Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(6)

Most of all, what felt different was his own mind. Amazing that a little kindness, a little care, had settled his chaos so well.

Lady Grey was watching him with those striking, lovely eyes. He had no notion of what to say to her, except the obvious. “Thank you, my lady.”

“My pleasure, my lord,” she said, and curtsied just a bit. He responded with as much of a bow as he could manage in a bathing sheet. “She’s spoken of you often, you know.”

“She?” Myrnin paused in reaching for the black woolen breeches that she’d set out for him, and blinked at her.

“Amelie,” Lady Grey said.

“Amelie?”

“Our queen. She was concerned for you, and bid me find you. It took a good slice of time, but I am pleased you’re not as daft as I was told.”

“Daft?”

“However, you do repeat things quite a bit.”

“I will bear it in mind.”

“Please do.” She gave him a look he could not even begin to interpret. “Shall I help you to dress?”

“No!” He must have sounded as scandalized as she hoped, for she gave him a saucy wink and left the room, closing the heavy oaken door behind her. He almost regretted her departure. She was . . . startling. Beautiful as an angel, tempting as something a great deal farther from heaven. Had Amelie intended for him to . . . No. No, of course not.

He felt vulnerable in the empty room. It was a hard thing to struggle into the clean clothes, but once he’d fastened them up, he felt far better. She’d even given him red felt shoes, lined with fur and festively embroidered. Amelie must have mentioned his fondness for the exotic.

Lady Grey was waiting in the hallway. She took him in at a long, sweeping glance, and he bowed again. “Do I meet your approval?”

“Sirrah, you met my approval when I found you stinking and ill in a dungeon. You are bidding fair to be a heartbreaker now, though I must credit myself for the beauty of your locks.” She winked at him and pulled the maid’s scarf from her head as she walked down the hallway. “Come. Your mistress will want to greet you, now that you’re half yourself again.”

“Only half?” he murmured.

“I’ll have a meal waiting when you’re done. I expect that will restore you the rest of the way.” She walked a few steps ahead, then turned toward him, still striding backward in an entirely unladylike manner. “Of course, restore you to what will be the question. Are you really a madman?”

“It depends on the day of the week,” he said. “And the direction of the wind.”

“Clever little madman.” She turned to finish her walk with absolute precision at the doors at the end of the hallway, which she thrust open with the confidence only a queen could possibly have. “My lady Amelie, I bring your errant wizard.”

“Not a wizard,” Myrnin whispered as he edged past her.

“How disappointing,” she whispered back, then bowed to Amelie and closed the doors, leaving him facing his old friend.

She was swathed in a dazzling white robe trimmed with ermine, intertwined most tellingly with strands of silver wire. . . . She wanted her subjects to know that she was old enough and tough enough to defeat the burning metal, and therefore them. She looked the same as always: young, beautiful, imperious. She was reading a volume, and she placed a feather in it as a marker and set it aside as he bowed to her. He assayed a full curtsy, and almost fell in rising.

She was up and at his side instantly to assist him to a nearby chair. “Sit,” Amelie said. “No ceremony between us.”

“As you wish, my lady.”

“I am not your lady,” she said. “At the least, I do not raise the color in your face the way our good Lady Grey seems to do. I’m pleased you enjoy her company. I hoped she might give you some . . . diversion.”

“Amelie!”

She gave him a quelling look. “I meant that only in the most innocent sense. I am no panderer. You will find Lady Grey to be an intelligent and well-read woman. The English have no sense of value, to have condemned her so easily to the chop.”

“Ah,” he said, as she took her seat again. “How did she escape it?”

“I found a girl of similar age and coloring willing to take her place, in exchange for rich compensation to her family.” Amelie was cold, but never unfeeling. Myrnin knew she could have simply forced a hapless double for Lady Grey to go to her death, but she was kind enough to bargain for it. Not kind enough, of course, to spare a life, but then, they were all killers, every one of them.

Even him. The trail of bodies stretched behind him through the years was something he tried hard not to consider.

“Why rescue me now, Amelie?” he asked, and fiddled with the ties on his shirtsleeves. The cloth felt soft on his skin, but he was unaccustomed to it, after so many years of wearing threadbare rags. “I’ve spent an eternity in that place, unremarked by you, and don’t tell me you didn’t know. You must need me for something.”

“Am I so cruel as that?”

“Not cruel,” he said. “Practical, I would say. And as a practical ruler, you would leave me where you knew you could find me. I have a terrible habit of getting lost, as you well know. Since you chose to fetch me from that storehouse, you must have a job for me.” It was hard to hold Amelie’s stare; she had ice-blue eyes that could freeze a man’s soul at the best of times, and when she exerted her power, even by a light whisper, it could cow anyone. Somehow, he kept the eye contact. “Do me the courtesy next time of storing me somewhere with a bed and a library, Your Majesty.”