House of Sand and Secrets (Books of Oreyn #2)(11)

“What does it say?” I gesture for him to hand the paper over and he complies. Our fingers brush, and the feeling between us jolts me like a spark of static. I frown.

Jannik looks at his empty setting, sighs, then gets up. He paces the room while I read. There’s not much more here than what he told me. The article is a piece of filler, cropped down to fit between an advertisement for a new soap, and a listing of wherry arrival and departure times. It’s just a bat, mutilated so it could not be identified. No one has stepped forward to report a missing slave, and the rookeries have remained conspicuously silent.

When I’m finished, I fold the paper closed and hand it over to him. “We should speak to Harun.”

Jannik raises an eyebrow. “Why trouble him over one dead bat?” That word again, sharp and hateful. The way he says it makes me think he wants it to hurt me more than it does him. “Every time we talk to them, there are more eyes on us. Why ruin your precious face over one corpse.”

“One that we know of,” I say. “There might have been others.”

“There are other people more deserving of your misplaced guilt,” Jannik says. “A whole city is dying by degrees outside us, if you feel the urge to run off and save people. But perhaps plague-fields are not a grand enough setting for your dramas. Or perhaps,” and he stares at me levelly, “Hobs don’t count.”

“Of course they do!” I stand, and run my hands down my stomach as if that will settle my anger. Surprisingly, it helps. Just another little trick I have for showing the world nothing of what I truly think.

Jannik has finally hurt me, and he knows it. I will never forgive myself for all the Hobs who died because I took too long to make a decision, to find a bit of backbone. “However, don’t you think that something like this is perhaps important to those of us who have–” I stutter. “Ties?”

“Is it really?”

“This new-found temper doesn’t suit you,” I say through gritted teeth.

“And neither does this pretty little mask you’ve taken to wearing,” he snaps back at me. “All so perfect and … bloody Pelim.”

I draw myself up straighter; fix my spine like an iron spear. I’ve been wearing this bloody Pelim mask for him as much as myself, doesn’t he understand? If the Houses accept me, then eventually they will have to accept my choices. “And what am I supposed to do – is there some particular manner in which you’d like me to conduct myself?”

“Yes.”

I frown. “Excuse me–”

“Felicita.” The fight has leached out of him and it seems to me he shrinks the smallest bit, and is left tired and ill. “You’re caught back up in it, in being a House piece. You’re back to that.”

It’s not true, I tell myself. Underneath everything, I am still me. Surely he must see that. “What of it?”

“I met a girl once.” He stares over my shoulder, into the past. “A girl who ran from things she hated, who worked in a tea-room just to grab at freedom. A girl who inspired me, because she fought for everything she was told she couldn’t have.” His gaze focuses again. “And now look what she’s become. People died for your freedom,” he says softly. “So you could become this? Is that all he was worth?”

I know better than to think Jannik is talking about my brother. He does not care for some spoiled House son. “Jannik,” I warn him, but my hands are shaking. Memories are spilling past the barriers I have built in my head; the coldness of Dash’s body between us as we waited with him for death, that last flutter-laugh when he knew it was over. I remember crying, even though I wanted to hate him.

This is about Dash. Beautiful and broken. Dead and buried. We both loved him in our ways, but I am certain he only loved one of us back.

The fire and anger dampen, and my shoulders slump. “Do you blame me for – for Dash?”

Jannik just stares, swallows, then finally, minutely, he shakes his head. When he looks at me, I wonder what he sees. I am just a girl who reads the same books as him, who grew up a game piece in my family’s plans, like he did. That is the shared history on which we shakily built this marriage.

He does not see a lover or a partner. That person is dead.

I feel crumpled and discarded. My heart is a dusty paper ball inside an empty urn. “Then what is this about?”

“I heard you call me a bat, just the other day.” His voice is very mild, as if we are discussing a change in the weather. “To one of the servants.”

“I did not.” But my assurance wavers in the last word. Oh Gris. Did I? I can’t even remember. My stomach tightens, and heat rushes my cheeks. I could have – Oh Gris I could have, and the worst of it is simply that I wouldn’t even have noticed if I had. This is the mould my family poured me into, the one I thought I’d broken out from.

“If it makes it any better I don’t think you meant any real insult by it.”

And how exactly does that make it better?

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says. “There are things I need to deal with in the offices.”

After he’s left, I swallow thickly and go to pick up the folded newspaper. The story about the dead vampire is hidden in there; a little entertainment for the Lammers, now over. I open it again and read slowly, as if each word were part of some incantation that will lead me to the truth of my own heart. As if rereading it will give me the vampire’s name, their history, their loves and dreams. As if I will somehow give them back the humanity my own people stole.