CHAPTER ELEVEN

ROYSTON

We traveled only the first day on horseback. The rest of the trip was made on foot, and it took a little more than a week and a half—nearly two by the time we’d met with our commanding officers and our garrison of Reds—to arrive at our side of the Cobalts. The path we took was a necessary one, looping back through the foothills and twisting around, until we were well shot of Thremedon herself. If we hadn’t been forced to take such a meandering route, we might have made it in five days, but it wasn’t speed that was of the essence. It was our own victory.

I had some recollections from a few years back, when I’d been on the front just the same as now, but it was always such a shock to be reminded that the Cobalts were so aptly named. They were high and jagged and faded off into the clouds, and they were indeed very blue, at least until the ice caps made them very white. If I hadn’t been about to be killing the men who lurked just on the other side of the range, I would have taken the time to drink in the sight of them. The first time I’d come here I’d been too young and too nervous to make proper note of them at all.

The way we were deployed was quite clever. It was a strategy developed after too many years spent fighting—well over a hundred by now—and one that had been only slightly modified by the advent of the Dragon Corps, whose service was invaluable but also limited to the night, because of what enormously obvious targets they’d have been in the daylight. Because they were so deadly and so precise and caused such destruction on so massive a scale, we avoided skirmishes in the nighttime. And so it was that we were able to engage the Ke-Han on two fronts: the more common form of warfare, between garrisons of Reds and Blues augmented by the particular specialties of magicians during battle days, then the more recent form, which took place only at night and was signaled by the howling, shrieking wind that had once worked against Volstov’s air force, and the subsequent explosions that meant it no longer did.

The captain in charge of my Reds was a man who’d been no more than a common foot soldier when last I’d been to the Cobalts. I was always pleased to be able to recognize a face. It meant that a man I’d once known, however brief our period of acquaintance, had managed to keep himself alive and well for as long as I had, and it fostered a certain heartening camaraderie. The captain’s surname was Achille, and as he explained it, he’d risen very suddenly in the ranks after a disastrous rout in which half of our generals had been killed and he’d proved himself quite the master at rallying half-starved men with no magician at all behind them.

“You’d be surprised what starving men and starving dogs are capable of,” he said, over our first dinner.

“Hardly,” I said, remembering the disasters in which I myself had been involved. “Shall we do our best not to arrive at such dire straits?”

“Indeed,” Achille said, “I’ve been doing my best these days to accomplish just that.”

We reminisced together for only a short period before it grew dark and Achille quiet.

“The dragons come sometime past midnight,” he said, with a faraway look. I wondered what sort of man he might have been if the war hadn’t claimed his quick mind and ample imagination and, I acknowledged privately, ample stubbornness. “If you listen, you can hear them from miles away.”

Our garrison was marked in midrange territory and housed by one of the old mountain forts. As far as any of us knew, the entire trouble with the Ke-Han, which by now spanned the course of several life-times, hadn’t arisen out of thin air but rather from an age-old border dispute. Since before most could remember, there had been mountain forts on our side and the Ke-Han—originally a nomadic people before they built their city of lapis stone—patrolled the Cobalt border during the summertime. Each country was eager to stake its claim to certain lands just beyond the mountains, but since the range proved such an excellent natural barrier, it was generally considered that east of the Cobalts began Ke-Han land and west of it was Volstov’s.

Stories varied as to whether it was the Ke-Han who broke the entente by building their tunnels. One popular legend in Thremedon ran that a captain of a midrange mountain fort heard with his unbelievably keen ears the echoing sound of stone being blasted away by the ancient Ke-Han nature workers and immediately began drill work of his own to meet them in the middle. Another story had it that a group of overexuberant Volstovic patrolmen accidentally killed two Ke-Han warriors in a moment of zealotry or, perhaps, confusion. What Ramanthine history books I’d managed to gather over the years stated that the Ke-Han were always seeking to expand their empire, and the Ramanthines had been their next great conquest. Volstov had inherited their war with the Ke-Han: an unexpected parting gift from our conquered Ramanthines. Then, if a man truly wanted to drive himself mad, there was the matter of the Kiril Islands, which the Ke-Han had taken from Volstovic control while the Esar had been occupying himself with the conquest of the Ramanthines.

I had no opinion as to which of these stories approached the truth more closely than the other. Likely it was none and things had escalated more gradually, until some misunderstanding or even accident brought things to a head and brought us all to such an interminable length of fighting.

It was madness, and neither side would step down until the other had been annihilated.

I wrapped my coat closer around me—the sort of coat all magicians wore when they were sent to Cobalt deployment: a burnished wine red with ermine lining and an abundance of white fur around the throat and wrists. It was comfortable, at least, and very warm, for mountainside temperatures had the unreliable habit of dropping quite suddenly once the sun set.

As I understood it, and as Achille had confirmed for me as we went over our approved plans for battle, the emperor in his lapis city was all but crushed. Achille himself had been leading a garrison of Reds when the wall was torn down, half by magician work and half by the tail of two crushing dragons—Compassus and another whose name I could not remember. It was the farthest that any dragon had ever made it into the city before, and the men seemed to take this as a sign. In fact, it was commonly held among the soldiers, who were farther removed from the troublesome goings-on at court than even I had been during my stay at Nevers, that our next battle might even be the one in which we claimed final victory as our own. Whether or not I could join them in this anticipation, I wasn’t yet convinced.

All I knew for certain was that, after the dragons hit the lapis city this night, all the Esar’s forces were to come down on the city at once.

Our plan—the Esar’s plan—was that we should take this city for our own. If all went according to plan, we would be able to take the Ke-Han emperor as our prisoner of war, toppling his throne and bringing an entire people to their knees.

Admittedly, there was a certain excitement buzzing with the cold in the air. I couldn’t help but allow it access to my own blood, for we all wanted this war to be over. And I knew that, if nothing else, we were doubtless on the verge of something colossal—though I couldn’t be sure if it was our own victory or something as yet unforeseen.

Be prepared for all eventualities.

I repeated this phrase to myself every time I threatened to get ahead of myself, and wished that those around me would attempt to be as circumspect as I was struggling to be.

I sat with Achille in his captain’s quarters—the highest room in the mountainside fort, reserved for captains and magicians alone—waiting to hear the sound of the dragons sleeking through the distant air. I thought for a brief moment of Hal, for I was always stealing such private moments to think of him, and wondered how I might have told this story to him if we were together in the warm room at Castle Nevers, with William on my knee and Hal’s eyes bright with firelight as he sat at my feet. I longed to have him at my side for a brief and impossibly selfish moment, until I remembered just how Hal would have suffered here. No; this was the sort of tale I’d bring back to him, and then I could allow myself to tangle my fingers with his and glean all my comfort from being so close.

Yet I would never have been able to do the moment justice with mere words. There was no describing the Dragon Corps.

It was true that we heard them before we saw them, and Achille and I went quickly together to the window, throwing it open. The evening was cloudy and dark, perfect conditions for flying, and almost half an hour passed, the wind changing constantly, before we saw anything.

We heard them more than saw them when they were at last overhead, the forceful boom of their bodies pounding too quickly through the air for us to see anything more than a momentary flash of silver dark in the filmy moonlight. They always rode in threes.

The wind they left in their wake shook the very building to its core. I almost imagined the Cobalts themselves being sent crumbling because of the disturbance in the air. Our side gave a great whoop of national pride to hear them pass overhead, and I could feel that pride replace the excitement, the air now stirred to a fever by the beating of the dragons’ mammoth metal wings.

“Fuck,” said Achille reverently. “Fuck me if they aren’t the most beautiful things in all of Volstov.”

“I agree with you,” I said, with the faint offerings of a smile, “and thus I’m afraid I must decline your suggestion as to the rest of it.”

He laughed and clapped me on the back and called me, somewhat affectionately, the greatest Cindy this side of the ocean.

I managed little sleep for myself that night, and what rest I did manage was laced through with nervous anticipation, the sound of the dragons in the air, and the explosions that shortly followed their arrival. I’d forgotten how reverberant such things sounded through the long, complicated system of tunnels the Ke-Han had twice used to overpower us; I’d forgotten how loud it could get, how bright, how nightmarish. I was losing my touch, I told myself wryly, and had best reacquaint myself with the peculiar sensation of having the ground shake like an earthquake beneath my feet by the time I was thrust into the thick of things long before this hour on the morrow.

There was also the troublesome matter of my headaches.

They had come and gone all throughout the trip, and while I told myself they were no more than my way of adapting to the shift in temperatures and altitude, I knew this for the flimsy lie that it was. Quite simply, they’d begun before I ever left for the Cobalts at all. The first, unprecedented and dizzying, had occurred during my exile, and it had taken all my skills at playacting to hide from Hal how greatly it distressed me.

Now, the only man I had to hide it from was myself—and the entire rest of my garrison of Reds, their captain, and the Ke-Han Blues. It was only a headache. I’d been getting them since the night before my return to the city, and I’d managed to find ways to function despite the discomfort. Undue stress could have brought it on, or my own entrenched fear of returning to battle.

Yet it was accompanied by a certain mind-numbing lack of equilibrium, as if someone had quite suddenly jerked the world out from underneath my feet and I was left to suffer through a maddening spin of blindness. I’d never suffered such headaches before, and there was absolutely no warning for them—merely a sudden onset of pain, pinching sharp at my temples, followed by that whirlwind of confusion.

If I were to suffer from such a headache during the battle to come as I was suffering with more and more frequency these days, I did not want to think of the possible ramifications—not only for myself, but for my entire garrison as well.

A combination of my headaches and thinking about my headaches kept me up most of the night. So it was that I rose early and joined Achille for breakfast, both of us talking with sparse, low words that anticipated too many possible outcomes.

“We’ll take their tunnels,” Achille said. “Use their strongholds against them. We’ve been working out the system the past year now and we’ve finally got it figured. We send a distraction up one side of the mountain to keep them busy, and meanwhile the rest of us from all the other positions take our mark through the tunnels and advance on them. Before they know it, we’ll all be out. And, the way they’re depleted, there won’t be any stopping us.”

He was repeating the plan to comfort himself.

I, too, was doing much the same, mouthing this speech of his that I had memorized.

It was a simple plan, a good plan. There was no foreseeable reason why it shouldn’t have worked.

But the unforeseeable was what undid us in the end. The Ke-Han had been waiting all this time, waiting for us to grow cocky, and we’d done exactly that. We couldn’t have suited their plans better than if we’d been working with them toward their own victory.

In some ways, it was my own fault. That is not to say that I was egotistic enough about my vital position among our Reds and the other magicians along with us, but one must always accept responsibility for his own actions, and in that way a great deal of the fault was my own. The troublesome headaches—I realized it too late—hadn’t been my own private suffering, but rather the indication of something much larger involving many more than myself.

There was no such thing as a singularity. It was what we’d learned first as magicians. It was the most important truth of who we were and what we did, and I’d forgotten it as swiftly as a dragon’s pass through the air.

My headaches were no more mine than they were harmless, and once we’d passed through the tunnels to the other side, that much became painfully evident.

The first sign was that the distraction wasn’t working as it should have been. Achille had sent several magicians with a detachment of Reds to aid it in hanging together, but the magicians were the purpose, all with Talents made for flash and destruction.

When we exited the tunnels, we should have been able to hear the results of our ruse, or see them at least, great colorful fireworks and rumbling earth, or even the warrior cries of the Ke-Han that indicated battle was at hand. There was none of this reassuring evidence, however, and I felt an uneasiness heavy in my chest as I caught myself scanning the jutting blue rock face of the Cobalts, which were stony and impassive and gave nothing away.

The uneasiness spread throughout my arms and legs, too swift to be the onset of anything that I could tie back to a simple worry about our progress. No, this was entirely physical, and I occupied my mind with trying to gauge exactly how bad it was and how I might be able to go on standing so long as we kept moving. None of the others seemed to be exhibiting any discomfort, and I thought that even if we couldn’t hear the various noises indicating that our distraction was under way, that didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t. It was quite possible that the men and magicians on the other side were at that very moment experiencing the full flush of victory.

Then Alcibiades collapsed.

He’d been a soldier before he was a magician, and the latter was only due to the Esar’s deciding some fifteen years prior that any man with a Talent fighting in the war would damn well learn to use it whether he wanted to or not. Still, he had some skill with water—once he’d got past his initial prejudice—and though we’d never interacted for any particular length of time, he was a singularly competent man.

Achille called us all to a halt with a silent gesture, signaling for someone to check on our fallen comrade. Marcelline, standing closest to me, adjusted the warm collar of her coat with fingers that shook almost imperceptibly.

“Do you feel it?” she asked, but I had no idea to what she was referring.

I shook my head. She looked a little green against the white and red of her clothing.

“That’s what I mean,” she said softly, more because it seemed as though she couldn’t bring herself to speak any louder, rather than any caution toward being overheard. “There’s nothing there.”

I thought that perhaps she meant the wind, and certainly it was odd the Ke-Han hadn’t begun to attack us with it yet. Then her eyes rolled up toward the back of her head, white and startling. I caught her before she hit the ground.

Someone shouted the warning, and even as I felt the headache begin like a battering ram at both of my temples, I turned to see the Ke-Han forces coming in from all sides, closing the net of the trap we had walked right into.

Out front, I saw a great gushing blast of water come exploding from the rock. There were veins of sulfurous hot springs running below the Cobalts, and I guessed that they were what now spewed forth from the land beneath us, scalding the men from the second midrange fort and giving our men some time to rally around a common point. I wondered if perhaps Alcibiades had regained consciousness, after all; this seemed something I should feel pleased over, if only I could bring myself to feel anything at all beyond the pounding in my temples.

I couldn’t. Rather, it was more like what Marcelline had been describing, an absence of that familiar, constant presence—my Talent—which left me feeling vulnerable and hollowed out as a man made from straw husks. It was akin to the strange, flooding loss of strength I experienced when I had a fever.

I should have moved, or tried to do my duty as both a soldier of the realm and a magician of the Basquiat, which made the code all the more important: I must necessarily do whatever was in my power to stop the Ke-Han’s advance. As a magician, whatever I had in my power was considerably more than the average man, and as such I knew that the soldiers had come to depend on our help, our protection.

As far as I could tell, however, after that first show of defiance from Alcibiades, everyone seemed to have been taken with the same affliction as I, for I saw no telltale rumbles of destruction, nor streaking jets of fire. Instead, the Ke-Han rallied around their injured, then surged forward once more, blue coats the very color of the mountain rock.

I placed Marcelline on the ground behind me, for I would need both my hands free, and even as I wavered on my feet, I drew a deep breath to draw on the place where my Talent rested, hidden deep within. My stomach gave a lurch in revolt against what I found there, and at last I understood what Marcelline had tried to warn me of.

There was nothing there.

It was as though someone had gone into my chest and scooped out something infinitely more vital than my heart or stomach, and the sensation brought me to my knees.

I heard around me all at once the clang and crash of metal as used in battle, the hoarse cries of men I’d known and eaten with as they fought on, despite the sudden onset of our debilitating handicap.

Achille wasn’t in plain view, for even my vision had blurred distressingly for me, as though, with the absence of what anchored me, everything else was falling apart. Maybe I was falling apart. Nothing like this had ever happened before. I had no way of knowing.

The world went white in from the edges, erasing the scene before me as surely as if I’d lost consciousness—not a blackout, but a whiteout—with the sharp, blinding force of a lightning bolt.

Everything that followed was a blank, clean slate.

When I awoke, I was in a tent that, from the lack of light streaming in through the fabric, must have been in the garrison at the foothills.

I ached all over, and the headache pounded still in my head, as though it wished to force my eyes from their sockets. Something smelled very strongly of blood. I sat up at once—a grievous error, as nausea rolled through me so that I had to lean over one side of the cot I’d been placed on to divest myself of the meager contents of my stomach. In a streak of wild luck, someone appeared to have placed a pan there for exactly that purpose.

To my right someone chuckled weakly, more of a pathetic coughing than anything else, and I lifted my head—slowly this time—to examine my surroundings. Alcibiades lay prone on the cot next to mine, nose like the prow of a dying ship and bandaged quite heavily about the head.

“Where are we?” I said, and swallowed to work the saliva into my mouth, which felt as dry as sandpaper. My throat hurt as though I’d been shouting.

Had I been shouting?

It took him a very long time to reply—so long that I thought he’d fallen asleep. When he did speak, the sound startled me and set all my nerves jangling as though I were a high-strung horse. “Base camp, med tent. ’Til we get moved, anyway.”

“Ah,” I said, and surrendered my head to the cool softness of the pillow below it. There were troublesome thoughts floating across my skull, but not a one of them seemed strong enough to break through the red haze of throbbing in my brain. “We’re to be moved?”

“Soon as possible,” said Alcibiades, in the same scratchy voice as mine. “Head doctor, she nearly had a fit when she saw us.”

I didn’t feel as though there were anything visibly wrong with me, and that surely the head doctor of a medical unit during wartime would have seen a great many terrible things. “Am I missing a leg?” I said at last, as it was the only thing I could think of, and might have gone a long way toward explaining why I couldn’t feel either one of them.

“No,” he said, without a trace of humor in his voice. “It’s because we’re magicians.”

I overlooked the contempt in his voice as he said this last, because it had set something else turning in my mind, like a great, if slow-moving, waterwheel.

The Reds had gone on fighting when we’d been stricken, that much I did remember. It was just that they went on fighting without us. The others who’d been . . . taken, I supposed I could call it, by this infernal numbness, were Alcibiades and Marcelline, both of them magicians. When I tried to think on it now, I found that I could not remember having seen any of the ordinary soldiers fall prey to whatever strange illness had taken hold of us. If it had struck magicians and magicians only, I thought against the pain in my head, then . . .

Then I had to be sick again, and I very nearly didn’t make it to the pan this time around.

I’d never heard of anything that could debilitate so selectively. There were illnesses that were intrinsically magic, of course, but they ravaged those with Talent and those without equally. That whatever had hit us in the mountains had hit only magicians was a curiosity I might have found fascinating if it had happened hundreds of years ago instead of just a handful of hours before.

An unsettling thought occurred to me, and I looked once more to Alcibiades. “The others. The captain?”

He shook his head, very slowly from left to right, and I felt a wave of sadness overtake my heart. “They thought we were all dead, I think—you were certainly lying there like you were—and I got pinned under Emeric while I was still out of it.” Alcibiades paused to clear his throat, as though he’d got something caught in it all of a sudden. “When I woke up, it was all quiet—they’d moved on—and I’d have gone right past you too if you hadn’t made a noise like you weren’t dead but dying, maybe.”

“Then I owe you my thanks,” I said, speaking more to distract myself from the memories I had of those who were now gone: of the easy companionability I had with Achille, and the idea of his kind eyes open and lifeless in the far reaches of the mountain range. “It’s fortunate that you were able to overcome whatever’s attempted to bleed us of our senses.”

“I was a soldier before ever I was a magician, Margrave,” he said, breathing shallow through his clenched teeth. “We learn how to go on through a little discomfort.”

I resented the implication that all magicians were soft, untested warriors, but I thought that it might be ungrateful to pick a fight with a man who’d in all likelihood saved my life. And besides, my headache was making it hurt to speak.

I grunted, instead.

Alcibiades went quiet after that, and I drifted into sleep, more passed out from the pain in my head than any kind of a real rest.

When I awoke a second time, it was to the sight of a silhouette in the open tent flap, and I’d no concept of the amount of time that had been lost to me while I was unconscious.

“Margrave Royston,” said the newcomer, in the curt, official voice of a bureaucrat or one of the Provost’s wolves. “And Alcibiades of the Glendarrow, by order of the Esar you are to accompany me to the Basquiat with all due haste.”

“Charming,” I said, just as soon as I could work up the energy to speak. “I cannot speak for my colleague at present, but rest assured we will follow you as soon as we are able to get up.”

The man didn’t laugh, but I was thinking more about what it meant that the Esar had become involved and what it meant that there was already a system set in place to cart us off to the Basquiat, of all places.

The Basquiat wasn’t the Esar’s province.

I thought of who had been missing at the ball, and came up with the same answer every time, that each of them—whatever other qualities they possessed—had been some manner or other of magician. Were they in the Basquiat, as well? If only I could have made myself think, think, beyond the dull arrhythmic pounding between my ears.

“You are not to speak with anyone,” the man went on, rolling his proclamation up as larger, burlier men with stretchers came in. “You will have no contact with the outside world. Any discussion of what occurred in the Cobalt Mountains will be viewed as inciting undue panic among the people and thus an act of treason.”

The thought of Hal came to me then, smiling and sudden and so vivid that it almost stopped the ache that plagued me.

“My . . . apprentice,” I said, too weak and out of sorts even to demand information from the medics. “I should get a message to him.”

“Your family members and associates will be informed of your situation,” said the man as rote, weary, and bored as if this were an everyday occurrence. I had to wonder how many times he’d recently said the same thing, rolled off the same reassurances. It was by no means a comforting thought.

“How long before we can leave?” From a ways off I heard the familiar voice, laced with irritability. Alcibiades had either just regained consciousness or chosen this particular moment to speak up.

Our only answer was the click-slam of twin carriage doors.

“Fucked as not,” Alcibiades said wearily.

I was slid off my cot and onto the stretcher, and another period of emptiness claimed me.

 

THOM

I left the medic room with ash on my hands and grease on my mouth and my heart clamped round with iron wire, the sort they used to keep urchins out of the shops in Molly.

I knew no other way to say it and there was no hiding from it, either. Rook was my brother; I had no doubt in my mind. It made a sick kind of sense, really, and the more I turned it over in my head, the more I found that I could get around it. This was the reason I could never just walk away from him, or couldn’t ever just let the matter lie, not even in my own head. I’d thought at first that it must have been some wild, proud streak in me that Marius had neglected to stamp out: a professor’s instinct to impart wisdom, or my own stubbornness in having wanted desperately to be right about him, right about my own theory that within everyone was some capacity for change.

What Rook had given me instead was the knowledge that, at the very least, I had better reason than the Isobel-Magrittes of the world to follow him around like a stray. After all, I’d begun doing it since birth, despite what obstacles and separations in the road between us had fallen since.

His name had once been John, almost too ridiculously simple for what he’d become since I was told he’d died in the fire. Mine had been Hilary; the whores who raised me called me Thom, and because it was a name my dead brother never called me, I allowed them to use it. Subsequently, it had stuck. I assumed a part of myself had died in that fire—the part of myself named by my parents—and I left it at that. Sometimes I dreamed of him, my dead brother, but he was always faceless, the features blurred. Understandable, since I’d been no more than three years old when the tragedy struck us.

He’d told me to stay where I was—he’d gone out for some reason—I’d later followed a bird, I think, or a dog. Perhaps a kitten. I never did as he told, could never remember, and he was often angry with me. I found my way back only just as it was beginning to get dark, and the house was in flames, and there was a lady crying; these were all the bare pieces I remembered, and no more than that.

Someone told me my brother was dead. I believed him, since my brother had always made it a point to get home before nightfall. I didn’t remember our parents, though when I was older I realized that they must have been among the countless other young couples who realized just how expensive it was to raise children. They’d cut their losses early and left me in John’s care. He hadn’t been old enough to take care of me, and yet he had.

I hadn’t cried when our parents left. When I lost my brother, I’d cried for days and days without end.

I was three then, and twenty-four now. Twenty-one years had passed in the interim—twenty-one years during which the one constant in my life was the specter of my dead brother—dead, I often thought, because he’d come back, thought me within the burning house, and run inside to save me. I only came to this conclusion when I was much older and sought to explain the occurrences that had stamped themselves, so unforgiving, on my memory in red-hot flashes.

What must have actually happened—for my own peace of mind, I needed more than anything to fit the missing parts of the puzzle together—was that John must have returned sometime after the fire had been put out, after I’d been led away from the conflagration by the neighboring women of ill repute, who’d taken pity on me. He must have thought the same thing I had, or perhaps he’d been told by the same man that his brother was dead.

He’d told me to stay where I was. He had no reason to believe I hadn’t done just as he said.

I believed I suddenly understood Rook better—but even as the thought crossed my mind I was struck with guilt, fierce and swift. I was pacing the halls of the Airman, and each time my path led me again and again to Rook’s private door. I had a brother again.

I leaned against the door for a moment, pressing my cheek against the frame and, on the most foolish of whims, tested the knob, barely thinking about what I was doing.

It turned, and the door swung open. Before I could stop myself from intruding, I stumbled inside.

Here I was: in the belly of the beast. It smelled faintly of ash, of sulfur and fire, and most pressingly of metal. The bed was unmade, three pairs of boots by the closet; there was a trapdoor that I knew led to Havemercy’s bay. There was a print of the famous portrait of Lady Greylace, the most renowned whore in all of Volstov, but no books at all. I nearly laughed; I nearly cried.

It smelled of him—on everything, every shadow in every corner—a glass half-full of water on the desk and a jewel box full of his earrings. Earlier this night, or on any other night for that matter, my brother might have died a second time without my ever learning that he’d lived.

I sat down on the edge of his bed and knotted my fingers in the sheets. When he returned to his room I would tell him—for he’d opened himself to me, whether it was from loss of blood or a sudden shift in altitude or any other stupid incomprehensible reason. He’d spoken my true name, and I would use his, and perhaps we might mend what had broken between us twenty-one years ago.

It was possible. I knew it was.

I waited there for hours, long past sunrise, rehearsing what I’d say and how I’d say it. Rook, I might begin, or perhaps John, though I thought the latter might be too sudden. You couldn’t spring this sort of realization on a man the way it had been sprung on me, though that had been an accident. I wished to spare him some of that pain—for despite all his cruelties, I remembered a time when he was gentle and kind, bandaging the knees I always scraped, or catching the fireflies I clamored for. Besides all that, he was my brother. It wasn’t every day that a man could be resurrected from the dead, and I knew that I must treat this as gently as he’d once treated me. It was more delicate, more precious, than any other secret I’d ever held.

Yet it was also the first time I’d ever had something on Rook, and it gave me a disturbing flush of some feeling I didn’t want to identify, as similar as it was to victory. True, I was for the first time in a position of possessing some knowledge that Rook did not, and an important piece of information, to boot, but this was entirely different. This was family, and I was no airman who kept secrets just to be hurtful or to lord over them who didn’t know.

At long last he returned, flinging the door open and half-kicking off one of his boots. They must have given him something to numb the burns—for there were great strides being made of late in medicines that eased almost any kind of pain—but his eyes were tired, and his shirt was open to reveal the bandage swathed across his chest.

He saw me then and stilled, wary as a tomcat on the prowl in an alleyway. This was his territory, and I a threat, engaged in trespass.

“You fucking waited up for me?” he said finally, his eyes still narrowed and all of him tensed and ready for a fight. He was too tired for it—despite his protestations, he was human before anything else—and I stood quickly. “Or were you snooping around?”

“What?” All my rehearsal seemed for naught; I’d forgotten every line as if I’d never thought of them at all. “Snooping?”

“I know about that pact you’ve got with th’Esar,” he snarled, ranging past me and shrugging out of his shirt with some delicacy. The burns clearly must have still troubled him. Of course they did. I’d seen what they looked like a few hours before.

“About the—What?”

“Jeannot’s got a friend in the palace,” he said, “and if you tell this to th’Esar, I’ll gut you from the belly up. But we know you met with him that night at the ball. We know he’s got you in his pocket like a fucking puppet.”

I shook my head, trying to clear it. “No,” I said, “you don’t understand—”

“You want to enlighten me, then, as to why it was you and His Majesty needed to meet so private-like?” He came close to me without any warning, nearly backing me up against the wall, and I could smell the burnt flesh, the medicinal stench of the balm on his chest, the metallic residue on his palms and, beneath that, blood lacing everything—always blood beneath. I should have told him then, should have let the knowledge come out of me all at once before I let my fear of it undo me, as it was already doing.

Yet if I told him now, there was no telling what he’d do. He was unpredictable, he was purposefully cruel, he was probably insane: All these things added up suddenly and startlingly to make an inarguable case, a perfect equation for why I should keep my mouth shut. It wasn’t simply that I was afraid of Rook, for now that fear was laced with a kind of hurt running through it, a marbled vein of regret for what I’d lost from my brother because I did remember a time when he’d been kind. Looking at him now made all sorts of emotions rise that I didn’t want to deal with at present, and certainly not where anyone so cunning as Rook could see.

So I held my tongue, and lifted my chin with instinctive defiance, and tried my best not to think about how he’d trusted me with his memories and the companionable silence that had followed.

I’d been so desperate for such a sign from him—any sign at all that all my work had not been in vain, that I wasn’t simply pouring my efforts into an empty yawning mouth of contempt and trickery. Rook had seemed changed over our time since the ball, but faced with my own lack of perception now—my own brother in front of me, mad and bleeding and more than a little tired—I was forced to wonder. Perhaps I’d never even made a dent in that armor of his, thicker than dragon-scale and twice as resilient. Perhaps all this waiting I was doing, looking for the barest shadow of kindness, something I could misconstrue as affection, was because I knew that I would accept it from him, and gratefully. Perhaps this was because I’d sensed in him all along my long-lost brother, who had been kind once, before time and whatever strange fate had befallen him ruined that instinct forever.

“Well?” he asked.

“I’m not spying on you,” I whispered.

That much was at least the truth, but there were other truths I should have spoken—other truths I might have spoken—but when I opened my mouth to speak, the words abandoned me. He looked at me as though I were mad, gaping like a fish, and I had no means to protest this assumption. I was mad.

He made a sound, rather more like a grunt than anything that could be misconstrued as human speech. He either believed me or didn’t, and the fact that I couldn’t tell the difference upset me just as it always had, so not everything had changed.

“Better not be,” he said, and brought his face so close to mine that I felt momentarily off-kilter, as though the earth had tipped sharply beneath my feet.

Then, just as suddenly, Rook turned away from me and the ground righted itself once more. I thought that I could say it then, unfair a thing as it was to sneak in on a man when he wasn’t looking. I swallowed, and cleared the dryness from my throat. It was a poor charade; I could no more speak than I could move.

This wasn’t to be the first time I kept the truth from him.

That night he didn’t even kick me from his room, just flung himself down onto his bed and was asleep almost before he hit the mattress; he must have known he had me pinned beneath his thumb like a bug, incapable of crossing him. This was the power Rook had over me.

I watched him for a few guilty moments to see if his face eased at all, if the harsh lines of it grew peaceful with sleep. I wanted to recognize him, but I didn’t. Then I forced myself from the room and curled against this secret as if it were slitting me open the way Rook had promised.

I think I understood now, if only a little, the reason for his sudden interest, his “change of heart”: It was to keep me close, keep me where he could watch me and make sure I wasn’t going to betray the corps. So long as there was a steady stream of reticent confidences and hesitant looks that suggested he would open up if only I stayed around, there would be no reporting to th’Esar. It was so clever that I would have experienced a grudging admiration were it not for the already-consuming wealth of guilt and confusion swamping me. Moreover, I was humiliated, for there had been some small part of me that had dared to hope at making a difference with Rook. And now, for all I’d thought it through so carefully, it was all dashed to pieces as surely as if thrown from his dragon as he sped her too quickly through the night.

Everything had changed, and nothing. I had failed on more counts than I could possibly name because I had come no closer to understanding Rook than I’d ever been, and I myself was now possessed of a secret almost too large to keep. I could no longer fault him for his questionable morals. He was my own brother, and I could not even summon up the wherewithal to tell him so. I told myself that I only needed more time to sort out my feelings before I took them to Rook, but I knew that a larger part of it than I wished to admit was rather the gratification of wielding some new power over him, and the lie became harder and harder as time passed. If pressed to choose, I’d say that I was worse than he’d ever been even when he was at his most vindictive.

I was too preoccupied with my own thoughts to notice the change that came over the city. Truth be told, I wasn’t paying attention. My focus had so turned inward that I’d completely forgotten there was a city living and breathing all around me. And, because Rook was off duty for the following week, I was allowed to forget there was a war.

Yet I wasn’t living inside a complete vacuum. Now and then I’d catch moments of the other airmen’s conversation in the halls, hushed and grave. One afternoon I even heard Adamo shouting inside his private quarters, though to whom he was shouting I couldn’t be sure and had no right to ask.

That night, when Rook cornered me in the hall, he grabbed my wrist hard, and said, “We have some talking to do.”

Fear rose sharp and quick as the guilt, and I let him lead me, all numbness, into his room and shut the door behind us.

He looked uncomfortable for a minute, then gritted his teeth as though what he was trying to say was about to kill him, or worse. Finally, he managed a curt, “Have ain’t right.”

For a moment I didn’t understand him. I was expecting him to tell me he’d known—that he’d read my thoughts—that he knew me for what I was and he never wanted to see me again so long as we both lived. Breathing ceased to be an autonomic function, and I concentrated on drawing air, along with as little attention as possible. I’d been prepared for the worst, not some garbled sentence I couldn’t parse. “What?” I asked.

“Have,” he snarled. “Havemercy. She ain’t—she isn’t—right. That mess I got myself into? Not for any reason I can figure. It’s like sometimes she’s okay and sometimes . . . she isn’t.”

I stared at him, relieved and terrified all at once. This, more than anything, cemented my place among the morally bereft and bankrupt. He was confiding in me a second time, this time of his own volition and not due either to pain or to blood loss, with no alternative motive, while I was keeping from him so massive a secret that I hadn’t slept in days. “You . . . Havemercy,” I managed at last. “She’s—What do you mean she isn’t right?”

Rook growled, clearly finding our means for communication ineffective. “She ain’t flying right. It’s like we’re not speaking the same language. It’s like we’re fucking strangers, is what it’s like, or worse. I tell her to do something and she just doesn’t do it—like she doesn’t hear what I’m saying or even recognize it for words.”

“I don’t know anything about dragons,” I said carefully, moving to sit beside him. “I don’t understand why you’re coming to me—”

“Because you can fucking tell th’Esar about it,” he said, nearly biting my head off with the words. “He’s expecting a report back from you—so, tell him. Tell him that Havemercy’s fucking off. It’s quicker than going through the proper channels.”

“Well,” I said, understanding why he was confiding in me yet again. I didn’t bother to argue my case—I wasn’t spying on my brother, but he was close enough to the truth of what th’Esar had asked me to do that it didn’t really matter.

He was looking at me, short-tempered and hot, and I realized that I hadn’t yet given him a proper answer. “Of course I will,” I said, quiet and low. He was my brother. I owed him that much.

I knew that the longer I stayed silent, the more likely it was that one day the odds would become irrevocably stacked against me, that I would break something that could not be fixed and that this lie would be the end of us.

“I’ll write to him,” I said.

“When?” Rook asked.

“Tonight,” I said. “Now.”

Because I’d promised him—because I was still under the strange impression I was a man of my word, if little else—I did exactly as I said, and wrote th’Esar a brief, formal note that I’d discovered something in the Airman that might be of interest to him.

I was almost grateful for th’Esar’s summons when it came the following morning, for the need to prepare a report was a welcome distraction from my own thoughts, confused and tangled as they’d become. I spent the morning attacking my new task with all the zeal of a hunted man.

The summons had said that a carriage would be sent to meet me nearby—a special treatment that surprised me, but th’Esar was apparently very good to his spies. Just as I was observing the turn of the hour on the small round watch Marius had gifted me with to congratulate me upon some previous academic success, the carriage appeared, white and gold like something out of a roman, or some ludicrous rich man’s fantasy. The Mollyrat in me couldn’t quite get past being awed long enough to be contemptuous, but having spent so long as a penny-pinching student, I couldn’t help but wonder at how many hot meals that carriage would buy. Somehow I thought it would be better if I didn’t know the answer.

I clambered inside, clutching tightly to the sheet of notes Rook had dictated to me—and which I’d subsequently translated into the kind of talk I could use with a man like th’Esar—and attempted to calm myself. Thinking with a clear head was the only way I was going to get through this particular meeting with any kind of dignity, or more importantly, with my head still fixed firmly to my shoulders. During my time in the Airman, I’d adapted to thinking one way and speaking another. This need for duplicity was still no excuse for the way I’d behaved, the way I was still behaving, toward Rook, but it had been cultivated as a survival tactic the moment I’d stepped into that room on the dais facing those fourteen wing-backed chairs, and the undoing of it was proving more difficult than I ever would have anticipated.

Now, it seemed, I would have to learn and fast, for th’Esar was a man who did not like to be lied to. And if he sensed a disparity between my mind and my lips, he would surely not hesitate to act.

The carriage moved quickly across the cobblestone streets, and I watched out the window as the city passed by in what seemed to me now a meaningless blur of hustle and bustle. Thremedon was my home; I’d known it all my life, and yet for all I recognized it now it might have been any central metropolis, teeming with its own people, its own traditions, and completely severed from my heart.

The servant sent to greet me bowed low, and I fought the urge to do the same back to him, as it would have damaged my standing considerably. I would never grow accustomed to being the sort of man to whom other men bowed. Perhaps it was something to be born into and not learned at all. That, more than anything, told me how much things had changed, the small worming ways in which Rook had got into my mind, because there was a time when I would have said that there was nothing that couldn’t be taught. Now I wasn’t so sure.

Then I had to concentrate on following, keeping the servant’s back in front of me, or else risk getting lost in th’Esar’s winding hallways—little better than catacombs, I thought, for all their decoration and fancy curios.

This time I counted them as we passed: two antiquated mirrors, one very large portrait of th’Esar himself, a tapestry, a door with no handle, a window with bars. The farther we moved toward our goal, the dimmer the light became, until we were plunged into the same grasping darkness that I remembered. I could no longer discern the shape of my surroundings and I could do no more than follow after my guide, ever ahead and turning so swiftly and so sharply that at times I felt dizzy.

I found myself thinking that it seemed th’Esar should have a more accessible set of chambers, for it wasn’t logical to assume that the noblesse with whom he met daily would accede to being led through the depths of the palace like rats through a maze. No, it seemed more logical that he would only have such a room as the one to which I was being led for his own private dealings, ones he didn’t want subject to court gossip and whisperings.

This was his route for spies.

It was a long way to go for a little privacy, I felt, but then th’Esar’s secrets were considerably more important than those of most men. Then I thought of the woman who’d been with him on the night of the ball, dark and striking and, most notably, perhaps, incredibly familiar toward th’Esar. Perhaps some of the secrets he held were the same as all men’s.

It was only when the servant stopped, turning on his heel with a motion eerily similar to his predecessor’s, that I realized we’d arrived at our destination.

“Thank you,” I said to him, with all sincerity, for I was certain that the dizzying trip to th’Esar’s secret meeting room could not be an enjoyable one, and I was equally certain of just how lost I’d have been without the guidance.

He merely nodded, then offered me the briefest of smiles.

I steeled myself and opened the door.

Th’Esar was seated in the same seat he’d been in before, giving me the momentarily jarring sensation that no time had passed at all. Of course, his companion was no longer the woman, but a man I was surprised to recognize as the Provost of the city.

“ . . . panic in the streets, not to mention the Basquiat, Your Majesty, if you don’t mind me saying. The bereaved are gathering, and there isn’t anything that starts a riot faster than unhappy people who feel they’ve been mistreated.” He hesitated, as though this last had been too much, and bowed low in the court fashion. “Your pardon.”

Th’Esar held up one square, powerful hand. He’d seen me enter.

“I will continue my discussion with you at a later date, Provost,” he said. “Do not fear. If the situation is truly as bad as you say, then we will have to think on a way toward solving it.”

The Provost nodded like a man careful not to look too disappointed. His hair was the same shade as th’Esar’s and his chin very similar.

“Yes, Your Majesty.” He turned then, understanding his dismissal when he saw me hovering guiltily in the doorway like a child caught out late. I could do nothing but offer him an apologetic look, and he left the room by moving past me without so much as a glance.

“Now,” said th’Esar, switching tack with a voice full of command and purpose, “what news do you have of our Dragon Corps? I trust that in the time we have given you there has been more than one event worthy of our attention.”

“Well, there is one matter,” I said, immediately forgetting what it was I’d written in my notes—Rook’s speech full of curses, as well as half-remembered complaints from Niall and Raphael, dark remarks made by Ghislain, and Adamo’s shouting behind closed doors. I forgot it all, and swallowed the sudden fluttering of panic that threatened to break loose from my throat. Th’Esar had this effect on people. It was no wonder his networks for intelligence were so precise and effective. “Rook—that is, the airman Rook, who flies your dragon Havemercy—he says that she’s . . . off.”

Th’Esar regarded me with a look that bordered dangerously on disapproval. “Off?”

In for a chevronet, in for a tournois, I thought weakly to myself, and nodded. “Yes, Your Majesty. I overhead him saying that she, it—the dragon, that is—he said it isn’t flying the way it ought to.”

“Perhaps Airman Rook finds himself incapable of the task of flying our most prized dragon,” replied th’Esar. “We have heard that he exhibits traits of inconsistency in his behavior when flying.”

I wondered then just how many spies th’Esar had set about the Airman, and whether I would have to keep a closer eye now on the men who came to collect the laundry, and the women who cleaned the rooms; even the young boys who kept the dragons clean and well oiled.

Not that this was my place, of course. I owed no loyalty to the airmen; I had no reason to inform them of th’Esar’s spies, especially not when I myself could still be counted among them. I couldn’t explain this sudden troublesome loyalty, only knew with a familiar helplessness that it had everything to do with Rook, the way it all did—the way it all would until I revealed the truth.

“I—” I paused, marveling weakly at the realization of what I’d been about to do. Rook had tainted every corner of my mind to the point where I would defend an imagined slight on his prowess to th’Esar himself. I felt ill. “As I understand it, he is the best flier among his fellows. If he thinks there’s something wrong with Havemercy—”

“There is nothing wrong with our dragons,” th’Esar said, with a clear note in his voice that this was the final pronouncement on the subject. “You have clearly misunderstood what it is we asked you to do in the first place.”

Disappointment flooded my mouth, hot and bitter. I held my tongue.

When he’d found I had no more to report other than what th’Esar clearly regarded as the fanciful misgivings of a man whose skills he appreciated but whose opinions he had no use for, I was dismissed promptly and without hesitation.

I’d failed on both sides of the equation. Th’Esar refused to see the truth—no doubt he had his reasons, yet I was infuriated all the same—and, what was more, when Rook demanded an answer, I could no more defend my ineffectiveness than I could prove to him the sky was green. I’d got nothing but a curt dismissal regarding the matter of the dragons, and I knew that it wouldn’t be good enough to take back. I should have pressed th’Esar; I should have made him listen.

Rook would have done it that way. No matter what happened, his voice would have been heard if he were the one in charge of speaking his mind. Whatever other shortcomings he had, getting his point across was never a problem.

I left, thinking that the long struggle back through the crooked hallways would wear me out, but I exited the palace fairly brimming with excess energy, as though I’d been caught in a fight and sent home before the knives had even been drawn. My hands were shaking, my cheeks hot. I decided to walk back to the Airman, as the weather was fair, and besides which I’d seen too much of the city from carriage windows of late. Perhaps I would feel more at home in Thremedon if I truly immersed myself in it once more; it was an approach that couldn’t hurt.

Before I’d even passed very far from the palace I stopped again. Something was bothering me, and it took a moment to realize that it was the memory of the Provost’s curious meeting with th’Esar. What snatches I’d heard of their conversation rose clear into my mind, and I turned my head toward the sun.

The stark, proud lines of the Basquiat stood off in the distance, serene shape belying the true chaos surrounding it if what I’d heard hadn’t been an exaggeration.

Perhaps it was a desire to speak with Marius, who was often at the Basquiat late into the day, or perhaps it was that I didn’t wish to face Rook with my stubborn and unexpected defense of him still ringing in my ears. For whatever reason, I turned around and headed in the direction of the Basquiat.

I hadn’t noticed it before from the window of the carriage, probably because I was so wrapped up in thinking about Rook and of what I would say to th’Esar, but I did now: the people keeping their distance, huddling together in small groups and whispering about a plague, or about th’Esar covering something up. That there was nerve enough for this sort of talk in broad daylight, on the streets no less, told me more than I thought I wanted to know. When I cut through the Rue d’St. Difference, I saw a woman crying in a hat shop, and when I doubled back for having come too close to Charlotte, I came upon the ’Versity Stretch, as busily populated as I’d ever seen it. It was as though everyone was out of doors instead of in, and when I stopped a girl on the street to ask, she shook her head.

“Most of our professors have gone off sick,” she explained. “At least I think that’s what they say it is. The explanation was actually surprisingly vague.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Yes,” she replied. “Only it’s sort of funny that the lot of them would have gone off sick all at once, don’t you think? It’s got a bit of a stink to it.”

I knew—as she was a student of the ’Versity—that if I didn’t make my escape now, I’d be there three hours listening to her particular theory on what had happened. Feeling rude but desperate, I quickly thanked her, then went along my way, picking up my pace as I came to the familiar turn of Whitstone Road that would lead me straight to the Basquiat.

If asked, I couldn’t have said what I was rushing for, but I thought that it was something more than a student’s curiosity or interest in a problem unsolved.

The Basquiat was almost too colorful, although I’d heard that it had come about as a disagreement between the founders, and that in order to please everyone they had simply used each suggestion of color that had been presented. The result was something spectacularly striking, which I suspected was what they’d been after in the first place. The seven domes atop its staggering towers were no two the same. Some were done in swirling patterns, and others had the checkered effect of a chessboard. The largest dome—not the topmost, but the largest—was a hollow onion of pure gold, and beneath it was the open tower magicians used to chart the weather or converse with the falcons. The center tower was a round room with arched windows that stretched from floor to ceiling, and it was here that the members of the Basquiat met. At ground level there were two doors, one large and perfectly centered and the other smaller, framed by a pointed capstone and off to one side.

This was the entrance for nonmembers of the Basquiat, and the one I saw the people crowding around before I’d even managed to get close enough.

No one, I saw, seemed to be using the official door, though when I neared it there was someone sitting there on the steps in front of it. His hair looked a little long—it was in his eyes—and he had drawn his knees up to his chest in what appeared to be abject misery. It was hard to place him without his eager smile and tentative kindness, but I thought all at once that I knew him.

“Excuse me, is that . . . Hal?”

His head flew up so fast that I half expected to hear his neck pop, and he blinked at me for a moment before I saw the flicker of recognition pass through his red-rimmed eyes. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days.

“I—It’s Thom, isn’t it?” His voice caught on something, faltering and wretched.

I felt again the unfamiliar kinship I had when we’d met in the bathroom, or perhaps it was simply that here was a person as miserable as I was, and in him I recognized some likeness of myself.

“It is,” I said, and moved to sit next to him on the stair.

“Oh,” he said, and sniffed as though he had a cold. “It’s good to see you again. I thought I’d offended you at the party. I didn’t mean to. If I did, I’m very sorry.”

I didn’t know where to begin. Should I start by telling him the fault was obviously mine, or that there were clearly more important things on his mind than some foolish fit of temper I’d had at th’Esar’s ball? I settled for reaching out to place a hand on his shoulder.

“Have you been here long?” I asked.

He nodded, and I saw his throat work for a moment as though he were trying to keep from crying. “It’s Royston,” he said at last. “Margrave Royston. I had a letter. It told me that he’s here, only I don’t know how to—They’ve said I’m not to see him.”

I felt a sweeping rush of sympathy, imagining what I would do if anyone had tried to tell me I had to stay away from Rook, even though I’d tried to tell myself that very thing time and time again. Besides which, it wasn’t the same situation at all. For one, this was clearly more serious. Anyone at all could see there was something being kept secret within the walls of the Basquiat. Having no idea what that secret could possibly be made it worse, not to mention the rumors I’d heard, the missing professors, the talk along ’Versity Stretch.

At once, with what wits I had left, I endeavored to think about this logically. “Hal,” I said, “what did your letter say?”

He smiled faintly, but there was no spirit, no heart at all, in the expression. “I thought there might be some clue, but it said no more than I told you. The Margrave Royston is here and he is not receiving visitors at this time. When I came here—I came here straightaway; I only received the letter this morning—there were others. It’s just as you see it. They’re not letting anyone who isn’t a magician enter, and we’ve seen no one at all come out again.” He drew a deep breath; I saw his mouth tremble and twist, and I knew he was on the verge of tears. He’d already been crying: his eyes showed me that. “I spoke with a young woman—her father’s within, she told me, or so it was written on her letter. She said that he told her once of a different entrance, a secret one, but as secrets go it may be better hidden than what’s happening to the magicians being kept inside there. But all I can do is sit here, useless and crying.”

“Come,” I said gently, resting a hand on his shoulder. “Shall we talk to the young woman you spoke to? It seems she knows more than we.”

“She doesn’t like to be interrupted,” Hal replied. “She’s much too busy threatening people. I only got a moment of her time, because she seemed to know what she was talking about—her rights as kin—but then, I’m not kin at all. I’m just—” He bit off without warning and shook his head almost savagely, and I gave his shoulder what I hoped was a reassuring squeeze. It was quite possible that it wasn’t anything of the sort, but it seemed to steady him somewhat. “I’m sorry,” he said at length. “I’m—I believe the phrase is at my wit’s end, and that’s exactly how it feels. At the end of my wits; at the end of everything.”

“I don’t blame you,” I said.

“I just—I don’t know what to do,” Hal whispered helplessly. He turned blue eyes on me, clear and pale and worlds apart from Rook’s icy blue. There was no guile at all in Hal’s eyes; the only bruise upon their clarity was sadness and fear. “I only know that I must do something. He’d . . . he’d do the same for me. Only he knows everyone. He’d go to his connections, he’d find a way, whereas I haven’t even been here a month. You’re the only person I know. It’s almost funny that I’ve run into you. The city is so big, I wouldn’t think—”

It was a cruel thing to offer Hal hope when chances were there wasn’t any, but I felt a sort of twinge, familiar as it was foreign from my days at the ’Versity, and I gently tuned him out. The beginning of a plan was forming in my mind. It was inspiration; it was a thesis.

“Hal,” I said. He must have noticed the change in my voice, the trembling excitement of something we might do, for he looked up at once, his expression a thousand forms of pleading: all of them desperate that I could help. “I don’t want to promise you anything I can’t deliver,” I continued, trying to temper that excitement, “but I am your connection in the city. I’ve just been to speak with th’Esar,” I said, close and private that no one else would hear us. “Something is happening—something is happening here. He wouldn’t listen to me because I’m not anyone he needs to listen to, but he’ll listen to the Dragon Corps. They’re his Dragon Corps.”

“Oh,” Hal said, quite breathlessly. “You can—I’d forgotten you know them. Can you do that?”

I paused for a moment to ask myself the very same question.

The answer was no, or at least probably not. But it wasn’t just for Hal’s sake that I’d be asking them to help; it was also for their own sakes, and the sakes of their dragons. Surely if I phrased it in that way—surely if I told Rook it was the only way they’d listen to him about Havemercy, which wasn’t entirely a lie—then at least I could give Hal the reassurance of a little knowledge. Not knowing what had happened to the Margrave was clearly driving him mad with misery, and his was a truly guileless face. I couldn’t simply leave him there, sitting on the steps of the Basquiat, the rumors sending him further into the depths of worry and his own traitorous imagination.

“Come,” I said, standing and offering him a hand. “We’ll find a way.”

He took my hand and stood, but then he hesitated, looking back at the Basquiat over his shoulder. “What if something happens?” he asked. “What if they open the doors? What if they start letting people in?”

I thought of the Provost’s words of caution, of th’Esar’s expression. I thought of the Volstov’s iron fist, the curtain that Thremedon drew over the most important of her dealings.

“They won’t,” I told him. “This is your best recourse.”

“My only recourse,” Hal replied. He paused for a moment, weighing the matter at hand, then squared his jaw. “Yes, I’ll come with you. It’s—Royston would do it, were it the other way around.”

I gave his shoulder another squeeze, then we left the Basquiat behind. Hal didn’t look back.

Once we were out on Whitstone Road I flagged a hansom and told the driver there was an extra tournois in it if he’d get us to the Airman faster than if we were flying a dragon.

“Sir has a way with words,” the driver said.

It was the most uncomfortable, jostling ride I’d ever experienced, for the driver was a man of his word, and when we arrived not half an hour later, I was covered all over in bruises. And, I suspected, Hal was as well.

“Should I,” Hal asked, hesitating at the door, “wait out here?”

I thought of how cruel the airmen could be when faced with a stranger. I’d had theories on why once—their distrust of the rest of the world which, I’d argued, they needed in order to foster a disproportionate trust among one another. It was their mechanism: the corps against the rest of the world. It was what allowed them to be so deadly and so fierce. I’d sought to condemn this behavior once, but now I was less sure if they weren’t in some ways, at least, partially justified—especially in light of what was happening right now in the rest of the city.

The last thing Hal needed was to be mistreated at their hands, for in order to be pilots of such precision and mercilessness, most of them had severed their ties to any empathy with which they’d been born. The system required this of them, but nevertheless it was a fact of life inside the Airman’s walls.

At the same time, it would be perhaps just as cruel to leave Hal out here to wait as we discussed things within. It would place him in much the same position he’d been in earlier, sitting outside alone in front of the Basquiat, enduring an interminable wait.

“You’d best come,” I decided. “Stay close, and say nothing. If you’re lucky, they’ll barely acknowledge you—and I’ll need all the information you have to hand about what’s happening at the Basquiat. It may be what convinces them to act.”

“If something is happening to the magicians,” said Hal astutely, “then the Dragon Corps may be next.”

Best not to phrase it like that, I thought, but they were smart enough to deduce that for themselves, and the unspoken threat might indeed inspire them to rally together and approach th’Esar with their complaints.

I was pleased to note that I did know a little about Rook by this point, a specialized sort of knowledge. At the very least, I understood enough about him to be certain of this: that he wouldn’t fight a war for anyone so long as he felt vital pieces of information were being kept from him by those in charge.

When I thought of Rook in the air, piloting a dragon that he said was “off,” I wanted to be ill.

The Airman was quiet, for it was early yet, and no man was yet awake and arguing over the coffee or the tea. I bid Hal sit down on the edge of my couch, told him I’d gather the others despite how dangerous a game it was to wake them, then started for Rook’s room.

It was my only recourse.

I was not even halfway down the hall when his door opened and he stepped out. “You’re fucking loud,” he snapped at me. “There’s men trying to sleep here.”

That was his way of asking me how I’d fared. I drew close to him, for I knew how angry he’d be if anyone overheard us. “Th’Esar refused to listen,” I began, but he cut me off with an angry sound.

“I knew it,” he said. “I knew you’d be fucking useless.”

“Listen,” I said to him. “Please—listen to me for only a moment.”

He folded his arms over his chest and gave me exactly the sort of look—impersonal, uncaring, almost amused by how useless I was—that so shattered me. You’re my brother, I wanted to say, but my tongue and throat blocked the words, and I couldn’t.

“Fine,” he said at last. “Spit it out.”

“There’s something happening in the city,” I said, wincing that I could phrase those words easily enough, but not the others. “Something very important. I’m not sure entirely what the details are, but there are magicians being kept quarantined in the Basquiat, and their families told of their whereabouts but denied permission to see them. The Basquiat is locked up tighter than—” I flushed for a moment. “Tighter than th’Esar’s safe,” I finished, changing tack halfway through the metaphor. “Some are believing foul play. Some sort of cover-up.”

Rook snorted. “Magicians,” he said. “Fucking magicians, always fucking magicians. They don’t have anything to do with us.”

I licked my lips and shook my head. “That’s untrue and you know it,” I said. “Magicians built your dragon—all the dragons. It’s their magic upon which the dragons run.”

Rook mulled it over for a while, toying idly with a loose thread at his sleeve. His chest was still bandaged—a direct result, I was beginning to think, of whatever game it was th’Esar was currently playing with the corps. I felt like a common shadow puppet, and I knew that if Rook were to feel this way too, he would be spurred to some kind of action. It was my job—my duty as his brother—to make sure he acted effectively, in a way from which he might benefit.

At length, Rook said, “So you’re thinking this problem with Have—”

“Is related to whatever’s happening with the magicians,” I concluded.

“So you’re thinking,” Rook said again, “that if we figure out what’s going on with the magicians, then we’ll figure out what to do about Have.”

“Something of the sort,” I confirmed. “Exactly.”

He looked me up and down, not entirely appreciative, but at least as though he considered me actually there, which was a step up from where we’d been a few moments before.

“You’re too fucking smart for your own good,” he said. “You know that?”

I shrugged. “Th’Esar wouldn’t listen to me. He has no reason to.”

“But he’ll listen to us,” Rook said. “We’re the fucking Dragon Corps. I’ll go get the boys.”

A shiver ran down my spine, unbidden and fleeting. I felt as I imagined the Ke-Han magicians must have felt when using their skills with the weather: as though I’d unleashed into the world something impossibly feral and beyond my control.

I hoped that I was doing the right thing. I would have liked to believe that I was doing it for Hal, to aid his cause as best I could, but the curious stirrings of unexpected loyalty I’d felt toward the Dragon Corps in th’Esar’s presence hadn’t diminished since I was dismissed.

I knew that it was my brother’s doing, this strange unprecedented suicide I’d committed, for if ever th’Esar found out I’d betrayed him, it would be my head.

In some ways I considered it my own small way of apologizing for the things I couldn’t say—and it was then that I realized I was stupider and crazier than Rook had ever been.