all about how much either of the cubs loved her, or how much they loved each other. Something had happened here, and I had been too distracted with my own life to see it clearly.
‘He’s dead,’ said Garnet in a gasp. ‘I’ve killed him.’
He was naked, and smelled of sex and animor, too much animor. He shone like a beacon, the power pouring out through the motes in his skin.
I couldn’t feel Ashiol. Not at all.
I went to the door of the room and saw him sprawled on the bed, his body unnaturally still. I heard the sob that caught in Livilla’s throat and stuck there. I could hear Garnet’s heart beating louder and louder, too fast.
‘You’ll have to make them think you meant to do it,’ I said, when I had a voice.
This was nothing. Garnet had killed Tasha. He was one of the beasts who had ripped Madalena to pieces. What was one more beloved corpse?
I made my way to the bed and stood over Ashiol. He didn’t breathe or move, and there was no animor in him. He was empty, like someone had carved out his insides, taken everything that made him himself.
This is what happens to the people Garnet loves, I thought, traitorously, and laid one hand on Ashiol’s bare chest.
He woke up, and started screaming with a pain and anger I’d never heard, not from any of them. He was still empty.
Garnet and Ashiol had been trained and punished by some of the harshest monsters the Creature Court had ever produced and yet no one could hurt them as deeply as they could hurt each other.
While Garnet buried his anguish in every potion he could get his hands on, and Livilla stayed at his side to lick up every fallen drop, it fell to me to cart Ashiol to the people of the daylight who might care for him.
Mars helped. He was Livilla’s courteso now, but he had served Ashiol once. He said little to me as we carried Ashiol’s inert body up through Saturn’s old Eyrie and towards the Palazzo on the top of the hill. Garnet had drugged Ashiol to dampen his screams, dosing him with so much poppy juice we were lucky he hadn’t killed him all over again.
‘I didn’t know it was possible,’ Mars said, breaking his silence as we laid Ashiol on the Palazzo steps. ‘To drain a man of animor. A King …’
‘There is much the Power and Majesty can do that we could never understand,’ I said.
We walked away and left Ashiol to be found by his daylight family and their servants. He lived, though it wasn’t long before we heard that he had left the city.
Mars had a point. No one had ever heard of a King being drained of his animor. It was possible to give and take animor, to share it when your Lord needed greater strength, to bestow it when your courtesi were wounded … but this was unheard of. The only conclusion we could reach was that Ashiol had given it of his own free will, but that hardly fitted with the facts known.
I went through Saturn’s books again, hunting for some answers as to what powers Garnet had, and what he had done to Ashiol, but they provided little.
There was one book missing. I counted and checked several times to be sure. I knew it; had once deciphered several pages of inane theories about creatures that lay beyond the sky and how we could communicate with them. I didn’t know what the rest of the volume held. But I found a single fine red hair in the chest and knew who had stolen it from me.
Apparently, my capacity for forgiveness is infinite. It’s important to know these things about yourself.
PART X
The Clockwork
Court
31
Four days after the Ides of Bestialis
The train journey south brought memories crashing in on Ashiol. He kept flashing back to that day five years ago when he had awoken, still half-drugged, miserable, broken, to find himself in a carriage en route to Diamagne. Three blank-faced lictors had been his only companions, charged with ensuring he arrive alive at his stepfather’s estate. (No, not stepfather; his brother’s estate. Diamagne was dead, there was a letter, but Ashiol had been so caught up in Garnet and his madness that he hadn’t even sent a card of consolation to his mother.) Ashiol had spent most of that journey trying to figure out how to steal one of those axes that the lictors carried,