10. Chapter 10
Bastien
The bidding is at ninety thousand, and I lift two fingers off the arm of my chair—a hundred and twenty—for the pleasure of watching Herrick’s face fall.
The lot is a silver wren in a silver cage, made by a Geneva watchmaker two hundred years ago for a queen who died before it was delivered. Wind the key and nothing happens—the mechanism seized up longer ago than anyone alive can remember. Nobody knows how to repair it, but I don’t care. I want it.
Herrick bids one thirty. I go to one sixty without waiting for the auctioneer to find me. Somewhere to my left, someone laughs low into their glass.
“One sixty,” the auctioneer says. “Against you, my lord Herrick.”
Herrick eyes me across three rows of the oldest predators on the continent. He’s weighing what the bird is worth against what it costs to bid against a Val-Serein who’s decided to play. He folds his hands. The hammer comes down.
Scattered applause, the dry kind. A mortal attendant in house uniform carries the cage to the settlement table. The wren sways mute on its perch. I’m pleased out of all proportion to the object. It’s a dead bird I paid too much for. I don’t care. It’s mine now.
“A hundred and sixty thousand, Bastien?” Odile arrives at my shoulder with two glasses and gives me one. “For a bird that doesn’t sing.”
“It sang for a queen.”
“She died before it ever sang for her. You know the provenance better than I do.”
She settles into the chair beside mine as the next lot comes out—a saint’s fingerbone, allegedly, in an ornate setting worth more than the saint.
The young man who poured her champagne is already back at her elbow, refilling a glass that’s nearly full, and she doesn’t send him away.
Fair, decorative, entirely unnecessary. She’ll have forgotten his name by the time she sends him home before dawn, and he doesn’t yet know that.
“It’s a fake,” she says, not looking away from the floor. “Third one I’ve seen sold as real this decade.” Odile spends more time at these evenings than I do, and she watches the room. “At this rate that saint had a dozen fingers. I’ve seen two of the real ones.”
“I’m not interested in the finger. I got my bird.”
“You outbid Herrick for the pleasure of it. I watched you do it.”
“Herrick’s face was worth eighty of the hundred and sixty.”
“Mm.” She drinks. Her eyes stay on me over the rim, pale gray, older than the building. “Do you know what you were doing the last time I sat beside you at one of these?”
“Improving the average of the company.”
“You were checking your watch every four minutes and sighing between lots.” She sets the glass down on the arm between us.
“Tonight you’ve bid on four lots, ruined Herrick’s week, and corrected the auctioneer’s Latin.
You’ve been dead behind the eyes for decades.
Tonight you’re not. Whatever it is, keep doing it. ”
“I’ve no idea what you mean.”
“No. Of course not.”
She lets it rest there.
The fingerbone goes to a collector from the eastern courts.
A tapestry comes out next, then a case of letters from a dead emperor to a mistress history missed.
I lift my fingers once for the letters, then let them go still on the arm of the chair when the bidding climbs past a young one who wants them badly enough to shake.
Tonight I can afford to lose on purpose.
A server glides by with fresh flutes, pausing to check that we have enough in our glasses. Fair-haired, quick hands, gone again—and for a moment I’m not in this room.
Firelight instead of chandeliers. A fist of white cotton. A sound she tried so hard to stifle. And a taste I can’t get back, no matter how I reach for it.
The auctioneer says a number twice before I hear it. I’ve lost the thread of the lot entirely—a bronze something, already hammering down—and Odile is watching me with those pale eyes.
“That good, is it?” she asks.
“The champagne?” I swirl my glass. “It’s tolerable.”
“I’m not talking about the champagne, Bastien.” She taps her fingertip against her flute. “I’m talking about your distraction.”
“My attention span is not your concern.”
She rolls her eyes. “Ah, mon Dieu! Impossible man. I will extract it from you sooner or later. You know this.”
I shrug and turn back to the floor, aware that I’m sitting with my society’s elite while my attention is in a blood den two hours away.
I resent it. Whatever the taste of her does, it has no business affecting me this way.
“Lot forty,” the auctioneer says, and someone takes the chair at my other side without being offered it.
Cologne, applied wholesale. Under it, the wrong scent for this room: young blood, fed recently and badly. Turned, and not long ago by our measures, sixty years at the outside. New suit, new watch, restless in a way our kind seldom is.
My teeth clench.
“Lord Val-Serein. Sterling.” He holds out a hand. “We haven’t been introduced.”
“No,” I agree, ignoring the hand.
He laughs as though I’ve been witty. His eyes keep moving—the floor, the exits, the better seats—a creature monitoring a room he can’t read.
“That was a statement, that bird.” He nods toward the settlement table. “A hundred sixty for a broken trinket. I respect it. You’re a man who buys what he wants, doesn’t matter what the label says.”
“Yes,” I say, watching the auction.
“See anything else you like here?” he presses.
“Perhaps,” I say.
“Or would your real interests lie elsewhere?” He leans in, and his voice drops into what he believes is discretion.
“The private houses. The specialty stock… I’ve heard of one that keeps vintages you can’t get anywhere licensed.
” A pause, testing how that lands. “And they say you’ve been slumming, my lord. Drinking off the books.”
Putain.
It didn’t take long for word to get out.
“They say a great many things.” I keep watching the auction.
“Sure. Sure they do.” He laughs again, too loud for the room, the kind that wants an audience. “But between us…where would a man go to find something special?”
“You’ve mistaken me for a colleague.” I don’t raise my voice. I don’t look at him. “The error is understandable. You’re new, and from a distance we look like the same kind of thing.”
I turn my head then and let him have my full attention, and whatever he finds in it takes the smile off his face.
“We aren’t. Age isn’t the difference. Everything you know, someone sold you.
Go sit with the people who fund your existence.
And if a rumor about my appetites reaches me again wearing your voice, I’ll take it up with your sponsors. You won’t enjoy how.”
He manages a nod. He leaves without managing anything else.
Odile watches him all the way back to the table he arrived with.
“Meridian,” she snorts. “That goddamn organization will turn anyone who can afford the fee these days. Five new feeders in the past five years alone. There are wagers on which of their clients survives the decade.”
“Not many of them, I imagine.” I have little time for the elders who sell their signatures for turnings. There are reasons we have rules about who can make one of our kind. Sterling is one of them.
“None of them, if you ask me.” She studies me over her glass. “He wasn’t entirely wrong about one thing, though. People are saying you’ve been slumming it. Where’s that coming from?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Mm-hmm.” Not a question this time. Just an answer. She doesn’t push, which isn’t like her.
Vasile is cleverer than the bowing suggests.
A house like that has one asset worth more than anything on its shelves—its client list—and a Seigneur who visits regularly is proof of quality, murmured into the right rooms at a markup.
He’s selling my name to sell what’s behind it, and every rumor he plants makes me more the thing I’m pretending to be.
When the Court finally burns that house down, they’ll take his whole ledger of buyers with it.
I turn the empty glass once in my hand and don’t remember picking it up.
I go over the terms of my own arrangement instead.
First call. I drink before anyone else does, on the days I’m there.
It says nothing about the days I’m not. I built it that way on purpose, so I wouldn’t price my own curiosity into the deal and hand Vasile a number he could work with. It felt clever, signing it.
She’s alone in that building. My cleverness is the only thing standing between her and whoever else decides they want a taste.
“You’ve gone quiet,” Odile says.
“I’m thinking.”
“About a woman.”
I don’t correct that.
“You’re leaving,” she says, certain of it. I’m already standing. I don’t know when that happened.
“I have an early evening tomorrow.”
“Yes.” She nods, rising too. “Yes, I’m sure you do.”
“There will be a time when I tell you more, Odile,” I say. “Now is not that time.”
She smiles. “Take the bird, Bastien.”
The young man reappears at her shoulder with her coat. She doesn’t look at him, just extends her arm back for the sleeve, already done with both of us for the evening.
I take the cage from the settlement table on my way out, my fingers finding the cold bars before I’ve decided to touch them. The silent wren rocks on its perch. The street is cold and empty down to the car. I should be thinking about Vasile, and the Court, and the uses of a rumor.
Instead I think about who else that rumor might reach, and what it will cost her if it does.