The Mirador by Katherine Addison

Author:Katherine Addison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mehitabel

Before I’d turned Semper back over to Jean-Soleil, I’d promised to take him along to the Engmond’s Tor Cheaps, where I was headed the next day to buy an assortment of sudden necessities: ribbons to match the dress Corinna and I had chosen, a fan, perhaps a pair of beaded gloves if I could find a bargain. We’d ended up agreeing to go in the morning, early. Waking up, therefore, at seven o’clock, I decided that I did not want to spend the morning alone with Antony’s seventeen-year-old bastard half brother; I dragged Gordeny out of bed and made her come with us. She didn’t grumble as much as I had expected, either because she liked the Cheaps, too, or because she’d gotten a good look at Semper waiting for us on the doorstep before she got her mouth open. Semper didn’t bat an eye at her accent, and my opinion of him went up.

We took a fiacre because I insisted on it. From their different perspectives, neither Semper nor Gordeny saw anything wrong with walking halfway across the Lower City. Gordeny was from the far south of the city, which even I knew was the roughest part; probably walking through Ruthven and Ramecrow didn’t seem dangerous at all to her. Semper, on the other hand, when I asked, said that he had been raised in a village called Moldwarp near Copal Carnifex, the seat of Antony’s branch of the Lemerii. Semper had lived in Moldwarp until he was seven; then he had been brought to St. Kemplegate, and he hadn’t left it until the previous day.

“Didn’t you go out at all?” Gordeny said.

“Of course we went out,” Semper said. Gordeny was only a year or two older than he, and her strangeness was quickly wearing off. “We weren’t cloistered monks. But mostly we didn’t go out of Shatterglass, except to visit the Academy or to sing in the Mirador.”

“Have you been in the Mirador often?” I asked.

“A few times,” he said, with a fairly unconvincing attempt at nonchalance. I wondered if the blush was because of his father or because someone had made a pass at him.

“What’s it like?” Gordeny said, her eyes big as saucers.

I let him tell her. I’d be just as happy not to be at center-stage all morning, and it furthermore would be all to the good if Gordeny and Semper, our youngest as well as our newest members, could forge some sort of alliance before Drin saw Semper.

What a professional choirmaster describes disparagingly as “a very nice baritone” translates for ordinary people to a lovely voice. For speaking, at least, I didn’t think Semper could be faulted. His voice was deep and clear, and his accent, unlike Gordeny’s, unexceptionable. Add to that his exquisite bone structure and the grace I had already observed in his movements … if the boy had any acting ability at all, Drin would be complaining about upstaging in a week or less. He’d done it to Bartholmew, and Bartholmew, poor thing, had a face like a fish.

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