The Mirador Read Free Page A

be good for a second round—sometimes he was, and sometimes he wasn’t—it was easy for me to trace one of the swirls of his tattoos and say, “Did these hurt very much?”
    “Oh, you know. Not much more than setting yourself on fire.”
    “Why do you do it?”
    “Become a Cabaline? Well, the alternative is to be a heretic and get set on fire for real.”
    I shuddered and I wasn’t entirely faking. “You could leave.” He shook his head. “Wouldn’t want to. And being a Cabaline is worth a little pain.”
    “Why? I don’t understand why anyone would want to . . .”
    “You’re annemer. You can’t understand.”
    “Try me. Why is it better to be Cabaline than to go to the Coeurterre or the schools in Norvena Magna?”
    “You really want to know,” he said, half skeptically.
    “It puzzles the living snot out of me,” I said promptly, and he laughed, distracted.
    “Different wizards will give you different answers, of course, and the Virtu has a good deal to do with it, too.”
    “I don’t understand that , either.”
    “My sweet, if you want me to explain thaumaturgic architecture to you as well, we’re going to be here all night.”
    Thaumaturgic architecture was his specialty; he probably wasn’t exaggerating. “No, I don’t,” I said firmly. “Just tell me why you wanted to be a Cabaline.”
    “That question’s not much better. But all right. When I was young, I thought I wanted to be powerful, and all I knew about power, growing up in Breadoven, was that the Mirador had it. By the time I was actually ready to swear the oaths, I knew I wasn’t powerful and wasn’t going to be. So one answer to your question is that becoming a Cabaline offered protection. The warding spells, you know. And a chance to do my work in peace. And . . .” He was frowning. “I don’t think I can explain the rest of it. But I suppose I like feeling that I’m part of something much larger and much older than myself.”
    “You’re right,” I said, smiling at him. “I am no wiser than I was.” A lie, since protection was a very good reason indeed for Gideon to want to become a Cabaline. I kissed Peter’s nose. “Are there lots of wizards who feel that way—I mean, did you have a lot of competition?”
    “Competition?” he said blankly.
    “Well, they don’t take everyone who asks, do they?”
    “Powers, no!” That was genuine, appalled horror; I let myself laugh.
    “So how do they decide? And who does the deciding anyway? ”
    He told me about the Curia and the complicated systems of sponsorship and patronage and the list of criteria—some of which seemed exceptionally nebulous and vulnerable to interpretation—and I listened and wished I could take notes.
    When I’d heard enough, it was very easy to shut him up. And it turned out he was good for a second round after all.

Mildmay
    Oh, I was in a shitty mood. It was just as well Felix and Gideon wouldn’t have noticed me if I’d got up on the table and started dancing, because I would have picked a fight with Felix, just because I could. That kind of mood.
    I went into my room and threw myself on the bed. I sat there and stared at the wall—the other side was Felix and Gideon’s bedroom and Kethe knows what they were doing in there, I didn’t want to—and spun my butterfly knife, first one way, then the other. I’d used to do it for practice, when I was a knife-fighter— and for swank, too. And then it got to be a habit, and I’d never got around to making myself quit.
    And powers and saints, it was better than thinking.
    But sometimes, no matter how much you don’t want to, you get to thinking anyway. And after a while, a thought got in my head. If I was calling Mehitabel Ginevra—and no matter how mad she was at me, she wouldn’t make up something like that—then there was something wrong. Something very fucking wrong.
    And it wasn’t Mehitabel’s problem, neither.
    See, Ginevra was dead. She’d been dead for indictions. We’d