Hands of Flame

Feeling stupid with astonishment, Margrit blurted, “Can I help?”

Surprise filtered over Grace’s expression, and her white-blond hair and pale skin lit with a glow, as though a veil had been taken down from Margrit’s vision. A stronger feeling of foolishness rose in her, tightening her chest: it seemed impossible that the inhuman woman before her ever could have been mistaken for someone ordinary. “Not unless you can give me the kiss of angels, Margrit Knight. I’ve searched for it for four centuries and found nothing yet, and I think you’ll take it right if I say I don’t think it’ll be from your lips. The thought is kind, though, and more than I might have expected. What will you do?”

“Grace has her secrets,” Margrit echoed. “None of them know?”

“There’s a reason I won’t cross the likes of Janx or Daisani. They know I’ve been around a long time, but I might’ve drunk of a vampire’s blood, or I might be born of some illicit union like the one that fathered those two girls. It’s better not to ask, sometimes. It’s better not to know. And I stay in the shadows most often, doing my work and staying out of their way.”

“But you haven’t. You’ve been helping and interfering all over the place the last few months.”

Grace flashed a smile. “It’s not often that a gargoyle and a lawyer walk into my tu

“Who cursed you? What happens if you find the kiss of angels? What is the kiss of angels?”

“A witch, Margrit, and don’t say what I see in your eyes. There are gargoyles and ghosts and dragons, my girl, so don’t say there are no witches. I don’t know,” she said easily, for once offering a straight answer. “If I knew, maybe I’d have found it long ago. And perhaps if I do find it, I leave this world behind. I’ve haunted it long enough that I wouldn’t mind. What,” she asked for the third time, “will you do?”

“The gargoyles are going to want to know how you freed Alban, but until they come asking, I’ll…” Margrit turned her palms up, and with the gesture finally understood the reticence that had stayed Alban’s tongue, had stayed all the Old Races when she’d asked them about their peoples or others. Alban had said more than once that some stories weren’t his to tell, and for the first time, sympathy and comprehension settled in Margrit’s bones. “I’ll keep your secret, Grace, and send them to you for the answers.”

Grace bowed her head, the gesture of thanks taking some of the glow away, so that when she looked up again, her brown eyes were little more than ordinary. Margrit could still see a subtle aura of wrongness around Grace, but it was something her eyes could forgive as a trick of the light, if she let them.

A great deal of the world she’d been thrust into was a matter of letting, and being, and accepting, all in ways that rubbed uncomfortably against her skin. But the art of compromise was one lawyers were supposed to be good at, and, watching Grace almost fading into the shadows again, the letting it be seemed one Margrit could live with. “Can you show me the way to Janx’s room before you go?”

“Pah,” Grace said, suddenly cheerful. “I’ll have to, won’t I, or I’ll be listening to you crash around in the dark all night. This way, lawyer. Let’s go.” She tilted her head and struck off down a tu

Familiar voices warned her that they’d found their way, but as she drew breath to thank Grace, the vigilante shrugged and disappeared. Margrit’s jaw flapped before she pulled it up into a smile and shook her head at the theatrics she was becoming accustomed to.

Janx, somewhere in the near distance, was speaking with his usual insufferable self-satisfaction. Margrit’s smile turned to a grin as she recognized his tale of the tapestries that softened the walls of his chamber. She wondered what stories had taken father and daughter and sister through the remaining night and all of the day, if he was only just now telling them of the tapestries and the windows that had been made in their likeness.

“The last of the arachne made the tapestries,” he was saying. “The youngest, as it happened. There were only ever three, and fate turned its hand against crone and mother.”

“There couldn’t possibly be only three,” Kate said tartly. “They must’ve had parents.”

Janx made a sound remarkably like a snorting dragon, though from the depth and clarity of his voice it was clear he was in his human form. “If you know so much, you tell the tale.”

Kate’s muttered, “Ow” suggested an elbow in the ribs, and Margrit’s grin broadened.

Janx, satisfied, continued, “As it happens, you’re presumably correct, and in retrospect, I wonder if they weren’t chimeras, as well. I’ve no idea what race mothered them, if that’s the case, but perhaps the crone’s age was honestly come by.”

“Harpies,” Ursula said distantly. “I think if the sisters of fate were born of man and the Old Races, that their mothers must have been harpies. We should ask Alban.”

“I’m begi

“But you made sure we wouldn’t be forgotten,” Kate pointed out. “Alban kept your secret about our mother, but he knew we existed. If he’d died, the memories would’ve gone back into the histories. We’d have never been forgotten the way the selkies let themselves be. Or maybe the way the arachne chose to be.”

Silence swept out of the room, tickling Margrit with its depth. Janx and Daisani had perhaps known of Sarah’s pregnancy, but not her survival; the secret Alban had kept, as far as they’d known, was that they’d loved a mortal woman, and told her about the Old Races, an exiling offense in and of itself. The half-blood children—chimeras, Janx had just called them—were a more complex confidence than that.

But the dragonlord let it go, as Margrit imagined he might. “Perhaps. But I was trying to tell you about the tapestries,” he said petulantly.

Kate put on a patient child’s tone: “Yes, Father.”

Margrit could all but hear Janx twitch. “I’m not sure I can become accustomed to that name. It sets firesnaps against my skin each time you say it.”

“Fatherfatherfatherfatherfather,” Kate chanted, and Janx laughed over the sound of Ursula’s impatient sigh.

“What about the windows? Who made the windows?”

Janx, with all the nonchalance in the world, said, “The newspapers say they’re Tiffany originals.”

“This is where you get it from,” Ursula muttered, and Kate’s laughter broke, an alto echo of Janx’s tenor. “You wouldn’t have brought them up if they were Tiffany windows,” Ursula went on accusingly.

Margrit’s eyebrows lifted in surprise as Janx made a smug confession: “I made them.

“Oh, well, all right,” he said half a moment later. “Not by myself. Tariq and I, actually.” And his voice darkened as he mentioned the dji

“We remember,” Ursula said dryly.

Margrit could imagine Janx refocusing on her, surprise coming into his voice. “I suppose you would, although you’d remember different things than I.”

“So would we all.” Alban’s voice broke in, coming from the other direction, beyond the curve Margrit stood behind. She startled, not expecting him, then smiled and leaned against the wall to listen a moment longer. She’d never had a chance to listen to the Old Races talk apparently unobserved, and had gained one insight already: Janx was far more willing to tell secrets to his chimera daughter than to the fully human Margrit. It was a soft disappointment, one she could expect and accept, but it reminded her again that she wasn’t truly part of their world. That there might yet be time to escape, if she wished.