3.

Psyke woke, thick-headed and cold, from dreams of breathlessness and terror. The tisane Olympia had fed her, a poisonously sweet concoction of Petal, bitter chocolate, boiled milk, and sugar syrup had done its work most thoroughly. Time seemed clouded, her head mazed, and her body as lethargic as river silt.

Her world was darkness streaked with grainy light, and the faint sour smell of her breath was directed back at her, captured by cloth.

Her fingers fumbled, only distantly obedient, and plucked the veil from 'round her face. Was she sleeping in her costume? Home from the Dark Solstice Masque so late that Olympia allowed her to seek her bed without even changing her dress for a nightrail?

Psyke rolled her head; the veil, crumpled now, was black silk--her costume veil had been silver and green and embroidered with forget-me-nots of an improbable blue. The dark veil was something else. A lingering remnant of old superstition of a dead god, and hardly the only one.

When Psyke was younger, and her father vanished under the tides of the Xipos War, her mother had wrapped her tight in a false shroud lest the Admiral come back for his favorite daughter. Pyske, stubborn, had thrown her shroud aside and tried to lure him home, calling Papa, Papa, calling on Haith, begging him to bring her father back, until Olympia, woken and cross with it, told her that not only was her father dead, but so too was Haith and there was none to answer her prayers.

"Papa," she murmured now, then shaking some of the fog from her mind, "Olympia," she said. No reply.

"Mother?"

The house gave back no answer, not even the rustle of one of her many sisters' skirts. She brought a hand to her face, rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and memory blossomed along with the bruising around her wrists, reddish purple, swollen where Maledicte had touched her.

The Solstice Ball, Psyke remembered with a sudden rushing influx of horror. Harriet falling, her eyes glassy, Lucy's pallid legs bared by her collapse, skin so blanched with death that her freckles stood out like cinders. Psyke heard herself whimpering in the back of her throat, an animal sound, and forced herself to stop. She had done that last night, too. Cried quietly, afraid to let the sound out as her peers died, and she stood alive but chilled to the bone, waiting for Haith to catch her up also.

Instead, there had been tisanes and cozening, the comforting clutch of her sisters and mother drowning her fear and shock with their own. Psyke had tumbled into stupor, fallen gratefully, dreaming of Haith's heavy steps scratching the floor, overlaying the distant sound of screaming. Her ears still rang with them, echoes from the ball; the skin of her face felt tight and pulled as if she had been crying in her sleep.

Psyke folded back her heavy, feather-filled counterpane with hands that felt as stiff as a crone's. Her breath plumed in the cold, silent air of her bedchamber, a wispy cloud. She shivered.

"Don't you worry, pet," Olympia had said, stroking Psyke's hair. "Just sleep and we'll see that no one, and nothing disturbs you, not even in your dreams."

Psyke fumbled her feet toward the distant carpet; the bedsteps had been taken away and tucked against the wall, inviting a spill had she risen carelessly. Her youngest sister and most vain, Gwena, still petulant that Psyke had had such an adventure, acting out in her usual petty fashion, no doubt. Psyke had a quick uncharitable wish that Gwena had come face to face with Mirabile and her poisons. Perhaps it would shake her out of her self-absorption. Nothing else ever had. Even last night, while Psyke recounted the murders of her friends, Gwena had inserted scornful remarks on how she would have been braver, have coaxed the men into capturing Mirabile, would have been smarter and seen Mirabile at her deadly work and prevented it all: the poisonings, the deaths, and Mirabile's escape. It had taken Olympia in a rare temper and a hard slap to silence Gwena.

The floor, reached safely, her nightrail tangling at her ankles, proved chill and damp; her fireplace showed no glimmer of heat. Further irritation touched her, a lingering gift of the Old Laudable, the main ingredient of Petal. It was one thing to keep her room still and quiet, another thing entirely to let the fire go ashy and cold.

Psyke tugged the bellpull, heard the clangor of it rising faintly from the kitchen board two floors below, and collected her wrap from her dressing table. A long moment passed, and Psyke's nerves, still sensitive to danger, sent dire warnings. Her heart, slowed by the tisane, began to beat faster.

That jangling bell was the only sound in the house. A lifetime of habit, and Psyke knew the bustle and drift of the maids' skirts rising to answer her summons like the sound of her mother's voice.

Listening with the caution of a wild creature, of a soldier's favorite daughter fed on war tales, Psyke heard a scratchy mouse-scrabble of sound that was followed by a sussurant weight sliding over thick rugs.

"Haith," she murmured, "walking." Falling into dreams again. Dragging his tail behind him, his crested brow scraping the walls as he passed.

A more homely sound reached her, comforted her. The quiet click and chime of the bottles on her mother's dressing table being shifted. Relief blossomed. It was only that it was early still, too early for her to be awake after such a dose, but perhaps it had been not one night of sleep but two, and this the second morning.

Psyke pulled back the curtains in her room, found a chill dawn waiting her, a thin rime crazing her windows, and shuddered again with cold and nerves. She passed through the weak daylight, and padded barefoot into the dim hallway. Her mother would fret when she saw it, mutter about savages and street-urchins, and no wonder Psyke remained unwed at such advanced age if her manners were so lamentable, but if Gwena had played her such a trick with her bedsteps, her slippers were likely full of thistle-down or slugs. Gwena was vain and self-important, but also very thorough.

Five steps into the hallway, into the twilight of its windowless passage, feet silent on the thick rugs, Psyke stepped into something chill that squelched wetly up between her toes, licked at her instep. Like poison, it weakened her instantly--such an anomalous mess in the well-run Bellane household; she dropped to an unsteady crouch, let her hands explore what her heart knew. When she raised her fingers into the thin, filtered light, they were stained the same red-brown as Mirabile's mad eyes, and made all comforting thoughts impossible. Her breath quickened, a sharp wheeze in her throat.

The chink of glass against glass stopped. From her mother's room, a voice called, "Is that you, my cherub? Woken finally?"

The dulcet tone halted her breath; that arch sweetness of pitch was not her mother's, not any of her younger sisters, not even Olympia tidying in her mother's room.

Psyke backed away on hands and knees, awkward, her hair tumbling in her face, sticking on the silent tears that had started falling the moment she'd seen the blood, identified that voice. A rasp of skirts warned her and she tried to shelter behind a small table, a hopeless task even for one as slightly built as she. Mirabile ghosted into the hall, her white-feathered gown stained at the breast, the sleeves, and the fluttering hem. "Surely you didn't think I, having gone to such trouble to remove those annoying debutantes, would spare you, when you were the worst offender of them all? Dancing with Maledicte as if you were his equal."

"Spare me?" Psyke breathed. Surely this was Petal dreaming still, nightmares that would dissolve with the dawn, leaving her well-rested and these horrors only forgotten phantoms.

"You were sleeping so sweetly when I came, and beyond my ability to waken you, though I tried." Mirabile's carmined lips turned downward, a caricature of cruelty like the masks stage villains at the Trieste wore. "I could have smothered you then, but where's the triumph in that? To win over the feeble struggle of a stunned bird."

Psyke thought of her breathless dreams and wondered sickly how close she had come to never waking at all. Mirabile's eyes, reddish even in the dim light, glittered at her, fervid, pleased. Psyke scuttled backward; her bare foot, questing ahead of her, touched the cooler air rising through the stairwell, and she turned, scrambled down the stairs as fast as her tangling skirts would allow.

Behind her Mirabile sighed, a gust of breath with a smile beneath it, as if she relished the chase.

The house was dark as Psyke ran through it, the drapes drawn tight though the sun crept through and left tiny dagger-shapes on the carpets and flocked walls. Daylight coming into full power, and if Psyke could reach the street, surely Mirabile would have to flee like a shade at dawn; though from the measured tread of Mirabile's feet on the stairs, it seemed hard to imagine her fleeing anything.

The hallway opened up to drawing room, to dining room, to the foyer and the main door beyond that. Mirabile's steps seemed to touch her shadow; a frisson wound its way up her spine, and Psyke whirled into the darker recesses of the dining room, veering toward the kitchen. Daylight outside, and if the hour was as early as it seemed, the tinge of a new day in the air, she was more like to find help in the delivery boys making their rounds than trusting to the front stoop and her fellow nobles.

In the darkness of the dining room, the scent hit her like a blow, fetid, thick, and horribly sweet for all of that. Psyke trembled, her body reacting instinctively, understanding that this was death before her mind could even begin to express it. Her breath seized and sobbed; she flattened a hand over her mouth trying to silence herself, while her eyes adjusted, inexorably, unwanted, to a scene better suited to the waxwork museum of horrors. The dining table and the dead set down to dine, silverware clutched in greying fingers. Her mother, her sisters, all dead and with their dinner course spread out before them. Darkness launched itself from the table with a hoarse caw and rattle and a broom-whisking of sharp-edged feathers, aiming directly at her, the pale lure of her nightgown.

Psyke shrieked and once started couldn't manage to stop. She ducked, flailed at the crow, stumbled to her knees, hands flying out to stop her fall, and her fingers caught, pulled on a silk skirt. Gwena slid down in the chair and seemed to glare, all protruberant eyes and swollen tongue, at her least favorite sister.

Wish Gwena had met Mirabile, Psyke had thought earlier. But she hadn't meant it, not like this, Haith give her back, not like this.

As if recognizing Gwena had been the key, loved faces leaped out of death's distorted masks. The blood-streaked rictus with the squeezed shut eyes--her mother. That fetally coiled body beneath the table, face upward with empty eyesockets and gaping mouth, no doubt courtesy of the crow, was her ten-year old niece, the woman reaching down to provide a comfort that never arrived was her widowed sister, Helena. Around the table so it went, Elsa, her favorite lace shawl draggled with blood; Olympia's chin wet with blood, her teeth reddened; Arisane, the youngest of them all, named for Aris when her birth coincided with his ascension, lay back in her chair, her hands locked on the edge of the table as if she had tried to push herself away from this deadly feast.

Psyke's throat was raw with screaming; her eyes felt equally raw as she saw only death where life should be.

A cold hand slapped her, followed by the sting of sharpened nails, and she jolted and fell silent.

"A little less of that appalling noise. A lady of your age should at least try for dignity," Mirabile said, moving past Psyke's huddled form. She pushed Elsa's corpse out of a chair, and after checking the seat for fluids, settled herself with a dowager's finicky grace, fluffing her feathered skirts, smoothing that blood-stained bodice.

"All of them?" Psyke said, her attention fixed firmly on her clenching hands. "All of my family given to death?"

"You wouldn't wake," Mirabile said. "Was I supposed to bear boredom, mewed up with you in your bedroom? It's not my nature to sit idle. So I came downstairs, but their endless chatter was entirely too wearying. One can only listen to gossip about oneself for so long without feeling the need to poison the speakers' soup."

Psyke gasped at the reasonableness of Mirabile's tone, the one that invited commiseration. "All of--" She trailed off, counted shadowed bodies in the room, counted again and again as if the number would change. Her mother, her sisters, all gone while she slept.

"Yes, Lady Psyke. All of them. And the maids, and the cook, and the butler, the tweeny, the stablehands. Might we move on to something more rewarding than revisiting schoolroom addition?"

The crow launched itself from the doorframe to land, wings flaring, claws scrabbling for balance, in Mirabile's lap. The fine silk of her dress tore beneath its talons; her white thigh bled and healed and bled again but she only stroked its matted feathers absently.

"No, I am rarely idle, but even I must admit, it was pleasant to sit by your bedside awhile. It's been quite a busy time for me," Mirabile said. "First the ball, then Westfall, and your family. Even Ani's been hard-pressed to keep up with my appetites, though Her gifts have been useful. Would you believe one of Westfall's servants so forgot himself as to flail away at me with his master's sword? A servant using his master's blade to strike at a noble? Westfall's egalitarian ways--"

Psyke lost the thread of Mirabile's rambling, her mind greying out in horror. Her fingers twitched in the carpet, scrabbling for safety like a rabbit trying to burrow. Ani, she thought. If it were true, if Ani, the god of love and vengeance had returned, and Mirabile's tally of the dead argued for it, the way her skin healed, the uses of poison. . . . If Ani had returned, then--Psyke closed her eyes, bent her head, and whispered a thread of a prayer to the only god her father had ever knelt to, the battlefield god: Haith, the god of death and victory. Strike me down now, she thought, numb with pain, paralysed with fear, and let me find victory in depriving Mirabile of my murder.

"--wring your neck, I think," Mirabile said, standing, and setting the crow into startled wingbeats again. "I grow bored with poison, and crave blood beneath my nails."

The crow circled the room, and Psyke opened her eyes when it made another call that cut off suddenly. It fell from the air, thrashed, and died on the carpet.

Its fault for feasting on poisoned bodies, Psyke thought, wildly. Mirabile prodded at the bird with an impatient foot, focusing her febrile attention in its clotted feathers. Psyke rose up, hands grasping, fumbling, found her grip closing cold and tight on the silver serving tray, and she threw it--porcelain cups and tea pot falling, crashing--with all the strength she had ever possessed. Mirabile staggered back, her reflection distorted and horrible in the silver surface, and stumbled over the crow's corpse with a wet crunch.

A wise sailor flees when the wind is wrong, her father had said, and the jolt of his voice, lovingly remembered, sent her moving before she had even truly registered the words. Flee now, pushing past Mirabile, her clawing nails, the snarl on her face, not looking back, but skittering on hands and knees, then to unsteady feet, as ungainly as a newborn foal, scrambling through the kitchen and into the road, nearly beneath the wheels of the flour cart.

Mirabile was gone by the time Echo's Particulars arrived; Psyke sat in their belled wagon, wrapped in a cheap, brown cloak, watching green-faced young men vomiting in her mother's herb garden with a certain detachment. Dominick Isley, Lord Echo, sitting beside her, seemed struck as numb as she, his face tired and set in grim lines. His questions were perfunctory; his mind elsewhere. After all, the murder of a mostly impoverished noble family was of no account when it was only one of many deaths. "Mirabile, you say."

At her nod, he sighed, "And you've no other family?"

"None," Psyke said. The enormity of it struck her again, and she was drowned in it. A gentle hand on her arm roused her, and she found Nicholas Rue of the Kingsguard staring in at her with a look of such pity that it made her turn from his gaze.

"Take her to the palace," Echo said. "Until the witch is caught, it is the safest place."

Rue nodded once and Psyke giggled, drawing both men's scandalized attention. Safe, when death walked the streets and made itself welcome in her home? There was no safety now.

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