House of Sand and Secrets (Books of Oreyn #2)(83)
“You lie,” I tell her. I walk across the room, away from her and from Merril. Next to Jannik, I thread my arm through his. The warmth of his body through the wool of his jacket strengthens me. I have agreed to be cruel only for the sake of those I love. After this is done, I will scour out this beast from me, this part of my nature that wants to rise so easily, champing to destroy others under its sharp and pointed hooves. “You lie because I know the things you cannot ask Merril. I know you do not want to be tied to House Eline by the child you carry. If I were to offer you something that Eline cannot, would you choose a side then?”
Carien stoppers her pipe and sets it down on the table. Like a jackal surprised by a gardener in the early morning, she is a creature in a liminal time, out of place and wary but not yet afraid. “What,” she says after many minutes have slid by, “exactly can you offer me?”
I hold up my hand, fingers raised. “Two things.”
Carien waits with a curious stillness, watching me as if all her future rests on what I say next. Perhaps it does, more than even she realizes.
The thing I am about to offer her is immense and ugly, as only the greatest bribes can be. I lower my hand slowly to her belly, pointing. “I can rid you of that.” Next to me Jannik’s muscles tense under his coat. He stamps down quickly on his anger and shock, but I can feel it still, scraping at the inside of my head, sand on raw flesh.
“How?” she snaps, the eagerness in her rising.
“Yes, Felicita, how?” Jannik speaks between gritted teeth.
“With your help. With magic.” I keep my eyes open and my chin raised, because if I close them – if I let myself weaken even the slightest – I will fall. I can feel it already sweeping up in me. I thin my lips and manage something that is not a laugh, not quite. The cold beast, rising. “It can be done.” I am always so sure of the things I can do, because failure would leave me nowhere. I once held a storm of nightmares contained, I can scrape away this little gobbet.
“Interesting,” says Harun. “You consider your control so delicate.” He’s still looking out the window, keeping up his pretence that this conversation barely interests him.
“It will be.” Do not falter. “And I can offer you a death.”
“If I wanted my husband killed I think I would have done better than come to you.” She sneers.
“Not his.” I stare at her face, unblinking. “Yours.”
“My own?” Her expression has not altered; her wild eyes are the emotionless amber glass of a child’s doll.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“You’ve done this before?”
And I have, oh dear Gris, I have. “If you’ve no ties that bind you here, we can dispose of you. There can be an accident. We then set up a body to take your place, suitably disfigured, of course – fire would work well, especially if Eline chooses such a weapon against us; it would be easy to assume you no more than an unfortunate victim of some inter-House rivalry.”
Harun stops looking out the window. “A body?”
“We have an entire city of plague-corpses at our disposal,” I say. “No point in letting the dead go to waste.” The words come up choked and tight, though I’m aiming for a kind of grim humour.
“And I am to be an unlucky accident?” Carien laughs hard and bright. “How very fitting.”
“Just so. What is that you want, Carien – art, freedom? I can give you these things. In Pelimburg.”
“I have no desire to starve to death in some stinking Pelimburg hovel.”
“I would not allow that.” For the first time it feels that instead of sentencing her, I am offering her a choice better than the one I made. She will run, that much is true, but she can also shake off the mantle of her old name and re-invent herself. I would be able to convince Mother and Lenora to take in an artist. Mother especially would love to be seen as some kind of patron. “Who do you want to be?”
*
The night falls late, the sky rain-cleaned. We sit in silence. Harun has given us the use of a private set of rooms. Everything in the bed chamber is blue, and the candle holders are the only bright point. The furniture is dark, but comforting. The room has a serenity like the final moment of drowning.
It is only Jannik, me and Carien in the bedroom. It is so still that I can hear the rustling of silk as we breathe, our collected air mingles, and in a way the three of us are closer than any person can be. We are bound in guilt.
For those who haven’t had the foresight to take rake’s parsley, or have fallen to ill luck, there are places tucked deep into alleyways that will take care of those unwanted unborn children. Desperate Hobs and low-Lammers will go to them.
Some of them even live. It’s not a chance taken lightly. My faith in myself drops a notch, and I shore it up. “Jannik?”
“I do not want to do this,” he says, but the protest is tired. He will do it, because I have asked. We have. Some of Carien’s wild animal must have spoken to him. I wonder if Jannik saw the thing in her that I did – that Dash-like need to claw at the world and to have it take him on his terms only? Jannik was in love, once. He has always fallen for the wild creatures, the ones which refused to be tamed. If he’d met Carien on a rain-drenched street in Pelimburg – if she’d been the one standing there with her umbrella – would it have been her and not me that he married?