Bone Palace, The - Amanda Downum Page 0,81

but most of her violence had been to rip out pages. Many of those he thought he could salvage, or at least rewrite. He shoved the survivors into his desk and lit a lamp. The raven regarded him with one black eye, its gaze canny for even a clever bird.

“What happened?” he asked again, risking a stretch past the bird to close the window.

“Someone was snooping around the castle.” She rubbed her face though she had no tears to wipe away. “Pawing through our things.”

That made him stiffen. No need to ask which castle, or who else she meant by our. “Who?”

“I don’t know. No one the birds had seen before. They fled west, so I imagine they weren’t Sarken.”

“Fled from what?”

She sat up, trying to smooth her tangled hair. “My birds drove them off. I should have burned it, should have razed the stones to the ground.”

He drew a breath. Let it out again. “Mightn’t it be wiser not to draw attention to the castle? To you?”

“It’s difficult to draw attention to my past these days.” She gave up on her hair and tugged her gown straight instead. Wine-red velvet today, a modern style. Varis’s work, no doubt. “You wrought that very well indeed. But not, apparently, well enough. We’ve had enough invasion, enough destruction and callous looting. The bones of Carnavas belong to my family now, and they may guard their treasures as they see fit.” Her wild rage cooled, settling into an angry chill.

“Be as that may, a little discretion would be wise. You won’t find revenge as a pile of salted ashes. Varis and I have no desire for that fate either.”

“No. No, Varis doesn’t deserve that. He was always so kind to me.”

“He worshiped you in university,” Kiril said, weary enough for unhappy truths to spill. And you repay him by making him a party to treason. But that was unfair—Varis had begun this. Phaedra’s magic had kept her from true death, but Varis had found her and nursed her back to sanity and kindled in her the desire for revenge.

Phaedra blinked. “He never said anything.”

Kiril nearly laughed. You never see what’s right in front of you. Isyllt had told him that years ago, her voice heavy with exasperation and resignation. And he, to prove her point, still hadn’t realized what she was speaking of. If he had—

Kiril sank into a chair across from Phaedra and rubbed his temples against a growing pressure there. His eyes felt as though they’d been scraped out with a spoon and shoved back into his sockets. “Of course he didn’t,” he said, forcing his thoughts to different history. “He has a heart, you know, under all that velvet gaud. And he’s never handed it away for the breaking.”

Which was why their own affair had been so brief. Or perhaps Varis had simply been unable to love someone already sworn to the Alexioi. Whatever the reason, he had broken with Kiril publicly and melodramatically before he left for Iskar, before Kiril had to do the leaving. It had been a kindness, just as his leaving Isyllt had been; that never seemed to make it easier for anyone.

The raven croaked and Phaedra stood, shaking out her wrinkled skirts as she crossed the room. “I know, darling,” she murmured, stroking its cheek with one knuckle. “Such a long way you’ve flown for me. And I’ll ask another journey of you still.” She slipped a knife from a skirt pocket and nicked the soft brown skin of her wrist. Blood welled, slow and dark and heavy. The bird bobbed its head to the wound, drinking till the edge of its beak glistened crimson.

The creation of familiars was an old practice, but Phaedra’s birds were closer to her than that. She had been them, and they her, until she had found a new body to claim. Kiril could scarcely imagine what that had been like—it was a wonder she had any remnants of sanity left.

Phaedra glanced up to find Kiril watching. Her eyebrows rose. “Care for a taste?”

“And become one of your pets as well? No thank you.”

“I don’t think you would,” she said after a thoughtful pause. “Not easily, at least, or from such a small amount.”

“But it would start the process. The spread of your power and will and consciousness into me. I did read your articles when you were at the Arcanost, you know.”

She smiled. “Then you know how much a taste could benefit you. Haematurgy can heal as well as