I had him now. Sometimes being me has its advantages. “There are a great many venomous things in the desert,” I said. “A great many. Chime-adders, diamond rattlevipers, the desert coral snake, and the beaded lizard—I don’t actually expect to see that last, since they’re mostly found farther west, and we’re too far south for timber rattlevipers—and that’s just the reptiles. Then there’s the scorpions, both the big ones, which aren’t terribly venomous, and the little bark scorpions that will make you regret you’ve ever been born. And that doesn’t get into the desert centipedes, which—”
“Saints, don’t mention the centipedes.” Aaron shuddered theatrically. “There was one as long as my hand in my shoe once. My foot swelled up like a melon.”
“—plus sundry other insects, like assassin bugs, which would love a garden like this.” I stood up from the rock I’d been sitting on and brushed my skirt off. “And of course there’s the spiders, including two varieties of widow and—”
“I retract the question,” said Aaron, holding up both hands. “And I will now retract myself, because my skin is crawling. Javier, if you survive the horrors of nature, I’ll see you later.”
Javier grunted. I tried to look disappointed. Aaron retreated, shaking his head.
“That was neatly done,” Javier said, once the other guard was out of earshot. “I tried to dissuade him, but he was bored and wanted to stir something up.”
“Stir something up?”
Javier coughed and found a nearby bush fascinating. It was antelope milkweed, which genuinely is fascinating—you can make a poultice that reduces the swelling of snakebites—but I suspected that wasn’t the reason. “He, uh, is wondering if we, uh…”
He trailed off. “‘We, uh’?” I prompted.
“Bodyguards and their charges spend a great deal of time in close quarters,” Javier said, still staring at the milkweed. “It’s, uh, something of a cliché that some of them will… uh.”
“Ohhh.”I could feel a blush starting. Aaron thought that? Shouldn’t Javier have set him straight? “Thatkind of… uh. But of course you and I aren’t… uhh-ing. At all.”
“Right,” said Javier. “No uh.”
“Right. Glad we cleared that up.”
Javier cleared his throat. “How did speaking with Snow go?”
I drew a blank. “Snow?”
“This morning?”
“Oh. That.” My conversation with Snow had been an age of the earth ago, in a time when I didn’t know about mirror-gelds. “Um.Badly, I think.” I recounted what she’d said. Javier leaned against a waist-high stone and listened.
“‘Tell me where she’s keeping my sister’?” he repeated, after I had finished. “What does that mean?”
“Either she’s convinced herself that her sister is still alive, or someone else has convinced her of that, or… I don’t know.” Snow had not struck me as particularly delusional, but it’s not like you can tell from the outside. Plus, she wastwelve. “Maybe something to do with souls? Surely they would have put her ashes in a spirit house.”
“I know they did,” said Javier. “I was part of the funeral procession.”
“You were?”
“They turned out most of the palace guard for it. And there was someone stationed there for a month, to keep anyone from stealing ashes.”
I grimaced. Disgusting, but of course there was always someone. “I suppose it could be something convoluted related to that. But we still don’t know who ‘her’ is. Anyway, look, that’s not the most important thing…”
I told him about the mirror-geld, leaving out only the bits about Grayling. I was going to have to tell him, I knew that, but it sounded so utterly unbelievable that I was hoping Grayling would be present for the conversation so that my bodyguard didn’t think I’d cracked under the strain.
When I had finished, Javier said, “Huh!” almost explosively. He looked curious more than horrified. (Yes, I was conscious of the irony.) “Are the parts still there?”
“I haven’t looked.”
He slid off the stone. “Then we should do that.”
The mirror-geld was gone. Javier even looked under the bed and behind the towels. I sagged against the wall in relief. “They musthave fallen apart,” he said. “I don’t know where else they could have gone. And the door’s still locked, so they didn’t leave that way.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that the horribly animated severed limbs could perhaps work a doorknob. I thanked him for the mental image.
“All part of my job.” One corner of his mouth crooked up, and I wondered that I’d ever thought him humorless. Or possibly he was like most of the healers I knew and his humor grew in proportion to the direness of the situation. Certainly the amount he talked did.
