CHAPTER THREE
ROYSTON
It was raining, hard like walls of water whipped sideways by the howling wind, when my brother came to me, hair wet and plastered over his brow, face wet, lips blue. I’d been sleeping—or rather, lying in my bed with my face to the wall—and was about to muster some snide quip from the depths of my weariness when I saw his expression fully, not just obscured and backlit from the hall.
I sat up. “William,” my brother said, dripping all over the floor. It would warp the wood. “Damn child, always thinks he’s playing when he isn’t—never mind, never mind. He was out earlier, before the storm hit. Hal went out to find him, only the idiot boy didn’t tell anyone, and we’d only just noticed them missing when Cooke came in to tell us he’d seen Hal set out—”
I was already pulling on my boots. What my brother thought he’d accomplish by running out into the rain was beyond me, but it stirred some trembling emotion in my chest to see how deeply he loved his children, despite how helpless he was to express any of it.
“What do you think?” I asked, not relishing the idea of going out into the rain. My left boot was giving me trouble, but unlike my brother’s, my hands weren’t shaking. “Where do you think they’d be?”
“William thinks it’s funny,” my brother said, then his voice broke on something wet and cold, “to play by the marsh.”
“And that’s where you think they are?”
“Hal would have gone there to check for him,” my brother confirmed. He pushed his wet hair back off his forehead, then grabbed my arm with his wet hand. “Can you—?”
He meant: Was my magic something that could help in this matter. My brother had never bothered to learn the specifics of my Talent, which had hurt me once and now no longer mattered. It was too complicated to explain to a man so bent on remaining mired in country feudalism. In short, my Talent wasn’t going to be especially helpful, no, but I had common sense and experience in similar matters; I’d saved an entire garrison of Reds on an afternoon as piss-poor as this one, and I was the only person in the entire household who had the head for doing what needed to be done to make sure no one was marsh-drowned by morning.
“No,” I told my brother. “ But I’ll find them.”
“Yes,” said my brother. “Right. What do you need?”
“I’ll need a coat,” I said at length, for I realized that none of my clothes had been tailored specifically for a downpour in the countryside.
“A coat,” my brother repeated.
“Yes,” I confirmed, then stood up. There was a moment when it seemed I’d done it too quickly, and the blood rushed from my uppers too soon, but I held in place for a moment and the dizziness passed. I took my brother by his wet arm and steered him out of the room and down the stairs. I was not unaccustomed to telling men and women what to do in their own homes; mercifully my brother seemed to have gone into a kind of frozen waterlogged trance, where he was numb to trifles such as hurt dignity or misplaced rivalry.
Once on the landing, he went to the closet while I kicked the toe of my left boot against the floor, still dissatisfied with the fit and feel of it.
The rain hammered down against the roof with a force that sounded as though it had the entirety of the Locque Nevers behind it. This was foolish, I knew, as rivers could not be pulled from their beds without at least three days’ advance planning and a geographical knowledge of the area.
“Here.” My brother handed me an oilskin raincoat. His own, I presumed—too wide in the chest and too short in the arms—but it would have to do. I put it on. “If you can’t find them,” he began, and I silenced him with a hand.
No matter what had passed between us, between my brother and me, I did not wish to see him harmed by the loss of his child.
“I’ll find them,” I said, and went out into the rain.
The lay of the land surrounding Castle Nevers could only have been designed by a countryman. There were no straight paths to anywhere, only the vague and winding curve that would lead you to the river if you followed it long enough.
In some ways, that reminded me enough of the city for it to weigh heavily on my heart.
Today, however, I had no time for the turning paths, counterintuitive to any man with logic at hand. The wind whipped at branches, drove rain sharp and bitterly cold against my face and hands. I wished I’d thought to bring some gloves, for in the cold your fingers were the first to be endangered.
Hal had pointed out the marsh on one of our walks, pleasant and innocuous as always. I’d not been paying attention at the time, but was thankful now for his insistence that I leave the house despite my contempt for both sheep and trees. If it hadn’t been for those walks, I’d be incurably lost now.
All things have a purpose. My mentor’s words came unbidden as they ever did, and I recalled them with the same deep regret that now tinged and tainted every part of my life.
I picked up speed.
To my surprise, much of the grounds were not unfamiliar, almost as though I truly hadn’t spent all my term of exile in an impermeable fugue of self-pity. There wasn’t a path to the marsh, not exactly, but it had a way all the same, past the ring of stumps where Emilie had her tea parties in the warmer months, and the burnt-out wreck of a caretaker’s cabin that had been destroyed in an accident involving the boys upriver.
Much as I liked to believe myself separate from the goings-on in my brother’s house, I knew with a sureness that flowed in me to the core that I could not—would not—go back to the house without my nephew and Hal. Those who knew me well might have called it stubbornness and they wouldn’t have been very wrong, for I was a stubborn man in all things, and especially the ones I thought could not be amenable to change—weather and law and the movement of the stars themselves. This warm closeness in my chest was a kin of stubbornness, then, but it was like nothing I’d ever felt before.
There would be time enough to examine my discovery later, I told myself; now was not the time.
The trees were beginning to thin out when my boot made a squelch instead of a thump, which meant that I was getting close. It also meant that the wind, while being deprived of branches to snap at my face, was also uninhibited by such trifling cover. It tore at my brother’s coat, freezing my wet skin and forcing my eyes to thin slits as I scanned the Nevers marsh for any signs of life. More than once I caught myself following the wind’s howl with my gaze, thinking it a voice in peril. I rubbed my arms briskly to keep them from going numb as my hands had, then continued more gingerly. The ground here was soft, and nearly as wet as the air. I thought of William and his short legs and his appetite for mischief, and I felt sick at heart.
A shrill whistle went soaring past my ears, and suddenly the wind was calling my brother’s name.
It was difficult to discern the direction from which the cry had come, but as I turned it came again, louder, stronger. Two voices instead of one, perhaps. I remembered various bits and pieces of lessons, training, how to narrow my focus, how to catch in my ears what I wanted to hear, and even as I put those theories to practice I forced my legs to move. There was water seeping into my boots, cold as the rest.
It made sense, in some strange way. Why should any part of me escape the frigid consequence of the rainy season?
I was thankful at least that the voices I was following were taking me back to the marsh’s edge rather than farther in. No matter what confidence I had in my own abilities, I hadn’t relished the idea of fishing two people from the watery depths of a piece of land that couldn’t make up its mind whether to be solid or liquid and was treacherous enough to be both.
I saw a flash of something pale waving among a tangle of branches and rain, and I realized with a shock that it was an arm. My sigh of relief was immediately snatched away by the wind. The boys were in a tree.
“Papa!” William’s voice was reed-thin, screamed ragged. I hated to disappoint him, but that was what came of wearing my brother’s coat. I struggled over to the tree, laid my hands against its gnarled trunk. Hal and the boy sat tangled together on a lower branch, hair and clothing glued to their skins. Neither was in danger of drowning in the marsh, but their chances of surviving the night outside would have been slim indeed. As it was, we could all be reasonably certain that in a matter of days, everyone in my brother’s castle would be sniffling and sneezing and harboring some version of the same cold.
“M-Margrave Royston,” said Hal, blue-lipped and shivering. He was holding tight to William, who looked ready to hurl himself out of the tree at the slightest provocation.
“Have the pair of you quite finished scaring my brother to death?” I asked.
William made a miserable sound that reminded me how young he was, so I checked my tongue and held out my arms for him, instead. My most-disagreeable nephew clung to me like a newborn kitten, tiny freezing hands crawling under my collar, thin arms looped about my neck. I felt something pierce the fog of indifference I’d held around me like the blanket in my bed, and I comforted him as I had when the children had been much younger and my brother visiting Miranda for the first and only time.
There was a rustling sound from above our heads, and I looked up to see Hal halfway out of the tree himself but moving slowly, careful of the limited response his frozen limbs must have been giving him.
“Here,” I said, shifting William to one arm so that I could hold out a hand to Hal.
He took it without compunction, squeezed my fingers tight, and slipped from the tree with a wet thump. His lips were pressed tightly together, I assumed to keep his teeth from chattering. When he opened his mouth, the words came rushing out in a halting flow, as though he had a lot to say and not the words to say it.
“William—I had to come. Didn’t think it would be so cold,” he managed, before falling against me much as William had done.
“Take my coat,” I said, though it was too late for any coat to do much more than trap the cold that had already got into them.
Hal shook his head, wet hair brushing against the curve of my chin as he did so.
“Here,” I said again, as reasonably as I could. I fumbled at the buttons of the coat with numb fingers until I could pull a side of it free. In a swift motion that let as little rain in as possible, I folded Hal in close, and brought the oilskin around him, so that it might serve a dual purpose.
“Oh,” I heard him say quietly, an icy and immediate presence against my chest. “Thank you.”
I swallowed, feeling the small movements of his mouth as he spoke against my shoulder. His hands were larger than William’s, but they clutched in exactly the same way, holding tight to my shirt as though I were an anchor in the storm. With a slowly trickling certainty, like the water running down my neck, I felt that same hand as surely as if it had clutched at something deeper within my chest.
“Well,” I said, gruff and businesslike. William was weeping against my shoulder. “We’d best get back to the house.”
ROOK
I didn’t have a mind to be sharing or caring again anytime soon. Only when I said as much to Adamo, he looked me square in the eye and said he’d string me up out the window even if I was the only soul who could fly Havemercy in a straight line. I wasn’t in a mood for that kind of horseshit—especially not with all the horseshit I’d been forced to swallow lately—so I told him as how he knew he wouldn’t; and then his jaw got hard, and we were just staring at each other for a while, breathing heavy like right before a fight. We’d’ve just about gutted each other on the spot, except then Ghislain stepped in with more news from th’Esar: that like as not we were going to have to show the little shit professor around our digs, let him observe us day to day, and not accidentally feed him to one of the girls. (That last being Ghislain’s own phrasing.)
We’d known, barely and sort of, what to expect when we all piled into the atrium for our rehabilitation. Before the fact, Balfour kept talking about how it was just a punishment in theory and not in actual practice, and how it was better than all the things the Arlemagnes were demanding for punishment, and how it was a clever idea when you thought about it, pleasing both sides—a real compromise instead of one of those fake ones where both parties leave the table dissatisfied. But I knew better than that. I knew it was a demotion in status and I knew how it made us all look, like kids who’d stolen cookies from the jar, like no better than naughty puppies, with th’Esar rapping news-print against our noses, and I was screaming pissed. No matter which way they tried to spin it, I wasn’t going to do what the little shit said, and I wasn’t going to cut him any breaks, either. Whatever he was here to accomplish it was all just more of the same: weak words ’Versity students and Margraves and members of the bastion tossed back and forth like birdies in some pussy’s badminton. We were different from all that—exempt, to use their own rhetoric—’cause this was the Dragon Corps. We weren’t supposed to abide by the usual rules, and whatever the fuck th’Esar thought he was going to accomplish, it sure wasn’t inspiring no fighting spirit in me, leastways not the kind he was looking for out of any one of us.
“I’m flying out,” I said.
“You aren’t,” Adamo told me.
But I was all energy and nerves and wanted to burn something, and we hadn’t been flying in months. “Havemercy’s pissed,” I said, which was true, and didn’t just mean I’m pissed. Havemercy liked flying better than anything, and these days when I visited her for a polish or a chat, she looked at me over one metal claw like I was a fucking disappointment. Yeah, sweetheart, I’d say, we’re all fucking disappointed right about now. Then I’d say a few other choice phrases, and Have’d just snort like she didn’t care one way or another, so long as I saw fit to get her up in the air again.
I needed to fly all that name-and-private-detail business off—and the idea that the little shit was coming to get the grand tour and we were all going to have to roll out the red carpet like he was some kind of king rather than all green and pissing his pants terrified of us.
Good, I thought. At least he had one thing straight, if nothing else.
“Don’t be a fool,” said Adamo. “You’ve already had your ride this month, same as the rest of the boys. It isn’t my fault none of you takes the time to understand rationing a thing out once in a while.”
Th’Esar had come to some sort of agreement with Adamo more than ten years back about how we each got one free ride a month during peacetimes. I guess he thought that any damage we could do up in the air was miles less than we could do on the ground, getting stir-crazy and all riled up at one another without nothing to let off the steam.
But mostly, we figured, he’d agreed for the dragons, partly ’cause keeping them locked up all the time made them cranky, and partly because he thought it made them rusty, too.
“I’m takin’ her out,” I repeated, and that was final-like. He wasn’t going to string me up, and he could give me dog rations all he liked knowing I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about it, and he sure as fuck couldn’t dismiss me.
He was right in some sense, ’cause the thing is, the tech the magicians use for making dragons is all pretty hush-hush, and you can’t risk some lucky Ke-Han getting his hands on you so he can figure it all out in his sweet time and start building up his own air force. When you’re an airman, you’ve got to be careful and you’ve got to be precise—but all that doesn’t mean anything unless you’re good, and out of all of them I was the best. Everybody knew it—even Ace, though he wouldn’t admit it, and especially Adamo, who was stubborn as a brick wall but smarter than he looked.
I wasn’t going to take her far, I said, getting on my gloves. I was just going to take her up, wheel her around a bit, give Volstov a show, then return her so she could sleep easier, having had the exercise.
And so I didn’t kill anyone from being so fucking mad.
“Thirty,” Adamo said, which meant if I was up for more than half an hour, he was going to string me up.
Whatever. We both knew who’d won that round.
So I went on down through the bunks and the mess and the showers and through the leisure door—rather than the one you take when the raid siren’s sounding, which shoots you straight from the bedroom to the docking bay—and then there I was, the wide, low-ceilinged room clean and dark and smelling of metal and burning things, and my palms itching to get Havemercy harnessed and get us both up in the air.
See, unlike most of the men here, I hadn’t been trained properly or anything. I’d volunteered to be one of the muck boys who run around after the real airmen and keep the harnesses polished and the dragonhide gleaming and all that bullshit, like with mops and yessirs and nosirs every two seconds, scraping and bowing and otherwise making an ass of myself. Only, I volunteered at the right time, just when Havemercy was fresh off the table, and she was being real picky and real precise about not having anyone flying her no matter how they coaxed, until she took one look at me and it was love at first sight, only we both knew the other one didn’t have any heart for loving to speak of. She was beautiful then, and she’s still beautiful now, though there’s a clip off her left wing from getting in too close to the real fighting one time, but we turned the tide of the skirmish and sent the Ke-Han packing back over the Cobalts where they’d come from all cocky and proud, so I guess we did all right by that.
“Hey, sweetheart,” I said.
Havemercy saw the harness in my hand, that I had my gloves and my riding boots on. She yawned and flicked her tail. “Bell didn’t ring,” she said.
The thing you have to understand about the way dragons sound is this—they’re not really talking. I mean, they’re machines. They’re made out of metal, and then there’s a little hole in their chests where a magician pours some vital piece of his Talent and his love, and that’s the dragonsoul. And if the magician’s peculiar or eccentric or completely off his nut, the way they usually are, then that comes out in the dragon’s personality. Only they don’t have any blood, and their voices grate out from their hollow metal bellows, so it’s more the echoing memory of words than actual words themselves. They aren’t hes or shes, either, only I liked to think of riding her like I’d ride any woman, only it was better than all those times rolled up into one, my legs wrapped around her powerful neck and her wings beating the air, throwing it against my back and whipping my hair around my face.
“Just a spin,” I said.
“Good,” said Havemercy. “I’m getting rusty.”
“Shit,” I said, “you ain’t.”
“Aren’t,” Havemercy said. “You common little fucker.”
There was a time when the powers that be were concerned I was going to be a bad influence on Havemercy, the pride of the entire dragon-fleet, but she wasn’t some prissy little politician’s wife, just power and musculature and sleeking grace, and she didn’t fuck around with being proper even from the start. I taught her all the good curses and she’d melt any man tried to separate us, leastways until I could get my knife in between his ribs and stick him like a pig.
Anyway, I harnessed her up and she lowered her neck for me to swing myself around. There were loops in her jaw like chain links for me to latch the harness on and I did, then she’d turned herself around and the door to her stall was lowering like a bridge-ramp, same as always, though slower since this was no more than a leisure jaunt, and also for reminding everyone as had a pair of eyes on them who really ran this city.
Us.
I snapped the goggles down over my eyes. They’re made more for actual emergencies, when the flying’s going to get sticky and there’s ash and smoke and all sorts of shit you don’t want getting into your eyes, not to mention clouding up your vision. I put them on, though, out of habit and because all I needed was to catch a bug under my lid to piss me off even more.
Havemercy stretched her wings—not all the way, since she wouldn’t have the room ’til we really got out of this damn room and off this damn ground. If she’d been a horse, or some common animal made of meat and bone, I’d’ve dug my heels in a bit—so keen I was to get in the air—but Havemercy wasn’t any kind of common anything, and even with my boots on it would’ve hurt my feet more than she could’ve felt it at all.
“So,” said Havemercy, making a thoughtful sound like metal grinding. “Any direction in particular?”
“Anywhere,” I said, then, “everywhere. Shit, Have, let’s just make sure the city hasn’t forgot about us.”
She snorted and unfurled her wings with the sharp whistle of steel through air. They caught the sun, flashed bright and blinding down to the ground below. I laughed my approval, loud and indifferent to the people who turned away and those who pointed and stared alike. My girl knew how to get attention.
We rose into the air, and all them people with their cares and concerns fell away at once, the steady beat of Have’s wings buffeting the currents all around me. On a clear day, a no-war-fucking-lull day, flying could be as smooth as a virgin’s thighs, and as soft and easy, too. On a rough day, it was like riding the eye of a storm, snaking metal and magic under me.
“Let’s go to the water, then,” said Havemercy.
Volstov was a city built on a hill, with everything slowly sliding down to ruin in the water. That wasn’t how the ’Versity types put it—“tiers” they said, the city was built on three tiers, Molly closest to the water and Miranda closest to the palace, with Charlotte in the middle, cold and unhappy as a child in the same position. It was all like some complicated cake for weddings, and right on top was the Basquiat. It rose from the center of Miranda, tall and arrogant as any one of the damned magicians and Margraves who occupied the place, with swirled onion-shaped domes set in too many colors. The only thing I liked about it was that it near rivaled the palace in size, and that pissed th’Esar off real nice every now and again when he caught sight of it out the windows. Or so I’d heard.
Nearest landmark to the Basquiat—stuck up on a nice little hill of its own, neat as you please—was the ’Versity Stretch. That was where good boys and girls went to drain their mamas and papas of their hard-earned cash in order to learn how to speak all proper and read things in dusty books that happened to no one left alive today. Not nothing or no one useful ever came out of the ’Versity Stretch, and our sensitive new piss-pot professor was only further proof of it.
“You’re clenching the reins,” said Havemercy.
I was. Just thinking about that little whoreson and his plans and his research made me want to spit, so I did, since there was no one to give me black looks in the air.
’Versity students didn’t have much money, of course, after spending it all on books and whatever the fuck, so if you followed the Stretch it’d run you right into the Rue. The Rue d’St. Difference—where you could buy anything except slaves and sex—was where the merchants established themselves and vied for customers every sunup to sundown. Foreigners coming to the city from elsewhere had a real problem with the Rue, since it was the only place where the roads ran straight instead of all crabbing crooked in the same direction. Niall, who spent more time on the ground and in the city than any self-respecting airman should, said that this year the Rue was crowded with milliners, and women in fancy wide-brimmed hats with feathers and ribbons. I tried to get him to bring me one back so we could stick it on Balfour, but he went on whining about the price until I wanted to punch him in the face; and then he said he was never going to do me any favors, ever.
Whatever. Adamo would only have torn me a new one for it, anyway.
The roads went crooked again sure as rain as soon as they bent off into Charlotte. The middle sister was where most men found their sport. Grouped together were the unmistakable red roofs and pointed, storied buildings marking the Amazement, Volstov’s entertainment district, filled with opera and theatre and a bit of whoring just to keep things interesting afterward. ’Course there were restaurants, if coffee after was more your bag, but you were like to be laughed straight back into Miranda with a priss attitude like that. Charlotte didn’t coddle, and it made no bones about someone’s ideas of segregation. If they wanted you out, they’d let you know. It was only a madman who’d want to live in Charlotte after Miranda, but you had to respect her attitude.
Through the center, just to one side of the Amazement, ran a road that was sharp and jagged as a lightning bolt. This was man-made. Wolf ’s Run, where the Provost’s men made their digs, and they didn’t have time for meandering around slow, sloping curves. The Run was located special in the center of things, so the wolves could duck into upper or lower as neat as they pleased whenever they had to keep the peace. I don’t know why they didn’t just stick the whole thing on the Mollyedge and keep the troubles out that way, but there’s no accounting for what some people think is sensible.
I didn’t have any desire to fly over Molly—Hapenny Lane, Tuesday Street, and an over-fucking-abundance of dirty, diseased urchins being its only commodities and sole export of the lowest maiden with her skirts soaking in ocean brine. No, I didn’t want to get near it, and not even to get to the ocean.
I said so sudden and firm to Havemercy as she twisted and climbed, fickle in the wind.
“Fuck that,” she said. “I wanted to see the boats.”
“No time,” I replied, though honestly I didn’t know whether it had been twenty minutes or forty since we’d took off.
She made a wheezy sound, like a cranky bellows, and flicked her tail in a way that meant she knew I was lying.
Twenty-five, I decided impartially, and only for the harbor. We continued on.
The harbor was a deceptive place, clean and bustling as it was. Thremedon City wasn’t a port town in that we needed the trade or nothing, but boats came and left just as often as they pleased since the Ke-Han had no use for the seas. They’d been fucked over more than once trying to cross them, which was why it’d been such a big surprise when they’d snuck up and took the Kiril Islands right out from under th’Esar’s nose. Took ’em a good few years to manage that one, and not from their fighting skills or nothing—because it took them that long to get across the water without capsizing in the storms.
Thremedon’s harbor was filled with ships built by people who knew what they were doing, else I didn’t think they’d have made it to us at all. Caelian barges with their dark orange sails like buildings on fire; little merchant vessels from Arlemagne; the fishing boats of the Molly-dwellers that were almost too small and insignificant to make out, like everything else that made up part and parcel of Molly.
I only felt sorry for the poor bastards who didn’t realize where they’d landed, smack in the middle of the city’s poorest and filthiest.
I was so fucking glad to be out of there.
Havemercy was humming a tune I’d taught her myself, picked up in one of the bars and memorized ’cause I knew she’d eat it up with a spoon. The bawdy songs were her favorite, and I could tell when she was in high spirits because of when she broke out with one. Anyone who says the dragons can’t have emotions ’cause they’re made of metal’s never flown one, see, though that sort of talk never bothered me. Have and I understood each other.
“Feeling better?” I asked before she could get to the line about the earl with a girl on each knee.
“Are you?” Havemercy beat her wings extra-hard, like she was jumping in the air, and evened out again.
I thought about it. “Always better when we’re off the ground,” I answered, at length.
“Bastion’s own truth,” she said, and went back to her song.
THOM
“So,” Marius asked that evening. “How was it?”
He was being kind about everything—treating me to dinner in Reliquary’s finest—because he pitied me. And though I didn’t relish being pitied for prolonged periods of time, I knew that the more I spoke to him, the more I could postpone heading back to be given the grand tour. Anything to avoid that, I thought; and, because Marius was paying and had assured me it was all right, I ordered the duck.
“You’re asking after the grand offender himself, aren’t you,” I said, suddenly very interested in the design of my salad fork.
“Well, I was going to wait for a while to bring it up. But since you mention it . . . Indeed, I am.”
“I think he might have been raised by wolves,” I replied. “Or at least by the Ke-Han themselves.”
“Ha,” said Marius, though somewhat humorlessly. “Hilarious. That dreadful?”
“We already know he’s an abuser of women,” I said darkly. “The first exercise I had planned—”
“Introductions, yes; I thought that was very clever.”
“Thank you.” Marius always knew what to say—and, surrounded by the friendly candlelight of the Amory Rose, I felt comforted, less fatalistic. “When it was his turn, he spoke at great length about the joys of forcing his way between a lady’s legs.”
“It’s said he comes from Molly,” Marius pointed out. “So of course, he’s bound to be vulgar, isn’t he? It’s common enough. He’ll be a nuisance, but at the least you can always remind yourself how much smarter you are.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Whether or not he can write his own name seems to have very little impact on his ability to be an ass.”
“So he’s the heart of the trouble, do you think? The ringleader?”
As much as I wanted to ask Marius how he managed the most troublesome of students, I was nearly certain that much of it had to do with his age, his experience, and his own confidence. I had none of these three tools, and was rather certain of my imminent doom. “Yes.” I sighed.
“I have no advice for you, Thomas,” said Marius, though he did look rueful. Perhaps I wasn’t so averse to pity as I’d thought. “You must weather it—and you mustn’t let him win.”
I thought of the stark gray lines of the Airman, where the pilots slept close by to their dragons. It was a new building, an ugly intrusion on the landscape of Miranda. And, like its inhabitants, it was made too many allowances.
“I know,” I said, firmly. “I won’t.”
HAL
If I’d known getting myself almost drowned by the rain would help improve the Margrave’s spirits so enormously, I would have done it sooner.
Well, that mightn’t have been entirely true, and at least, if I’d been clever enough to plan it beforehand, I wouldn’t have involved poor William.
After the chatelain recovered from his short-lived period of relief, the boy was confined to the indoors for the rest of the month, and by no more than the second day of his punishment he was nearly climbing the walls with boredom. I myself was suffering from something of a cold and was also cautioned to remain inside the castle, so I tried to entertain him with a few storybooks, but soon we ran out of stories he hadn’t already heard. If we were left to our own devices much longer, I feared he might run away and really be lost to us for good.
Yet Margrave Royston was like unto a different man, and so we weren’t left to our own devices at all.
I’d given up on the storybooks entirely and thought to try a bit of the lesson plan I was forever amending to please William’s ever-changing interests. It began with an explanation of Volstov’s war with Xi’an, its history and the reasons for it—though I’d never been able to find two textbooks that agreed on the latter—but to my dismay, there wasn’t anything more recent than fifty years ago, and it had none of the detailed descriptions about famous battles that William was so enthusiastic about.
“I don’t understand,” he said, peering at the book over my shoulder as though he was angry with it.
“What don’t you understand?” I asked, in a calm voice that I’d been perfecting for just this purpose. I thought that if I at least sounded like a proper tutor, it wouldn’t matter so much that I didn’t feel like one at all.
“You keep talking about the war,” William said, “and about the mountains and those others, the Ramanthines. But I don’t understand. Who are the villains?”
“I . . . well,” I said, turning to the table of contents in the front of the book and stalling for time. “I’m not sure. It’s not exactly that simple.”
“Oh but there must be villains,” William insisted. “It isn’t a proper story without them. Papa always does the villains with a scary voice, but Mama says it hurts her throat, and she pretends like there aren’t any in the stories she reads me. Does it hurt your throat too?”
“No,” I said, reaching for another book that might have the answer I was looking for. “It’s not that. I only think that there may really not be any villains in this story in particular. It all depends on what side you’re coming from.”
“Or whose side of the table you’re sitting on,” said the Margrave Royston from where he was standing in the doorway.
“Oh,” I said, and stood, brushing dust off the backs of my trousers and fighting away the urge to rub my nose with the back of my sleeve. (Such behavior was countrified, vulgar, and unacceptable, said the Mme; only sometimes I forgot myself, and there was no kerchief handy.) “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow.”
I thought at first that the Margrave must have caught a fever from being out so long in the downpour the same way I’d caught a cold, but on that second day, as he showed no particularly feverish symptoms, I realized that what he’d actually caught was the memory of a purpose.
It changed him, chased the darkness from his eyes. He shook his head as though he’d only just remembered. “I’m sorry, I forgot. It happened before you were born. The last time we attempted diplomacy with Xi’an, William, our ambassador had some bad eel, which caused him to be ill all over the Ke-Han warlord’s favored niece.”
“He threw up?” William asked, with scandalized delight.
“Yes,” the Margrave said, looking very serious. “She thought it was an attack, poor creature, and defended herself with a knife.”
William was now looking at the Margrave Royston as if he were the last slice of chocolate cake at dinner.
He was not so absent a man that he did not notice the attention. “Have you run out of stories already, William?”
“Yes, well—” I couldn’t help speaking up, since I was feeling somewhat responsible in the first place. “You see, we’ve read most of them before.”
“Yes,” William said sullenly, “we have,” as if it were the worst fate in all the world. Part of me very much agreed with him.
“What, even the one about Slipfinger the Penniless?” the Margrave asked.
“And his fifteen different adventures,” I confirmed.
William scuffed his toe against the carpet, and added under his breath, “Which weren’t so different, not really.”
“Well, after the tenth they do tend to get a bit similar,” the Margrave agreed. He took a moment to look around the room, half of its shelves miserably empty and the dusky sunlight sinking low just outside the lone, squat window. For a moment I thought he would reject it and be lost to his fog just from the sight, but then, to my surprise, he stepped inside and clasped his hands before him. “If you’d like, William, I could always tell you about Cobalt Range.”
That was the most famous battle in the past fifteen years, and William’s eyes widened enormously. “Were you there, Uncle Roy?” he asked, all his sullenness forgotten.
“More or less,” the Margrave said.
“Would you like a seat?” I asked, admittedly eager to hear the story myself.
“If it’s no trouble,” said the Margrave, who seemed to have only just realized there was but one comfortable chair in the entire room.
“Papa broke the other one,” William said sagely. “He was very angry.”
“He’d lost his favorite horse,” I explained, then drew up the chair for the Margrave. I caught him looking at me with a curious expression—I couldn’t understand it—but by the time I’d thought to look again for any clues to the puzzle, he wasn’t looking at me at all, turning instead to helping William scramble up beside him on the chair. I sat at his feet, knees drawn up to my chest.
“Are you quite all right down there?” the Margrave inquired. “Surely—though this is the country—there are other chairs to be had somewhere about the place.”
“Hal enjoys sitting in strange places,” William confided.
I felt my ears grow hot, and knew without having to see them for myself that they were as pink as my cheeks.
The Margrave cleared his throat; not entirely in disapproval, I thought, but it hardly mattered, as I was still blushing. “Is that so?” he said. “To each his own, it would seem.”
“Tell the story, Uncle Roy,” William pleaded, and I was grateful for the distraction.
“Which story was that? Oh, yes, Cobalt Range.” The Margrave closed his eyes for a moment, and sighed—not entirely happily, but with a certain pleasure in remembering. “Yes. Ten years ago, almost eleven. It was only my second campaign, and the first had hardly given me any experience at all. Now, a curiosity of the mountains is that no one wants to fight there for long. Though the higher ground is what counts, of course, in a battle, it’s a lot of mean, close-in fighting. You can’t get any space to fight, trapped like that, and space becomes very important when, well”—he paused, with a glance at William—“when there are a frightful amount of explosions going off all at once.”
“Brilliant,” said William happily, and the Margrave looked relieved. If he’d been worrying over William’s appetite for violence, he needn’t have done. Mme was often chasing him away from Cooke when he told his stories of terrible riding injuries and horses with broken bones.
“On the other side of the Cobalts,” he went on, “there is a valley. Imagine it like this: The Ke-Han city closest to our mountains is like a blue bowl, carved deep and smooth into the earth.” He spoke of it like a beautiful thing, respect lighting his eyes and touching his voice, though I thought that where the Ke-Han were concerned every man was a barbarian and in no position to be concerning himself with beauty.
“Now, this city of theirs,” the Margrave went on. “We thought that if we could push them back to it, get out of the mountains and into the open space, those of us with . . . particularly useful Talents—skills that were doing no one any good all pinned together as we were like sardines in a can—the fighting would end more quickly. And we did need it to end, because while much of our battle magic was rendered useless by proximity, theirs was doing just fine, and many men were dying.
“No one quite understands the Ke-Han magic. We do know that it’s something unique, feral and uncultivated when compared to ours. Something to do with the elements, though, and they seem particularly fond of wind. I think they focus on that because they know our air force—the Dragon Corps—is so vital to our successes past and present.
“Seven days they hammered at us with everything they had. The Reds took it the hardest, being commanded to fight no matter what, and most of them with no knowledge of magic save what their grandmothers had told them about the Well.” He shook his head, as though the memory was painful for him, but it was clearly an old hurt, long since healed over, and nothing that I recognized of that deeper hurt with which I was already familiar.
“They’d only spared twelve magicians on the Cobalts, and there were two and a half times more than that against us. Their leader was a man named Jiro, and he was clever, as much as I hated to admit it. He was going to keep us holed up in those mountains until we died of starvation, or ran out of soldiers, or both.”
“What about the dragons, Uncle Roy?” William’s mouth hung halfway open as though he were under some spellbinding enchantment.
“I’m getting to them, nephew of mine,” the Margrave said, poking the end of William’s nose with a heretofore unseen affection. Then he looked at me.
I swallowed, feeling peculiar—as though I were under some kind of enchantment myself. I tucked my knees in closer to my chest.
“We moved just after noon,” he went on, and this time his eyes did not leave my face. “Waiting until night would have given us better cover, but those dragons you love so much, young William, aren’t worth piss in the daytime. Pardon my vulgarity. By then the Ke-Han had done us so much damage that they’d grown complacent—assumed they’d already won the battle. There were the eight of my fellows left, along with the Fourteenth Company of Reds and a handful of the Ninth. The rocks were sharp and loose from over a week of near-constant assault, and pushing down through the mountain passes became like sliding on an ever-shifting sea of shale. One of our members had a Talent for concealment; this may very well have saved all our lives.
“Intelligence and more than an appropriate amount of guesswork told us that the Ke-Han were operating from an elaborate network of tunnels in the mountains. Of course, those tunnels were the only spot on the whole damned mountain—don’t tell your mother I used that word, William—where wind hadn’t hammered the rock to death. We slipped into the tunnels silent as shadows, the other magicians and I, while the Reds advanced farther into the city. We’d been promised air support if the dragons could untangle their wings from their asses in time. If they weren’t there by nightfall, then it wouldn’t much matter, either way.”
He sighed, rubbing his long fingers over his forehead as though he were suddenly weary, though in a moment it passed and I was left wondering if I’d been seeing things. I still didn’t understand Margrave Royston and his all-too-mercurial moods, but he smiled with far more teeth than strictly necessary, and it was better than the resignation from days before.
“It all went wrong in the tunnels. Jenkins knocked over some rock-rabble shrine, and released some damned wind spirit that started howling like fury. Of course the Ke-Han woke up, came pouring in from every direction; it was like being trapped in a rat warren. We ended up racing for our lives. By some miracle we ended up outside. I—I went last, collapsed the entire setup behind us.
“By then, of course, we’d caused such a ruckus that the city below was sending off alarm fireworks, bright red like fire in the darkening sky. Our colors.
“With the element of surprise lost, many of us no longer had anything to lose. The sun was dipping below the edge of the mountain range at our backs; in a few hours it would stain the sky as red as the soldiers’ coats. We descended into the city, Ninth Company at our backs and the Fourteenth with me in front.
“I . . . operate better if there isn’t anyone in the way, you see, as it wouldn’t do any good to go blowing away our allies.
“I don’t remember who it was who started singing the anthem, low and rolling. It moved through our battered little platoon like a wave until we were shouting it to the skies, song punctuated by blasts of rock and the shouts of our enemies. We made it nearly to the gates before they’d mustered almost enough of a force to greet us. We’d caught them off guard, remember, and most thought our campaign in the mountains quite over and done with.
“Jenkins died with a spear in his throat; it was a terrible way to go. And that’s—Well, that was when I lost my temper and blew a hole in the cerulean wall surrounding the city. Nearly killed myself in the process, interestingly enough, as there’s only so much a magician can do with his own Talent before it starts to tug at his blood, and the wall was built with a very old magic. Still, it seemed like we might almost be massacred then and there, after all, with the Ke-Han screaming bloody murder with their deep-throated war cries, and crashing their enormous war gongs, and pouring out from behind the city walls like an endless stream of ants.
“Then the dragons came.
“It started as a high whine, like the whistle of a kettle. Then the sound changed, became akin to that of the wind spirits that had rushed through the tunnels earlier that morning. It was, of course, the sound of wings, metal and magic, beating the air—and turning the tides of battle, I like to think. They covered the sky, streaking copper and silver, platinum and gold, flashing their bellies and glinting ferociously in the moonlight. I’d never seen anything so beautiful in all my life.”
“Do they really breathe fire?” William asked.
I realized my mouth had been hanging open and closed it abruptly.
“In a way,” the Margrave answered, and his eyes lost the distance they’d gathered with his story. “The city certainly burned, I know that much.”
“It’s a mechanism,” I said. My throat was dry, my tongue no more useful to my needs than a rock. “I . . . I think,” I added, very soon after that, for this was the Margrave’s story, and surely he knew better than I.
“Indeed, it is that,” the Margrave confirmed. “A complicated business—another story entirely—and perhaps one I’ll tell you tomorrow. What do you say?”
“Please,” William said, though he never liked to use the word unless he was coerced or tricked into it. I couldn’t help but smile. “Is that really your Talent, Uncle Royston? Blowing things up?”
“Ah,” the Margrave replied. “That’s . . . well . . . in a way. It’s very hard to explain.”
“Will you explain that tomorrow, too?” I was grateful for William’s questions, since they were the ones I wanted to ask for myself but couldn’t. I tried not to look too eager for a favorable reply.
“Indeed,” the Margrave said. It wasn’t the first time I found him watching me—as if he could see my wishes because I was very poor at hiding them. “I think, nephew, that I shall.”
That night I dreamed of the war cry of the Ke-Han, and Margrave Royston in the tunnels at Cobalt, at that time scarcely more than my own age, much as I would have dreamed of any favorite roman. When I woke, I was almost disappointed to recall it had no bearing on my life at all.
THOM
Chief Sergeant Adamo and Airman Balfour met me at the door. From within, I could catch wisps of a melody—one I didn’t recognize—as picked out on the keys of a piano. I could smell, too, the scent of the clove cigarettes certain professors and Margraves of the Basquiat smoked.
Above all that, though, was the smell of fire.
It wasn’t simply something as commonplace as the sulfurous gasp of a match struck or a candle lit. It was real fire, the killing kind, the sort that ripped through cities and trapped children in their little rooms—fire hot enough to melt metal—and the thick, dark smoke groaning at its heel, cruel and suffocating. I didn’t like fire of that unpredictable, violent nature. I had my reasons for that, too.
My stomach turned over at the scent, but it was a grounding revulsion, one that reminded me who I was and the relative insignificance of what I’d been asked to accomplish. I didn’t know where the dragons themselves were—I assumed I wasn’t important enough to see them up close—and rather than overstepping my bounds, I simply allowed a young, rather grimy man to take my suitcase.
“Your quarters’re this way,” Adamo grunted.
Balfour fiddled with the thumb of his left glove. “It’s only a couch,” he said. “And a sort of . . . standing curtain. It won’t be very quiet. Niall wakes up early and he likes to sing while he makes breakfast, but in any case—I wanted to tell you—if you wake up and your hand feels funny, wet sort of, whatever you do don’t bring it up to your face.”
“Oh,” I said, and I must have looked something awfully unhappy, because Balfour’s face fell.
Adamo stifled what might have been a laugh or might have been a cough behind the palm of his broad hand. “If you’re stupid enough to fall for it,” he said gruffly, “then you get what you deserve.”
“No one deserves a blue face,” Balfour said quietly.
I was inclined to agree with him.
As I already knew, the Airman was a hideous, blunt building, erected in the modern style and designed for efficiency over beauty. It was somewhat nicer on the inside, I was relieved to note, though not by very much. It was also a mess. There were boots strewn about the hallway, and coats in disarray, so that I almost tripped over one. There was even a shirt and what appeared to be a pair of ladies’ undergarments. I realized all at once that these men had no idea how to clean up after themselves, and no awareness that they even should. I wondered what unpleasant smells the permeating scent of burning and the clove cigarettes masked, and found myself quite relieved I might never have cause to know.
I wasn’t their nanny, and I wasn’t their maid. I was their instructor in the skeleton of basic decency; I would teach them how to interact as humans rather than animals. What they did with their women’s undergarments was up to them.
“And there’s Niall’s bunker, and Magoughin’s,” Balfour was in the process of telling me, “and there’s the first row of showers. You sign up in advance, unless you’ve been out on a raid, and then you’ve got first priority whether you’ve signed up or not.”
“Um,” I said, though I didn’t mean to sound stupid. “Why’s that?”
“Oh,” Balfour said, as if it were perfectly common sense, “to wash off all the ash, of course.”
“Ah,” I said, and promptly decided to keep my mouth shut.
“That’s the common room, the one for music and smoking—and there’s the private common room, for when you’re engaged with a . . . ah . . . companion for the evening, or the afternoon, or whenever you’ve got off-hours.”
A belch of perfume hit me from beyond the half-open door. It reminded me of my childhood, and I stepped quickly past it.
“That’s command,” Adamo said, jerking a hand toward a room across the way. “You don’t go in there.”
“Yes,” Balfour agreed. “No one goes in there but Chief Sergeant.”
“Duly noted,” I assured them both.
I wondered where the rest of my welcoming committee was, or if they’d sent Balfour and Adamo ahead to lull me into a false sense of security while they waited just around the corner like jumping spiders, ready to strike.
“And there’s my bunker, and there’s Rook’s, and there’s Merritt’s,” Balfour continued, still giving me the grand tour. I didn’t entirely see that it was necessary. I didn’t think I would be spending much time inside any of these forbidding little rooms, their doors staunchly, disapprovingly, locked against me. It was, however, good to make note of which room not to stumble into in the dead of night, thinking it would be the right place to have a drink of water or to relieve myself.
“You may notice the rooms are all scattered-like,” Adamo said. Indeed, I had, and I said as much. “The docking area’s below,” he explained. “Each man sleeps above his dragon.”
“When we’re needed, the air-raid bell sounds,” Balfour added. “There’s a trapdoor for each of us that lets us down into each of our private bays directly.”
“The long way ’round isn’t one you need to know, either,” Adamo said. “The docks are off-limits.” And that was most emphatically the end of that.
“Understood,” I assured him.
“Now, Rook’s out tonight,” Adamo added, privately, and I was embarrassed to learn how easily everyone had seen through me, embarrassed to feel Balfour’s eyes moving between the two of us. “We thought it’d be for the best. And, knowing him, he won’t be back for a day at the least.”
Before I could stop myself, I said, “But th’Esar—”
Adamo’s look hardened. “We’re not much used to having th’Esar in direct command of us,” he said evenly. “Seeing as how he doesn’t pilot a dragon, himself.”
“Ah,” I said. As they’d have noted in Molly, I’d stepped in it. “Of course.”
I was quickly beginning to understand that conversation with any of the airmen outside of the requisite teachings would be akin to running the gauntlet. In a Ke-Han minefield.
“Here you are,” Balfour piped up, gesturing to a plain standing screen that had been pulled haphazardly across an alcove. This was where the couch was.
I examined my new living space—it could hardly be called a room—with trepidation.
It was a largish couch, I’d give them that. Of course, it made sense that th’Esar would spare no luxury when it came to his precious Dragon Corps. I wondered if he even knew the extent of what went on down at the Airman when his influence wasn’t physically present. I wondered if there would be certain things that I was to omit from my reports, and how I would know what was to be deemed information to which th’Esar didn’t need to be privy. I felt the onset of a headache creeping from my temples to the bridge of my nose, knowing that if I got it wrong, the airmen would likely feed me to the dragons.
You are accountable only to the Chief Sergeant, I reminded myself. I would make my report, then Adamo himself could discern what information he wanted to share with the head of the nation. That would save me from trying to navigate the pitfalls of that particular arrangement, and also from trying to understand the strange circadian logic that governed these men. I did not at all cherish the deep anxiety fostering in my gut that came from not knowing what to expect.
“Ivory’s on your left.” Balfour tugged his right glove on tighter, gesturing farther down the hall to another room, which had been placed as all the rest: with no real rhyme or reason. The man who had designed the building must have been a genius or a madman or both. “He’s very quiet, so you might not be . . . bothered.”
He tacked on this last as if he hoped very much that it were true. On my other side, Adamo snorted; he didn’t even bother trying to hide it.
I had never before felt so strongly the urge for a door of my very own that I could lock, not even when I’d been living in the very depths of Molly, where a lack of things to steal did not necessarily preclude break-ins.
Small blessings, I told myself again. Rook would be out for the evening, likely the entire night, and might not have the care to coat my hand in something strange and wet. I felt some helpless frustration once again at my predicament, that I’d allowed myself so easily to be caught at the tender mercies of the very type of system I’d made strict measures to avoid my entire life.
“Well,” I said, and was promptly cut off by a bloodcurdling scream that echoed down the hallways.
“My books!”
“Ah,” said Balfour. “That will be Raphael.”
“My books,” said Raphael again, louder this time and with a quivering timbre to his voice, as though he was a volcano on the edge of eruption. “What have you done, you piss-drinking sons of Ke-Han whores?”
“Shit,” Adamo said, the curse torn rough as crushed cobblestone from his throat. “I’d better go. Docks’re off-limits,” he repeated to me, as though I were simple.
I could take no offense at his attitude, though, instead nodding to show that I really did understand. The Chief Sergeant was a man I did not want on any side but my own, and if that meant a little more bowing and scraping than usual, so be it.
He marched off down the hallway to the tune of a muffled crash, followed by a series of undignified hoots and hollers that sounded like nothing so much as an entire band of wild chimpanzees let loose from the zoo.
I thought about calm things: the surface of a lake on a windless day, the grant money I would receive for my studies upon completing this assignment. The knowledge that, even if they killed me, I was still much, much smarter.
There was another scream.
“Madeline!”
“I bet it’s Niall and Compagnon,” said Balfour confidentially. “They’ve had this big secret project going for weeks now. Papier-mâché. I guess they ran out of paper.”
“Oh,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Balfour nodded. “It was going to be a scale model of the city, only Compagnon gave it these, you know, enormous breasts, so now it’s just a misshapen sort of woman. She’s in the common room—not the private one, but the other one.”
“And that’s . . . Madeline?” I asked, with a sense of looming dread.
“Yes,” said Balfour. “She’s kind of like our mascot.”