Amanda Downum - The Bone Palace

“Uncle Varis.” She hadn’t realized until she smiled just how unhappy her morning had been.

He was actually her mother’s cousin, but he’d been a familiar and cheering presence as she’d grown up. He’d soothed her adolescent awkwardness with shopping expeditions and visits from his tailors, and taught her to bury the gangly teenaged boy she despised under careful cosmetics and deportment. And, on rare occasions when she’d thought she would go mad, with subtle illusion charms. He had taken her away from the palace on Nikos’ wedding night and gotten her thoroughly drunk.

He took her hand, jeweled rings pressing against her skin. His cheeks creased with a smile that always looked like a smirk, no matter how sincere. He resembled none of her closer relatives, being slight and bird-boned, with startling pale eyes and translucent skin. He’d begun losing his hair before she was born, and made up for it by shaving his head; it set off the delicacy of his features. Malachite powder glittered on his eyelids, and he smelled of lime and lilac and white musk when she kissed his cheek.

He wore black, which meant he must have come from the Arcanost-sober colors were his only concession to Archlight’s dour ideas on fashion. Nothing else about the sculpture of layered velvet and leather that was his coat was reserved. Not that combining chartreuse and fuchsia was the worst of his scandals by far.

“You look tired, my dear,” he said as Savedra bent to kiss her mother. “Is that Alexios pet of yours keeping you up?”

“I keep him up, Uncle. I wouldn’t be much of a mistress if I didn’t.”

“Did you ever try that Iskari massage oil I recommended? I’ve had-”

“Varis.” Nadesda’s quiet reproving tone had worked on children and archons for thirty years. “Pretend for a moment that you have the decency not to corrupt my children. Or at least the tact not to do it while I’m in the room.”

“You know I was never any good at acting, Desda. A pity too-imagine Uncle Tselios’s reaction if I’d run off and joined the Orpheum Rhodon.”

“Hah!” Nadesda’s bright laugh was one of the rare unschooled expressions that no one outside of House Severos had ever seen. Garnets and marcasites glittered as she shook her head. “Too bad you never did. We didn’t outrage the old bastard nearly enough before he died.”

“Maybe it’s not too late. I could find a necromancer to summon him back.”

Nadesda reached for her teacup and stopped when she realized it was empty. “Sit down, Vedra. What’s the matter?”

Savedra drew up a chair and sat, envying as always her mother’s perfect posture. She ought to wear more corsets. “Can’t you guess?”

One eyebrow rose. “Something to do with the note I sent you?”

With perfect timing, a diffident knock fell on the door and a maid slipped in with a new tea tray. While she laid out the dishes, Savedra wondered if she ought to talk to her mother in private. Varis disdained politics, being more concerned with debauchery and thaumaturgy, but she didn’t precisely trust any member of her family with secrets. But, she decided, this was safe enough as far as intrigues went. He already knew about her arrangement with Nadesda.

When the maid had left and everyone had fresh tea-and Savedra had devoured a scone with undignified haste-Varis snapped his fingers. The orange padparadscha sapphire on his right hand sparkled with the motion and a hush filled the room like water, drowning the hiss of rain and crackle of the fire. Theatrics, for all he pretended not to be an actor. Any Severos could invoke the silence-the spell was bound into a marble ornament on the hearth-but there was no point in wasting a mage if you had one at hand.

After the silence deepened and scone and tea settled warm in her stomach, Savedra set her cup down. “Who sent the assassin, Mother?”

Varis’s eyebrows climbed. Nadesda cocked her head, tendrils of steam drifting around her face. “Who has the most to gain from the princess’s death?”

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.