The Bone Palace - Amanda Downum [21]
“Not today, Uncle.” She shut the Phoenix Codex with a soft whump and stripped off the library’s cotton gloves.
Beneath his paints and powders, Varis looked tired. The skin around his eyes was delicate as crepe, the lines there deeper when he smiled. He had been gone from the city for much of the past year, and distant and withdrawn about his trips. Scandal was his specialty, but secrets ran in their blood.
“What do you know about vampires?” she asked, thinking of secrets.
He stilled for an instant, then plucked imaginary lint off one sleeve. “Not much, I’m afraid. Why the interest?”
Savedra smiled, carefully bright. “Some of the courtiers have started reading those awful penny dreadfuls. I hoped I could find something in here to impress them with.”
“Ah. Sadly, no. No one knows much about the vrykoloi, except perhaps a few who know better than to speak of it. A proper treatise or examination would make the Arcanost scholars’ teeth ache with envy, but none of them have the guts to go underground.” He waved one perfectly manicured black-nailed hand. “No one likes to get their hands dirty anymore.”
“Pity.” Savedra rose, shaking out her skirts, and reshelved the books. “I’ll have to settle for knowing looks and sly silences, I suppose.”
“Clever girl.” He tugged his collar straight again. “And now that your mother is gone, you can tell me about that massage oil.”
Savedra laughed and let herself be distracted, but a warning chill had settled in her stomach. That he lied only stung a little—she was used to her family—but that he lied now unnerved her.
What did he know about vampires?
CHAPTER 3
Kiril had given up many of his duties over the last three years, but he couldn’t prove it by the paperwork. A single lamp burned on his desk, spilling yellow light across stacked ledgers and rolled parchment and drifts of loose paper. Legal forms scribed in triplicate and foreign news and hand-scrawled notes in private ciphers. Agents who reported directly to the king still sent him copies of their reports, and he had plenty of contacts who communicated only with him. His slow slide from favor had done nothing to lessen the tide. Fallings out might be counterfeited, after all, or damaged friendships mended.
There was nothing false in his split from Mathiros, nor did it hold any hope of reconciliation. He had seen to that himself.
He glared at the two latest missives; the words blurred less than an armspan away. Lamps were bad for his eyes, the physicians swore to him, but he made no move to draw back the curtains. The day outside was rain-washed and gloomy, the autumn afternoon already dull as dusk. Neither did he reach for the spectacles folded on the corner of the wide rosewood desk. Instead he called witchlight, harsh and white.
The simplest of spells, it should have been effortless. Instead he felt the drain of it all the way to his bones. But it was much easier to read by.
The first letter was a report from the front. The king had not seen fit to send it to him, nor had the mage who took Kiril’s place at the king’s side, but the scribe was an old friend. For such a foolish enterprise, Mathiros had acquitted himself well enough. An armistice with the Ordozh, and only two hundred Selafaïn dead to show for it. That number might be lower had Kiril been at the front, and it might not.
Which rankles more, old man? he thought wryly, rubbing the bridge of his nose against an incipient headache. That he needs you and ignores you, or that he doesn’t need you at all?
But among the dead were forty mages, and that wasn’t a number to be shrugged aside. Kristof Vargas, Kiril’s replacement and former student, was a talented sorcerer but still cocky with advancement. Selafai didn’t have scores of battle mages to spare.
That rankled most of all. That Kiril had been set aside after long service he might forgive, but for a decade he had groomed Isyllt Iskaldur to be his successor,