by Jaida Jones
“I shall certainly do so,” I assured him, offering a small wave.
Under different circumstances, I’d have returned to Laure immediately to tell her of my adventure in the hall, but with matters currently as they were, I first retreated to the kitchens to pour her a cold glass of water.
My conversation with the couple in the hall had left me feeling uneasy, for reasons I couldn’t quite place. My worry for Laure—not to mention cleaning up her mess—had jolted my mood off center, but I found myself thinking of other things, ones that had nothing at all to do with Laure: Gaeth’s vague, preoccupied air when we’d met him in the Amazement; his apparent return home to the country; and the girl’s tale of not being able to rouse her friend once he’d arrived back at the dormitory from his own appointment.
That line of thinking did lead back to Laure, since her sudden illness coincided with her return from the physician. I knew a great deal about fevers simply from having suffered through more than my share, and it seemed impossible to me that Laure’s physicians wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary with her during either of her visits.
Perhaps the city physicians were—as my father had put it before we left—incompetent jackasses, like every other jacked-up charlatan living in the city, but I was unwilling to subscribe to my father’s beliefs just yet. Not even my doctors in the countryside had ever done so much harm, and they still subscribed to the outdated belief that leeches could actually cure a man of his cough.
My room was cold when I returned, but at least the smell seemed to have dissipated somewhat. I could see a cloud of red hair above the blankets that indicated Laure hadn’t moved at all since I’d left her. I set her water down on the bedside table and moved quickly to close the window, since despite how she might have felt about it, bracing herself in winter air was not what her constitution required.
The window made rather a loud noise when I closed it, and I heard the rustle of the covers as she began to stir beneath them.
“Toverre?” she rasped, sounding a great deal like my great-aunt Bernadette, who’d smoked clove cigarettes for much of her youth.
“I am here at last,” I told her, turning the lock on the window and making sure it caught before I returned to her side. “And I’ve brought water, just like I promised.”
“M’mouth tastes like pig slop,” Laure said, and she pulled the covers down enough for me to see her bright red face. “I probably look like pig slop, too. Don’t even look at me. Don’t tell me if I do.”
“You have never looked like pig slop,” I said, holding out the water and helping her to sit up. “Not even when you were actually covered in it.”
Laure leaned on me instead of the headboard as I held the cup to her lips. Some of it spilled onto my blankets, but at least it was only water. If she was sick in my bed, now that would be a different matter.
“ ’M sorry about making you clean all that up,” Laure mumbled, after she’d had something to drink. “Thought for sure you weren’t coming back. You’d gone off to scrub yourself clean, or something, then ask for a change of rooms because this one’s no good anymore.”
“I’ll do all that later,” I assured her. “I’ll get clean eventually. With a steel brush and everything.”
“I hate being sick,” Laure said, leaning her head on my shoulder.
“I’m sure it will pass quite soon,” I told her, stroking her hair with my free hand. “And at your next physician’s appointment—to which I will accompany you—you will beat the attending severely around the head for allowing you to leave in this state.”
Laure chuckled, then let out a small sigh. “You know,” she said, “they didn’t even give me my blood back. I wanted it, too, because it doesn’t do to have it running around out there without me. They said they were sorry, but that wasn’t possible. Well ’s my blood, isn’t it? That’s like stealing.”
“You’re delirious,” I told her, gently patting her head. “Get some sleep, and we’ll talk about everything in the morning.”
“Can’t sleep here,” Laure said. She hid an overly scandalized gasp behind a clumped-up handful of coverlet. “What will everyone say? What will they think?”
“Now,” I said, trying to be reasonable, though I did realize it would injure both our prospects if people were to think we were engaged in that kind of behavior together. “I’ll tell everyone you were sick, and there’s no need to worry—no one would believe someone like you would ever spend that … kind of night with someone like me, anyway.”
“But we’re going to be married,” Laure said. “We’re going to have to spend that kind of a night together someday.”
Laure had a fever, I told myself, and could not possibly know she was bringing up such a delicate subject. If I was lucky, she wouldn’t remember having asked it at all, and I could also put the difficulty right out of my mind.
Truth be told, I had worried about the same matter myself enough times in the past. Our families would be expecting additions to the fold, little boys and girls they could train better than they’d trained me, and I shuddered at the idea.
“You’re grimacing,” Laure said. “I’m talking about sleeping with you, and you’re grimacing. Makes a girl feel … Makes a girl feel …”
“That’s just the fever talking,” I said, tucking her in. “Don’t worry about your work; I’ll see to it. And we’ll worry about all the rest in the morning.”
“Grimacing,” Laure mumbled, but she buried her face against the pillow and burrowed in deep. I had a long night ahead of me, finishing up one of her essays—she probably hadn’t even started it yet—and sleeping in the chair beside her, in case she needed anything.
I checked to make sure she was sleeping soundly, which she was, then went to gather the books I needed. My thoughts were troubling me, but until Laure was in a more lucid state, I would have to shelve them. And what better way to avoid thinking than by composing an essay?
BALFOUR
I’d started the letter at least ten times already and scrapped just as many pieces of paper since. No matter how I phrased it, the words sounded too needful—as though I somehow didn’t realize Thom had troubles of his own to deal with on his travels, and with him so far from the city, there was nothing in particular he could even do for me.
It was just my luck to find someone at last in whom I felt comfortable confiding, only to see him leave Thremedon almost immediately after we’d been introduced. If it hadn’t been so sad, it would have made an excellent joke.
Dear Thom, my current missive read, I really would appreciate your advice …
But that was too abrupt, I thought, without any mention of his health, or Rook’s health, or how they were both holding up after their unexpected and nearly fatal adventure. I crumpled the eleventh page swiftly and tossed it into the corner with the rest of them, then pinched my brow too hard with my clumsy fingers.
Since we were friends, I tried to reason with myself, a simple task like this one really shouldn’t have been so difficult. He overthought things himself, to some extent—one of the many points of personality on which we came together—but he did manage to write letters despite it, asking for help or simply wishing to hear my opinion on matters both important and trivial. His latest letter, however, had made all my little woes seem relatively insignificant, and I hadn’t known how to reply to him.
Until now—now that I needed something.
It seemed greedy to me, like some fatal flaw in my manners, but I had no one else to speak to.
Dear Thom, I tried again, holding the pen stiffly. I heard from Luvander yesterday that there is a song in the bars of lower Charlotte dedicated to my hands, but also, to my ba …
That was completely ridiculous, I told myself, and tore that one up before I tossed it, so no one going through the garbage might be able to read it.
In warmer weather, I’d confided in the statues, like the old tale of a lonely boy whispering all his problems into a hole in the ground.
It was a thought that gave me much unrest. Adamo would’ve been quite disappointed if he’d known.
But it was too cold for that kind of trip now, especially with my hands in their current state. And anyway, the more I did it, the more foolish I felt. These men were gone, and they’d left their petty problems behind them when they left. I had no place burdening them with mine where others came with gifts, flower wreaths, and the like. Had I no real respect for the dead?
There’d also been a chance I’d have run into Adamo or Luvander while lingering at the site, and I’d wanted to avoid that at all costs—and the questions concerning my health especially. What answer should I have given them? Perhaps simply showing them what remained of me would be enough, but I couldn’t bear the idea of their pity.
I much preferred Luvander’s gossip and his jokes, as though nothing at all had changed. Uncomfortable as they might have made me, the discomfort was at least a familiar one.
Dear Thom, I began again, I wonder if you might be amused by the promise that upon your return to Thremedon, I will invite you to accompany me to lower Charlotte, so that we may learn the tune to the song praising my genitals and sing it together as a welcome-home present.
At least this false start made me laugh. It even brought a few tears to my eyes.
If my current accommodations had come with a fireplace, it would have been getting an awful lot of fuel tonight. My mind was just too distracted to compose a letter though I knew the reasons for that well enough. My thoughts were currently in a turmoil I couldn’t conceive of putting into a letter, even if it was Thom who’d written about the matter first, to Adamo. He, at least, had the excuse of being far away from home, adventuring through the desert with only Rook’s moods to worry about. I didn’t blame him for being rash. He’d probably thought that the information was important enough to risk everyone’s getting into a little trouble, and in strictest truth there was nothing illegal about what he’d sent.
By the way Adamo told it, Thom’s story had been a recounting of a very sad and disturbing experience that had begun and ended in the desert. But it did make me wonder how Rook had been able to deal with everything—he’d been there, right in the thick of it, seeing a resurrection none of us had thought possible. While I knew I would never be able to extract anything from him that resembled the truth of his feelings on the matter, I felt like I surely had some idea—the hope and longing, and eventual despair, he’d felt.
Like it or not, we’d all been tarred with the same brush, and now we were connected in ways I didn’t think any of us had ever considered before.
Privately, it made me wonder what I might’ve done had I been in Rook’s place at the time. Certainly I felt the twinge—the same as any man might have—at the promise of being given back someone I’d thought lost forever. But, just like Rook, neither did I believe in that kind of easy solution.
The Esar was a different matter. He’d never been close to the dragons, as we were. They’d been weapons to him, and nothing more.
Adamo and Luvander had both seemed willing to bet that the Esar wouldn’t experience my misgivings, and however much I tried to look at it in a different way, I was beginning to share their opinion. My meeting at the palace seemed all too suspicious in the light of Thom’s information—though what it meant for Margrave Ginette and the fate of my hands, I’d been too stubborn to bring up at the meeting. There was more to be discussed than my problems, which affected no one other than me.
I was suffering for it, though, my hands too stiff to write another letter even if I’d wanted to. I could still move them enough to accomplish all my daily tasks, but the result was stiffness quite similar to that suffered by my extremely arthritic grandfather, and it made me self-conscious to be seen in public.
The clumsiness, too, might have had some part in my frustration. I could no longer write quickly enough to keep up with my thoughts, and the cramps in my wrists shot all the way up my arms to the elbows.
Even though I’d stopped writing, my hand was still firmly wrapped around the pen, and I knew that I’d have to use the other to pry it off. It was becoming inconvenient, not to mention painful, and I had to check the date again just to make sure I hadn’t gotten it wrong.
Some help was coming, at long last.
With timing that could only be called ironic—or impeccable—it had been only after my meeting with the remnants of the Dragon Corps that the Esar had finally contacted me. His letter—to which I hadn’t even been able to reply—informed me that he’d set up an appointment for me with one of the finest magicians for technical work, his own personal recommendation, and I must accept his apologies for not arranging something sooner but he’d been quite busy with this and that.
I’d been relieved just to realize that his letter had nothing at all to do with my shadowy meeting of peers. That was an act the Esar was bound to find suspicious if his present state of mind was as bad as some seemed to believe.
All this living while constantly looking over my shoulder did remind me, in some ways, of what it’d been like at the Airman, but it had all of the downsides with none of the brief, momentary upswings that had come alongside it. And, what was worse, Ghislain was not there to stand sentinel at the door.
Knowing that a man like that was keeping watch helped me sleep more deeply at night. I pitied whatever poor pirates crossed paths with him and wondered if they’d be singing about those exploits in Charlotte, soon enough.
The knock at the door startled me out of any further brooding thoughts I might’ve had, and I willed my fingers to flex with such force that I heard the metal creak in protest. This appointment was coming none too soon—for me or them.
I took the gloves from my desk and struggled with getting them on before I answered the door, while my visitor knocked impatiently for the second time.
They could wait, I thought stubbornly. The last thing I needed was for my hands to be seen by anyone other than a Margrave in this state. It reflected poorly on Ginette’s work, not to mention how I felt about them personally. Not everyone needed to know my private suffering—not even when it appeared to have become a matter of state.
“Good afternoon,” said the man in the Esar’s uniform who awaited me, tipping his hat. “Sorry for making you wait. I got all turned around by the Basquiat, then couldn’t seem to straighten things out. I’ve got it now, though. All filed away in my head. Once I take a route, I know it. Like the back of my hand,” he added, showing me the hand in question. It was pink and chapped with cold, a little split around the thumb nail.
“That’s quite all right,” I said quickly, pulling on my coat and pressing my hands into the pockets. It was to keep them warm as much as it was to hide them. “Is the appointed place very far from here?”
“Won’t take us all day, if that’s what you’re asking,” the man said, glancing at me curiously. “You are him, right? Steelhands—no offense meant, that’s just what they call you in my part of town. I mean, we all heard what happened in the war, but I never … None of us up at the palace could even agree about what they’d look like, let alone how something like that’d even work.”
“They work very poorly at the moment,” I told him, being somewhat short because of how uncomfortable the question made me. Though some of my comrades in the corps had always gone out of their way to be at the center of attention at all times, such scrutiny made me twitch. The tavern songs a d
runken mind composed in the dead of night were one thing, but I’d never wished to be famous in the first place, let alone for something I hadn’t even done.
“Right. Like I said, no offense meant,” the driver told me, stepping back so that I could lock the door and follow him down the stairs. He seemed appropriately sheepish, but I was too distracted even to apologize to him.
Dear Thom, I began composing mentally, as I got into the carriage and the driver hopped up on top. Today I took out my bad mood on someone who made the mistake of trying to engage me in friendly conversation. I doubt it’s a mistake he’ll be making again anytime soon, and if word spreads of my behavior, I’m sure you’ll hear tales of Balfour the Terrible—worse than any dragon—as far as you’ve traveled. Wherever that place may be.
The journey passed quickly enough, me writing my imaginary letters and the driver no doubt working out the best way to tell his friends that Balfour Steelhands was a rude little bastard.
It was possible that I was exaggerating, but the stiffness in my hands left me little room for optimism.
I was so lost in my own thoughts that I didn’t follow the narrow twists and turns of the streets as we rode through Thremedon—something none of my old friends would have ever allowed—and when the carriage began slowing to a halt, I realized that we were actually back at the palace, though not at the entrance I’d taken last time. The more I looked at it, I realized I’d never seen the palace from behind, and though the shape of the building was unmistakable, I wondered at being allowed to use this entrance, which clearly wasn’t meant for the common visitor.
They’d built walls to cordon off the area for a reason—to keep almost everyone out—and I marveled at how the gilding around the minarets was faded from the salty wind, and the colors of the turrets seemed somehow less bright.
“Not much to look at, is it?” my driver asked in a low whisper. “That’s ’cause the good parts face the rest of the city; but in the back here, it’s all shadow.”