Maledicte by Lane Robins Read Free Book Online Page B

path.
    The coat had been discarded, a dark blotch in the snow beside an ivy-covered wall. The ivy was brown and sere, withered by the cold, but up above a window flashed, and something weightier than ice fell to the drift beside him. Gilly stooped, picked up the shard of glass, and swore. He backtracked, pounded on the door until his hands stung with impact, but this time no one answered.
    “Drive down to the gate, blanket the horses, and wait for us. I’d rather them not grow suspicious of our continued presence.”
    He returned to the wall of ivy and stared upward. Gilly estimated that he had at least eighty pounds over the boy, but the ivy showed no breakages from the boy’s ascent. Maybe it would hold his weight, he thought. Or maybe he would plummet to the snow beneath and break a leg or his neck.
    Gilly took off his coat, dropped it over the boy’s, firmed his gloves around his fingers, and began to climb. Ivy leaves crumbled beneath his hands; the vines stayed firm, until, within an armspan of the window, they started to peel away from the mortar. Gilly lunged upward, hooked his hands over the sill, and pulled himself inward, landing on the dusty floor of an unused bedchamber. He wrinkled his nose, repressed a sneeze and a sneer that Last couldn’t get good servants either, and set off tracking the boy’s damp footprints.
    He found the boy standing in the shadowed alcove of a long hallway. “What are you—”
    The boy put an icy hand over Gilly’s mouth, drew him into the alcove. “There’s someone coming.” His whisper warmed Gilly’s ear.
    They watched the maid carrying the bundles of whites pass them and head down distant, uncarpeted stairs.
    “What are you doing?” Gilly repeated.
    “Learning my enemy.”
    Gilly sighed. “I can tell you about him. And in the comfort of Vornatti’s library. Or at his dining table if you’re hungry again.”
    The boy wandered into the hallway, looked down the stairs into a dim long room, near bare of furnishings. “What is that?”
    Gilly peered over the boy’s shoulder. “Portrait gallery. Pictures of his ancestors.”
    “He knows what they all look like?” The boy was impressed by that, by the simple fact that the earl of Last knew who fathered him, who fathered his father, and so on, and more, could trace images of himself in their features. “I want to see.” He descended the stairs and Gilly hastened after him.
    The nearest panel was blank. The boy turned to Gilly, his face demanding explanation. Gilly, keeping a nervous eye and ear out, said, “That’s for the next earl, the current earl’s son. The portraits go by birth order.”
    “So this is Last?” The boy walked on to the next portrait, heading farther into the house, farther from the window and escape.
    Gilly caught him up. “Yes. This is Michel Ixion, the fourteenth earl of Last.”
    The boy’s eyes narrowed. “Is it like him?”
    “Enough,” Gilly said. The boy touched the painting, put his palm flat against the canvas, then drew his hand into a claw as if he might start tearing at it, as if he could slake his bloodlust on a picture. Gilly tugged the boy away, memories of rural superstition making his skin crawl, thinking of pins stuck in dolls and left on altars for godly intercession, never mind that the gods could not answer.
    The boy’s wrist trembled against Gilly’s hand, the fine bones taut under Gilly’s fingers, but he didn’t resist. His eyes fell on the blank panel again and his breath caught. “This is for Janus?”
    “It’s unlikely. He is a bastard, no matter the story they intend to put out. It’s far more likely that Last means to use Janus as a bargaining chip in his next marriage—a tangible, albeit scandalous, counter to the rumors of tainted blood.”
    Even as Gilly said it, he wondered,
Why legitimize the bastard at all?
It wasn’t like Last, a stalwart traditionalist, to fly in the face of custom, to not only recognize his bastard son, but to legitimize