“Not remotely; I never have,” he said, affably. “Do you accept the terms of the offer?”
“Tell me what you’re—”
“Accept first.”
“I’ll accept if you swear on the sword,” said Mercy, with unholy eagerness.
He raised his rapier up within its scabbard. It had a bright conical hilt of what looked to be copper, with pricked designs all over it. “I swear by the sword of Alfred Quinque, best of men and cavaliers, that the details of your, ahem, business will not be told by me, or revealed by me, or let fall from the lips of my mouth nor the pads of my fingers—even though I think it will be the death of us,” he added. At this, there was a fractional relaxing of Mercymorn’s frowzled brow: not relief, but the germination of the seed of relief. “Accept.”
“Fine! I accept,” she said. Then she looked around herself, and said: “You do know the children are present? Should I kill them, or what?”
“Ignore ’em,” said Augustine. “Better you don’t know why they’re here. Look—I need you to fully commit to this one, Joy, and if you don’t, I will consider the oath I just swore tampered with.”
“Commit! Commit!!” she said scornfully. You noticed she was wearing short strings of apricot-coloured seed pearls in her ears; they vibrated as she folded her arms across her chest. “Stop wasting your breath and tell me the plan.”
“Once you hear it, whatever you do to me, don’t do it below the neck. None of my other shirts are pressed.”
“Stop drawing this out! Tell me!”
He cleared his throat and said: “Dios apate, minor.”
You had a front-row seat to Mercymorn’s dreamy eyes going quiet; the eye of the tempest, before she reared back and punched him full in the face. There was not much force in that blow, which barely snapped his head back, but he whitened as though her fist had been a battering ram. He gagged, doubled over his washstand, and ejected a mouthful of teeth—a tumbling, plinking bowlful; he held his hand over his red and dripping mouth and closed his eyes, and after a few moments straightened back up, a trifle greyer, running his tongue over his regrown incisors.
“Minor,” he repeated when he could, taking out a handkerchief and dabbing his mouth. “Minor—how many times must I say it?”
“You’ve lost your senses,” she said unsteadily.
“You think I am joking, Mercymorn?”
They looked at each other. Then followed the type of conversation you had only seen once before, between her and God—that exchange of shrugs, and words begun in the mouth and aborted at the first breath, and at one point she said, “Gradient?” and he answered, “Radial,” and then they devolved again into a shorthand of facial expressions. In its own way, it was swifter and less coherent than what you had seen pass between the Emperor of the Nine Houses and her, that lifetime ago leaving the Erebos; but at the end, her hand fluttered around her mouth, and she halfway wailed:
“I’m not wearing the right dress.”
“It’s perfect. You look like a melon.”
“But I hate this,” she said, quite genuinely, and Augustine looked at her with his insubstantial eyes and said: “I understand. Buck up, Joy; it won’t kill you.”
Your gaze met Ianthe’s. She had followed the whole thing in rank fascination; now she quirked her own eyebrows at you in what you had come to understand was, Who knows? For a moment you worried that, come another myriad, you and she might be able to carry on such a conversation: that you would know her intent by the twist of her mouth and her exhalation, to the point where you could speak without dialogue.
In the end, Mercymorn said, “Blech!” and turned on one heel and stalked out. She flung open the door, said anxiously, “White wine!” and with that cryptic epigram, disappeared.
The Saint of Patience said, “That went significantly better than I thought it might,” without a glance at his sink of bloodied teeth. “Come on—I want one of you on each of my arms on this battlefront. On my right, Ianthe. I’m not clutching that bone; I never did like ’em skinny—Harrowhark, you really didn’t get any height, did you? Lord! Imagine being crystallized a teenager, forever! Whatever you see tonight,” he added, suddenly serious as the grave, “do not get involved.”
Behind his back—as you walked down the corridor—the Princess of Ida mouthed at you smugly: Quick! Sophisticated! Devious!
30
IT TURNED OUT THAT AUGUSTINE THE FIRST—Saint of Patience, founder of the