The Bone Palace - Amanda Downum [35]
“Saints and specters,” he whispered. “So that’s it. Damn.” He began to pace, short measured strides scuffing against carpets and clicking on tile. “Your apprentice told the prince, and the prince told Savedra.”
Kiril’s spine stiffened. “Told her what, exactly?”
“I don’t know. Everything, I imagine. She was asking about vampires yesterday, with much too convenient an excuse.” He stopped his circuit and flung himself into another chair. Phaedra watched him with an expression somewhere between amusement and befuddlement and Kiril nearly laughed—Varis had that effect on people. The pale sorcerer sighed, rubbing a hand over his scalp. “We know entirely too many inquisitive people.”
“We’ll take care of it,” Phaedra promised. Kiril didn’t have the energy left to argue with her.
Silence fell between them, broken only by the crackling of the hearth. They were, Kiril thought, an unlikely conspiracy. Varis was known for his dissipation and excess, and despite a brief assignment at the Selafaïn embassy in Iskar over twenty years ago no one imagined he might have a political thought in his head. No one remembered or cared about the rumors that had attended his birth: his mother had held the old king’s regard, and been removed from court too hastily; her marriage to her cousin Tselios had also been too hasty, especially to account for Varis’s birth; Nikolaos Alexios had had the same pale blue eyes, so uncommon in Selafaïns. It could have been the makings of a terrible scandal, but had faded instead into obscurity.
It had taken more than rumor control and royal unconcern to keep Phaedra Severos quietly obscure. She had been a prominent fixture at the Arcanost, famed for her beauty and brilliance and mercurial temper. Her death, and that of her foreign noble husband, would have meant not scandal but ruin for the young Mathiros had the truth of them ever been found out. Preventing that had taken all of Kiril’s resources, and the greatest magic he had ever wrought. He had been paying off the debt of it for three years now, but it had worked: no one outside this room remembered Phaedra, or had any concern about her if they did.
The way no one would remember him. History cared for kings and princes and their scandals, but spymasters were brushed quietly away with dust and pen shavings. The most effective were never known at all. As it ought to be.
“Speaking of care,” Varis said, distracting Kiril from the bitter spiral of his thoughts, “we can’t let you wander around dressed like that.” A wave of his hand encompassed Phaedra’s gown and shed veils. “You’re years out of style, and unseasonal besides.”
“We can’t let her wander around at all,” Kiril said, even as Phaedra plucked at her dress—sleeveless gauzy silk belted below her breasts—with a frown. The shade of orange should have flattered, but her brown skin was unhealthily pale, like tea with too much milk. Or dead flesh through which no blood flowed.
“Things happen,” Varis replied, “as your story so clearly illustrates. It’s impossible that she won’t be seen eventually—we need to make sure that when she is she doesn’t look like a mad vengeful ghost from one of Kolkhis’s tragedies.”
Kiril opened his mouth to argue—And never mind, he thought, that that’s exactly what she is—but Phaedra’s eyes had already widened, shining with manic light. He remembered her wild moods from her first life; death had done nothing to settle them. Some physicians thought that her particular combination of mania, black despair, and violent temper was an illness, an imbalance of humors or aethers. But if it were a physical malady, shouldn’t it have died with her first body? A defect of the soul, perhaps? Or was she simply so used to being mad that it had become habit?
He set the problem aside—he had no time to write a dissertation about her, however fascinating it would be. By now she and Varis were deep in a conversation about fashion and milliners, and how one could be properly fitted without showing