CHAPTER EIGHT

THOM

I began to have dreams of flying.

This wasn’t so surprising. I’d never been up in the air before Rook manhandled me onto Havemercy, and it was such an incredible thing I didn’t wonder at the impression it left upon me. Yet at the same time, in the course of just one night, Rook had managed to throw off my entire balance, ruin all my equilibrium, and send all my assumptions into the sort of tailspin he’d maneuvered at one point over the Cobalt Range. I didn’t know what to make of it—or of him.

The most I knew was that I couldn’t stop dreaming about it.

I couldn’t get the grease out of my hair or the soot out from under my fingernails, and sometimes in the night I startled myself awake by catching the lingering smell of sulfur still clinging to my skin. Naturally, this meant I spent most of my time weary and also useless—for now that the airmen were back in the air, it seemed that the purpose for my presence was obsolete. At any moment I expected to kiss all dreams of a grant from th’Esar good-bye. My one reprieve was, now that all the airmen were doing nightly raids, everything smelled of smoke and ash and grease, so at least Chief Sergeant Adamo wouldn’t notice one more man in the Airman who reeked of it.

It was then that the invitation arrived. Or rather, all fifteen of them.

There was one for each of the airmen, and one for me. We were all guests of honor at th’Esar’s ball tomorrow evening as a part of the citywide festivities to celebrate our impending victory, which was apparently much closer at hand than anyone had known until now. The few times I’d left the Airman to clear my head, the city had been full of uncertainty, men and women not liking what it meant that the raids had started back up again without warning. Thremedon was too far from the border to see the effects of the war in the city itself, but the people weren’t deaf, and those in Miranda especially must have heard the raid siren going off every night. The last thing I’d expected now was a festival. Then again, it would probably do everyone some good, and if the end of the war was truly as close as th’Esar said, then we were all due a little celebration.

It was only that, to my eyes, th’Esar’s ball was going to be much more like a performance evaluation than a party. I was reminded that the Dragon Corps was especially required at the ball, in order to show off their newly acquired etiquette and manners.

I thought I was going to be sick when I read this final, personal addendum on my invitation. We hadn’t done our exercises in weeks, and there wasn’t a man in the lot who had any reason to make anything other than a fool out of me for all the torture I’d put them through. Showing them up in front of one another with those role cards had seemed a brilliant idea at the time, but it certainly hadn’t done anything to dispel the animosity between me and Rook. I knew that without Rook’s support, I would be completely disgraced in front of everyone. It was quite possible there’d be another international incident.

In short, I was going to be ruined.

Since there was no way around it, I resigned myself to it. When th’Esar himself sent his personal tailor to fit me with suitable attire for the coming festivities, I held out my arms and let my measurements be taken with a sort of mechanical numbness.

And I was still dreaming of being up in the air, the electric friction and the sheer exhilaration of almost dying, the world falling away beneath me, the wild madman’s cries Rook let out as he dove toward the ground. It was quite obvious I’d lost my mind.

I didn’t see much of Rook himself after that night, for it seemed that he was called out most often despite the arrangement of signing up that Adamo had explained to me one day when we’d found ourselves both in the common room at the same time with no polite way of excusing ourselves. As for Adamo, he continued to display the same peculiar kindness toward me that he had since the war had started back up, and whether it was simply pity rather than an appreciation of my position or skills, I didn’t know.

I had a feeling it was the former, but I would still take what I could get.

Curiosity continued to overwhelm me—or perhaps it was simply that I could still smell on my skin the evidence of a city being burnt weeks after the fact. In any case, when next I found myself accompanied in the common room by a noisy game of darts that appeared to have no rules to it whatsoever, I let my interest get the better of me.

“Why is it that Rook goes out so often?” I was combing over my notes in an attempt to gather at least a concise report of what I’d learned in my time here, that I might have something to present to th’Esar when he demanded it.

“Well, he’s the best, isn’t he?” Niall threw his dart, whereupon it stuck deep into the wall. He punched the air, and gave his companions a condescending look. Whatever their target was, I could only assume he’d hit it dead center.

“Well,” said Raphael, “and he signs up for all the extra shifts.”

“Is he kind of like a madman?” I said without thinking.

Niall only laughed while Compagnon went to the wall, examining the shapes made by the darts with what I thought looked like a compass.

“It doesn’t count,” he said at last, and Raphael held out his hand as though expecting to be paid.

Niall ignored him. “There’re the fourteen of us, yeah? Three a night, if we go out every night, then it depends on what you fly because you’ve got to balance out your attributes.”

Compagnon set to giggling over “attributes.” I listened like a student.

“Anything more than that is extra, see? So if the fighting’s really bad, and we want a leg up, we’ll take the girls in twice a night,” Niall went on. “The extra shifts used to be real necessary when the war was wilder years back and th’Esar didn’t want to give them any kind of a chance to rebuild. And it’s a volunteer system, see, only no one really wants to sign up for any of those shifts unless they’re assigned to ’em proper, since it means that much less sleep, so Adamo used to just put our names up there; didn’t even bother disguising his handwriting, just wrote ’em up there neat as you please.”

I nodded, swallowing the urge to polish his speech. With the ball looming in my mind’s eye, I had to be particularly gracious if I had any hope of earning their sympathy and cooperation.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Niall concluded, “because we’re all keen on the flying, else we wouldn’t be here, you know? But Rook’s—Rook’s built like a dragon himself—more comfortable in the air than he is on the ground, plus he’ll blast right through anyone as tries to get in his way.”

“Also,” said Compagnon slyly, “he’s made of metal, so that he can go all night long.”

Raphael groaned and threatened to stick him with the compass in what sounded like a not only painful but quite physically impossible feat.

I wanted to ask how many of them had ever flown with passengers, but something bid me hold my tongue.

There hadn’t—so far as I could see—been any consequences for Rook having taken me up on his dragon. It seemed odd to think that no one might have noticed, when it had changed something so surely within me. I felt as though the information must have been branded across my forehead in a way entirely different from the ash under my fingernails and the greasy smell of firesmoke still clinging to my hands and hair.

More than once after that night I’d dreamed of the fires in Molly, and woke with my heart pounding to find myself alone, a shaft of moonlight spilling across the floor of the Airman’s common room.

If Rook had known how I felt about fire, then surely he would have done it on purpose, but I couldn’t see fit to accuse him of the things that weren’t his fault, especially as those occurred so few and far between.

I went for a walk that evening to collect my thoughts.

Certainly, when I’d been put to the challenge of rehabilitating th’Esar’s Dragon Corps, I hadn’t agreed to anything like exile. The city stretched from the door of the Airman, same as it had from the ’Versity, and there was no reason for me to stay locked away like a heroine of fairy tales—though as luck would have it, the airmen would have paid more attention if I’d been possessed of breasts and a skirt—and my obstinacy in this regard was faintly maddening. The more time passed, the less inclined I was to leave the building; now, when I went for a walk, it was simply up and down the halls, being turned about by my surroundings like a rat in a maze.

Some small irrational part of me knew that if I allowed myself to leave now, even for an hour, some sea change—some disastrous rolling of the collective mind—would destroy any work I’d managed to accomplish with these men, and they would go back to being exactly the way they’d always been, as opposed to exactly the way they’d always been with an ever-so-slight variation: the occasional kindnesses they afforded me, by habit or by forgetfulness. My only hope was that slight variations were all the fashion this season, and that th’Esar, while not providing me with a grant, would at least allow me to leave in one piece.

Everything depended on Rook. That was the plain hard truth, and mine was not a comfortable position to be in. While the other airmen seemed to have taken to me with a reasonable tolerance—similar to what one might project toward a neglected family pet—Rook had experienced no such change of mind. In the end he held sway over the others—with perhaps the notable exception of Chief Sergeant Adamo—and I knew that they would follow his lead, both here and at the ball.

In Molly there was a saying that you shouldn’t think too hard on the things you didn’t want to come to pass. It was superstitious nonsense, of course, woven by mothers who didn’t wish their children to dwell on negative thoughts, as though by merely contemplating something or someone you could draw it from the ether like a ghost from the darkness.

My luck, however, was a matter entirely different when it came to suspicion, and when Rook stumbled from his room, reeking of acrid smoke and covered in ash, as if he hadn’t bothered to shower before he’d rolled off Havemercy and gone right back to sleep, I knew that it had nothing to do with whether I’d been thinking of him or not.

He barely spared me a glance, pale-rimmed eyes bright and awake despite his rumpled appearance.

“I,” I began before I could stop myself, and he halted.

I realized with a fleeting panic that I didn’t know what I’d meant to say, that I’d only called out to keep him from ignoring me entirely the way he’d begun to do of late. Normally this would have been a blessing, to be overlooked after months of malevolent attention, but instead I only felt cut off, alone. I thought it must have been the flying, that in him somewhere there was the evidence that had stripped my theories from me as surely as old bark, and I couldn’t let it just pass by.

I was certainly losing my mind, then.

“I’m waitin’,” Rook said roughly.

“I, ah, I wanted to thank you,” I said, taken aback at the words coming out of my own mouth.

Judging by Rook’s expression, so was he.

“Don’t know what for, unless it’s not killing you in your sleep.” He smiled then, and I waited for the familiar fear to grip me. It did not. Instead when he looked at me I felt his expression was not unlike my dreams of flying—the faint echo of something elusive and strange.

“For, well, the additional perspective,” I answered honestly, recovering myself as best I could. “And for . . . not letting me fall.”

“Yeah, well. I didn’t do it for you.” He shrugged, though whether he was talking about catching my wrist or taking me up into the air in the first place I couldn’t guess. His hair looked filthy, almost tan instead of golden, and I wondered how it would be possible for him to be clean by tomorrow night when it had taken me over a week to get to anything near resembling my state before I’d clambered onto that dragon in the first place.

“No,” I agreed quickly, for no matter how I’d lost my mind, I was quite aware that nothing Rook did was for my own benefit. “I know that. I only—I didn’t know. I mean I suppose I knew, but not in the same way as, as when we were flying.”

“You mean when I was flying,” Rook cut in. “You were hanging on and screaming like a whore either done real wrong or real nice.”

I drew a deep breath, determined not to allow him to get the better of me so close to this trial set by th’Esar. “I was not,” I said, “screaming.”

“And you don’t know everything about everything, even with that fancy ’Versity education of yours,” he went on as though he hadn’t heard me at all. “We act different ’cause we are different, not because we never had the right nannies come around to teach us all how to play nice and all that shit.”

“You’re still human,” I said quietly. “So I suppose you can act like one.”

“Then you’d be supposing dead wrong, professor,” he replied, looking down his long nose at me. “Can’t be human and fly the dragons. That’s just the way it works.”

It was the most terrible thing I’d ever heard, and truly maddening if that was what all of them believed. Yet somehow I got the sense that this was a notion particular to Rook, though it didn’t make me feel any better. “You must be,” I insisted, with no real idea of what it was that I was so insistent against. “You’re just hiding behind the dragons, using them as . . . as an excuse for whatever reasons you have for wanting to act as though you’re completely emotionless. No man is made of metal.”

He shook his head, and stepped so close that I could smell the night’s raid on him—dragonmetal and the burning strongholds of the Ke-Han. I wondered dizzily if it were possible that this man was made of metal. “You don’t listen, and I ain’t patient, but I’ll say it again: It’s not an act. In the air I can’t be thinking about how I feel, much less how my actions affect everything going on around me. You go up, you do the job, you come back. Isn’t anything other than that, and if you get it confused, you’ll die because some other son-of-a was smart enough not to.”

“But you can’t spend your life on the ground as if you’re still in the air,” I said, clinging to my faint and crumbling resolve. For one wild moment I thought I could smell something below the fire, anger or something sharper. But scenting such human emotions was a particular skill of the airmen and not one I could have learned through propinquity.

Rook swallowed something back, frowning like it nearly choked him to do it, then turned on his heel. “Shit, professor. And you think we’re the stubborn ones.”

This time I was powerless to stop him as he walked away, my boots planted as though glued to the floor.

“Anyway,” he called back over his shoulder, “I got some cleaning up to do. Have you heard? Seems we’ve been invited to a party—and from the looks of it, we’re the Ke-Han-fucking guests of honor!”

He had impeccable aim. Perhaps it came from so long a time spent up in the air, or from his skill at the airmen’s complicated and seemingly incomprehensible game of darts, but he managed to hit home each time with his sly words. It was obvious that the airman Rook had my number, that for all my ’Versity schooling we were on uneven ground, and we both knew it instinctively, in the same way cats know to chase mice or hawks to drop down from the sky upon rabbits with deadly accuracy.

I had the distinct sense that the ball was going to be a disaster. I knew my etiquette better than a single one of the airmen—except, perhaps, for Balfour, who’d been raised in high society—yet I wasn’t so vital to Volstov’s success in the war. And any slip I made, no matter how slight, would be on par with the most egregious of Rook’s errors.

Th’Esar had no reason to be so lenient when punishing me as he did when punishing his elite Dragon Corps, scourge of the skies, heroes of the bastion.

I hardly slept at all that night, and spent the day before the evening of the ball trying once again, however futile the endeavor was, to cohere my notes into some semblance of an order. Surely I must have learned something vital in all my time spent sleeping on a couch in the Airman and enduring the cruelest of the corps’ insults. Surely I must have in turn imparted some learning of my own. Yet the more I read over my notes, the more I noticed how uninformed I was. If the riders of the Dragon Corps were incapable of understanding the rules of the rest of society, then it was equally true that the rest of society was incapable of understanding the rules of the Dragon Corps. Each was governed by vastly different principles; the motivating factors for behaving politically were like the structure of outlandish foreign grammar to the airmen, and I was at last beginning to understand why. Still, it was no excuse for them to behave as pigs to their fellowmen, or for them to treat women as objects to be bartered and discussed like horses, or to look down upon all of Arlemagne for doing their best to stay out of our war. The airmen didn’t have to agree with other opinions, and they certainly didn’t have to follow other men’s rules all that often, but they did have to acknowledge that these things existed.

I couldn’t imagine what they would do once their services were no longer required.

This was always the trouble with learning, I remembered from my first few courses at the ’Versity. The more you were informed, the less you realized you knew, and the point between grasping new knowledge and abandoning the old was as precarious as straddling a great divide, being torn in both directions and terrified of falling between with neither side to support your theories.

I wished Marius were close by to tell me I was overthinking the issue and should take a deep breath and confront, as simply as possible, all the things I knew. If I were to do him proud, I would gather my results without any preconceptions and allow them to shape their own conclusion. This was the mark of a true scholar, if not a great one.

Yet there was no real time for such intellectual pursuits. Sometime after midday the tailor brought my clothes for their final fitting, and meanwhile all of the Airman was gradually being filled with the sound of new boots being broken in before that evening’s dancing. While the tailor adjusted the inseam of my trousers, I managed to catch bits and pieces of a lively story Magoughin was telling about the daughters of the new Arlemagne diplomat—the other one, presumably, had been asked to cool his heels for a while, and was perhaps mending his now-tenuous relationship with his wife. I even caught, tacked on to the end of the story almost as an afterthought, Magoughin’s realization that: “Now we’ve been trained to act like proper gentlemen, though, I don’t suppose we can take them back with us afterward and show them a thing or two about Volstov?”

Compagnon’s giggling nearly obscured Jeannot’s wry reply, which was, as far as I could make it out, “A thing or three, knowing your tastes.”

“I’d rather be at Benoite’s party if all’s said and done,” Ghislain admitted, “but I guess a man can’t turn down th’Esar when he’s invited somewhere, and he’s th’Esar anyway, so chances are he’ll have the best wine, if not the friendliest ladies.”

After that, all was drowned out by a chorus of laughter, whereupon the tailor said I was twisting around too much, and in order to make his job less impossible—and to avoid being stuck in the thigh by any needles—I stopped trying to eavesdrop on their conversation and consigned myself to my thoughts once more.

By the time my suit was finished, the Airman clock had tolled six hours past noon, and the members of the corps were beginning to gather in the common room, each one of them dressed in Volstov’s most recognizable uniform.

I myself was wearing the sort of fabric I never had the cause or the money to purchase for myself while I was a student. It was soft and heavy at once, and fit slim where it needed to, rather than bulking up as a less expensive grade would. The collar and lapels of the jacket were wide after the latest fashion, the sleeves long. The tailor had decided that the best color for my eyes and my complexion was a sort of bottle green, and the outfit had even come with handsome, tall leather boots, heavy buckles at the ankles, and stiff white gloves.

It was safe to say, as the airmen came in to wait and laugh and joke with one another, and lounge easily in their finery, that I’d never felt so out of place in my entire life.

I was a plain-looking sort of person—neither ugly nor handsome—and though, as the tailor said, the color of the suit did hint at the green in my eyes, whenever I caught sight of myself in the mirror I felt startled by how different my usual perception of myself was from the present reality. When compared to the airmen, each man striking in his own way, I felt even more ridiculously common, like a little boy from the Mollyedge dressed up but nevertheless revealed for what he really was.

I wasn’t one of these men, part of their brotherhood. Never before had I felt so much of an intruder on their comfort, their rituals, their way of life.

I sat on the arm of my couch-bed with my gloves held in my hands, waiting with the rest for our carriages to come, and yet not with the rest at all. When Jeannot came in, he was called over to talk with Ghislain, Ace, and Balfour; likewise, when Niall made his entrance, he was beckoned to the smaller group of Raphael and Compagnon. All the men were dressed in their Dragon Corps uniforms: dark blue jackets and silver buttons, gold epaulettes, slim white trousers, and high black boots. Grouped together, the airmen reminded me of a collection of gems, each one cut differently, but all of them polished so brightly they shone.

The last man to make his arrival was, of course, Rook; it wasn’t because I was looking for him that I noticed this detail, but rather the ubiquity of his presence in any room. In that way he was exactly like a dragon: mythical, enormous, surreal.

He entered in grand style, kicking the door open and immediately engaging Ivory in some heated discussion about what had been done with Rook’s favorite earrings, and how they fucking weren’t lying around just so some son-of-a could give them to his lady friend. They were apparently the finest Ke-Han gold, fashioned into Ke-Han loops, and I wondered, not for the first time, at Rook’s decision to wear his hair in Ke-Han braids and pierce his ears with demarcations of Ke-Han warrior status, when he was known throughout Ke-Han as a murdering god, capricious, merciless, and cruel.

In the spirit of the evening—and perhaps to match the royal blue of the Dragon Corps jacket—he’d redyed the blue streaks in his golden hair, and his eyes were bright in the candlelight.

There was a moment when I felt as if he were watching me, but all at once there was a commotion from without, then everyone was rushing toward the door.

“That’ll be the carriages,” Balfour told me, adjusting his white gloves one last time before he, too, followed the crowd.

I soon saw why they were all so quick to scramble for their carriages, for those left behind had no choice in where they sat, and everyone was shoving in every which way like children who didn’t want to be left behind. Since I brought up the rear, I was stuck in with Rook and Magoughin—three men to a carriage—with them telling lewd jokes the entire way and occasionally looking over to me with quite pointed expressions, leaving me no need to wonder if they were doing it on purpose.

And then, we arrived at the palace.

It was lit up with countless glittering lights—the spires aglow, no doubt with magic—onion domes the color of the crown, golden and pearl white and midnight blue. It was a scene I’d viewed only distantly over the years from my various rooms along the ’Versity stretch, which was, I realized now, too far away from the palace to do justice to the sight.

I felt all my breath leave me at once. Yet, though I waited for Rook to mock me about my wide-eyed “civ” wonderment, he said nothing at all, although he did shove past me with no more than a grunt as he made his way out of the carriage and onto Palace Walk.

It, too, was alight with the shimmering of countless paper lanterns. They lined the pathway and the narrow flight of stairs up to the palace’s main doorway. The whole palace itself, while dark and spindly in the daytime, had taken on new life. To say I was overwhelmed would be something of an understatement.

The airmen had no reason to wait for me and so they didn’t, filtering off ahead in chattering groups of threes and fours. I stood frozen, admiring the colored lights like a common child as the sharp sounds of their new boots against the ground faded off into the distance.

Then it occurred to me that it would be much worse to enter alone than in the wake of the airmen, where I might be able to escape attention entirely, and I moved quickly to catch up.

“Palace Walk ain’t for running,” Adamo said to me as I came up to him. There was something strange about his face, I thought, and I couldn’t place it until I realized that he’d shaved.

“Isn’t,” I corrected him automatically, and slowed to the leisurely pace the other men were walking at.

He raised his eyebrows at me.

“Ah,” I said, beginning to worry at my gloves the way Balfour did. “I’m sorry about that.”

He shrugged. “Can’t help being the way you are.”

I nodded, offering him a shaky smile of truce. It felt uncomfortably as though he were trying to make a point, and I was too nervous to be taught any more lessons by the very men I’d been charged to teach.

Up ahead tinkled a distinctly feminine peal of laughter, and I saw that Rook had been enveloped by a group of fashionably dressed women, their hair curled and pinned, gowns voluminous in gold and cream, as if they’d planned them to match the palace—which in a way I supposed they could have. I didn’t pretend to understand the minds of women, or at least these women. I knew that if I’d been female, the story of the Arlemagne diplomat’s wife would have kept me as far away from hanging off Rook’s arm as possible, and I would never have smiled so brightly at him, with teeth like rows of pearls.

Then Rook and his entourage of attractive young ladies disappeared, swallowed up by the light spilling out from the palace, and I was left frowning at the open doors with little reason or understanding.

“He’s doing very well,” said Adamo. I waited for a moment, to see if anyone else responded. Then, since I was still the only person next to him, I had to assume he was speaking to me.

“I—who?” I asked. “Rook?”

He nodded, finding it perhaps harder than he’d anticipated to hide his amusement without a full beard. “None of those women are even anyone else’s wives.”

 

HAL

The city was alive.

That wasn’t to say that there were more living things in it than in the country, for all during the carriage ride away from Castle Nevers, Royston waxed enthusiastic about the lack of small winged insects, and sheep, and ducks, and trees, until I was forced to ask—with impossible fondness, and not at all the exasperation I’d aimed for—what it was they did have in the city, if not these things.

I should have known better.

My curiosity was rewarded with a sermon that approached the zeal of a man deeply religious or deeply in love; it spanned the length of our ride into Thremedon, transporting me out of our bumping carriage where my elbows jostled against Royston’s. (The proper way to ride in a carriage I knew was to sit opposite your companion, but I found after the first mile or so, I was opposed even to this small distance between us, and had wedged myself quite firmly between him and the little window. I shouldn’t have demanded so much, but he at least seemed untroubled by it, and was too caught up in speaking about the city to notice how I clung to his every word, or peered out the window like a child each time we turned a new corner.)

He spoke of the Crescents—a district filled entirely with magicians—and the structurally unsound homes they built for beauty and kept aloft with magic. From his descriptions, I constructed in my head some approximation of their long, crooked towers and crabbed iron spires, with staircases that spiraled within as well as without and balconies on the rooftops. Most magicians, he explained, liked to be high up; it made them feel important. He laughed, and I imagined the buildings, crowding in on one another like children huddled together to keep out of the rain. Royston said that the enchantment set in place to hold the houses in the air was older than his grandfather, though the technology was in some ways a precursor to the dragons themselves. It had been the first Esar who’d gathered all the magicians with related Talents to place a lasting magic on the district, so that he would always know exactly where his most powerful magicians were living.

“He likes to have all his chickens in one coop, so to speak,” Royston explained, a fleeting stoniness in his eyes and around his mouth. “In case he is ever feeling less than favorably disposed toward them.”

I nodded, wishing I hadn’t asked in the first place.

Just off from the Crescents was Moon Street, he said, which was a bit of a step down as far as magic went. The people on Moon Street dealt in charms mostly, smaller Talents that could be bought or borrowed for a fee. They weren’t true magicians—though their ancestors had been once—but the Well’s influence in their blood was long diluted over the years. When Royston first spoke of Moon Street it was clear that he didn’t think much of it, but after a time he paused, traced the outline of his mouth with long fingers and beseeched me not to be influenced by his snobbish prejudices.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’ve not had that problem yet.”

He laughed, and for what I felt was the first time turned away from the window to look at me and not the city. I felt the same as I always did when confronted with his complete attention, frightened and selfish all at once, as though I didn’t want it, yet couldn’t bear to lose it.

“Hal,” he said, “now that we are speeding toward the city with all alacrity, there are some things that may become . . . much simpler, given Thremedon’s relative tolerance, and what may or may not be done without igniting the fury of one’s own brother and his shrewish wife.”

Despite all the rules I’d set down for my own best interests, I felt something excited twist within my stomach. “Oh?” I managed.

All I could see of him then was his stark profile, framed in shadows and by the carriage window, and completely unreadable.

The trouble with Royston was that, for all the words he knew, he so rarely managed to employ them properly. They got in the way of what he wanted to say rather than aiding him. I was left next to him in the carriage, jostled with every bump beneath us, watching his face eagerly for some hint as to his deeper meaning—or rather, for some hint as to what he wanted.

It was as though he didn’t know I would gladly offer it. It was as though he didn’t know I already had.

“What I mean to say,” Royston said, picking his words very carefully, “is that my invitation is not necessarily a shrewd business proposal, in need though I am of an assistant, nor is it solely academic, delighted though I am at the prospect of a student. That is . . .”

I hesitated, then reached out to cover his hand with one of my own. It was difficult to swallow, as though my collar were buttoned too tightly, but now that I had taken Royston’s hand with my own I could hardly move, much less to do anything so mundane as check the clasps at my throat.

“What you mean to say is that the city is nothing at all like the country,” I supplied, nerves making me cheeky, “and more than nomenclature alone separates them so distinctly.”

Royston turned to me at that, at last, some measure of amusement and surprise in his eyes.

“Something to that effect,” he agreed. “Thremedon requires a certain amount of charades, it is true, but nothing so complicated as the tragicomic scenes we enacted in my brother’s house.”

I thought of his discomfort in the boathouse, his excuses in the pantry, how well he’d played his part. I thought of how educated he was and how much he had seen in comparison to my limited scope. Royston was a Margrave of the Esar; I had been a tutor to the reluctant, boisterous children of a country estate. There was a great deal for me to feel awkward about and a great deal to separate us, but right then all I could think was that we were heading away from the country, and there was only half a carriage seat’s width between us.

A rush of giddiness at what lay before me—before us—flooded me. Royston was just about to say something further, some clarification that would no doubt have been even more convoluted, when I put my hands against the sides of his face and kissed him.

I would have liked for it to be less awkward than the first, when my elbows almost knocked over the cinnamon and I nearly thrust him backward into an open bag of flour. It wasn’t. At that very moment the carriage hit a bump and our teeth scraped; our noses banged. I was ready enough to pull away, humiliated and blushing fiercely, just like the first time.

Only then Royston’s fingers were in my hair, his palm against my throat.

He was better at this than I was.

I should have felt ashamed, or even more nervous; I should have frozen where I was, for all I’d been thinking about this since I’d tried and failed the first time. Instead, I scrambled forward, clutching at Royston’s shoulders against the jostling of the carriage. His left knee knocked against my right.

If this was what Thremedon promised, then I was glad to have left the country, for all my littler fears. How had I failed to know all this time what I’d been stifling, and, in turn, how I’d been stifled?

It took me too long to notice Royston’s hand moving from my throat to my shoulder, until I realized all at once with a sudden punch of disappointment that he was encouraging me to stop, or, at least, to pause.

“Hal,” he said gently. I let my cheek remain pressed next to his for a few seconds longer before I allowed myself to move away. And still we were much closer than we might have been, so that I was distracted even by the smell of him.

I let out a long, unsteady breath. “Yes?”

“Thremedon’s allowances aside,” Royston said carefully, “I would like it very much if we might refrain from . . . rushing into anything. Recently, I have had a great many rushed and ultimately disastrous liaisons, and you . . .” He paused for a moment, to turn his face against my hair; I thought, from the deep breath he drew in, he might have been doing the same as I was—savoring the moment. His words disappointed me but, I found, they did not surprise me. When I thought of the rumors surrounding the Arlemagne prince and Royston’s reason for leaving the city in the first place, it wasn’t only jealousy I felt, but a deep protectiveness, as though Royston were in some ways my ward. It was little wonder he was so reticent now.

“I see,” I said, just as carefully.

“More than that,” Royston continued. “Hal, you have never been beyond Nevers, and I am only a small piece of a very large city. There is a great deal more for you to see before you—Before you make any decisions.”

It would do no good to protest, or to argue with Royston’s meticulous, if somewhat faulty, logic. At present, he was pinching the bridge of his nose as though the headache that had been plaguing him for some time now had returned. This time, however, when I felt the urge to run my fingers against the few gray hairs at his temple, I did.

As my father used to say, you can’t ask the summer flowers to bloom in the spring. This would be a different sort of hesitation, and I was willing to wait—long enough, at least, to prove to him that my exodus from the countryside was more about following him than anything else.

“All right,” I said.

Royston leaned into the light touch of my fingers at his temple. “Thank you,” he replied.

After what seemed like an age—though it was surely my own impatience that made it so—the city rose into view, nestled back against the land as if she were reclining, crowned with proud towers in the Esar’s own colors.

There was another building farther off, built in the same style as the palace but with many more towers, and the swirling domes that topped them seemed to come alive, shimmering in the sunlight.

Royston rested a hand against my shoulder, leaning over to look out the window as well.

“That’s the Basquiat,” he said, and his voice held a low note of wonder that I’d scarcely heard before.

I’d never considered myself a jealous person before, but the look I saw on Royston’s face when he spoke of Thremedon was enough to stir something decidedly wistful and selfish inside me.

“Oh,” I said only. “Well, it’s very nice.”

He moved his hand down my shoulder to lace his fingers through mine. I felt reassured, even if I was still nervous.

“It is even nicer,” he said, “from up close.”

I didn’t have the privilege of seeing the Basquiat that day, and on the next the invitation arrived.

There was only one, as the Esar had no reason to know or even care about a country boy barely into manhood, but Royston insisted I accompany him to the tailor’s anyway, disappearing during my fitting and returning with triumph flashing in his eyes and a real, embossed invitation on stiff white paper. Even as he handed it to me, he refused to say where or how he’d come into possession of it, but it was the first intimation I had that Royston was a man with considerable power in the city. It wasn’t any wonder he’d hated the country and his place in it.

High collars, it appeared, hadn’t gone out of style during Royston’s absence from the city, and mine was clasped against my throat with some strange silver-laced thread.

The moment my clothes were sewn into place, we were hurrying into yet another carriage before I could get a satisfactory answer out of Royston as to what, exactly, I was expected to do at a ball, and what did he mean dance?

It was all I could do not to stroke the plush fabric of my jacket when we stepped out together onto the main walk. It led narrowly to the palace, lit on both sides with countless flickering paper lanterns on high black stands. Before us was the palace itself, brighter than the sun; I had to resist the urge to shield my eyes against the sight of it.

I’d thought before that Royston had been going somewhat overboard by spoiling me with such finery, but as we mixed in with the other guests, I saw that I’d been quite mistaken. The truth of the matter was, Royston had actually been rather restrained in recommending solid blues for me.

Royston himself was dressed all in black, with gold detailing over his jacket and in a single stripe down the length of his trousers.

I hesitated when we came to the door, but he took my hand, entwining my gloved fingers with his own.

The main doors of the palace opened directly onto a balcony above the ballroom, which was so enormous that I felt certain it would have fit the entirety of Castle Nevers with room to spare. High tables had been arranged to overlook the floor on a more complicated set of balconies below the entranceway, where the noblesse sat drinking and eating all manner of very tiny foods.

The very best wine, Royston said to me in an undertone as we crossed the room, was made by the Ke-Han, and it was dark and red as blood.

I wondered if it been taken as the spoils of battle, for all I’d heard since I’d arrived in the city was how the war was almost certainly over, and how the Dragon Corps had assured us a swift and total victory. I didn’t understand why Royston had been called back at all, if that was the case, but I didn’t want to expose my ignorance to the people of the city so immediately. Surely, if they said the war was close to an end—and if the opinion was shared by a man as great as the Esar—then that was the truth of the matter. I couldn’t bring myself to ask Royston what his opinion was, but I privately cherished the idea that he might not have to go away to war at all, however foolish that was.

Above the floor, at the very center of the ceiling, hung an enormous, three-tiered chandelier—not unlike an upside-down approximation of Thremedon, made all in crystal and spun gold. Its light illuminated the dancers with perfect clarity, and yet left many shadowy places in the corners where a person might hide.

I lost count of how many times I was introduced to complete strangers as we descended the steps halfway to the second-tier balconies, where the noblesse stood together talking, both men and women hiding their laughter elegantly behind lace fans. There were people staring at us, I realized. Or to be more accurate, they were staring at Royston.

“I didn’t think he’d ever come back,” a lady to my right whispered to her keen-eyed companion.

“I didn’t think he’d ever be asked back,” said a man dressed all in blue. He wore a mask over one side of his face.

“Never mind the Margrave,” murmured the lady next to him. “Have you seen who came in after them? It’s Caius Greylace! I’d have sworn up and down that the Esar would have abdicated his throne before he asked him back to court. And without any grand incident, either!”

“Perhaps it’s for our grand victory,” the masked man replied, in a tone that revealed he was delighted to show off his knowledge of the proceedings. “The Esar wants this victory to be decisive. That, and he wants it to be as flamboyant as possible.”

The lady struck him on the shoulder with her fan, and I felt Royston’s hand underneath my elbow, drawing me away from the whispering clutches to make further introductions. I didn’t ask if he’d heard the people gossiping. Surely, if he had, then he had his own reasons for ignoring it. If he hadn’t, then there was no need to upset him by drawing attention to it.

After that, I had little time to think about it, as I became lost among the sea of faces that Royston propelled me through. He introduced me to everyone, as though I belonged there just the same as they did. Amidst the complicated names of the Margraves and the velikaia, my own name seemed to retreat to one of the many small, dark shadows.

I wished very much to be able to follow it.

I knew—despite my valiant efforts to sit still in the elegant, wing-backed chair next to Royston and listen as his friends discussed political matters, the state of the Basquiat, and a great many other subjects I had no way of understanding—that I no more belonged here than did a sheep from the country.

Royston pointed out certain people of note as they entered and were announced, warning me away from some and gossiping about others.

“And those,” he said at last, sitting forward somewhat in his chair, “are the airmen of the Esar’s Dragon Corps.”

I sat up with interest, curious to see the men who had featured so often in the romans I’d read that they were almost like legends themselves.

They were very striking indeed, dressed all in uniform save for a man in green who stood with them at the rear. He had a look of forced calm that I knew meant he was in fact frightfully uncomfortable, and I felt an immediate kinship with him. We were in the same dire straits, and I wished there was some way I could inform him there was at least some company for his suffering.

The airmen filtered through the crowd like royal-blue water, dispersing like rain through the cracks of pavement, though they weren’t any the less noticeable while separated than when they were together. Every now and then I would catch sight of a gold epaulette or a dark blue jacket moving through the crowd—the chandelier light glinting off a silver button—and I knew who it must be before I even turned my head to get a closer look at him.

There was one who was especially striking. He wore his blue-streaked golden hair braided and loose around his face. When the corps split up, the crowd surrounding that particular airman seemed largely female, and the man in green was left standing alone.

“The man in green,” a pale woman murmured to her escort. “Who do you suppose he is?”

“Not one of their escorts, I’m sure,” the man replied, with an expression that made me rather uncomfortable.

“I assume it’s the poor soul the Esar assigned to nanny them,” Royston replied, stifling a yawn with one hand. “Don’t you think? He looks very much like a ’Versity student.”

“I can’t imagine why he’s been invited,” said another woman at our table. She fanned herself wearily, though I saw her crane her neck to follow the movements of the poor man in green. “He seems rather . . . young, don’t you agree?”

“Well,” said the first woman, “it wasn’t a real punishment, was it?”

Everyone dissolved into laughter, even Royston, who chuckled politely for a moment, then returned to watching the man in green with a keener interest than the rest.

I took my leave to visit the bathroom sometime later on, when various members of the Basquiat and Royston started in on a discussion about the war. No one else seemed to think it strange, their having won so abruptly when as far as I knew the raids had only just begun again. Once or twice Royston frowned, as though he didn’t entirely like the direction the conversation was taking, but since he was quite capable of turning the tides of an entire discussion on his own, I didn’t think he would miss me. I could be brave in the kind of way that got me through a fancy city ball, I thought, and I could be brave in a way that allowed me to accept the eventuality of Royston going away to war—if indeed it lasted that long—but I could not be the two kinds of brave at once.

As soon as I’d resigned myself to this, my newest problem was trying to avoid becoming hopelessly lost once I’d left the ballroom. It was not as difficult as I’d feared, as there seemed to be many servants scattered throughout the halls for specifically this purpose. That they didn’t seem all that keen on speaking to me was only a small detail, but I was nevertheless very grateful when I finally opened the correct door.

“Oh,” said someone, who was quite unexpectedly seated on the marble counter into which the porcelain washing-sink was inlaid.

It was the man in green.

“I’m sorry,” I said as he slid to the floor, smoothing the creases in his trousers. “I didn’t realize there was anyone, ah, using the room.”

“Oh,” he said again, straightening up at once. “Well you see, I’m—I’m not so much using the room as I am hiding. In the room.”

This seemed to me a perfectly reasonable thing to do, as it had been my plan exactly. He was braver than I, however, for being able to reveal his motives freely.

“I think that may also be why I’m here,” I admitted. “I’m glad to see I’ve come to the right place.”

His smile indicated he’d been starved for basic kindness for a very long time, and my heart went out to him immediately. From what little I’d heard about the Dragon Corps—and if he was indeed the ’Versity student who’d been set to the task of rehabilitating them for proper society—then his life couldn’t have been very easy of late. And now he found himself here, in this terrifying place, as foreign as if it weren’t the center of our own Volstov capital. I didn’t envy him his position.

“I haven’t been here long,” he said cautiously, as if he expected to be caught out and ridiculed at any moment. “In fact, I was just leaving—”

“You needn’t, not on my account,” I assured him. “I think it may be much more preferable to hide in the bathroom with someone than by myself. On my own it has a . . . more desperate air. Don’t you agree?”

He laughed hesitantly, but when he’d finished laughing the smile remained in his eyes, lighting up his entire face. “Yes,” he agreed at length. “I suppose it does. Do you mind my asking—it may be presumptuous of me—but your accent seems to indicate—”

“I’m from county Nevers,” I told him. In truth, I was glad to have the secret out. It was so obvious from the moment I opened my mouth that I might as well have been wearing a sign pronouncing my country origins to the entire room.

“I thought so,” the man in green admitted. “There’s a certain—That is, one of my professors was a specialist in the dialects.”

“Was he?” I asked. “What did you study with him?”

“The provinces, mostly, and the regional influences of the old Ramanthe,” the man in green replied, a dreamy expression on his face. “We barely touched upon Nevers—it’s unorthodox teaching to go so far as the river—but in any case, this is probably all overwhelmingly dull for you, isn’t it?”

It wasn’t, and I let him know it in no uncertain terms. “I’ve always wanted to study at the ’Versity,” I added, almost shyly. It wasn’t a dream I shared with many, but the man in green, I felt, would understand this desire. “ I’m too old now, of course, but—Was there really a class like that?”

“Countless classes,” the man in green replied. “Marius—Marius is my thesis advisor—often had to chastise me about spreading myself too thin by signing up for too many of them.”

“Of course you did,” I replied. “Attending the ’Versity is the only chance you’ll get to learn such things.”

“Exactly,” the man in green said. There was a momentary silence between us—not entirely uncomfortable—and then a sudden flush of embarrassment came over him. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Thom. I’m here with the, ah, corps. Their reputation precedes them.”

“I’m Hal,” I replied. “It’s rather a relief to meet you.”

“You’re here with Mar—The Margrave,” Thom said quickly. There was a new blush on his cheeks, but I had to confess I was at a loss as to why. “Margrave . . .Royston. Yes, Margrave Royston. I saw you at his table.”

It was my turn to blush. “Yes,” I said. “He—You know, I’m sure, the—”

“The circumstances for his sojourn in the countryside?” Thom supplied for me kindly.

“Yes,” I confirmed. “Well. I was to be the tutor at Castle Nevers.”

“And now you’re not.”

“Yes,” I said. “Exactly that.”

Thom leaned back against the marble wall, toying idly with his collar. It made me feel much better about the stiffness at my own throat, and I took this as my chance to loosen the clasp there somewhat and breathe deeply and properly for the first time in what felt like years. “It’s been a dramatic year,” Thom said at last. “Hasn’t it?”

“It seems it has,” I replied. “I’m not entirely . . . up on my Thremedon gossip, however.”

“My friend,” Thom informed me, “I believe you are in the midst of that about which everyone is gossiping.”

“I’m not sure that’s preferable,” I confided.

“No,” he agreed. “Nor am I.”

“Are you the instructor to the Dragon Corps?” I began.

Thom nodded. “I have some manner or other of a title, at this point,” he said. “But all it means is that I’m supposed to teach the Dragon Corps to be respectful of others and to refrain from harassing every woman they meet, whether she’s a common Nellie or a diplomat’s wife. I admit that it’s a thankless job.”

I couldn’t help myself, and asked impulsively, “But have you seen them? The dragons?”

Something strange and unrecognizable passed over Thom’s face; it made him look rather more mysterious, darkening his eyes to the color of twin bruises. Rather than intimating some divine secret about the Dragon Corps, however, he simply said, “Yes. Once. Not very close, though.”

“Ah,” I said. “That was . . . rude of me, wasn’t it? I’m sorry. I’m from Nevers, and—”

“Bastion,” Thom swore wearily. “Goodness, please don’t apologize. You’re the first person who’s actually talked to me—I mean really talked to me, rather than cursed at me or told me I had a giant blue handprint on my face or beetles still in my hair—in months. It seems more like years, to be honest with you. I’m grateful for it.”

I paused for a moment to consider this, and found I had to loosen my high, tight collar a second time. “Is it really that awful?” I asked companionably. “I’m sorry. I’d no idea it could be that bad. After all, I’ve only ever read about the Dragon Corps. Naturally,” I added, blushing again, “since I’ve been in Thremedon no more than two days.”

“It’s an experience,” Thom said dryly. “One I’m sure I’ll be grateful to have had one day in the very, very distant future, once I have fully recovered from all this experiencing.”

We laughed together for a moment, a more friendly sound than the sparkling, tittering noises the noblesse made behind their lacy fans.

“Surely it isn’t all bad,” I said presumptuously. “I even thought perhaps—But, no, that’s rather stupid of me. And silly.”

“What?” Thom inquired, suddenly curious.

“Never mind,” I insisted. “It really is unfounded. I don’t know what I could possibly have been thinking to bring it up.”

“Come,” Thom encouraged, “let’s try to be honest with each other, shall we? I’m in need of some honesty. What was it you were going to say?”

I struggled for a moment with the right way to phrase what I had in mind. At last, I formed my tentative words with the utmost care, certain that this was presuming too much familiarity. “I only thought—from the way he was looking at you—the man in blue, with the braids—I only thought you might have been particular friends—”

Thom’s expression closed itself off to me at once, and I knew I’d committed a fatal blunder in our tentative acquaintanceship. “Why,” he said, voice a little too hard; I thought for a moment he might even have been on the verge of laughter, but it was a dreadful laugh that stifled itself in his throat, and one which made my stomach feel ice-cold. “Why would you even think that?”

I felt awful. I didn’t know what it was that I’d said that had so offended him. If I’d known which way to turn once I made my escape, I would have fled the bathroom then and there, but it was necessary I right my own wrong and patch up the damage as best as I could. “I’m so sorry,” I assured him. “Perhaps I was mistaken? I only thought I saw . . . but of course I didn’t. Do you have . . . particular trouble with him? Was that why he was watching you?”

There was a long and awkward silence, bristling unpleasantly between us. “Has he put you up to this?” Thom asked at last. “I wouldn’t blame you; he’s quite intimidating, and if he caught you while you were on your way here . . .”

I realized at once that whatever Thom had been put through during his time with the Dragon Corps, it was beyond my ability to imagine. The man with the gold-and-blue braids certainly made a striking impression; the intensity I’d mistakenly thought of as collegiality might have been something much more sinister. I wondered if there was something—anything—I could do for Thom, but we were no more than strangers exchanging our personal social ineptitudes in the bathroom of the Esar’s palace. We didn’t know each other at all beyond the barest of details and a kinship born of mutual anxiety.

I was a complete idiot.

“I haven’t spoken to him at all,” I said, hoping he’d believe me. “I’m not any good at lying—you can ask Royston, if you’d like. He’ll tell you just how awful at it I really am.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Thom said, his expression softening only somewhat. “You really—You really thought you saw him, as you say, looking at me?”

Perhaps it would have been better to lie about it, to assuage his worries, but as I’d already told him, I was dreadful at lying and he would have seen through my attempts immediately. “I must have been mistaken. I’ve never—”

“Please,” Thom said, voice polite but clipped, “don’t feel the need to excuse yourself. Whatever you saw or didn’t see, it doesn’t really matter, does it? Doubtless he has something planned, and was keeping an eye on me to ensure his—Bastion! If you’ll excuse me, I really must be—Good-bye.”

Before I could apologize for my mistake, he’d left the room, the bathroom door closing loudly behind him. I winced at the sound it made, the echoes through the marble room, and sank back against one of the countless, floor-length mirrors. I began to realize just how naive I was, and to understand that I was no longer in the country, where a look meant nothing more than the obvious.

My first palace offense, I thought wretchedly, and I wished it had been someone who better deserved it.

 

ROOK

All night long I was surrounded by ladies and their perfumes and their polished nails and their powdered breasts, some of them looking good enough to eat, decked out in their finest and all of them tripping over one another to dance with me. But I was too busy thinking about something else, against all better instincts and real stupid, and the more I thought about it the angrier I got—especially seeing as how about fifteen minutes after we all arrived the crazy professor disappeared, and nobody seemed to notice he was missing. My guess was that he’d been called to report on us, or maybe he’d gone to drown himself in the bathroom before he had to admit to th’Esar that he had no idea in the world what in bastion’s name he was doing. Either way, there was no reason to torture him by being rude on purpose to the women surrounding me like sharks scenting blood in the water if he wasn’t there to see it and sweat about it, even if they were the reason I lost sight of him in the first place. After that business with Have, I was bursting with an excuse to give him trouble. Without him around to witness everyone seeing how he’d failed, I wasn’t even in the mood to find some poor bastard’s brand-new wife and get her dancing in front of all the noblesse in all their gossiping finery.

When the dancing finally started up for real about an hour later, I saw him again. He was one of the only people wearing green—blue being in fashion these days and all because of our uniforms, despite th’Esar’s colors being red—and so it was easy to spot him through the crowd, even though he stuck to the shadows.

And there I was with my ideas of revenge banging around, and the women pressing close to me asking me to sign their cards for more dances than I’d signed away to the lady before. Even though I liked dancing—and I did like it, not in the same way court dandies liked it for its stiff formality, but because when the music got wild, the women got breathless—I wasn’t in the mood.

It was because of what Have’d said about me and the professor being like two peas in a pod. I wasn’t forgetting that anytime soon.

It was this nagging sensation that’d chased me around ever since we’d gone up in the air together, like the tail end of a dream I could only half remember and needed the whole of for my own peace of mind. I guess it had something to do with how I really shouldn’t’ve taken the professor along with me for a raid, how what me and Have did was private between the two of us, and how I couldn’t fly a night afterward without thinking of him cursing like a gutter whore right in my ear, and me whooping up a storm and burning the Ke-Han as they scattered across the desert in the night. But most of all, I couldn’t forget Have’s reaction to him. She didn’t have any loyalty to anyone but me. But then I’d never gone riding with anyone else alongside neither. Whatever it was I’d done—whatever my role in this horseshit was—I didn’t like it. And I knew who was going to pay for it, too, soon as I knew right where he was and I knew that he could see me.

My whole evening was just spent waiting for a chance to embarrass him.

But you couldn’t explain something like that to a lady, especially not the ravenous sort who frequented these balls. I figured it was because they’d married noble husbands and had to wait for just such an event to dance—or better—with a real man that they got so desperate. In any case, with the music going and my dance card full, I lost sight of the professor, skulking about in the shadows the way he was, like he knew he didn’t belong here, neither.

In that way, I guess Have was right. I guess we were some kind of the same. The difference was in how we acted about it, and that was where I came out on top.

When I looked back he’d disappeared again, and just when I’d got it into my head what I was going to do with the redhead waving her lace handkerchief at me like a welcoming flag, too.

That was it, what sent my blood fizzing nice and warm and got my limbs all loose and hot like they were ready to hit someone or worse. I didn’t much care about what the professor did one way or the other, but he’d spent all his time at our bunker loitering around like he thought he was too good to mix in proper with people, and now he was doing it here, too.

Some people didn’t have any fucking idea about good manners.

I spun sharp with a pretty brunette who’d been batting her eyelashes at me since I arrived. She was small enough so I could see right over the top of her head, and right on the dip, there was the thin green silhouette of the professor disappearing behind the fancy curtains. I knew personal-like how th’Esar had rigged those curtains up special to hang over the entrances to the balconies for when his honored guests got a little too hot and bothered for being in the public eye. I also knew, just as personal-like, that this particular brunette was the daughter of one of th’Esar’s favorites, some stuffed pigeon from the bastion who kept her trimmed like a cake in a bakery window but wouldn’t let anyone inside the shop.

The professor had a kind of talent for hiding, if nothing else. When the music ended I took the brunette round the waist a little tighter even than when we were dancing, and she followed me just like that. We cut easy through the crowd with none of that sidling off to one side that most people did. If you were slow enough to trip up dancing couples, then you didn’t deserve to be on the floor at all was my way of thinking, and I weaved in and out a bit, bobbing like it was a real good fight that demanded all my attention. Sometimes navigating the dance floor was pretty close to how it was flying Have.

Then, we were out. Back inside, the musicians kicked into a popular tune that usually made me want to smash someone’s head in, so it was just as well.

It was too late at night for the sky to be anything but perfect black, mottled with streaks of starlight here and there, and the filmy gray clouds that meant it’d have been a perfect night for flying.

I could see the professor out of the corner of my eye like a shadow nobody wanted, hiding behind one of the long red curtains. He must’ve snuck back there when he realized we were heading straight for him, and if he was gonna be no better than a coward, then my revenge was clear as day. It was easier than picking out the Ke-Han towers, and almost as satisfying.

“So,” I said. “Magritte.”

“Isobel,” the brunette corrected me.

“Right,” I said. “Isobel.”

“It’s all right,” she whispered, toying with her glove and pressing back against the railing. “They’re very similar.”

They weren’t, and I figured, if anything, that kind of thing would piss the professor off more than anything else. I took one of Isobel- Magritte’s tight brown ringlets in one hand, curling it around a finger, but she didn’t look up at me, just kept toying with her glove like it was the most fascinating thing she’d ever seen. I hated it when women did that, but liked it a little, too. They did it on purpose, but only the right kind of lady could pull it off.

I could feel the professor watching me, green eyes burning disapproval into the back of my neck, but my hide was thicker than Have’s metal scales, and, since he was a ’Versity student and all, he should have known that kind of thing wouldn’t make one speck of difference with me.

Isobel was breathing a little quickly—guess it had to do with her tight bodice and how fast I’d been spinning her out on the floor—and I dropped my hand without any warning, letting it hover above one of the fancy laces holding her bodice up that were in fashion this year, which made taking someone out on one of the balconies at th’Esar’s celebrations pretty fucking complicated. By the time you got to anything, people were already gossiping about you behind their fans.

It’d’ve been even better if I could give the professor some kind of signal—like I knew he was there, like I was doing it all for him, just ’cause I could—but I didn’t fancy getting slapped for all my troubles. This would have to do for now, and anyway, I could always let him know later I’d seen him there all along, make the look on his face even sweeter when I finally got to see it.

Isobel-Magritte had already turned her face up toward mine when I started kissing her good and deep and fierce, and I was just getting into it when the curtains shifted and the sound cut us off pretty quick. Stupid Nellie, I thought, and nearly swore, except Isobel-Magritte was scrabbling at me to get away because of her honor being compromised and all, and then the professor must have realized his game was up and decided to cut his losses before I knifed him for a spy.

Once all the smoke had cleared, and Isobel had cleared off for good, I was even angrier than before. My plan had all but backfired, except for the wary look in the professor’s eyes and the flush on his cheeks, and I wasn’t in the mood for taking any prisoners. I’d get even with him now or throw him over the fucking railing, no two ways about it.

“Couldn’t take the show?” I asked, undoing the top button on my collar.

The professor took a step away from me, disgust and something else mingling in his expression, and I guessed I could count that, at least, as a triumph that night. There was something in his eyes that I recognized—I guess it was kind of a look you got to be familiar with, growing up in Molly where you had to be stubborn and fierce just so no one took the idea that they could fleece you. It didn’t look at all strange on his face, either, and suddenly what Have had been talking about hit me but hard. The little snot was a Mollyrat, same as me, defensive as he was about doing things right and knowing all them curse words besides. I had him figured out. He looked so prim and proper, I wanted to smack the ’Versity out of him, only he was too stubborn for that, too. Just as quick as I’d figured him out, my plans for revenge changed.

“You’re disgusting,” he said. “Do you realize who she is? And she’s barely of age!”

I shrugged, dangling my arms over the edge of the railing, all the while keeping a close watch. I was ready for him. He wasn’t so smart as all that, and I was going to be the one to show him just how stupid he was.

“Figured you’d be hiding away and pissing yourself in the bathroom or something,” I said.

“I tried that,” he admitted bitterly, stiffening. “But I was . . . interrupted.”

I knew there was some kind of an insult in there somewhere, and I knew it was for me, but I was already too caught up and angry over everything that had already happened to go getting mad over something else altogether. Instead, I laughed, because the way he said it was just so offended. Interrupted: like it was another one of his fiddly rules of etiquette. Maybe he should’ve hung up a sign that read, “Please refrain from using the bathrooms in which the fucking crazies are hiding.”

I was surprised he hadn’t tried to tack on a whole extra course in fancy court learning before we’d all gone rushing out the door, but then I remembered what I’d figured out—that he was an urchin from the Mollyedge, probably no better than a Mollyrat and no better than me, and didn’t know any better than us even if he’d wanted to.

All the balconies overlooked th’Esar’s gardens, probably because it got the ladies all wet to stand outside in the moonlight with the smell of climbing jasmine in the air. Bastion, it’d almost worked for me until the professor interrupted things with that way he had of twisting everything around no matter where he was or what he was doing.

I leaned closer to him, mainly because I liked the twitchy look he got at the corner of his eye that meant he was trying to watch me and trying not to look like he was watching me all at the same time. It only made him look jittery as a rabbit, or worse, like he couldn’t make up his fucking mind. I just stretched my arms, letting him know I was comfortable as anything and perfectly happy to stay there all night until he had some kind of a fit right then and there and in front of me, even though deep down, I was bristling with fire.

Predictably, it was him who cracked first.

“I’d have thought,” he said, voice clipped and cool, like he obviously thought he could fool me into thinking he was the same, “that my presence here wouldn’t have stopped you from pursuing your acquaintance . Magritte, I believe it was? Or was that Isobel?”

“Magritte or Isobel,” I said, “I didn’t think you pillow-biters noticed that sort of thing.”

He looked at me then, eyes green even in the dark and spitting-mad, like he wanted to hit me but was too smart to go through with it. Whatever I’d got into my head just now concerning the professor hit me real sweet and real deep, the way a particular drop did a number on my belly when I was riding Havemercy, but I wasn’t averse to hitting him back—and harder.

Being a Mollyrat, he was too smart to hit someone bigger than he was, and better at fighting to boot. Dirty fucking sneak—just like the rest of them.

“Wrong, huh?” I guessed. “You must have had your eye on one of them, then.” I wasn’t getting right in his face, just reminding him that I could. “Which was it then? The blonde? ’Cause she screams like you wouldn’t believe, only it’s the dark one’s got this trick she does with her tongue, like—”

“Don’t,” he said, eyes bright, jaw as hard as he could make it. “Spare me the sordid details. No one cares as much as you think.”

“As much as I think? Here’s what I think.” I changed tack swift as if he’d flicked a switch, pushing forward like you had to in a raid ’cause once you’d touched off from the ground there wasn’t no going back. “I think you don’t have any idea who I’m talking about, that I could name them all and you still wouldn’t know, because you weren’t looking at a one of them no matter how much tit they were showing.”

“I’d be surprised if you could name one of them, either,” he said, “considering your embarrassing display earlier.”

“She didn’t seem to mind,” I pointed out. The whole thing reminded me a little of that first night when I’d put him to the wall. The professor got like a wildcat when he was cornered, and it wasn’t like I’d forgot the fact but more like I had to remember it a bit every time it happened. “Why, do you?”

“Actually,” the professor faltered, “I think that this whole little performance was for my benefit, that you didn’t care one way or another about being with that girl. You only cared about my seeing it and what my reaction would be.”

Something sparked in his eyes like metal scraping metal.

“Do you?” I asked, soft and dangerous.

I leaned in close and his face changed, disgust and confusion and fear in his eyes. His lips parted halfway like he was going to protest or scream or something, and I felt a hot spike of victory hit me low in the belly.

It was better than a dive.

Swift as changing direction to find the right current, I knew exactly how I was going to play this one out. He was no different from anybody else I knew, and, given enough time, everyone saw reason.

“What kind of a brainless fucking idiot would say something like that?” I snapped. “You think you’re so smart, better than every man-fucking-jack of us, but I can see right through you. A Mollyrat’s always a Mollyrat, no matter how far he runs.”

His eyes flew open again, as though whatever he’d been expecting, it definitely hadn’t been that. I smiled, ’cause I had him now exactly where I wanted him, and for all his cleverness I didn’t think he’d figured it out yet.

“Yeah,” I said, like I’d been planning on it all along. Let him wonder how long I’d known his little secret for, ’cause the look on his face told me I was right, no matter what he said after. “That’s right. You’re that fucking easy for me to read. Don’t think all of them in there wouldn’t know it if I let it slip, that it would be so hard to fucking believe with the way you walk, all nervous and small. You stink of it.”

“I don’t care if they know,” he began.

I grinned, too certain now to stop. “Liar,” I said, rolling the word fat and sweet off my tongue.

It caught him by surprise, and for a moment his mouth was as weak and soft as a woman’s. Then, he must have remembered who I was—where he was—and his jaw hardened, chin tilting up in useless, stupid defiance.

“So what if I am,” he snapped right back, that suicide streak in him showing itself, and not for the first time. It was a miracle he survived Molly, acting so proud as all that. “You’re a ’rat yourself.”

“And I’m an airman,” I said, feeling dangerous. “What medals do you have? What lives have you saved? Speaking fifteen useless languages and being able to argue your way out of a paper bag—real fucking special.”

His cheeks were bright red now and his eyes sparking bright, like I’d lit up a fire inside him. “Well, we can’t all be upstanding citizens and heroes like you. Some of us weren’t so lucky.”

“Lucky?” I laughed at that, sharp and barking, and he drew back again; maybe he thought I was going to hit him, or maybe the sound was just so fucking awful he thought I already had. Didn’t matter to me either way, so long as he was knocked down a peg or fifteen by someone who could make sure he stayed down. No one else had volunteered for the job, and I was only too glad to take it on.

“You get to do whatever you want,” the professor returned, shaking, but holding his ground. “You think you’re above the common laws of courtesy—decency—basic humanity. You take what you want and don’t think about anyone else—and it isn’t that you’re stupid, either. You’re like every other Mollyrat who never bothered to learn beyond the gutters. You think that because your mother raised you in the streets, you can live by their rules—”

That was when I grabbed him by the collar and threw him up against the railing. His lower back hit against it and his breath whistled sharp between his teeth, and then we stared at each other for a long time, that same metallic scraping and flashing passed between us.

“We’re not so different as you think,” he said finally, just like Have. It was like he had some kind of death wish.

“If you believe that,” I said, showing all my teeth, “then you’re stupider than you look. If you thought I was watching you and putting on a show for you—maybe you were right. But you’d better keep just as close an eye on me,” I added, tightening my grip at his throat, “if you know what’s good for you.”

“You’re no more than a common bully,” he whispered, voice trembling. I’d shaken him for good now, and it was deeper than just the physical side, my knuckles bruising his throat and his back aching for all his so-called defiance.

“I don’t care what I am, so long as you’re afraid of me,” I said, and dropped him neat as that.

He really was that easy, that touchy about where he came from. Seeing as how he was no more than a stuck-up fucking ’Versity boy, I should’ve picked up on it sooner; maybe I could’ve spared us all the trouble of having him teach us how to channel our emotions good and proper.

The one thing I could say for him was how long he lasted—but then again, being from Molly, it wasn’t any wonder he was a tenacious little bastard. People from Molly tended to hold on good and long and hard to whatever it was they had, seeing as how quick it tended to get snatched away from them once they were down past the Mollyedge, where everything was free game to them as could take it fast enough.

I took a handful of his hair right at the back of his neck and tugged his head back. Tilted up toward mine, his face was hard, like maybe I’d pushed him too far, but I could see something still struggling in his mouth, bitter and desperate like surrender.

“Yeah,” I said finally, when I could be sure he was listening. “I thought so.”

Then I turned on my heel and left him there without any warning, sagged against the balcony and limp as a forgotten pair of gloves. I needed some time to think about what had just happened, and what in bastion’s name I was going to even do about it.