though flourishing the bottle as far above her as possible would make it taste better. He retreated with consummate ease. Retreat was the speciality down in Ospria, after all. She reached for the glass again. The most recent smoke had stopped her hand shaking, but nothing more.
So she prayed for mindless, shameful, stupefying drunkenness to swarm over and blot out the misery.
She let her eyes crawl over Ospria’s richest and most useless citizens. If you really looked for it, the banquet had an edge of shrill hysteria. Drinking too much. Talking too fast. Laughing too loud. Nothing like a dash of imminent annihilation to lower the inhibitions. The one consolation of Rogont’s coming rout was that a good number of these fools would lose everything along with him.
“You sure I should be up here?” she grunted.
“Someone has to be.” Rogont glanced sideways at the girlish Countess Cotarda of Affoia without great enthusiasm. “The noble League of Eight, it seems, has become a League of Two.” He leaned close. “And to be entirely honest I’m wondering if it’s not too late for me to get out of it. The sad fact is I’m running short of notable guests.”
“So I’m an exhibit to stiffen your wilting prestige, am I?”
“Exactly so. A perfectly charming one, though. And those stories about my wilting are all scurrilous rumours, I assure you.” Monza couldn’t find the strength even to be irritated, let alone amused, and settled for a weary snort. “You should eat something.” He gestured at her untouched plate with his fork. “You look thin.”
“I’m sick.” That and her right hand hurt so badly she could scarcely hold the knife. “I’m always sick.”
“Really? Something you ate?” Rogont forked meat into his mouth with all the relish of a man likely to live out the week. “Or something you did?”
“Maybe it’s just the company.”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised. My Aunt Sefeline was always revolted by me. She was a woman much prone to nausea. You remind me of her in a way. Sharp mind, great talents, will of iron, but a weaker stomach than might have been expected.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.” The dead knew she disappointed herself enough.
“Me? Oh, quite the reverse, I assure you. We are none of us made from flint, eh?”
If only. Monza gagged down more wine and scowled at the glass. A year ago, she’d had nothing but contempt for Rogont. She remembered laughing with Benna and Faithful over what a coward he was, what a treacherous ally. Now Benna was dead, she’d murdered Faithful and she’d run to Rogont for shelter like a wayward child to her rich uncle. An uncle who couldn’t even protect himself, in this case. But he was far better company than the alternative. Her eyes were dragged reluctantly towards the bottom of the long table on the right, where Shivers sat alone.
The hard fact was he sickened her. It was an effort just to stand beside him, let alone touch him. It was far more than the simple ugliness of his maimed face. She’d seen enough that was ugly, and done enough too, to have no trouble at least pretending to be comfortable around it. It was the silences, when before she couldn’t shut him up. They were full of debts she couldn’t pay. She’d see that skewed, dead ruin of an eye and remember him whispering at her, It should’ve been you. And she’d know it should have been. When he did talk he said nothing about doing the right thing anymore, nothing about being a better man. Maybe it should have pleased her to have won that argument. She’d tried hard enough. But all she could think was that she’d taken a halfway decent man and somehow made a halfway evil one. She wasn’t only rotten herself, she rotted everything she touched.
Shivers sickened her, and the fact she was disgusted when she knew she should have been grateful only sickened her even more.
“I’m wasting time,” she hissed, more at her glass than anyone else.
Rogont sighed. “We all are. Just passing the ugly moments until our ignominious deaths in the least horrible manner we can find.”
“I should be gone.” She tried to make a fist of her gloved hand, but the pain only made her weaker now. “Find a way… find a way to kill Orso.” But she was so tired she could hardly find the strength to say it.
“Revenge? Truly?”
“Revenge.”
“I would be crushed if you were to leave.”
She could hardly be bothered to take care what she said. “Why the hell would you want me?”
“I, want you?” Rogont’s smile slipped for a moment. “I can delay no longer, Monzcarro. Soon, perhaps tomorrow, there will be a great battle. One that will decide the fate of Styria. What could be more valuable than the advice of one of Styria’s greatest soldiers?”
“I’ll see if I can find you one,” she muttered.
“And you have many friends.”
“Me?” She couldn’t think of a single one alive.
“The people of Talins love you still.” He raised his eyebrows at the gathering, some of them still glowering at her with scant friendliness. “Less popular here, of course, but that only serves to prove the point. One man’s villain is another’s hero, after all.”
“They think I’m dead in Talins, and don’t care into the bargain.” She hardly cared herself.
“On the contrary, agents of mine are in the process of making the citizens well aware of your triumphant survival. Bills posted at every crossroads dispute Duke Orso’s story, charge him with your attempted murder and proclaim your imminent return. The people care deeply, believe me, with that bottomless passion common folk sometimes have for great figures they have never met, and never will. If nothing else, it turns them further against Orso, and gives him difficulties at home.”
“Politics, eh?” She drained her glass. “Small gestures, when war is knocking at your gates.”
“We all make the gestures we can. But in war and politics both you are still an asset to be courted.” His smile was back now, and broader than ever. “Besides, what extra reason should a man require to keep cunning and beautiful women close at hand?”
She scowled sideways. “Fuck yourself.”
“When I must.” He looked straight back at her. “But I’d much rather have help.”
You look almost as bitter as I feel.”
“Eh?” Shivers prised his scowl from the happy couple. “Ah.” There was a woman talking to him. “Oh.” She was very good to look at, so much that she seemed to have a glow about her. Then he saw everything had a glow. He was drunk as shit.
She seemed different from the rest, though. Necklace of red stones round her long neck, white dress that hung loose, like the ones he’d seen black women wearing in Westport, but she was very pale. There was something easy in the way she stood, no stiff manners to her. Something open in her smile. For a moment, it almost had him smiling with her. First time in a while.
“Is there space here?” She spoke Styrian with a Union accent. An outsider, like him.
“You want to sit… with me?”
“Why not, do you carry the plague?”
“With my luck I wouldn’t be surprised.” He turned the left side of his face towards her. “This seems to keep most folk well clear o’ me by itself, though.”
Her eyes moved over it, then back, and her smile didn’t flicker. “We all have our scars. Some of us on the outside, some of us-”
“The ones on the inside don’t take quite such a toll on the looks, though, eh?”
“I’ve found that looks are overrated.”
Shivers looked her slowly up and down, and enjoyed it. “Easy for you to say, you’ve plenty to spare.”
“Manners.” She puffed out her cheeks as she looked round the hall. “I’d despaired of finding any among this crowd. I swear, you must be the only honest man here.”
“Don’t count on it.” Though he was grinning wide enough. There was never a bad time for flattery from a fine-looking woman, after all. He had his pride. She held out one hand to him and he blinked at it. “I kiss it, do I?”
“If you like. It won’t dissolve.”
