The Bone Palace

crept into the words. “She went to the theater with Nikos just the other day. And she’s attending the boating party at the palace on Polyhymnis.”

“If the princess goes with them,” said Varis, “tell her not to stand too close to the rail.”

“What will you do?” Nadesda asked.

Savedra shrugged, not quite keeping the anger from the gesture. “The same thing I always do. Wait. Watch. Stop them.” Ever and always, the unceasing vigilance-tasting food, staring at shadows, studying every gift and visitor who came too close. It wasn’t what she’d imagined when she and Nikos had exchanged their first too-long glance across a crowded room nearly five years ago. “I should have been a whore after all.”

She only saw it because she was looking: the tightening around Nadesda’s eyes, the heartbeat-quick compression of painted lips. A mother’s pain beneath an archa’s poise.

Varis’s response was less controlled-his jaw clenched, and his pale eyes darkened with anger-but gone just as quickly. “Of course you shouldn’t have,” he said, voice carefully light. “That would be boring.” He tugged at his high sculpted collar. “Never let them forget you.”

Tea dragged into lunch, and then an hour spent gossiping about court and family, until Nadesda excused herself for an appointment and Varis became distracted by a conversation with the gardener about western herblore. Savedra took her chance to slip out quietly and return to the library. The assassin was only half her reason for visiting.

Many volumes of Severos history weren’t stored in Phoenix House, but secreted in vaults in remote properties or in the family library at Evharis. She wished she had those at hand, but there was no subtle way to visit them. For now the Phoenix Codex would have to satisfy her curiosity about the vrykoloi.

So of course it didn’t. An hour passed as she turned page after page with careful gloved fingers, squinting at the cramped scholarly hand. The book spoke in detail of the reign of Darius II Severos, including his dealings-in circumspect, politic language-with the vrykoloi, but of the vampires themselves she found little besides footnotes: Sovay’s Mathematics and Thaumaturgy, Anektra’s Principia Demonica, a monograph about blood magic by a Phaedra Severos published in 463. She pulled the Anektra off the shelf, risking a sprained wrist, but the handspan-thick volume was too daunting to open.

“Don’t tell me you’ve finally decided to study magic.”

Savedra started, cracking her elbow on the table and cursing. The silence on the room had faded, but Varis could still come and go unheard.

“It would make an old degenerate so proud.”

She snorted. This was a conversation they’d had a dozen times. The only way Varis had ever tried to shape her life was by encouraging her to take up sorcery, to test the fabled mysticism of the hijra. It was, to her knowledge, the only way she’d ever disappointed him; she had neither the desire nor aptitude for magic, and even less desire to remind people of the marks she didn’t wear.

“Not today, Uncle.” She shut the Phoenix Codex with a soft whump and stripped off the library’s cotton gloves.

Beneath his paints and powders, Varis looked tired. The skin around his eyes was delicate as crepe, the lines there deeper when he smiled. He had been gone from the city for much of the past year, and distant and withdrawn about his trips. Scandal was his specialty, but secrets ran in their blood.

“What do you know about vampires?” she asked, thinking of secrets.

He stilled for an instant, then plucked imaginary lint off one sleeve. “Not much, I’m afraid. Why the interest?”

Savedra smiled, carefully bright. “Some of the courtiers have started reading those awful penny dreadfuls. I hoped I could find something in here to impress them with.”

“Ah. Sadly, no. No one knows much about the vrykoloi, except perhaps a few who know better than to speak of it. A proper treatise or examination would make the Arcanost scholars’ teeth ache with envy, but none of them have the guts to go underground.” He waved one perfectly manicured black-nailed hand. “No one likes to get their hands dirty anymore.”

“Pity.” Savedra rose, shaking out her skirts, and reshelved the books. “I’ll have to settle for knowing looks and sly silences, I suppose.”

“Clever girl.” He tugged his collar straight again. “And now that your mother is gone, you can tell me about that massage oil.”

Savedra laughed and let herself be distracted, but a warning chill had settled in her stomach. That he lied only stung a little-she was used to her family-but that he lied now unnerved her.

What did he know about vampires?

CHAPTER 3

Kiril had given up many of his duties over the last three years, but he couldn’t prove it by the paperwork. A single lamp burned on his desk, spilling yellow light across stacked ledgers and rolled parchment and drifts of loose paper. Legal forms scribed in triplicate and foreign news and hand-scrawled notes in private ciphers. Agents who reported directly to the king still sent him copies of their reports, and he had plenty of contacts who communicated only with him. His slow slide from favor had done nothing to lessen the tide. Fallings out might be counterfeited, after all, or damaged friendships mended.

There was nothing false in his split from Mathiros, nor did it hold any hope of reconciliation. He had seen to that himself.

He glared at the two latest missives; the words blurred less than an armspan away. Lamps were bad for his eyes, the physicians swore to him, but he made no move to draw back the curtains. The day outside was rain- washed and gloomy, the autumn afternoon already dull as dusk. Neither did he reach for the spectacles folded on the corner of the wide rosewood desk. Instead he called witchlight, harsh and white.

The simplest of spells, it should have been effortless. Instead he felt the drain of it all the way to his bones. But it was much easier to read by.

The first letter was a report from the front. The king had not seen fit to send it to him, nor had the mage who took Kiril’s place at the king’s side, but the scribe was an old friend. For such a foolish enterprise, Mathiros had acquitted himself well enough. An armistice with the Ordozh, and only two hundred Selafain dead to show for it. That number might be lower had Kiril been at the front, and it might not.

Which rankles more, old man? he thought wryly, rubbing the bridge of his nose against an incipient headache. That he needs you and ignores you, or that he doesn’t need you at all?

But among the dead were forty mages, and that wasn’t a number to be shrugged aside. Kristof Vargas, Kiril’s replacement and former student, was a talented sorcerer but still cocky with advancement. Selafai didn’t have scores of battle mages to spare.

That rankled most of all. That Kiril had been set aside after long service he might forgive, but for a decade he had groomed Isyllt Iskaldur to be his successor, and Mathiros had ignored her as he ignored all of Kiril’s advice these days.

Leaving her in the city to stumble over tomb robbers, and secrets he couldn’t confide to her.

He banished the witchlight and touched both notes to the coals in the brazier, breathing in the acrid smoke of burnt parchment. The warmth eased the pain in his hands more than he cared to admit. His joints had begun to ache even before his heart failed three years ago, and the rheumatism had worsened with every winter since. Now even his magic couldn’t distract him from the pain.

It would pass. He’d endured worse.

When the last corner of parchment blackened and fell to ash, Kiril wiped the soot from his hands and rose, leaning against his chair. He didn’t need strength or magic to deal with tomb-robbing vampires, only wits and caution.

He snuffed the lamp and prepared to lie to someone he loved.