She made no answer but to smile; I sank deeply in a curtsy. "Joy to your grace on the Longest Night," I murmured.
His fingers lifted my chin and he searched my eyes through the holes of my mask. "No!" he exclaimed, glancing at Melisande, then back at me. "Is it true?"
"Phèdre nó Delaunay," she said, with her faint smile. It curved like a scarlet bow beneath the black mask that hid her features. "Did you not know Elua’s City boasted a genuine anguissette, your grace?"
"I cannot credit it." Without removing his sharp gaze from mine, he reached forward and gathered up the sheer folds of my gown, slipping his hand beneath them.
I cried out then, out of pleasure and shame both. The Duc de Morhban regarded me from behind his mask, an amused wolf. Melisande twitched the line and I staggered, dropping to my knees in defense. The tiny diamonds sewn into my sheer gown bit into my flesh.
"The Duc de Morhban is not your patron," she reminded me, one hand twining in my hair in a gesture that was half caress, half threat.
"No, my lady," I breathed. Her hand grew gentler, and I found myself leaning into it, pressing my cheek to the velvet of her skirts and inhaling her scent as if it were a sanctuary. Her fingers trailed down my throat, and I heard as if from a great distance my own answering whimper.
"You see, your grace," Melisande said lightly. "Kushiel’s Dart strikes true."
"Well, have a care where it strikes!" he snapped, turning away. I could feel her low laugh thrumming through her, and a crimson haze rose to cloud my vision.
I could not say what transpired during the remainder of the Duc de Morhban’s Midwinter Masque; and I tried, for Delaunay queried me at some length, having never known my wits to thus falter. I can only say that my time there passed as if in a fever-dream. As Blessed Elua is my witness, I tried to pay heed to what passed about me and what conversations I overheard, but the slender velvet rope Melisande Shahrizai had set about my neck had severed at last my connection with that far part of my mind that was ever thinking and analyzing at Anafiel Delaunay’s behest, and I was aware only of her hand on the far end of it. When I reached for that calculating corner, I found only the indrawn susurrus of the great wave gathering, and knew myself doomed when it broke.
If you were to ask me what I remembered of that Masque, it is only this: Melisande. Every laugh, every smile, every movement, all thrummed along the velvet cord that bound us, till I was nearly gasping with it.
There was a pageant; I remember nothing of it, except the outcry of the horologer, Melisande clapping, and her smile. I see that smile still in my dreams.
And too many of them are pleasant.
It is a small mercy that Joscelin was not there to see me.
When at last we left, the guests were fewer. Now it seemed I stumbled in her wake, and when the coachman handed me into the trap, I was quivering all over like a plucked harpstring. The velvet lead-line grew tight between us; she had not released it, getting into the coach.
"Come here," Melisande whispered as the coach lurched into motion, and there was still no order in it, but the velvet cord twitched and I slid, helpless and obedient, into her arms. Elua knows, I had been kissed before, but never like this. Everything in me surrendered to it, until she released me and pulled off my mask, stripping off the last vestige of disguise. Hers she kept, glowing blue eyes flanked by the dark upsweep of cormorant wings. And then she kissed me again, until I could return it with no artistry, but mere craving, clinging to her and drowning under her mouth.
Until the coach stopped, shocking me with its suddenness. Melisande laughed as the coachman opened the door onto her own courtyard; I could not imagine that we had arrived so soon. He helped me out, face studiously averted-I cannot even think what I looked like, glaze-eyed, tousled and naked beneath the expanse of diamond-studded gauze-and the velvet line grew taut. Too far from her, I shivered with dismay until she disembarked, and guided me, gently, into her home.
It was the Longest Night. It had only begun.
What befell afterward, I relate without pride. I am Kushiel’s chosen, as she was his scion; this had been a long time coming between us. With Baudoin, I had seen her pleasure-chamber. This time, I saw the inner sanctum that was her boudoir. Little enough I saw of it, at that first glance: lamps burning scented oil, a great bed, and from the highest rafter, a single hook hung. That much I saw, and then she bound my eyes with a velvet sash, and I saw no more.
When she took the slip-collar and lead from about my neck, I almost wept; but then I felt them again, the familiar cord binding my wrists as she raised them above my head and looped them securely about the dangling hook.
"For you, my dear," I heard her whisper, "I will not dally with lesser toys."
A sound, then, of a catch being lifted. I hung suspended, too high to kneel, too weak to stand, and wondered what.
"Do you know these?" The cold caress of steel against my cheek, a razor-fine edge tracing the line of the sash binding my eyes. "They are called flechettes."
Then I did weep, and it availed nothing.
The fine blade of the flechette, keen as a chirurgeon’s tool, trailed down the length of my throat and brushed the neckline of my gown. How much that diamond-spangled gauze had cost, I could not guess, but the sheer fabric parted with a sigh, and I could feel the brazier-heated warmth of Melisande’s bedroom against bare skin. The sleeves were pooled around my upwardly wrenched shoulders; the flechette traced the veins in my bound wrists, not breaking the skin, down the length of my arms to whisper effortlessly through the gauze. I felt the gown slither away, tangling about my ankles, the tiny diamonds clicking against each other.
"Much better." The fabric was withdrawn and tossed to one side; I heard it rustle and click in falling and turned my head after the sound. "You don’t like having your eyes bound, do you?" There was deep amusement in Melisande’s voice.
"No." My skin shivered all over involuntarily and I fought to remain still, fearful of the deadly point of the flechette. It was hard to do, suspended like that. The blade moved softly over my skin and the point of it pricked between my shoulder blades.
"Ah, but if you could see, the anticipation would be so much less," she said softly, drawing the flechette down the length of my spine. I didn’t answer. I was shuddering like a fly-stung horse, and couldn’t stop the tears that steadily soaked the velvet binding my eyes. Fear made my mind a blank, and a yearning so sharp it was like pain made breathing a struggle.
"Such desire," Melisande murmured, and the tip of the flechette danced over my skin, pricking my taut nipples. I gasped, bound hands clenching involuntarily, making the chain sway. Melisande laughed.
And then she began to cut me.
Any warrior wounded in battle has taken far worse from a blade than I had from Melisande’s flechettes; I daresay it was nothing to the knife-slash Alcuin had endured. But the point of the flechette is not injury: it is pain. The blades are unimaginably sharp, and part flesh nigh as easily as gauze. One barely feels it, when first it pierces the skin.
That is why the subsequent cutting is done very, very slowly.
Blind and dangling, gripped by terror and longing, my entire consciousness narrowed to the scope of the flechette’s blade as it harrowed my flesh with agonizing slowness, etching an unseen sigil on the inner swell of my right breast. I could feel the blood running in a steady trickle between my breasts and down my belly. My skin parted before the blade, and flesh was carved by it. It was like the pain of the marquist’s needles multiplied a thousand-fold.
How long it continued, I could not say; forever, it seemed, until she stopped cutting and traced the point of the blade slowly down the path my blood had taken.