CHAPTER TEN
HAL
Things were different in Royston’s home from the way they were at the palace—for which I thought I might be eternally grateful. When I was in his collection of magician’s rooms, overlooking the entire city and swaying with the tower on its precarious foundations, I felt as at home as I ever had in Nevers, if not more so. From time to time I was gripped by sudden fear that the city would swallow us up, tower and all, but this was only my lack of experience, and I felt certain I’d soon enough grow past it. Royston had apologized for the unpleasantness at the ball—and indeed, he seemed rather less distracted—and the “day of recovery,” as he called it, was a quiet one. We spent it alone, in private. I enjoyed it very much.
There were times when I still felt raw and thwarted over the rules that Royston had set into place for us, his infuriating stubbornness in doing what he thought was fitting, but he still allowed me to take his hand, and to rub at his temples whenever he got one of his now-frequent headaches. It wasn’t so bad as all that. I knew I could be patient enough to prove to him what I needed to prove—and then the waiting would not seem so interminable as all that.
“I thought perhaps,” Royston said that evening, “that we might see about enrolling you in a few classes at the ’Versity.”
He was reading some letter that had come for him earlier, the importance of which he’d protested was completely negligible, but I saw the way he read it and couldn’t help my curiosity.
As far as distractions went, however, Royston was quite the master.
“But I’ve no primary education at all,” I protested, almost forgetting the letter completely. Royston seemed to have done the same; it lay folded by his cup of after-dinner coffee as if it were no more than a napkin.
“Nonsense,” Royston said. “You’re quite intelligent. I wouldn’t have brought you here if I meant to keep you locked away inside this tower like some sort of maiden of old.”
“Well,” I said carefully. “But it seems—The expense—”
“No matter,” Royston said. “I’m a wealthy man, unless I failed to impress that upon you earlier with my displays of foolish extravagance. And their purpose was to impress you, by the by. I thought I’d succeeded with the carriage.”
“Four white horses,” I said, toying unhappily with my spoon. “Yes, I was aware—”
“But something disturbs you.” Royston’s tone immediately grew serious, and I saw the creases along his brow deepen. “What is it?”
I struggled to find the proper words to express my concerns without seeming ungrateful. “I would like to attend the ’Versity,” I said. “Very much, in fact. I never thought it would even be a possibility. But the cost is something. I wouldn’t wish to take your money, any more than I already have—which has been too much, despite what you may think. I would feel . . . uncomfortable, knowing that you’d spent so much on me, without my having any way to repay you—”
“Your education would be an investment,” Royston began reasonably. “It would be payment in itself to see your mind put to the tasks for which it was meant.”
“If I attend the ’Versity,” I said firmly, and with no room for argument, “then I will do so on my own chevronet.”
Royston was silent for a moment. I saw him soften, and at last he said, “We use tournois primarily. In the city.”
I flushed to the tips of my ears. I’d known that, of course, but old country habits died hard. “I thought perhaps I might offer myself as a tutor,” I said. I’d been thinking it over since I scrambled into the carriage with him, and I thought it the most viable of my options. “Not children so old as Alexander or even William. Surely there are preparatory schools? Before the primary education? I might even act as an assistant. It wouldn’t entirely pay handsomely, but at least I wouldn’t be a burden.”
“Whatever you do or do not choose to do,” Royston told me sharply, “do not ever call yourself a burden, Hal.”
I was blushing again. I hadn’t meant to imply that, either. “No,” I promised. “I won’t. I’m very sorry. But I would feel it, Royston, if I simply did nothing.”
Royston was silent again, mulling this over, stirring the coffee in his cup. I nearly dropped my spoon at one point, and so gave up my fidgeting. It was a disagreement between us—as close to any sort of argument as we’d ever come—and I felt miserable for it. But above all I couldn’t allow him to spend money so heedlessly on me when I had nothing to offer him in return except myself if I ever managed to overcome his stubbornness, and I didn’t wish for that to feel like any sort of common exchange between us.
“No,” Royston said at length. “You are right. Of course you are. I’ve been distracted; I haven’t been thinking clearly.”
I stood then, and went over to sit on the floor at his side as I’d done countless times before when he was spinning his stories. “You haven’t,” I said. “Tell me what’s been troubling you.”
“In truth, I should not,” Royston said. He paused, though, and I could see him waver on the edge of sharing it with me.
I pressed on, however recklessly. “I know the chances of my being able to help you with it are very slim,” I said, “for I know little about the intrigues of the city. But perhaps I might be able to help even by listening. I’d be glad to,” I added, letting my palm rest against his knee for a moment before I thought the better of it and let it fall. He dropped his hand to my hair and sighed.
“I don’t believe the war is about to end,” he replied carefully. “In fact, I think that we are all—very efficiently, mind you that—being lied to, but for what purpose I cannot divine. And the thought that something important is being kept from even those with reason to know it . . . I admit that it’s driving me to distraction just thinking about it.”
I let this information sink in. Despite Royston’s assurances to the contrary, I couldn’t help but feel my own ignorance when it came to discussing matters of the city, or its oddly structured politics—much like a tower in the Crescents, as far as I could see, in that there was no way of telling how it stayed up from the outside. “You don’t have any idea as to what it might be about?” I said at last. Royston was the cleverest person I knew, and I found I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the concept that there was anything he didn’t understand.
He hesitated, then I felt his fingers begin to stroke my hair a little, as though he were in deep thought. I tried not to let the motion distract me too much, though I liked the small reassurance that these moments gave me. Some days, it was very hard to remember what Royston had told me in the carriage, and even harder when he hadn’t told me outright. When he touched my hair, or placed a hand against my back to guide me up the stairs, it became easier to believe that I hadn’t imagined all sorts of implications which hadn’t really been there. Royston did care for me.
“I don’t have any idea,” he said at last, sounding as frustrated as I’d ever heard him. “There have only been . . . anomalies, of a sort.”
“Oh yes?” I asked, and looked at him encouragingly. For all his brilliance, Royston was often a man who needed to be led like a horse by a carrot if you wanted him to finish his thoughts out loud rather than retreat back into his own mind.
He cast a glance at me and smiled just slightly in the very left corner of his mouth, as though he knew exactly what I was doing. “Only the paranoia of the rich and powerful, I’m afraid,” he said, and I knew he was joking, could see it dancing in the depths of his eyes, warm and brown. “Spend enough time at the palace and everything starts to seem like a conspiracy.”
If he really thought that, then there would have been no reason at all for him to behave the way he was, with considerably more distraction than had ever occupied him in the country, no matter his disinterest in sheep and trees alike.
As seemed to be my curse, I couldn’t help but wear my thoughts plain as the nose on my face.
“I’m sorry, Hal,” he said, fingers still making restless, nesting motions at the back of my head. “If you are keen on the specifics, it is only that there were fewer faces at the ball than I’d expected to recognize.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to divine his meaning as he obviously expected me to. “Do you think they’re at war, then? Off with the fighting?”
He closed his eyes to think it over, then sighed. “Hal,” he said, “forgive me for burdening you with this; it is most unfair of me. But I must confess that the state of the war itself is what troubles me.”
I felt a sudden plummeting in my chest. “Why?” I asked, and put an entreating hand once more on his knee. “Have they told you—Do you have to go away already? Was that what was written in the letter?”
“What?” His eyes went to the object in question though he didn’t turn his face from mine. “No! Oh, certainly not, Hal. Of course I would have mentioned anything such as that much earlier. I only wonder how close to the end we can truly be if the Esar is so keen on calling back so many of my fellows in relative states of disgrace with the crown. That is what I was discussing with my fellows when I so rudely excused myself from your company in the hall.”
“With the blonde woman?” I realized my hand was still on his knee, and felt a flush rising in my cheeks when I remembered how jealous I’d been.
“Yes,” he said. “And what I can’t make out for the life of me is why the Esar would bother if we were just meant to attend fancy parties. Not that I’m not a devotee of fancy parties, by all means; they are infinitely preferable to leaving for war, yet not entirely as pressing a matter, if you catch my meaning.”
Still bearing the emotional bruises I’d obtained from my first fancy party, I declined to offer my opinion on the subject.
“Most people do seem to think the war’s quite over,” I said, after a moment. It was the first time I’d said aloud what Royston must also have noticed. I didn’t have any particular reason for keeping it to myself, only the unfounded fear that exposing it to the light and air would send it crumbling away as surely as ash.
As far as I could tell, it was the talk all over town: in colorful Bottle Alley, where Royston had taken me so that he could buy “something to reassure him that all of Thremedon hadn’t gone mad for horse’s piss in his absence,” then all along the wide rows of the Shoals, where we’d gone to buy fish for dinner. Little old women with black teeth had even proclaimed it cheerfully, announcing the catch of the day as a special in celebration of Volstov’s imminent victory.
So it was silly of me, perhaps, to have held my tongue on the subject as long as I had, as though it were a wish I’d made on a shooting star or something equally childish.
When I saw Royston’s face, however, fondness mixed with a kind of deep sadness, I knew why I’d done it; I hadn’t wanted to see that look.
“I know it’s silly of me to say,” I said, quickly, before he could speak again. “Why else would they have called you back if they didn’t need you? Of course the war can’t be over. I only thought that perhaps, with what everyone’s been saying, there might be something else. Something you’re missing?”
“Hal,” he said, frowning as though he were unhappy with something, though I knew it wasn’t me. “I can’t say many things for certain at the moment, but one thing I feel as though I must prepare you for is that I will still very likely be called away.”
I swallowed around something that rose in my throat. “I know that,” I told him.
In truth I felt a little at odds with myself, not wanting to require the special treatment Royston often afforded me, and yet still craving the kind of reassurance—unreasonable to ask for, unreasonable to promise—that everything was going to be all right.
I was going to say something more when there was a knock at the downstairs door.
When first I’d come to live in Royston’s rooms at the tower, the layout had confused me terribly. There seemed to be staircases with no visible destination, doors without any handles that couldn’t possibly lead into new rooms. There was even a bright green trapdoor set into the ceiling, but when I’d asked after it he only mentioned something about the best houses having alternative points of exit and left the matter at that.
My consternation—weighted with the fact that this was in every way still Royston’s house—kept me seated and waiting while he stood to answer the knock. I did clamber into his chair, though, watching the firm lines of his back fondly, as I tended to whenever I thought I could steal a look.
“There are people I might speak to,” he said in passing. “If you are anxious to find a place as a tutor.”
“Yes.” I nodded. “I would be very grateful.”
He smiled over his shoulder at me—seemingly in no hurry to answer the door—and then all at once a change came over his face, sudden and still as though he’d missed a step in the staircase. I watched his hand around the banister go white at the knuckles, as though he was forced suddenly to hold on very tightly, and I was out of the chair before I could help myself.
“Are you all right?” I was so close that I could hear his breathing, even and deep, the way it only ever was in sleep, or when he was steadying himself before trying to control some more basic human impulse.
It was a long time before he answered, so long that I’d begun to think he hadn’t heard me at all. I asked again, near to feeling ill. “Royston? What is it?”
His head snapped up all at once, clearly startled, and he shook it quickly as if to clear it. “I’m sorry,” he said, and there was a rough note in his voice that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “It’s nothing.”
I thought it was self-evident that it had indeed been something, and I took his hand before I could think better of it. “I’ll see who was at the door,” I offered, and once I was sure Royston could stand on his own I hurried down the steps.
Whoever had knocked was at the door no longer, but when I closed it again I felt something slippery under my foot, and moved aside to examine it. At the bottom of the landing someone had pushed a square white envelope under the door. It felt expensive, heavy, when I picked it up, with sharp corners and stiff stationery. The handwriting on the front was impeccable and addressed itself to the Margrave Royston.
When I carried the envelope back up the stairs, Royston was sitting at the top. He still didn’t look entirely right, and I had the useless, fluttering urge to offer him a cup of tea even though he preferred dark coffee or coax him into the comfortable chair by the fire.
What I did was neither of these things, but instead gave over the letter that had been delivered, then sat too close beside him on the top step.
He looked at me sidelong and I realized what it looked like: that I was trying to read his mail. Then he smiled, and it was something like watching the shadow over his face pass away with the advent of day.
“Thank you,” he said, and opened his letter with ruthless precision.
The letter must have been short, as he glanced at it only briefly before crumpling it in his hand. All I could think, against the sudden hammering of my heart, was that it was not paper made for crumpling. It was of very fine quality, much too thick to be of no importance.
We sat in uncomfortable silence there on the stairs, Royston not willing to tell me whatever had been in the letter, and me too cowardly to ask outright, and both of us knowing it was inevitable. In the dull, dark stretch at the back of my mind that perhaps had known what was coming all along, I thought that surely the Esar would be the only man to use such fine stationery. After that realization, it was only a small jump to come to a reasonable conclusion about what exactly had been written there.
There was, after all, only one reason I could think of for the Esar to contact Royston.
As the minutes ticked by, measured by the large grandfather clock in the drawing room, I wrapped a hand around Royston’s arm below the elbow. I was still nervous about touching him first, since there was always the chance that he would remember his rules and become stern with me. It had never happened yet, but my anxiety remained all the same.
“Hal,” he began, careful and slow, as though I were a nervous horse that needed gentling to avoid being spooked.
“When?” I interrupted, startled by the hardness in my voice.
It must have startled Royston, too, because he refrained from answering, only put his arms close around me and held me tight the way he’d only ever had occasion to do a handful of times before.
I put my head against his shoulder and hated the war.
ROOK
I half expected the professor to have stormed his way back to the ’Versity by the time the ball ended, but to my surprise, when I got back to the Airman, I found him right where he’d always been: sleeping or not sleeping or whatever it was he did on his pathetic little couch.
Jeannot’d told me right before the carriage ride back that the little snot’d met with th’Esar private-like sometime during the night—which Jeannot knew because he was friends with all the oldest servants in the palace. You can’t buy the respect old blood can get you some places. From the reports Jeannot and Ghislain had got out of ’em, it was pretty clear that th’Esar wasn’t just trying to keep us acting proper, but was also using the professor to get all the information on us he could without us knowing about it. It was pretty fucking clever of both of them, and I only saw it as a shame we hadn’t acted up enough to get the professor sacked, though maybe I’d wasted too much of my time with that stunt on the balcony and I doubted he’d be telling anyone about that anytime soon, even threatened by th’Esar, seeing as how I had him pinned. The last thing a snot like him wanted was everyone to know he didn’t have a pedigree—and besides which, if Isobel-Magritte’s father was to find out I’d cornered her so nice and easy on the balcony at th’Esar’s own ball, there was no accounting for the shit the professor’d be armpit deep in.
Truth was that, after learning we had a real son-of-a spy in our midst, I hadn’t had much mood for sport. I was too angry, and while there are some girls who like that kind of thing just fine, the overwhelming majority tend to call you a pig or worse, and I already had one professor to deal with. I wasn’t completely fucking crazy. There are some things you just don’t bring down upon yourself twice, and the professor was one of them.
Not because he was anything in particular, mind. Just because he was so fucking annoying.
The carriage ride back everyone was in a mood ’cause we were all wondering what that meeting meant for us, and whether we were going to have to hang the professor out the window the same way we did to new recruits who couldn’t keep their stupid mouths shut.
Finally, I said, “I’ll take care of it. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Oh?” Jeannot lifted a brow, sliding back in his seat. “And how are you planning on doing that?”
“I’m thinking,” I snapped. “Just keep quiet about it.”
It was just me, Jeannot, and Ghislain in the carriage. Jeannot and Ghislain could be out of their minds sometimes and they’d pulled some crazy stunts, but the one good thing about them was that you could always trust them to keep their mouths locked up tighter’n th’Esarina’s cunt when it suited their best interests.
We were safe with the information being ours. For now, anyway.
But we had to do something, on top of that.
After a while I realized Ghislain was looking at me, which meant he had something to say about it and was waiting to be asked with proper grammar and everything to grace us with his brilliance. Ghislain was more or less that smug, but he was big enough no one could complain about it, and I didn’t have the time or patience to be all coy like some Margrave’s daughter.
“Spit it out,” I said, “or quit looking at me like that.”
Ghislain took his time, cracking the knuckles of his left hand and inspecting his nails. “It’s you,” he said at length, all cryptic and as smug as ever, like he wasn’t spouting total horseshit. “You’re the one who has to do it.”
“Kill him?” I asked. I was only half-joking.
Jeannot snorted and rolled his eyes. “Don’t you know anything?” he asked, like he didn’t know how dangerous it was to say something that stupid to me. “Why do you think he sticks around?”
“Because he’s got shit for brains,” I said, but by now I was more than half-interested in what the boys were saying.
“Because he’s as stubborn as you are,” Jeannot said, and Ghislain nodded in agreement.
“And because he’s got shit for brains,” I added.
“Look,” Jeannot said, leaning across the space between us as the carriage jostled us down the road. “If he was given reason to believe he’s got through to you—if he was to think you’d had a change of heart, or perhaps had seen the error of your ways—”
“You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” Ghislain said, like some sort of Brother of Regina preaching to his followers. I wanted to punch him in his square jaw, but even I wasn’t so stupid. Only thing that would’ve given me was five broken fingers.
“So you’re saying I’ve gotta pretend like all this talk of—seeing the other side of things and opening myself up to my feelings has made a difference in my poor, deluded life,” I concluded for them. “And this way, we can control whatever information he thinks he’s found to feed th’Esar.” An idea was sort of half-forming, and I liked the way it looked from where I sat. I was sick and tired of having some green-as-grass professor, barely out of the ’Versity, lording himself over me. I wasn’t letting him spy on us, either, and the thought of seeing him trip all over himself just thinking I’d seen the light suited me just fine.
“You are the toughest pupil,” Jeannot finished, leaning back again, for all the world as if he wasn’t going back to a building infiltrated by an outsider, one of th’Esar’s lackeys, a whoreson spy.
I wasn’t just going to sit back and eat whatever th’Esar fed us. We were winning his war for him. I could take the professor. I’d taken worse.
“Seems like a plan,” I said.
Then we were quiet, and I had the rest of the ride to think about how I was going to handle this.
The way I figured it—and it was sort of like a plan of attack, which occasionally I had the inspiration for—I’d have to keep him guessing, keep him on his toes. Had he changed me or hadn’t he? He didn’t have to know. If I seemed to be reformed too sudden-like, all the red flags in his head would start waving. I would still keep him scared as a rabbit who’s just seen a fox, but I would also start to give some, to play to his sense of duty, his twisted-up morals he’d read out of a book somewhere and fancied himself the keeper of. I’d be some kind of an idiot not to use what Jeannot and Ghislain saw to our advantage, and I wasn’t any kind of an idiot—no matter how mad I was I hadn’t seen it in the first place for myself.
So anyway, when we got back to the compound and saw the professor sleeping, or pretending to sleep, Ghislain gave me one of his unreadable looks, like he was some god on high and whatever it was he was thinking couldn’t be figured out by mere mortal men. Then he looked over at the professor and a kind of understanding passed between us, like how he knew what I had in mind and if it kept the professor’s mouth shut, then he wasn’t going to say a single thing against it.
Good man, Ghislain. Bat-shit bell-cracked, I sometimes thought, or just a hundred times smarter than any of us. But whatever way you cut it, he was still on my side—in a manner of speaking—and that was all that counted.
I closed the door behind me and came up on the professor real slow. This was my world now, not the professor’s, and I could do whatever I wanted.
That was about the time I figured out he wasn’t asleep: when his back stiffened as I came close, and I could all but see his face, eyes wide open and ready for the attack.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said.
That sure as bastion wasn’t what the professor was expecting me to say, and I had to clamp down hard as the vise of a dragon’s mouth not to grin. I had the professor right in the palm of my hand, like Havemercy’s reins.
The professor didn’t say anything—not that I figured he would—but I sat down on the edge of the couch right up close to him, slipping off my gloves and easing out of my boots and pretending like I was struggling with what I had to say, when in reality the only thing I was struggling with was not laughing then and there. It was almost the same as acting at one of th’Esar’s balls, pretending like I was listening to what my dancing partner was saying while she let me twirl her a little too close in the midst of the crowd, and maybe let me keep one of her handkerchiefs, a prize of a different kind of war.
The professor must’ve been too on edge to speak or move, and when I cleared my throat he might’ve jumped straight up into the air if he hadn’t been lying down. “Like I said, I’ve been thinking,” I repeated. “About what you said at the ball.”
“Oh,” the professor said. “What I said. At the ball. I said a lot of things. Most men do when they’re feeling, feeling cornered, attacked. We say a lot of things we don’t mean—”
“Don’t fuck around,” I said. “You said it, you meant it. I don’t want to play any games. It’s too fucking late for that.”
“Oh,” the professor said again. “I see. Yes. Too late, indeed.”
“It’s just, the way I see it,” I said, swallowing back another laugh, “some of us aren’t lucky enough to get to the ’Versity and make fine, respectable civs out of themselves. What I’ve got is flying. Maybe you can’t teach me anything. Maybe you’re too fucking late.”
The professor turned real quick, like he just couldn’t stop himself, like he just couldn’t help it, and I knew I’d hit him deep and hard and in the place that wondered—same as I did, but only when I wasn’t in my right mind—just how different we were. I knew the truth, because I was the one calling all the shots, and if I fed him the right combination of lines, gave him what he wanted, his standards would keep him here, trying to help me. As if I needed to be fucking helped. He was the one who needed help, and maybe after all this was over he could take a good, long look at himself and change his mind on a few things.
None of that mattered now, though. What mattered now were his big green eyes staring up at me like I’d just admitted my mother didn’t love me enough when I was little, or my drunken Molly father beat me. Or no matter what, deep down, I was scared and alone and just lashing out so no one would see it. I wasn’t any of those things, didn’t have any memory of my parents and didn’t much care, but the one thing that was important here was to keep the professor guessing.
“What are you saying?” he asked, eyes bright in the darkness.
I chewed my lower lip for a little while. I used to be the best grifter on all of Hapenny, before I met Have and put an end to that business, but there are some things you never forget how to do, and conning a man is one of those things.
“Sometimes,” I said, “I do think about it. What I might’ve been.”
“Oh,” the professor said.
He wasn’t so brilliant, just saying “oh” all the time and nodding, staring at me like that could fix anything.
I let the silence hang all heavy and important between us for a good, long while, then, without any warning, I stood up, leaving my boots behind.
“Doesn’t fucking matter now,” I said, and left him where he was. I could feel him watching me all the way out.
And that was how it started.
I mean, if you want to get precise, you could really say it started on the balcony; but that was just the beginning, a kind of prelude to the main event. This was when I knew the way to keep the professor guessing and keep his loyalties all mixed up like signals in the dark. It would be by dangling what he wanted so bad in front of his nose, and that was exactly what I did. Most would say that being an airman must’ve dulled any kindness I ever had in me, but the truth was that by the time I came to sign up for the corps I didn’t have any of that kindness left, not even so much as a scrap, and it wasn’t as if that sort of horseshit mattered to me, anyway.
I hit him with moments of my “vulnerability” like we hit the Ke-Han with the air raids, though it was more unpredictable than that; the Ke-Han pretty much knew to look to the skies soon as the clouds covered the moon. But with the professor, I had to be a whole lot less easy to anticipate and prepare for.
What really throws people off is if you don’t give them any pattern to plan around. People are real routine-based creatures; they like it best when their days have some semblance of familiarity. So when you throw them off the scent like that, mixing it up every time, you get them below the belt no matter what they think they’re expecting.
First and foremost, there were a couple of rules, and I made sure he knew them. One: I was gonna come to him, if I came to him at all. He couldn’t seek me out or he’d ruin it, get my defenses up and my blood hot, and there’d be no talking to me at all, just silence or the sound of me sharpening my knives. I don’t think the professor much liked those knives, since they were a reminder of where we both came from, and soon enough the professor picked up on the fact that if he was going to “get” to me, he’d have to be cagey. That made it pretty hard to go anywhere or meet any of th’Esar’s men in case he had something to report, so I had to be sure the professor didn’t want to miss a fucking minute of time just being nearby—just in case I did have something to say to him, some kind of admission to make, some kind of breakthrough thanks to his guidance.
The professor could sense I was on the verge of something. Then again, the professor was real smart.
Two: There was no talking about it. When everyone else was around and the sun was up and we were having a grand old time of it, he had to learn how to keep his eyes to the floor, as that was the only way he wouldn’t look straight at me like he was starving for knowledge, for any little bit of information that could explain who I was, and give the game away. This was private business. I was a private man. I wanted him to think I didn’t want the other boys to know I was questioning who I was.
Three: We weren’t friends. We weren’t going to be friends. We didn’t talk about how our days were and we certainly didn’t say good morning or good night to each other. It didn’t change anything, just his allegiance to me.
All I was doing was getting his hopes up, but hopes are a dangerous thing in a man, and the professor was too proud for his own good. He wanted to see he’d made a difference, and I was feeding him exactly what he wanted to hear—if only sometimes.
A few days after I’d started, and was just beginning to “open up,” I let him think he’d almost lost me again—called him a pillow-biter and a Nellie and worse than the Mary Margrave and everything, until I could see the despair in his eyes like a gray shadow, like ash.
“You’re insane,” he said.
“Yeah?” I said. “But you keep trying to change me, so what does that fucking say about you?”
Mostly this was my neat and simple way of keeping an eye on him, even when I wasn’t trapping him in a box of his own making, giving him the idea that maybe this time I’d actually give him a little piece of me that would solve the puzzle and let him in, then snatching it back. I could feel him watching me all the time, careful and measured like he was trying to size me up and measure my actions against what I should be telling him, but he didn’t want me to catch him at it. One day he was doing it in front of a couple of the boys, Ivory and Magoughin and Merritt and Luvander, and I lost it with him afterward, just lost it.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing,” I snarled, close to his ear, my breath gusting hot back up against my own face. “I don’t want you fucking looking at me.”
He didn’t stop, but at least he was smart enough to be more careful about it.
So I guess that took care of the professor for the time being. I saw Balfour worrying after him a couple of times when he caught the professor sneaking out of my room late one night—since after all, that was the kind of thing I liked to do, just to keep him on edge all the time, keep him tired and careless, not paying attention to anything else but converting me or whatever it was he thought he was going to do. I guess it upset Balfour something special, seeing as how they were two bleeding hearts and he thought he was losing the one person who actually cared what he had to say. But for all his worrying, Balfour didn’t know what I knew, that the professor might’ve been a rat.
I wasn’t too concerned about it.
Other than that, there was the war to think about. Even though we’d been led to believe it would be over in a week, things played out just like I’d figured they might, and pretty much right after the ball, all the magicians that th’Esar’d called back from disreputable exile were deployed quick as that, and the air-raid siren was still ringing out every night so not a man jack of us was getting enough sleep. Most of the time we caught winks during the day, long catnaps I liked to think of them, while at night we kept the Ke-Han busy even as the magicians made their way to the Cobalts, then through ’em, then right up to the front.
Something didn’t smell right about it; it smelled like lying. A couple of the boys were thinking the same thing, but our job was to go where we were told when we’d signed our names for the week earlier, so whether we thought something of it or not it didn’t seem to make much difference. I signed up for a couple of extra shifts, and it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen, coming back one night to find the professor waiting up for me, holding his own elbows, his knuckles real white.
I wiped some of the soot off my forehead and cocked my head to the side, giving him a look like he was the crazy one, not me.
“Do you know,” he said faintly, “you can sometimes hear the sound of the explosions, even here? The ground shakes.”
It didn’t. Or, at least, it never had before, since Thremedon was nestled real cozy against the hillside and the water, miles away from the Cobalts. Most of the fighting since the creation of the dragons took place on the Ke-Han’s side of the mountains.
“You’re making things up,” I said. “It’s pretty fucking far away.”
He didn’t say anything, just sort of rocking in his place for a moment or two, then he surged off the couch all at once, like the tide.
“You’re bleeding,” he said.
Have’d got me a swish-flick with her wing. Nothing crazy like that’d ever happened before—we knew where the other one was down to the barest hairbreadth of a centimeter—and it’d spooked us both pretty bad. It pissed me off that the professor’d zeroed right in on it, like he knew, or was just a damn good guesser.
Then, because he was out of his right mind and straight into his wrong one, he started dabbing at the cut on my temple with the edge of his sleeve.
I was tired and I was still a little biting mad, but for some reason instead of breaking his jaw I let him do it. It was stupid of him to get so close to me after a fight and I could see he knew it, breathing unsteadily, waiting for me to lash out at him or bite him or something.
I figured not doing any of those things would freak him more than actually doing what he expected me to. When he led me over to his couch and went to get me a glass of water I stayed put like a little kid. Fuck, I even drank some of it.
“Was it . . . very rough tonight?” he asked, like he thought I was in the mood for discussing it with him.
“Not particularly,” I said, rolling out the tension in my shoulders. I needed a shower pretty bad, but now all of a sudden here we were, sitting and talking like it was afternoon tea. “Ivory almost took it chin-fucking-on, but Have and I got him out. What the fuck do you care about it?”
“You can almost hear the explosions from here,” he repeated, like it meant something I just wasn’t picking up on. He colored, just a little, high on his cheeks. For a moment he even looked kind of familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “The couch is going to smell like grease,” he said. “There will be no getting it out, no matter how many times it’s cleaned.”
“You’re the one who wanted me to sit down so bad,” I pointed out. “I gotta clean up.”
“If there’s anything I could—” he began, then cut off short, like he thought now was the time to start being coy with me. That was what came of letting him come close even for a second, really. I had him in a bad place, cornered nice and good. “If you want to talk,” he finished finally, and winced, because even he must’ve known how pathetic it sounded.
“Think I’ve been handling this for a long time on my own, professor,” I said. “Don’t fucking worry about it.”
“I do,” the professor replied, almost fiercely.
It was a pretty stupid thing to say, and I wasn’t predisposed toward excusing him for any slip-ups anyway, but he had a strange kind of courage, and it made me hesitate, which gave him some kind of idea, I’m sure, about how close we’d grown.
Once that happened, the professor stopped trying to pretend he wasn’t over-the-moon distracted after something or other. He didn’t break the rules, though, no matter how many times the boys caught him at his notes, muttering to himself or looking after me the morning after a raid, asking me if I wanted breakfast, that sort of thing. The only thing that gave me some kind of amusement was Balfour, whose look of bitter disappointment that the professor had no time for him at all kept me laughing for hours after I saw it.
Then things with Have started to get messy, and I wasn’t laughing at anything for a good long while.
It wasn’t anything big at first, just the little things, like the first time when her wing had grazed my head. Only it didn’t stop there, like it should’ve. Have and I were the best because we flew like one being, metal and magic, flesh and blood, without a heart between us. Some days, when it all went right, I could barely tell who it was that did the flying, her or me. It wasn’t that the line was blurred; there was no fucking line at all. But that was before.
Like I said, it wasn’t anything big. Leastways it wasn’t so big that I could mention it to any of the others. I’d tried sneaking it into a question about something else to Ace, Thoushalt being the closest thing to Have in all the world, but he’d only given me a strange look with those sleepy eyes of his, like he didn’t have a clue what I was on about and could he shower now?
So it was only me, then, or whatever was off wasn’t so much that the others’d noticed yet. I wasn’t any kind of egomaniac, despite what certain people and professors chose to believe. And even if I was the best, I knew that if there was something wrong—really wrong—with our girls, then there wouldn’t have been a man of us not up in arms about it. I might’ve told myself it was all in my imagination even, only it wasn’t, ’cause Have was real enough and things on her weren’t working like they used to. We were flying like separate creatures, Havemercy and me, with no regard for where anyone put their hand or their tail. The scrape with her wing was the first, but it sure as shit wasn’t the last, and when I gave her trouble for it, she seemed real surprised and ’bout as concerned as something that can’t feel concern could be. She wasn’t even talking like she had before, only the muck-headed Handlers didn’t notice it, said I was making shit up or gone mad with signing up for too many raids.
One of them even tried to say it was my fault for signing up for so many raids, and that Have was probably just out of sorts on account of being overworked.
I broke his jaw.
I thought for sure that’d get me in some kind of trouble with Adamo, but even our grand Chief Sergeant seemed distracted like he’d never been before, spending all his time locked up in command like some real war general and us too distracting or not good enough to strategize with him. ’Course I knew it wasn’t that, and that Adamo had been real good to me when he did hear about the fight, didn’t put me on tight rations or nothing.
Instead of making it better, though, it just pissed me off even more. Nothing was acting like it was damn well supposed to.
With all that anger in my head it might have been a good idea to stay away from the professor for a spell, but I got the uncomfortable feeling that he’d start following me around like some kind of dog that didn’t have another home if I stayed away too long.
Then he started hanging around me anyway, not anything like the rest of the guys did on downtime, but more like a real persistent shadow in the back of my head, reading in the back of the room or writing his notes down or even just eating his lunch while I was eating my breakfast.
With things going on with Have the way they were, and me coming back scratched or cut up or something most nights, it was like he’d forgot the rules. He was cleverer about it than he could’ve been, but not near as clever as he thought he was, like he thought he could look at me just because I had a bandage on my fucking face.
I didn’t much care whether he was doing it on purpose or not, only it seemed worse if he wasn’t, ’cause just what kind of a weak-willed son-of-a didn’t even do the things he wanted to on purpose?
If he wanted someone to follow around, I told him one night when it’d especially worn on me seeing him there, calm as you please, then he could go and get himself some kind of a Cindy boyfriend. He got quiet after that—only the professor was always quiet lately—just clamped right down on his tongue and didn’t let anything past that didn’t force itself free.
I could almost see him questioning himself after that, and I swallowed my pride for a moment.
“Tired,” I ground out.
“Oh, of course,” he said, like that made all the difference. “They’re riding you very hard these days, aren’t they?”
It was like he thought he was getting everything he wanted just by sitting next to me and agreeing with me, making exceptions until the moment I saw the light, had my epiphany, and changed my ways. What he didn’t know was that I made the rules and I was holding all the cards. Neither of these things was liable to change soon, and he’d just have to get used to it.
That night when I left, after dragging him along like a puppy on a string, I signed up for the next night’s crush shift that Niall had been complaining no one wanted, knowing it was probably his turn. Have and I just needed to get back into the groove of things, I thought, and it wouldn’t do no good ignoring the problem.
Paying attention to the problem didn’t seem to be working any better, though.
Things came to a head the night I was out with Compagnon and Raphael, though it didn’t happen for more than a flash and neither one of them noticed it, but I fucking lost control of Havemercy for all the time it took a man to sneeze.
Someone once told me that when you sneeze your heart just stops, not long enough to kill you, not so long that you’re even aware of it, but it stops.
Feeling Have streaking underneath me in the sky while knowing I wasn’t having a thing to do with it was a lot like a sneeze in that respect.
Anyway, losing control like that, for even a split second, was long enough for the magicians to hit me with whatever flying fucking debris on fire they’d caught up in the wind; trust the Ke-Han to fight with their own buildings. I got hit bad in the left side, knocking all the feeling out of my shoulder and burning me like I’d just been blindsided by a damn enormous coal, which I guess I had.
Through some kind or another of luck, Compagnon did notice and had the gall to act like we should retreat or something just ’cause my whole left side was on fire and I was riding a dragon who wasn’t my girl except when she was.
“I think you should go with the retreat,” she said, sounding enough like her old self that I could almost forget what’d happened. Excepting the searing pain, of course. “You stubborn jackass.”
She was right enough about that, I thought, because by the time we landed in the hangar I felt all sharp and miserable the way I did when something was either going to make me pass out or sick up.
When we were really in the thick of it, the Airman had its own meds, but either th’Esar had cut their funding or he’d decided things weren’t hot enough yet, ’cause we hadn’t seen hide nor hair of anyone looking remotely doctory or useful or nothing, and the rooms they normally filled for this sort of thing were cold, clean steel and white walls.
Completely fucking empty.
I sat on the examination table before my legs got too shaky and I didn’t have any choice in the matter. I closed my eyes and leaned back against the wall, grinding my teeth against the insistent throbbing in my shoulder and smack over my ribs.
The Rittenhouse was nearest, was what Compagnon said, and with Raphael still running point on recon, I’d just have to wait there by myself while he got the meds out of their nice restful sleeps. Compagnon had a terrible sense of humor, though, and when the door opened a minute later, him saying he’d run into someone in the hall who could keep watch over me, I didn’t need to open my eyes to know who he was talking about.
I couldn’t even smell the professor over the stench on my own flesh—cooked meat and charred coat and silver buttons sizzling where they’d hit my skin—but I knew.
The door swung shut with a quiet snick, and the professor breathed in deep.
“Might not want to use your nose there,” I said idly, voice dull with the effort of controlling the pain. “Burnt flesh ain’t so pretty.”
He made a soft, useless sort of sound in the back of his throat, and I cracked open an eye.
“You just going to stand there?” I asked.
Even laid up as I was, functioning on only the most basic levels, it really amused me how the professor could go on looking so shocked after so long.
That galvanized him into moving forward, at least. There was something strange in his eyes—not pity, else I would have hit him and pain be damned—but something for certain. It stayed there, green and strange and bothering me when he sat down on my good side, even when he reached out to touch me, maybe to pat my hand, then seemed to think better of it. Some people just like to feel useful, especially the most useless of them all.
There wasn’t anything the professor could do here and, for once, even he knew it.
“What happened?” he asked at last. His voice wasn’t rough or dream-slurred or nothing, so I knew he hadn’t been sleeping again. He didn’t sleep much lately. The raid sirens and I saw to that pretty well.
I shrugged, only I couldn’t shrug and I’d forgotten. Instead I swore until I ran out of things to curse, and body parts to curse them with, then leaned back against the wall again, breathing none too easily. I thought I’d give th’Esar a piece of my mind on moving out our resident meds, but then I remembered the professor and that, if he really was a rat and I played my cards right, he might be able to do it for me.
Except when I tried to focus on what might be the best way to go about it, my thoughts shifted, refused to come together like the mismatched pieces of the jigsaw puzzles that Evariste did in the common room when no one else was around to entertain him.
I gave up in exasperation, as apparently I’d got the ability to be clever knocked out of me along with the air when I’d been hit by bits of burning Ke-Han building.
I sighed loud and frustrated, then felt a cool hand against mine.
I opened both eyes.
“All right,” I said. “Here’s the thing. I could tear down the bastion all on my lonesome, amount of pain I’m in right now, so I don’t want you asking any dumb-ass questions about how I’m feeling or what happened or anything like that, okay?”
He nodded, pale concern and a willingness in his face like he didn’t know what he’d done wrong or what he could do to make it right. “All right.”
“If you’re going to be here, then you talk to me, distract me from pulling your head off, ’cause you’re closer than the bastion by a long shot.”
“Oh,” he said, and I could practically hear him thinking, even when I closed my eyes again and I couldn’t see it. “Well, Luvander won the game of darts in the common room today.”
“Luvander cheats,” I answered. “Everyone knows it.”
“Well, then, they must have let him win,” the professor amended. “And there was some commotion over who had used the gas burners in Raphael’s room to make grilled cheese.”
If this was the kind of information he was feeding th’Esar, I thought, then we wouldn’t have any kind of a problem on our hands anytime soon.
“I think it was Magoughin and Merritt,” he finished, going all quiet at the end like he’d finally realized he was babbling on about nonsense no one in their right mind would have anything to do with caring about.
I let the silence fester, shifting infinitesimally against the wall ’cause I couldn’t just sit still with all this fire and metal in me. I smelled like the burnt-out hull of a building, everything scorched beyond recognition. I smelled like death.
“Shit,” I said into the quiet, and the professor’s hand went tight where I’d forgotten it was on mine. He had big hands, but I knew that from before, when I took him up with me on Have. He was hurting me. I wanted to go to sleep, and I wanted the medics from the Rittenhouse to get themselves into gear. “I hate fire.”
“I—Oh,” he said, pretty damn stupidly. “So do I.”
I wondered why he’d ever let me take him up into the air without putting up more of a fight if he hated it that much, but he’d won something out of me for not asking the fucking stupid question I’d been expecting: What sort of airman hates fire, that kind of shit, and I just wasn’t in the mood.
“It spreads very quickly from house to house, on the Mollyedge and in Molly especially,” he continued.
“Yeah,” I said, and I don’t know what I’d got into my head, whether it was the burn, or my coat melting into my shoulder, or the fact that I hadn’t got more than catnaps for longer’n I could remember, but I didn’t stop talking there like I should’ve. “My brother died in a fire like that. Guess it was about—well, a long fucking time ago, that’s for sure. I mean, I must’ve lost track of how long it was.” That was a pretty lie, and no mistake. “His name was Hilary. He was goin’ on four and he used to eat fireflies. I don’t know. I think he thought they’d make him glow.”
I felt him go very still, like even though he didn’t have any special skills toward reading me, he could still sense he was on real thin ice here. Maybe he knew me better than I thought, or maybe he just understood that men like me didn’t talk about this kind of thing to just anyone.
He was right, any which way he was thinking. I hadn’t said a word about Hilary since Hilary’d died.
I opened my eyes again, and slid down the wall a little so our faces were nice and close. “You tell anyone what I just said, I don’t care if they wear a crown, I’ll kill you first.”
“Oh,” he said, looking real white and a little sick, like I’d figured out his biggest secret. “Oh, no, of course not, I wouldn’t dream—I’ll forget you ever mentioned it.” He swallowed hard.
The professor looked a little shaky, the way he had when he’d clambered on down off Havemercy’s back, only there was that same electricity in his eyes that had given me the idea in the first place.
“Good,” I said. “Just so long as we’re clear.”
By the time the meds got there, I was half-out, the professor breathing slow and steady by my side. My eyes were closed and, what with burnt flesh and the rest of my skin too hot for thinking, I don’t know if he stayed with me the whole rest of the night. Knowing him, he probably did.