Free The Mirador by Sarah Monette

distresses you so, why didn’t you ask Felix?”
    He gave me a look that was as much offended as anything else. “I am not on intimate terms with Lord Felix.”
    I heard Felix’s breathless, mocking voice in my head: Darling, I wouldn’t take you if you came free with a pound of sugar. Squelched it, said, “This is hardly an ‘intimate’ favor. And Felix would understand about your work.”
    “I want nothing to do with him,” Antony said, and I didn’t spoil the magnificence of his statement by pointing out that if that was the case, he was going entirely the wrong way about it. Instead, I asked, “Do his proclivities offend you so greatly?”
    “Oh, it isn’t that, although Father gets quite exercised about the degeneracy of the court. But the Lemerii do not consort with wizards.”
    “Oh,” I said, brought up hard against the lunatic schisms of court society. “Of course.”
    Another awkward silence. I was about, in desperation, to start him talking about the Cordelii again, when I was saved by my other problem. Mildmay came through the door, with just enough hitch in his eyebrows to tell me he’d had another argument with Felix. The frown vanished from his face almost before I’d seen it, and he nodded at Antony, his compromise between the obligation d’âme and his own innate politeness. “Lord Antony,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
    “Mildmay,” I said; he gave me one of his indecipherable looks, green and sharp and waiting. “Lord Antony wants to examine the crypt of the Cordelii. We’ve heard that you know the way—will you show him?”
    There was a pause; although Mildmay’s face didn’t change, I knew I’d startled him, and I was glad of it. Then he shrugged. “Yeah. Sure. When’d you like to go, m’lord?”
    “Is now too soon?” Antony said.
    “Nah. Suits me fine. Want to come, Mehitabel?”
    “Are you kidding?” I said, getting up. “You’d have to beat me off with a stick.”

Mildmay
    Nobody talked much on the way to the crypt, which was fine with me. Felix had picked a fight with Johannes Hilliard at the end of the committee meeting, because he knew Lord Johannes would give him what he wanted, and it was either his bad luck or just exactly what he had coming to him, depending on how you look at things, that Lord Giancarlo heard him. He had some things to say about it, too.
    Felix didn’t fight with Lord Giancarlo—he wasn’t that stupid—so he stood and let Lord Giancarlo chew him out, and then Felix dragged me up to the Crown of Nails and chewed me out, and we ended up having a fight like we hadn’t had in months. He’d finally yelled at me to get away from him and leave him alone. I hadn’t waited for him to say it twice.
    But there was this little voice in the back of my head saying, he’s getting worse. I mean, he was a nasty-tempered prick at the best of times, but these days it seemed like he was going out of his way to find fights. And he was leaving the suite at night, and me and Gideon didn’t have the least idea where he was going, although it wasn’t hard to guess what he was doing when he got there. And there was the drinking.
    He ain’t drinking that much, I said to myself. I mean, he ain’t getting smashed or nothing.
    But that didn’t even get a chance to make me feel better before I was thinking, Yeah, but he’s getting drunk enough that people are noticing. People other’n me. People who’ve known him longer’n me, and they don’t like it. They think it’s weird.
    And then I sighed because it didn’t matter. Felix wasn’t going to listen to me, and if he’d wanted to tell me what was wrong, he would have. And maybe the binding-by-forms could’ve helped— there were stories that sort of hinted it might—but that would mean giving it more of me, and I wasn’t doing that.
    Fuck this for the Emperor’s snotrag, I said to myself. Think about something else, can’t you? And that worked about as well as it ever does.
    When we