The Virtu (37 page)

Everybody was looking at me squiggle-eyed by the end of the day, and I didn’t blame them. I hadn’t been able to eat, hadn’t been able to put two words together in a row, hadn’t been able to quit watching Felix. I felt like a rope, stretched too tight and starting to fray.

I went upstairs early. Way early. Because I’d caught myself just about to buy a second glass of gin, and I hate the stuff. And then I sat there on the edge of the bed me and Felix were going to be sharing and clamped my hands together and tried to quit shaking. I didn’t figure there was much else I could hope for, but I wanted to start this conversation with Felix
not
shaking like a virgin on her wedding night.

Oh, bad bad comparison. Because we hadn’t talked about that weird thing that had happened in the river, and I didn’t want to be Silas to Felix’s Porphyria. And, fuck, that was an even worse comparison. Quit thinking while you’re ahead, Milly-Fox.

Felix being Felix, he didn’t make me wait long. I’d about got my breathing steadied out when I heard the hotel stairs creaking. And then I was panicking all over again, like a virgin being married off to an ogre or something.

“Fuck this for the emperor’s snotrag,” I said and threw myself backwards on the bed. Not that it helped, but it was better than sitting there all hunched up like a hedgehog. Felix opened the door just as I was laughing at the idea of a hedgehog-bride.

“What?” he said, shutting the door behind him.

“Nothing. Not about you, I mean. Just…”

He sighed. “You don’t tell anyone even a quarter of what you think, do you?”

“Um,” I said and sat up again. “I don’t know. I mean…”

“Never mind.” He sat down on the other side of the bed. “You’ve clearly wanted to say something to me all day. What is it?”

“Oh. Powers. Um.”

“What? That
wasn’t
why you were staring at me every time I turned around?”

“No. I mean, yes. I mean… I mean, yes. I got something I need to say. To ask.”

He waited, his eyebrows going up. “Well?”

I was shaking, and I could feel myself going red. But he was here, he was listening, and I just spat it out: “D’you know how to do the obligation d‘âme?”

“Yes. But why… Oh.” He folded his hands together carefully and calmly. “Mildmay, please tell me that you’re not asking for the reason I think you are.”

“Yes. I mean… fuck it, you keep getting me all twisted. I mean, yes, I need you to do it, the binding-by-forms. With me.”

“Why?” he said, real quiet, real controlled, and I wished he’d been yelling.

“Because…” I’d tried to work out what to say, but none of the words would come, and I ended up just saying the truth: “Because otherwise I’m gonna end up dead.”

It rocked him. Whatever he’d been going to say, he didn’t. He just sat there for a moment, and then he pushed his hair back from his face and said, in a completely different voice, “Why?”

“You know what I done. About… about the Witchfinder Extraordinary.”

“Yes.”

I swallowed hard. “You ain’t the only one who knows. I can’t work no more, not with my leg like this. And if I can’t work, I got nothing to trade, nothing to make me more useful to people than the gorgons they’ll get for telling the Dogs where to find me.”

“But I don’t see—”

“
Please
. I know it’s crazy, but I can’t… there ain’t…” I looked down at my hands, where they were clenched together over that ache in my right thigh that was never really not there, even when I wasn’t thinking about it. “There ain’t no other way.”

“Of course there’s another way. Don’t be an idiot.”

“Felix,
there ain’t
.”

“There’s no reason you have to come back to Mélusine,” he said, and he sounded so matter-of-fact about it, so fucking
cheerful
, that I wanted to strangle him.

“I can’t…”

“Can’t what?” He was frowning at me, not like he was mad, but like he really didn’t understand the problem.

“I just
can’t
. Okay?”

“No. Not ‘okay.’ You can’t ask me to do something like that and then not tell me why.”

“Fuck,” I said. I unclenched my hands, rubbed my face. Didn’t really feel it on the left side, but that’d been true so long I couldn’t remember what it’d been like before. “ ‘Cause I have a feeling.”

“A feeling,” he said, like he thought he’d misunderstood me.

“Yeah. I got ‘em sometimes, about jobs. About jobs I shouldn’t take. And I got one now.”

“And this feeling is telling you what? That I have to commit an act of the grossest and most blatant heresy to save your life?”

“Not like that.”

“Then what is it like?”

“Look,” I said, and my voice was starting to shake with something that was partly anger but mostly not. “If I go back to the Lower City, I’m gonna end up dead. But if I… if I…”

“What?” he said, more gently.

I could only meet his eyes for a second. Having his full attention was like getting a sword through the guts. I gulped and said, “If I got to leave you, then I don’t know why I should bother to stay alive.”

I saw it hit him. His eyes widened. He went red, and then white, white as his shirt. He said, his voice barely a whisper, “You don’t mean that.”

“I do,” I said. “I swear to you, I mean it.”

His hands moved like he was trying to push the whole idea away. “You can’t. You can’t mean… do you know what the obligation d‘âme
does
?”

“Yeah.”

“Mildmay, I can’t…” His fingers were pressed against his mouth. “I can’t do that to you.”

“You ain’t. I’m
asking
.”

He shook his head, but not like he was disagreeing. It was like he didn’t even know he was doing it.

And then I thought of something else. “Don’t you… I mean, if you don’t want me to stay, I’ll leave tonight. Head for St. Millefleur or something.”

“No!” He reached out before he even knew he was doing it. His fingers were cold on my wrist. “Don’t go.”

And then we sat there staring at each other. Finally, I said, “I don’t want to go. But if I go to the Mirador with you.” I had to stop for a second, just out of being purely unable to believe I’d said it. “If I do that, I’ll end up hanging from Livergate in a decad, tops.”

“But no one knows.”

“Nobody in the Mirador knows. There’s plenty of people know. And they’ll tell.”

“But…”

“You got oaths you swore, right? To be loyal and shit?”

He nodded, his eyes big and spooked, like he was halfway back to crazy again.

“I know the stories. I know the binding-by-forms is the only thing can trump them oaths. And so that’s the only way.”

“But, Mildmay—”

“It’s either that or I go to St. Millefleur. The Mirador’ll kill me one way, or the Lower City’ll kill me the other.” I pulled, gently, and he let go of my Wrist. “I may not last the winter in St. Millefleur, but that ain’t on your head.”

I started to get up, and he said, in a funny, breathless voice, “I’ll go to St. Millefleur with you.”

“The fuck you will,” I said, dropping back down and staring at him. “What the fuck are you gonna do in St. Millefleur?”

“I don’t know. What are
you
going to do?”

“That don’t matter. I ain’t a hocus. Don’t you get it? You got something to go back to. I don’t.”

“But you—”

“It’s
over
.” I hit my right leg, maybe a little harder than I should’ve. “Can’t be a cat burglar with a bad leg. I ain’t gonna be a pusher or a pimp, can’t be a fence. And I don’t want to be just hired muscle.”

“Those aren’t your only options,” he said through his teeth.

“I can’t go straight. That gets me right back to the Dogs and the Kennel. And the spikes over Livergate. I need protection, Felix. And you’re the only one can give it to me.”

“What you’re asking me to do is monstrous.”

“So? Ain’t we both monsters?”

He just stared at me. Then he turned away, managed this shaky sort of laugh, pushed his hair back. Said, “You’ve got to give me some time to think about it. I can’t just…”

“Why not?”

“It’s
heresy
.”

“Will they burn you for it?” I hadn’t thought of that. I’d kind of figured once you were in with the Mirador you could do whatever the fuck you liked. But if it was going to get Felix in that kind of trouble… I’d go to St. Millefleur or wherever, and if I died of it, that was fine.

His mouth opened, then closed again, and he got this weird look on his face, like he was looking at something a long ways away and he couldn’t decide if he liked it or not. “Technically,” he said in this dreamy kind of voice, “at the moment I am not a wizard of the Mirador.”

“You ain’t?” Fucking news to me.

“No.” And now he was smiling, sort of bitter and dreamy all at once, and the hair was trying to stand up on the back of my neck. “They stripped me of my rank and privileges.”

I didn’t say nothing because I was afraid the next time he looked at me it’d draw blood.

“They cast me out themselves. They can’t accuse me of heresy when they’ve already declared me anathema.” His smile sharpened. “An object lesson.”

Then he did look at me, and somehow, powers, I didn’t flinch. “Is this what you want?” he said, hard and sharp and bitter like an iron knife. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” I said and swallowed hard. “I mean, yes. I am.”

“You understand what it entails?”

“I know the story of Silas Altamont.”

A flicker of darkness in his eyes. “Then may we both be forgiven for this. Give me your hands.”

Too late to back out now, Milly-Fox. I held out my hands. He stripped off his gloves and laid them aside. His hands were smooth, soft, not like mine with the scars and the calluses and the lumpy knuckles, but I could feel the stiffness where his fingers had been broken and hadn’t healed quite right. He traced over the scars on my hands, and then his grip firmed and I gripped back.

“You’re sure?” he said and was more himself again. He sounded like he cared about the answer.

“Kethe, just get on with it!”

He nodded and bowed his head over our hands. He said something I didn’t understand, and then he looked up—looked me square in the eyes—and leaned in and kissed me.

Hard.

With tongue.

And that was when I felt the obligation d‘âme take hold, like a lightning bolt, like falling down a staircase you didn’t know was there. And it was all tangled up with the taste of him and the way his lips felt against mine and powers and saints the things he was doing with his tongue. Some stupid part of my brain was going, So this is what a Pharaohlight whore is like, and even though I didn’t know why he was kissing me and didn’t want him to be doing it, neither, I couldn’t help, just for a second, wondering what it would be like with him.

And then I could move again, and I pushed away from him and said, “What the
fuck
?” My voice was unsteady and mostly breath and slurred worse than ever, and I couldn’t seem to get my eyes to move away from him.

“Magic is symbolism,” he said. “The obligation d‘âme binds us closer than lovers.”

“Symbolic kissing?”

“I thought you would prefer it,” he said, and when I figured out what he meant I went red clear up to my scalp.

“You could’ve warned me.”

“I could have,” he said darkly. “In any event, it’s done, and I wish you much joy of it.”

“Better’n being dead,” I said, and my voice broke on the last word.

He didn’t have an answer.

Once Mildmay was asleep, I got up and slipped out of the room. I could not sleep, and I did not want to be alone with my thoughts and the quiet rasp of his breathing.

I felt as I had the night I had lost my virginity, only this was in some indefinable way worse because I had
done
this, I had
chosen
it. I had used my magic on an annemer, and it did not matter that he had asked me to, that it had been his idea to start with. And I had kissed him. That had not been his idea, and I was trying very hard not to catalogue the reasons I had not warned him it was part of the deal.

I felt feverish, nauseated. It was with no clear idea of what I was doing that I found and ascended the stairs to the roof. It had rained earlier, but the sky now was clear, the air smelling damp and clean. I stood and tilted my head back to look at the stars, calming myself with their names and constellations.

He had called me a monster, and I knew he was right. But he had also said he did not want to leave me. He would rather endure the obligation d‘âme than leave me, monster that I was. I could not make sense of it, of this unwarranted devotion, no sooner admitted to than betrayed. In a choice between committing an act of grievous heresy—possibly even an act of evil—and losing my brother, I had chosen to commit heresy. And no matter how much it sickened me, I knew I would make the same choice again.

I could still feel his lips against mine, the strange stiffness of scar tissue, the surprised softness of his mouth. The harsh bite of gin on his tongue, the hard edges of his teeth. The way that, for a moment, a bare breathless moment, he had not been unwilling.

And then he had pushed me away.

A noise behind me, a foot scuffing against the shingles. I turned: Gideon Thraxios, his eyes like night-filled holes in his sallow face.

“Oh,” I said, letting my breath out in a sigh that was half relief and half exasperation. “It’s you. What are you doing up here?”

He hesitated, his dark eyes searching my face.

“Go ahead,” I said tiredly. “You might as well.”

:I did not mean to disturb you. Or to intrude.:

Well, you did. I kept from saying it, although it was an effort, and said instead, “It isn’t my roof. You have as much right as anyone to be up here.”

He almost seemed to flinch although it was hard to tell with only the moon and stars for light. He said, his mental voice as carefully neutral as my spoken voice had been, :I was looking at the stars.:

I tilted my head back, contemplating those distant brightnesses, and said, “And what do the stars tell you?”

:Nothing. The stars have no voice that I can hear.:

Pain, bitterness, loneliness. It was my turn to flinch, and he said, :I am sorry. I should not—: