Bone Palace, The - Amanda Downum Page 0,124

Mathiros and me. She was a powerful mage and a brilliant scholar. The things she could do with haematurgy were a marvel.” He sipped his drink, grimacing as he always did at the taste. “She was also mad. Not like she is now, but bad enough—she spent days in frenzies of research, creating wondrous things, only to burn her notes in black despair because nothing she wrought was as flawless as it should be. She went from mania to despair without warning. And more rarely and worse yet, she fell into a sort of fierce nihilism, like a phoenix who meant to take the whole world with her when she burned. That fire, I think, is what drew Mathiros.”

“They were lovers?”

Kiril knocked back the rest of his drink. “There was nothing of love between them, no matter how loosely one defines the term. But yes. She was already married. I met her husband once, before all that began. He reminded me of Mathiros, actually, but older and wiser and far calmer. Ferenz weathered Phaedra’s moods like a mountain. Mathiros couldn’t offer that—he was little more than a boy when they met, cocky with his rank and the strength of youth. He wanted her because she was beautiful, and because—” He stared into the bottom of his empty glass. “Because he has always been searching for that fire that will consume him, ever since he was a child. And in each other, they found the means to destroy themselves.

“I couldn’t stop it. I was already Mathiros’s closest advisor, but nothing would keep him from Phaedra. It was ugly and brutal—not the brutality of fists, though possibly that too, but of words and heart. And eventually it went too far. Perhaps he struck her, or merely said the wrong hurtful thing. Whatever it was, she responded with magic, and drew his blood. And then it was treason.

“That might have been the end of it. She fled the palace and returned to Sarkany, and without her presence to goad him I think I could have calmed him. But the palace maids thought Phaedra was pregnant, and the rumor reached Mathiros. I silenced it, but too late.” His mouth was a grim line, and Isyllt didn’t ask what measures he’d taken for that silence.

“Now we had a royal bastard to deal with, who would be raised by a Severos blood mage and a Sarken noble. The possibilities were… unpleasant. Mathiros was determined to deal with it, and I couldn’t dissuade him from doing so personally. We rode to Carnavas in all the stealth my magic and lies could give us. I still hoped that we could solve this reasonably.” His smile was humorless. “The folly of youth.

“It began with discussion, but quickly degenerated. Mathiros and Ferenz fought, while I pursued Phaedra to her tower. Then Ferenz fell, and all the fight went out of her. She threw herself off the tower.” His eyes closed, fingers tightening on the arm of the chair.

“But she didn’t die,” Isyllt said. “Not permanently.” Her jaw ached from the effort of keeping her teeth from chattering. She hadn’t lit a fire, and the room was nearly as cold as the dawn.

“No. Though I didn’t know that at the time. And so we were left with a castle full of corpses and the makings of an international incident.”

“What did you do?”

“I killed all the castle servants, to start, and used their deaths to cover our tracks at Carnavas. But that did nothing about the city full of people who knew and would miss Phaedra. Hushing up a bastard is one thing, but murdering a scion of a great house would mean open revolt from the Octagon Court. So I erased her.”

Isyllt swallowed, her throat gone dry. Erasing a moment’s memory was one thing, but a lifetime—“How?”

“With more murder, of course.” His voice was harsher than the winter outside. “I carried the souls I collected to the labyrinth beneath Erishal’s cathedral and offered them to her, along with three years of my life. She took my offering—she does so enjoy watching secular mages prostrate themselves. And slowly everyone who had ever known Phaedra began to forget her. The physical evidence—her papers and research—I stole from the Arcanost, so no one would be reminded.”

“Does that mean Mathiros?”

Kiril nodded. “Also has no memory of her. He couldn’t remember, or he would have spent the rest of his life a butcher. I took the burden from him to give him another chance. When he