being cuckolded, and which was the cock, do you suppose? Or did they share a woman gracefully, mmm? Don’t tell me their fair lady had them fooled. None of you have a weak nose for scent, and not even the nobility scrubbed clean often in that day and age.”
Alban rumbled, “I would never dream of asking,” and Grace laughed aloud, clapping her hands like a pleased child.
“No, and of course you wouldn’t, solid, stolid, stone thing that you are. Well, and maybe I’ll have a chance to ask myself, someday. But go on, Stoneheart.” Grace sobered. “Rid me of the dragon, will you? He’s only stalling anyway. Your Margrit laid it out for him clear enough, and I’ve never seen one such as he tuck tail and turn that readily. What was the task?” she asked, curiosity and caution turning her voice sharp. “What’d he set Margrit to do?”
“I don’t know. It seemed Margrit did, but I wasn’t privy to whatever favor he asked.”
“Ah.” Curiosity lit Grace’s eyes before she waved him down the hall. “Well, go on, then. Go find out, and then send him packing. The sooner these tunnels are my own again, the happier I’ll be.”
Amusement washed through him. “Where do you come by your command, Grace? Even I find myself inclined to leap before realizing I’ve been given an order.”
“Born to it, love, and you’re not meant to notice. Gargoyles,” she said with a sniff. “You pay too much attention. I’ll be glad to have the lot of you gone from my territory, so I will, and yes, that means you, too, Alban Korund. I’ve had enough trouble from the Old Races. My kids and I need our peace.”
“So you haven’t set your cap for Eldred?” Alban asked, still amused, and Grace mimed adjusting one.
“Not at all. There’s a fine man out there for Gráinne Ui Mháille, and I’ll capture his heart when the time comes. Now go on, Alban,” she said again. “Protect me and mine. That’s what you’re here for.”
Tariq had shown an iota more subtlety than Margrit had expected, and had waited until he’d left Rebecca’s office on foot before dissipating. Margrit had stared at where he’d been, wondering why discretion mattered now, when he’d materialized in front of Rebecca, but had restrained from casting the question into the apparently empty hallway. He’d spared her life and given his word against further attempts, but where she would have trusted Janx or even Daisani on that promise, she was reluctant to test the djinn.
When she was certain he was gone, she’d turned back to her mother’s office, about to enter and offer… solace, or penance. In the end, both had seemed somehow arrogant, and she’d walked away, then begun to run once she’d left the building.
Within minutes she’d brought herself to one of the handful of entrances to Grace’s under-city haunts that she’d finally learned in the past few days. That, at least, was one good thing that had come of the exhausting week, though that it qualified as “one good thing” filled her with rue.
She was more confident of finding her way to the central hub where the trial had been held than Janx’s off- the-path lair, but she risked trying to pick her way through the tunnels to the latter. Wisdom dictated otherwise, but Grace had an uncanny knack for finding her when she was lost, and Margrit trusted that even more than she trusted Janx’s or Daisani’s word. She breathed, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave,” as she worked her way deeper into the underground system, and was oddly unsurprised when, minutes later, Grace’s voice echoed the second half of the couplet back at her.
“When first we practice to deceive. Where do you think you’re going, Margrit?” Grace came out of the shadows, ethereal as always. More than usual, even, as slightly detached from the world as she’d been when Margrit had first awakened in the docking garage.
Margrit stopped, not quite looking at her and half expecting that she’d fade away, nothing more than an illusion. “To Janx’s place. Or I hoped I was. It’s funny.” Her voice sounded hollow and light to her own ears.
“Getting lost finding the dragonlord’s chambers is funny?”
“Do you think I was dead?” The question felt like a non sequitur even to Margrit, thoughts and speech not quite in tandem with one another.
Grace, at the corner of Margrit’s vision, looked startled. “Near enough to it, love. Why?”
“Because you’ve looked different since I came back.” Margrit risked a full-on glance at the blonde, then shuttered her gaze away again, watching Grace all but shimmer in her peripheral vision. “Because I keep thinking, only not really thinking, because when I think, it gets cloudy. I just have this idea down in the back of my brain. About how you always turn up places faster than you should be able to. About how sometimes in that fight I was sure I’d hit you but it kind of shivered off. About how you got Alban out of those chains, and how you got through my locked front door.”
Margrit blinked hard and turned her full attention to Grace. “And about why a modern-day folk hero would name herself after a centuries-old pirate and brigand. You’re human, aren’t you. But you’re not…alive. And the only reason I can see it is because I died myself.”
“It’s been a long time since anyone’s seen Grace so clearly.” The tall vigilante disappeared from sight as she spoke, not in the coalescing manner that djinn did, but simply gone, blinking out and leaving her voice to linger. It came again from behind Margrit, light and amused and traced with approval. “Grace has her secrets. Grace has her ways.”
Margrit spun around, heartbeat high with excitement and confusion. “What are—Are you a ghost? How —?”
Grace spread long fingers in a move both dismissive and accepting. “Cursed, love. Making up for old sins, I told you that once and again. Grace O’Malley spilled a fair lot of blood in her day, and some of it should have stayed in the veins it fell from. What will you do, now that you have the truth of me?”
Feeling stupid with astonishment, Margrit blurted, “Can I help?”
Surprise filtered over Grace’s expression, and her white-blond hair and pale skin lit with a glow, as though a veil had been taken down from Margrit’s vision. A stronger feeling of foolishness rose in her, tightening her chest: it seemed impossible that the inhuman woman before her ever could have been mistaken for someone ordinary. “Not unless you can give me the kiss of angels, Margrit Knight. I’ve searched for it for four centuries and found nothing yet, and I think you’ll take it right if I say I don’t think it’ll be from your lips. The thought is kind, though, and more than I might have expected. What will you do?”
“Grace has her secrets,” Margrit echoed. “None of them know?”
“There’s a reason I won’t cross the likes of Janx or Daisani. They know I’ve been around a long time, but I might’ve drunk of a vampire’s blood, or I might be born of some illicit union like the one that fathered those two girls. It’s better not to ask, sometimes. It’s better not to know. And I stay in the shadows most often, doing my work and staying out of their way.”
“But you haven’t. You’ve been helping and interfering all over the place the last few months.”
Grace flashed a smile. “It’s not often that a gargoyle and a lawyer walk into my tunnels, love.” She rolled her eyes to the ceiling, said, “That ought to start a joke,” then looked back at Margrit, smile fading to something gentle and wry. “And I suppose that for all the years, I’m still only human at heart. Curiosity gets the best of us every time.”
“Who cursed you? What happens if you find the kiss of angels? What is the kiss of angels?”
“A witch, Margrit, and don’t say what I see in your eyes. There are gargoyles and ghosts and dragons, my girl, so don’t say there are no witches. I don’t know,” she said easily, for once offering a straight answer. “If I knew, maybe I’d have found it long ago. And perhaps if I do find it, I leave this world behind. I’ve haunted it long enough that I wouldn’t mind. What,” she asked for the third time, “will you do?”
“The gargoyles are going to want to know how you freed Alban, but until they come asking, I’ll…” Margrit turned her palms up, and with the gesture finally understood the reticence that had stayed Alban’s tongue, had stayed all the Old Races when she’d asked them about their peoples or others. Alban had said more than once that some stories weren’t his to tell, and for the first time, sympathy and comprehension settled in Margrit’s bones. “I’ll keep your secret, Grace, and send them to you for the answers.”
Grace bowed her head, the gesture of thanks taking some of the glow away, so that when she looked up again, her brown eyes were little more than ordinary. Margrit could still see a subtle aura of wrongness around Grace, but it was something her eyes could forgive as a trick of the light, if she let them.
A great deal of the world she’d been thrust into was a matter of letting, and being, and accepting, all in ways that rubbed uncomfortably against her skin. But the art of compromise was one lawyers were supposed to be good at, and, watching Grace almost fading into the shadows again, the letting it be seemed one Margrit could live with. “Can you show me the way to Janx’s room before you go?”
