Steelhands

by Danielle Bennett

  Not likely, I told myself, fingering the soft cotton, feeling fond despite myself.

  “Ah, well,” Toverre said, clearing his throat. “Those are … not my mother’s. I didn’t think you’d approve of that; it’s hardly proper. But I simply couldn’t have you tramping around Thremedon with trousers under your skirts, Laure; it’s beastly. I gather these are what the women use here—woolen stockings and extra petticoats and the like. They’ll be serviceable and they won’t make your legs look like tree trunks, which is a great disservice to your legs, considering what a fine shape they are.” On that last note, he almost sounded jealous, I thought. I shook out the green pair of stockings, their empty feet dangling with a knot of thread at each toe.

  “Nice save,” I told him, not really annoyed. I knew already I’d be heading into the city with him even in spite of the way he’d asked me. It was hard to be angry with someone who’d just given you a nice, thoughtful gift, and maybe he’d planned it that way, but that didn’t really seem like Toverre. The present itself was Toverre all over, though, finding a way to insult me just before he made me realize he’d been thinking this whole time about my problem and what might make me more comfortable.

  He was as sweet as a hand-raised dove when he wanted to be, though at first I’d thought of him more like a hawk, wild and strange and ready to turn on you and claw your eyes out at any moment. There was also his nose, hooked like all those of the other members of his father’s family, but I’d never thought of that as a flaw, really. It did somehow make him look handsome.

  “You’ll have to leave so I can get changed,” I told him, clasping the green set to my chest. I knew he’d approve of the choice, since he was always going on and on about how the right greens made my eyes look like something more than the gray we both knew they really were. It didn’t seem all that important to me, since they were going on under my skirts, but I knew it was the kind of thing that’d put him at ease.

  “I’ll turn around,” Toverre said, facing the fireplace. “But if you think I’m going back out into that hall to wait, you’ve taken leave of your senses.”

  “I didn’t actually think that,” I admitted.

  “I know,” Toverre replied. “You’re always very clever.”

  “Thank you,” I said as sincerely as I knew how. “It’s a wonderful present.”

  Toverre’s shoulders stiffened and I imagined him scowling fiercely, though since he’d turned to stare into the fire, I couldn’t actually see his face.

  “You’re welcome,” he said after a moment’s silence. “Just hurry up and put them on. I need to know right away if something doesn’t fit.”

  He didn’t have to tell me twice. Lingering would’ve only meant spending more time half-naked in my room, which was feeling colder and colder day by day, what with the absence of the plate in the chimney. I was going to have to do something about that, maybe try to keep the fire lit all the time, but that didn’t seem too practical. And I could always put the plate back—now that it was clear to me why someone had put it up the chimney in the first place.

  I was probably the only girl in Thremedon tonight getting undressed with her fiancé in the room and thinking about fireplaces.

  It hadn’t always been like this between Toverre and me. I’d liked him fine while we were growing up, of course, and when I’d heard about the arrangement our families had made I’d counted myself pretty lucky, given my other options. Sure, Toverre was as mad as a badger in winter and not as slow-moving, but he was kind and we got along and he didn’t have a nose like a fat red tomato like Ermengilde’s fiancé had. And he’d never once tried to look down my blouse. I hadn’t known the reasons for that then, of course, but he seemed pretty ideal to me at the time.

  On top of that, it was funny to get mud on him and watch him run home crying.

  One night, during one of Da’s dinner parties when all the young ones were left to their own devices, I’d even gotten undressed for Toverre on my own inspiration, with him watching. I’d stolen some of the wine from the cellar and dressed myself in one of my mam’s old corsets because I already knew it made me look particularly grown-up—which really meant that it pushed my breasts together and up in a way that men seemed to find near impossible to resist. We were going to be married, I’d reasoned, and Toverre had said he was all right with it—even implied he was looking forward to the ceremony, that rotten liar—but the look on his face after I’d unlaced my top told me everything I ever needed to know.

  We did spend the night together after that, though I’m sure it wasn’t what either of us had been expecting. Toverre lay with his head on my chest instead, and told me all about the boy his mother had hired to work in the stables.

  I’d liked him, too, because he knew how to handle the horses and didn’t boast about it.

  In the morning, I’d realized I wasn’t heartbroken, just extremely embarrassed, and Toverre and I had finally decided that in order for our friendship to continue as it was, we’d never speak about that night again. Also, I wouldn’t throw mud at him anymore. I’d agreed to the latter only because we were too old for it by that point. All in all, making that big mistake of mine had made us closer, if not in the specific way that I’d intended, and when I heard that stableboy laughing with the blacksmith about Toverre’s obsessive cleaning two weeks later, I stopped liking him and gave him a bloody nose for it.

  Even if Toverre didn’t love me the way I’d wanted him to—the way a husband should love his wife—Toverre and I were in this together. If anyone ever did come along—if they managed to run the gauntlet of Toverre’s complete insanity and come out unscathed—then they were going to have to go through me, too. And if anyone in this city so much as looked at my crazy fiancé cross-eyed, then they were going to find themselves with my fist in their face.

  It was an indelicate thought, so I kept it to myself. I didn’t want to be sending Toverre into fits of fainting on top of everything else. Poor thing probably thought he knew how to take care of himself, but he definitely didn’t.

  Speaking of which, he was fidgeting by the fireplace like an impatient child, checking his pocket watch, tapping it exactly three times on the right side, then sliding it carefully back into his pocket. I did up the final laces in the front of my dress, tugged at the skirts, and turned around. The woolen underclothes were much more comfortable than wearing pants underneath my dress had been, and I could already see that they made everything look sleeker. They weren’t even as itchy as I’d expected, either.

  “Huh,” I said out loud, looking down at myself.

  “What is it?” Toverre asked, not turning around. “You’ve put them on backward, haven’t you? I just know it.”

  “I was going to say they look wonderful, but now you’ve ruined it,” I told him, smoothing out my skirts. “The boots fit, too.”

  “I thought they would,” he said, glancing over his shoulder—like he was afraid I might be wearing nothing but the boots and undergarments, and I guess he had his reasons to watch out for something like that—before turning to face me at last. “You and Mother are the same size in most respects. Not up there, of course, but your shoes.”

  “Watch it,” I told him, tugging on my coat to discourage any more talk of my bosom. This coat was the one piece of clothing I knew would always pass muster, because Toverre had bought it for me as a gift last winter. Big buttons, high collar, a deep bottle green, and all of it very flattering. No doubt he’d tell me it was going out of style soon enough, but until then I was planning on wearing the hell out of it.

  “Guess I’m ready,” I said, holding out my arm to him.

  Toverre tugged on his sleek gray gloves, reaching out to touch the doorknob the way most people picked a rat out of a trap.

  With the help of a map he’d procured somewhere, we made our way to the Amazement, Thremedon’s theater and entertainment district. It was close to the ’Versity Stretch, but not too close; students probably didn’t need any extra distracting, I wa
s coming to realize, with a stack of books up to my waist to get through in the next two months.

  Toverre wasn’t planning for us to take in any shows, of course, but wanted instead to “drink in the sight of the people who were.” The sun hadn’t yet set fully, but the skies were growing dark, and the streetlights had all begun to glow faintly in the dusk. It was pretty as new snow in the country, and that was before we came to the row of theaters proper, with their establishments lit up in all different arrangements of color, each proclaiming why its show was the only one you should think of seeing.

  Men in sharp, dark coats with their collars turned up walked side by side with women in neat little fur hats, heeled boots stepping carefully around the patches of ice littering the streets. And Toverre had been right; they were all matching, down to their gloves and their muffs. Some of them even matched the men they were walking with. There were some men walking together, of course, and even women alone with no chaperones—unheard-of business in the countryside, but something that made me wonder just as much as I was sure the lean young men leaning on one another made Toverre wonder. Or perhaps “wonder” wasn’t the right word for it, but it was exhilarating.

  Even though it was marked clearly on the map as a part of Thremedon, I felt like I’d stepped into another world entirely.

  Close by, a group of children were gathered around a poster with a beautiful young woman painted on it. The title read CINDERFOLD in garish, snowcapped letters, and, in smaller print, starring Angerona Greylace, but underneath that someone had written a word that made me laugh and Toverre gasp with how dirty it was. So that was what all the young ones were staring at, I realized. Before I knew it, one of them even reached up to pull the poster down, rolling it up and tucking it under his arm as he ran away, followed by the rest of the gawkers.

  “Well,” Toverre said.

  “Think of it as romantic,” I suggested. “Have you ever heard of Angerona Greylace?”

  “Not at all,” Toverre admitted. “But trust me, by tomorrow, I will have. She must be very famous.”

  “For one thing or another,” I replied, a little bit too practical to keep up the pretense of romance any longer.

  Another group of women moved past us then, and they were the sort to give a simple country girl pause, no matter how much she tried not to think about things like how her hair looked or whether her nose was turning red in the cold. They wore little drop earrings and had white powder all over their faces, and I could see how fine their dresses were underneath their light coats. They must have been very cold, and they were practically running as they laughed among themselves—out of one small set of back-alley doors, across the cobblestones, and into another, larger door that opened onto the main street. A sign above the door said it was The Cobble. It appeared to be some kind of eatery, judging by the smells that drifted out of it.

  “My educated guess is that they are actresses,” Toverre said simply, with a sniff. “Too much perfume, and one of them was very plain. They can’t possibly play more than supporting roles.” Then, with a mischievous tone I’d never heard him use before, he added, “Let’s follow them.”

  I was all for it, and about to tell him so, but before I could do so, something caught my eye.

  “Hang on,” I said. “Isn’t that Gaeth?”

  I knew it was before Toverre answered—we’d taken enough meals with him, even sat next to him in a few classes, for me to recognize the easy slope of his shoulders, the relaxation of every movement. He was definitely a country boy through and through, but the sort who came from the other side of Nevers, men and women renowned for their comfort in the sunlight and their lazy demeanors. Besides which, I recognized his threadbare gray coat because it was missing part of the collar, like some stubborn horse had bitten a piece out of it.

  Maybe it had, but I couldn’t imagine any animal taking offense at him.

  “Hey there!” I called out, startling a few of the people around me. “Gaeth!” As much as Toverre would be horrified by my clumsy tactics, saying hello to the one person you actually knew in a city as big as this one was only polite.

  Everyone but Gaeth seemed to hear me at first. Then, very slowly, he turned around, like he was waking up from some deep dream.

  “Oh,” he said, as we drew up to him. “Laure. And Toverre. What are you doing all the way out here on a school night?”

  “Couldn’t we ask the very same thing of you?” Toverre demanded, the talons coming out. Apparently having latched onto Hal wasn’t making him any less sharp with Gaeth. I’d never known him to have it out for two people at the same time; I didn’t know whether that made Gaeth lucky or just a real poor son of a bitch. Maybe Toverre was just flustered.

  “Suppose you could,” Gaeth agreed.

  I sought out Toverre’s foot with my own and stepped on it lightly. He winced with his entire body, but for some reason, Gaeth didn’t seem to notice. It had to be that lackadaisical, old-country demeanor, I supposed, but then he’d never seemed as far off as this. Long day, maybe, I thought, and felt a little sorry for him.

  “I was just on my way back from the Crescents,” Gaeth continued without further prompting, like he’d suddenly remembered an important fact. “It’s dormitory protocol, to make sure no fevers make their rounds this early on. Guess, what with people living so close together, that kind of thing’s all too easy.”

  “Is there something going around?” Toverre asked, face suddenly even whiter than before.

  “It’s a precaution,” I told him. Honestly, did he not know how to listen? “I’m sure it’ll be all right.”

  “You’ll be called in soon, like as not,” Gaeth said. “Just a simple blood testing, and nothing else too awful, I’d suspect.”

  “Oh, needles,” Toverre murmured.

  “Barely felt it,” Gaeth said.

  “Some of us have very small veins,” Toverre shot back.

  In an attempt to make sure nothing too awkward happened between them—Gaeth was easygoing enough, but Toverre had a way of provoking even the gentlest of folk—I decided to step in, and in my brand-new boots, no less. “We were just going to get something to eat,” I said, having decided that once my stomach’d started growling only a few moments ago. “You hungry, Gaeth?”

  “She means to ask if you would like to join us,” Toverre corrected. At least he was picking at me now, but I was used to it. I could take it.

  “Maybe another time, hey?” Gaeth suggested. “They said I should head straight back to my rooms after the visit. And I don’t want to argue with those in charge, at least not right away.”

  “Who said?” I asked, but Gaeth had already turned and started off down the road, and not in the direction of the ’Versity Stretch, either. “Weird,” I said, turning to Toverre.

  “Not very,” Toverre replied. “Because you would expect someone like that to have a coat that smells of horses.”

  ADAMO

  I arrived at Roy’s place in the Crescents about ten minutes too early. Leave it to a man of war to be early to meetings—never early on the battlefield, though, where being early was just as bad as being late. This tendency of mine was especially bad with Roy, who always liked to be fashionably late. And the last thing I wanted was to have the door answered with a scuffle of noise and laughter after the long pause it took when the people you were calling on were trying to get dressed and make it look like they hadn’t just been going at it like rabbits. No one ever did a good enough job of tucking in their shirts or combing out their hair to put one past me.

  No, I’d already had my life’s share of catching Roy in flagrante, and I wasn’t going to tempt fate any more than I already was, just by paying a social visit.

  So there I stood, down on the street in the Crescents, ignored for the most part by anyone who did pass by, waiting for the city bells to ring out the hour. I was damn near certain that Roy—or his boy, if he even cared halfway what happened over the top edge of his current roman—knew I was already out there.
I could assume I was being made fun of upstairs, in the top room of Roy’s Crescent tower. But I’d weathered worse insults than those. Dealt out worse ones, too. They’d roll off me.

  At least the building wasn’t one of the crazier structures I always passed walking from my new place in the middle of Charlotte up to the Crescents, seeing for myself easy enough why th’Esar had trouble with magicians. They fancied form over function now and then—though I didn’t think they were so stupid as to live in buildings that would actually screw them over, or whatever they were working on. No, it was more a display of what they could do—how they could defy nature and still come out on top—that must’ve made the fire in th’Esar’s mustache stand out a little more against the gray, whenever he caught sight of it. It was a bit of a nose-tweak, if you asked me, and the kind of thing people with Roy’s disposition for tweaking noses really went in for.

  It was a sight different from the simple buildings in Miranda, where all th’Esar’s people lived. There, the houses and the offices were just straight up and down, made of solid brick or white stone or marble, no rooms on stilts or hanging towers.

  I didn’t prefer either since, by my taste, both were too fancy.

  The first bell of the hour was struck up by the bastion, ringing down over the rest of the city, clear as day. Good, I thought, because I was starting to get just a little cold, what with the sun setting hours ago and me just standing there growing moss.

  I rapped on the door without hesitating—I wasn’t one to question if I should wait until after the bell couldn’t be heard anymore, so as not to sound desperate or whatever these little details meant. After that, I could hear some noise from within the house, and a quicker footfall on the stairs that told me all I needed to know.

  The boy was answering the door for him.

  If that meant Roy was trying his hand at cooking again, I thought, shifting my shoulders and grinding my teeth, then there was probably going to be a fire in Charlotte tonight. Tragedy for the ages, though wouldn’t it please th’Esar to have what remained of his little magician problem taken care of by one of their number?