“When’re you due?” Adamo asked. I pulled the card out of my pocket, setting it down on the table.
4:00 PM, it read, and under that, M. GERMAINE.
“Stands for Margrave Germaine, I’m assuming?” Adamo asked.
“She’s the one,” I replied. “Seems all right enough, even though her place is full of these instruments—metal ones, all of ’em kept out of sight so as not to make us shudder. But I caught sight of ’em, and damn me if it wasn’t eerie.”
Adamo picked up the card, turning it back and forth. It looked small and silly in one of his enormous hands, but I didn’t know what he thought he’d get out of inspecting it so closely. He must’ve known something I didn’t because he couldn’t stop staring at it.
“Didn’t lend yourself much time to get out of it,” he said finally.
“Sure I did,” I said. “The first notice was when I came to see you last week.”
“But you didn’t tell me about it,” Adamo added.
I felt myself color and cleared my throat, trying to keep any signs of blushing off my face. “Guess I didn’t want to tell you,” I explained, “because it sounds so loopy.”
“You’re saying others had this same fever after going to visit her?” Adamo asked.
“Sure did,” I said, remembering Gaeth suddenly. A feeling of dread crept through me, and Adamo must’ve seen some of it on my face because he gave me a sharp look.
“Anything else you want to tell me?” he asked.
“Someone I know, another first-year,” I told him. “He got the fever, too. Had his appointment before me and suffered from it for a little while. And then, out of nowhere, he just disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Adamo repeated. His tone wasn’t skeptical—at least, not skeptical of the information I was giving him, I didn’t think—and it encouraged me.
“I thought maybe he’d gone home, but he left everything behind in his room,” I explained. “Like he meant to come back to it. Like something happened to him. And then Toverre—you remember, my fiancé—wrote a letter to his mother back home, and when she replied, she seemed to think he really was still here. But nobody’s seen him for over a week now.”
“Sounds like he disappeared to me,” Adamo replied.
I set my cocoa down on his desk. It was too cold—having passed the perfect point where it wasn’t scalding hot but wasn’t warm enough, either.
“So,” I said. “I’m crazy, right?”
“You shouldn’t go to that appointment,” Adamo told me. “That’s what I think.”
It hadn’t been what I was expecting, not by a wide mark, and I had to repeat it a few times in my head to make sure I hadn’t just misheard him. “I shouldn’t?”
“Instincts are there for a reason,” Adamo replied. “All this city living tells you to go against ’em a lot of the time, but sometimes they’re all you’ve got to protect you. And I say, why ignore ’em when they’re so clear?”
“Well, because they’re gonna tell my da, for one thing,” I replied, aware of how childish it sounded. “And if I get in too much trouble here, he’ll call me back home for sure. But for another, Margrave Germaine’s gonna come and get me at this point; had another note from her a few days back that said if I missed this appointment, she was gonna be real worried about my health, and she’d have to come see me in the dormitories. Felt like intimidation to me, but what do I do about it? I don’t have anywhere else to live.”
“Four this afternoon,” Adamo said, clearly thinking over something heavy. He turned the note card over in his hand one more time. “You mind if I take this?”
“Go ahead,” I told him. “I sure don’t want it.”
“Guess it wouldn’t be looked on as decent if I came with you to that appointment,” Adamo said, more like thinking out loud than asking me a question.
“Not even one way,” I agreed, since it wasn’t polite not to answer someone.
“And I’m not sending you in there like a soldier for some answers, either,” Adamo added. “Felt bad enough when I had to send one of my boys on a mission like that.”
“I could go on a mission,” I told him, folding my arms over my chest. “Even if I’m not one of your boys.”
Adamo snapped out of whatever’d taken control of him, looking at me for the first time since I’d shown him Germaine’s summons. “Yeah, I guess you could,” he admitted. “But that doesn’t mean it sits right with me, and I’m not gonna do it that way.”
“Guess you just can’t trust someone who hasn’t been tested in the field,” I said, managing to make it only a little sulky. For a second there, I’d almost thought he was starting to think of us as equals.
“Guess I can’t,” Adamo replied. “But I got another idea for you, though. You ever heard of Yesfir? It’s a hat shop.”
ADAMO
I had a whole lot of junk in my head that needed sorting out, and for once I didn’t have any idea of where to begin.
I didn’t know when I’d become some kind of counselor, but first Balfour’d spilled his guts to me, and now I had one of my own students following suit. Both of ’em were equally mad—not in the way they thought, but because they’d decided I’d make a good listener when all signs pointed to how piss-poor I’d be at it.
The problem was that I’d picked up on a few similarities in their separate stories—things that shouldn’t and by all rights couldn’t’ve been the same, but were anyway—and I was the one putting both sides together. That is, if I could even find a way to make things fit.
I really didn’t like it. Sure, everyone at the Airman’d had their own opinions about whether or not Balfour was man enough for the job he’d inherited, but he’d handled the same shit as any of us and then some, on account of all that hazing. He was a tough little bugger underneath it all. This girl Laure I knew less about, but what I did know seemed pretty sturdy to me.
She wasn’t one of them fainting flowers, and she wasn’t the sort to make up stories for attention, either. At least that was what it seemed like to me, and I was gonna feel real blockheaded if it turned out I was wrong. But I had a few instincts of my own and they were usually good ones. She wasn’t a rotten egg. After dealing with all the nutters th’Esar sent my way for airman training, and before that working with my fair share of deserters, I knew a liar when I saw one.
I’d taken her appointment card just to make sure I wasn’t imagining things, and I kept staring at it, like that would somehow help me make sense of this whole mess. Maybe I was hoping that the next time I looked at the name on the card, it’d be something different and I could unclench.
Royston would’ve said I was acting like some young schoolboy who’d snagged a trinket from an admirer, but I wasn’t going to give him a chance to get that far. Never mind the fact that the thought’d gone and entered my head in the first place. I had a lot more to be concerning myself with than simple nonsense.
Normally we’d have met in a coffee shop, but I was starting to feel kinda paranoid, and the topic was sensitive enough that I didn’t want anyone eavesdropping—not an idle café gossip, which Royston was himself sometimes. I’d promised Balfour I’d be discreet, and even if no one knew or cared about a country girl studying at the ’Versity, that didn’t mean a man could go blabbing about the condition of her mind all over the city, either.
It was only common decency.
As far as I was concerned, the only place where I was comfortable having this discussion was my very own home. It wasn’t as fancy as Roy’s place in the Crescents, and it didn’t serve fancy little vegetable sandwiches with no crust like they did at Piquant—which was “our place,” according to Roy—but Royston was just going to have to saddle up and deal with roughing it for an afternoon.
Probably wasn’t the exact attitude I wanted to have toward someone I needed to help me, but there it was.
My place was clean, even if it did smell like “dragon and dirty boots and the inside of an old coffeepot.”
Roy arrived late, of course, but since I knew his style, I’d told him to come about an hour before I needed him to, and it all worked out. There were certain strategies for dealing with people, same as in battles, and when you had friends as complicated as mine were, you needed to arm yourself in advance.
“I can’t say I wasn’t intrigued by the message you left for me at the Basquiat,” Royston said, peeling off his scarf and hooking it over the rack I never used. Why have one of those at all when the back of a chair served your purpose just fine? “All this secrecy! The messenger told me you threatened to find him and do him bodily harm if he went ‘flapping his mouth’ to anyone else. That’s one way to make everyone paranoid, you know. You really should be more discreet sometimes.”
“I said that?” I grunted. It wasn’t because I was playing coy but because I honestly didn’t remember.
Royston gave me one of his long-nosed looks. “It does sound like you,” he said.
“Guess it does,” I admitted.
“You are going to tell me what’s bothering you, I hope?” he asked. “There’s only so much I can take of you stalking the streets like a wild bear in search of prey. I never know when you’ll claim your next victim, and I can’t handle the responsibility.”
“Bastion,” I said, momentarily distracted. “You really would get on with Luvander. Or else you’d kill each other; I’m not really sure.”
“I’ll pretend that’s a statement I understand, shall I?” Royston asked, folding his coat neatly over the rack and heading off ahead of me down the hall. “It’s not some sort of code, is it? If you’ve resorted to code, I’m leaving right now. The tiger strikes when the moon is full; the lion leaps at midnight; you really would get on with Luvander. Et cetera.”
“Have some coffee,” I said, following him into the kitchen. “And shut up.”
“Such ambiance,” Royston said, settling down into one of my chairs, wasting no time in making himself feel at home. “You wonder why I don’t come here more often. Why am I here, by the way?”
I still had Laure’s card in my pocket, and I pulled it out, setting it down on the table. Not that it meant anything by itself; I just wanted to have it there. Serving as a reminder, maybe. “Got a few more things to talk to you about. Remember Margrave Germaine?”
“The woman who dresses like a mushroom,” Royston said, leaning across the table to peer at the card. “Quite distinctly. You could have told me that’s what this was about. I’ve been making my own discreet inquiries into the matter already. You’d be shocked—or perhaps you wouldn’t—at how quickly my fellow Margraves and Wildgraves in the Basquiat are willing to gossip about someone they consider to be a spy. Her well-known liaison with the Esar did her no services among us, fortunately for you. Everyone has some little bit of dirt or another, though it’s slow going when you have to piece together something useful from all that idle chatter.”
“Lucky me,” I said, doing my best not to look like an eager schoolboy at lecture. “So what’d you find?”
“Well, your hunch was right,” Royston said. “If the Esar was going to capitalize on the new information about the dragons, it seems likely that her services would be the ones he’d use. She was an assistant on the original dragon project, though they never used her Talent outright; I’d assume she was simply too young at the time to participate, but she must have learned a great deal from the original magicians. I’m not saying for certain that’s what she’s doing now, however—if she is, she’s smart enough not to leave anything so helpful as a speck of proof lying around—but it would make sense for Germaine to see to your man’s hands first, if that’s the case. According to anyone who knows anything, the principles of dragons and Balfour’s steel hands are essentially the same, and observing him might very well help her to fine-tune the process of other endeavors. I must stress again,” he added, looking at me sharply, “that this is speculation based on what information I did suss out. We still don’t know that the Esar—meticulous as he is—is planning anything.”
“So you believe that?” I asked him.
“Not for an instant,” Roy told me.
“Better not go shoveling that shit in my direction, then,” I said, thinking over what he’d said. It all made sense, but there was still a piece missing. Why the hell was a woman like that doing routine checkups on ’Versity students, and why had Laure and Balfour both come away from seeing this woman feeling feverish and hearing voices?
A dragon’s voice, in Balfour’s case, I reminded myself. I wasn’t prone to the shivers, but I got the faintest sliver of one right then, like someone was dripping ice water down my back.
“Best let those thoughts out, whatever they are,” Royston said, peering at me from across the table. “You’ll give yourself an ulcer otherwise.”
“With all your chatting around, did you find out anything about why Germaine’s playing physician to the new ’Versity kids?” I managed finally, spitting the words out like bad food. “If she’s such a high-end Talent, you’d think th’Esar’d put her to better use than wiping snotty noses. But one of my students told me they’ve all been coming back feverish—and I’m sure, what with you being so caught up on your bastion gossip, you’ve already heard about what happened with Balfour.”
“There might’ve been a murmur or two about that poor gosling floating around the Basquiat,” Royston said, pressing the tips of his fingers together. “Nothing too undignified. I believe most sympathized with the poor man for having to deal with the Arlemagne emissaries day in and day out. No one enjoys that. I’m simply lucky enough that I’ve been forbidden to speak with any of them, on pain of death. You know how it is.”
“Well, fever’s not all that’s been going on,” I said, coming around to the real point at last. As much as I could and did give Royston shit about dancing around a topic, I was as guilty as anyone right then. Sometimes, a man knew he wasn’t gonna like the answers he was about to get and avoided asking the question for as long as possible.
“Oh?” Roy asked, his attention immediately focusing. He was pretty sensitive to mysterious illnesses at the moment, and I could tell the idea that it might’ve had anything to do with another Margrave was getting under his skin.
“Balfour said he was hearing voices,” I said, not feeling guilty because I’d gotten his permission to talk about it. Still, it felt a little strange telling someone else without him being there to supervise us or make sure I wasn’t misrepresenting it. “And before you ask—yeah, I believe him. He’s the worst liar I’ve ever met, so I know he wasn’t spinning some story to cover his ass after making a fool of himself in front of the diplomats. The symptom came alongside the fever, and that fever came after he had his damned checkup with Margrave Germaine.”
Royston sighed, glancing away from me to look out the window for a long moment. He was gathering his thoughts, sorting them out, and putting them in order, but sometimes he could get too caught up in the flourishes and the embellishments. I could only hope I wasn’t in for three, four minutes of contemplative silence, at least not today.
“When magic gets into someone without a Talent, it can cause a slight fever,” Roy said at last, right when I was about to reach across the table and drag the words out of his mouth. “Their bodies aren’t used to the sudden change—the water gets into the blood, you see, where it’s treated almost like an infection until the body becomes accustomed to it. Hence the reaction. I didn’t think anything of it before, since, as you said, it is winter, and fevers always spread like wildfire through the ’Versity dorms the moment the weather changes. But you say Balfour fell ill, too, and that this woman’s been providing the care for all those first-year students when her specialties clearly lie elsewhere. You know how I hate to leap at shadows; it wastes good energy. But I would be remiss to decide I could ignore this uneasy feeling entirely in favor of my own personal comfort.”
“Shit,” I said, rubbing my hands over my face. I hadn’t shaved long past the point where I’d mean
t to; waking up early to see Balfour before work had taken up most of my free time, and I was closer to growing a beard than I had been in about fifteen years. Pretty soon I was gonna have a nice winter goatee to match Roy’s if I wasn’t careful. “One of those kids went missing, you know.”
“I can only hope he proves easier to locate than Margrave Ginette,” Royston said, looking grim. “I wonder …”
“You wonder what?” I prompted.
Roy was so lost in thought he wasn’t even complaining that I was pacing back and forth, or that my stomping around was distracting him. “Hal heard a similar sort of rumor,” Roy explained. “About a missing student. I wonder if it’s the same one, or if they’re being spirited away right and left. How embarrassing for the dean if that’s the case.”
“Ain’t funny,” I said.
“No, of course not,” Roy agreed. “It’s very grave indeed. It leads me to believe something I don’t want to contemplate—and yet all the clues do point directly toward it, making the conclusion inevitable.”
“And that is?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t confirm my suspicions.
“That Margrave Germaine is conducting experiments in magic on children,” Roy replied simply. He pressed his forefingers to his temples, closing his eyes for a moment, then relaxed. “And if her specialty is in dragonmaking …”
“This is a fucking mess,” I said.
“Very well put,” Roy said.
We were quiet after that, giving our thoughts the gravity they deserved. It wasn’t as though we could go to the Provost about everything—him being th’Esar’s bastard son made it clear where his loyalties were—and I felt like I was going to be arrested myself just for having these thoughts. They were treason, sure enough—and I’d feel like the madman, not Balfour, if it turned out I was believing His Highness capable of something so fucking drastic.
“I gotta meet with the boys,” I said finally. “We’ll stand together, same as always, but if it’s about dragons, then it’s not your fight. You get your large nose out of this and stop asking around before you’re exiled again, or worse.”
Steelhands Page 32