CHAPTER TWO

HAL

The chatelain’s brother wasn’t eating.

I didn’t really think it was my place to coax him to accept food like a sick cat, but leaving plates by the door wasn’t advisable either because one of the dogs was bound to eat the food before Margrave Royston—Uncle Roy to the children—ever deigned to touch it.

The situation didn’t seem about to get better, and I didn’t seem about to get any smarter. I had a bowl of the Mme’s favorite stew in one hand, a book tucked under my arm, and a closed door right in front of my face. I had to shift things a little and nearly dropped the bowl, but after a minute of awkward struggling, I managed to knock against the door with my right elbow.

From within, I heard the Margrave sigh. This was not a good sign. The week before he’d been possessed of energy and defiance enough to swear, but since he’d begun to boycott food he’d graduated to sighing only, and the chatelain spent most of his time shouting at everyone he could because, I suspected, he was worried the same as I was.

“Dinner,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else, and then, “if you wouldn’t mind. If it’s not too much trouble, I mean.”

He seemed to know what I was talking about before I could even get it out, which was as unsettling as it ever was. Margrave Royston often gave the impression that he was reading my mind, though I knew he wasn’t. Even in my books, it said the ability to draw another’s thoughts into your consciousness was a rare gift—what was known as a quiet Talent—and those who were mind readers even went by a special name: velikaia. Most went mad from it, and those who did have the Talent were required to wear a badge that declared them and gave people fair warning. No; likely it was that the Margrave was just so enormously clever and I so lacking in pretense.

The door creaked as it opened and I slipped inside before I could spill or drop anything.

The room the chatelain had given his brother was one of our largest, with windows overlooking the Locque Nevers, a large desk against one wall, and a bed against the other. The curtains were drawn, though the days were long enough yet that the sun hadn’t set, and I got the uncomfortable feeling they hadn’t been opened all day. A thin shaft of purple evening light split the drapes in two, illuminating the dust swirling around the room and little else. Last week I’d not been bold enough to make any changes to the Margrave’s room. Today, borne by some strange fit of audacity, I set the bowl of stew on the desk along with my book and crossed the room to throw the curtains wide.

There was another sigh, from behind me this time, and I turned aside from the dusty folds of fabric. Margrave Royston was kneeling on the ground, sifting through an enormous black trunk with silver fastenings. Next to the trunk was a stack of romans in all range of shapes and sizes. He seemed to be looking for something.

“Have your orders extended to staying and making sure I eat?”

I blinked, feeling immediately guilty as though I’d been caught staring—which in a way I had. At least his irritability was a comfort, for if he still had it in him to snap at me, then I could at least feel assured he hadn’t given up entirely.

“No,” I said honestly, remembering the stew. It wasn’t my place to judge Mme’s cooking, but she could put together a mean dinner when she had a mind to—or when she was required, on days when our cook fell ill.

I went to fetch the meal I’d brought. The Margrave dropped another roman on top of his unsteady pile in response.

“It’s better warm,” I persisted. There wasn’t anyplace to set the bowl near the Margrave that I could see, so I kept ahold of it.

Finally, he looked up. I was still having trouble seeing the resemblance between Margrave Royston and the chatelain. They were brothers, of course, and I knew that, but I’d been looking for some small signifier, any sign at all that this man shared a relation to the kindly, blustering man I’d come to appreciate as my patron. They had the same nose, I decided, and perhaps they once might have had the same mouth, but then the chatelain didn’t have dark eyes that pinned me as surely as a beetle on a card. And their voices were so different it was hard to imagine them both men, much less relatives.

“You aren’t going to leave until I’ve eaten, are you?” The Margrave’s questions lately had been resigned, tinged with acquiescence, as though he didn’t really need to ask at all.

“No,” I said, surprising myself. I sat on the floor a good distance from the books in case any drops from the bowl should escape. “What are you looking for?”

“Poison,” the Margrave answered sourly, reaching across the distance between us to take the dish from my hands.

I didn’t know what to say to that.

He ate a spoonful of the stew—more than I’d seen him eat the entire previous day. Then his eyes found me again.

When I’d first come to the chatelain’s family, we’d gone to the lakeside country, where the waters were deep and wide. Here I felt again as if I was young, on a tiny boat in the middle of a deep lake, staring into the depths of water that had no sign of a bottom. It confounded me some, that I could spend so long gaining years and experience only to have them stripped away in a matter of seconds. If this was what everyone in the city was like, I decided it was a good thing I’d never been to the Volstov capital.

“So,” the Margrave said at last, rolling the word around in his mouth as though he were tasting it, like the stew. “What are you reading?”

I’d been staring at the romans again.

“It’s about the Ke-Han,” I answered, eager to have something to talk about. “Is it true they really have magicians like ours?”

“They do.” He swallowed another spoonful of the stew. The chatelain had been the proud owner of a beard for a little over a month, and he’d ended up with more food caught in it than his mouth. The Margrave did not share his brother’s problem. “They aren’t . . . exactly like ours, but they’re magicians, true enough.”

“How—How are they different?” The query was out before I could stop it. The chatelain had instructed his children not to pester their uncle with questions, and I had to assume the same rules were meant to apply with me as well—more strictly, in fact, than to the others.

He answered me, though, in the weary voice I’d come to recognize so well. “No one knows their source.”

“Oh,” I said. And then, hating myself for my own ignorance, “You mean like the Well?”

“Like our Well, yes.” He nodded, stirring his dinner in precise, careful motions. I watched his hands, imagination lending a paleness to them that could not have been real; he’d not been shut up in his room that long. Even so, I’d never before felt so inadequate, not even when I was new to the castle and constantly getting in the way of my adoptive family.

There were no simple rules to learn that would help me accustom myself to Margrave Royston.

“I’ve never understood everything about the Well,” I said before I could stop myself. “I mean, some of the books say that there was a time when men could drink from it directly, but there are others that say that such a straight dose of power would kill a man.”

The Margrave looked at me over the dinner I’d brought him, and I thought that I saw a glimmer of something like interest in his expression.

“It wasn’t guarded to begin with,” he said, “if that’s what you mean. The Ramanthines had a very different idea of how to go about things. They were much freer with who might be granted great power and who might not be. Our Esar likes things to be far more controlled—far more institutionalized, you might say—and he likes to know just how many magicians there are with pure Talents. By which I mean, those who haven’t bred with the common folk, or diluted their power by marrying someone with a completely different Talent from their own.” He paused to see if I was following, then carried on. “The Well water gets into your very blood, and it operates like a pedigree. Most magicians view dilution as an inevitability, that our powers will over the course of years, now that the Esar has his zealots to guard the Well and there’s no one drinking from it directly. Of course, every assembly of individuals has its recalcitrants. There are those who are very reluctant to lose their power, and who believe that it is of the utmost importance to keep their bloodline pure. Never mind that there are only so many times one can reproduce within similar categories before you’re marrying your own cousin. That’s how you get inbred but extremely useful lunatics like young Caius Greylace—from families too keen to preserve the purity of their Talents, and without the good sense it would take to fill a thimble.”

“And it’s guarded?” I asked, almost breathless. Hearing the Margrave speak was better even than reading the most thrilling of romans. And, even better, what the Margrave told me was true; the history of Thremedon, the story of the Well.

“By the Brothers and Sisters of Regina,” the Margrave said, “yes. Theirs is a story you don’t find in every history book. They’re devotees of a young Volstov woman who died for her country. Regina was tortured for information, but she never spoke a word. In honor of her, the Brothers and Sisters often sew up their mouths. So you can see why they are perfect for the task of guarding one of Volstov’s best-kept secrets.”

“Oh,” I said, trying not to look as painfully foolish and eager for knowledge as I felt. It wasn’t just that this was the most that Margrave Royston had spoken to me in all the time since he’d come to stay at Castle Nevers. It was that this was the first time anyone had answered a question of mine with more than a cursory reply, and a brusque warning not to spend all my time thinking of such nonsense.

“I doubt such knowledge will do you much good here,” the Margrave said after my silence, no doubt mistaking my lack of further response for a lack of interest. I could see it the moment the interest faded from his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said suddenly. “I don’t mean to bother you.” The chatelain had warned me of the possibility that his brother might be rude in his displeasure, but I’d not been prepared for the slow, unsettling misery that hung around the Margrave like a heavy fog, obscuring whatever precarious attachments he had grounding him to this room, to the countryside, and perhaps even to the world.

To my dismay, he lowered the bowl and placed it on the floor. He took a moment to adjust his cuffs, then reached back into the trunk, rustling softly as he searched for something that I hoped wasn’t poison.

Luck was with me, as what he drew out of the trunk was nothing more suspect than yet another roman, bound in red leather, title and author embossed in gold plating. I had to sit on my hands to keep them from reaching for it of their own accord.

“Would you like to read something besides histories, Hal?” He held the volume out to me without a care, as though it were not an item worth more than my own life—something which I was almost certain it was.

This civility from the Margrave was somehow worse than his previous defiance.

I took the roman, fingers hesitating over the pages before I could bring myself to open it. It fell open as easily as a door fitted with the right key, with no crack of stiffness from the spine. A story often read, then. I cleared my throat. Occasion sometimes called for me to soothe the children to sleep by reading to them, and though Margrave Royston was no child, I’d been charged with caring for him all the same.

Even if I hadn’t been, I felt a little sorry for this man, whose misery marked everything he touched.

There was a chair at the desk, and a perfectly serviceable bed, but the Margrave made no move to rise from the floor, so neither did I. He only closed his trunk and leaned his long arms against it, watching me with an unexpected patience, as though he had all the time in the world. Such exclusive attention made me nervous.

My fingers stilled against the first page.

“This is about Tycho the Brave,” I said, recognizing the words all at once.

The Margrave stirred with what I thought might be annoyance, but when I looked at him, his expression hadn’t changed any. He’d only lifted his head to speak.

“Yes.”

It was much thicker than my own volume. I found myself turning the pages ahead, to the place that I knew best: And they were very happy until the end of their days. There was a full roman’s length again after those words.

In fact, my finger was placed solidly in the middle of the book.

“Oh,” I said again, back to feeling foolish. “There’s so much more left to this one.”

The Margrave cleared his throat, and though I looked up too late to catch it, I thought he might have been smiling.

“Yes,” he said again. “You’ll find in this next part that he is quite unfortunate enough to have been struck by lightning.”

All at once I felt a curious reverence overtake me, the way I felt when I encountered a new and particularly wonderful story. There was no time to examine it, however, since the Margrave had been kind enough to entrust me with one of his books. He was waiting for me to start reading. With a prickle of excitement I could scarcely contain, I concentrated hard on the unfamiliar words in front of me, reading aloud until there was no longer any light to see the words by.

 

THOM

My thesis was of a different nature from Marius’s particular field, despite the considerable and fortuitous overlap. He specialized in politics, while I’d been studying the various peculiarities of a society raised exclusively on war. When Marius had said, then, that my time with the Dragon Corps would help me to write my thesis, he hadn’t been entirely incorrect. He’d helped me a great deal over the years by being a fount of knowledge and encouragement, but most of my studies had become independent once I’d refined my own field. That year was to mark my last as a student; Marius had promised to recommend me at the least as an assistant professor before I was found a supporter, either in the bastion or the Basquiat, to fund my work so that I might turn my treatise into a proper volume.

These were dreams: small and unassuming, but nevertheless mine. I set a considerable store by them.

“Think of it this way,” Marius said. He’d come earlier to take me to see the dragon compound, the Airman, and I was grateful for the company, though he would not be able to escort me to that first crucial meeting with the corps at th’Esar’s palace. “You can have an entire chapter devoted to the peculiar and fraternal behavior of the members of the Dragon Corps, raised not on mother’s milk but rather the innate knowledge of their own vital importance—who are allowed to do as they please without fear of any repercussion, and who think so highly of themselves that they are able, without pause, to call a diplomat’s wife from Arlemagne a Hapenny whore in the middle of Miranda, in broad daylight.”

I’d done my research for this particular test as I did my research for all other exams. I was well-read, up-to-date, and completely prepared. That wasn’t to say I didn’t feel a sick kind of nervousness churning and clenching in my stomach, because I did, and had for the past twenty-four hours, only two of which had approximated sleep.

“Well, you’re not getting the chop,” Marius reasoned with me gently, tugging at his beard. “Thom, I do think you can pull this off.”

His trust meant a great deal to me. I knew that if I failed, it would reflect very poorly on his standing in the Basquiat and in th’Esar’s bastion both. And after all Marius’s support, I didn’t want to let him down, either. “Don’t worry,” I said, then, lying through my teeth, “I’m not. Worried, I mean.”

“Thom,” he said, “you’re green.”

I didn’t look in the mirror to corroborate this assessment. I was almost certain he must be right, since I certainly felt green enough. “Do you think they’ll notice?” I asked instead.

“Yes,” Marius said. “They smell fear. They’re trained to.”

There was very little information about the corps accessible to the public. Margraves from the Basquiat bound me to secrecy about the preparatory knowledge I was given, as well as the knowledge I would come to gather in my own, personal experiences dealing with the dragons and their pilots. My thesis would have to deal with the corps’psychology alone, and not even approach the many secrets hidden behind the Airman’s doors. I’d only ever seen dragons from the ground, wheeling overhead in the sky on their way to deployment: great, metalline, sleek. Copper and silver and steel, catching the sunlight along the glint and arc of their spiny wings. They were as mythical as they were man-made. I was out-of-my-mind terrified, and the members of the corps would sense that as soon as they looked at me—if they even bothered to look.

Luckily, I had very little to pack, and therefore little time to consider my fate.

“Again,” Marius said, tapping his foot on the carriage floor.

I drew in a deep breath. “Chief Master Sergeant Adamo is their superior,” I said patiently. “I’m to direct all questions, plans, purposes, grievances to his desk, and report only to him. Anything else will be seen as an act of insubordination and, once I’ve lost his support, I’ll have no more luck than a fish on a hook.” That last bit was Marius’s personal elaboration, but I found thinking about it in those terms, while admittedly chilling, did help keep me focused.

“And the others?” Marius was exacting, but I’d no cause to be resentful of his precision as an instructor. In fact, it had only ever served me well.

“I’ve devised a mnemonic device for the others,” I said. “By Night, I’ll Always Remember My Effective and Judicious Lecturer Marius’s Companionable Guidance.”

“Very kind,” said Marius. “Well?”

“Balfour, Niall, Ivory, Ace, Raphael, Merritt, Evariste, Jeannot, Luvander, Magoughin, Compagnon, and Ghislain.” It was a mouthful, and I’d forgotten to breathe.

“You’re missing one,” Marius informed me.

I frowned. “I am?”

“Rook, I believe,” Marius said. “He’s Havemercy’s pilot. He’s also the one who caused this mess in the first place.”

The strangest detail about the dragons was that each magician who designed and built them named them like they were his or her own children. Some were named after lovers, famous battles, lost children. One of the scientists—widely considered the most talented architect in all of Volstov—was something of a zealot, and the three dragons he’d designed were all named after prayers: Thoushalt, Compassus, and his most recent triumph, Havemercy, the scourge of the skies. Havemercy was the latest of the dragons and arguably the most famous. They said she was as black as onyx or obsidian laced with platinum—an experimental and alchemic metallurgy that had the Basquiat up in arms no more than fifteen years ago—and she’d been exceedingly picky about choosing her pilot. Marius had already shared with me his opinion as to why: that, though the science was not perfected yet at the time of Havemercy’s forging, the technology still depended upon individual Talents, and the result was a capriciousness in which machines should never be allowed to indulge. That, and the question of their capacity for fuel, made up the only two flaws that any man, scholar or magician, could pick out in the crafting of the dragons. Even the largest of them couldn’t hold enough to carry it into the heart of Lapis, the capital city of Xi’an where the Ke-Han magicians made their home. Or at least, not enough to mount a serious attack on the city, then carry them back, as well. No one knew what the dragons ran on, since it was meant to be kept a secret, but I’d heard several clever theories that speculated their fuel was a diluted solution of water from the Well itself.

“I don’t have room for another R,” I said cheekily. “I’ll have to remember him as the one I forgot.”

Marius clapped me on the shoulder. “Well, then, Thom,” he said. “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” I said.

But I wasn’t.

 

ROYSTON

The tutor, Hal, took to reading to me near the end of my second week in exile. And, when I offered no immediate protest, the practice became first habit, then ritual. Resignation, boredom, the sheep, the incessant and constant proliferation of uninspiring trees, the coming of cold weather, my own idiocy and self-pity, my shame and loss—all these factors conspired against me until I was helpless against any external forces, incapable of making any choice or decision. I allowed Hal to do as he pleased when it pleased him, and while part of me grudgingly anticipated his arrival each evening to coax me toward food and conversation, I knew my brother had put him up to the task. Still, it was a break in the monotony of my day that interested me—even if this was only a vague interest, in that it was not expressly disinterest. I felt enveloped not in a blizzard but in a fog; I could barely muster the enthusiasm to roll out of bed in the morning, leave my dust-settled room, and roam the blocky, uninspired hallway.

I recognized the signs: This was depression, in its purest and most clinical form. Despite my self-awareness, I was incapable of warding off its advance—perhaps because I no longer cared if it swallowed me whole. It was quite possible I hadn’t noticed its first stages and was already long lost to its grip.

Then, one evening, in the middle of a passage on Ifchrist the Barbarous, Hal looked up, and said, “It’s going to get very cold soon.”

“That’s not part of the story,” I replied, too tired to be perplexed by this interjection.

“I only thought,” Hal said, struggling visibly, “that perhaps—if you wanted to go for a walk—you might do better to start now, before the rains come.”

“I wasn’t aware I’d expressed an interest in walks,” I said. Though I tried to keep the measured, humorless judgment from my voice, I saw him flinch and knew I hadn’t succeeded. Such self-loathing is cruel to others, though it’s cruelest to the self. “What I mean to say is,” I amended, “it’s already the rainy season.”

“Well, there are good spots of sunshine,” Hal went on bravely. “Noon is often very nice for walking by the Locque Nevers.”

“Is it,” I said. “Well. I see.”

“And I thought you might enjoy the fresh air,” Hal finished. “It’s dreadful in here—stuffy, dust everywhere. I don’t know how you stand it.”

“If it’s that unpleasant,” I replied, “you needn’t spend hours here every day.”

He colored at that, cheeks and ears pink and the freckles on his nose suffused with the blush, and I knew I’d been cruel to him again. I cast about for an apology, but before I could find something suitable he was speaking again. “I just—I just thought,” he said, “that you might like it. There aren’t so many mosquitoes. It isn’t so bad, not on the bank of the Nevers in any case, and on the weekends some of the boys from upriver have paper-boat races.”

I felt numb all over, with no more feeling than a boat folded out of paper and submitted to the whims and fancies of children. I rolled over in my bed and faced the wall, trying to gather my composure. “When do you suggest?” I said, at length.

Hal’s voice was warm. “Oh,” he said, as if he’d expected me to put up much more of a fight. “Well—Tomorrow after lunchtime, I think.”

I nodded slowly to the wall, then realized he couldn’t see it. “All right, then.”

“I think,” he insisted, “I think that it’ll do you good.”

I didn’t need to turn in order to know that he was smiling. As though all my cruelty had washed away to reveal clearer skies, like these so-called spots of sunshine he claimed existed.

I hoped he was not going to try anything like a picnic to trick me into eating.

It was a rare day in the country that I rose in time for lunch at all. Already my clothes were beginning to hang where they had once fit in perfectly cut lines—what happened, I knew, when you had to be cajoled into eating your requisite one meal a day by a young man barely out of adolescence. It was for the best, really. Dressing as I’d dressed in the city left me with a querulous helplessness, serving only to magnify my alien presence in the house. My tall boots were made to sound smartly against cobblestones, paved streets, or the marble floors of the Basquiat, not to slog through cow pastures.

After a moment of hopeful silence, Hal went back to his reading, voice surer with the written word than he was in conversation. It was evident even to me, mired as I was in my own private misery, that the young man held a natural proclivity for learning. It was rare to find in country lads at that age—or any age, really, I thought disparagingly, as most seemed more inclined to riding, and hunting, and thwacking at one another with large sticks, if my brother and his friends had been anything to go by. If Hal had been born in the city, he might have found a considerable peer group at the ’Versity, in time.

If Hal had been born in the city, I’d have had no one to read to me at all.

In a state less self-absorbed than my own, I might have taken more recognition, more of an interest in his obvious hunger for knowledge. Members of the Basquiat often took on assistants from the ’Versity in order to pass along their learning. It was often easier than apprenticing another magician, whose Talent might be so antithetical to your own that you ended up like Shrike the Bellows, buried in an avalanche by his own Talent of blasting sound in conjunction with his young apprentice’s capacity for exploding rock.

At my very best, all I could offer him were my romans, some of which were quite illegal—these being volumes written in the old Ramanthe, and several anthologies of Ke-Han verse that I’d picked up during my service toward the war—stacked in an undignified heap at the foot of my bed like corpses for the burning. Volstov was decidedly liberal when it came to what romans traveled beyond the pale, but since the call for the burning of all Ramanthine novels, one had to be careful to keep one’s library under lock and key.

As Hal read, I drifted in and out of a conscious state, turning the words over in my head to discern another meaning if I could. It was an old game, made for common rooms and peers. One of the things they taught you in the Basquiat was that nothing had only one use, one meaning, one state of being.

Magicians understood this, and thus were better able to change the realities around them. Of course, the true and greater source of our power was the closely guarded Well. But, as youths, the ideologies of our professors had ignited some whimsical spark within us, and many a night was spent reading passages and trying to understand not what was, but what could be.

In the war, such thinking saved my life, as not even allies can say what they mean—or mean what they say—in every instance.

Of course, such duality couldn’t be mistaken for malicious intent. As a soldier, one had to understand that there was a great deal that couldn’t come guaranteed, and that a man’s word was more like his intent. I had experienced such a dichotomy firsthand when the troops I’d been traveling with had been stranded in the mountains for nearly a month before there was any need for us. Of course our captain hadn’t intended it that way, and certainly the Esar would never intentionally doom any of his men to potential death and frostbite in the Cobalts, but that was what had happened nonetheless. There were men who were not as forgiving as I.

Silence settled over the room like an additional layer of dust, and I could hear Hal getting up to leave with quiet, uncertain movements. Halfway there already, I decided to feign sleep so as not to prolong this visit any more than was strictly necessary. He was only with me as per request, after all, and I was not so old that I couldn’t remember what it was like to have no time to call my own.

The door closed behind him with a soft but nevertheless grating creak. Everything in the country made noise, but it was never the right sort of noise. In the city everything was boisterous, vibrant, chasing you at the heels so that you had to step lively every second to survive.

In the country, everything sighed like a dying man.

I thought about what Hal had said, about the coming cold, and how I would possibly weather out the season trapped inside this house like a prisoner with a family I’d made a point of never visiting. Surely, I would sink as if to the bottom of a lake, slow and certain.

When I dreamed, it was of another cold, another time. The war crept often enough into my dreams; there was nothing I could do about it.

It had been a foul season in the mountains, frigid and unwelcoming when last the war had been at its peak, the Ke-Han magicians performing whatever barbaric rituals they needed to harness the wind. Blue was considered the color of our enemy, but it was also the color of the mountains, dark and deep as purest steel. The Cobalts bordered Volstov to the east and were our first defense against any attack.

It had been nearly a three-week wait, our fingers as blue as the Ke-Han’s coats, before we saw any action. Such things happened—we’d heard of them—but the years had given me a patience and understanding that I didn’t have in the dream. I hadn’t had it there in the mountains either. In the end we’d come across an enemy battalion simply by chance of remaining in one place for long enough that the Ke-Han had run into us.

The battle started very quickly. At that time, the fighting in the mountains was often a swift and violent business, ending when one side brought the rocky hills down onto the other. We were lucky enough to have come out victorious in that particular battle, leaving enough enemy magicians alive so that we could question them about their operations. The cold often aided such things, as the snow clotted the blood, so that we had a long time to question them. One of my fellows lost a hand in those hills.

I have hated the cold ever since.

 

THOM

I’d changed my shirt twice in the morning. I was not so foolish as to think it would make a difference one way or the other with men trained to sniff out fear the way most of us were trained to speak, but it made me feel a little calmer, and so I allowed myself the indulgence.

I was no longer quite so uneasy about my current project. As with anything—applying for the scholarship, taking the nation’s exams, et cetera—I found most of the worrying was spent in preparation for the event. When the event itself came, however, I was merely afflicted with the same fatalistic numbness that I’d heard afflicted soldiers during the war.

What would come would come, and I’d deal with it to the best of my abilities, using the knowledge I’d gained. Laid out like that, it didn’t seem so overwhelming.

Besides, I thought it rather unlikely that anyone would be taking it upon himself to slap my ass and call me Nellie. So it seemed I already had at least one advantage over the Arlemagne diplomat’s wife.

Navigating the palace would take some getting used to, though. More than once I wished I’d taken Marius’s offer of company for my first day.

“You’re more nervous than I am,” I’d accused him, after ensuring my materials were all in order.

“No, I’m not,” he’d said, tugging at his beard all the while—which meant that he was nervous and trying not to show it, and was failing miserably.

“Marius,” I’d said, familiarity and exhaustion both creeping up to make me rather more impertinent than usual. “Leave. It’s late, and I still cherish the idea that I may yet get some sleep.”

“Yes,” he’d said, but still had made no effort to get up, so that in the end I’d had to be quite firm with him, fairly ejecting him from the ’Versity at an hour that most decent people were abed anyway, so that the pair of us might get some rest.

It was a left, then a right, or a right, then a left. I breathed deeply to calm myself, feeling nerves disappear in a quick rush of annoyance. It wouldn’t do to begin my day by cursing the architect of the palace, but I quite felt like it by the time I’d passed that same statue of the current Esar for the sixth time, bronzed and brave and quite twenty years younger than he was now.

“Bastion,” I said heatedly, coming upon his courageous brow once more.

“Oh,” said a voice from behind me. “Are you lost?”

I turned and was surprised to see someone of about my own age. He had the dark hair and pale complexion of a nobleman and was fiddling absently with a pair of gloves. He was also, I realized a moment later, wearing a coat with large brass buttons and a high Cheongju collar, and I recognized the colors immediately. He was a member of the Dragon Corps.

I made to bow, before it occurred to me that teachers did not bow to their students—that bowing might be considered a sign of weakness—and then I didn’t know what to do, so I held out my hand.

He took it with a bemused smile, and shook it. He was most genteel.

“I’m Balfour,” he added helpfully, after a spell.

The newest member, my brain provided from the notes I’d made and committed to memory. Also, it pointed out, I’d not introduced myself yet.

I cleared my throat loudly, to cover up for the rather obvious breach in etiquette I’d just made, and hoped this wouldn’t make it back to the Chief Sergeant before I’d even had the chance to meet him. “Thomas,” I said. “From the ’Versity. I believe I’m supposed to be meeting your . . . the rest of the corps in the atrium, only I can’t seem to . . . that is . . .” I looked to th’Esar, large and bronzed, as though this were all his fault. And in a way it was—his and the airman Rook’s, and I blamed them both equally.

“Oh,” said Balfour, with a rush of gladness that threw me off. “I thought I was late! Merritt stole my alarm clock, see, to fish the bells out of it. Come along, then. It’s this way.”

He set off ahead of me, chattering still, so that I could only assume I was meant to keep up.

The atrium had walls of glass and a black-and-white-tiled floor that resembled a giant game board. I felt like an expendable and very small plebe piece in a round of Knights and Margraves, but it did me no good to indulge in thoughts like that.

It would be very warm in the atrium in the full flush of summer, I thought, but today was suitably overcast so as not to turn the room into a giant greenhouse. The sound of raucous laughter echoed from just around the corner.

I held my nerves in check as firmly as a horse’s reins and stepped after Balfour to meet the Dragon Corps.

Right away, I could see being outnumbered fourteen to one would make this no simple task. Once Balfour joined them in the row of graceful, gold-backed chairs, I found myself alone on a dais. Fourteen pairs of eyes pinned me. My throat was very dry.

“Well if it isn’t himself,” said one all the way on the end, whose coat was unbuttoned and whose boots were tall but slouched. He had the lazy, self-satisfied grace of a cat, and I was certain—though I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge—that this was Rook in all his infamy. The smug expression he wore, remorseless and amused, lit his cold blue eyes as if they were trapped behind stained glass. His mouth was unrepentant, almost cruel, his blond hair in knotted braids in the Ke-Han style, streaks of royal blue at his temple.

I disliked him, and I was frightened of him yet oddly intrigued by him as well.

“Come to teach us all to talk and act like the noblesse and keep our fucking private-like?” he went on, leaning forward and making a lewd Molly gesture between his legs. “’Cause we’ve been waitin’ on you. And I’ve heard it’s considered rude, in some places, to leave esteemed guests waitin’.”

“Rook,” said the eldest—a heavyset man with an even heavier brow and a square jaw like a nutcracker’s—in a voice that suffered no insubordination. “Sit the fuck back and shut the fuck up. Your pardon,” the man went on, giving me a once-over.

“You must be Chief Sergeant Adamo,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Adamo. “That’s right.”

“Well,” said Rook, who’d managed the art of sitting back but not, apparently, of shutting the fuck up, “when’s the sensitivity start?” The airman next to him giggled—at least I thought it might be a giggle—and I swallowed as hard as I could to prevent my own tongue from choking me.

This wasn’t simply going to be difficult. This was going to be suicide.

Of the fourteen men lined up and sitting before me like princes, there was only one kind face to be seen, which the rest soon shamed out of its kindness. I didn’t blame Balfour for falling in step with the others. I’d seen such behavior during my worst days at the ’Versity—but those young men had always fallen by the wayside quickly enough, as the ’Versity was an institution of learning, not a catchall house for fraternities and (to put it like a boy raised on the Mollyedge strip) fuck-ups.

Here, it seemed that such stupendously cruel hierarchical systems were encouraged rather than torn down before they could form.

“I thought we might first introduce ourselves,” I said, buying myself time. I had notes—files, papers, years of behavioral research—behind me, and yet I didn’t want to scrabble at odds and ends, nor seem as young as I felt. Not in front of these men. I thought of Marius’s reminder—that they could smell fear—and swallowed down my intimidation as best I could.

“You thought we might?” asked Rook. “How fucking old are you?”

“Rook,” said Adamo. Balfour made a high, disapproving noise.

“It’s just he looks fucking twelve, is what I’m sayin’,” Rook said.

“Rook,” Adamo repeated.

“And I don’t want to be taught fucking anything by a fucking twelve-year-old,” Rook finished, then shut his mouth easy as you please, as if he were a choirboy at week’s end and his parents were looking up at him from the pews.

I dug my fingernails into my right palm. Steady, Thom, I told myself. Steady. I thought of distant, soothing things: of the strength of my dead brother, of Ilsa on Hapenny Lane who always was kind to me, of Marius’s gentle laughter. In the face of what I’d lost and what I’d accomplished, a handful of self-important men were nothing I couldn’t handle. “We’re going to start by introducing ourselves,” I said. “Now. Who wants to begin?”

Silence was my only reply, and the sound of the wind against the glass walls. I saw Balfour look nervously about at his fellow airmen, as if he wanted to volunteer but knew he couldn’t. And then at last, as if it were being drawn out of him by the screws, Adamo cleared his throat.

“Thank you,” I said, and meant it with all my heart.

“Tell us how it’s done,” Adamo said, a little grudgingly, as if he knew as well as I did that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing; that I was green as the grass, and that I was going to mess all of this up.

I licked my lower lip. “We’re going to say our names, which dragon we fly—well, that’s not for me to say, obviously, but for the rest of you—and something the others have never known about you.”

“Something private?” said the giggler.

“How private?” Balfour asked nervously.

“It can be anything,” I said. “Anything at all.”

“Right,” said Chief Sergeant Adamo. “Well, I’m Chief Sergeant Adamo. Proudmouth’s my girl, and if another one of you little shits brings up ‘Mary’ Margrave again, it’s dog rations for you for a month afterward.”

Another silence followed. The giggler was gaping; Balfour had pulled off both his gloves and was worrying them in his fingers as if he sought to tear them to shreds. Rook’s smile had turned outright nasty, twisted down at the corner.

“I’m not sure that entirely constitutes a private detail,” I said at length.

“Doesn’t it?” Adamo asked, lifting one heavy brow at me.

“You’re not some fucking pillow-biter,” Rook said sullenly, crossing his arms over his chest.

“I don’t believe that’s exactly what I said,” Adamo said, like any Margrave or professor I’d ever met for diction, but with an edge to it, and showing more teeth than was necessary. “He’s an acquaintance of mine.”

“I’m just saying,” Rook began, but before this came to blows, I knew I had to cut him off.

“Thank you for volunteering to go second, Rook,” I said.

He turned his eyes to me, colder than glass but more indifferent than ice, blue and sharp in his lean face. On the whole, he was simply a sharp-looking man, and admittedly almost painfully handsome, but it was a statue’s beauty he possessed, a bit roughed up around the edges—for his nose was broken, and there was a scar along his left cheekbone like a half-moon, crescented, just under his eye. And, like some artists’ portrayals of beauty, there was too much spite and malice in him; one could hardly bear to look at him for long.

“You already know my name,” he said. “Don’t you?”

He said it like a challenge; I knew I couldn’t back down, though I felt cornered and trapped and on the verge of complete humiliation.

“For the others, then,” I said patiently.

“They know my name, too.”

“Yes,” said the giggler. “It’s Rook.”

“The other part,” I insisted, refusing to be bested.

“I fly Havemercy,” Rook said. “She’s pretty famous. You might even have heard of her.”

“And the last?” I prompted. It wouldn’t do to let him get away with anything, no matter how minor.

“Oh, that.” Rook bit his thumbnail, looking up at the ceiling, putting on an excellent show of being in deep thought. Finally, he said, “I sure like fucking women.”

“That’s not exactly news,” Balfour said, somewhat darkly.

“Yeah, well, it’s true,” Rook went on, relishing every second of it. “I like to grab ’em around the waist and shove their legs wide open and make ’em beg for it, ’cause you know—”

“My name’s Balfour,” Balfour said very quickly. “I fly Anastasia. We met in the hallway. I . . . I’m very fond of certain philosophical treatises.”

At that moment, I was more grateful to Balfour than to anyone else in my entire life. I couldn’t show favoritism, but I knew my expression revealed the wealth of my gratitude, for he responded with a halfway sort of grin—as if it were no trouble at all, and he was in fact glad for the excuse to get the better of his fellow airman.

“You know, a lot of fucking pillow-biters like philosophy,” Rook said.

“Oh, yes,” said the giggler, giggling again. “And d’you know where they like it?” Adamo gave him a look then like melting steel, and he cleared his throat. “By which I mean to say, I’m Compagnon. I ride Spiridon, and I own the most thorough collection of indecent imprints in the entire city.”

“It’s true,” said a swarthy man with a hook nose and impossibly white teeth. He sighed fondly.

“And your name, please?” I asked.

He shrugged broad, graceful shoulders. “Ghislain,” he said. “Compassus. My great-great-grandfather died for th’Ramanthe.”

I was surprised, though I knew I shouldn’t have been. Many families had originated as Ramanthe supporters, as once there had been no one else to support. Ghislain had the dark eyes and the burnt-sugar coloring of someone from an old Ramanthine family—one that had declined to interbreed with the Volstovic invaders from the west. It was a rare thing to see in a man of our generation, unless he was a part of the nobility.

Not even Rook could think of a clever way to make what he had said into an insult, though, so I put my curiosity aside and took the opportunity to move along down the line.

There was a man with a chin sharp and pointed as an arrow seated next to Ghislain. He looked bored, his legs stretched out in front of him, and paused midway through a yawn when he realized I was looking at him.

“I think you’re up.” Ghislain elbowed him harder than seemed necessary, and he straightened in the chair.

“I’m Ace.” He had bright red hair and a sleep-thick voice, as though he’d only just woken up. “Thoushalt’s mine. When I was little my mam caught me tryin’ to take a swan dive off our terrace; ever since I’ve wanted to be up in the air.”

“That’s a load of horseshit,” said Rook. “What is that, a fucking poem? You sound like Raphael.”

“Yes, and I so love it when you insult me where I can hear you, Rook.”

There were so many of them, screamed a panicky voice in my head. I quelled it quickly, gaze flicking over to a man with black, curly hair. He’d leaned halfway out of his chair to shout down the line.

“You must be Raphael,” I said bravely, attempting to regain the thread of what I’d started.

He looked at me as though he’d forgotten I was in the room at all. I nodded encouragingly.

“Oh,” he leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs with a fluid motion. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize we’d reached my place in line yet.”

I couldn’t tell from his tone whether that was meant as a jibe at me or an honest apology. My money was on the former, but before I could decide, he was speaking again.

“I am Raphael,” he said with an illustrative wave of his hand. “I’ve been blessed with flying Natalia, the beauty. Truth be told, I was getting very bored with the monotony of our days with hardly any battles to fight. Perhaps this will prove interesting.”

“Thank you, Raphael,” I said quickly, over a loud and disbelieving sound from Rook down at the far end. I was beginning, I felt, to get the hang of this. The key was to speak quickly, before Rook could get his comments in and set off the others. “Next,” I said, a little too sharply and a little too closely to the way one of my least favorite professors had, but I couldn’t afford to wince.

Mercifully, there was only a short silence this time, as those who’d introduced themselves glared at the stragglers.

“I’m Jeannot,” said another man with the dark hair and eyes of a Ramanthine, which meant that his family too must have been very old or very inbred. His nose was thin, like the blade of a knife. “I’m on Al Atan, and I’ve never seen the ocean at anything closer than a dragon’s height.”

“Oh,” said Balfour, from whom I hadn’t expected an outburst. He looked as though he’d just heard something very sad. “Sorry,” he said, by way of realizing he’d interrupted. “Only, I didn’t know that.”

“I told you he was a girl,” said Rook with savage triumph. “Got feminine parts between his legs, airman’s honor.”

I bit my tongue and counted slowly to five. Balfour put his gloves back on and stared down at his hands.

“Merritt, I swear by the bastion, if you don’t sit still I am going to lynch you in the showers.”

At the opposite end of the line, a man entirely too freckly for his own good scowled in hurt dignity. His companion, the one who’d spoken, turned in his chair to face me.

“This training, will it make Merritt less irritating?”

“Well,” I began.

“Fuck off, Evariste.” The freckled one crossed his arms across his chest, then his legs at the ankle, like a sullen child who’d been scolded.

“Ah,” I tried again. “It’s not exactly—why don’t the pair of you tell us something about yourselves.” This was progress, I told myself. Real progress.

And if not, it would make for excellent research material once I’d picked the shattered fragments of my dignity up from off the black-and-white floor.

The one who’d complained—Evariste—chewed at his lip. His hair stood at ends, like he’d often tugged at it in thought. “I fly Illarion. What about me, what about me . . . oh yes! Once I ate a pound of butter.”

The giggler—Compagnon; I drilled it into my memory—started up again.

I had a feeling I didn’t want to ask after the story that went with that anecdote. If anything, I could save it for a later exercise.

Merritt’s cheeks were stained bright red with either anger or embarrassment, I couldn’t tell which, though it made me wonder how many of the airmen were happy being tied together in such an intimate way. Several of them seemed as though they’d function best as individuals and not smaller parts of a greater whole.

“I’m Merritt,” he said gruffly. “I’ve got Vachir. My sister got married last month.”

“And you didn’t invite us to the wedding?” A man who’d turned his chair the wrong way around, seemingly for the sole purpose of leaning his arms across the back, turned his head to leer at Merritt. “Might have liked the opportunity of seeing your sister again.”

Adamo cleared his throat from the center of the room, as though he was growing short of patience. I was grateful, even if his impatience was sure to be directed toward me in due time.

“Oops,” said the man in the backward chair. His mouth would have looked distinctly feminine on anyone else, round and full as it was. He flashed a careless smile. “Niall. I fly Erdeni. I’ve found the perfect place to nap in th’Esar’s orchard, and I’m not telling a man of you where it is.”

“Fuck, Magoughin told us that joke last week,” Rook pounded his fist against the chair. Then, he smiled like a cat having helped himself not only to the canary, but to the entire Esarian aviary of birds. “It’s th’Esarina’s lap.”

Someone laughed, broad-faced and friendly. He waved his one enormous shovel-pan hand in the air like a child at school eager for recognition.

“Magoughin?” I asked, even though I was fairly certain of the response.

“Chastity’s mine. And I collect jokes, of a sort,” he replied.

I nodded, though presumably this was not a private piece of information. I would have to bend a little, I’d realized, in order to get anywhere successfully with the Dragon Corps. They no longer seemed as one, a wall of intimidation stark against me, but rather like a mob of jackdaws, pecking at each other, and cawing, and preening their own feathers. I could manage this. I would.

“He’s Ivory,” Magoughin added helpfully, nodding to the man at his left, so blond and pale that he looked almost unreal.

“They call me that because I’m good at the piano,” he said, in a voice as dry as sandpaper. “Not because of my skin, so don’t even bother asking. Oh, and I ride Cassiopeia.”

“I—I wasn’t going to,” I assured him, quickly stifling the sudden, insistent notion that I should and could have been taking notes this entire time. They may have seemed like trivial bits of information, but anything additional I could learn about this merry band of lunatics might very well help me in the future. You never knew what was going to be important, as Marius was often fond of pointing out when my patience with studies had worn thin. Jokes, the piano, the giggling—even Merritt’s tapping and Balfour’s gloves—there was something to be gleaned from all of this, if I were to treat them as individuals.

Divide and conquer—it was an old adage.

“Luvander,” the final voice piped up, and I forced myself to acknowledge him politely instead of slumping to the floor with relief. He wore dark hair tied back from his face, and his coat was unbuttoned. “I fly Yesfir, though I like to think it’s more as how she deigns to let me hop on once in a while. In any case, I really hate going last.”

“Ah,” I said, most cleverly. And then, when no one jumped in immediately to comment, I straightened my shoulders and allowed the success of the moment to buoy my spirits, however briefly. “Well. Thank you, everyone. I appreciate the . . . enthusiasm some of you exhibited in sharing.”

“Whoa there just a second, ’Versity boy.” Rook had leaned forward in his chair again, eyes like twin chips of bright ice. “Where’s your introduction?”

Ah, yes, I thought. I’d forgotten that. I’d prepared something in advance—something clever and noncommittal, something which wouldn’t prove fuel for the fires—but at the moment my energy was sapped, my nerves jangling, Rook’s eyes skewering me like I was the board in a game of darts. I knew immediately that I’d forgotten all of it—my introduction and my speech, my purpose in neat and precise order; everything I’d prepared and memorized.

I looked out over the group, all fourteen of them against the one of me. They were only men, I thought; they flew great steel beasts that were quirky and capricious, but these were only men, and all men had some human tenderness.

“Well, as you may already know,” I said, hating myself for the uncertainty in my voice, “my name is Thom, and I—” I remembered it out of the blue, like a thunderclap. “I’ve never actually seen a dragon up close.”

 

HAL

I was supposed to meet the Margrave for our daily walk. I don’t know how it became a ritual but it did. And, after a few days, I couldn’t imagine my life without the ambling path we took every noontime along the Locque Nevers, occasionally speaking, but most often not. It was awkward at times, and once I stumbled so that I almost took a dive into the water, but I think it did the chatelain’s brother some good to be out and about. Fresh air was the cure for all ills, or so said Cooke, the chatelain’s stableboy, with a laugh and a toss of his head much like a horse. And the Mme said it as well, though she never took fresh air for herself, claiming it made her dizzy.

The first time I’d thought it would be worse than it was, the two of us walking not quite side by side, and the Margrave’s profile very sharp and lean against the sunlight.

“Well,” I said.

I’d said “Well” three times now. It seemed only fair that I continue to fish for conversation like any other man would for—well, fish, I supposed—casting the line out into the dark, quiet waters and waiting each time hopefully, though I was granted no answering bite. The Margrave didn’t enjoy talking, which was funny, since he seemed as if he might have been the sort of man who had enjoyed it. Once.

His unhappiness had begun to poison him, though I wasn’t sure exactly how. I’d never seen someone so unhappy in my life. I wanted to reach out to him with something more than a Well, halting and inadequate.

This time, however—the fourth time—the Margrave stopped by the edge of the river.

“What fish,” he said, “do you suppose frequent these waters?”

“I have no idea,” I replied.

That was the extent of our first conversation. From the sigh of disappointment he heaved, I assumed I’d let him down somehow, but it wasn’t my job to teach William or Alexander about the Locque Nevers, which meant I’d never been given cause to teach myself this unexpectedly necessary information.

I asked Cooke that evening, and he said there weren’t any fish at all in Locque Nevers, though in some places there were tadpoles and newts and bullfrogs.

“Interesting,” the Margrave said, when I relayed this knowledge.

That was the extent of our second conversation.

The third was longer, and seemed to make him almost happy before it made him much more unhappy. He spoke to me about the city—his own inspiration, though I felt guilty nonetheless.

“What sort of man you are depends on the bar you frequent,” he explained to me, quite patiently, while I listened wide-eyed as a child—and to him, I suppose, I was one. “And I don’t mean bar as in your provincial equivalent—a roof and a few stools and a great sweating hulk of a man slamming out dreadful, diseased drink for fools who don’t know the difference. No. Pantheon Bar, for example, is a great cobbled stretch right by the Amazement, which is the entertainment district, though I’m sure you’ve heard of that. Men from the Basquiat tend to prefer Pantheon over Reliquary, which I’d say is something of a more . . . old-school feel, for those who still claim loyalty, for whatever reason, to the spirit of the Ramanthe, while the students at the ’Versity are all for Chapel, which is cheaper, you see, and caters to the flashier sensibilities of the young.”

I soaked it all in like a wet stone soaks in sunlight. “Oh,” I said happily, but I couldn’t imagine it.

Then, all at once, the Margrave’s eyes shuttered and closed completely. I could see pain etch itself deeply around his eyes and mouth, so that it was hard for me to believe that he was a good many years younger than the chatelain himself.

“Are you all right?” I asked, worrying my lower lip but not daring to reach out to him. A cold wind was blowing in over the water.

“I’m going back,” he said.

I didn’t understand his moods, nor did I understand the private miseries he nursed. The Mme needed her smelling salts whenever his name was mentioned, and the rumors Cooke passed back and forth with Collins and Ramsey and Miller—who might not have known what they were talking about, but might also have known more than I did—were vicious.

I couldn’t ask the chatelain. It wasn’t my place, and he would have bellowed all the window glass out of their frames.

I wondered to myself, the night I heard Cooke and Collins and the rest talking about it, whether or not it mattered what he’d done—if it was what they said, or something like they said but different, or something truly bad, or something so stupid it didn’t merit thinking about. I decided that it wasn’t, rolled over in my little bed, and fell asleep soon after.