A Few Good Men

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  “Solitary?” he asked, clearly surprised.

  “Yes, and I didn’t do it just to escape the Sons of Liberty.”

  “The Sons—” he sounded startled. “No. Is that who they say did it? Killed Max, I mean? Well, for once . . .” He trailed off. “No. I know you didn’t—” he stopped. “Fourteen years? And you’re still sane?”

  “Functional,” I said.

  He blinked at me, then looked me up and down. “You’re naked.”

  “Astonishing powers of observation,” I said. “No wonder you’re a lawyer.”

  He shook his head. “You should dress. And I should . . . I meant to ask you about Goldie.”

  “Goldie?”

  He gestured towards the drawing on the wall, the one I’d admired before. “That,” he said, “is Max and Goldie. Goldilocks. Goldie for short.”

  I looked at the portrait. I looked at the dog beside the person, whom I had to assume now was Max.

  “Max’s dog?”

  Nathaniel gave a sort of exasperated little huff. “No, I— Oh, never mind. I thought . . . Yes, Max’s dog. I . . . I’d like to keep him, but . . .” He floundered.

  I turned towards the bed and said, “Am I really expected to wear that? Has the style changed that much in fifteen years?”

  He looked towards the bed, too, and made a sound. Then shrugged. “Your father’s tastes ran to rather more gaudy than . . . than fashion,” he said. “And I’d guess they haven’t had the time to get your clothes from storage or . . .” He paused, looked stricken. “They might no longer exist.”

  I opened my mouth to ask him why my father’s clothes would be in this room at all, and if my father’s clothes wouldn’t have been disposed of, as well, since Max had succeeded a year ago, but I couldn’t because he’d walked past me to the closet and thrown it open. “There should be something. They’re never that thorough,” he said. Then he shut the door with a bang and started, with strange enthusiasm, opening drawers under the closet. “Ah,” he said, in a tone of satisfaction. “This drawer is all Max’s.” He brought out a, dark, soft-looking suit, and threw it at me.

  As I caught the pants midair, the tunic fell on the floor. I grabbed it, one-handed, and tossed it on the bed. The type of fabric was non-wrinkling. I started pulling the pants on and felt disapproval from somewhere in Nathaniel’s direction. I looked up and at him, and he held, in his hands, just taken from the drawer, a pair of underwear. Oh.

  I pulled the pants off, and extended my hand for the underpants. “I’d forgotten about the niceties,” I said. “It’s been fourteen years with only one suit, nothing else to my name. I suppose I should wear socks and shoes as well.”

  It didn’t get a smile from him, just a tight nod, and when I looked up from pulling on the pants that felt like a second skin, he handed me socks and a pair of dark slipper-shoes, the kind one wore when one wasn’t going to do much walking over rough ground.

  I was about to ask him how and why he seemed to know where everything was in this room, but I never did, because he glared at me as if I’d done something wrong. “You’ll have to have suits made. That is much too tight. You’re bigger than Max.” And then he said, “Perhaps they still have your clothes in the attics or something. Sometimes I think nothing gets thrown away in this place.”

  The chuckle at the idea came out despite my best intentions. “My clothes? From before I was arrested? They’d fit worse than this. I was twenty-two and skinny.”

  “Twenty-two.” The though seemed to stop him and he looked at me, as though to make sure I wasn’t lying, then shrugged. “Sorry. No one ever told us that. As far as I remember, you were, well . . . old.”

  I didn’t remember him at all, though now that I made an effort I conjured up the image of a small, pale shadow trailing Max, an older boy who mostly watched from the sidelines and rarely spoke. “I would seem so to a six- or seven-year-old,” I said, drily. “At any rate, if you wanted to tell me you wanted to keep Max’s dog, fine.”

  “My father says he’s technically yours if you want him,” Nathaniel said, with far more emotion than seemed to be warranted. “He says you like dogs.”

  “I like dogs,” I said. “And cats. And hamsters. And I once was very fond of a tarantula spider. But I don’t like fish except on the plate.” I looked up to meet with total confusion in the dark eyes. “Right. But, just because I like dogs, it doesn’t mean I need Max’s. If he’s used to you now, that’s fine. Is he used to you?”

  Nathaniel shrugged. “You can always get another dog,” he said. “I’d hate to disrupt Goldie’s life again.”

  “I can always get another dog,” I agreed. I hadn’t had a dog since the scene when my father had got rid of my dog when I was ten. “Was that all you wished to tell me, Nathaniel Remy?”

  “No,” he said. He looked guilty. “The dog is not—never mind. I’m sorry, it seemed the most important thing. I . . . I have no idea what came over me.”

  I patted his shoulder once. Once, because by the second time, he’d sprang away from me.

  “Grief acts in strange ways,” I said. And I hoped I was telling the truth and that his behavior was the result of grief, because I wasn’t prepared to tell Sam Remy that his son was completely insane and would need serious treatment, or perhaps to be confined in a nice cell where he couldn’t hurt himself.

  Nathaniel looked up at me a while longer than made sense, frowned, nodded. He ran a hand across his forehead. He was wearing a heavy silver ring, which probably explained the cut on my lip. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I suppose it would. But . . . my father sent me in to discuss with you the legal strategy for presenting your claim to the Council.”

  “Your father doesn’t think that anyone can dispute my right to rule.”

  Nathaniel shrugged. “My father doesn’t think anyone can dispute it successfully. But my father hasn’t examined the law. He’s simply speaking from custom and logic. You’re the last of the blood. By blood, Keevas own Olympus. There is no possible claim that outstrips yours. But there are some small issues we should sweep out of the way first.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’m sure my father disinherited me.”

  He shook his head. “No. He simply superseded you with Max. You were the heir, after Max. No. What I mean is, though it is irrelevant now, because the Good Man can’t be guilty of any crime, you . . . have a conviction on your record, which some of your . . . peers might say is a capital conviction and you . . .”

  “And I should have been executed,” I said, and watched, fascinated, as Nathaniel, while still talking to me, started patting himself down, as though he were trying to stop an invasive stream of ants that had climbed up his well-cut trousers.

  “Oh, no. Well, maybe you would have been, if you were a commoner, but then commoners—” He reached into what appeared to be a hidden pocket behind his knee and extracted a square box of some sort. I watched carefully, in case it was a weapon, but he brought out a thin white cylinder and shook it. When the end glowed ember-red, I realized it was a cigarette. A few of my peers had smoked as an affectation.

  He sucked on the unlit end as though that was the only way he could get oxygen and he’d spent the last three days without breathing, then expelled the smoke slowly. “Commoners can be executed because they looked at you wrong. Executing the . . . son of a Good Man was never going to happen.”

  “Even if the crime was killing a Good Man’s heir?”

  He gave me an odd lingering look, sucked on the cigarette again. “Not even then. He just had another heir.” He put his hand under the growing ash of the cigarette and looked around frantically. Then he opened my desk drawer, rummaged around, brought out a little porcelain box used for gems, dumped the gems into the drawer, and shook the ash into the box. “But that’s not the point. Your peers could still use it against you.”

  I frowned at him. “Would they want to? Good Man Rainer is dead.” I hastened to add, “I didn’t kill him. I found him—”

  “I kno
w,” he said. “His son, Jan, kill— Oh, shit. Never mind. That is not for public consumption. But it’s not Good Man Rainer you’ve got to worry about. It’s . . .” He seemed to struggle with words, and I got the impression he was closing several avenues of explanation. I wonder how Nathaniel Remy had come by that’s not for public consumption information. “It’s anyone who could claim Olympus,” he finally settled on.

  “So?” I said, watching fascinated, as he stabbed his tiny stub of cigarette into the porcelain box to put it out, then lit another one so fast I could barely follow the movement. “You know, those things will kill you,” I said. “I mean, they’ve removed most carcinogens from them, but they’re still not meant to be used in great quantities.”

  “The— What? Oh, these. Nah, I’m not that lucky.” He sucked in smoke. “So, you need to pardon yourself.”

  I blinked at him. “My crime prevents my becoming a Good Man, so I should pardon myself?”

  He opened his mouth, then seemed to very carefully bite the tip of his tongue. He sighed. “Well, not . . . precisely. Your father needs to pardon you.”

  “Uh . . .” How crazy was Nathaniel Remy? Was I going to have to break it to Sam? “I’m sorry, but I’m fresh out of resurrection powers. And wouldn’t resurrect him if I could.”

  Something very like a half-laugh caught in Nat’s throat, causing him to cough puffs of smoke. He looked at me, really looked, as if evaluating me for the first time, as if he were trying to tell what sort of person I was. Then he looked as if trying to figure out what to tell me. “You know how the genlocks react to you,” he said. “I mean, how all the men in your line can—”

  “Open the same genlocks, yes, which is why my father always had additional security in things he didn’t want me to see. And?”

  “And, the judicial gen seals aren’t any finer.”

  This didn’t sound right. “Are you sure? I mean, they’d have to be—”

  He shook his head. “Trust me,” he said. “I’m a lawyer.”

  That seemed like a very odd claim to my trust, but I supposed a lot of them were trustworthy, popular image notwithstanding. “We have papers,” he said, “From your father’s time, so, you know, it’s the right type of paper, and I’ve printed a letter of pardon. That ring,” he said, and pointed at the signet ring, “has a sign function. Do you know how to set it?”

  I must have looked helpless, because he set down his cigarette, inside the porcelain box, which he put on the desk. Then he held out his hand for the signet. I took it off, and put it on his palm, thinking that for some strange reason, Nathaniel Remy reminded me a lot of my nanny. Or at least, both of them could command obedience with a gesture and a look.

  He held up the ring, and twisted one of the bands around the gem carefully, till a sequence of green lights came on, then told me, “Now put it on,” as if I were about two years old. From inside his tunic somewhere, he pulled a sheet of paper that wasn’t even creased. I suspected the man’s clothes were sewn with multiple pockets, but did they also contain folders?

  He set the paper on the desk, and told me where to press the ring, and how, so it left behind an imprint of my genetic code.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “They won’t be able to tell it’s mine and not my father’s?”

  “Positive,” he said, as he made the paper disappear. Though he’d answered instantly, I had the impression of a hesitation. “I promise.” He looked me over. “And now I will be gone and leave you to . . . to . . . whatever it was you were doing.”

  And like that, he slid out of the room and closed the door behind him as unobtrusively as his entrance had been explosive. And left me wondering what this creature was. If he was mad, he was the sanest madman I’d ever met. If he was sane . . . then he acted a lot like a madman. More importantly, what did he know that he wasn’t telling me? It was obvious he knew something. Was it something that could hurt me? Had Max let this sort of thing go unexamined? Was that why he’d got killed?

  Maxims my father had given me, about making sure you knew your servants and what they were up to, flitted through my head. I sighed.

  Nathaniel had left his cigarette in the box. I put it out, carefully, then closed the box on the ashes, and set it back on the desk. I had the odd feeling he’d need it again and look for it there.

  But why would he? And friends with Max or not, why did he know the room so well and act like it was his room? Had they been— No. Too much of a coincidence. I was projecting my own history onto Max.

  My head hurt. What I really needed was a ride on my broom and to talk to some old friends.

  Running Away

  I stared, frowning at the door, after Nathaniel Remy left. All right, so this cell was much nicer than the last place where I’d been confined. But it was not much more free. And I’d known that. Of course I’d known that.

  I rotated my shoulders as I thought. My entire childhood had been confined, hemmed in due to my peculiar position, my overprotective parents and the deference of those who were socially beneath me.

  Of course the Good Man had more freedom. I could walk out of the house and go for a walk. I could tell them all to take a hike. I could have them put to death alphabetically, starting with A and ending with Z. And none of them could oppose me, at least legally.

  Well, not if Nathaniel and Sam were right about confirming me.

  But the truth was I couldn’t execute them, of course. I was far too aware of their being real people. I wasn’t sure I could ever execute anyone, though my father had seemed to do it almost whimsically at times. Perhaps that came with time. Or perhaps it was due to my father being a right bastard. I frowned at the closed door.

  I could walk out of here, and go down to the city, and mingle with people. I could. Except that I could never walk out without facing too many questions, too many looks. Sam would try to tell me there was too much to do—there probably was too much to do. Paperwork would have been neglected for at least three days and I remembered well the stack of papers my father signed every night, usually in breaks during the dinner, while mother and I tried to make conversation.

  But I didn’t want to sign papers. I didn’t want to think. I wanted to be alone and have time to mourn Ben, and have time to think of what I was going to do in this house without Mother. Somehow I’d been counting on her to give me clues, to help me hide the fact that I’d forgotten the society of humans. To be one person who cared what happened to me, beyond my role as Good Man.

  I ran my fingers over the scar on my face, which seemed, suddenly, to be itching and flaring with pain, even though at some level, I knew it was imaginary pain.

  And then my body decided for me. I caught myself halfway to the door, to close it and lock it. My shoulders were flexing in the too-tight suit and what I wanted—what I needed—was to get out of here and to be in the air, on my broom. More than that, I wanted to visit my old friends. They would now be the Good Men, most of them. And most of them had known very well I hadn’t done anything to deserve being slammed in jail. At least, I hadn’t done what they said.

  Most of them, in fact, had got the same call I had, and had only been saved from a like fate by getting there too late. I still didn’t know what that was all about or why Hans had been killed, much less why I’d been blamed for it. I suspected if Ben and I hadn’t got out of there fast enough, instead of being jailed, we’d have been killed like Hans, and someone else been blamed for the murder.

  But no one who knew Hans and I could have thought I’d kill him. After Ben, Hans was my right hand in the Hellions, absolutely trusted and trusting. I don’t think we’d ever even argued.

  So . . . my old friends would know I was innocent. Whether they’d rejoice to see me was something else. It had been a long time, and I knew I looked quite different. But they wouldn’t deny me or spurn me. Of that I was sure. So. I’d visit them. Javier, I thought, first. He’d been in the Hellions also, and as his father was close to eighty at the time, I couldn’t imagine that he wou
ldn’t have succeeded by now. And he had always been levelheaded. He could help me find my footing on the command. He could help me figure out how to be a Good Man.

  And even if I was sure he’d never had any idea how things really were between Ben and me, he could talk about Ben as someone who had known him.

  I had no idea if my broom and suit would still be where I’d left them, but it was worth a try. I went into the bathroom and opened both faucets over the basin, then opened the fresher door, then went back into the bathroom and turned the door knob on the closet to the left. Yes, it really was that complex. Mostly because I’d had it made when I was all of fifteen.

  But it worked, too. When I turned around, a portion of the wall, one of the many panels, had popped out. And in the opening was what looked uncommonly like leathers and a broom.

  I went to it and brought out a broomer suit and boots, a broom and oxygen tanks. And then I frowned at them. The black leather suit had red piping. I didn’t remember red piping. The Hellions colors had been pure black, with a stylized drawing of flames on the back. Ben used to joke that it was very subtle and classy, our pattern of black on black.

  Had I gone crazy? This one had no insignia on the back, but there was definitely red piping. But who could have cracked the complex—not to say insane—code to open the compartment? Impossible. And only Ben and I had known how to open it. Unless Ben had told Sam, though I had no idea why he would have, or why Sam would have told anyone.

  Still, the suit smelled different. I can’t explain it. But it did not smell like me. And putting it on I found that it fit me about as well as the clothes I was wearing. Better, since broomer suits are designed to accommodate a variety of clothing under them, so there was room for a formal suit. And there was no way my suit from when I’d been arrested would have fit me this way. I was—almost—sure that I could fit it, but it would have felt like a tourniquet.

  I slipped the gloves on, and the boots. Those, at least, would be about the right size, but they still didn’t feel like mine.