What My Husband Doesn’t Know #2
Mallory stands at the edge of the mezzanine, leaning on the golden balustrade.
He’s hatless tonight, but sports a feather in his curls like the steel-knuckled tomboys of Splinter Row.
He looks profoundly out of place, his embroidered suit a shade of lavender that barely skims the outskirts of taste.
A group of gamblers has gathered on the stairs below him, a giggling collection of short skirts and long legs.
Aster can’t tell if their intent is to flatter or torment him, and by the look on his face, he can’t either.
His appearance stalls her just long enough for an usher to pry her empty glass from her hand and replace it.
One more can’t hurt. She takes a gulp, then a deep breath, and decides she’s feeling chivalrous tonight.
It would be poor form to abandon him now, to leave a helpless country boy to be beaten or fleeced.
She glides up the stairs to the mezzanine, preceded by a snake of perfume. The musk gently nudges the idlers out of her way; a hint of mayfly exudate renders their attention fleeting. The girls part for her, politely, unwittingly, and Mallory drips from their awareness like water through a sieve.
“Appreciated, vralen.” He smiles—genuinely, as far as she can tell. “Those girls are on the prowl for a mark.”
“You do look like one, Eir vant Passand.”
He laughs, feather rippling in the glassy light. “That’s fine. I aspire to always be smarter than I look.”
She takes his arm. “Did no one tell you it’s dangerous to go to a show alone?”
“I didn’t come alone.” He glances around as they ascend to the balcony. “But I may leave that way.”
“Elspeth is known to abandon her dates,” Aster says. “Don’t take it personally.”
He plucks a cocktail from a passing tray. “You’re close with her, vralen?”
“We were … in the Sanitarium together.”
“I see.” There is no hint of surprise in his voice, no disgust. “She told me about her eyes. Why her paintings are so…”
Aster smiles, unsure if she should attempt to explain Elspeth’s inexplicable method, the way her streaked oil continues to grow after her brush retreats, clinging to a viewer’s eye well after they look away—an effect only strengthened by the portraits’ incompletion.
Their subjects will infect dreams, manifest in slips of the tongue or in absentminded napkin doodles.
In the Chancellor’s case, a good look at his likeness will have even his opponents parroting his rhetoric.
“Has she ever finished one?” Mallory asks.
“Gorslung’s portrait will be the first,” Aster says. “Only half done and it’s a masterpiece. Hers is the only attempt that ever came close to satisfying him. All the others he’s had burned. The paintings, and their makers.”
“And she still took his commission?”
“You think you can say no to the Laurel Chancellor? If we run into him tonight, you should try.”
“I think I can manage.”
She takes his arm and leads him to the edge of the balcony, where gold shelves sag under steins and highballs and leaning elbows.
Mallory’s gaze passes over the orchestra, the black streaks of soot along the ceiling, the cracks in the frescoes, the beautiful, bulbous fasciations the Great Revival has left in the walls, the hundreds of glass shards hanging in lieu of chandeliers.
The damage is only the latest in a thousand-year history of remodeling.
Every tyrant who’s ever sponsored (or laid siege to) the opera house has left some evidence of their presence, knowing that those names and reigns not committed to music would be forgotten.
The violent tradition stretches back to before kings became chancellors and laurels their crowns, well before Tiliard was thrust into modernity with Vernhardt’s discovery that Catoptric water, under certain circumstances, could burn.
Mallory’s metal-sharp eyes miss nothing. He drinks in the theater not with idle sips, as champagne-cradling tourists are supposed to, but with desperate, pleasureless thirst. He wears the same searching look Elspeth does when she paints, as if beauty were not an abstraction, but sustenance.
“Not many theaters in the countryside?” Aster asks.
“A few.” He narrows his eyes. “I was under the impression there would be seats.”
“There used to be. Nowadays, if you want to sit, you have to talk your way up to paradise.” She gestures to the highest boxes, obscured in curtains and statuary. “But you’d better change first. They’d sooner admit an assassin than a man wearing your jacket.”
He laughs. “I’ve heard hell has better acoustics.”
“Would you like to see it? After the show, I mean. They have a little bar down there, right under the stage.”
“I’d love that.”
The lights dim. The chatter rises with the orchestra. A few dancers appear onstage, and Aster, like the rest of the audience, ignores them. “So, you never did tell me where you were staying, vant Passand.”
“Well, my … father died recently. He left me the keys to his house on Rebirth.”
“Oh dear. Which end?”
“South.” He smiles weakly. “It’s not as bad as you’d think. Just an overgrown garden and a few missing walls. The front door was blown off in the Revival.” He takes a cautious sip of his cocktail. “Makes the keys irrelevant, but it’s still a lovely house. It might surprise you.”
“Are you inviting me back to your place, vant Passand?”
“It’s not as if you can invite me back to yours.”
“Not unless you want to end the night in a prison cell. But if that appeals to you—”
“There you are! I was afraid I’d let you escape.
” The words swoop in from above, and an angel descends shortly after, trailing a gown of blue feathers.
Elspeth appears at Mallory’s side, wearing the scent of sky-lily and a crown of fluttering moths.
“And Aster, thank God you’re here. I wanted to show off this man, but no one within a mile is worthy of ogling him.
They have no taste.” She slips her arm into his with some difficulty; either her perfume or her shoes have elevated her a head above him.
“I promised him a good view of the pas de deux. He’s friends with someone in the corps.
” She whispers the last word as if sharing a dangerous secret. “Who is it, Mal? Tell her.”
“Demetrius Prophet,” he says.
Aster strains to put a role to the name. “The understudy?”
“Thomas the Younger, now,” Elspeth says. “Apparently the principal went a little too hard last night and—well, no one wants to die hungover.”
A stony look crosses Mallory’s face. “Have some faith, vralen.”
“Faith—Mal, I prefer doubt. It’s more dependable.” Elspeth glances over the rabble. “Where’s Flo the Impaler? This’ll be the kind of bloodbath he enjoys.”
“He’s probably around somewhere,” Aster says. “He knows I’m out shopping for his patron tonight.”
“Oh, the Marshal will love Ludovico. I did his publicity nudes—long and wiry as a sight hound—” She waves her hand and her moths take lustrous flight, circling her coiffure.
One veers awry and slaps onto Aster’s forehead with wings the size of oak leaves.
“So sorry, dear. New gift from the hubby. Insists I show it off—you know how he is. Apparently these are some cousin of the burglar moth.”
“Bugbear moth, you mean?” Mallory asks.
Elspeth glances at him. “Isn’t he quaint?” she says. “No perfume, and all dressed up like a gamine, like Little Orphan Clevette—you know, he’s going to let me paint him.”
Dread clenches in Aster’s chest, though it may only be a clump of tissue she’ll cough up later. “What about your patron, El?”
“What he doesn’t know, et cetera.” Her dark eyes turn toward the booths. “I imagine he’s made his appearance by now?”
“I saw him with his contortionist,” Aster offers.
“Oh, lovely. Still trying to squeeze a portrait out of her, is he?”
“Seems like it.”
“Well. He can try his best.” She makes a dismissive gesture with her fan, but there is worry in her voice.
If tonight the Chancellor conceives a satisfactory facsimile of himself, even nine months in the making, it could beat out what Elspeth has to offer.
Paint, no matter how beautiful, how alive, will not win out against flesh.
“I should at least try to save my commission. Not to mention my marriage. Mal, you’re in Aster’s good hands. It was such a pleasure—”
She leans down to kiss Mallory on the cheek, then Aster on the tip of her nose.
She turns and disappears in a fluttering blue glow, as a surge of music flows over the balcony.
The audience cheers. Two bettors throw fists by the orchestra pit, and the chorus parts in preparation for the final act.
The upper boxes rattle with anticipation, with laughter, with arguments and fervent copulation.
“Down south,” Mallory says, “they say Tiliarders race their ballerinas like dogs.”
“That’s uncharitable,” Aster replies. “It’s more of a pit fight.”
“Are you a fan?”
“I try to be, since I’m here so often. I’ll watch anything, so long as there’s no consumptive heroine.” He chuckles, and she basks in the music of it. “I enjoy a good Aufhocker. Romances, histories … and I come for the weekly reportage, since the Marshal won’t. He detests all of this.”
“I heard he still carries off a singer every once in a while.”
Aster prickles, wondering what seedy rumors Elspeth has already sown in his head. “He does occasionally request private performances.”
“Performances of what nature?”
“Of a private nature, vant Passand.”
He frowns. His lips part, as if readying another query, but a cheer turns his attention to the stage.
Ludovico Pelagos glides from the wing, buoyed by a wave of applause.
Nearly every inch of skin glints with gems, each facet a fallen antagonist, each gold band a successful season.
Wearing enough wealth to pay his debts a dozen times over, he dances only for the love of the art, a love that has made many great men a great deal of money.
The doomed understudy is a black-haired, pale man, a little lankier than Aster expects, but startlingly handsome in the regalia of Thomas the Younger.
He circles his enemy with self-assured grace, stride long and slow as a crane’s.
As he opens the duet with a husky baritone, murmurs ripple through the audience.
Someone hisses as the princes retreat to opposite ends of the stage, taking their places on opposing sides of an ancient war.
Aster raises her lorgnette. Demetrius magnifies in her sight, long-nosed and a little devilish.
Her heart races, though not for his striking looks, nor for the tragedy of his upcoming defeat, but for the cravat he has tied at his throat.
Tucked against his bare skin, far more intimate than a handkerchief in a breast pocket, the embroidery is unmistakably Mallory’s.