34
Felix lingered at the edge of the crowd, letting the chaos buffet him from side to side. The word was spreading fast. A crowd had gathered thick around Valorus, who seemed too stunned to register his good fortune. In spite of everything, Felix almost smiled.
One face was missing, though. He hadn’t seen the centurion emerge from her chamber. He suspected she was watching from afar until the dust settled.
Or she doesn’t want to see you, he thought. Well, bad luck. He needed to see her. There were things he couldn’t leave unsaid.
Felix steeled his spine, then slipped into the private corridors. He knocked on the centurion’s door, knowing she’d sense the fading shimmers of his magic.
“Come,” she called.
He slipped inside and found Gloriana at the empty desk. Had she been less the soldier, he knew her head would have been in her hands. As it was, she sat tall, propped up by twenty years of habit.
Felix strode to her desk and stood before her. After such a night, he fancied neither of them had the heart for prevarication.
“Well,” the centurion murmured, “you helped her.”
“No, ma’am. I helped you both.”
“By handing the depraedeon to a criminal?”
“Better that than handing it to the Praetorium,” he said as gently as he could. “Or to you.”
She didn’t flinch, but nor did she lash back. She only stared at the wall, as though unwilling to look at him.
“In truth, ma’am, it’s safer in her hands,” he went on. “She can’t wield arcana, so she hasn’t any incentive to steal it from others. Nor is it in her interests to let the grayside run wild. She’ll keep the peace.”
“And you believe I wouldn’t have.”
“I don’t know what to believe, ma’am,” said Felix, his heart twisting even as he said it. “I know you’ve bought the glory for the feats of others. Many others. Given the chance, would you have taken the powers that—”
“No!” she interrupted, coming sharply to her feet. “For the Pantheon’s sake, Felix, don’t you remember? I didn’t force you. I didn’t force any of them!”
There—anger, at last. It filled him with a curious relief. There was honesty in anger. Gloriana breathed out hard, grief chasing fury across her face.
“Whether you believe me or not, I did it for you. All of you. Do you remember how you used to feel at the battlefront? All of us, standing together, about to charge?”
“Unafraid. Unassailable,” he said. A spasm crossed her face. Her jaw tightened.
“What else could make you fly straight into the face of firing cannons? You knew you’d risk mutilation. Death. Worse.” Her gaze flicked up to him for a heartbeat. “Believing that you fought beside some . . . living legend . . . it made you brave enough to do it all the same.”
“We’d have done it for Carintheum. For the peace—”
“But you wouldn’t,” she cut in, bitterness hardening her voice. “No one believes in the Pax Carintheus. Not when it matters. Were you thinking of the empire when you stepped into the path of those missiles?”
It shocked him silent for a moment—to hear Gloriana Valora, of all people, rip down that rallying banner with a few jagged words. Still, he couldn’t deny it.
“No,” he said. “I thought of my comrades.”
“It’s for them.” She raised her head and met his eyes at last. “The empire can hang. It’s always for them.”
“But . . . ma’am, if you don’t . . .”
“If I don’t believe in the cause, then why do I carry the banner?
” She gave a harsh laugh and shook her head.
“We’re cogs in a vast machine, Felix. It’ll keep turning, with or without us, because that’s what it does.
You can try and struggle your way loose, but fall out the wrong side, and it’ll crush you and keep rolling on. ”
She turned hard on the spot, as though fighting the urge to curse something to ash. At length, she mastered herself and faced him with softer, sadder eyes.
“I saw what happened to soldiers heartsick of war,” she said.
“They’d throw down arms and be executed, or give up the battle and let the enemy do the job, and I couldn’t do a damned thing about it.
If I can keep them brave and faithful, though, I can keep them alive.
I don’t care how. I’ve lied about many things, Felix, but not about my loyalty to you. To all of you.”
For a while, he said nothing, thoughts turning over in his mind. In the end, though, it didn’t come down to reason. He’d seen her risk her life beside her company a hundred times. It meant all the more for knowing that she was no more invincible than the rest of them. It was true.
“And loyalty covers many sins,” he said at last. “Besides . . . Carintheum seems fairly blissful in its ignorance. I wouldn’t make it wise.”
The centurion watched him for a moment, as though waiting for the trapdoor to open beneath her. Then, for the first time in his life, Felix extended a hand to her. It had always been a bow or a salute in days gone by. The gesture was something close to insubordination, but she took it all the same.
“Loyalty always, Felix Aurelias,” she finished. “That, I promise.”
One week later
“Well, well. Look at that, Lysander. They’re releasing you from Haideum Castle,” said Leo, reeling out his news scroll.
They sat at the heights of Divinitas Tower as sunset bathed Carintheum with violet gold. The wreckage of a conquered meal lay between them. They’d reserved a table at the summit of the city’s tallest tower, on a balcony that glided slowly around the outside of the spire.
“Decent of them,” said Lysander, taking a sip of his tea. “Shame the rest of you are dead, or I’d invite you for a drink to celebrate.”
“Indeed,” Myria sighed, “but our names are washed posthumously pure.”
It was gratifying, really, the things one could induce the Magister-General to do when the right person put a word in his ear. That said, when the person was Gloriana, and the word was do it or die, it wasn’t a surprise.
“Ooh, pudding,” said Cassia, bringing them back to the matter of the hour.
The waitress glided in with an armful of desserts fresh from paradise. Myria beamed and set her fork to a swan carved from honeyed sesame. She had no further need of the hollowed-out face and figure she’d brought from prison, and she’d been working deliciously hard to be rid of them ever since.
“Reckon you’ll get back into surgery, then, Ly?” Cassia asked between spoonfuls of a candied sea-seraph egg.
“Perhaps,” he said, “but I’ll be occupied in, ah . . . administering his lordship’s estate for some while to come.”
“I’ll lend a hand, of course, liquidating the poor fellow’s assets,” Myria said solemnly. She fought a smirk as her mind wandered to the vault they’d cut in the silver lining. There lay all the treasures of the grayside, quite beyond the reach of Carintheum.
“Well, enjoy yourselves,” Cassia said breezily. “I’m off to buy an airship.”
“Low Gods have mercy,” Leo muttered.
“Button it. They’re things of beauty. Roaming the continent, free as you like, and all those engines . . .”
“You’ll be using it for smuggling within a fortnight.”
“A wench needs an occupation. What about you, you layabout?”
“I’m not too philosophical to be content with the life of a gentleman of leisure,” Leo said, examining the play of light through his wine. “It’s an art I’m certain I’ll excel in. Myria?”
“Oh, I intend to lead a reformed life,” she said with perfect innocence. Easier that than thinking up a proper answer.
“You’ll go mad,” said Cassia.
“I may take another bath,” she added.
“Well, that’s settled,” Leo said, then topped up his wine. “To the devious!”
“To the devious,” they chorused, clashing glasses in midair.
“And to the worst of us,” he added, turning his raffish smile on Myria. “Sorry we doubted you.”
It was, perhaps, a little self-indulgent to join the toast. She did it all the same.
The declarations grew sillier, and the bottle emptier, until the sun set in a blaze of gilded crimson. Night fell, warm and summer perfumed, and the music played on from the tower. Feeling the need of fresh air, Myria retreated to the edge of the balcony.
There, she leaned against the balustrade and smiled. All the lights of Carintheum stretched out before her—the strings of phaetons’ headlamps glinting down the roads, the blaze of the opera house windows shimmering on the water, and the field of stars flung wide above.
The scent of cypress reached her on the breeze, and all at once, her mind swept three years back. She stood at the summit of Elysius Tower, with a thousand-foot drop at her toes and the end of her old life an hour away.
If you’d known . . . she thought. A shrewd smile touched her all the same.
With a hush of silk and spice, Lysander came to the rail beside her. The memory intensified at the sight. He looked like his old self again, from the silvered hair to the immaculate ivy-green coat.
“Evening, my dear,” he said. “You’re looking dashed close to philosophy.”
“It was the wine wot dunnit, m’lud,” she said blearily. He gave a low laugh.
“In all sincerity, though, Myria, what will you do now?”
“I’ve a waistline to expand and a hoard to gloat over. I shan’t be short of occupations.”
“You’ve an interesting construction of sincerity.”
“I think I’d make a rather good lady of leisure,” she added.
Could be true, she thought. Never really had the chance to find out. Even in Halcyon, right from the off, working away . . .
“You’ll have a virtuoso in the art on hand,” said Lysander, gesturing to Leo. “Still, I . . . have some sense of what it’s like, you know. All those years with a single end in mind, hardly expecting to survive, and then, suddenly, it works . . .”
Myria took his arm and leaned her head against his shoulder. It was true enough. Some part of her had never quite believed she’d pull it off. Still, it was a problem for another day, deciding what to do next. For the first time in a good long while, she knew there was a next.
“Myria?” he prompted.
“I’ll muddle through,” she said with a lingering smile. “What do any of us do?”
“Fairly said, old girl.”