CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THOM

The ceremony was set in a long reception room at the palace that had plush red carpeting running down the center of it and chairs on either side where the noblesse sat. Behind them, the higher-ranking officers of the Volstovic army stood. At the very end of the room stood th’Esar himself, and seated next to him was th’Esarina, resplendent in crystal and pure white.

This was ceremonial dress—it had been for generations—and none but a rare few were allowed to see it.

At any other time, I might have felt out of place, but there was no room in my heart or my head for anything except the man standing not quite mended at the back of the room with his fellow airmen.

They were a much smaller group than they’d been before.

As th’Esar read the names, first of the magicians who had given their lives in the final battle, as well as those who had fought and lived, I found my gaze drawn irresistibly to what remained of the Dragon Corps, dressed that afternoon all in black instead of their customary royal blue with the gold epaulettes of their dress uniforms. Balfour held his new hands folded awkwardly in front of him, still not entirely comfortable with the prosthetics the magicians had created for him. Once, I would have been fascinated to know that there were magicians who could employ the same technology they’d invented for the dragons to make prosthetics for a man who’d lost his own hands, but I felt no pleasure now to see the science in action. They shone silver and alien, and a little too big for him, but most poignant of all, I thought, was the fact that he had no gloves that would fit them. Ghislain stood still as a shadow at his side, his arms crossed over his chest. Adamo stood by himself, pointedly ignoring the moment when Luvander slipped in late to stand with the rest of them. He wore a bandage over one eye, and inclined his head toward Ghislain to ask what he’d missed, their mouths moving in near-silent whispers. Every now and then, Ghislain would nudge Rook with his shoulder, to get his opinion, and Rook would scowl the same way each time, knowing full well Ghislain hadn’t forgotten where he was injured and where he wasn’t.

Rook hadn’t spoken to me since we’d set foot in the palace, not even to snap at me for following him watchfully, as though I was afraid his ankle would give out on him at any second. Rather, he ignored me completely and limped to the room where the ceremony was being held, melting in with the other airmen as soon as he arrived and not once looking back.

I told myself it didn’t matter. Acknowledgment was more than I could ask for and I should have been thankful he’d lived at all. It was much more than many people in my situation had been left with.

By rights, being neither a hero nor a soldier, I had no place among those attending, but Rook had made some bitter remark about family, and in the end no one seemed to have noticed me enough to object to my presence. Th’Esar himself even had some misguided impression that I’d done something instrumental in all this mess; that I’d aided Hal or put Hal in position to solve the riddle on his own with barely a second to spare. I wasn’t sure if this was true or not, but as always, there was no arguing with th’Esar. You did as you were told, and kept quiet about it.

That left me here, in this somber, private room, watching Rook, as always, from afar.

I noticed as some of the magicians passed me by that they were dressed all in black, just as the airmen, so that despite the finery of the noblesse and th’Esar and Esarina themselves, the ceremony was ultimately a dark one. The war had ended, and a provisional treaty had been signed, which was more progress than we’d previously made in my lifetime—in several lifetimes—but it had still come at an unimaginable cost. There were so few magicians remaining to us, and no more than the barest remnants of the Dragon Corps, not to mention their dragons. I’d overheard Adamo speaking to the Margrave Royston about it—of the fourteen girls, there were only five who still resembled themselves. Havemercy wasn’t one of them.

When I thought of her in pieces on the other side of the mountains, I felt a distant sadness overtake me. She wasn’t my dragon, and it was often said that, because they were made of metal and machinery, the dragons had no souls at all for us to mourn their passing. But when I recalled Havemercy’s affinity for the dirty jokes Magoughin told, and the sharp, fond way she’d spoken to my brother, I couldn’t help but wish she’d made it through in one piece. If not for her own sake, I added more privately, then for my brother’s.

We were given medals individually; that was the ceremony’s purpose. Mine was a small silver star for services rendered to the crown. Each of the airmen received a golden shield except for Rook, who received two, one of them inlaid with rubies, and the magicians were each given a crescent of ivory. There was no celebrating.

Hal himself was honored separately, and I saw how uncomfortable it made him. There was no precedent for what sort of war medal he should receive, and so th’Esar had chosen to hang about his neck a silver key, which I thought fitting and which made Hal blush to the tips of his ears when he knelt to be decorated with it.

And then, after a period that seemed both as swift as mere minutes and as endless as days, it was done.

Marius caught my sleeve as we began to file out of the room, his hands shakier than usual, but his eyes as clear as they’d ever been before the disease had almost taken him. The sight of his familiar face so overwhelmed me that I was speechless while he fingered my silver star, a rueful smile playing across his lips.

“I told you you’d manage it,” he said at last, clapping me on the shoulder. His voice was still rough from his ordeal in the Basquiat. “There was a time when I assumed I’d been talking out my ass, but I’m glad you’ve proved me wrong.”

I ducked my head to hide the bitter turn my laugh took. “You were right about it,” I said. “It was an opportunity I could never forgive myself for passing over to another.”

“There was no other,” Marius said. “I know you don’t entirely ascribe to my side of the philosophical border, Thom, but these things do happen for their own reasons—and not just because I’m a stubborn old man who was bored with hearing men argue foolishly over what was to be done over a trifling offense.”

“Impatience or fate,” I murmured, too weary to be properly wry. “I wonder which it was?”

“I’d say a combination of both,” Marius offered. “Compromise is all the rage these days.” He paused, then added, “Will I see you back in the ’Versity come spring? We’ve a dearth of keen minds since you left. Though in all fairness, I’m not supposed to say as much out loud to any of my students.”

“You’ll have Hal soon enough,” I pointed out. “Famous throughout all of Volstov.”

“And rightly so,” Marius said. “We all ought to go on missions to the countryside, same as Royston.”

I smiled somewhat more honestly at that. Who knew what friends Marius had lost during this time? I shook his hand in mine, letting the grip linger, and his sharp eyes softened.

“Well,” he said. “Whatever you choose, Thom, I hope it serves you as well as you have served.”

There was nothing I could say to that, and we parted ways soon after, Marius in the company of a red-haired woman named Marcelline, and I alone, wishing I were the sort of man Marius believed I was.

After that afternoon, Rook had something of a relapse, and because he was too feverish to protest, I tended to him. Adamo didn’t object—in fact, there was something in the set of his jaw that seemed to indicate he rather endorsed my stubbornness—but I was too busy tending to Rook to think about it. There were burns along his left side, and there had been some question as to whether or not he’d be able to fight off the infection that had crept into the raw, open wound over his chest. On his back—when I had occasion to see it—was a complicated web of precise, deep cuts, already healed over, that would one day be a map of scars. Those were no battle wounds; he’d suffered them at the hands of the Ke-Han, and every night as I tried to sleep I saw them before me like a tangled maze, out of which I might never find my way.

It was foolish of the other airmen to have let Rook attend the ceremony—though in truth he’d insisted on it—and now he was suffering the effects of that rashness.

“You might not even have the chance to see them unveil your own statue,” I told him one night a few days later, believing him to be asleep.

He grunted, and opened one eye. It was piercing blue, not touched by any fever, and my heart dropped all at once.

“Don’t fucking lecture me,” he said. “You got no right to it.”

He was right, and I turned my face away from him, seeing to the basin of cool water and the wet cloth I’d been using to bring down his fever during the nights, when his temperature inevitably rose.

“No,” I said. “That’s true.”

I could feel his eyes on me a long time after that, even after he’d closed them, and his breathing had evened out into the regular patterns of sleep.

On the fourth morning he was well enough to stand, and though I saw how bitterly he hated to do it, at midday he allowed me to help him to the window, out of which we could see the unveiling. The other airmen were in attendance, and so the Airman itself was once again pervaded by that eerie silence when she was left all to herself. It was all the more eerie for the knowledge that it would never hold the same boisterous noise as once it had, and that the men I’d come to know and even, if only a little, to understand would never return to leave their boots lying in the entranceway, or play their confusing game of darts against the common-room wall, whose paint still bore the pocks and marks of the game. Perhaps it always would.

I hoped, strangely, that no one would ever paint over that smaller tribute to the men who’d lived and died for all of us. In the most complicated of ways, I truly missed them, even if I’d never been their friend at all.

“That big one,” Rook said, startling me out of my reverie. “That one me?”

I turned to him, barely daring to hope—but his face was turned away from mine, caught in a shaft of sunlight, and so beautiful and still as to be a statue himself, though I doubted they’d included on his statue the small scar at the corner of his eye, tearing through his right eyebrow, or the sharp, unhappy line of his mouth.

I longed to embrace him—to be embraced by him in turn. My brother needed me, and could no more reach out for me than he could rebuild his Havemercy. We were on opposite sides of the window from each other.

“I’m not sure,” I replied, careful with my words. “Perhaps, when they return, the others will tell us.”

“Maybe,” Rook agreed, nodding once, and seemed to believe that was final.

I suppose it was.

When he was again well enough to walk on his own and had no more need of me, I still sought to do the littler tasks for him, bringing him his meals when he preferred them and otherwise hovering around his doorway like a moth beside a lamp, just in case he might still require my assistance in some matter. This was how I caught him at packing soon after the unveiling of the statues.

This was also the first time he ever truly invited me inside his room.

“Stop fucking lingering,” he said, rolling up a pair of trousers into a ball and shoving them into a canvas rucksack. “Either get in or get out, but being in between like that can be fucking annoying.”

I chose the former option—how could I not—and slipped inside, closing the door quietly behind me.

“You seem to be leaving,” I said. It was the only thing I could think of, and I knew it was I who needed to speak first.

“Yeah,” Rook agreed. “Looks like, doesn’t it?”

I clasped my hands behind me and dug my nails deep into my palms to find some surer footing. “Is there,” I began, “do you have—any particular destination in mind?”

“Not good to stay someplace where everyone knows what you look like down to the bump in your fucking nose,” he said. “Ghislain told me the statue’s pretty fucking spot on, so I’m taking my corps money and going somewhere else.”

“Oh,” I said. “So you’re going to—travel.”

“That’s what going somewhere else means,” he said.

I couldn’t let him leave; not without saying what I should have said before anything else. “John,” I told him, all in a rush, “I’m sorry.”

He went still for a moment, and I thought he was going to yell. He struggled with something very tight in his jaw, but he seemed suddenly to overcome it, and all he said was, “Yeah. I got that from all the fucking crying.”

“For what I did to you,” I said. “Not for how it turned out for me.”

“Look,” Rook told me then, “ain’t it better just to say we don’t have any brothers anymore? Twenty-one years, for fuck’s sake. Can’t you just let it drop?”

“No,” I replied. The conviction in my voice frightened even me.

“We did some mean fucking things to each other,” Rook said. “And there were times when we pretty near almost did more. I wanted to break your fucking jaw sometimes, or worse.”

I swallowed. “Yes,” I said.

“You lied to me,” he said, and from the roughness of his voice I almost thought he might have meant, And I lied to you, too.

I stared at his poster of Lady Greylace, wondering if he’d take it with him, some small memory from home—but Rook wasn’t the sort of man who indulged in any sentiment, much less nostalgia, the most cloyingly sweet of all. I closed my eyes, pinching the bridge of my nose with my fingers.

“I did,” I said.

Beyond that, I didn’t know what else I felt. I wanted something from him—John, Rook, my brother and the man he’d become—but it was such a jumble of emotions I could barely untangle one from the other, not unlike the maze of torture carved into his back.

“Yeah,” he said. “So that’s that, and I’m going.”

We were quiet for a long time, standing on opposite ends of the room together. I was unsure of how to mend myself, but men were resilient creatures, and somehow we might both manage it, given enough time. Rook was going to see the world. I was going back to my studies at the ’Versity. We might yet find each other again, even if it took another twenty-one years.

I could barely swallow my own excuses, but I forced myself to do so.

“Perhaps,” I said, my voice shaking despite my best efforts, “you might send me a card in the post.”

“Care of,” he said. “Maybe.”

“When are you leaving?” I asked.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said. “Got myself a ride and everything.”

I made my excuses and took my leave of him before I did or said anything rash. If Rook was going, then there was no more reason for me to stay in the Airman. I had to rearrange the pillow on the couch, dig the last of my notes from underneath the cushions. I was missing a few socks—part of one of the earlier pranks, no doubt, and one which I’d never got around to realizing until now—and then I sat down all at once as my legs gave way beneath me and cried at last in the common room for all the times I hadn’t.

No one came in; no one saw me. It was as private as I’d ever managed to be in the Airman, now that I no longer required such privacy.

Because I was so tired—because I’d been unable to sleep properly for weeks—I must have drifted off, and when I woke it was early morning, my whole body stiff from the uncomfortable position I’d been curled into all night long.

I combed my hair with my fingers. My suitcase was already packed; I was already wearing my shoes. I paused only for a moment by Rook’s door, but it was quiet inside and no light spilled out from underneath it, and I knew immediately he was already gone.

That was it, then, I told myself, and squared my shoulders against the change. I would have to write Chief Sergeant Adamo, now ex–Chief Sergeant Adamo, a letter of thanks; and shorter ones for each of the other airmen, Ghislain and Luvander and Balfour. It was a small gesture, and one by which they’d like as not be baffled, but I was certain I needed to bow to the formality of the moment, as if by treating my time with the Dragon Corps as a chapter in my life I could just as easily end it as one.

Except for Rook—John—who was sitting on the stairs when I opened the door. I nearly fell over him before I caught my balance.

The sun was rising from the direction of the Cobalt Mountains, rising properly now, and the whole sky was alight without any hint of the grayish color of predawn.

“So, Hilary,” Rook said, “where’re we going?”

I closed my eyes and let the sunlight wash over me. “I’ve always wanted to see the hanging gardens of Eklesias,” I said.

Rook stood up and shifted his sack more comfortably over his right shoulder. “I don’t even know where the fuck that is,” he said.

 

ROYSTON

Things had changed, and they also hadn’t. For some time since the unveiling, there was talk of tearing the Airman down now that it no longer served a purpose, and popular opinion had long been that the building was a blight on the architecture of Thremedon, flat and too modern and entirely out of place. Yet no one ever quite got down to doing anything about it, and it went on standing solid and gray as a mausoleum, a testament to the Dragon Corps in its own way.

The view from the Rue d’St. Difference was different now that there were statues lining the crossing between lower Miranda and upper Charlotte. I couldn’t walk my usual route home from the Basquiat without seeing all fourteen of them, which I supposed was the intention when it was decided they should be erected there. Nevertheless, it was still jarring to see the faces of men I’d known magnified and elevated to the status of war heroes.

In that respect, I was exactly like Hal: not entirely prepared to deal with the realities of living in a time when the statues were freshly built rather than hundreds of years old.

On the days when Adamo wasn’t giving guest lectures at the ’Versity, “like some fucking professor” as he so adeptly phrased it, we would meet occasionally for lunch, and it was during these times that I took full advantage of the opportunity to compare him to his larger bronzed counterpart.

“He’s taller than you,” I said, signaling our waitress in the hopes of speeding up the service of our coffees. If there had been a statue of me set along the Mirandaedge, I was sure this wouldn’t have been a problem, yet Adamo refused to use his fame toward such petty ends as obtaining a decent and expeditious cappuccino. How very like him. “And handsomer, certainly.”

“You’re sure you didn’t lose your eyesight in that plague?” Adamo drank his coffee any way it was served, and particularly if it was black, which forced me on occasion to wonder why we were even friends at all.

“That was quick,” I said. “Perhaps your time at the ’Versity hasn’t been wasted after all.”

He shrugged easily, though there was still darkness in his eyes when he turned to look at the line of statues all along the Rue. “After dealing with my boys,” he said, “talking to a bunch of students who’re actually interested in what you’ve got to teach ’em isn’t really much of a challenge.”

“Oh, don’t be so sour just because you’ve found your true calling so late in life,” I told him, and laughed when he brought his teaspoon down hard against my knuckles. “Bastion, look at the hat on that one.”

Just as the Ke-Han in their lapis city, we were rebuilding. It was a slow enough process even without the daunting task of restoring destroyed buildings to their former glory—something the Ke-Han alone must suffer—but there were some days when I believed us up to the task, and some when I suspected I would never see my city fully recovered. Between the loss of the airmen and what colleagues I’d bid farewell to beneath the golden dome, it seemed as though there was no replacing what we’d lost. There were days when I could no longer look at the Basquiat without remembering, and it had once been my favorite sight in all the city.

At my suggestion, Hal and I went on long walks around the city, and I pointed out the best places to go for a quick meal in between daily lectures, or where he might drop in to a private library if he needed to study in real peace and quiet.

“And I just follow Whitstone Road to get to you?” he asked on one such walk, when we stood side by side in front of the ’Versity fountain, sun dappling the water so that it arced like molten gold in all directions.

“That will take you to the Basquiat,” I confirmed, and slipped an arm about his shoulders for no other reason than that I wanted to and could.

He fished for something under his shirt at the neck, and drew out the silver key the Esar had given him with a glad look of triumph. “This time, they can’t keep me out.”

“I would use my Talent to explode anyone who had the gall to try,” I confirmed, and he kissed me then in front of the spray, so that by the time we were finished we were most unfortunately damp.

For the first time I could remember, there were empty seats in the Basquiat, but there were familiar faces too, and more than I’d dared to count on. The handy trick about doing a service for royalty was that they couldn’t turn around and banish you once again after they’d made a public acknowledgment and handed out the medals.

Among the magicians I’d known before the plague, Caius remained, and though I was sure Alcibiades would rather have spat on us than join our numbers, I did see him about the city every now and again, mostly with groups of men who I assumed had been soldiers once. There was talk of erecting some sort of a monument for those magicians who had died during the plague, and when after a few weeks it became evident that no one was particularly keen on reentering the room at the top of the golden-domed tower, it was cordoned off. One of the magicians with a Talent for sculpting stone carved an uncanny likeness of their faces around the walls, and though I’d visited it with Hal when it had first been opened to the public, I found I couldn’t bring myself to go again after that.

What had started as a plan to acclimatize Hal to the winding streets of Miranda unofficially became his habit of walking me to and from the Basquiat every day, pointing out everything I’d showed him with the kind of tenacious memory and eagerness to learn that I knew would serve him well at the ’Versity. I’d been right to bring him to the city, and not only because he’d saved all of our lives in the process.

Hal belonged in Thremedon; he belonged with me.

I’d never before been a man prone to permanence. In that respect, I was much the same as the city herself, for even with all her familiar landmarks she was constantly shifting just below the surface. For the most part, her appearance remained the same, but she was always changing just enough to keep me on my toes. I, too, felt myself in constant flux, adapting to her whims and pleasures. For Thremedon, it would not have been a problem to remain ever so in this permanent state of mutability, but I was a man, and there were some things that for me must necessarily remain constant if I were ever to remain this content.

One afternoon, barely half a week before the spring term began at the ’Versity, I returned home to my private tower to find Hal waiting for me on the top step. In one hand he held a long roll of fine paper—I recognized it immediately for a list of required texts—and an envelope in the other, its ’Versity seal broken. His cheeks were flushed from the brisk nip of late winter air.

“It’s so long!” he exclaimed, as soon as he saw me. “How am I ever to find all these books? I thought I’d start early, but I’ll never be done!”

I drew close to him, giving the list a brief glance. “You’ll find,” I said gently, “if you look at the titles a second time, while better composed, that you are familiar with at least half of them. If you wait a moment while I fetch my wallet, we shall visit the shops together, and I’m sure by the end of the day we’ll have them all.”

“Thank you,” Hal said simply.

There was a wealth of feelings in his words, which extended far beyond the moment. I found it necessary just then to turn my face away from his, and in doing so I found myself faced with all of Thremedon descending before me toward the water, the uneven rooftops catching the clean sunlight through crisp, bracing air. This was my city, beautiful and dangerous and twisting and coy, and I knew in that moment that I had at last come home to her.