The Virtu Read Free Page A

don’t know, and it troubles me. Using an annemer as an anchor is not unheard of, but it has not been done since the ascendancy of the House Hippothontis, precisely because it is so dangerous.”
    “Well, if no one else would help him,” I said, “and if he was as desperate as it seems he was—”
    “He wanted it,” Mildmay said without opening his eyes. “Only thing I’ve ever seen him want.” And that, I thought, was essentially what he’d said to me in Marathine, merely stripped of the ugly metaphor. “He didn’t care if it killed him. Almost did, too. I had to—” He broke off with a sharp, painful shake of his head.
    Xanthippe went over to Mildmay, touched his hand lightly. When he looked up at her, she said, “I do not know if you did the right thing, but you did the best thing it was in you to do.” The silence remaining when she had left, the heels of her shoes beating a slow but impatient rhythm down the corridor, was heavy and cold, like great blocks of ice.
    Mildmay said, out of that coldness, “Don’t have to stay.”
    “There’s no point in going back to bed,” I said. “I’m quite thoroughly awake.”
    “Sorry,” he said, turning his head to look out at the dark-drowned garden.
    “Mildmay.”
    When he tilted his head back, I realized I was about to do something terribly wrong, and knelt quickly down beside him, so that our eyes were level. With the six-inch difference in our heights, it was not a vantage we had on each other very often. His face was expressionless; it was always expressionless, and sometimes it made me want to shake him until his spine rattled.
    I said, very carefully, “You do know it would have been a, er, ‘big loss’ to me if you had died tonight.”
    He didn’t even give me the twitch of an eyebrow, just sat there, watching me, silent.
    “I haven’t forgotten,” I said.
    “I know that.” Flat, heavy words; I had a momentary, ugly flash of stones falling from Diokletian’s mouth, a memory of my madness, and shook it away.
    “I am… grateful.”
    He looked away, muttered something I couldn’t understand.
    “What?”
    “Don’t want that.”
    “Don’t want what?”
    “I don’t want you to be grateful.”
    “Then what
do
you want?”
    I watched, fascinated, as a slow tide of crimson washed over his face; he said nothing.
    “Tell me,” I said, as gently as I could.
    He shook his head. “It’s stupid.”
    “If you’re feeling suicidal, nothing’s—”
    “I ain’t.”
    “Then quit acting like it!”
    “I don’t want to be a crip, okay? And I can’t have that and I know it and it’s stupid. So fuck off and leave me alone.”
    The silence in the room felt like a bubble made of crystal, as if the slightest movement, even a breath, would shatter it. I reached out slowly and took his hands. They felt like bunches of sticks, and they were shaking with the fear and unhappiness he would not let anyone see on his face.
    I had expected him to jerk away from me, but he did not move.
    There were all sorts of things I could have said—
should
have said—but too many of them were things I didn’t want to say, or he didn’t want to hear. I said, “I think it’s about time we went home.”
    His head came up at that, and I could see the darkness leaving his eyes like shadows fleeing from the sun.
    “Okay,” he said, and after a moment, struck dumb and breathless by his sudden beauty, I remembered to let go of his hands.

    I spent the next two days in the library, trying to bury that terrible flash of desire.
    I had desired him in Kekropia, I remembered; I had been mad then and surely could be forgiven. But this…
    He is your brother, I said to myself, and even in my own mind, the voice sounded pleading rather than stern. He was my brother, and I knew I should not desire him. But knowing that changed nothing.
    And in fleeing from my own monstrosity, I achieved nothing more than confronting myself with another monster I did not want to face: