32
Ashiol was well experienced with torture. Actual torture, with nets and blades and all manner of cruelties. He had been beaten bloody and had every drop of power drained out of him. Right now, he would gladly trade one of those long noxes with Garnet for the evening he had to endure in the Palazzo of Bazeppe.
Everyone was so interested in him, and there were few aristocratic airs in this city of clockwork and metal. Its people touched constantly, hands brushing arms, kisses against cheeks and wrists. He had spent too long in the Creature Court, where touch meant an exchange of power or comfort or blood. He wasn’t used to it meaning nothing.
The air smelled of thunderstorms and tin. It set Ashiol so far on edge that he jumped at every sound. The music crushed around him, and the people as well. So many people in a ridiculously small reception room.
He had expected Isangell to be the centre of attention, not himself. The few public receptions he had not been able to avoid in Aufleur had been peopled with seigneurs and demoiselles who gave him a wide berth for the most part. Those stories were good for something, after all. No one here had any such qualms. They tugged at him, cooing and gossiping, and dragged him into dance after dance. The steps seemed overly confusing, and though he matched his partners’ movements well enough, it was clear that he was being in some way utterly hilarious.
So many of the women had their hair cut short; not in the flapper bob he was used to from home, but mannishly short. Was it the fashion, or fear of being dragged into machinery?
The food was brought up from the kitchens on jerky little elevating platforms, and steam puffed constantly out of a large metal water pot, kept piping hot for the servants to serve fresh tea at a moment’s notice. Even at supper, the people of Bazeppe drank tea as if it were their patriotic duty.
The Duc-Elected of Bazeppe — who, it transpired, had been elected to the position without contest for the last twenty years — had three sons. Ashiol didn’t think much of any of them — they obviously spent far too much time inside reading books and talking politics or some shit like that. Besides, he couldn’t really tell the difference between the three, except that one was particularly irritating — either the plump one or the one with spectacles.
Ashiol had made the mistake of putting on the outfit laid out for him by the Palazzo servants: some kind of embroidered jacket thing over a waistcoat, and breeches that were far too tight. It was as if there was metal in the cloth, pressing too close around him.
Not any daylight metal he knew, nor skysilver. Something new. It made his skin itch.
‘I’ve never been to Aufleur,’ said a buxom dame wearing a seigneur’s suit of clothes. A pearl-edged pocket watch hung decoratively from of her cravat and Ashiol couldn’t take his eyes off it. This whole city was as bad as his stepfather, counting time in hours, minutes, seconds. How did they get anything done?
‘Are they all like you back home?’ the dame asked.
‘I hope not,’ he said fervently.
A hand slid over his sleeve. ‘Excuse me,’ said a melting voice. ‘May I borrow the Ducomte for a moment?’
Once more, Ashiol was not consulted. On the other hand, nothing could be worse than this. He allowed himself to be led away.
The melting voice belonged to a man in his early twenties, whip-thin and energetic, in one of those gaudy suits. ‘Sorry to be so forward,’ he said with what could only be a flirtatious smile. ‘But you looked like you were about to drown yourself in the punch bowl.’
‘I had considered it,’ Ashiol admitted.
The young man held out a hand and shook Ashiol’s vigorously when he ventured it in that general direction. ‘The name is Troyes. I’m to be your personal secretary while you’re in Bazeppe.’ There was no mistaking the way he lingered on the word ‘personal’.
‘And what exactly does that mean?’ Ashiol asked, giving little away.
‘It means I’m to provide you with anything you need,’ purred Troyes. ‘What do you need, Seigneur Ducomte?’
‘Fresh air,’ Ashiol said without thinking.
Home. I need to go home and put my feet under Velody’s table and run on the rooftops and save the world. But I don’t think you can offer that.
‘Done,’ said Troyes, whipping out a small book and making a note inside with a scratchy feathered pen. ‘I’ll have you moved to a room with a balcony — somewhere at the back, overlooking the oak grove. Not too high up.’ He smiled a dazzling smile. ‘You seem the athletic type. I’m sure you’ll want to make use of the grounds.’
Days passed, a jumble of receptions, suppers, breakfasts and other formal occasions, all measured out to the second by the hundreds of noisy, ticking clocks. Factory visits, parades, ceremonies … clocks.
There weren’t as many parades and ceremonies as Ashiol might have predicted, though. He didn’t notice at first, because the latter half of Bestialis was traditionally quiet, but then it was the Kalends of Fortuna, and no sign that there would be any celebration of the Pomonia. No green ribbons, holly crowns or sacrifices in honour of the beginning of winter. Now he came to think of it, Bazeppe had only held a single parade in more than a market-nine, and Ashiol got the impression it was especially to honour their ducal guest. Even the everyday rituals were sparse compared to what he was used to.
The ticking didn’t stop even when Ashiol was alone in his room. There were clocks on the walls, on the bedside table, and in the corridor outside. He could have asked Troyes to clear the room of clocks. His ‘secretary’ was nothing if not brutally efficient in any task given to him, whether in or out of Ashiol’s bed. But Ashiol couldn’t help his suspicion that Troyes was watching him carefully and he was loathe to give too much information away.
He could live with the clocks.
The balcony attached to his room saved his sanity. It provided the closest thing he could get to silence. He liked to go wandering in cat form at nox, climbing trees and running for miles. Sleep found him sometimes before he even reached his bed. He’d fall asleep as a pile of black cats, warm and purring, only to awake naked on the balcony or by the fire in his room, with a blanket tossed over his body. He wandered what Troyes thought about that, but couldn’t find it in him to care.
The evening of the Kalends of Fortuna, after a particularly gruelling poetry reading at which Ashiol had spent an hour trying to make conversation with one of Isangell’s prospective husbands (and considered it a great triumph that he hadn’t bitten the twit’s throat out), he retreated to his room and his balcony. The first snowfall covered the skeletal tree-shapes of the grove and he closed the glass doors behind him, leaned against the snow-dusted rail and breathed in the cool nox air.
Guilt set in. However irritating the chatter and amateur dramatics of the nobles of Bazeppe might be, at least they filled his head. Only here, when it was cool and silent, did he remember everything he had left behind. Garnet. Warlord. Livilla. The sentinels. Velody.
It was more and more difficult to avoid thinking about Velody.
Stars gleamed between the misty shapes of the clouds. It was a long time since Ashiol had been able to look at a nox sky without fear or tension. The sky over Aufleur was coloured with the constant threat of death, blood, devils. Bazeppe’s was calm. A greenish black, lit as it was by so many flickering gas lamps, but it was peaceful to gaze up and see nothing that wanted to eat you alive.
A white shape flickered near his field of vision and Ashiol turned his head to see pale owls gliding overhead, their wings catching the breezes beautifully. Even that was a peaceful sight. The owls called to one another, disappearing into the silhouetted bare trees of the oak grove with only a hoot or two breaking the silence.
Ashiol breathed. He could live here. He could forget about Garnet, and Velody. The ticking clocks were worth putting up with, surely, in return for this kind of inner peace. No wonder Priest had seen this city as a sanctuary. It was so far from the politics of the Creature Court, from everything dangerous.
A city that wasn’t doomed. Must be nice.
A woman walked out of the oak grove. She was the colour of moonlight all over: pale hair, pale skin, a lush figure contained within a long white gown. Her feet were bare. Ashiol gazed at her for a long while, wondering why this scene seemed familiar, like something from an old story someone had once told him.
The woman turned her head and for a moment Ashiol thought she was staring directly at him, though she shouldn’t be able to see anyone from that distance. The room behind him was dark.
She crossed the lawn towards the Palazzo, stopped right underneath Ashiol’s window and looked up. ‘My Lord Ducomte,’ she said in a voice laden with sarcasm, familiar and cutting. ‘Or should I call you King?’
Ashiol’s fingers gripped the railing. Motherf*cking saints, it was Celeste.
‘Lord of Owls,’ he said with a dignity that belied the panic in his head. ‘Are you well?’
‘Aye,’ she said, and there was that smile, a half-crease that had completely enraptured Lysandor and drawn him away from Tasha, from Garnet, from all of them. ‘I am well. I never thought you would come here. I did not think you would still be alive, in truth. Men like you don’t grow old.’
‘Is —’ Ashiol’s voice broke a little, because he wasn’t sure if he wanted to hear the answer.
‘Lysandor,’ said Celeste, and her face glowed like the moon this time when she smiled. ‘He is also well.’
Something Ashiol had not known he had been holding tight inside himself for years cracked open. ‘Can I see him?’ he asked.
Celeste grinned and held out her hand.
Ashiol leaped off the balcony, landing on hands and knees on the grassy earth. He took Celeste’s hand and they went into the grove together.