Steelhands

by Danielle Bennett

  “I’m sorry,” he said, turning to Laure, “I didn’t mean to interrupt anything. I only saw the pair of you standing here and I thought I’d come over.”

  “No harm done,” said Old Drake, setting Laure’s bag back down at her feet. However tempting a catch we might’ve been before—a deceptively peaceful young woman and myself, posing no real physical threat—this newcomer was clearly a discouragement to whatever Old Drake had planned for us. “Welcome to the three ladies, and here’s hoping your visit’s a prosperous one.”

  He offered a funny little bow and a tip of his hat—the threads at the top had come undone and it flapped like an ugly, open mouth—and melted back into the crowd. At last, I felt the ice in my chest begin to thaw, even if the rest of me was still quite chilled.

  “Are you heading toward the ’Versity?” asked our savior, pushing his hair from his eyes. He was wearing thick woolen gloves of an unassuming gray that matched his eyes, and his winter coat had clearly seen better days, but he was also divinely handsome. He could have comfortably worn anything in the milliner’s shop and still carried it off marvelously.

  Some people simply had such complexions.

  “We are,” Laure said, shooting a look toward me that suggested she knew exactly what I was thinking. If only she had not always been quite so discerning! “Thank you. Your timing is … particularly apt.”

  “Oh, that,” said the young man, ducking his head. “Well, I didn’t want to say anything in front of him, but it seemed like you might need some help if that’s not too presumptuous. I’m Gaeth, by the way. Heading to the ’Versity meself.”

  “Laurence,” said Laure, holding out her hand instead of dropping a curtsy the way I’d expressly shown her. “And this is Toverre. We thought we’d do some looking around the city, but I think perhaps we should take that as a sign to move on.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Gaeth said, shaking her hand. “And your friend. Is … is everything all right with him?”

  I realized I’d been caught staring and promptly changed strategies, busying myself with my own suitcases to make sure everything was in order, and also since it was evident that Gaeth would want to help Laure with hers. It was a clumsy tactic, at best, but the tips of my fingers and toes were beginning to go numb from the cold and I wasn’t operating at my best. Here I’d thought we might have a few days of being equally alone and unappreciated in the city. That showed how little I knew.

  “Here, I can take that,” Gaeth said, appearing before me to tug the leather case from my hands.

  “That’s not necessary,” I said quickly, voice snapping. It wasn’t at all the handsome rejoinder I’d had planned. Perhaps I was smarting slightly from the implication that I was Laure’s “simple” companion—though I supposed that was what I got for not responding in the first place. “Surely you have your own bags to tend to.”

  “Got them sent ahead to my room,” Gaeth said, hefting my bag over one shoulder as though it were filled with nothing more substantial than straw. “ ’Course, I haven’t been to my room yet, so I’ve got to hope they’re there at all.”

  “That was smart of you,” Laure piped up, handing over one of her own bags gladly before she picked up the other. “I wish I’d thought of that.”

  “My mam arranged it all,” Gaeth said, starting off down the street with Laure and leaving me to struggle after them. At least he’d taken the heavier of my bags. In the city, one could be grateful for saviors and small miracles.

  Thick clouds had begun to form in the sky above us. Despite Old Drake’s more nefarious intentions, perhaps he hadn’t been lying about the weather. I was looking forward to spending the winter months in something warmer and finer than an old barn converted to extra housing. No matter how Father insisted it had been properly insulated—and that a real man should have no trouble with it even if it were not—there were terrible drafts from all corners, and the bathroom always smelled stubbornly of horse no matter how many hours I spent cleaning it.

  Here in Thremedon, I would have my own space, and I could give it a smell of my choosing. Exotic incense from a merchant bartering in Ke-Han goods would be quite daring, I thought. It might even make me the talk of the dormitories, though I hadn’t yet decided what sort of reputation I wished to cultivate among my peers. Something remarkable, of course, and one that had nothing to do with dragging my suitcases along the cobblestones after my fiancée and someone who looked like an artist’s dream. Were he chiseled from marble, surely, the craftsman would throw down his tools and cease to work ever again. He represented the absolute pinnacle of someone’s ideal, and I was not about to allow Laurence to scare him away as she did all the others, with her peculiar cleverness or with her fists, depending on the sort of mood she was in that day.

  “It is a boy’s name,” she was saying, as I drew nearer. “If you think that’s bad, you should’ve seen me before my father let me dress myself. Nothing but cotton shirts and trousers my entire life. This is the longest my hair’s ever been, too. Just lucky the notice came when it did, or else I’d’ve looked a fine fool among all these fancy ladies.”

  “I’m sure that isn’t the case,” Gaeth said. He seemed just slightly uncomfortable. It was inevitable, of course. Laure brought people together, regardless of class or age, in that they were all to some degree put off by her candid nature.

  “Toverre told me so,” she confirmed most traitorously.

  “Well,” Gaeth said, stopping in front of a simple doorway. “Here we are.”

  The bottommost step was crumbling, and all the paint worn off the knob. The window lowest to the ground was dirty inside, and all cluttered with plants and books. For a moment I had no idea what our newfound savior could possibly be talking about.

  “Here we are where?” I asked, feeling my nose twitch. A marvel, considering how very cold it was.

  “ ’Versity housing for first-years,” Gaeth replied. He fished an envelope from his coat pocket and from it procured a simple key. How magical it all seemed, yet also, how very mundane. “I assume you’ll have to get sorted with your schedules and your rooms, but I can help you with your bags, if you need me.”

  “Seeing as how we almost lost them, that’d be nice,” Laure said. No doubt he would find it charming that she had not thanked him.

  I could have done so myself, except that I was too busy staring in abject horror at the state of the carpet inside the dormitory building, just past the doorway, where Gaeth was still standing. Boot marks and stains everywhere, and even something that looked like a mess made by a house cat.

  Surely there had to have been some mistake.

  “Are you certain this is the place?” I asked, grateful for the thin, more fashionable gloves I was wearing; they would shield me from whatever lingered on the banister and the doorknob even if they didn’t do their job in the cold.

  “Seems it must be,” Gaeth replied. “You’ve … never been to Thremedon before, have you?”

  “I think it’s more than all right,” Laure said, giving my arm a gentle squeeze. “We’ll just have to get used to it, that’s all.”

  Used to it, I thought in terror, but I could not allow my comrades to see me balk at the idea. It would take all my courage and a day of scrubbing—if my room was in any similar state—but I would be able to manage it. Perhaps there was a common room of some sort that would be in better repair, regularly cleaned if I was lucky. And a little adversity would harden me into the man I intended to become.

  “Used to it,” I repeated, gathering my wits and my breath and my scarf around me before I stepped inside my home for the next full tutoring year.

  BALFOUR

  I was beginning to hate the Arlemagne people more than I’d ever hated the Ke-Han. Yet dirty, strange, and traitorous thought that it was, I continued to harbor it. I was just lucky there was no one around to read it on my face.

  At least my first week in the Airman had taught me how to hide my emotions more than adequately for a collection o
f mere diplomats—although someone would have easily been able to tell what I was thinking had I been sitting with my fellow airmen in the common room. They’d have sensed it even playing darts or exchanging stories of conquest, and suddenly I would have heard my name, Balfour! from Rook or Compagnon or Ace, most likely. Then it would have been Hang his trousers from the window! or perhaps Let’s see what will happen if we set fire to his socks! and all the giggling that usually followed such delightful experiments. Not to mention my need to write home for another pair of socks and trousers. It was always so difficult to explain to Mother.

  I missed it like hell and burning, and I supposed I likely would forever. I was always reminded of them somehow, just as I was of the little scars at my wrist where my skin ended and metal began.

  One of the magicians who’d fitted me for my prosthetics had told me I was suffering from phantom limb—and he was right, though I was also suffering from phantom airmen alongside it.

  Only at present I was suffering from all-too-tangible Arlemagne diplomats more than anything else, and not even rubbing at my wrists under the table could distract me from the gaping despair I suddenly felt. It was hopeless. After all we’d done to Arlemagne, they would never really forgive us.

  At that, I thought of what Rook would have done in my situation—found someone to call a Cindy, insulted a wife or two, and insinuated he had slept with them all and could ride their horses better, too, making everything far worse but at least far more entertaining—and then I smiled from the fond memories it brought because quite obviously I was going insane.

  “Well,” Diplomat Chanteur, a large man with a red nose who had once spat on me by accident while speaking of the troubles involving one of our Margraves and their own Crown Prince, “I am famished from all this talking. Despite what little your people have to offer by means of food, perhaps it is time for us all to lunch?”

  “What a wonderful idea,” I said. “I commend you for your sharp thinking.”

  Privately, I thought to myself that such sharp thinking would have been better appreciated almost two hours ago—about the point at which my stomach finally gave up growling.

  In the Airman, one could have meals at any time one wished to, provided one was also prepared to share one’s meal at least three ways, depending on who was awake at the time. Then there were the boys complaining that there wasn’t enough, that it tasted like pig’s shit, that they’d chipped a tooth and how did I intend to pay for it? Despite all the talk, the bastion could also be silent on occasion; not so with the Airman. So it was not that I preferred providing breakfast and lunch and dinner for men just as picky about their food as the Arlemagne were—and the Arlemagne loathed Volstovic fare, especially Volstovic attempts to serve traditional Arlemagne dishes. Nostalgia hadn’t taken hold of me quite so badly, at least not yet.

  “Don’t commend me,” Chanteur suggested. He stood in his chair; it creaked almost as loudly as his back. “Commend some better chefs, that’s what I say.”

  “My lord,” I told Chanteur, bowing stiffly as he brushed past me on his way out. “It has been a pleasure, as always.”

  What an excellent liar I was.

  The diplomats all filed out after their leader. They were dressed fashionably, a few of them absolutely reeking of perfume. Those who didn’t smelled distressingly of other things—a sharp body odor that reminded me of myself after a particularly grueling flight, only with less oil and more human sweat. I cleared my throat, keeping my head down and my thoughts to myself. When they’d arrived in Thremedon, they’d been expecting a cold winter. What they hadn’t been expecting was a hot room in a bastion tower, and I didn’t envy them their brocade coats and stiff ruffles.

  How I ever managed to be given this position, I had no idea. It was because I wasn’t as slippery as Luvander, who’d managed to wriggle free of all obligations, or as intimidating as Ghislain, who’d said he planned on heading out to sea, and no one, it seemed, felt like arguing with him. Adamo and I had unfortunately been caught up in some bizarre, terrible system of being rewarded as living heroes.

  And as for Rook … I had been informed of his progress here and there by Thom, who seemed to be weathering those troubles with his usual distress and stubbornness.

  “Lost in thought, I see?” a familiar voice said beside me. “Or is it simply that your stomach has digested itself? I’d personally eat a bale of oats right now, fine cooking aside.”

  Now that Thom was gone for parts unknown, fighting his way through the desert and dealing with the discomfort of sand in his trousers, there were few people left in Thremedon I could consider my friends. The man standing in front of me was one of them, I supposed, partly because we’d known each other in school when we were younger, and partly because he’d managed to adopt me diplomatically on my first day of talks. In class, we’d always conducted a particular rivalry for top marks, but in the practice of diplomacy I was at last willing to concede my defeat; his years of experience in the field were more suited for this than my own.

  Even if I sometimes wished I might have conducted the talks from atop Anastasia—then I surely would have had an advantage. At the very least, it might have hurried the pace along.

  Still, in the absence of my dragon, I was glad to have a childhood companion at my side. We’d fallen out of touch when I’d moved to Thremedon and into the Airman and he’d remained in the country, but the years between us didn’t seem to have made things too abruptly awkward. He’d even asked me how I was with only the barest of glances at my hands and never shied away from shaking when we met.

  It was comforting, in its own way.

  “Troius,” I said, smiling this time not because I was thinking of—or like—my old comrades in arms, but rather because of some more present emotion.

  “You still remember my name,” Troius said. “That’s an excellent sign. Quick! To the kitchens, before we lose our minds to starvation.”

  “Were I truly experiencing starvation, I don’t think my first concern would be my mind,” I confessed, falling into step with him despite my better judgment.

  The men from Arlemagne didn’t like to see too many of us conferring together at once. It made them feel plotted against, or so Troius had informed me on our third day of talks when I’d asked him why he didn’t see fit to take his meals with the rest of us. Personally, while I understood the need for diplomacy now more than ever—the war effort was over for the present, but one never knew what the future might hold—I didn’t particularly enjoy all the conceding to Arlemagne comfort.

  But then, I supposed, that was why I had been given this task and not Adamo. I was better bred for it, and my nature was such that—outwardly, at least—I seemed more eager to please.

  I could think of thirteen other men who would never have bothered, though of course it was because of one of them that we had to be so bastion-blasted cautious with the Arlemagne all the time.

  That, and the business with the Arlemagne prince. As far as our foreign friends were concerned—and I use “friends” in the loosest sense of the word—Volstov was the equivalent of a pretty whore and Thremedon what lay beneath her layered skirts. They were humoring us with the talks, perhaps, but they showed no signs of truly respecting us.

  Nor would they send us their royalty again, but that was a different matter. On that front I supposed I didn’t blame them.

  I had learned to live without respect before, and certainly my life would continue without it in the future. Of all the airmen, I was the only one who could count himself a member of the second generation. My brother had died in an air raid against the Ke-Han, brought down somewhere in the skies over Lapis, and it had been all the others could do just to get his dragon back in one piece. That was how they’d explained it to my parents, and again in a letter from the Esar himself—with a painful lack of detail. No body had ever been recovered. It simply wasn’t worth the risk to the other dragons and their riders to try to find him.

  Indeed, Chanteur’s ru
deness paled in comparison to the arsenal of hazing leveled against me once before by the other airmen—vicious, personal reminders that I was not my brother and never would be, as though I hadn’t enough of those on my own. It had been in some ways easier to deal with than the simple grief I’d seen on my parents’ faces, quiet and resigned every time that they remembered I was Balfour, and not someone else entirely.

  By comparison, a blue handprint on the face didn’t seem all that bad. But I wouldn’t miss all the piss in my boots. A man had to have some standards.

  “You look like the dog’s breakfast,” Troius said, steering me through the seemingly endless halls. “Don’t worry, things are bound to look up sooner or later. They can call us a corrupting influence all they like, but their men visit the ’Fans often enough, don’t they? Nothing says hospitality like satin sheets and low lighting. We’ll welcome them into our beds and eventually find places in their hearts.”

  “If that’s the case, then I imagine they’ll want to do some redecorating at the bastion,” I said, trying and failing not to picture it. I had to suppress a curious giggle that did not sound quite like me.

  Diplomatic venues were largely the same in every country, I imagined; all around us were soothing neutral colors and no decorations that could be considered offensive to anyone, no matter what their heritage might be. I’d considered it a privilege when the talks had first started—no one I knew could lay claim to ever having entered the bastion for anything other than criminal charges—and I’d even written a letter to Thom proclaiming as much.

  He was very interested in the procedures, if distracted somewhat by his own diplomatic proceedings with Rook.

  Now all I could really think was that it was much different from a building decorated with naughty portraitures that looked as though they’d been drawn by someone with either very little understanding of anatomy or a generous overestimation of the weight a woman’s back could support. Not to mention, there was no Madeline here. The Airman’s own personal mascot had started out as a papier-mâché bust of someone’s ideal woman but had gradually grown to a full-size mannequin. When the boys had run out of materials, they’d started using Raphael’s books, which I’d always felt lent her a dignified air. There was ancient poetry on her breasts, and a line of translation from the Old Ramanthe over her upper lip that Ghislain always said looked just like a healthy mustache.