Authors: Sarah Monette
Powers and saints, I was mad at him. Not so much about him making a pass at me because, tell you the truth, I’d been expecting that for decads. Who the fuck else did he have? I mean, me, I could find a chambermaid or a barmaid or some gal willing to trade my face for the chance to fuck somebody new, but the further north we got, the less we saw guys who were openly molly, and the more we saw people giving the hairy eyeball to guys who looked like they
might
be. Like Felix. It wasn’t safe. I knew it, and he knew it, and he was still pretty fucked up about everything, so I wasn’t sure he’d’ve gone hunting anyway.
But there I was, and I knew how he felt about me even if I didn’t understand it and didn’t share it, so I wasn’t surprised at him coming on to me, and I didn’t blame him or nothing. No, what had me too mad to see straight was what he did when I turned him down. It wasn’t even the part where he was getting back at me by using the binding- by- forms, it was the part where he was using me to punish himself. I don’t even know what he thought he needed to be punished for, but I’d knocked him flat on his ass, and he’d practically said thank you. That wasn’t about him wanting to fuck me. Not even a little. That was about him using what ever tool was handy to hurt himself.
I wanted to yell at him— no, more’n that. I wanted to howl at him, scream at him, beat him up for real, make him fucking admit that I wasn’t a tool for him to use. I wasn’t a knife, and I wasn’t a fucking clockwork bear, and if he wanted to hurt himself, he should have the common fucking courtesy not to use me to do it. Of course, I also wanted to pin him down and sit on him until he explained to me just
why
he thought he needed to be hurt, and then sit on him some more until he listened when I told him he’d already been hurt plenty and should just let it the fuck go.
But, you know, that wasn’t going to work, so I’d let it go, as best I could— but there was one thing I was hanging onto, and that was that I was not fucking apologizing this time. He wanted things right between us, he was going to have to do the work himself. And he was going to have to come out and say he was sorry. The looks he was giving me, and the awful, meek way he was creeping around like he thought I was going to hit him again and this time without being told to— that was all fine, pretty much standard for him when he knew he’d fucked up. But it wasn’t enough, and I was not going to fucking cave. Not this time.
Mildmay’s anger was like a third person sitting between us— which was all the more unfortunate as there was barely room for two. The stagecoach was indeed exactly like a diligence, and apparently the drivers practiced the same abominable custom of overbooking. Either that or the need to reach Bernatha had become an epidemic. We were crammed together, shoulder to shoulder, and I couldn’t decide if it made me feel better or worse that he let me have the outside seat, so that my other shoulder was against the side of the coach. Sick with gratitude summed it up, and I applied myself rather desperately to the conversation of the other passengers, preferring even the most tedious of provincial gossip to either my own thoughts or Mildmay’s black glower.
The man across from me, stout and gray- haired, was silent all the morning and half the afternoon, but finally, when most of the other passengers had subsided into uncomfortable dozes, I managed to draw him out about his country’s recent history. He’d been too young to fight when the Corambins invaded forty years ago: “Was only a boy. But my brother answered Lord Seaward’s call. Should be his farm by rights, but he never came back.”
That war had been about magic, although he was unclear on the difference between Caloxan warlocks and Corambin magicians. Either he truly didn’t know, or he didn’t want to discuss it with me— all he said was “Warlocks used bad magic,” and I didn’t press him.
It hadn’t lasted long— not nearly as long as the Insurgence— and in general (he suggested although did not say outright) Caloxans were glad of the Corambin thaumaturgical reforms. The trouble was all po liti cal.
Corambis had done away with its kings hundreds of years before, “and I suppose they thought was the only right way of things. But their dukes and such aren’t like our margraves, and maybe our king wasn’t like their king either. So King James had to go, we all saw that, but a Corambin governor in his place was no good answer. And the Moot—” He snorted. “Have never seen that the Moot does anything but fight amongst themselves like a flock of chickens.”
So the margraves agreed on nothing, the governors came and went, corrupt some years, incompetent others, and Gerrard Hume grew up and decided it was his place to do something about it.
“I saw him once,” the gray- haired man said as we came into the town where we would spend the night. “My eldest boy was with me, and there was the start of all
that
trouble. But is true. He was . . .” He broke off, groping for a word. “He was
kingly
. And he’d come to places like Arbalest— which has not seen a single governor, not once in forty indictions— and he’d listen when people told him what was wrong.” He broke off again, and I waited, understanding that I was watching an inarticulate man trying to say something important.
“He wanted to make things
better
,” he said finally. “I don’t think he ever had a chance— not once Bernatha cast their lot for the Convocation, that’s for sure— but I do wish he had.”
And then the coach drew up in the yard of a hotel called the Blue Ox, and we disembarked in a graceless scramble. Rooms and food alike were unappealing and overpriced, but the worst thing about that night was that Mildmay was still not speaking to me. I slept fitfully, poorly, and when the overworked maid came around to bang on everyone’s door in the morning, I knew suddenly and completely that I couldn’t bear another day like this.
I blurted, “What do you want me to say?”
My voice was louder than I’d meant it to be; I startled myself almost as much as I startled him. There were times when I might have taken a petty plea sure in making him jump, but now it was just another thing I’d gotten wrong. It took him a moment to turn from the window; when he did, he didn’t say anything at first, simply looked at me, face unreadable, eyes like stone. Then he sighed, and some indefinable tension seemed to bleed away from his shoulders. He said, “You could start with ‘I’m sorry.’ ”
I stared at him.
“What? You gonna try and tell me you don’t know you fucked up?”
I shook my head dumbly.
“Or don’t I rate an apology?” he said, and he meant it to be sarcasm, but I heard true bitterness and remembered unbidden a dozen separate occasions of deliberate cruelty, things I’d done or said to hurt him, to make him feel as if I didn’t care about him, as if he wasn’t worth treating decently.
I stumbled over the words as I said them: “I’m sorry.”
And what hurt even more was his obvious surprise.
“Okay,” he said. And then he tilted his head a little, eyes not as hard but dangerously thoughtful. “D’you know what it is you’re sorry for, or are you just trying to get me to let it go?”
I felt my face flood crimson, and I couldn’t meet his eyes any longer. “I’m sorry for making a pass at you,” I said.
“But that ain’t why I’m mad.”
And I was staring at him again. “It isn’t?”
“Well, a little,” he admitted. “But it ain’t that. It’s the other thing.”
“The other . . . Oh.”
“Yeah.” And he waited.
“I . . . I’m sorry about that, too.”
There was a moment when I thought he was going to tell me that wasn’t good enough—
Make me believe you mean it, dearest,
Malkar’s voice whispered in the back of my head— but then, all at once, he said, “Okay.” He didn’t smile, of course, but something changed like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, and I knew he had forgiven me. Again. I wondered if I could manage to deserve it this time.
The stagecoach’s likeness to a diligence extended to the extreme discomfort of the journey, and by the time we reached Bernatha, it was obvious that Mildmay was worse again. The stagecoach had not been good for him. When he let me help him down in the stable yard of the Gull and Gringolet, I knew he was in a bad way.
“We’ll stay here to night,” I said. It was already past sundown; the last hour of the journey was an experience I would go well out of my way to avoid having ever again.
“Be ’spensive,” Mildmay said thickly. He was shivering, and I hoped he wasn’t developing an ague.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said— and nearly stumbled over my own feet when he said, “Okay,” and actually leaned on me for support.
We should have stayed in Arbalest, I thought— but he’d been impatient to keep going, and he’d truly seemed better. Even last night in the Blue Ox, I hadn’t noticed anything wrong. I wondered now, helping him up the stairs into the long, narrow foyer of the hotel, how much of that had been due to his honestly appalling skill at hiding any sign of illness. I wasn’t going to yell at him when he was sick, but I rather badly wanted to.
The clerk demanded money in advance; given their prices—“expensive” was a kind word— I wondered if they’d had a lot of trouble with people skipping out on the bill. Mildmay counted the money out owlishly. It wasn’t all we had. Not quite.
The room itself was a grandiose closet. I helped Mildmay take off his shoes, got him as comfortable as I could, and then went down to the bar. We couldn’t stay here another night, and I needed local knowledge if we weren’t going to end up somewhere just as bad.
The patrons of the bar were an odd mix: stagecoach passengers; local gamblers playing what looked like the game Mildmay had so disliked in Arbalest and probably hoping to lure in some gulls fresh off the coach; and a variety of prostitutes, mostly women but a few men, their shabby- gaudy finery not so different from what they would have been wearing in a Lower City bar, likewise hoping for gulls. The prostitutes were the people I needed to talk to; they would know every cheap hotel in Bernatha. But getting them to talk to me was a different matter.
Oh, they were
interested
in me. They started drifting my direction as soon as I came in; I sat with a glass of the cheapest wine I could stand to drink and watched the almost invisible struggle over who was going to get to approach me first.
A girl won; she was sixteen or seventeen, fine- boned for a Corambin, with curly, pale blond hair and dark eyes. She had a long nose and her jaw wasn’t nearly as heavy as the Corambin norm; she was actually quite pretty, although not, as they said in Pharaohlight, my type.
She caught my eye— or, to be more accurate, I allowed her to catch my eye— and said, “You must be a long way from home, wherever home is for you. Want some company?” Her accent, like the clerk’s and the bartender’s, was quite different from that of the stagecoach passengers and the people in Arbalest, more liquid, musical, with a roll to the
r
’s, and the
s
’s shading into
th
’s.
I waved her to a seat. “What’s your name?”
“What ever you want it to be, gorgeous.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh please.”
Indignation straightened her spine. I leaned across the table and said, “I don’t do women, and I’m not in the mood for that kind of company to night anyway, but I’ll pay you for information.”
I watched emotions flicker across her face; then she settled back in her chair. She sounded much older and harder when she said, “What kind of information and how much?”
“Let’s start with what I already asked you: what’s your name?”
She gave me a narrow look, then nodded sharply, more to herself than me, and said, “My name’s Corbie.” And when I raised my eyebrows at her, she added, almost sullenly, “Gartrett Corbie. What’s yours?”
“Felix Harrowgate.”
“Huh. All right, Mr. Harrowgate. Let’s see your money.”
I put down a banshee.
“Huh,” she said again. But she leaned forward, putting her elbows on the table, and blew a stray strand of hair out of her eyes. “Well, you bought yourself some good answers there. So, hit me. What do you want to know?”
“To start with, the name of a cheap and honest hotel.”
That made her laugh. “You’re asking
me
?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know.”
She tilted her head a little, frowning at me. “Well, I do know. But how’d you
know
I’d know?”
“Because,” I said tiredly, “I know how prostitution works.”
Her eyebrows shot up, and she leaned even closer. “Are you looking to get into the game here?”
She’d heard more than I’d meant her to, but I couldn’t deny her inference. She was, after all, perfectly correct. “No.”
“You’d probably do all right,” she said, and I cringed a little at the assessment in her voice.
“I am
not
—” I caught myself. “We don’t intend to be in Bernatha long.”
“We?”
“My brother and I. But we’ll be here some days, and—”
“And you can’t stay here. I hear you. So. A hotel I’d stay at, or a hotel I’d take a fish to?”
“Fish” was clearly the Bernathan word for a prostitute’s client—“trick” at home. “A hotel you’d stay at,” I said.
I’d gone up a notch or two in her estimation, by the way she nodded, and she went up a notch or two in mine, because she thought about it for several moments before she said, “I’d go with the Fiddler’s Fox, if it was me. It’s in the House of Chastity, but maybe you won’t mind that so much.”
“I beg your pardon? It’s what?”
“You’ve never been to Bernatha before,” she said, not asking.
“No, I haven’t.”
“Strewth,” she said, but mildly. I supposed newcomers were a part of life for any prostitute who worked the Gull and Gringolet. “All right. I give all my customers value for money.” And she winked at me so lewdly I felt myself blush.
Her explanation was swift, succinct, and smooth with long practice, if not as detailed as I would have liked. Bernatha was a free city, divided into eight districts; the one we were in, St. Melior, was apparently not considered a proper part of the city, although it was definitely Bernathan rather than Corambin— or Caloxan, and after only a moment’s consideration, I abandoned the thought of asking her to explain the relationship of a “free city” to either government. The rest of Bernatha was on a set of three islands; the main island was accessible, at certain times of day, by a causeway from St. Melior, but otherwise, all traffic was by boat. The three islands were divided into seven Houses— which were something like districts, as I was accustomed to them in Mélusine, and something like guilds. The north island was the House of Honesty, being the home of the judicial system and the city government and also the prison of Stonewater. The south island was the House of Mercy, and was largely taken up, most confusingly, by the House of Mercy, which was, Gartrett Corbie told me proudly, the largest hospital in Corambis. The remaining five houses— Prudence, Patience, Loyalty, Chastity, and Charity— shared the main island and all of them tithed St. Melior, although I couldn’t make out from what Corbie said whether it was that they paid St. Melior or St. Melior paid them or possibly, in some labyrinthine fashion, both.
Corbie, like her colleagues, was a member (the word she used was “pledge”) of the House of Chastity. She was very proud of this, and I gathered it was something one had to work for. “So are there prostitutes who aren’t pledges?”
“Oh sure. Lots of ’em.” She jerked her chin at a pair of girls on the other side of the bar, double- teaming one of my fellow passengers from the stagecoach. “But the upright dens won’t take you unless you’re pledged. So you’re on your own. And mostly, you don’t last long.”
“Upright dens?” I said.
She made an impatient noise behind her teeth and said,
“Respectable brothels,”
in what I felt safe assuming was meant as a parody of my voice. “You know, places where your crib has a
lock
on the door.”
“Ah,” I said. “Quite.”
There were hotels in a number of the Houses, but not all of them were pledged. The Fiddler’s Fox was pledged, although— confusingly again— not to the House of Chastity. “Loyalty, I think,” Corbie said, as if it wasn’t particularly important.
There wasn’t much point in asking Corbie most of my other questions, but there was one I couldn’t avoid: “How expensive are doctors?”
“Are you sick, Mr. Harrowgate?”
“Not me. But I’m afraid my brother has, um . . .” I remembered the word Mrs. Fawn had used. “Pleuriny.”
From the grimace she made, even if pleuriny wasn’t exactly the Winter Fever, it was just as serious. “A pledged physician- practitioner will cost you an arm and a leg, you not being pledged yourself. And anybody good won’t be cheap. But you want to be careful. Make ’em show you their practitioner’s license before you let ’em anywhere near your brother. If you go to the Fiddler’s Fox, ask Mrs. Lettice. She’ll know who you can trust.”
Custom was picking up, and Corbie was starting to fidget. “Thank you,” I said and pushed the banshee across the table to her.
She looked nearly shocked. “That’s
it
?”
I shrugged. “You answered my questions.” There was no need to tell her I was buying her goodwill along with her answers. I had a lowering presentiment we were going to need all the goodwill we could get, and I knew how fast news traveled among prostitutes— nearly as fast as among courtiers.
“Are you sure you don’t want anything else?” she said, and I might have been offended except that she sounded more worried than seductive.
“I’m sure,” I said, standing up, and smiled at her. “You’ve been very helpful, Miss Corbie. Thank you.” At the door, I glanced back; she was still staring at me, looking baffled.
Mildmay was awake when I came in, and obviously wretched.
“You’re sick,” I said, mostly because I was curious about whether he would continue to deny it.
“Yeah,” he said. “Sorry to be such a pain.” Not all of the color in his face was from the fever.
“Don’t apologize to me,” I said, more sharply than I meant to, and he recoiled a little. Add bullying the sick to my list of virtues. “Anyway, it should be me apologizing to you.”
“How d’you figure?”
“I’m the one who dumped you in the St. Grainne.”
“You didn’t
dump
me,” he said. “I jumped.” And he even managed to sound indignant, although the effort caused an ugly coughing fit.
When he’d recovered enough that he wasn’t actually panting for breath, I said, “And anyway I know you didn’t get sick on purpose.”
“Damn straight,” he said. “Hey, Felix?”
“Yes?”
“Where are we? Did we make it to Bernatha okay?”
“Yes,” I said, and swallowed against the sudden knot of panic and pity in my throat. “We’re in a hotel called the Gull and Gringolet.”
“Okay, good,” he said and shut his eyes.