I winced. I recalled Ketura’s warning, Franca’s callous wonder that I had ever imagined the Curators would accept me as anything but a common whore.
“I wanted to learn from him—” I began, when Roland suddenly, called out.
“Whitlock! They’re gathering the suzeins for the judging—” His expression clouded as he saw me standing above Whitlock. “Miramar,” he said.
He no longer sounded drunk. He strode across the room to his paramour. “Who let him in?”
Whitlock flinched, then tossed back his white hair pettishly. “Raphael and I were paired a—”
“Who let him in, you pasty slut?” Nopcsa kicked at the pile of blankets.
Whitlock stumbled to his feet, wrapping a sheet around his thin shoulders. “Best go, Raphael,” he said, and stooped to gather his costume. “I don’t know who let him in, Roland. Perhaps the scholiast was tampered with.”
“Who let you in?” demanded Roland. “How did you know we were here? How did you get here?”
“I crossed the Narrow Forest,” I replied. “I’ve brought you a gift, Roland. Anku!”
Like smoke seeping up through the floorboards the jackal materialized at my side. Whitlock eyed him nervously, tugging on his robe as he shifted from one foot to the other. I could feel Anku quivering as he stared at the Curator.
“An albino jackal,” Roland said, stroking his chin and eyeing Anku. Suddenly he began to laugh. “Miramar, I always thought you were too clever for a whore!” He stooped and snapped his fingers at the jackal. Anku’s ears flattened against his skull but he did not move.
“A peace offering,” I suggested.
“An albino?” said Whitlock, somewhat plaintively. I shrugged. My head had begun pounding again. About my wrist I felt a steady pulse of heat come and go, come and go, in rhythm with the rush of blood through my veins.
“As pretty a consort as ever you’ve had, Roland,” I said. I hoped my excitement and fear would not betray me. But I felt a little ashamed as well, and dared an apologetic glance at Whitlock. He was regarding me curiously. I saw his glance slide from my face to my arm and then fix upon my wrist. I gripped the glowing bracelet with my other hand. At my feet a wan pool of violet reflected from the sagittal. And to my horror the gaze Whitlock cast back upon me mirrored my own. His blinking eyes darted between fear and wonder as he looked from the sagittal to my face and back again, shaking his head in disbelief.
He knows what it is!
For an instant I held his gaze, thinking Do not betray me! as I stood there calmly, and even Anku’s breath stilled as he waited with me.
Then—
“Well, Roland,” Whitlock announced with that same lazy note of petulance, as though he were only half-awake and none too pleased about it. With calculated slowness he bent to pick up a crown of azure and yellow macaw quills. “I must go to the judging—”
“Take me,” I said to Roland. I turned to confront him, almost near enough now for us to embrace. “Leave him and be my escort.”
Because suddenly, more than anything—more than vengeance, more than surcease from pain and exhaustion, more even than I longed for his love and desire for me to return—I simply wanted everything to be as it had been. I wanted to enter the Great Hall with Roland and lower my eyes as he guffawed at the sight we made together, as he had done at so many masques and balls. I wanted to have Gower Miramar as my lover and confidante and suzein once more, and Fancy my beloved cousin beside me, and Ketura with her explosive laugh and temper to match …
“I won’t leave again, I promise,” I pleaded. My hand had fallen upon Anku’s head. My fingers kneaded his fur as I raised my eyes to Roland’s. “Just let me go with you now.”
He stared at me for a long time. Like a moth that alights upon one fair blossom and then forsakes it for another, desire for me lingered upon Roland’s dark face; and then was gone forever.
“You’re too clever for yourself, Raphael,” he said at last. Disdainfully he kicked at Anku, missing the jackal but sending a small tide of silks washing across the floor. “Some whore’s trick to curry favor with your people! A white dog—”
Anku growled and slipped to the other side of the room.
Roland glanced at Whitlock lining his eyes with kohl and smiled. “I have a prettier pet than that already, Miramar. Hurry up, Whitlock.” And without another glance at me he turned and began to pull on his tunic and Regent’s sash of red and black.
I watched him, stunned that he had rejected me—really rejected me!—so easily, without so much as an argument over my hair or torn clothes, without even acknowledging that I had braved the perils of the Narrow Forest to come here, and risked humiliation by my own people in order to break into this garish seraglio and offer myself to him.
“Roland …” I began.
He paused at the far wall and tugged at one of a dozen multicolored ropes of braided velvet that looped from the ceiling. A clear sweet chime. Then a tiny door opened in the wall. A brazen face blinked verdigrised eyelids. Its speaking mechanism ground resolutely, as though it had been unused for many months.
“Speak cousin,” it finally pronounced in the same chilly tones the scholiasts affected.
“Bid the elders come and remove an uninvited guest from the Exiguous Hagioscopic Chamber. Inform Lemuel High Brazil that the catamite Raphael Miramar has committed a crime of interjacence.”
“As you wish,” the brass head replied. The tiny door snapped shut.
“Roland!” Whitlock gasped. The kohl wand snapped shut in a flurry of black powder. “That’s banishment —you can’t!— ”
Roland snarled and slashed at the air with his hand. “Do you want to go with him?” He turned, grabbing blindly at the dangling ropes. Chimes pealed and tinkled. From a dozen alcoves soft voices rang from brazen throats. “Summon Lemuel High Brazil!”
“No!” Whitlock cried, cowering on the floor. A tremor of pity for him cut through my own fear and indecision. Before I could say anything he shrieked, pointing.
“Raphael!”
I turned, too late to avoid Roland’s arm swinging to smash against my throat. I fell to my knees, gagging as I tried to catch my breath. But Roland grabbed my shoulders and yanked me back up, his crimson face swimming before mine.
“Whores and lazars! You all feed off us—” His hands gripped me so that I cried aloud, and he laughed. “Not so strong and well fed as you were, eh, Miramar? You won’t last long once you’re banished.”
And he tore at my tunic, pushed me to the floor, and with one hand tight about my throat twisted to turn me onto my stomach as I struggled. Roland cursed and smacked me with the side of his hand. My head reeled. For a moment I lay once more beneath the apple tree in the Narrow Forest, the figure grunting above me not Roland but the Hanged Boy, hands like a rope tightening about my throat, pain ripping through me and a voice braying such triumph and utter desolation that I screamed …
“Raphael!”
This is what awaits you this and nothing more and it does not end no not now no not ever no come to me come to me —
“Raphael, please!”
And there above me crouched neither Roland nor the Gaping One but Whitlock, Anku panting at his side. From Roland’s neck a broken ampule protruded.
“— dead, Raphael, I killed him, sweet Magdalene, oh save me he’s dead!”
I tried to speak but my bruised throat could not form the question. The clamor in my ears softened, the roaring broke into discrete notes that I gradually realized were words, the voices of scholiasts pronouncing the same message over and over again: