The Bone Palace - Amanda Downum [20]
Savedra snorted. “We do, of course.”
One manicured nail clicked against her teacup. “Ah, but that’s not true, is it?”
“Can’t we skip the lessons?” But Nadesda only waited expectantly. “Fine. Even if Ashlin died and Nikos married me, I would never be queen or produce an heir. The best we could hope for would be another Severos adopted, and the other houses would fight that with all their breath.” Her forehead creased as she contemplated it more. “But other houses have marriageable daughters.” Real daughters, she didn’t say. Murder left her bitter as well as maudlin. “Daughters already slighted by Mathiros’s choice of a foreign bride for his son.” She tapped thumb against fingers as she counted the daughters in question. “Ginevra Jsutien, Radha Aravind, and Althaia Hadrian being the most obvious of those.”
“Your first example was the best,” Nadesda said. “Ginevra Jsutien was the favorite of at least four houses, and her aunt knew it. Of course, I’m sure Thea is much too clever to involve herself with assassins, or to leave any links behind if she did.”
“Thea.” Savedra shook her head. “That silver-tongued bitch.” She couldn’t stop the thread of admiration that crept into the words. “She went to the theater with Nikos just the other day. And she’s attending the boating party at the palace on Polyhymnis.”
“If the princess goes with them,” said Varis, “tell her not to stand too close to the rail.”
“What will you do?” Nadesda asked.
Savedra shrugged, not quite keeping the anger from the gesture. “The same thing I always do. Wait. Watch. Stop them.” Ever and always, the unceasing vigilance—tasting food, staring at shadows, studying every gift and visitor who came too close. It wasn’t what she’d imagined when she and Nikos had exchanged their first too-long glance across a crowded room nearly five years ago. “I should have been a whore after all.”
She only saw it because she was looking: the tightening around Nadesda’s eyes, the heartbeat-quick compression of painted lips. A mother’s pain beneath an archa’s poise.
Varis’s response was less controlled—his jaw clenched, and his pale eyes darkened with anger—but gone just as quickly. “Of course you shouldn’t have,” he said, voice carefully light. “That would be boring.” He tugged at his high sculpted collar. “Never let them forget you.”
Tea dragged into lunch, and then an hour spent gossiping about court and family, until Nadesda excused herself for an appointment and Varis became distracted by a conversation with the gardener about western herblore. Savedra took her chance to slip out quietly and return to the library. The assassin was only half her reason for visiting.
Many volumes of Severos history weren’t stored in Phoenix House, but secreted in vaults in remote properties or in the family library at Evharis. She wished she had those at hand, but there was no subtle way to visit them. For now the Phoenix Codex would have to satisfy her curiosity about the vrykoloi.
So of course it didn’t. An hour passed as she turned page after page with careful gloved fingers, squinting at the cramped scholarly hand. The book spoke in detail of the reign of Darius II Severos, including his dealings—in circumspect, politic language—with the vrykoloi, but of the vampires themselves she found little besides footnotes: Sovay’s Mathematics and Thaumaturgy, Anektra’s Principia Demonica, a monograph about blood magic by a Phaedra Severos published in 463. She pulled the Anektra off the shelf, risking a sprained wrist, but the handspan-thick volume was too daunting to open.
“Don’t tell me you’ve finally decided to study magic.”
Savedra started, cracking her elbow on the table and cursing. The silence on the room had faded, but Varis could still come and go unheard.
“It would make an old degenerate so proud.”
She snorted. This was a conversation they’d had a dozen times. The only way Varis had ever tried to shape her life was by encouraging her to take up sorcery, to test the fabled mysticism of the hijra. It was, to her knowledge,