Kushiel's Mercy by Jacqueline Carey Read Free Book Online

young and uncertain. Now it was different. She’d stood up to her mother and defied half the realm for my sake. There could be nothing less than complete honesty between us, dangerous or no. I owed her nothing less.
    I would have to tell her about the Unseen Guild.

Four
    I told her that night.
    I could have waited. Elua knows, I wanted to. We’d won a victory of sorts that day, albeit a bitter one. By the time we retired to her chambers, Sidonie was tired and drained. I wanted nothing more than to hold her in my arms and safeguard her sleep.
    Instead, I laid a burden on her.
    “Sidonie,” I said softly when we were alone together. “There’s somewhat I never told you about my time in Tiberium.”
    She paused in the act of brushing her hair. “Oh?”
    I sat cross-legged on her bed, turning the knotted gold ring on my finger. The ring had been her gift, a symbol of the ties that bound us, and of other ties, too. On the night of her seventeenth birthday, I’d lashed her wrists to the bedposts with a golden cord and tormented her with pleasure until she begged me to take her. I suspected there would be no such love-play tonight. “You know the tale of Anafiel Delaunay?”
    “Yes, of course.” She frowned. “Why?”
    Anafiel Delaunay, born Anafiel de Montrève, had been her grandfather’s lover and a poet of some renown. Long before any of us were born, they had studied together in Tiberium.
    There had been a falling out between them when Prince Rolande’s betrothed was killed and Delaunay wrote a satire implicating Rolande’s new bride in the death, none of which particularly mattered anymore. What mattered was that Delaunay had sworn an oath to protect Rolande’s daughter, the infant Ysandre. And he had kept it, long after Rolande’s death in battle.
    The Whoremaster of Spies, his detractors called him. Anafiel Delaunay had adopted two children into his household, training them in the arts of covertcy, and later, courtesanship.
    He was long dead, and so was one of them; two more casualties of my mother’s plotting.
    The other was Phèdre, who had kept all his promises and more.
    I swallowed. “Who taught Anafiel Delaunay the arts of covertcy?”
    Sidonie stared at me. “I never thought to wonder.”
    “Well,” I said. “I did. And I found out.”
    I told her then. The truth, the whole truth, of what had befallen me in Tiberium. How I’d made inquiries. How I’d been seduced by Claudia Fulvia, the wife of a Tiberian senator, seeking to recruit me for a secret organization she called the Unseen Guild. A consortium of spies, reporting to persons in places of power all across the world, capable of influencing great events. They had attempted to recruit Anafiel Delaunay when he was a young man in Tiberium, training him in the arts of covertcy.
    In the end, he had refused them.
    So had I.
    “It was a choice,” I said hoarsely. “Swear allegiance, or refuse and keep their secrets.”
    “And you chose the latter?” Sidonie asked.
    “Yes.” I took a deep breath. “But there’s more. I told you about Canis?”
    “The man who took a spear for you in Lucca.” Her eyes were dark and unreadable. “The one who said, ‘Your mother sends her love’ before he died.”
    “Yes.” I told her the whole truth of that tale, too. How Canis, who had seemed only an odd philosopher-beggar, had given me a clay medallion with the image of a lamp on it.
    How I’d learned in the Temple of Asclepius that there were words etched around the edge in a code invented by a blind healer. Do no harm . And how, when at last I’d confronted Claudia Fulvia about it, she had admitted that it meant a member of the Unseen Guild had placed me under their protection.
    “Your mother,” Sidonie said flatly.
    “I think so,” I murmured.
    Sidonie rose without comment. She went to the balcony doors, gazing out into the summer night, her arms wrapped around herself. She was wearing a dressing-robe of thin, cream-colored silk, so fine I