Lilith Saintcrow - The Iron Wyrm Affair

“I am well enough, thank you. I shall be gone for the day, hunting some rather interesting loose ends of this conspiracy. Here is the safest place for you, Mr Clare, and with Mikal to watch over you—”

“Prima.” Just the one word, but Mikal’s face was a thundercloud.

“Do not interrupt, Shield.” She let the sentence carry its own warning. “Your charge is to protect the mentath. It appears mentaths are central to this series of events; therefore, he shall be as safe as I may make him while I hunt in other quarters. I shall hopefully return in time for dinner – Mr Clare, we dine a trifle early, I do hope that won’t inconvenience you?”

“My digestion agrees with the notion.” But his long, sweat-greased face had returned to mournfulness, and he shrugged into a threadbare shirt, folding down the turnover collar precisely. “However, Miss Bannon, I am not at all certain that I am the only target of the attacks we have endured so far. Last night—”

There are other reasons for me keeping you mewed here, thank you . “These foxes now know I am at their heels. My barouche is making deceptive rounds today, and I shall slip about largely unseen.” She loosed her fingers with an effort, ignoring Mikal’s tension, a powder-bloom of deep bruiselike colour visible to Sight. “I assure you, Mr Clare, I am quite capable of performing the duty Her Majesty has assigned me – namely, protecting a mentath, and ferreting out the source of this unpleasantness.” Her shoulders ached; she relaxed them with an effort. “My staff has been set to procuring you fresh linens – yours have arrived from the Chancellor’s care, and been laundered – and providing you with a valet, since you may be my guest for some small length of time. Would you be so kind as to accept Mr Finch’s questions on those matters, once you have refreshed yourself?”

“Delighted to.” The look on his face shouted that he would be anything but. Still, he did not waste time. He simply shook hands with Mikal and left the salle. Of course, he would think her terribly unfeminine.

Let him. His opinion matters little; his continued existence is what I am to protect . She held Mikal’s gaze as the salle door closed with a decisive snick, and the Shield’s cheekbones were flushed with ugly colour under their copper.

Fighting did not make him blush so.

“You will guard the mentath.” Even, level, her tone nevertheless paled the sunlight coming through the long upper windows. The witchballs shuddered, one of them spitting a few blue sparks.

“My Prima.” His jaw set. A fine thin tremor ran through him as her will hardened, the link between them painfully taut.

My Prima. As in, it is my duty to guard you. “He is in more danger than I am. And I have my reasons, Mikal.”

A small, restless movement. If he dared, she almost thought he would argue with her.

And that could not be allowed.

“Good.” She touched her skirts, her reticule brushing against velvet. The bonnet she’d chosen was far worse than dowdy, but at least she would feel no sting if it was lost or damaged, and it did not interfere with her peripheral vision. “Until dinner, then.”

And there she would have left it, but for his stubbornness.

“Emma.” Tight-clipped, her name, forced from his throat. “Please.”

Sorcerous force flared through her. He fought it, but she was Prime, and her will forced his knees to bend. When he was in a Shield’s abeyance, kneeling with his hands resting loose against his thighs, head bowed and almost every muscle locked, she let out a soft sound between her teeth.

“I am Prime .” The words turned to gall, scorching her throat. “I am not some hedge-charmer to be ordered about. I allow you a great deal, Mikal, but I will not abide disobedience. You will guard the mentath.” The threat of you strangling me as well is not enough to make me tolerate an order from a Shield. Not nearly enough at all .

The struggle went out of him. He slumped inside the cage of her will. “Yes,” he murmured.

“Yes …?”

“Yes, my Prima.”

It was a wonder he did not hate her. Of course, he very well might. But as long as he was desirous of continued survival, they were allied. Hatred mattered little in such an alliance.

Or so I tell myself. Until he finds a better treaty to sign, and then? Who knows? “Good.” She turned, skirts swishing, and set off for the door. Her will slackened, but Mikal did not move.

“Emma.” Softly, now.

She did not halt.

“Be careful.” A little more loudly than he had to, making the salle’s bright air tremble, dust swirling softly. “I would not care to lose you.”

Sudden self-loathing bit under her breastbone. It was a familiar feeling. “I have no intention of being lost, Mikal. Thank you.” I should not have done this. Forgive me . The words trembled just on the edge of her tongue, but she swallowed them, and left him behind in the sunlit salle.

The sorceress’s house was odd indeed. It was a good address – Mayefair was a very respectable part of Londinium, and Miss Bannon was of course comfortable. Rare indeed was the sorcerer with bad business sense, though most of them affected a high disdain for such matters. To be in trade carried its own shame, sometimes worse than the stigma of sorcery.

The house seemed far larger than its exterior would have given one to surmise, and he did not like that illogical notion at all. It caused him some discomfort until he consigned it to his mental drawer of complex problems judged worthy of further investigation at some later date, if at all.

The suite he had been shown to by the cadaverous Finch – tall, thin, marks of childhood malnutrition around his jaw and evident in his bowed legs, dressed in dusty black but with his indenture collar lovingly polished – was furnished spare, dark, and heavy, but the fume of scorched dust told him hurried cleaning charms had been applied just prior to his residence. Dark wainscoting, leather and wine-red upholstery, but the bed was fresh and its linen crisp. Fire crackled merrily on the grate, and he was gratified to see that during his morning’s exercise newspapers and periodicals had been brought, stacked neatly on the huge desk. Plenty of paper had been provided as well, and a complete set of Encyclopaedie Britannicus , in fifty-eight volumes, was arranged on the bookshelf, along with two dictionaries and a chemist’s arrangement of reference works.

Miss Bannon must have given orders. It would do to keep his faculties occupied for a short while.

The servants were proud, but they spared no effort. Each one had a burnished indenture collar, and they were an odd assortment. Finch, for example, spoke with a laborious upper-crust wheeze, but Clare’s trained ear caught traces of a youth spent mouthing Whitchapel’s slur and slang. The man’s musculature was wasted, but several of his mannerisms led Clare to the conclusion that Finch was familiar with the ungraceful dance of a knife fight or two in the darkness of a forgotten alley.

Then there was the pair of chambermaids – one with long chestnut ripples pulled tightly back, all elbows and angles in her brushed black gown, the other a short, plump, fair Irish colleen – who descended on his room to put it to rights a few moments after he pulled the bell-rope upon awakening. And the housekeeper, a round merry-eyed Frenchwoman with an atrocious Picardie accent, who had fussed him into a Delft-and-cream breakfast room and tsked over him.

The chambermaids both flinched at odd moments, and the housekeeper compulsively straightened everything she could lay her hands upon, tweaking with deft fingers. Yet they did not seem precisely afraid ; Clare’s sensitive nose caught no acrid note of fresh fear. The food, of course, was superlative, for all that Miss Bannon made no appearance until mid-morning in the salle.