Bone Palace, The - Amanda Downum Page 0,21

all their visits in the past several months had been strained and brief. After fifteen years, she wanted to tell him, she could tell the difference between honest distraction and willful avoidance.

Instead she ushered him in and moved to stir the fire and pour wine. After fifteen years she also knew how impossible it was to pry things from him that he didn’t want to share. His footsteps creaked unevenly across the floorboards; she wondered when he’d begun to limp. Fabric rustled as he sank into a chair near the great window.

Isyllt handed him a glass—a cunningly wrought cage cup, one of a pair he’d given her for a long-ago saint day—and sat down in the other worn and much-mended chair. Her apartments had been new and richly furnished fifty years ago, but nicks and scuffs had accumulated over a succession of government employees, and Isyllt was more apt to spend her salary on clothes and expensive wine than new furniture. Decades of pacing feet had worn the patterns from the rugs, and the smoke of lamps and candles darkened the high beams.

“What do you think of this?” Kiril asked, his voice carefully bland.

“I don’t know.” Leather creaked as she crossed her legs. “I don’t know what the girl had to do with the robbery, or why she was killed, or who even amongst demons would be mad or foolish enough to do something like this.” She sipped her wine, rolling tannin and warm spices across her tongue. “If Mathiros hears of this…”

Kiril’s mouth hooked down. “He’ll storm the catacombs with flame and silver and hang the charred bones from the walls. Yes.” He tasted the wine and nodded approval. “Which would be madness in its turn—the vrykoloi would certainly retaliate. But he isn’t rational where Lychandra is concerned.”

He stared out the window; the light died by inches and thunder growled in the distance. The gloom washed his face grey, filled the hollows of his cheeks and eyes with shadows. Isyllt couldn’t remember the first time her breath had caught when she looked at him too long, but it had never stopped since. Her hand tightened on her cup till the filigreed silver cage bit her palm.

The ache of memory wasn’t enough to distract her from his frown, or the faint movement of his fingers against the arm of the chair. “What is it?” she asked. “You know something.”

“It’s nothing,” he said after a pause. At least he had the grace to look rueful when he lied to her. She pushed the fleeting sting aside—there had always been things he couldn’t tell her. A hazard of their work. “Investigate as you see fit. If we can find those responsible and return what was stolen, perhaps Mathiros need never learn of this.” His frown deepened. Did it pain him to hide things from the king he’d served so long? Isyllt didn’t think he would have kept secrets three years ago. Three years ago he could have swayed the king from any foolish vengeance. But maybe there had always been secrets between Kiril and Mathiros too. “Perhaps Aphra and Tenebris know something.”

She nearly smiled. Many in Erisín avoided even the word vrykoloi, for fear of attracting unwanted attention—Kiril named their elders as he might old friends.

He turned back to her and the firelight picked out glints of garnet in his hair, lined the weary creases on his face. “You’re not going alone, are you?”

“I’m taking Ciaran. He knows his way around the sewers.” The musician’s days of fencing and sneak-thievery might be over, but he hadn’t forgotten them any more than she’d forgotten hers. Elysia branded its children deep.

Kiril’s eyebrows rose. “You and he are still close, then?”

She chuckled. She’d had other relationships over the years, before and after Kiril, but of all her lovers in Erisín, she only spoke to him and Ciaran. “I’m not made of rosewood and strings—it will never be serious. I trust him at my back.” But not like I trust you. She washed the thought away with a swallow of wine.

He nodded and raised his own cup. “That’s good. You need more people you can trust around you. Perhaps you should consider taking an apprentice of your own.”

Her smile felt brittle. “I don’t need to worry about that yet, do I?” Was his health the secret he was keeping? He had never truly recovered from the attack he suffered after the queen’s death, but she hadn’t imagined things had worsened so much.

He stared into the ruby-black