The Bone Palace

chapter 17

The Solstice ball was meant to last throughout the longest night. But while none of the guests had expected to see their beds before dawn, this wasn’t how they’d imagined the party would end.
Savedra helped calm the guests now sequestered in the ballroom while Isyllt and the palace mages questioned them: Had anyone spoken to the assassin, or the woman in white? Had anyone seen them arrive? No one had, of course, though several courtiers began to second-guess themselves and others developed acute cases of hindsight.
“I knew something was wrong with her from the moment I saw her,” said an Aravind matron, fanning herself excessively. “My aunt is a mage, you know, and I have a bit of a shiver myself. But no one else paid her any mind….”
Nikos handled the whole thing gracefully, sending for more refreshments, issuing polite orders and reassurances, and never letting Ashlin out of arm’s reach. The princess clearly wanted to snap at him, but the courtiers were already responding to his concern. If she’d known the good a public assassination attempt would do, Savedra thought wryly, she could have saved herself long hours skulking in gardens.
Mathiros led the search patrol himself, despite arguments from Nikos, Kurgoth, and Adrastos. It looked very brave, of course, but Savedra could feel the court clinging tighter to Nikos in the absence of his father.
Good, she thought, and resisted the urge to smirk at Thea Jsutien.
Tempers and nerves began to fray when a young dandy from House Hadrian stopped complaining about his headache and began to shake and cough instead. Within the hour he was limp and feverish, propped in a corner while his erstwhile bosom companions edged away and breathed through handkerchiefs. Soon half the hall was arguing for fresh air, or braziers for warmth, or incense to keep the illness at bay—the other half demanded to leave, or to call their personal physicians. No one wanted to say influenza, which was an illness for the poor or unlucky, but everyone knew the signs.
During an especially loud argument over the virtues of incense versus fresh-sliced onions to ward off the ill vapors, Isyllt appeared at Savedra’s side.
“We won’t get anything useful from them now,” she muttered, “not even silence. I need your help.”
Savedra followed her down the side hall, and eventually onto a porch leading into the gardens. “Where are we going?” she asked. “And can I fetch a cloak first?”
“To the temple, and no. We need to be there and out again before we’re noticed.” By lantern-light Isyllt’s face was grim and pale. “I kept your secrets—now I need you to keep one for me.”
Savedra nodded and followed Isyllt across the lawn, tucking her hands beneath her folded arms.
Isyllt held onto her as they entered the temple; the sleepy acolyte didn’t look up as they started down the black mouth of the stairs. Savedra wanted to question, to protest, but wasn’t sure how far a whisper would carry—the slither of their skirts over timeworn stone was unnerving enough. She tested each step carefully and tried not to imagine all the things that might be waiting for them at the bottom.
At the foot of the steps Isyllt conjured a light, which Savedra took as a sign that they were safe to speak.
“Where are we going?” she asked, and winced at the broken weight of silence.
“The Alexios crypt.” A muscle worked in Isyllt’s square jaw. The light turned her eyes into cold mirrors. Savedra withheld the rest of her questions, at least until they reached the door.
“Do you have a key?” she ventured then.
“Always.” She laid a hand on the lock plate, and Savedra’s nape prickled with the same sensation she’d felt earlier.
“What is that?”
“Entropomancy. The essence of death and decay.” Isyllt’s voice cracked. “I don’t like to use it. It hurts.”
It also worked. She set her shoulder against the door and pushed, and it scraped inward. Savedra touched the ruin of the lock and her fingers came away red with rust.
Isyllt turned her attention to the queen’s coffin and Savedra’s stomach twisted. “I thought Nikos said the seal on the sarcophagus was intact.” Her skin crawled, ears straining for the sound of footsteps. Mathiros would send them to the headsman for this.
“It is.” Isyllt’s eyes met hers across the carven lid, cold and pale as the marble. “Whatever we find here, swear to me you won’t speak of it until I do.”
“All right. I swear.”
Isyllt laid her hands on the queen’s stone breast and frowned. She stood like that for long moments. Finally blue sparks crackled from her fingers and she straightened. “Help me move the lid.”
Savedra thought she would be sick. She fought it down, forcing herself to take the last steps across the room and set her hands on the coffin.
On the count of three she and Isyllt pushed. Muscles corded and her still-healing arm burned fiercely from the effort. Stone gave way with a terrible scrape, inch by inch until the head of the sarcophagus was open. Wan and sweating, Isyllt summoned the light closer, filling the interior with its opalescent glow.
Empty.
False dawn lit the sky when Isyllt finally left the palace, chasing the Hounds into the west; the Dragon’s breath did nothing against the cold. The palace guards had found nothing, and had finally released the guests. Dancing away the longest night was one thing, but no one wanted to face the dawn of the demon days.
Isyllt imagined she would be seeing all too much of the demons this year.
Kiril joined her in front of the palace gates as she waited through the line of angry and frightened courtiers. More of them had already begun to cough and sniffle, which might merely be chill and fatigue, or the influenza’s touch.
She didn’t look at him for several moments, though she didn’t pull away from the line of warmth he offered, either. A scream coiled in her throat and she feared to let it loose.
“Let me see you home,” he said.
“Afraid your blood witch will come for me?”
“Yes.”
The honesty of it knocked the acerbity out of her. She let him help her into a carriage, and didn’t speak again. The things she had to say couldn’t be spoken in the open. She wasn’t sure she could speak them at all.
When they stepped onto the frost-rimed stones of Calderon Court, she knew she had to try. “Come inside.”
She didn’t take his cloak when she shot the bolt behind them, or offer tea. Familiar ritual was no comfort now, and he knew where she kept the cups. She went straight to that cupboard and poured herself a shot of ouzo. Its anise-and-coriander fire numbed her throat enough to let the words free.
“I checked the wards on the queen’s coffin, when first we investigated the stolen jewels. They were intact, as strong as if they’d just been cast. Too strong, though of course I never thought of it. You opened the coffin, stole her body for a demon, and sealed it again.”
“You see why I didn’t want you investigating this.” His humor was fleeting. “Yes. That was the act that broke my oath, and my power. Listening to conspirators is one thing—that was more than Mathiros would ever forgive.”
She poured herself another shot and downed it. “Why? What possibly justifies such a violation?”
Kiril sighed, and moved past her to pour himself a drink. Cradling it, he sank into a chair. “Had you ever heard of Phaedra Severos, before you found that girl’s body?”
She shook her head, sitting opposite him.
“You should have. You would have, if not for Mathiros and me. She was a powerful mage and a brilliant scholar. The things she could do with haematurgy were a marvel.” He sipped his drink, grimacing as he always did at the taste. “She was also mad. Not like she is now, but bad enough—she spent days in frenzies of research, creating wondrous things, only to burn her notes in black despair because nothing she wrought was as flawless as it should be. She went from mania to despair without warning. And more rarely and worse yet, she fell into a sort of fierce nihilism, like a phoenix who meant to take the whole world with her when she burned. That fire, I think, is what drew Mathiros.”
“They were lovers?”
Kiril knocked back the rest of his drink. “There was nothing of love between them, no matter how loosely one defines the term. But yes. She was already married. I met her husband once, before all that began. He reminded me of Mathiros, actually, but older and wiser and far calmer. Ferenz weathered Phaedra’s moods like a mountain. Mathiros couldn’t offer that—he was little more than a boy when they met, cocky with his rank and the strength of youth. He wanted her because she was beautiful, and because—” He stared into the bottom of his empty glass. “Because he has always been searching for that fire that will consume him, ever since he was a child. And in each other, they found the means to destroy themselves.
“I couldn’t stop it. I was already Mathiros’s closest advisor, but nothing would keep him from Phaedra. It was ugly and brutal—not the brutality of fists, though possibly that too, but of words and heart. And eventually it went too far. Perhaps he struck her, or merely said the wrong hurtful thing. Whatever it was, she responded with magic, and drew his blood. And then it was treason.
“That might have been the end of it. She fled the palace and returned to Sarkany, and without her presence to goad him I think I could have calmed him. But the palace maids thought Phaedra was pregnant, and the rumor reached Mathiros. I silenced it, but too late.” His mouth was a grim line, and Isyllt didn’t ask what measures he’d taken for that silence.
“Now we had a royal bastard to deal with, who would be raised by a Severos blood mage and a Sarken noble. The possibilities were… unpleasant. Mathiros was determined to deal with it, and I couldn’t dissuade him from doing so personally. We rode to Carnavas in all the stealth my magic and lies could give us. I still hoped that we could solve this reasonably.” His smile was humorless. “The folly of youth.
“It began with discussion, but quickly degenerated. Mathiros and Ferenz fought, while I pursued Phaedra to her tower. Then Ferenz fell, and all the fight went out of her. She threw herself off the tower.” His eyes closed, fingers tightening on the arm of the chair.
“But she didn’t die,” Isyllt said. “Not permanently.” Her jaw ached from the effort of keeping her teeth from chattering. She hadn’t lit a fire, and the room was nearly as cold as the dawn.
“No. Though I didn’t know that at the time. And so we were left with a castle full of corpses and the makings of an international incident.”
“What did you do?”
“I killed all the castle servants, to start, and used their deaths to cover our tracks at Carnavas. But that did nothing about the city full of people who knew and would miss Phaedra. Hushing up a bastard is one thing, but murdering a scion of a great house would mean open revolt from the Octagon Court. So I erased her.”
Isyllt swallowed, her throat gone dry. Erasing a moment’s memory was one thing, but a lifetime—“How?”
“With more murder, of course.” His voice was harsher than the winter outside. “I carried the souls I collected to the labyrinth beneath Erishal’s cathedral and offered them to her, along with three years of my life. She took my offering—she does so enjoy watching secular mages prostrate themselves. And slowly everyone who had ever known Phaedra began to forget her. The physical evidence—her papers and research—I stole from the Arcanost, so no one would be reminded.”
“Does that mean Mathiros?”
Kiril nodded. “Also has no memory of her. He couldn’t remember, or he would have spent the rest of his life a butcher. I took the burden from him to give him another chance. When he found Lychandra, I thought it had worked.”
“But you bore the burden.”
“I did. Phaedra was due that much. But I wasn’t alone, it turned out. Varis loved her, and was in Iskar when she died, beyond Erishal’s reach. He searched for years, and finally found her.”
“How did she survive?”
“She had learned how to transfer consciousness—soul—through blood. She kept a flock of familiar birds who had been drinking her blood for years, who served as her eyes and ears. They stole her rings off her corpse, and between blood and foci, she lived on in them.”
“A demon.”
“Yes. But her magic was stronger than the chain of flesh is to most demons. Eventually she grew strong again, more herself, and arranged for a mortal to drink the blood of her birds. Her consciousness grew again in a human body, and she began to regain her strength. I imagine being a flock of birds for years was… taxing. This was the demon Varis found, who he brought back to Erisín, and to me.”
It was a great law of magic: the combination of spirit and flesh that created a demon could only happen once. To find it so easily overthrown knocked the wind from her lungs. She forced her mind away from the implications and back to the story at hand.
“She didn’t try to kill you?”
“What would be the point?” He laughed harshly. “Mathiros had already cast me aside. And she knew her murder had never been my goal. All her rage is for him.”
“And he doesn’t remember why.” She remembered Phaedra’s fury in the palace—You’ll remember me—and Mathiros’s confusion.
“Yes. I should have struck her down when she came to me, or gone straight to Mathiros with the news. But I couldn’t do that to her again. Not after—”
Not after everything.
They sat in cold and silence for a moment, while the blue light of dawn rose behind the curtains. She didn’t say that’s horrible, because he knew it was. She didn’t say how could you? because she knew how he could. She didn’t say I’m sorry, because that didn’t help anything.
“She’s due her revenge,” Isyllt said at last. “I grant you that. But what about Forsythia, and all the others she and Spider have killed? Don’t they deserve the same?”
“Justice for all?” His eyebrows rose. “Have you become an altruist?”
She laughed. “I’ve become what you made me.” She rose, unsteady as liquor and fatigue surged through her limbs. “What are we going to do?”
“We?” He rose to meet her. “You would still stand by me?”
“You’ve done terrible things. I can’t say that I wouldn’t have done the same. I was made for terrible things, wasn’t I?”
“I may have made you a killer, but your strength and cleverness are your own. Don’t throw yourself away for me.”
A muscle worked in her jaw. “I thought you were done making decisions for me.”
He touched the disheveled wreck of her veil again, then cupped her cheek, skin to skin. She leaned into the touch. He lowered his mouth to hers.
Her left hand tightened against the nape of his neck; her right tangled in his robes. The taste of ouzo on both their tongues slowly melted into the familiar warmth that was his alone.
When they drew apart her pulse beat hard and fast in her lips and the ocean-rush of blood in her ears deafened her. Her eyes were closed, but she felt his sharp intake of breath. He still wanted her, and that dizzied her more than liquor ever could.
She took his hand and led him to the bedroom. He didn’t argue.