CHAPTER FOUR
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ROYSTON

If asked, I couldn’t have pinpointed the exact time or day when Hal’s tradition of reading to me in the evenings became reversed, so that I was the one telling the stories, but it had happened. Some nights we would retire to the drawing room and—William having bragged to his siblings both younger and older—I would find myself seated hearthside, speaking to a rapt semicircle of bright, dark eyes as my brother’s wife drifted in and out, mostly to “tch” noisily at the most violent parts. I prided myself on only ever having made Emilie cry once, and I thought perhaps that if William hadn’t jeered at her so mercilessly, the whole mess might have been avoided entirely.

It was during these stories that I was most aware of Hal, the open wonderment on his face, the careful attention he paid to my words, as though I were one of the romans to which he was so devoted. A folly of mine perhaps, but it inspired me to find somewhere inside myself the parts that hadn’t yet been ground down to rubble and compost by the country, and I was glad of it.

There was little news from the city, though I freely admitted to my friends in written word that the fault was mine for allowing the lines of communication to dry up. A colleague of mine from the Basquiat wrote that there was some great uproar in the Dragon Corps, that they were being made to take etiquette classes. I immediately wrote to the only touchstone I had ever cared to have among the Esar’s colorful band of self-important animals: Chief Sergeant Adamo.

The letter I’d got back confirmed everything I’d been told, and what was more—the man doing the teaching was a student barely out of the ’Versity.

He seems very clever, Adamo’s letter read. And I think he’ll do all right so long as he survives the first few weeks, which he might not, and so long as he’s quiet enough that Rook forgets him completely when the lessons aren’t on. I don’t really know what th’Esar’s thinking having him stay here, of all places, but it’ll work out or it won’t.

Everything’s going swimmingly in the country, I hope. Don’t go so long without writing again, or I’ll have to break th’Esar’s rules myself and fly upcountry way to pluck you out of there myself.

At the very idea of this I laughed so long and loud that Hal came to investigate. The letters from home, coupled with my newfound audience for what stories I’d collected, had made a world of difference in what I no longer viewed as the most terrible of exiles.

And then, of course, there was Hal.

He was, I liked to tell myself, the ubiquitous essence of that part of the countryside I still couldn’t bring myself to hate. One of my mentors had told me that in order to be embraced by Thremedon, a man must cast aside all other lovers and take the city as his one and only—for then her secrets would be spread wide open, as in a card trick or a whorehouse. It seemed a very apt theory—though with my proclivities, I was required to modify the analogy somewhat.

Yet at the same time—though Thremedon was always my other lover, as it were—and as much as I hated to admit it, the country was my home. I’d been raised not in Nevers but in Tonnerre, on its border, and no matter how much time I’d spent learning the city as I would have learned a lover—and no matter how I yearned for that other lover during my exile—no man could ever completely expunge all trace of his first lover from his heart. I, too, was a victim of this pattern. In my own way, I suppose I still yearned to be accepted by this place I couldn’t quite bring myself to accept in return.

If I’d been a philosopher and not a Margrave, I would have solved this problem for myself already. Or, at least, I’d have owned a better vocabulary for grappling with it privately. Perhaps that would have assuaged my bruised ego somewhat.

Unfortunately, the truth of the matter remained: I had conflated Hal with something taken from my own needs, and I found myself seeking out his company for reasons I should not have allowed myself to act upon or even to indulge in thought. His approval meant everything to me—the way he wrapped his arms around his knees and held them tight during the most frightening moments in my memoirs, or insisted on sitting on the floor at my feet, even when there were ample chairs for him to make use of. In his eyes I saw admiration and fascination both, as if he wished to read me like a book. And Hal, I knew, was a voracious reader.

It sparked something untoward in me, some answering desire to be read. He had a sharp mind and was cleverer than he thought he was, than the country had allowed him to be. Still, it was hardly in selflessness that I offered him all the knowledge I had that was fit for more innocent ears, hardly in selflessness that I endeavored to keep him near to me whenever I could.

To measure how impossible I had truly become, how stubborn and how self-involved, one need only take this for an example: I sought him out myself, though I always made it seem as if I hadn’t. After his cold had ended I even mentioned our usual walks by the Nevers, more than once, though I tried with the coy neediness of a schoolboy to seem thoroughly disinterested in whether he could spare the time for me or not.

Hal wasn’t the sort of creature suited to such games. I didn’t think he had any idea I was playing them.

What did I want? I was certain that I wanted something—I knew it because I’d found once more the will to rise and bathe and knock the dust out of my own curtains, to demand some servant’s punctuality to air the choking smell of dust out of the entire room—but it was there that my self-awareness ceased to be useful. I had no doubt I was protecting myself from the nature of my eagerness to please and to be favored above all other members of the household. This last wasn’t very hard, for he was treated quite abominably, despite his tenuous kinship to my brother’s wife. I don’t mean that he was in any way overtly abused. It was simply that most pretended he wasn’t there, and while he seemed not to mind overly much, it was nevertheless true that every time I made overtures or reached out to engage him in conversation his warm eyes, the pale blue color of a dreaming sky, lit up immediately. Now that I was no longer steeped in my own self-pity I could recognize the signs at once. This was an affectionate young man who was being starved for warmth.

He was also clever, and being starved of something to test his cleverness against. This, I supposed, was the reason for all the reading he did—for the way he tore into new books the way desert sands swallowed any and all water for which they were so burningly parched.

It was once again selfish of me, but I loved to watch him read. He had nimble, long fingers and he turned the pages of his romans with a trembling reverence—trembling, I realized quickly enough, because he was keeping a necessary hold on himself, that he wouldn’t become so overeager as to tear a single page. He read as he walked; read in small, snug corners of every room; read outside in the branches of trees and tucked up against tree trunks. When he was at the table he wished he was reading. Only when he was at my feet and listening to my evening stories did that wistful expression fade from his face. Only then was the same hunger he usually reserved for the secrets between the pages fixed on someone alive and breathing in this world.

I admit freely that I lived to be sole proprietor of that expression. I dreamed of it at night and waited all day long to see it again.

Was this so selfish of me? Perhaps it was. Yet, in all honesty, I kept the children entertained and kept William from going mad during his confinement, which also kept the burden from resting solely upon Hal’s shoulders. The Mme even fainted less. In my own way, I was useful in a house that still didn’t entirely forgive my presence; and I was glad, also, to be wanted, by someone. It was a small thing, but it gave me a purpose, even if I’d never fancied myself the country bard before.

One evening, William asked me, “Are those stories all true, Uncle Royston?”

“As true as any story can be,” I replied with a smile.

At that moment Hal caught my eyes, his own bright and wide. I understood, with a sudden and fierce thunderclap of epiphany, what it was I had cobbled together and pinned all my hopes to.

I excused myself from the room at once, worrying Emilie and troubling Hal and sending William into a fit of a tantrum in which he made Etienne’s nose bleed all over the brand-new rug my brother’s wife had just procured for the sitting room.

If we were to go about labeling things, then I will readily admit that was selfish.

Sometime later, I heard a tentative knock on my bedroom door. I knew whose knock it was; I’d memorized it. How I hadn’t realized before the extent and the particular quality of my feelings, I didn’t know. I was an idiot.

“Come in,” I said. Even in the depths of condemning myself, I couldn’t keep Hal out. I simply didn’t want to.

He entered the room and closed the door very quietly behind him, perhaps to keep the light from the hallway from bothering me. There he stood, his back against the door and his hands behind him, still holding the doorknob, I presumed, and worrying his lower lip as he so often did. My heart made a strange revolution in my chest. I was sunk, as surely as I lay there.

“Are you feeling unwell?” Hal asked at last, when the silence was too long and too thick for either of us to bear a second more. “I thought perhaps, since you left so suddenly—”

“Something of a headache,” I replied lightly. I hated myself not simply for worrying him, but for lying to him now—as if it made even an inch of difference.

“Oh,” said Hal. Then he nodded, as though this were a perfectly appropriate reason for leaving as abruptly as I had, rather than merely excusing myself as any gentleman would have done in my place.

He would accept any answer I gave him, I felt certain. Except for the truth.

I had a fleeting, foreign wish for my old fog of indifference. Then I might have something at least to shield me from this awareness, new and raw. It was rather akin to having a headache, in that every movement seemed magnified, but my affliction was—for mercy or tragedy—centered only and irrevocably around Hal.

The doorknob clicked as he let go of it and came forward, hands clasped still behind his back.

“Would you like me to read to you?” His brow creased in a rare frown. “No, I suppose that wouldn’t help, would it?”

It would help neither my fictional headache nor what truly ailed me. And, as selfish as I was, I could not stomach the idea of lying in bed while Hal read to me as though nothing had changed.

“No,” I agreed, too quickly for manners, too quickly to stop the hurt from flashing across Hal’s face, visible as print on the page. I felt like a brute, protecting myself at the expense of his ego, but trapped here as I was in the house, the country, I could think of no other way. I would not indulge in the same mistake twice.

“Would you like the drapes shut, then?” Hal’s face had a curious look to it, wary and uncertain.

I realized then what it looked like, and that his concern revolved around the idea that I might have given up once more on life in the country at large and decided to shutter myself away. How could I explain that it was quite the opposite? The idea itself was laughable. Only I wasn’t laughing.

“That’s all right,” I said at length, then sat up straighter so as to reassure him. “It’s only a headache.”

“Of course,” he said, relief passing smooth as glass over his face. Hal, I understood, had quite simply never been given cause to hide his emotions from anyone. It was rather a dangerous skill to be without. “Well, you’ll call if you need anything? There are always servants about—or me.”

“I’m sure it will be gone come morning,” I said, no longer in control of my own lie nor even clear on the good it could possibly be doing. After all, I would doubtless wake up in the morning exactly as I was now, lest I took as desperate measures as the men in the historically inaccurate books Hal had been reading in earlier months: which was to say, cut my own heart from my chest and seal it away for safekeeping.

“I hope so,” he confided. “Otherwise, William will be inconsolable. And, well, you’ve seen him when he’s inconsolable. It tends to lead to bloodshed.”

I nodded and felt that this would be an appropriate place for an apology about the rug. “You may give him my deepest regrets,” I told Hal instead. “And inform him that no one was eaten by ravenous sea creatures.”

“That will disappoint him,” said Hal.

“He’ll get used to it,” I said, too coldly again. It wasn’t right or fair of me; I knew that Hal was made for no such pretenses, and that a good man, a better man, would have been perfectly clear with him.

There was a short silence, wherein I could see Hal struggle for a clear direction to take the conversation from there. I should have warned him that it was impossible. In the country, as I might well have known, there were many trees to become tangled in.

“Are you quite sure that there’s nothing I can get for you, Margrave Royston?”

The mere fact that I’d grown less self-indulgent, dragged myself from a mire of self-pity, did not mean that my brother’s request had changed, or that Hal came to see me out of anything resembling his own volition. Remembering this fact made things a little easier, like digging one’s nails into the palm of one’s hand to ward off distraction, or the advances of those with mind-reading Talents. A bit perverse, perhaps, but it was a small and necessary pain, there for me to call out of the ether whenever I so happened to need the reminder.

“Yes, Hal,” I assured him. And then, buoyed by some fool capricious impulse, I looked at him directly. “You needn’t address me that way, in case you haven’t noticed. The rest of the family certainly doesn’t bother.”

“Oh,” he said. The tips of his ears went a helpless, bright pink so that I had to look away. “I only thought—I’m not true family, see.”

“Be that as it may,” I said patiently.

I was not normally a patient man; it was the reason I’d turned down a position at the ’Versity Stretch when they’d offered it. Professors had to enjoy the gift of teaching and I was no teacher. I was too impatient, too scattered and self-interested. I wanted nothing to do with someone else’s ideas and wanted to share none of my own. This curious new generosity was a change and—despite the contempt I held for the country and its own fear of progress—it affected me.

“All right,” he replied after a spell, and I thought he sounded pleased, though I couldn’t bring myself to look and see.


HAL

The night I learned for certain of Margrave Royston’s reason for coming to stay with us started just the same as any other night, with no warning signs nor any indication that it was to be something out of the ordinary.

I’d prepared the children for dinner as best I could. Earlier that day, William celebrated his release from captivity by immediately finding the largest and squishiest mud puddle left by the rains; he’d used it to spark a war between himself and any of the others who came near, myself included. By the time we’d all got clean again, we’d run short on hot water, and that put Mme in a foul temper.

Mme was in a foul temper often enough these days, though she was fainting less. I came upon her arguing with the chatelain in the study about influences—specifically, the sort of influence the Margrave was having on the children and William in particular, who now proclaimed to anyone who asked that he was going to move to the city just as soon as he was able. He’d also picked up one or two words that had slipped into the stories in the heat of the moment, words that caused our cook to chase him about the house with a wooden spoon.

In general, though, I felt that things had been running more smoothly since Margrave Royston had taken it upon himself to occupy the children’s fancy. I myself enjoyed the help as much as I did the stories, and would have been very sorry if anyone had convinced him to spend his time otherwise.

The children marched downstairs in a queue to the dining room, which I privately thought of as the finest room in the house. It was certainly one of the largest, paneled all in fine, dark wood with high-backed chairs and a long, rectangular table of exactly the same shade. The servants polished the table daily, whether we were using it or not, so that the wood always had an exacting gleam to it, as though it was not wood at all but marble or glass. I knew it couldn’t compare to the likes of what they had in the city, but I thought it very fine, all the same.

“Any news from Thremedon?” The chatelain seemed relieved to have found that the city was no longer a subject taboo with his brother, and he asked after it often now; though whether he was truly curious or if it was only a peace offering, I couldn’t tell.

“Well,” said Royston, and his eyes crinkled at the corners the way they did whenever he was about to relay something particularly amusing. I leaned forward on my elbows—too eager as always, but then no one was looking at me. “It seems the Esar has come up with a particularly unique way of dealing with our airmen and the diplomat from Arlemagne all in one.”

Mme took a very long drink from her wineglass. She didn’t seem to like talking about the city very much.

“Out with it then,” said the chatelain, who had no patience for the way his brother paused in order to build suspense.

Margrave Royston put down his fork and smiled so widely that it still looked rather foreign on his face. “They’re calling it ‘sensitivity training.’”

What?” The chatelain’s broad face went slack with shock.

The children broke out in a smattering of laughter, though whether they truly understood or whether they were laughing at their father’s expression, I didn’t know.

“It’s a stroke of genius really,” said the Margrave, fingers toying idly with the stem of his wineglass. “It humiliates the Dragon Corps without any blood drawn, which I think the diplomat was quite keen on initially; and perhaps they might even learn something from the whole ordeal though I sincerely doubt it.”

“Oh, Arlemagne,” Mme said, in a tone I thought rather strange. “They never do know what they want over there, do they?”

There was a short pause before the Margrave answered. “Well, I don’t know about that.”

“They’ve certainly had some problems in the past,” said the chatelain, in support of Mme. He smiled jovially, and refilled his glass with wine. “Especially after their king took ill.”

“This new one is completely useless,” agreed Mme. She dabbed at her mouth neatly with a napkin and gestured for a servant to take her bowl of soup. “The prince, or whatever they insist on calling him.”

“Now,” said the Margrave—and he’d told me not to address him as such but remembering was hard, especially in my own head. His voice came out a little colder than it had a second ago, and I had the unexpected sensation of a sudden frost. “Now, that’s not entirely fair. The heir apparent has many fine leadership qualities.”

“Oh I’m sure he does,” said Mme, her expression as sharp and brittle as glass. “But that wasn’t exactly what we were talking about, now was it?”

“Marjorie.” The chatelain said his wife’s given name, quick and quiet like a rebuke. It was obvious that she’d said something rude, though for the life of me I didn’t understand what.

“Yes, Royston,” she went on. “Perhaps you should tell us of the enormous . . . talents the Arlemagnes possess.”

Mme had partaken of rather a lot of wine. I could tell from the way she spoke, kneading the words in her mouth as if they were dough.

“Brother,” said Royston, and in his voice I thought I could hear the rumbling of falling rock in the Ke-Han tunnels, “tell your wife to hold her tongue, else I may lose my temper.”

She laughed, high and shrill, and I found myself wishing she would be quiet, or that the chatelain at least would quiet her. I stole a glance at the children to find William watching the Margrave with an eager sort of anticipation, while Etienne and Alexander stared at their uncle with a mixture of horror and awe. Emilie’s hair hung in her eyes, the way it did when she was trying not to cry.

“What are you going to do? Blow me to smithereens, perhaps?” Mme asked pointedly. There were two spots of color rising high on her cheeks, and she was trembling. Despite the poor constitution she spoke so often of having, she seemed in no danger of fainting now.

“That would be against the law,” the Margrave replied. His voice seemed to have two layers, the external worn thin to reveal the one beneath, which was sharp and unpleasant as a row of crocodile teeth. “I’m quite sure that I needn’t go to such extreme measures to shut your mouth.”

Brother,” the chatelain warned.

“This is an outrage,” Mme pressed; a moment later she’d slammed her wineglass down on the table so vehemently I was stunned when it didn’t break. “We’ve given you our home, our hospitality—”

“And it has been truly hospitable,” the Margrave replied, on the edge of a sneer.

“How dare you?” Mme said, her lips trembling. “How dare he!”

“I merely feel,” the Margrave countered neatly, “that you should keep your mouth shut when you know so very little about the subject at hand.”

“I know this much!” The Mme had never struck me as frightening before—inflexible, yes, and often selfish, but never so unforgiving or unkind—but now I found myself drawing away from her, wrapping my arms around Emilie and letting her hide her face against my shoulder. “You did a disservice to your country—betrayed your king by taking up with that fool in the first place—and because you did, why we . . . we might have gone to war over it! It’s unnatural, and yet you—you had the audacity to be so indiscreet—”

“Marjorie,” the chatelain almost shouted.

He never called Mme by her first name. In the course of five minutes, he’d used it twice.

I hardly dared, but suddenly I found myself looking at the Margrave in the midst of all this. His face was white as a ghost’s, his jaw clenched, his eyes fiercely dark. When I combined what I knew of the Margrave as he was now with his stories from the past, I wondered if he wouldn’t set something on fire or use his Talent out of anger.

Surely he wouldn’t, I told myself.

Emilie was on the verge of crying. I stroked her hair.

“Madam,” the Margrave ground out in a voice like sharpening knives, “this may come as an immense surprise to you, considering how highly you esteem your intellect, yet I must confess there is a great deal in this world about which you know less than nothing. I say ‘less than’ because you are informed incorrectly—and being both tenacious and pompous, you cling to this misinformation as a pit bull to the bone, which makes you far more dangerous and contemptible than even the stupidest of men.”

After that, no one said anything for a very long minute. I could hear the sounds Mme made as she searched for something to say, her breaths rasping; I could almost hear the moment when the entirety of the Margrave’s insult had sunk in at last.

Then everything happened at once, the chatelain and Margrave Royston and Mme shouting at one another; the Mme’s wineglass being knocked over; the chatelain pounding the table with his fist over and over until it threatened to split along the grain; and above all that, a crackling tension that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and which came from where the Margrave was seated, perfectly still. I knew at once that it was his Talent, and whether he was searching to employ it or to check it, I wasn’t sure.

“Only an idiot,” Mme was screaming hoarsely, “would be so incompetent as to—”

“The Arlemagnes are damned shirkers, that’s what they are,” the chatelain was bellowing over all that. “Shirkers of responsibility, dogs in a fight, cowards and bastards all, and I can’t say, Royston, I can’t say as I approve of any of your damn choices, but this—”

“Is too much!” Mme barked. She clutched at her breast. “To come here—to poison our children—to allow them to worship you, when you are no more than a common—”

“As I said, Madam, I have no further use for you or a single one of your ample prejudices,” the Margrave interrupted smoothly. “I should like to think that you and your ilk are the reason most of Volstov has gone to piss in the past four years, and the reason why I fled the countryside in the first place. You epitomize everyone I’ve ever hated—every fluttering, close-minded maiden aunt with no beauty of feature or soul—”

“Now see here, damn it,” the chatelain snarled. “Royston, you ass, if you hadn’t noticed, she’s my wife—”

“I’m very sorry, brother,” the Margrave replied. “That was an unfortunate choice you made, and it’s an unfortunate fate you suffer. I’d not even wish such a terrible thing on the Ke-Han—”

“All this from a man who bedded an Arlemagne prince!” The Mme spat on the floor; William, in what I assume was uncomfortable horror, barked out a dreadful laugh. Neither his parents nor his uncle seemed to notice. “I’d say, of everyone here, you’re the disgrace to our country, Margrave,” the Mme went on, inexorable. “As evidenced by the Esar’s all-too-lenient punishment. If you ask me, it should have been far worse!”

It was then that the Margrave exploded the dining-room table.

I believe, even provoked as he was and shaking with rage, he was still in enough control of himself not to harm any of us with the outburst of raw magic; the explosion was oddly contained, as if some invisible protective dome existed between us and the blast. Splintering, burning wood skittered underneath our chairs and to the four walls of the dining room like some sort of fireworks display. As quickly as the fire began it was doused, and all we were left with was a singed rug and pieces of table everywhere.

Emilie was too shocked even to cry. Etienne was gripping Alexander by the arm, and William’s eyes were wide with disbelief. I, too, felt myself staring.

Once again, the Margrave had rendered us speechless.

In the silence that followed, the Margrave said, very quietly, “I’ll pay for that.”

“Yes,” the chatelain replied, clearing his throat. “Well. See that you do, brother.”

The Mme fainted; Emilie immediately recovered from her shock and began to bawl. It was into the ensuing chaos that William asked, “Will you do the china cupboard next, Uncle Roy? Mama always says it’s so ugly!”

“To your room, William!” the chatelain commanded.

While I attempted to round up the children and lead them out of the dining room—which appeared now to be more of a war zone than anything else—I saw the Margrave sink into his chair and put his head in his hands. I feared the fog would descend around him; I feared Mme’s tongue had been too sharp. I feared a great many things, but Emilie was tugging on my sleeve, desperate to leave this battlefield.

Instead of doing anything I would have liked to do, I ushered the children out into the hallway, where the servants had gathered to stare, openmouthed, through the door and at the scene before them.

“Would you?” I asked the cook.

“Of course,” the cook said, gathering Emilie close. “Come now. Tut, what’s she crying for, then?”

I turned back to the dining room. One of Mme’s maids was kneeling on the floor beside her, waving smelling salts underneath her nose and trying, in vain, to rouse her. Now and then, Mme would let out a trembling groan; she’d stir, her eyes would flutter, and she’d fall back into deathly stillness. She’d done this before. It only meant she was scared and unhappy and faced with something she didn’t understand and couldn’t predict. By morning she’d be fine, if complaining of a headache.

The chatelain was unexpectedly quiet, staring at the tragedy his dining-room table had become.

“It was a very nice table,” he said, at length. Mme took that moment to let out another groan, and I saw the Margrave wince.

“I’ll buy you another,” he repeated. “My apologies for the mess, brother.”

“Well,” the chatelain said. “Marjorie has that effect on even the best of us.”

The Margrave returned his head to his hands, and I took that opportunity to step back over the threshold and into the madness. When I rested my hand on the Margrave’s shoulder, he stirred and looked back at me, and did not smile.

What I’d learned was in some ways very much what Cooke and the others had been gossiping about before—the rumors that had preceded the Margrave and made the servants so uncomfortable. There must have been more to it than that, however; I could tell as much by the unhappy slump of the Margrave’s back.

“Would you,” I said carefully, “like me to accompany you back to your room?”

“Oh,” he said, and didn’t seem able to answer my question.

“It’s just that I think you might benefit from some company,” I said, more quietly, so that only he could hear. I hoped that intimated what I thought—that no man should be left alone with such thoughts as were obviously haunting him—but I couldn’t tell if he was pleased or displeased to hear my motives.

“I’ve made something of a mess,” he said, still refusing to answer me.

“It would appear so,” I replied. I looped both my arms under one of his and helped him to his feet. “The servants will look after it.”

“Hal,” he began.

“Come,” I said. “You won’t even have to talk to me. We can sit about in silence, if you’d like, or I can read to you. Anything you’d like.”

The look he gave me then was one I’d remember for the rest of my life. “Well,” said the Margrave. “All right.”

I took him upstairs. I thought it strange that the Margrave, after such a display of power, could need to be led anywhere, but he didn’t make any effort to lose me. I myself was glad of it, because I had the uncomfortable feeling that Margrave Royston had transformed into someone else again before my very eyes, and I wanted him in sight until I’d got it pinned down.

At some point during the tenure of his long and difficult stay at Castle Nevers, I’d somehow convinced myself that I knew the Margrave, knew what sort of a man he was by the way he interacted with the children and with me. The stories he told were fascinating, and I’d never heard the like, but until tonight they had remained only that—stories. Now, with the memory of the dining-room table fresh in my mind, it seemed as though the things I’d known about the Margrave were only a very small part of a much greater whole.

It was as though a character from one of my romans had leapt from the pages, full-blown and hale. I could scarcely look at him, I found, and not for lack of wanting to.

“I should apologize,” he said, when we reached the landing. His voice was quiet, private, as though he were still half-lost in thought.

“You’ve done so,” I reminded him, even if it was uncharitable of me. “And you promised to pay for the table.”

“I lost my temper,” he said. “I shouldn’t have.”

“Well, you heard the chatelain. Mme has that effect on everyone.”

At that the Margrave laughed, startled and hoarse, so that I knew it had sounded quite as rude as I’d feared. I didn’t care. At that moment, I felt as though I would say anything at all if it would keep him from retiring once more into depression.

“Indeed,” he said, with a rumble in his throat that sounded pleased. I felt a strange sort of swelling in my chest—like pride—to know that I’d caused it, that I could effect such a change.

It was, after all, what I’d been aiming for.

The Margrave stepped away from me as we reached the door, turned the knob, and opened it halfway so that he might slip inside alone. He paused at the doorframe.

“I suppose,” he said, turning slowly to meet my gaze, “that if you have any questions about the details aired so publicly this evening, I should offer to answer them now.”

I blinked, felt a momentary scramble in my mind as I sought for the right question, or even any question at all. I wanted to ask a great many things. I wondered what the prince of Arlemagne had been like, or whether he’d been anything like me, though that seemed a terribly inappropriate thing to ask, and not at all the sort of question I imagined Margrave Royston would feel up to answering.

“Would you,” I said at last, “like to finish telling me how they built the Basquiat?”

He smiled again, and again I felt that peculiar flush of gladness.

“I would.”


ROOK

Our Lady of a Thousand Fans was nice enough, but there was way too much fucking ceremony involved for my tastes, too much hoopla for the end result. I mean, everywhere else you have to sign your name and such, so if you kill somebody they’ve got your calling card if you’re stupid enough to leave your real name, but in Our Lady they make you leave a surety—that is, a piece of yourself they keep until you’re done, the kind of personal item they can track you down with if you were smart enough to sign with an alias. But Our Lady, if you counted it all up and weighed it out, was just about the same as anywhere else, so far as I could tell. Sure, they taught a few of the girls some real exotic stuff, just so they could charge us extra, but underneath all that they weren’t nothin’ special.

I had to go to Pantheon after Our Lady, get the sludgy taste of their sweet tea out of my mouth. That and some other things, ’cause Our Lady was all silk and softness, and I was too hacked off at everything to deal with any of that shit. Pantheon had gambling, and a man with one eye who was offering knife fights in the corner, even odds. Adamo’d told me off more than once for knife-fighting in the city, ’cause I was better’n most and more than once we’d had to have a little “talk” about what was fair and what was murdering a man in broad daylight. I still say that if you’ve got a knife and the other man’s got a knife, then it’s a fair fight no matter what angle you’re coming from. It just shakes down that what isn’t fair in this world is some people being better than others at killing.

But I liked being allowed in the bars more than I liked stabbing men in the gut, and soon enough we came to a sort of compromise.

Didn’t stop me from laughing fit to burst when the one-eyed man nearly lost his other eye, though.

I ended up on the road back to the Airman much quicker than I’d’ve liked, the whole night having constituted nothing so much as one giant disappointment. At least, I reasoned, I’d be getting a good night’s sleep and maybe tomorrow would be less of a complete fuck-up.

I lost sight of that notion the minute I walked in the door. Something in the air smelled different.

The people in the streets—laypeople as they’re called, in technical terms—are always yammering on about the Dragon Corps and what we can or can’t do. I’ve heard stories so wrong that I was sure they’d mixed us up with magicians or the Ke-Han or worse. Anyway, we can smell fear-sweat, but it’s not like it’s some mystical power; it just smells different than anything else. Train any animal early enough, and there isn’t much you can’t teach it. In the end, people are animals too, no matter how they dress themselves up or teach themselves to speak proper, and we’re the same as anything else when it comes to training. The airmen got trained up real special to smell the things most people don’t, but it didn’t mean we were some bogeymen with Talents like magicians.

Anyone with a nose could do it. Anyone with a brain and a nose could do it, which unfortunately cuts out a good portion of Thremedon since there are a whole lot more people with noses than with brains wandering around.

Merritt’s boots were in the doorway, and I’d’ve tripped if I hadn’t been expecting them. They were always in the doorway, no matter how many times I broke into his room to throw them at his head. I even tried jamming them down his throat once, but Magoughin and Ghislain had pulled me off. I kicked them out of the way, and cursed, loud as I pleased ’cause anyone awake wouldn’t care and anyone asleep had thick steel doors between them and me, but it still hadn’t made an impression.

But then: “Oh,” said a voice, and worse it was a voice I recognized, ’cause there were only about fifteen voices I bothered to recognize in this world, Have’s included. The rest fell by the wayside unless it was someone I really hated.

The professor and all his hugging-kissing philosophies definitely qualified.

“Bastion fucking cunt,” I said, soft this time, like I knew I didn’t need to be loud to intimidate this one. No, the ’Versity brat intimidated real nice and easy on his own. He had too much imagination for his own good.

From down the hall, something made a scraping noise against the ground. I thought it must have been that curtain thing Raphael’d dredged up from fuck knows where. Probably stole it from a whorehouse, seeing as how it had cranes and snowy mountaintops painted on it, and that sort of business had gone out of fashion about five years ago.

That didn’t matter though. What mattered was: They’d moved him in. Brought him right into the fold like he wasn’t some outsider, which anyone with eyes could see perfectly well he was. I picked my way down the hall, neat and quiet like some big Ke-Han panther. Little-known fact was that I could be as quiet as I pleased when it suited me. Just so happened that it didn’t suit me often enough.

Zeroing in on the source of the noise came easy enough, as the halls weren’t exactly dark and there was only one body moving in them. Everyone else—due to another rule they’d instated a couple years back—was doing their moving behind closed doors, shuttered and locked as was proper and decent. He’d moved the screen aside, to find the source of the noise, I guessed, and was in the midst of moving right into his little corner, making everything all home-and-cozy-like.

Just looking at him got me so twisted around that I wanted to hit something. No, what I wanted to do was get up into the air again, only there was a strict policy against flying by night unless we heard the raid siren. Strict enough that I stuck by it, same as everyone else. Don’t take your girls out for pleasure unless they’re tearing the place apart for a fly, and it’s during the day.

“What do you want?” The professor didn’t look up, just went on digging in his beat-up old trunk.

They’d got him set up on the couch they’d had put in when Niall started complaining that the walk from one end of the building to the other was too long. It was almost appalling what a man could obtain if he implied to th’Esar that he was unhappy. ’Course it all counted for horseshit if you couldn’t convince Adamo first, but he picked his battles. Knew when giving in might be the better option.

It was, as he was often fond of saying, what made him so much smarter than me, though I couldn’t see what he was going on about. I got on just fine.

“Chief Sergeant said you were out tonight,” the professor added, which wasn’t an answer to the question at all. He’d made himself a fortress—a stupid little wall with his two suitcases and the screen—like he thought it would actually stop anyone wanting to get in. The whole idea made me so mad I kicked one over, just to show him.

It landed on the floor with a satisfying smack. I showed all my teeth, but it wasn’t a smile.

The professor made a noise in his throat that sounded like he’d thought the better of something, which ticked me off. I wanted him to say whatever it was he wanted to say. I’d been spoiling for a fight since the one-eyed man in Pantheon, and my nerves were humming with alcohol, thick and golden.

“He’s not my fucking nursemaid,” I said instead. “And neither’re you.

“Yes, well, thank the bastion for that,” he muttered, unfolding a pathetic homespun blanket and throwing it over the couch.

“What was that, Cindy?”

“My name—” he began, like he was doing me a favor by acting all patient.

“Let’s get a few things straight,” I cut him off, marching over the suitcases and sitting square in the middle of the couch.

He turned to face me, glasses catching the glare from the low red emergency lights they kept on and burning in the hallways. He looked angry, which was funny, and more than that it was stupid. Rule number one: I could sit anywhere I liked, and he’d have to learn to get over that if he was going to survive any longer than a day.

Which he still probably wasn’t.

“You’re not a guest. And you’re sure as fuck not one of us, so you know what that means?” I leaned back easy on the couch and spread my arms across the back, in case there was any dispute as to whose couch it really was.

“I can’t imagine,” he said, throwing on his professor look while he bit his words sharp, kept what he meant back there in his throat, all for himself.

The professor had a pinched look to his face, small and hard. Real stuck-up, like he belonged on the face of some coin instead of breathing and living around real people. Even in the red light, with nothing proper to ’lumin him, he looked younger than the boys running about with their nanny-nursemaids in the city. I wanted to spit in his face.

“Means you’re a waste of space,” I said instead. “Means you ain’t never going to get done what you came here to do, and you might as well go back to the ’Versity while they’ll still take you back, all in one pretty piece.”

“Your concern,” he said, dry as a Ke-Han desert, “is touching.”

There was rage coming off him now, clear as a waving flag—it had a different smell than fear, anger—and it stopped him saying whatever it was he’d been about to say. He turned his back to me, went back to arranging his suitcases, and picked up the one I’d kicked over.

“Not very many men who’d turn their backs on me,” I said as a point of interest.

He didn’t say anything, but his shoulders twitched together like he was getting his hackles up about something. Then they evened out again and he answered flat and calm, “I’m not afraid of you.”

That was just about the stupidest thing I’d ever heard anyone say. I laughed to prove it, quiet and sweet and taking my time, because the longer I took, the more scared he’d be. That’s the way to get someone to provoke you—you just wait it out. It’s the only kind of game I’ve got patience for.

“Yeah?” I asked. “’Cause it sure smells like you are.”

He stiffened, his hands stilling on what might’ve been a pair of socks. Real intimidating. Not scared of me at all; him and his socks were going to mess me up good and proper. “Perhaps you’re imagining things,” he said at length. “I certainly don’t smell anything.”

“Try again,” I said. “Breathe in deep, get a good whiff of yourself.” I didn’t lean forward; I didn’t have to. “You stink of it.”

I saw him work his response around for just a moment; it was too split-second for him to do much thinking beforehand, and it was a big mistake he was about to make. I didn’t even have proper time to relish the anticipation of it.

You,” he said, “smell rather like a whore.”

That was when I came off the couch, quick as a Ke-Han panther could be when he wasn’t lounging back nice and easy and tracking every movement you made before the pounce, and grabbed him by the collar, threw him up against the wall. “Say it again,” I snapped. It was easy this way, to let the anger out piece by pretty piece. The blood was pounding between my ears and I loved the sound, the feel of it.

“You smell rather like a whore,” the professor said, but there wasn’t nearly the same venom in it as the first time. Maybe he’d finally figured out what a stupid thing it was to say, just him and me, and no one around to vouch for me having killed him. No witnesses: That was the fancy way the Provost would’ve said it, or one of his wolves.

“That’s ’cause I’ve been with whores,” I said, drawing each word out sweet and mean, vowels like they’d pronounce them in Molly, all long and hard-edged. “I’ve been with whores all night long and, you know, sometimes it’s so good I don’t even have to pay them.”

“I sincerely doubt that,” said the professor. It seemed like he already knew he was going to die, like he felt it wouldn’t make no difference if he went down swinging than if he went down meek and mild as a babe in arms. “I’m rather well acquainted with the system of prostitution and, if I recall, the frequenter is required to pay before the act. So unless one or two individual women who know you by name harbor a particularly soft spot for you—But even then, it’s the madam who takes the money, and not the woman herself, so you see that’s rather an empty and unnecessary boast. We both know better.”

I tightened my fist in the front of his shirt and shoved him back against the wall so his head knocked against it and the fear rolled off him in waves.

“Yeah?” I asked. “You’ve been following me? You know how I get it done?”

“Well,” said the professor, who by now was just babbling and waiting for death to come, and if he’d’ve been anybody else, I might’ve grown to admire him a little for it, “it’s just that unless you climb in through the windows and rape the madams, what you’ve said is rather impossible. But, considering your style, it’s not all that unlikely you would do things that way, in which case certainly you might not have to pay at all. Except of course there are bars on the windows, for keeping both deranged rapists out and kept women in. So once again we find ourselves at a fork in the road of logic—a logistical impasse, if you will—wherein you say one thing and I counter it very effectively with, ah, the truth.”

I was gearing up to hit him. “Like you’ve spent all your school trips getting used to the way they do it in Hapenny,” I snarled. Our faces were real close, and I could see his eyes get panicked, like he thought I was going to bite him.

Not likely. I don’t put my mouth on just anybody.

“Actually,” he said, in a squeezed voice, all reed-thin, “I have done much research on Tuesday Street, so you see I am rather well acquainted with the way things work in that particular business, Messire Rook.”

If he thought he was so familiar with Tuesday Street just because of doing some research, I thought—all blind rage and preparing my fist to break his face—then he didn’t know anything at all.

I raised my fist and let him take a good look at it. I was still wearing my flying gloves—it gets a man better service no matter where he goes—and I watched him square himself against it, when of course the real way to let yourself get hit is to go soft and relaxed to try and keep any bones from breaking.

It was kind of like hitting a puppy.

“No,” I said finally, “I don’t think I’m gonna.”

He looked startled; even more so when I released my grip on him and let him slide down the wall, his knees shaking, his eyes not trusting my sudden relenting. That was smart of him, at least. “You’re not going to—What?” he asked. Like he hadn’t been pissing himself about what I was about to do this whole damn time.

“Later,” I promised him. “Don’t sleep too deeply or nothing, ’cause, well. You know.” I flashed him more teeth than I needed to.

“Do I?” he asked, struggling to regain his composure.

“On the point of a pin, like,” I replied. “And sometimes I get up in the night and look after unfinished business. That’s all.”

“Oh,” he said.

And, quick as you please, I turned on my heel and headed back to my bunker, where I locked the door and lay down and slept nice and easy, while he was no doubt still shivering in his socks right there in the common room, by his couch and his fancy screen that wasn’t going to help him none soon as I got the other boys behind me.