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"Unlike some, I've never seen the appeal of evil cougars.”
-Palamedes Sextus, Nona the Ninth
When they were young, Palamedes would make a game out of it. In lectures, or long meetings, or when he got to the dining hall late and had to make his way to her table through the crowd, he would stare intently at Camilla, trying to see if he could make her look at him. She was better at the game than he was, if one were to make it into a competition; more often than not he would look for her and find her already watching him, or she would notice and look back within seconds. Then she’d smile without smiling, which made him feel like the luckiest person in the world.
Which is why, when he touches the writing on the wall and realizes that their luck has run out at last, he wants nothing more than to take one last look at her and see how long it takes her to look back.
Which is why he doesn’t.
The walk to the sickroom takes too long, and he talks himself in and out of a variety of stupid plans as he goes. At the threshold, he stops for a minute to let the fear pass over him and through him, which is when—because everything is a goddamn ordeal at Canaan House—the Ninth cavalier somehow sneaks up on him.
She’s breathing like she just ran up the central stairs of the Library, and her face paint is smudged with sweat and tears. Not the great, heaving sobs of the night that the Fourth had died, just a quiet sniffle, and when she reaches him she scrubs a knuckle under her eyes, wiping away tears and paint together.
She opens her mouth to say something, and he reaches out instinctively with an immobilizing field. Her eyes widen in their paint-streaked sockets, and the indignant confusion in the gesture hits him unexpectedly. He feels inordinately fond of her, and longs to sit down in this hallway and hear what she has to say, but they’re out of time. He can only hope that, if he hasn’t underestimated Camilla’s faithfulness or his own ability, someday he will get to exchange apologies with Gideon Nav.
He makes an attempt at a reassuring smile. Then he opens the door and goes to meet his fate.
She is lying on the bed, sheets crumpled around her waist as though thrown off in a fever. Her hair falls artfully across the pillow, a few ringlets cascading down her pale chest, and Palamedes takes a moment to hate himself bitterly. Dulcie had mentioned keeping her hair short, had said she hated having to worry about detangling it on days when she was too tired to lift a comb. He’d thought it was odd, that first day, to see those long, delicate curls swinging around her shoulders, but he’d told himself that the pit in his stomach was grief that he didn’t know her as well as he’d thought he had.
Well. That’ll show him.
He still needs to be sure, though, so he approaches her bedside and takes one of her hands in his. Chivalry seems a safe bet, given the way he’s seen her act with Gideon. Her eyes widen in graceful, practiced surprise as he presses a kiss to the back of her hand and tries this time, the way he should have when he’d brought her tea—a horribly indirect test, in hindsight—or all the other times he could have ignored his heartbreak long enough to reach for her.
It takes everything he has not to recoil, and he sits down hard in the chair, trying to disguise his reaction as simple exhaustion. He can feel nothing at all from her. His focus slides off her, and instead of being able to read her thanergetic and thalergetic signatures, he feels as though he’s put his hand in a vat of cold oil. He takes a deep breath to try to fight the sudden sense of motion sickness.
Slowly, he peels through the layers of obfuscation, to focus just on the skin he’s touching, and it gradually becomes legible. Just a hand, just skin and ligaments and bone. Nauseatingly old and powerful, but there she is.
“Master Warden?” Her voice is soft, but there is a sharp question in her voice, and he knows he’s pushed too far.
“I wanted to see how you were feeling, D—” He can’t. “Duchess.”
“How considerate,” she murmurs, and moves to lift her hand from his. He grasps tighter, unwilling to let her go. A frown clouds her face, just for a moment.
“I’m sure I must be the least interesting thing in Canaan House right now. Why are you here, really, Sextus?”
She raises her other hand to his face, brushing one thoughtful finger down his cheek.
“I wish—” he begins. He can’t narrow it down. He starts again, a little steadier: “I wish I had talked to you right at the start.”
She leans in closer. Her hand is still on his face. He doesn’t pull away. This woman—this impossibly old woman, who even now is almost unreadable—is not the woman he’s spent the better part of his life in love with. But she almost is—he thought she was—and he cannot bring himself to refuse her touch.
“Why didn’t you?”
He glances down at their entangled hands, the thin skin stretched over the bones of her fingers and wrist, the tributaries of blue veins beneath the surface. And then he feels it, a shimmer under her skin, the bilious thanergy signature he’s built his life around. Finally, the last part of the plan falls into place. He just needs time.
He angles his body towards her, as close as he can get without getting up from his chair, and meets her cool gaze.
“I was afraid,” he says. He tells her as much as he’s willing to tell about Dulcie, and about Cam, and lets her ramble about why Abigail goddamn Pent caught her so off guard that she had to kill her, and he focuses on the feeling of her skin under her fingers. He brushes a hand up the inside of her wrist and she sighs, soft and fluttering. He presses down harder there, massaging her hand lightly. Dulcie had complained about aching joints sometimes, one of the half-million things he’d filed away in foolish hope.
When she mentions psychometry, he thinks for a moment he’s been caught out, but she just laughs. He leads her away with some stupid, pointless question about the keys, and has never been so grateful in his life to be underestimated.
And then, God help him, he asks about Dulcie. Against everything he’s learned in the last few minutes, he had managed to hope that she just hadn’t made it onto the shuttle when this woman had come in her place, that she was back on the Seventh, lonely and sick and alive. At this point he really should know better.
So that’s one less thing to hold him back.
She struggles upright to lecture him about the Emperor and all his awful plans, and her eyes—the eyes she stole from her cavalier a very long time ago—shine with an otherworldly vengeance, but when she finishes, the rage rushes out of her abruptly, and she lists to the side, as though she might fall out of the bed. He moves quickly to catch her, rising from his seat to put one arm around her waist, and he almost doesn’t recoil when she drops her head to her shoulder. They’re sitting close together now, leaning against the mountain of pillows, and when she speaks again, it’s in a rush of hot breath against his collarbone.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you this…you who have been alive for less than a heartbeat,” she says. She is still leaning against him, and has started to trail her fingers down the side of his neck. He’s begun to respond to her touch, he notes with vague horror; the dull ache between his legs has become impossible to ignore. She is warm and fine-boned in his arms, like he imagined Dulcinea would be, and he doesn’t want her to stop touching him. She finishes talking and waits for a response as he tries to recall what she just said.
“I wouldn’t have done that to Camilla,” he says.
She draws back for a moment to consider him, though her fingertips don’t stop moving up and down his throat. Her eyes are suddenly sad, in a way that seems almost believable.
“So you know how it happens. Clever boy,” she says, in a tone that would be irritating if she hadn’t dropped her head to his shoulder again.
He’s lost contact with her skin, so he wraps one arm around her, running his hand up to her arm to rest at the swollen, inflamed joint of her elbow. He has become so accustomed to fighting it, and it is so much easier to just let it happen.
She makes a soft noise of interest against the side of his neck, and that’s all the warning he gets before she reaches down to palm him through his trousers.
He forgets to breathe for a moment, and when he regains control of his senses, he realizes that the binding he’d placed on Gideon has broken. He braces himself, waiting for her to charge in and make everything complicated, but she does not. Good , he thinks fiercely. If she’d heard—if she can get to Cam and Harrowhark and warn them—
The Lyctor is gazing at him curiously when he blinks her back into focus.
“Stay with me, Master Warden,” she says in a low voice, pressing down. “You really did want her, didn’t you? That’s all right.”
All he can think about is the feeling of her thumb running up and down the length of him, and the smell, like candy or cough syrup, that has filled the room. “Whatever’s happening out there will happen for a little longer with or without us. Unless you’re that concerned about getting back to that cavalier of yours…?”
She’s fishing, and Palamedes doesn’t want to rise to her bait, doesn’t want to confirm anything she thinks about Dulcie or about Camilla. But he needs contact, as much as he can get, to make this work, and Gideon needs time. He angles himself to the side, and he kisses her.
She hums into his mouth, self-satisfied. Her lips are very dry, but when he skims his hand up her arm to rest on the curve of her neck, her hair is soft and feather-light. He kisses her meticulously, and does not think about anyone else’s mouth, or anyone else’s hair. He traces the fever-hot lines beneath her skin and she shivers and presses herself closer until she’s lying half on top of him.
He barely notices her working at the fastenings of his trousers until her hand slips under his waistband to grasp his cock. He squeezes his eyes shut as his hips jerk up, involuntarily. She strokes him once, twice, her frail, clever hands squeezing very lightly until he lets out a soft, strangled moan.
Eventually, he regains enough control to run one hand down her thigh, trying to find the hem of her skirt. He’s barely brushed her skin when she reaches down and, with a strength that he really should not be surprised by, wrenches his arm above his head. She shifts to rest her weight on him more fully, keeping his wrist pinned his wrist to the pillow beside his head.
“Not yet, I don’t think, Master Warden” she says thoughtfully, stroking up and down his cock at a gentle, agonizing pace.
Ordinarily, Palamedes prides himself on being able to take direction, but he’s never given in quite that easily and he’s certainly not starting now. He cups her cheek with his free hand and kisses her, as softly as he can manage, and then brushes his hand along her collarbone. She allows this, so he moves his hand further down to cup her breast over the fabric of her nightgown. She’s wearing nothing underneath, and he can feel her nipples pebbling under his fingers.
She presses down into his touch with a sigh. Then, abruptly, she sits back, straddling his thighs and bringing her hands up to rest on his ribs. Her eyes are shining as she considers him, and the ragged catch of her breath fills the room.
“I’m not her,” she says, with a warning edge to her voice. “I flatter myself that I did a good job pretending, but I am not her and I am not feeling disposed to be kind.”
This, more than anything, sets his heart racing.
“I’m not looking for your kindness.”
He’s not sure what he would tell her if she asked what he was looking for, but she doesn’t. She just smiles, and it’s all teeth.
She bends down, as though to kiss him again, but ends up doubled over, seized by a long, hacking cough. He braces one hand against her back and lowers her onto the bed next to him. Once she’s settled, she looks up at him, and her mouth is set in a grim and slightly bloody line.
“There’s a bag at the foot of the bed. Get it for me?”
His legs are shaking as he gathers himself and stands. He could run. He could get his dick back in his pants and leave this room behind. He could find his cavalier and put her on a shuttle and get as far away from the First House as he possibly can.
But they’re long past the point of running. Maybe they’d never had the choice.
And he can’t say he’s not curious.
The bag is made of thick woven fabric with an old-fashioned clasp at the top. She opens it and fishes around, setting several novels and a small bottle of perfume on the bedside table before pulling out a pale green silk scarf. She winds it around her hands a few times and tugs lightly. Satisfied, she looks back up at him.
“Do you trust me, Master Warden?”
He bites back a sharp, anxious laugh and does not respond.
“Clever boy,” she says again. “Take off your shirt.”
She pushes him to lean against the headboard and kneels over him, binding his wrists to the bedframe with a few firm tugs. This position brings her very close, at the perfect height for him to lean forward and set his teeth to the thin skin of her sternum. She writhes at this, and yanks the knot around his right wrist tight enough to hurt.
“Don’t make me wish I’d packed a muzzle,” she warns.
She settles back to view her work. He is still painfully hard, which she ignores. Instead, she runs her hands up his chest, pausing briefly to press her thumb down on his jugular. She carefully removes his glasses and sets them on her bedside table, then returns her hand to his face, stroking through the stubble on his cheeks.
She wraps her hand around him again, finally, and begins to move at an excruciating pace. He closes his eyes, tries to lose himself in the feeling of her hands on him and the scarf biting into his wrists. She bends her head forward and presses her mouth to his neck, and he can only faintly make out her murmured encouragement as she brings him closer to the precipice.
Then she pulls away and settles onto his thighs.
“That’s enough for now, I think,” she says, and he fails to suppress a whine.
She arranges him so that he is lying flat on the mattress, the silk scarf pulling on the bedframe until it creaks as his arms are pulled to full extension. Then she rests one hand on the top of his head and straddles his face.
He can’t resist biting down on her thigh, and she yanks on his hair. He gasps at the sharp pain, and tries, against his instinct, not to relax into it. He is not safe here.
He focuses in on the lace at the front of her panties, mouthing insistently at the fabric like he can taste her through it. When she begins to rock against his face, he finds the upper edge with his teeth and tugs until she shifts to take them off. She settles back down, and he sets his teeth on the inside of her other thigh, biting and sucking until he realizes she won’t bruise.
After that, it’s anatomy. He flattens his tongue against her cunt and drinks her in; she coos something inane about repressed librarians. Close to her like this, wrapped up in and surrounded by her, with her thin pulse hammering in his ears, it’s even easier to tune into the sickly thanergetic signature lying under her skin and coax it into bloom. He’s so close, and then her legs start to shake and she pulls back, just a little.
He chases her, arching off the bed as his wrists, bound above his head, pull his shoulders back. She laughs, setting back to straddle his stomach as she runs a hand down the side of his face down to his chest.
“Oh, don’t hurt yourself,” she says in a saccharine tone of false concern, “I have neither the time nor the energy for emergency medicine. Hold still.” She leans over him again and, within a few moments, his hands are free.
Before she can say anything else, he wraps one arm around her waist and flips them, pinning the Lyctor down against the bed.
“Terribly sorry, but I wasn’t quite finished,” he says, knowing he sounds like a bitch and far beyond caring.
She rolls her neck and looks up at him, her eyes very wide and very blue.
“Well, don’t let me stop you,” she says, as her legs fall open under him.
He pushes up her diaphanous skirts and rests one arm across her stomach, tracing patterns with his fingers along her iliac vein. He sets his mouth on her again and traces a line down from her stomach to her center. She’s close already, trembling at his touch, and he works with a single-minded focus. She makes no attempt to be quiet and, unfortunately, every sound she makes goes straight to his cock. He’d touch himself, but his other hand is occupied rubbing slow circle around her entrance, in time with the movement of his tongue on her clit. When he finally eases two fingers inside her, she laughs breathlessly and rocks up into his touch.
“Right there, yes,” the Lyctor sighs. “I never would have guessed, Sextus. Does Camilla the Sixth know how easy you are?”
He wants Cam’s name out of her mouth. As if anyone who killed their own cavalier could understand what they are to each other. More than anything, he wants Cam with him now, and it must show on his face, because the Lyctor widens her eyes in exaggerated surprise.
“Oh, unless you’re this easy for her, too? There’s no need to blush, you know, it’s frowned upon these days but it’s really one of the oldest sins in the book. Why, the founder of your own House—”
He has a vague sense that he should care about what she has to say but he is, suddenly, very tired of listening to her talk, and desperately wants this to be over. He bends his head back down to fuck her with his tongue in long, slow strokes and her thighs tense around his head. His thumb brushes around her clit in a tight circle and that’s all it takes, she is crying out, her nails digging into his shoulder.
Lapping at her cunt and hoping the sensation will keep her distracted, he runs his hands down the sides of her legs. At this point it takes barely any effort to find his quarry, burrowing through her blood vessels, and push it along, encourage it in its work.
She settles back with a long sigh, and he looks up to see her reclining on her pillow. The brown curls framing her face are lank with sweat, and her eyes are hooded and self-satisfied. At some point, she undid the delicate laces that had tied the top of her dress shut, and she is palming idly at one breast, rolling her nipple between her fingers as he watches.
Without breaking eye contact or moving his hand from her hip, he reaches down. It won’t take much; it feels like he’s been hard for hours, and just the feel of his own hand, slick with her, makes him groan.
“Wait,” she says, and his hand stills. It’s a precise theorem that binds his arm from the elbow down, and he’s annoyed as hell to find himself admiring her skill and control.
“No need to rush,” she says, her voice sweet and almost sleepy. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”
She wraps her ankles around the back of his thighs, urging him forward. The theorem binding his arm releases just in time for him to catch himself before he falls on top of her. He regains his balance, fisting a hand in the sheets beside her hips. She leans up too, spitting pink into her palm before wrapping it around him.
“Gorgeous,” she says, her touch ghostly and insubstantial on his skin. “It’s a shame she didn’t get to see you like this. She’d know exactly what to do with you.”
“Fuck you,” he says, the effect of the words ruined somewhat by the noise he makes when she runs her thumb over the head of his cock, smearing through the fluid gathered there.
“Language,” she chides. “Do you fuck your cavalier with that mouth?”
And then she leans forward and moves her hand faster, in time with the feverish, bruising kisses that she scatters across his neck and chest, and he is overcome. He curls in on himself, hand clenching in the sheets for balance so he doesn’t reach for her, his whole body tensing as he thrusts into her hand.
He lies down beside her for as long as it takes him to stop shaking, and then he retrieves his glasses from the bedside table and the room comes back into focus. The bedsheets are scratchy and slightly sticky under him, and his trousers are caught around his thighs. Her chest is rising and falling irregularly with faint, rattling breaths, and he can feel the web of thanergy under her skin, the cells spreading and killing at a prodigal, obscene rate.
He tries to calculate how long it has been since he lost track of Gideon; he can’t imagine he has more than a few minutes. She’ll be back soon, with reinforcements— with Camilla— and if the work isn’t done by the time she gets here, it will never be.
When the Lyctor speaks, her voice is dry and crackly, and she sounds apocalyptically exhausted.
“You really are a surprise, Sextus. You’ve taken this much more sensibly than I thought you would.”
Her hand, when she brushes it across his cheek and into his hair, is sticky and hot.
“When you’re young,” she continues, “you do everything the moment you think about it. For example, I’ve spent the last three hundred years planning my revenge… but I assumed you would try something silly when you realized she was dead.”
Privately, he thinks that if he were planning to do something for three hundred years, he would put a little more effort into researching the heads of the eight Houses, not to mention the personal life of the woman being impersonated. Really, they’d made it embarrassingly easy for her, in years of denied applications for inter-House research visits and horribly obvious streams of communication between two heads of state. He says none of that now, though, because it’s not important that she didn’t do her research, except in the sense that she should have killed him, and Camilla for good measure, the second the shuttles landed. This reckoning was always coming.
She has a mole right at the center of her sternum, and he spends a long moment considering it, before turning to face her.
Her eyes are half-closed and she’s still carding her fingers through his hair. It feels good, and he can almost pretend— but these hands killed Dulcinea, and would do that and worse to everyone left alive in Canaan House if he gave them the chance. Time to stop fucking around.
“I wouldn’t ever try to do something silly,” he says, pushing himself upright to sit, but keeping one hand pressed to her protruding ribs, where he can feel, deep beneath the surface, the teeming mass of bacterial life inside her lungs. “I made the decision to kill you the moment I knew there was no more chance to save her.”
Dulcie had bought them weeks by not telling the Lyctor who took over her life about them. He can only hope that the time he buys Camilla will make as much of a difference.
Palamedes closes his eyes.