House of Sand and Secrets (Books of Oreyn #2)(9)

“You’re not Mallen Gris,” he says. “People won’t follow your lead merely because you say so.”

“No.” We’re almost at the front doors, and the servants step out of our way. Their stares are angry, grudging. They hate us. They hate Isidro, and they will hate Jannik. “I’m not a mad man, and people won’t be using my name as a curse.”

Jannik glances at the servants, shrugs. “You might just be surprised one day,” he says as a serving girl leads us gracelessly inside.

But now the thought is in my head. How long before people attack us in the street, daub obscenities across our house, ostracise us from MallenIve society? I don’t want to become like the Guyins, but nor do I want to be caught up in the web of Readers and Saints and War-Singers who run the Houses. People like Carien who would gleefully skin my husband just to see if she could strip the magic right out of him. Magic she shouldn’t know about or be interested in.

Not everyone feels it, Jannik told me. And those who do, don’t mention it. Most people have to touch the vampires before they feel anything, and no one wants to admit that they have. It’s like taking out an advertisement in the Courant telling the world you enjoy molesting goats.

There is a kind of safety for the vampires in the city’s hatred of them. But I think that safety is growing thin and small and well-used. If the woman of the Houses are talking freely among themselves, then the word will spread soon enough, perhaps even to the ears of those with real power and a lust for magic. To the palace itself.

And perhaps it’s too early to begin worrying. I am grasping at nightmares and finding only mist.

Through dinner I find I cannot stop staring at Isidro’s skin, as if somehow, should I glare at him for long enough, all his mysteries will come seeping out. It’s easier to watch him than to do the same to my husband. Every time I look at Jannik, my eyes slide away, as if there is something there my brain refuses to acknowledge.

Perhaps it is simply that Isidro has an easier face upon which to look. He is startling, that is certain. I do not think I have ever seen someone as beautiful, and I, who only paint flowers and sticks, wish I had the talent to set him down in inks, and the courage to ask.

“Something terribly exciting about my face, Pelim?” he snaps.

“Not at all,” I say quietly. “Should there be?”

I have no idea why he hates us so much. Something about Jannik’s family, and the gulf between the two of them. Every time he looks at Jannik, his whole face twists, making it the closest it can get to ugly.

Rumour says the Lord Guyin bought Isidro from one of the three MallenIve rookeries. In Pelimburg there are no rookeries. All the vampires are members or servants of one of the free Houses. Here, things are more than a little different. The vampires are not free. They are born into the rookeries where they serve out their time as whores, or as night-soil collectors.

A rookery vampire does make a little coin off each transaction, and there’s the elusive goal of buying their own way free. But the truth of it is that they make so little their only true escape is to be bought as a servant and freed. If one is lucky enough to be bought out, Gris alone knows what their new owners want with them. I think of Carien’s face, in lamplight. Her eagerness.

If I am correct, Jannik’s family, House Sandwalker, did buy some of MallenIve’s vampires for a while, sinking their fortune into buying the freedom of rookery whores. They would have brought their people down to Pelimburg, far from the memories of this awful city. It may be this is why Isidro hates Jannik so: because he had to buy his own mockery of freedom with his looks.

I glance at Harun, who is supping more on wine than on the roast trout and milk-and-lemon soup his kitchens have prepared for us. Again. The skin under his eyes is pouched and his hand tremors a little, sometimes. I wonder what he is trying to drown inside himself.

What is it that made Harun buy Isidro and keep him as a lover? For myself I saw no other way to escape my family while minimizing their disgrace than by entering this farcical marriage, and Jannik is at least from a powerful House. But what kind of man throws away his inheritance, his future, for some spoiled pretty thing?

For the shit on the walls and the hatred of everyone around him?

He is either a madman or an idiot. Certainly, he is a drunk.

“Felicita,” Jannik says, his voice very soft, “perhaps you could tell them of what you heard at House Ives.” I spoke of it only a little to Jannik, just told him that Carien has strange ideas about vampires. Uncomfortable ones. He seemed to brush my disquiet away by telling me that only certain people were sensitive to the vampire magic and could be affected by it.

Does that make me special, then? I’ve never seen myself as particularly sensitive, although my control over scriv-based magic is very fine.

I think Jannik is wrong. It has to do with physical and emotional connection and not on any inherent ability.

But that sounds too much like the fancies of women, pinning all the world on fate, and so I have said nothing. Because truly – should I say to him I think I can feel his magic because we’re meant to be together? What a stupid thing.

A stupid childish thing.

“The Houses,” I say, then find myself wondering how to put it.

Harun raises one eyebrow, drains his glass, and beckons for another bottle.

“Fascinating,” says Isidro.

I swallow, glance at him then continue. “Some of the women from the Houses seem to have this ridiculous notion that the vampires are magical. That their magic can be accessed, with the right … tools.”