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“I’ll accept if you swear on the sword,” said Mercy, with unholy eagerness.
He raised his rapier up within its scabbard. It had a bright conical hilt of what looked to be copper, with pricked designs all over it. “I swear by the sword of Alfred Quinque, best of men and cavaliers, that the details of your, ahem, business will not be told by me, or revealed by me, or let fall from the lips of my mouth nor the pads of my fingers—even though I think it will be the death of us,” he added. At this, there was a fractional relaxing of Mercymorn’s frowzled brow: not relief, but the germination of the seed of relief. “Accept.”
“Fine! I accept,” she said. Then she looked around herself, and said: “You do know the children are present? Should I kill them, or what?”
“Ignore ’em,” said Augustine. “Better you don’t know why they’re here. Look—I need you to fully commit to this one, Joy, and if you don’t, I will consider the oath I just swore tampered with.”
“Commit! Commit!!” she said scornfully. You noticed she was wearing short strings of apricot-coloured seed pearls in her ears; they vibrated as she folded her arms across her chest. “Stop wasting your breath and tell me the plan.”
“Once you hear it, whatever you do to me, don’t do it below the neck. None of my other shirts are pressed.”
“Stop drawing this out! Tell me!”
He cleared his throat and said: “Dios apate, minor.”
You had a front-row seat to Mercymorn’s dreamy eyes going quiet; the eye of the tempest, before she reared back and punched him full in the face. There was not much force in that blow, which barely snapped his head back, but he whitened as though her fist had been a battering ram. He gagged, doubled over his washstand, and ejected a mouthful of teeth—a tumbling, plinking bowlful; he held his hand over his red and dripping mouth and closed his eyes, and after a few moments straightened back up, a trifle greyer, running his tongue over his regrown incisors.
“Minor,” he repeated when he could, taking out a handkerchief and dabbing his mouth. “Minor—how many times must I say it?”
“You’ve lost your senses,” she said unsteadily.
“You think I am joking, Mercymorn?”
They looked at each other. Then followed the type of conversation you had only seen once before, between her and God—that exchange of shrugs, and words begun in the mouth and aborted at the first breath, and at one point she said, “Gradient?” and he answered, “Radial,” and then they devolved again into a shorthand of facial expressions. In its own way, it was swifter and less coherent than what you had seen pass between the Emperor of the Nine Houses and her, that lifetime ago leaving the Erebos; but at the end, her hand fluttered around her mouth, and she halfway wailed:
“I’m not wearing the right dress.”
“It’s perfect. You look like a melon.”
“But I hate this,” she said, quite genuinely, and Augustine looked at her with his insubstantial eyes and said: “I understand. Buck up, Joy; it won’t kill you.”
Your gaze met Ianthe’s. She had followed the whole thing in rank fascination; now she quirked her own eyebrows at you in what you had come to understand was, Who knows? For a moment you worried that, come another myriad, you and she might be able to carry on such a conversation: that you would know her intent by the twist of her mouth and her exhalation, to the point where you could speak without dialogue.
In the end, Mercymorn said, “Blech!” and turned on one heel and stalked out. She flung open the door, said anxiously, “White wine!” and with that cryptic epigram, disappeared.
The Saint of Patience said, “That went significantly better than I thought it might,” without a glance at his sink of bloodied teeth. “Come on—I want one of you on each of my arms on this battlefront. On my right, Ianthe. I’m not clutching that bone; I never did like ’em skinny—Harrowhark, you really didn’t get any height, did you? Lord! Imagine being crystallized a teenager, forever! Whatever you see tonight,” he added, suddenly serious as the grave, “do not get involved.”
Behind his back—as you walked down the corridor—the Princess of Ida mouthed at you smugly: Quick! Sophisticated! Devious!
30
IT TURNED OUT THAT AUGUSTINE THE FIRST—Saint of Patience, founder of the court of Koniortos, genius of the River—ten thousand years old and oldest among saints, quick and sophisticated and devious—had a shrewd plan to assist you in the murder of his dutiful brother. His shrewd plan: to get everyone profoundly drunk.
Two hours later you sat amid a pillage. The remains of a meal lay before you, more than you had ever eaten of your own volition. You’d had to. The only other option was unconsciousness. A pyre of candles cast their radiance across the snowy white linen and the silver cutlery that the Saint of Patience had so carefully set, and on the crumb-strewn plate that had once contained rolls of some description, but they had been eaten—or put somewhere—you did not know, and you didn’t care. The shining bones of Cohort heroes hung as silent observers on either side of the room, and you fancied weariness in their eyeless expressions.
You were not sure how it had happened. It had seemed to begin as all previous dinners had, just more formal. Maybe Augustine’s cooking was more careful and more lavish—he tended to cook in short bursts of violence, serving many parts of a meal but not all at once, which coming from the Drearburh table you found bewildering. You hadn’t been able to focus on what you were eating; only that by the third course, you had to continue or suffer the consequences. You did not really like the taste of wine, which Augustine had served you before, and had not imagined there could be that much of it. He refilled the glasses before you ever finished one, so that you never made it to the bottom of the first.
Now, in the smoking ruins of dinner, he and the Saint of Joy, and God and Ianthe, had moved their seats to a cluster at the end of the table. Ianthe’s First House robes were somewhere on the floor, and her elbows were on the tablecloth, and her cheeks were pink, which gave her a spurious loveliness. Augustine had removed his jacket and was sitting in his white button-up shirt. The tie at his throat had come undone entirely to hang limp and black beneath the points of his dishevelled collar. Mercy had it worst: the knot of hair at her neck had come down, and now was springing loose in pale, rose-gold strands, and she was actually sniggering.
God sat between them. Teacher had his sleeves rolled up to his elbows; if it was a tidier or nicer shirt than he usually wore, you could not tell. The coronet of bones and leaves had fallen from his brow, probably in among the napkins, and his top button was crooked, and every so often he would come around and fill up everyone’s water glasses, and say with increasing earnestness: “Keep drinking water, Harrow,” as though water were the greatest and most impossible boon granted to the Nine Houses. His smile kept crinkling the edges of those white-encircled eyes.
Every so often you would look over the table at the man you intended to kill. The Saint of Duty had drunk just as much as Augustine, but had an expression like stone, with not a button out of place. He had more than once shared a glance with you that you were very afraid was solidarity. You weren’t sure. You were drinking water. You were drinking a great deal of water.
“To absent friends,” said Augustine suddenly, and raised his glass.
And everyone said, “Absent friends,” and raised their glasses, and drank. That was the invention of torture; you had no doubt that either the Third or the Fifth House had come up with the damned rule that whenever you raised your glass and proposed a sentimental toast, everyone had to drink with you. You sipped. You did not have any absent friends.
“And to our cavaliers,” said the Saint of Joy, quite suddenly, after everyone had drunk.
Augustine raised his glass again. “I’ll drink to that. To cavaliers—we didn’t deserve ’em … and they didn’t deserve us, as I always say. To Alfred—Cristabel—Pyrrha—Loveday—Naberius—to them all.”
You saw the Emperor darting an impassive glance at the increasingly disarranged saint at his right, but she did not greet this toast with anger. She simply said, “To Cristabel,” and drained her glass in one single, violent motion. When God briefly pressed the tips of his fingers to the tips of her fingers, she said instantly: “I’m not drunk!!”
“I’d never think it,” he said.
You watched Ianthe take another swig of the pale, apple-yellow liquid in her glass. She leaned over to you and murmured, breathlessly: “This is the greatest night of my life.”
“I’ve drunk enough to Alfred over the years, so let me drink to Cristabel,” said the Saint of Patience, and he drank, and then he swirled the contents of his glass meditatively. “Here’s to Cristabel.”
