'

Ashiol laughed at her. ‘Look at you, playing the sentinel. Shiny swords on your back, shiny knives tucked into your bodice. I thought you wanted nothing to do with any of us. Or has Macready frigged compliance into you?'

Oh, this one was a charming drunk. Delphine loved her swords, even if she was still this side of rubbish when it came to training, and she wasn't taking any of
the inebriated Ducomte's cack. ‘I know that if we don't get a Power and Majesty who is up to the job, I'll end up as dead as the rest of you when the sky …'

She shut her mouth on the last word, but he knew what she had been about to say.

‘When the sky swallows Aufleur,' said Ashiol, lips shaping the words with great deliberation. ‘Believe me, I'm looking forward to it. It will be like a family reunion.'

Delphine set her glass down so sharply that her drink splashed against the smooth wood of the bar. ‘Why don't you stop acting like such a spoiled brat? All you lost is a chance to escape responsibility. I lost my
friend
.' The thought of Velody, the fact that she was gone, the hurting space she had left behind, was enough to make Delphine fall apart all over again. But she couldn't. Didn't. Everyone needed her to be strong, and she hated them for it.

Ashiol was watching her like she was something he wanted to eat. He slid a small velvet bag out of his shirt and lay it on the bar between them, letting the contents spill a little on to the polished surface.

Delphine stared. She knew what that was. The tiny glittering crystals, like crushed moonstone and sugar. They called it surrender. She'd only tried it once or twice, when a seigneur with more money than sense was trying to impress her. It was worth a small fortune, and she could practically taste it on her tongue.

Ashiol smiled that cat's smile of his. ‘Want to share?'

Delphine was going to retort that the last thing he needed — they needed — was to get high. She had been good for so long. She found herself saying, ‘Why not?'

 

Ashiol had never had much of a taste for potions and powders when he was young. Animor was his drug of choice in those days. He had needed nothing but that burst of blood under the teeth, that fierce light inside the chest when he swarmed over the rooftops as cats.

It was Garnet who needed more.

Tasha had encouraged it, using the prettier potions to reward her lions for good behaviour. Garnet, taking to the life of indulgent power with glee, had lapped up everything that came his way.

Ashiol remembered shouting at him, furious, more than once. The sky would be ablaze, their lives were on the line, and Garnet would be high on surrender, or bliss, laughing like a madman as he threw himself into the fray.

I don't understand why you need it
, Ashiol had spat in disgust one nox when they were what, seventeen years old?
We have everything
.

Garnet had looked at him as if he was a special kind of stupid.
You have everything
, he said.
The rest us cluster at your feet to lick at the scraps
.

Livilla had liked the powders too. It was something she and Garnet shared, even when she went through phases of preferring Ashiol as her bedmate. Sometimes she would come to Ashiol smelling of gin and mint and something else he couldn't recognise, eyes shining with a metallic glow. Sometimes she would make him taste fragments on her tongue, or a fingertip, and he would do it because … she was Livilla.

Garnet never seemed to mind that Livilla had that power over Ashiol. He would watch them with a sly smile. He had his own power over Ashiol, and he did not waste it on potions and powders. He used it to make
them love him, hold true to him; to give complete loyalty even when they were Lords of separate households, building their own power bases, and should no longer be friends, nor anything else.

Breaking the rules was what Garnet did best.

Ashiol arched his neck back now, letting the surrender crystals melt on his tongue. He lay on the rough tiles of the roof of the Pretty Princel, with a lithe demme beside him, her own lips reddened and wet as she sucked another pinch from her fingers.

It didn't matter that this was Delphine, who hated him, and not Livilla. The type was the same. She giggled now, shifting awkwardly, not used to dealing with the angles and planes of roofs in her knee-high silk sheath dress. Her cloak and sword-harness — still so new they squeaked — lay abandoned near a chimney stack. ‘The sky is so sharp,' Delphine said, eyes wide and fixed upon the aimless stars. ‘Like someone stabbed it. Over and over and over …'

Ashiol stretched his whole body out, wanting to be in cat shape. ‘Makes it all better, doesn't it?'

‘Mmm,' Delphine breathed, wriggling her shoulders, breasts half-spilling out of her low neckline. ‘I'd forgotten what it was like to just
be
.'

Must be nice.

There was one day, five years ago, when Ashiol had awoken on the floor of the Palazzo, completely drained. Garnet had taken everything from him. Ashiol didn't know how to function without animor, without his cats, without the thrum of power that came with being a King.

(The sentinels had shared their blood with him sometimes, given him a taste of mortality to allow
respite from Garnet's tortures, and he had resented it every time.)

Ashiol's skin had hurt, everything hurt: he could feel scars burning into him for so long, and then he hadn't been able to feel the scars at all which was worse, because it meant his animor was gone. He had nothing. He was nothing. He closed himself in his Palazzo rooms for three days, speaking to no one, not eating, barely sleeping. Eventually he climbed out a window and took to the streets, looking for something that would take the edge off. Crumbs and scraps.

Powders and potions had helped, then. Until they didn't, and the rope or the sword became more appealing.

‘Velody would be so cranky about this,' Delphine said sleepily, her voice breaking into his thoughts. He had almost forgotten about her presence.

‘Don't say her name,' Ashiol snapped, but too late. Everything he was trying to push away came crowding back. Heliora, grabbing at him.
I can't see past Saturnalia. I'm not going to live
… He had ignored her, because he had lost enough and he didn't want to think about it, didn't even want to consider the possibility. He had entirely failed to give her any kind of comfort, and had instead devoted all his attention to sniffing around Velody, selling her on how to be a hero. He hadn't saved either of them. He deserved to be alone, left holding the pieces of the Creature Court.

He still had Heliora's ashes. It was supposed to be bad luck, to hold on to them. Ashiol should have cast them from a hill, interred them in one of the city walls, or hurled them into the fires of any one of several dozen saints or angels. He couldn't decide, though. Couldn't let her go.

Neither had he checked on Livilla recently, no matter that she had suffered her own losses. He hadn't bothered to ask how well Mars had recovered, if Priest was hanging on to sanity, if Poet had killed them all in their sleep. He had let Velody sacrifice herself, and he couldn't even pull himself together long enough to take her place. What was the sodding point? He couldn't be her. He couldn't even be Garnet.