The Spirit Lens (23 page)

“Lord Ilario, look at me.” I used the most commanding voice I could manage without splitting my skull.

He halted, startled, as if he’d already forgotten I was in the room.

“Tell me, lord chevalier, who prompted you to choose Massimo Haile’s barge for the king’s launch party?”

You’d have thought I’d just asked him why the Pantokrator created the world. “
You
did, Portier, or near enough. You said to do whatever I needed to keep the assassins off balance and ensure that you and the confounded Dante were near Philippe. No King of Sabria has ever graced a Fassid’s barge, and no mage and no minor secretary have ever accompanied the king to any such event. You don’t think Massimo—?”

The full import of my question struck him as a boot to the gut. He blanched and collapsed onto a silken divan that directly faced my own stool. “Merciful hosts . . . you think that
I
. . .”

“Certainly not. It’s only I must have answers for the king.” More ill by the moment, I could not answer further.

He peered closely at my face that felt as clammy as sweating cheese, then popped up from his seat. In moments he returned with restored composure, a small towel, and a vase stripped of its flowers.

“When I saw you burst from that hellish fire alive, I thought you must be one of the Saints Reborn, come to save us. Now you look as if we should cart you to the deadhouse.” He dipped the towel in the vase and slopped the cool, wet thing over my head. “Go to bed, Portier. And think. If I want Philippe dead, and Geni and me hanged at Merona’s gates, all I have to do is propose a game of stratagems and walk into his private study wearing a poison ring. His guards don’t even search me anymore.”

He tossed the emptied vase onto his silk divan, hauled me to my feet, and shoved me toward the door. “Philippe will never believe such scurrilous charges,” he said, “especially now Orviene and Gaetana have been redeemed—and such a justification of Eugenie’s wisdom
that
is. No, these events have been perpetrated by some rogue from Seravain. You must shift your inquiries there.”

And so was
I
stymied, as well. For, indeed, our structure of ill-informed suppositions had collapsed the moment Orviene and Gaetana followed the cursed banners onto the
Swan
and raised a rainstorm. The queen might still be the enemy Philippe feared, but our only
magical
suspects had saved the king, not slain him.

ILARIO RETIRED TO HIS COUNTRY house for a few days to recover his spirits and grow out his hair, so he said, but insisted I stay behind and work on his scientific exposition. “I want it held on the Anniversary—to honor Prince Desmond as the launch was meant to do. Mayhap it will blot out the taint of this wickedness. Eugenie will be pleased. Philippe, too.”

The Anniversary. Six-and-forty days away. Little more than a month to arrange a scientific and magical display “unequaled in this age.” I could not even begin.

My attempts to address our more important business were equally futile. Plagued with persistent pain and nausea, a lingering cough from the smoke, and an internal storm of guilt and failure, I could neither follow the confusing trail of evidence nor devise any stratagem to further our investigation—assuming Philippe wished me to continue. Every hour I expected a summons and a dismissal.

The echoed screams of those dying on the
Swan
ruined what sleep my sickness allowed, and a pernicious dread grew in me every hour. On the third night from the fire, I huddled on the floor in the corner of my bedchamber, my head buried in my arms. A familiar, seductive inner voice insisted there was no use forcing myself to impossible tasks, no use striving to be something I was not, no use eating or drinking or sleeping or breathing. . . .

Nine years it had been since failure had so unraveled me, since the day I had killed my father in defense of my own life. On that occasion, illness, guilt, and despair had come near finishing what my father’s knife had begun. Past, present, and future had faded to gray. My dreams of destiny had withered, replaced by blinding headaches and unfocused anxieties. A month it had been until I could speak my own name; two until I could engage in conversation; six until I could complete a simple task on my own; a year until I had relieved my mentor of his burden and resumed responsibility for my own life.

Not this time
, I mumbled, as the sky lightened yet again
. You’ve sworn loyalty and perseverance to souls other than your own. If you cannot move forward, go back and start again
.

To begin, I drafted a letter to my solicitor, expressing a desire to locate the family of a disgraced guard captain and direct the paltry thread of my family allowance to its sustenance. It would be enough to stave off starvation. I sought out Verger Rinaldo and told him of a muddled “vision” of a family in danger, mentioning naught but Riverside and a girl child and a guardsman/father gone missing. He promised to investigate. If Gruchin’s family were to be found, he would do it.

Then I returned to the more difficult task. The keys to Ophelie’s torment and Michel de Vernase’s fate must surely lie at Seravain. To travel there unremarked, I needed Dante’s cooperation. Yet conscience demanded I tell him what I thought of a gifted man who could hear fellow humans suffer and die without so much as raising his hand. Such frankness would risk our partnership. But I could not stay silent.

Once resolved to the necessity, I shouldered my journal like a flimsy shield and pressed through the busy byways of the east wing. I had scarce lifted my hand to knock on the mage’s door when it flew open. Dante yanked me inside by my belt.

“Gods, where have you been?” he said, before I could speak even one of my carefully rehearsed words. “I near fright the serving men out of their trousers every time they bring me a dinner tray. We need—” He grabbed the wrist of my bandaged hand. “Damn the vile creatures, are you burnt?”

With a grip kin to a mad dog’s jaws, he dragged me to the sunny end of his apartment, shoved me roughly onto the couch, and kicked a stool into place so he could sit close. Fortunately, he took better care as he laid my hand on his lap and unwrapped the bandages.

“Stop,” I said, pain scrambling my arguments. “There’s no need—”

“
Never
bind a burn so tight. And
never
slather a burn with ointments like this. Burns need air. Joints need movement. Can you uncurl your fingers?”

“Somewhat. It’s only—Aagh!” He had laid the back of my hand open to view, forcing my fingers out straight. The whole was swollen and seeping. Though smaller than warts, the fifteen or twenty angry wounds yet stung as if burning spikes had been driven through flesh and bone. My stomach heaved as had become its unfortunate habit. It was all I could do to hold back until he supplied a rag to catch the remnants of my breakfast.

Dante disposed of the foul mess, poured a slick, bitter potion down my throat, and took up exactly where he’d left off, wriggling each of my fingers in turn. “It’s well that it hurts. You understand that much?” My sweat-beaded face must not have reassured him. “If the burn is too deep, it destroys the underlying nature of flesh—the very senses that give you pain or pleasure. The physicians washed your wounds with natron, as I told them?”

My left hand massaged my head, which prickled as if tiny brooms were sweeping away the cobwebs of fever and sleeplessness. “Natron . . . yes.
You
told them?”

“People assume that every mage knows healing.” He jumped up and scrabbled through the paraphernalia on his worktable, returning with an amber flask and a wad of clean linen. “Unfortunately, the study of healing requires a patience I’ve only recently developed. At the time I had the chance to learn, I desired grander magic.”

He dampened a square of linen and dabbed at the raw wounds. I strove for mental discipline, hoping to prevent further humiliation. One would think the particles had burned straight through my gut to the roots of my toenails.

“I can scarce distinguish bone from muscle or liver from heart,” he said, “nor can I soothe so much as an itch out of mind, whether by conjury or practical wisdom.” He patted all dry, then bound a length of fresh bandage loosely about each finger before rewrapping my whole hand in the same fashion. “Burns, though”—he snugged the trailing end of the bandage, then grimaced at his own scarred appendage—“burns I know. Now tell me, did we not judge these villains rightly? So very clever they are. I’d never have understood what they were up to had you not laid the very revelation in my lap. Well done.” He jumped up and kicked the stool away in sheer exuberance.

Thrown completely out of mind, hand throbbing, stomach curdled at imagining a burn that could have caused so terrible a ruin as Dante’s hand, I could not comprehend in the least what he was talking about. We had been entirely
wrong
about the mages.

Dante seemed to need no response from me. He circled the room, the fever of discovery propelling steps and speech.

“I’d never have thought you subtle enough to extract such secrets, but then I’ve no understanding of
talk
, as you’ve seen. Only the magic. An arrow that could penetrate iron, placed in the hands of an expert marksman. Caelomancy prepared in advance to douse a sudden conflagration.”

Halfway through his second circuit of the room, he snatched up the flask, linens, and bandages and returned them to his worktable.

“So now, student, bend your mind to the villains’ purpose. It’s not just to lay suspicion on the lady queen—though her absence from the
Swan
fits that purpose like the popinjay fits his hose. That requires no such elaborate plotting. Nor can I think they were just looking to raise the reputation of sorcery, though Gaetana looked sour enough to gnaw her own arm when she heard the king speak of the ‘Pantokrator’s blessed gift of rain.’ If His Majesty refuses to admit what saved him, then next time they might decide to actually kill the royal fool!”

My reviving faculties began to knit these rambling threads together. “You’re saying they planned—they weren’t trying to kill Philippe at all!”

And then, of course, the revelation—the elusive mystery of Calvino de Santo’s testimony—dropped into my own lap like an enchanted stone. Gruchin, the first mule, had been
an expert marksman.
He had aspired to be a sorcerer, but Gaetana had dismissed him from her service, accusing him of using transference. Yet she had not reported this offense. The threat of exposure and certain execution would ensure his silence about anything he’d seen or done . . . until the fool got drunk enough to babble about it to his captain. Only then did his accuracy with a bow begin to fail. And when de Santo dismissed him for his shaky hands, he had vanished with no one to notice save a wife and child. Gaetana . . . someone . . . had bled Gruchin for two years.

What if Gruchin’s marksmanship had not truly failed, but had been only temporarily blocked? What if the mages had promised him redemption and healing if he placed the arrow exactly where they told him?

“Gruchin’s arrow was
supposed
to miss,” I said. “Supposed to penetrate the saddle and kill the horse and come ever so close to killing the king, making everyone believe that someone wanted the king dead—most likely his queen. Supposed to leave everyone afraid and suspicious. And then Orviene and Gaetana caused the fire on the
Swan
, but you believed—you knew—they intended all the while to bring on the rain to save Philippe.”

Dante scooped up a flat box and several other items from the worktable and headed back toward me. “Gaetana is a calculating witch. She would hardly have come sailing with us without a way to undo whatever mischief they intended. Orviene is thick enough to go sailing in his own piss. It just took me damnably long to figure out the banners were the danger. I wasn’t close enough to them until we stood talking to you, and I smelled the wax. If I’d discovered the truth sooner, I’d have found some less drastic way to warn you.”

“You saved my life,” I said, stupidly. And my eyes, a gift of no less value. Yet with eight dead souls screaming in my head, how could I thank him?

He tossed an open book aside and set the flat box, a ball of string, and a knife beside me on the couch. He didn’t meet my gaze. “It has occurred to me I might need you to get me out of here someday. To vouch for my good purposes and all that.”

“Too bad we couldn’t have warned a few others, even if they were less useful to you.”

Dante’s face, body, and spirit froze. “Speak this accusation completely, Portier.” His voice reverted to the soft, cool precision so much more menacing than heated fury. “And while you’re about it, lay out the terms of our agreement. If you wish me to salvage every sorry dullwit who strays into the path of wicked sorcery, then state that right now. Or if you wish me to curry these mages’ favor and allow myself to be drawn into their trusted circle, state
that
. But understand that I am not so talented as to do both.”