The Bone Palace

chapter 11

Kiril heard crying before he opened the library door. Phaedra had come once more uninvited, but his annoyance at her intrusions faded at the sound of tears. No, he corrected himself as his hand closed on the handle, not tears—no wet sniffles or hiccupping sobs, but a high mournful keen. The dead couldn’t truly weep.
She lay in a heap beside the hearth, perilously close to the unscreened fire. Books and parchment scattered around her, torn and crumpled pages drifting like snow. Kiril locked the door, hands tightening at the sight of mangled books. He held back a curse as he crouched beside her, gathering her hair and skirts away from the fireplace. Even in the shadows and red light he recognized the books: her books, her work that hadn’t been destroyed at her death. Some he’d taken during the careful sack of Carnavas and others he’d stolen from the Arcanost later. Murder he could stomach, but the loss of knowledge sickened him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, gentling his voice. Phaedra rocked and moaned in his arms, face contorted in the firelight.
A cold draft and movement in the shadows made him glance over his shoulder, already tensing to deal with some new intruder. All his dark-sharpened eyes found were an open casement and a bird perched on a chair beside it. A raven, huge and glossy. It mantled, oilslick rainbows rippling across its wings, but remained on the chair-back. A quick touch found his wards intact; her pets could pass through them as easily as she did. His nape prickled at the thought.
Phaedra’s keening died and she gulped air she didn’t need. Awkwardly, he cradled her to his chest and stood, carrying her to a chair. His back and knees screamed, but she was lighter than a living woman, dry of so many of life’s fluids. He left her curled against the cushions and bent to retrieve what he could of the books. A few scraps of paper curled and fell to ash in the hearth, but most of her violence had been to rip out pages. Many of those he thought he could salvage, or at least rewrite. He shoved the survivors into his desk and lit a lamp. The raven regarded him with one black eye, its gaze canny for even a clever bird.
“What happened?” he asked again, risking a stretch past the bird to close the window.
“Someone was snooping around the castle.” She rubbed her face though she had no tears to wipe away. “Pawing through our things.”
That made him stiffen. No need to ask which castle, or who else she meant by our. “Who?”
“I don’t know. No one the birds had seen before. They fled west, so I imagine they weren’t Sarken.”
“Fled from what?”
She sat up, trying to smooth her tangled hair. “My birds drove them off. I should have burned it, should have razed the stones to the ground.”
He drew a breath. Let it out again. “Mightn’t it be wiser not to draw attention to the castle? To you?”
“It’s difficult to draw attention to my past these days.” She gave up on her hair and tugged her gown straight instead. Wine-red velvet today, a modern style. Varis’s work, no doubt. “You wrought that very well indeed. But not, apparently, well enough. We’ve had enough invasion, enough destruction and callous looting. The bones of Carnavas belong to my family now, and they may guard their treasures as they see fit.” Her wild rage cooled, settling into an angry chill.
“Be as that may, a little discretion would be wise. You won’t find revenge as a pile of salted ashes. Varis and I have no desire for that fate either.”
“No. No, Varis doesn’t deserve that. He was always so kind to me.”
“He worshiped you in university,” Kiril said, weary enough for unhappy truths to spill. And you repay him by making him a party to treason. But that was unfair—Varis had begun this. Phaedra’s magic had kept her from true death, but Varis had found her and nursed her back to sanity and kindled in her the desire for revenge.
Phaedra blinked. “He never said anything.”
Kiril nearly laughed. You never see what’s right in front of you. Isyllt had told him that years ago, her voice heavy with exasperation and resignation. And he, to prove her point, still hadn’t realized what she was speaking of. If he had—
Kiril sank into a chair across from Phaedra and rubbed his temples against a growing pressure there. His eyes felt as though they’d been scraped out with a spoon and shoved back into his sockets. “Of course he didn’t,” he said, forcing his thoughts to different history. “He has a heart, you know, under all that velvet gaud. And he’s never handed it away for the breaking.”
Which was why their own affair had been so brief. Or perhaps Varis had simply been unable to love someone already sworn to the Alexioi. Whatever the reason, he had broken with Kiril publicly and melodramatically before he left for Iskar, before Kiril had to do the leaving. It had been a kindness, just as his leaving Isyllt had been; that never seemed to make it easier for anyone.
The raven croaked and Phaedra stood, shaking out her wrinkled skirts as she crossed the room. “I know, darling,” she murmured, stroking its cheek with one knuckle. “Such a long way you’ve flown for me. And I’ll ask another journey of you still.” She slipped a knife from a skirt pocket and nicked the soft brown skin of her wrist. Blood welled, slow and dark and heavy. The bird bobbed its head to the wound, drinking till the edge of its beak glistened crimson.
The creation of familiars was an old practice, but Phaedra’s birds were closer to her than that. She had been them, and they her, until she had found a new body to claim. Kiril could scarcely imagine what that had been like—it was a wonder she had any remnants of sanity left.
Phaedra glanced up to find Kiril watching. Her eyebrows rose. “Care for a taste?”
“And become one of your pets as well? No thank you.”
“I don’t think you would,” she said after a thoughtful pause. “Not easily, at least, or from such a small amount.”
“But it would start the process. The spread of your power and will and consciousness into me. I did read your articles when you were at the Arcanost, you know.”
She smiled. “Then you know how much a taste could benefit you. Haematurgy can heal as well as harm, unlike your necromancy. My power can make you strong again.” She wiped a bead of blood off her wrist with one finger, and raised the finger to his lips.
He caught her arm before she touched him, staring at the slick crimson stain seeping along the whorls of her fingertip. “The cost is not one I feel like paying today.” Even with the headaches, the weariness and aching joints, the tender, bruised feeling that still accompanied any use of magic? No, he told himself firmly. Even so, her offer wasn’t worth it.
“But some day. You will.” She swayed against him and he held her carefully away.
“We’ll see.” He removed his hand and stepped back.
She smiled again, then licked her finger clean and turned back to her bird. After a few more coos and caresses she opened the window, through which it vanished with a flurry of black wings. When she sat her movements were unusually heavy—almost clumsy.
“Are you all right?” Kiril asked. As much as her demon grace unnerved him, its absence was more unsettling.
“Weak,” she admitted. “Tired. I had thought to postpone it, but I need to hunt tonight.”
“Hunt?”
“Living blood regenerates. Dead blood doesn’t. I need a living source every so often, and I didn’t imagine you wanted to bleed for me.”
“So you hunt, like a vrykola. With them?” Her silence was answer enough. Her quiet journeys into the underground had intrigued him when they were at the Arcanost together. Without her work, he would never have formed his own fragile ties to the catacombs. But now her renewed involvement brought only trouble, and his unease hadn’t faded. Varis’s schemes were dangerous enough—who knew what plots the vrykoloi whispered in her ear?
“Do you stalk the slums like they do,” he asked, his voice inflectionless, “taking those who won’t be missed, or whose families have no recourse to search for them?”
“You wanted me to be discreet. Would you rather I stalk the Octagon Court?”
“I didn’t realize you were making such a habit of murder.”
She flinched, then stiffened. “Will you play games of conscience with me, spymaster? How many other women disappeared because of you? How many other murders did you clean up for him?”
“None. None like you, that is.” Dozens of murders for king and country, hundreds, but never any so personal. And thank the saints for that—he didn’t think he could have done it more than once, not for any love or loyalty. “You… He was mad for you, as I’d never seen. Whatever alchemy was between you was a powerful one.” Kiril shook his head. “But you’re quite right—I have no place to be your conscience.” He rose, simultaneously annoyed and amused that he was ever the one retreating from his own home. “Do what you must. But try not to leave any more bodies in plain sight.”
He felt Phaedra leave the house not long after. But then, she never really left him anymore. He sat awake well past the final terce, turning a glass of whiskey between his palms and turning memories over in his head. He took them out every so often to keep them polished—he was the only one who carried them now, and he felt he shouldn’t lose them. The sight of Phaedra’s bird triggered his last memory of her as she had been. The one that should have been the end of it.
No one could survive the fall, no matter how powerful a mage. Phaedra certainly hasn’t. Kiril hopes and fears that the river might have claimed the body, denying them confirmation but sparing them the sight, but they receive no such mercy.
She sprawls on the rocks beside the ice-edged water, close enough to soak her skirts. Grey and crimson splatters freeze on stone, clot and crust in the unbound darkness of her hair. Her limbs are broken twigs, neck grotesquely twisted. Birds take flight in a rush of black wings as Kiril and Mathiros approach. They made short work of her; her hands are already picked to the bone, eyes and tongue gone, lips ripped free to bare a white rictus of teeth. They even took her glittering rings, and lesser gems and gold thread from her girdle.
The sight of her bare hands gives Kiril a moment’s unease, but no trace of life or unlife lingers in her shattered corpse, no hint of a ghost.
“Leave her for the beasts,” Mathiros mutters, his voice raw and hollow.
At another time, Kiril would have shot him a pointed glare. Now he doesn’t want to look his liege in the face. “That would be unwise, Highness,” he says instead.
Mathiros grunts and nods. “Do as you see fit, then.” He turns and strides back to the path, boot heels ringing on the stones.
When the prince is gone, Kiril kneels beside the body. He might have closed her eyes, but the lids are ruined, and straightening her limbs is out of the question. Instead he calls spellfire. It licks cold and silent around his fingers, flaring brighter when he touches Phaedra’s frozen gore-stiff gown, running and pooling as if the damp fabric were soaked in oil. The blue-white flames grow only colder as they burn, but cloth and flesh char and crumble all the same, till all that remains is greasy ash and a few blackened nubs of bone.
The ashes freeze Kiril’s hands to aching as he scatters them into the river.