Kushiel's Chosen - Jacqueline Carey [61]
I felt my arms caught from behind in an unexpectedly strong grip, elbows drawn together. Diànne's breasts pressed against my back, her voice laughing at my ear. "It seems," she whispered, "my brother is not so tired as he thought.
Your Delaunay's machinations are an inspiration to the scions of Naamah!"
So it seemed, for I continued to inspire them for a good while longer.
One does not reckon, at such times, the cost to one's limbs and joints; there is a limit to the pliancy of the mortal form. I daresay I surpassed it that day, although I have kept myself limber, ever since Delaunay first ordered Alcuin and me to study as tumblers. Still, it was a fine time, for brother and sister alike were wholly without shame in the arts of Naamah, and had honed their desires on the fine edge of Kushiel's cruelty. Some things I learned, and it accomplished what I set out, purging my mind for a time of its endless workings.
For all of that, my bed was still lonely when I went to sleep at the end of the day, and I still woke shuddering from nightmares.
NINETEEN
Winter spun out its length in grey, dreary days, chill wind and bluster, and only sometimes a snow that transformed the City into a vista of pristine whiteness, shining towers and icy minarets. I had become quite the fashion by this time, and I accepted assignations as readily as my swift-healing flesh allowed, choosing sometimes at whim and sometimes out of covert interest, so that no pattern might be discerned in my choices. My patrons were noble-born, scions of Elua and his Companions, diverse in their desires, and not a one displeasing to me.
Everything I had dreamed of having as a young adept in Delaunay's service, I had. Poets wrote odes in my honor, praising my beauty and charms; indeed, one slept three nights on my doorstep, nearly dying of cold and exposure, until Fortun dragged him bodily to his home. My patrons sent me gifts unbidden, curiosities and trinkets of varyingvalue. Of money, I had no want; it flowed like a river. I paid my retainers and servants generously, and my debt to my glumly unsurprised factor. I invested in a Serenissiman enterprise, on the strength of a vague foreboding. I gave, quietly, considerable sums to Naamah's Temple, and made certain a portion of it went to sanctuaries in Namarre devastated in the war, where a captive priestess had once given her body to win me a few precious minutes of freedom in which to warn the fortress of Troyes-le-Mont.
I paid visits to Favrielle no Eglantine, who had taken to freedom like a fish to water and designed for me any number of spectacular gowns with the fierce, focused joy of a genius at work. And when I was not doing any of these things, I met with the Rebbe Nahum ben Isaac and bent my mind to the difficult tasks he set me, droning Habiru verses for hour upon hour, while he chewed his beard and glowered at me.
And I was, quietly, unhappy.
No more pieces of the puzzle fell into place, no matter how I juggled them in my mind. No matter how diligently my chevaliers drank and diced and delved, not a single guardsman from Troyes-le-Mont was found. No word was forthcoming from the Prefect of the Cassiline Brotherhood; not in answer to Joscelin's query, and not in answer to the Royal Archivist's. I gave myself up to violent ecstasies at the hands of patron upon patron, all the while waiting and watching and listening in that tiny, Delaunay-trained corner of my mind I held back, but none divulged the key to make sense of it all.
Joscelin and I spoke less and less.
Somewhere, Melisande was laughing.
I thought a great deal of Hyacinthe in those days, and sometimes I missed him so terribly I ached with it. It had been our youthful dream, he and I: The Queen of Courtesans