CHAPTER SEVEN
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THOM

The first air raid I was privy to during my stay at the Airman came in the middle of the night. I saw no one and heard nothing above the blasting, howling cry of the siren, though I had made my way to the hallway to see what I could discover. There was a light flashing on and off in the hall, but by the time I’d collected my thoughts and realized over the stuttering of my heart what must have been happening, the siren had stopped ringing and the light was only flickering, unsteadily, over my head. In the siren’s wake was an awful, swallowing silence—the kind of silence you imagine at the bottom of a country lake or well, deep and dark and unforgiving.

I was tired, uncertain; my heart was still hammering. I’d not been schooled in these procedures. They were of utmost state secrecy, and I’d already been given more information than any other person of my standing and position—and for all I knew everyone had gone, leaving me alone to fend for myself in this eerie silence. It would have been much easier, I thought, if I’d been given a contingency plan: some slip of paper that told me what I should do in case of an air raid.

It was just when I was about to give up and head back to my makeshift bedroom, where I would try—and no doubt fail—to rediscover sleep that a doorway at the end of the hall opened and from it spilled a golden shaft of light.

I recognized the location after a moment of searching for the knowledge. It was Adamo’s room.

“There you are,” Adamo said, stepping out mere moments later. “I take it the alarm woke you?”

“I take it the alarm was designed with waking people in mind,” I replied. My ears were still ringing.

“Only Rook, Ace, and Ghislain have gone,” Adamo explained brusquely. “It’s the weekend, which means they’re the ones on night duty.”

“I see,” I said, which was a blatant lie.

“Everyone else went back to sleep,” Adamo said. I was going to ask how they managed it—I would never be able, no matter how many times I heard that bell in the middle of the night, simply to roll over in my bed and fall back asleep in a matter of seconds—but then I supposed this was why I wasn’t a member of the corps, and held my tongue. “There might be another raid tonight, but probably not. It might even just be a false alarm. Raids are usually only called for one of three reasons, those being that the Ke-Han are at our doorstep—which is pretty unlikely—or that one of the watchtowers to the east’s been attacked. Third reason’s if we’ve been fighting awhile already and th’Esar gets it into his head that a preemptive hit’s necessary. Since we haven’t been fighting in a while, and since you don’t hear the alarms that’d indicate a city-breaching, I’d guess it’s the guard towers.”

He fell silent, seemingly unaware that this was the most he’d ever spoken to me.

I realized at once what I’d been too dazed, too tired, to understand until now. Adamo was being kind to me. After all, he wasn’t required to explain the situation or indeed any of the particulars to me. And yet, if I understood correctly, he’d stepped out of his chief sergeant’s quarters to let me know. Perhaps it wasn’t so very important to him, but considering the month I’d been having, I could have kissed him.

On second thought, I added dryly to myself, that was clearly not a system of rewards I should put into play at the Airman, of all places.

“Ah, yes. Thank you. I had wondered,” I said.

“So you should try for some more sleep yourself,” he concluded, then jerked one hand behind him. “That’s where I’m headed. And tomorrow, you might want to lay off it. The boys’ll be tired, on edge. It’s been a long time since the bell sounded, if you catch my meaning.”

“I do. I’ll keep it in mind. Of course,” I said, all very quickly. “Thank you again.” I was on the verge of adding a tentative but nevertheless friendly good night when the door snicked shut, leaving the hall empty and dark and utterly silent once more.

Well, I thought. It might have been second nature to the members of the corps, but I’d only been there a month. Though I returned to my couch, I found myself wide-awake, nerves still jangling, heart still skipping its usual rhythm when I remembered the shock of the raid bell, or when I thought that at any moment it was likely to sound again. How any of these men managed to sleep, I had no idea.

For a long time I stared at the ceiling, calming my thoughts, but the comfortable ambling path of my mind just before sleep continued to elude me. I let my mind wander, but it was too much engaged. I was thinking about the dragons and, admittedly, their riders. What sort of men, I wondered, would volunteer for such a job? It shouldn’t ever have come as a surprise to me that I was dealing with madmen, with lunatics, with perhaps the criminally insane. They were capable of waking instantly at the sound of the bell, suiting up, and shipping out before I’d even rubbed the sleep from my eyes. It was a miraculous talent, certainly, but who would ever knowingly choose such a way of living?

The dragons’ choices had something or other to do with it, but they chose from a group of volunteers—from men willing to die at the drop of a hat or at the sound of a bell. Though for many of them, I began to realize, it’s what they had been trained for since birth, perhaps creating a mentality an outsider would find difficult to understand.

My mind veered off after that to uninformed theories on the dragons and the mechanisms that ran them, half motor and half magic. Their greatest attributes were speed, stealth, the ability—despite their limited capacity for fuel, and what it did to their range—to raze an entire Ke-Han city to the ground. And, of course, there was the fact that the technology was ours and ours alone. The Ke-Han had no comparable army in the skies. The corps was th’Esar’s greatest triumph and Volstov’s ace in the hole. Admittedly, the Ke-Han had still found a way to make things particularly dangerous for them. In the earlier years it had been the catapults, firing great rocks into the sky before any of the first airmen had really got the hang of flying their dragons. We’d adapted around that, though, and the next dragons created had been sleeker, swifter, and the catapults had become relatively obsolete. Next, and perhaps most successfully, the Ke-Han had capitalized on their skills with wind magic, coupled with the mountains that so often landed dead center of the battlefield. They’d never brought a dragon down in large enough pieces for it to be of any use to them, but they’d brought one or more to ruin in the mountains, along with their airmen.

These days, the biggest vulnerability concerning the dragons was the amount of fuel their sleek bodies could hold. It wasn’t enough to get into Lapis and back properly, and Lapis was where the Ke-Han kept their magicians. The more fuel they carried, the heavier they were and the slower they flew, and so on. The system hadn’t yet been perfected, so that the farthest the dragons could reach were the Ke-Han watchtowers stationed along the mountains and their troops stationed around them.

If the war continued for another fifty years, perhaps the technicians would have time to solve the problem.

Still, there was a lot riding on the airmen, both on nights when the bell rang and on nights when it didn’t.

I passed my hand over my eyes, rubbing blearily at them. What I couldn’t get behind, I decided at last, wasn’t the sound of the siren, nor even the flying, for I had no fear of heights. Rather, it was the fire. Most children who grow up in Molly or along the Mollyedge are trained to hate and fear fire; in Molly’s cramped, winding streets and cluttered tenements, fire spreads too quickly to contain and kills without prejudice and without remorse the unlucky, the lame, the very young, and the very old. I lost my brother to one such fire, and naturally have been averse to them ever since.

After that, I was taken in by a few young women who tricked their trade at a House on Tuesday Street; a fire nearly claimed them two years later, when I was five. I can’t say they moved up in the world after that, but rather cut their losses and dove deeper into Molly, bringing me along with them. I stayed for ten years, even once things became a bit dodgy. It was there that I forgot my brother’s face—since, after all, I’d only known him for three years—and there that I taught myself three languages, the requirement for applying to ’Versity Prep, by studying in the prop room behind the hapenny-for-a-peek burlesque to the sound of Gin the Rattler’s uncertain piano tunes. One year there was even a trumpeter, but he was a hopeless sot, and he was found halfway through his contract facedown in a gutter, and once that happened it was only old Gin hammering away at the half-remembered melodies.

All of this was long past. It was only the late hour and my unfortunate bout of insomnia that caused me to remember them. I wasn’t often prone to such nostalgic indulgences.

I was just on the verge of drifting off again—in the midst of wondering what it was my brother really did look like—when I heard the sound of a door slamming, followed by raucous laughter and approaching footsteps. The voices I heard a few moments later I recognized immediately. Rook, Ace, and Ghislain were coming toward the common room, and my only recourse was to pretend I was sleeping.

Luckily, they stopped just beyond the door; I heard them talking, muted, through the wall. A few nervous laughs punctuated the distant conversation.

“Fuck”—and that was Rook—“if I wouldn’t’ve taken a dive if it wasn’t for that trick you pulled at the last fucking second!”

“You’ve been holding out on us, Ghislain,” Ace—it must have been Ace—agreed.

“It was just a dive, only without the falling off,” Ghislain pointed out. Only Ace laughed at that one, but it was the sound of Rook’s voice that fascinated me most. It had changed. It was no longer a sullen child’s, neither stubborn nor prideful, defensive nor prejudiced, but laced with fierce excitement.

“Fuck, but it was sweet,” Rook said. He was entirely breathless.

If only I could have moved, sat up, or even reached for something to write on. I had the strange and sudden urge to document this moment for posterity, that I might remember it in the morning as real and not the deluded fabrication of my mind left to its own devices. Even with the airmen’s distraction, I didn’t trust my own movements to be stealthy enough to escape their attention, especially keyed up as they were from the raid.

No, with my luck, I would knock a table over, announcing my eavesdropping presence more assuredly than any air-raid siren.

“I only did what I had to,” said Ghislain, and his voice sounded calmer than the rest.

“Saved my life or damn near to it.” It was the first time I’d heard Ace sound wide-awake, focused. He cursed cheerfully. “I thought I’d never see anything outside of that tornado again! Lucky for me you’ve got lead weights in your ass the same as your dragon. Ke-Han; who’d have guessed? They’ve got balls on ’em, if nothing else.”

“Thank the bastion for that. Another day on the ground and Havemercy’d’ve lost it.”

“You mean you’d have lost it,” said Ace, but it was a cheerful rejoinder, with none of the venom or snapping I’d grown accustomed to hearing from them whenever the airmen interacted in a group, or especially when Ace and Rook were alone.

Breathing shallowly, holding carefully still despite the fact that no one had attempted to enter the room, I remained possessed by a feeling I could not name or did not want to. In short: I was awestruck. I’d spent weeks trying to divine what it was that kept these men together and allowed them to function as a team when all I’d seen of them appeared to be grave dysfunction and an unwillingness to do whatever it was they were told. These were men contrary as cats and solitary as lone wolves, and all the information I’d gathered to this point added up to indicate that logically, they could not and would not function as a team.

Except logic appeared to have taken a leave—perhaps the sirens had scared it away—and outside my door the three men continued to converse as perfectly natural human beings. A little nervous and on edge, certainly, but it was the kind of jump that anyone got from a rush of adrenaline, and it held none of their usual sparking hatred.

“Think the war’s on for good again?” Rook’s voice practically trembled on this last, with enough eagerness to inspire in me a peculiar mix of revulsion and intrigue. Only a man so cold as Airman Rook would crave the resumption of something as destructive as Volstov’s hundred-years war with the Ke-Han.

“Don’t think anyone’ll really miss that guard tower. Anyway, that isn’t the important part. They hit us. You know what that means.” With my eyes closed, I thought I could almost picture the smooth, rolling indifference of Ghislain’s broad shoulders.

“We hit back,” Rook answered, with violent exhilaration. “Shit, I don’t think any of them’s going to be forgetting tonight real soon.”

“I don’t think I’ll be forgetting tonight real soon,” Ace complained.

“Better be on your guard,” said Rook, “or else Ghislain’ll be taking your spot on that board pretty quick.”

“Maybe he’ll take yours,” said Ace, but quietly, and it was only then I grasped that I could hear him because he was standing just outside the door.

I threw the blankets over my head. The room lit up with a spark and a hum, and the sound of laughter and booted feet flooded the common room.

I cursed silently in the three languages I’d learned to speak, which had indirectly led me along the path to being here, sleeping on a couch—a grown man, hiding from other grown men.

“Well, if it isn’t the littlest fucking professor.” Even with me, Rook’s voice did not regain that glass-sharp cruelty to which I’d become accustomed. “Up and out. This is a private party and I know you ain’t asleep. Ain’t nobody who sleeps after the raid siren on their first night.”

“I was asleep,” I said stubbornly, which defeated my purpose in concealment, but I thought perhaps in the long run it might save me from the indignity of being sat on, or coated in tar, and then dipped in feathers, or whatever other horrible plans they had percolating behind their laughing eyes and smug, secure grins.

When I opened my eyes I saw immediately why anyone back from a raid procured inarguable rights to the showers, as all three men were covered in thick, uneven layers of ash that had been smeared into their clothes and faces like a second skin. Their gloves were stained greasy and black, and there were bright, pale rings around their eyes that I supposed meant they had been wearing goggles. When Rook smiled, his teeth flashed white and uncomfortably pointed against the black of his skin.

They looked less like men and more than a little like the portraits of the Ke-Han warrior gods I’d seen inked in the textbooks at the ’Versity.

“I know I’ve left it here somewhere,” said Ace out loud, though to no one in particular. He was rummaging through the cupboards set into the far wall.

“Leave him be,” said Ghislain, meaning me. “I’m too worn-out to be fighting with anyone as isn’t dressed in blue and screaming curses on my family to all eternity.”

“Sometimes he wears blue,” said Rook, nodding toward me with a maddening obstinacy.

To my great surprise, however, he didn’t press the matter. He only leaned against the wall and folded his arms, as though he were too tired to stand and too wired to sit.

“Ha!” Ace produced a bottle from one of the cupboards, which bore a seal resembling that of the private store of the Arlemagne noblesse. I recognized it because their diplomat had spent a very long time wetting his throat with it in between detailing how exactly he wanted Airman Rook torn to pieces by wild dogs.

Ghislain—who’d procured a chair and was studying the floor as though he were now trying to decide whether it would be an adequate place to fall asleep or not—smiled, his mouth knowing and expectant, then asked anyway. “What’s that?”

“I thought we might celebrate, it being our first raid of the season and all.”

“Make it quick,” said Rook, leaving a long black smudge against the wall where he’d been leaning against it. “I’m gonna sleep like the dead tonight and I ain’t getting up for any lessons.” He threw this last with a look at me, which was jarring after having been so ignored.

“There aren’t any lessons tomorrow,” I said, uncomfortably clearing the sleep from my voice as the other two turned to look at me as well. “I thought—Well, the Chief Sergeant suggested, I mean—I don’t have anything planned,” I concluded lamely, ashamed of myself for being so surprised by the change in the airmen that I no longer knew how to interact with them.

It was as though they’d undergone a metamorphosis, and where I’d once made myself comfortable in a cocoon of sarcasm and heavy-handed wit, I now had to reevaluate everything I’d learned. I got the feeling they’d brought the shadows of their dragons back with them, hidden but transformative, and were both less and more like real human men for it.

If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought they did it on purpose.

“There, see,” said Ace, pouring the bubbling liquor into large cups obviously not meant for the expensive vintage they now held. “No lessons. That means you can all celebrate and stop pretending like you’re sleepy as babes in arms.”

“I am sleepy,” said Ghislain, but he held his hand out for the glass all the same.

I could no more attempt to go back to sleep now than I could after the air-raid sirens had gone off. Even ignored as I was, even aware that I was an outsider, I could not help but observe with fascination the difference in process. My fear, that as the novelty and the adrenaline wore off them it would be replaced by the sullenness and anger I’d come to think of as characteristic, turned out to be unfounded. Instead, a kind of calm had settled over them. It was partly exhaustion, perhaps, but when Ace thrust his cup out in front of him, even Rook begrudgingly joined the toast.

What I realized then—with the clarity that could only come from having been powerfully, painfully wrong—was that much of the behavior of the airmen came not from a fount of cruelty and stupidity, but rather a gratuitous squandering of ability. These were men who’d been fed from birth, as Marius had so aptly put it, on their own importance to the realm. Each member of the Dragon Corps knew this about himself, only to be met with the stubborn reality that, when the war was no longer being waged, th’Esar had no need for them. It must have been a bitter tonic to swallow. It was as though the siren and the resulting raid had bled off some reserve of poison and drained them of their shaky, pent-up rage.

They no longer seemed a separate species, like proud, ill-behaved animals, but appeared to be men at last.

That was not to say I excused their behavior, for in truth I still found their society as oppressive, cruel, and elitist as I ever had, but I felt for the first time as though I understood, infinitesimally, the smallest piece of the puzzle that caused them to operate the way they did.


ROYSTON

We had to be careful. That much was of paramount importance.

A knock on my door—my brother, briefly inquiring after my health that evening—jolted me from a thoroughly incautious examination of the shadow of Hal’s eyelashes against his cheek while he read.

My own private feelings on the matter would have to be kept just that: private. It was all there was to it, and with no room for argument I thought that I could readily convince myself of the new way of things.

All too soon—or seemingly not soon enough—Hal had finished with his reading. At least, I applauded myself, I’d kept from descending so much into my thoughts that I no longer had the wherewithal to converse with him properly.

“Hal,” I spoke to remind him, quiet and low, though it was as much for my own benefit as it was for his. “You mustn’t forget what we discussed. We cannot meet with such frequency, and you must try your hardest not to seek me out so.”

“I will,” Hal said. Then, flushing, he added, “But it will be difficult.”

“You must do it,” I insisted, more forcefully than was perhaps necessary. I had to make him listen and, beyond that, I had to know he understood me. I thought of my brother’s wife, her intolerance fueled by a sharp but nevertheless closed mind. I thought of what she might do if she suspected Hal of having any manner of feelings for me which she might deem unseemly, and it was enough to make me ill.

“I know,” Hal said, the light in his eyes dimming. “The Mme—”

“Hang her,” I muttered. “She doesn’t know anything. Yet—and we must both remember this—it is as much her house as it is my brother’s, and though he is a good man in many respects, he is content in the simplicity of his countrified existence. He isn’t searching to expand his mind or open his heart any further than his wife is willing. It’s enough that he tolerates my presence here, and that his wife does. Despite their differing levels of graciousness.”

Hal reached out as if he meant to touch me again, then thought the better of it. “I know,” he repeated sadly.

“And you should take your leave,” I continued. I knew full well I was exhibiting more self-restraint than I ever had in my entire life, but if my brother was making his rounds that evening and found Hal missing from his tiny corner of a bedroom—and yes, I’d seen it, and yes, it was bordering on the inhumane, his bed cramped in a slope-ceilinged corner, barely more than ample closet space—then doubtless his suspicions would be aroused. My dignity and my status in the household would not withstand any more blows than they already had. It was Hal and Hal’s place in my brother’s castle that worried me, and, I felt, out of Hal’s best interests that I acted so decisively now. Such a thing could not be rescinded nor could it, in the country, be defended. Hal was going to be a tutor, and I saw very keenly that he was eager for the post; he loved my niece and nephews very tenderly, and was better with them than one could imagine possible. He was goodness through and through, and therefore his heart was more vulnerable than most.

I could protect him, even if I’d never been able to protect myself.

“All right,” Hal said, and he stood from the chair very slowly, as if it pained him to do so. After that he slipped away—his silhouette outlined for a moment in the doorway—and closed the door carefully as he left.

And so began our little charade.

Hal didn’t have the requisite nature for it. It was well enough when I wasn’t there, when Hal was playing with the children or discussing a book with Alexander, engaged in the task of testing the young boy’s comprehension and depth of critical thinking. Yet when we were in the same room together—and when we weren’t alone—I saw him struggle with the task I’d set him. Whether or not it was in his own best interests had nothing to do with the way his face fell each time I was curt with him, or turned down his entreaties to come and join him and William for another story. It pained me to be cruel to him even in appearance alone, but I was certain he was clever enough to realize I was only acting my part of the shadow play we’d decided on.

Yet it seemed that I was much too convincing in my role. He came to me that first night, hesitant and unsure.

“I thought . . . you might have changed your mind,” he said.

At once, remorse engulfed me. I could never apologize enough, I thought, and stepped firmly on a blooming impulse to cross the room and hold him as closely as I had in the boathouse.

“Hal,” I said carefully. “I was acting. We’d both decided—”

“I knew that,” he said, shutting the door and ducking to hide his expression. “I knew that, and yet—You were so convincing, I did think it might have been possible you’d thought things over again, and—”

“I would have told you,” I promised, over a rising sense of uneasiness that it was not my tutoring he spoke of. “Barring a sudden onset of madness, I don’t believe I’ll be thinking anything over anytime soon.”

We looked at each other for a long moment after that. I took it upon myself to choose the text for that night, a small and meaningless gesture of apology for the things I could not change. If I thought about it in this way—that Hal was my pupil, and I his mentor—then like any good teacher I must allow each new discovery to take its natural time. When we were alone, it grew more difficult to ignore the temptation to encourage and reward any way I pleased, mix poetics with the physical, guide his study of the complicated structure of old Ramanthe and kiss him for the pleasure of seeing his neck bowed to the task, or the pleasure of seeing his eyes alight when he’d solved some new, more complicated problem.

I did so want to kiss him yet knew that I could not.

There were times during the day when I was unnecessarily sharp with him. There were also times when I was no more than brusque—and that, I thought, was what hurt him most of all. After a few days of this behavior, of his eyes the color of bruises at every hurt, however scripted, I decided against my better judgment that to prolong our studies together in the nighttime hours after the rest of the house lay abed would not be too much to ask. There was a certain privacy to working late into the night, as though the silence of the house enveloped us, left us cut off and safe from the country and its prejudices.

The only problem in this plan was that Hal had exhausting days taking care of the children, and the more hours he spent conscious and studying, the more meals he required to relieve his fatigue, so that a mere week after my proposed extension of our time together, we began sneaking down to the kitchen like children to concoct something suitably filling with which we might fuel our studies.

My only concern was the cook, and what she would say to my brother’s wife if she found the two of us quite alone together in the dark pocketing bread and cheese and whatever else we might find left over from that evening’s meal. I found myself quite keen on never learning what would happen if we were caught, and so it was that I discovered the pantry, with its simple array of plain spices and herbs. It was not particularly large, and there were certainly cobwebs about the ceiling, but it would do, I decided, if ever we were in a pinch.

Additionally, there were few things that didn’t go down better with a sprinkle of rosemary.

After that, our routine carried on in very much the same fashion, with our breaks at midnight to rifle through the kitchen like common burglars. I mastered the urge to suggest that Hal stay, when we finished our studies and his head drooped low to nearly sleeping in his chair.

I wasn’t made for the role of a teacher for the same reasons I’d never been a good student: I was too selfish, too impulsive. What I needed I took, and there were a few times when I nearly gave into my less noble desires, without any thought for what would come of my capriciousness.

Hal didn’t seem to mind. Indeed, he didn’t seem to notice a single one of my flaws. And, as I’d suspected, he was as eager and quick to learn as he was to please. He was as open as the country gentry were not.

I would ruin it, I was certain. It was only a matter of time. It was not in my nature to deny anything I wanted so wholeheartedly, and to my dismay I was gradually beginning to discover that Hal fell into that category. On some days when I was feeling particularly maudlin, it seemed Hal was the category.

We stole rolls from the kitchen at night—by light of a candle-lamp we read together and tangled in the handsome words, but not in body. In this setting, I did my best to tutor Hal on the correct pronunciations—but there was no more than that. There were times when I thought Hal disappointed with this reserve on my side—what must have seemed part-infuriating coyness—but he said nothing and was content to let me brush the hair back from his brow and out of his eyes, and watch him as he read with the unsteady flickering of the candlelight illuminating his face and causing the freckles to stand out sharply against his pale skin.

Then, things changed.

The first change came a few weeks after we began our system of reading late into the night and descending upon the kitchen to raid the leftovers, experimenting with the heady aroma of the cook’s spices and trying not to disorder her most prized possessions.

It was a weekend, I believe, and Hal had completed a very difficult text in the old Ramanthe. Though by then it wasn’t much of a reward, I still took it upon myself to congratulate him and suggest we take pains to discover what had happened with the unfinished dessert from that night’s dinner.

We’d been in the kitchen, speaking softly, and Hal had found us spoons and everything had been going very much as it always did until I heard the footsteps from outside the door. Without a second thought, I whisked Hal with me into the pantry.

All around us was the smell of the simpler herbs and spices—cinnamon, rosemary, sage, and thyme—and I stood close to him so that the little spice bottles rattled when he trembled and stumbled back against them.

“Careful,” I whispered.

He said nothing at all, only inhaled soft and sharp as though he’d seen a spider.

When I looked down I met his gaze, touched with nervous apology, and I scarcely had the time to wonder why before he put his hands on either side of my face and kissed me.

For a moment I could do nothing at all, frozen in place and the blood pounding at my temples as if anticipating a fight. There was silence in the kitchen.

His mouth was very warm.

As if jerking awake from a deep sleep, I forced myself to straighten, in a slow but firm refusal to give in to the dizzying wave that threatened to break over me. I saw Hal’s eyes, wide and frightened of what he had just done.

We both recovered ourselves at the same time.

“Please,” he said, just as I was stepping away. I didn’t hear what else he said after that. I’d already made my swift escape, smoothing out the front of my shirt and all but fleeing back to my room.

It wasn’t the right thing to do. I knew this even as I did it. Whatever promises we’d made to each other, whatever stage we’d agreed to play upon, I knew full well that our rules didn’t extend to this matter. My leaving was no act for our audience, for there had been no audience to witness Hal’s declaration; it had been only me and the cook’s spices, mute in their bottles. It was not for their benefit that I’d flown, and certainly not for Hal’s.

No, it was only for me, selfish as I’d ever been. I’d always known, of course, that I would do something to ruin our cautious happiness. I just hadn’t suspected it would be so soon.

I closed the door behind me, the dead bolt sliding into place with a sure thump that echoed the lead weight in my stomach. My only reprieve, so small as to be almost laughable, was that the cook hadn’t caught us at our game. Luck was on our side, but I knew how simply and how swiftly luck could turn. We’d been far too careless.

Hal didn’t follow me back to my room.

It was a reprieve, then. It gave me the time to think over what exactly it was I thought I was doing and what I’d already done to Hal.

I felt charged with an overabundance of nervous energy. I picked up the book we’d been reading for two nights now, but the text assumed a certain mutability. It danced and skittered across the page so that I quite lost my temper with it, and hurled the book to the floor.

Frustration roiled in my veins as I thought of Hal and what his reaction would have been if he saw me now, throwing one of the books; and then I thought again of Hal, and what would doubtless prove the irrevocable destruction of something I’d not allowed myself to name or label.

I sat on my bed, facing the empty chair. As it almost always was when I’d been too self-centered to see the truth of the matter, I felt impossibly foolish. I couldn’t even blame Hal’s feelings on something I’d done, not entirely, as—he was fond of reminding me—he was quite old enough to be capable of understanding his own emotions. Though inexperienced in many ways, Hal was not a child and hardly needed me to tell him what it was he felt or thought. He was clever enough that to think otherwise would be to do him a dishonor, and I had no great wish to lump myself among the other residents of my brother’s house who no more recognized his intellect than they would have recognized a dragon come to roost in the trees.

Finally, to pretend that Hal did not understand the gravity of what he’d done would be an insult to both of us.

He had meant it, then. I knew it was childish—and acknowledging that I could still be the child in a relationship with a boy a full fifteen summers younger than myself was humbling fare—but more so than that, it had been a coward’s province to flee from someone brave enough to declare his feelings by acting without thought. I was not a complete coward, that at least I knew, but the idea of having to scramble for a reply in the faint cobwebbed light of the pantry had ignited in me a desperate, throttling urgency to be somewhere, anywhere, other than where I was.

It wasn’t my finest of moments. And it wasn’t fair to Hal—especially to give him no reply at all—to protect myself and garner ample time to sort out my own emotions, leaving him with nothing but silence and doubt.

What, then, did I have to sort out? Staring at the empty chair didn’t help me any, as all around it hovered the specter of Hal, smiling and freckled about the nose and shoulders. I stood up again, paced the length of my small room, as though an excess of bloodflow would help me to think better.

Instead, I could think only of Hal.

He was a creature entirely lovable, and I feared that in allowing myself to love him, I would somehow extinguish the intrinsic optimism he held in his heart.

For the fact of the matter was that Hal was someone made entirely to be honest, in an environment that would not allow him to be so. I couldn’t ask him to become entangled ever further into this mess I’d—we’d—created. He was to be a tutor come the summer, and the children’s attentions would become far more important than my own. I had no wish to upset Hal’s standing in the house any more than I already had, and by allowing things to continue along their progressive course, I knew that I would.

My time in my brother’s country house was an exile of indeterminate length, and pretending otherwise was what would sink us.

In this I was quite resolved until I heard the knock at my door, twice, as was our signal. It was very late. I felt my determination struggle to be set free like a stubborn bird and I held it in place even as I held still in the center of my room.

“Please,” said Hal, quiet, but not quiet enough should anyone have been passing through the hall, which I sincerely hoped they were not.

The door was locked, which I realized too late was a clear sign that I was indeed within. Too late, and always too slow. I cursed myself but crossed the room to unlock the door and pull it open.

Hal had a wild look about his eyes, anxious and desperate in one, and I knew that I’d been right to leave the pantry.

“Hal,” I said unsteadily, drawing him in after a perfunctory check up and down the hallway for curious young eyes. Then I closed the door.

He stared up at me, misery radiating from every small motion, worrying his lower lip in a way that I was often quite fond of, but not now. Not when I knew I’d been the cause.

I sought for the proper words, some fitting apology that I could make, and found that there were none. “I’m sorry,” I said instead. It was no more than a fraction of the true apology I wanted to make. “I should not have left,” I added, and hesitantly touched his face.

This seemed to be the signal he’d been waiting for, as he all but threw himself into my arms. I held him tight; it was all I could think of doing.

“Please,” he said, close against my neck. “I didn’t mean—” He stopped then, as though he couldn’t even pretend to take it back.

The rules of the game hadn’t been so clear when I’d set them, and once again the fault was all my own.

With Hal caught close in my arms, I found that my words had deserted me. It was an unsettling realization, as I depended on words more often than I would have liked to admit. They were my citadel and stronghold; they kept me afloat when everything else was a swirling, cooking stew of what I knew and what I felt.

There were no words that would set this right save those that couldn’t be unsaid.

“Can we just—Can we pretend that never happened?”

I can’t,” I said, honest as I only ever could be when it was completely inconvenient to be so. Hal’s fingers tightened so fiercely in my shirt that I was sure for a moment it would rip. “And, even if I could, Hal, I wouldn’t.”

“Oh,” he said, and slumped a little as he exhaled. I put an arm around his waist, as much to hold him up as to keep him close. “I was afraid of that.”

“It isn’t—It’s not something I would ever want to pretend hadn’t . . . happened,” I said clumsily. “If I teach you at least one thing during my time here, then let it be this: There is no kiss we can undo, nor any word we can unsay.”

I felt him nod. Then he lifted his head to look at me, visibly struggling with something he wanted to say. “Is that why you left, then?”

“Likewise, I can make no excuse for my actions,” I said, helplessly aware that an apology wasn’t what he wanted. “They were inexcusable. I am sorry, Hal.”

I found I had no way of explaining it to him. But I had faith that his intrinsic intelligence and empathy would guide him to discern my true emotions and to understand why they could not be expressed.

I was afraid, but I was also certain of what we needed. I would endeavor to avoid such situations again.

“We should perhaps,” I said haltingly, then tried again. “We should perhaps . . . meet with less frequency.”

I could at least teach him, however, though I knew what a poor compensation it was. But I could hope that he might soon be able to see that my rejection was not born out of a lack of affection. There were things I could say without speaking, and I hoped only that Hal would understand them.

“Would you care to finish that passage on the laws of the bastion?” I asked lightly, still holding him foolishly close. Despite all my fine words and upright sentiments, I could not release him until I heard his reply. If he refused, I knew I would be bound to do something even more foolish, and my beseeching must have been evident in my expression, for he hesitated only a moment.

“I’d like that,” he said, seemingly relieved, though there was a shadow of disappointment that hung far off in the back of his gaze.

I held him for a while longer, and in the bright moonlight that streamed through my unshuttered windows, it was almost easy to believe we were not so trapped.


ROOK

Pretty soon our period of lazing about was all over, and, quick as that, it seemed like every night the siren was howling and we were grabbing our boots and getting out just as our palms were itching to do for too fucking long.

The way to ride depended, to begin with, on what kind of airman you were and what kind of dragon you were flying. Balfour’s Anastasia was small and sleek and kind of the same as riding a horse, I’d wager, though I’d never been astride her myself. If you were a big mother-fucker like Ghislain, then you could get away with straddling Compassus and steering her through the air without cramping up your legs something crazy, not to mention breaking both your arms just to jerk the harness and bring her around. But you’ve got to be a real serious son-of-a to ride a girl as fast as my Havemercy—or Thoushalt, Ace’s girl, who was the only dragon of the lot to match my darling for speed.

Basically, our girls were all designed by different men who I guess were thinking completely different thoughts at the time they designed them, so things are real different depending on whether you find yourself saddling up a swift like Anastasia or a fire-belcher like Ivory’s Cassiopeia, or a Jacqueline-of-all-trades like Havemercy, who’s the greatest beauty of the lot and who kills like none other, not even Thoushalt. Havemercy was the best, though, since she was almost as fast as Anastasia herself and easier to rein in, besides. And where fire was concerned, she was the most precise and so could hit them hardest and fastest.

The Ke-Han call Have the fire god, and that’s about as good a name for her as any, not to mention one I’m particularly proud of for my personal hand in.

The problem with the Ke-Han was that they were smart, and they knew the lay of the land better than any of us, seeing as how the Cobalts were theirs to begin with, so of course they had these tricks, like hiding in the mountains or using the winds against us. That was how Balfour’s brother—who rode Anastasia before him—died, the first time the Ke-Han got their magicians together and turned the skies against us. After that we figured pretty quick how to fly even when the wind was shrieking us down with all it had; leastways, it’s easier for the bigger girls to resist a sudden gust from an unnatural direction, the kind that always means the Ke-Han’ve spotted us and the race is on. If you’re on a swift, you’ve gotta let yourself be pummeled along until you can duck down below the gust, double back around, and hit the sons of whores when they least expect it. Of course flying against the winds used a hell of a lot more Well’s-piss fuel than normal, so whenever we got hit by the magicians we had to move double quick to make sure we got back to the Airman in time and didn’t cause a national crisis by crashing into the mountains or getting caught by the Ke-Han.

The fuel thing was what got under my skin like nothing else, since there were nights when we could as good as see the magician’s dome, blue like an overturned bowl and nestled in the heart of the city. Any trip out that far’d be a suicide mission, without enough fuel to get back, but I couldn’t help thinking some nights—if I was angry enough—that it’d be worth it to put the Ke-Han in their place once and for all.

The way rounds worked was that you signed up for at least two shifts a week, and it was best if you were working in threes with a swift for recon, a fire-belcher for razing, and a crusher like Compassus, or a Jacqueline-of-all-trades like Havemercy. Once things started getting hot and heavy I was working with Ghislain and Balfour pretty regular, but also with Ace ’cause there was no beating us when we worked together, hitting the Ke-Han from both sides no matter which way they went scurrying, toward the mountain or their cities.

They hadn’t even rebuilt their fucking lapis wall. They had no clue what they were doing, and the way everyone was figuring it now was that because of the corps and our dragons, it was going to be over pretty soon. We just kept hitting them and hitting them with all we had, magicians and dragons both, which meant we were being called for every fucking night for a period of about two, two and a half weeks.

It was pretty fucking great.

I mean, I wasn’t supporting war or anything—just my role in it. I wasn’t some kind of half-wit and I knew that this was my place, up in the air whooping like crazy and steering Havemercy until we were right overhead—Compassus or even Adamo on Proudmouth watching my tail, and one of the swifts scouting out the next target. Sometimes we even got in two, three hits a night. Soon enough we were going to absolutely crush them—I mean, absolutely have them crushed. They knew it. They weren’t even being smart about their moves anymore, just scattering every which way, so’s knocking them off was like picking out ants beneath a magnifying glass, until there wasn’t any point in it anymore and we were too close to sunrise and were recalled.

Because that’s the thing about riding a dragon into battle: You just can’t do it in the daytime. Well, you could, but you’d have to be pretty fucking stupid or pretty fucking desperate or a really uncomfortable combination of the two to do it. It’s too easy to see a girl in the sunlight, and too easy to bring her down. The Ke-Han don’t depend all that much on catapults anymore, but that’d change real soon if they could see us even halfway clearly. Everything’s done by moonlight, and you’ve got to hope to whoever’s actually listening that you can just get out there on a night when there’s clouds and shit mucking up the starlight. Dragons can see pretty well in the dark, so basically you’ve just got to trust your girl and she’s got to trust you—and the two of you have to work together to live through the night.

Havemercy and I had it down to a science, to an art. I signed up for all the extra shifts no one wanted, and we were up in the air near on to every other night, the wind making my hair even more of a knot than usual, and on our off-days we slept like the fucking dead. In the skies, we didn’t have to answer to anyone and we didn’t have the time to think about what our actions meant, what poor bastards they affected. You do unto others or they do unto you—that’s the first rule of the skies and the one you stick to like the words are your brothers.

The best thing about all this was that the professor didn’t have any time or any orders to keep torturing us with our feelings, and whenever I did see him—mercifully more rare now than ever—he was just wandering the halls looking lost and alone.

And that’s when I got my idea.

Adamo was going to tear me a brand-new one, since there’s laws against taking a civ up into the skies without filling out all kinds of miserable paperwork. But the idea was too good and, anyway, there was no real punishment for an airman when the war was on. I mean, Adamo could give me rations that tasted like dogshit and make sure I never slept on a comfortable bed again, but the truth was I wasn’t sleeping much anyway and I didn’t care what I ate so long as it kept up my strength for flying.

So I sat on my brilliant idea for the whole day I was off duty, and made sure to eat all my favorites in the mess since I might not be able to for a long while after.

The logistics were kind of hard to figure. Like: How the fuck was I supposed to get the snotnose into the hangar decks? And where the fuck was I going to get an extra pair of goggles so that the smoke didn’t make him go blind?

Anyway, I got the whole thing prepared; I just had to make sure I was awake and dressed when the siren started its wailing. That’d give me, I figured, about a half minute extra to find him, grab him, get him down below, and strap the goggles on him without nobody seeing it. And, since nobody was going to be out and about with the raid bell ringing, it wasn’t all that hard to maneuver. I just had to be quick enough, and smart about it. And I was.

I didn’t even figure for sleep that night, and when the bell started to clang I was out of my room like a shot and inside that common room in, possibly, negative time, grabbing the professor by the collar and hauling him to his feet. Before he was even awake enough to protest I had a hand clamped over his mouth.

“Angh!” he said, very angry, and tried to bite my palm.

Too bad for him I was wearing my riding gloves.

“Shut up,” I said, “and pay close attention. I’m going to show you a little something about the Dragon Corps—for mutual understandin’, that kind of thing.”

His eyes were wide and I didn’t wait to hear him complain any further. We only had fifteen seconds, and in just that time I’d dragged him back to my room and shoved him through the chute, coming down fast behind him.

Then, we were inside Havemercy’s private quarters. I flung the harness on her and strapped up, shoving my feet into the stirrups and holding my hand out to his highness the sensitivity trainer.

To my surprise, he didn’t hesitate—just reached out and took it, just like that.

“Goggles behind you,” I said, grabbing my own and putting them on. I heard him struggle for a moment, then the familiar snap that meant he’d got ’em on, but the wrong way. That’d leave a bruise for him in the morning.

“Havemercy’s a go!” Perkins, the prep for that evening, shouted at us from the main deck. I dug my heels in.

“Hold on tight,” I said.

The professor barely had time to follow my instructions before the doors opened and we were thrown out into the night—Havemercy held tight beneath my thighs and my boots strapped to the stirrups, with the professor hanging on around my waist. That first push once you’re off deck was a necessary propulsion to get us flying in the first place, but most fresh blood doesn’t expect it, and I heard the professor grunt somewhere next to my ear as all the breath got knocked out of him like a sucker punch to the gut.

This was probably a piss-poor plan from the professor’s point of view, since there was no one to say he wasn’t going to get thrown at any minute the rest of that long, bloody night. There wasn’t a single thing standing beneath him and the distance to the ground—dropping away beneath us every second of rushing wind and cloudy moonlight—except for his arms wrapped around me. He was still in his fucking pajamas. If he did survive the night, he was going to be covered from head to toe with ash and he wouldn’t be able to wash it out of his hair for at least a week, but if that was all he suffered, then he could consider himself one lucky bastard, and thank the skies for treating him proper.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he shouted, while meanwhile Havemercy was leaving all of Volstov behind, and the wind she was creating pummeled his words so as I could barely make out what he was saying.

It was easier for me, since I was in front, to keep my words from getting swallowed up somewhere just a ways behind us. “Introducing you to my particular lifestyle,” I snapped back. Adrenaline was working its magic on me even as we spoke.

It was always like this, when I got close enough to the mountains to see the little Ke-Han lights dotting the desert in the nighttime—like a miniature sky flipped onto its belly.

“You’re crazy,” I heard him mutter, though it must have been louder than that or I wouldn’t have heard a thing.

“That isn’t any kind of a thing to be saying to a man in my position, professor,” I said, real easy, like it didn’t bother me in the slightest—which it didn’t, not really. There wasn’t much that could bother me once Have and I were in the air, which was how come I would be able to stand being close to the professor for any length of time.

He fell silent, and as far as I could tell that meant he was thinking it over. With that big brain of his, I was sure he’d come to the right conclusion, which was not to insult me on my own fucking dragon when no one even knew he was here except me and Havemercy, and her with no loyalty to anyone but herself and me.

Ghislain’s Compassus rose huge and terrifying at my right. The professor’s reaction was real sweet; I could hear him swear the way I was sure they didn’t ever teach in the ’Versity, and after that he nearly pushed the air from my lungs with his skinny arms.

I remembered what he’d said about never having seen a dragon up close before. Now he was face-to-face with two in one night. Let no one say I never did the kid any favors.

“It’s three for a raid,” I said, loud over the wind as we were climbing now, and the higher up we got the more it whipped around us sudden and fierce. “Unless the fighting’s hot, then we got no need for recon because the Ke-Han are barreling out from the hills every which way and we just got to plug them up no matter what.”

“Ah.” I felt him nod, sharp, into my shoulder. He was paying attention, I realized, and let loose a snort of amusement. The little freak was paying attention like this was some class, where he’d be tested later, and then graded on his memory of everything he’d learned.

If he’d known to bring a notebook, he’d probably be taking notes in that, too.

Whatever. If the kid wanted to treat me like one of the Nellies who taught at the ’Versity and didn’t ever once figure on going out to learn things for themselves, that was fine.

“Who’s the kid?” Have’d been pretty quiet for her usual quick self up until now, but that was only because she was smart, trying to get the lay of the situation before she said anything. She was deadly, my girl, and wicked sharp in a tight situation just the same as I was.

I hadn’t told her about the professor, least not in as many words.

“Did—Did you say something?” He was yelling practically into my ear, which I didn’t appreciate, and I let him know by shrugging my shoulder so that it bounced his jaw. “Bastion,” he swore again, as if he’d bit his tongue something painful.

“I’m not deaf,” I told him. To Have, real close to her neck, I said, “This is the man who’s been teaching me all manner of speaking pretty and not treadin’ on the feelings of others.”

Havemercy made the sound I’d come to think of as her laugh, all machinery and metallic amusement. “The one you said you were going to slit open like an envelope from end to end?”

“I—What?” The professor was speaking quiet again, I’d give him that. “Did you . . . I could have sworn you said something.”

“That was just Have,” I said, not because I took pity on him or nothing but because I could see his questions getting really old really fast, and for a clever sort of brat he didn’t seem any closer to figuring it out.

“Have?” he asked, proving me right. “Have what? Do you mean . . . oh, I—I didn’t realize . . .”

It was almost painful, keeping my laugh in, but then I knew Ghislain would want to know what I was laughing at, and chances were that up until this point he hadn’t even seen the professor hitching a ride with Havemercy and me. The dark’s pretty good for keeping secrets.

I knew Balfour would see him, though, because Balfour saw everything. It was what he’d been trained to do. But he also wouldn’t be likely to go running to Adamo on me, mainly ’cause he didn’t want piss in his boots anytime soon, whereas that kind of retribution wouldn’t be weighing too much on Ghislain’s mind—stony bastard that he was.

“She talks?” The way the professor said it, I could tell exactly what kind of a look he’d have on his face: the exact same dumb, incredulous expression he wore when he woke up with beetles in his hair or missing all his clothes.

“You bet your sweet ass she talks,” said my girl. “Now be quiet, would you? We’ve got important matters to look after. And stop all your fucking cursing. Haven’t you seen a proper dragon before?”

“I can’t say that I have,” the professor said, and maybe more that the wind swallowed.

Balfour had come up on our left from the rear, Anastasia sleek and hidden behind the clouds. Even if he had girl parts, Balfour was still good for recon, had a mind for understanding that, when it was important to stay in one place, he should damn well stay there. That’s harder’n most think, especially when you’ve got a fight happening around you on all sides. But, as Adamo was fond of reminding us at full pitch, someone has to keep their heads when the battle’s going on.

I knew sure as dragonfire it wasn’t ever going to be me.

We picked up speed with the cresting slope of the Cobalts—they’re real smooth and easy for a while, tricking you into thinking they’re all pretty and welcoming, until they get jagged as alligator teeth and you know the truth. Once we crossed over those mountains I’d go in fast and hard, hammer the bastards first and give ’em a bit of a show, something to chase. Ghislain’d be right behind me, crushing the sons-of so thoroughly they’d never get up again.

The idea was that Balfour would use this distraction to get close, fly in deep over the Ke-Han city territory, and see if there was anything th’Esar needed to be worrying about; then we’d all go scurrying back to the rendezvous point and make it back to base before the sun came up over the range’s edge.

We’d tried it the other way round, recon first and us guns coming in later if the swift got into trouble, but I was too damn impatient to be put into the sky for any kind of a waiting game, and after several instances of Adamo trying to explain the way of things to me yet again, we all just figured it’d be for the best that we changed the plan around so as it suited us rather than trying to fit us to the plan.

’Course what had helped my case was Balfour’s brother getting into the trouble he did, and us not knowing anything about it until it was too late. We almost lost Anastasia in that one, and then we’d have all been nobly fucked harder than the chambermaids in th’Esar’s palace. We only had two swifts. Recon was dangerous flying: the point of being small was to get close, and if you got too close, there was always a chance you wouldn’t get out again.

It was funny—not so funny that I was laughing—but I could hear the professor breathing in my ear, piss-terrified no matter what he said and holding tight to me like a kid hiding under his bed from monsters.

“You want to ease off so I can say this,” I said. I heard the quiet oh before I felt the vise around my waist loosen marginally. “It’s going to get loud real soon. Real fast, too, and real messy. Nothing’ll get in your eyes with those goggles on, but don’t look directly at nothing that seems too bright, and don’t fucking scream or I’ll throw you to the Ke-Han and let them sort out the pieces. You got that?”

He nodded mutely, fingers worrying dedicatedly at a button on my coat.

Well. It was better than screaming, I supposed.

“What about you, sweetheart?” I twitched Have’s harness fondly, knew what the answer’d be before I even asked it, but it was a politeness I knew she liked. It was probably the only one.

Most of the guys talked to their dragons like they were real ladies, so it wasn’t out of the ordinary. If the professor knew what was good for him, he’d forget he ever heard it.

“Just don’t spin around so hard this time,” she said. “You’ll break my neck.”

I laughed, feeling the air all around us as she began to plummet. “I won’t.”

I didn’t warn the professor or tell him to hold on, so as we made our descent I felt his hands scrabbling for a safer purchase, like he wasn’t so sure just holding on to me would be safe enough. I really hoped he wasn’t going to tear the buttons off my coat or nothing, ’cause then I’d have to make him sew them back on.

I bet he knew how to do it, too.

Finally, his arms locked tight around my ribs again, like he figured we weren’t going to be doing much more talking anyway, and I wouldn’t speak up to complain. He was at least right about that.

The wind hit us like a bucket of cold water, sharp and freezing and all at once, which meant that it wasn’t real wind at all but the work of those fucking magicians. I held our course, steering Have right through because I knew that if there were anything stronger they could have hit us with, they’d have done so right up front. We’d caught them unawares, the lazy cunts, and in the time it’d take to cook up anything really threatening, Ghislain and Compassus would have them flattened to the ground.

I let out a war whoop, wild as any of the Ke-Han’s breathless, ululating screams, and took out a guard tower on the far wall. The trick to getting Have to breathe fire was a different kind of jerking the harness, pulling against the mechanism just behind her tongue; and then the gasoline caught the fuse and she was screaming fire. The guard tower burst into flames—orange and the faint soul of green that was the dragonmagic. These were fires that couldn’t be easily quenched with sand or water.

The tower lit up our section like a beacon, and below us the tiny scrambling silhouettes of Ke-Han warriors came pouring out from behind the wall, as though there were anything they could possibly do against three fucking dragons.

“That seems a—a rather showy way of announcing our presence, doesn’t it?”

It took me a full minute to figure out one, why someone was talking to me, and two, why that someone wasn’t Havemercy. The thing with flying is, you’ve got to get your head into an almost completely separate mind-set, deep focus, and you can’t be taking breaks to ask yourself: Gee, I wonder if there are families down there, or: Hey, I haven’t seen Ghislain and Balfour in a while, because that’s the kind of thinking that can get you killed. The first thing you learn is how not to get all distracted like that.

“Not trying to hide,” I gritted out, twisting with Have to one side as a sudden push of wind beckoned us closer to die on the rocks.

“Those look like catapults,” he said, in a voice that meant he’d been shocked calm, or was a little bit of a sociopath, our professor.

“So they are,” I said. Then, just for revenge, I added, “Trebuchets, actually.”

We took off like a streak of lightning, wind howling in my ears as Havemercy let out a screech to make sure everyone on the ground knew just who was the god of fire around here. Something molten crashed against the mountains behind, where we’d just been.

“I don’t understand,” the professor said, loud as he could over the boom of the catapult. “They don’t even seem to be trying!”

I wanted to tell him no, professor, that we were just that good, but the trouble was that I didn’t quite understand it, either.

Catapults were inelegant, a clunking technology the Ke-Han had given up on years ago when it became evident that they weren’t quick enough to hit us even flying half-blind and on one wing. They hid behind their magicians when it came to matching us, and if I’d been in any kind of a charitable mood while dealing with the Ke-Han, I’d have said they did all right. Not well, because when you were pitting anything against the Dragon Corps it was just a sad inevitability that we’d send ’em screaming, but all right.

Now things almost seemed too easy. I was suspicious of easiness from anything, excepting women, and thought I might make a point of saying as much to Adamo when we made it back to the Airman after we were finished.

It was like the Ke-Han emperor had gone on a holiday and left his fourteen-year-old nephew in charge.

They were lining the catapult up to us again when a long, earth-shattering groan pierced the skies, and Ghislain came roaring down on Compassus like he didn’t have a care in the world for the little breezes the Ke-Han magicians threw at him.

Ghislain said the Ke-Han called Compassus the sky-shaker. Fuckers were apt, if nothing else.

The catapult creaked and swung loose, and we soared wide of the mark, Havemercy’s long, gorgeous framework glinting silver in the arc light.

The sound of screaming was louder now that the sky-shaker had arrived and was mowing down everything they sent forward. In moments, the catapults were no longer a threat, and neither was the second guard tower, resolutely pealing its alarm to all that could hear—as if they couldn’t already hear from the screaming and our dragons, gnashing and roaring their pleasure to the skies.

“Oh,” said the professor. I felt his hands go slack as interest got the better of him and he tried to sit up, presumably to get a better look while still holding on.

A twister of a spell hit Havemercy square in the jaw left of nowhere, so that I had to turn us hard like she’d told me not to, and for one sick moment I felt the professor’s hands slip against my stomach.

“Sit the fuck down,” I snarled, harsher than I’d meant to. I couldn’t grab both his hands in one of mine, they weren’t at all tiny like I’d’ve thought, but I held tight to Have’s harness with one hand, tighter to his wrist with the other. If the air had been perfectly still, I’d have been able to hear his bones grinding. Or maybe that was my teeth. “Let go again and I swear, by Havemercy, I’ll let you fall.”

I released my hold on his wrist in disgust, gloved hands put to better use trying to steer us clear of the litter of tornadoes that had popped up around the city walls. I was as mad at myself as anything—I’d been watching and thinking when I should have been moving, and that was what came of bringing the professor up where he didn’t belong for a second.

It was my own damn fault, though, trying to teach the professor some kind of reverse lesson.

Below us, Ghislain was still wreaking havoc with Compassus; she was big enough that the twisters merely nudged them with a suggestion of a twirl this way and that.

Holding close as he was, I could feel the professor shaking like he was out-of-his-mind-terrified, which—for once—I couldn’t blame him for.

The sky was losing its pitch-darkness fairly quickly by this point, so I hoped Balfour was planning on heading back our way real soon. Anastasia could move when she had to, but I knew Compassus would need a fair time’s warning to make it back by first light.

Something shifted in the clouds.

You never heard Anastasia before you saw her. That was one of her talents. And even then you didn’t see her unless you knew what to look for, silver and blue like skymetal, and in the clouds she was fucking invisible. Still, when I saw the flicker of movement wide of the city, I knew what it meant. Time to go.

I didn’t warn the professor this time when we dove either, and I could hear him cursing all the way down, soft in my ear as the wind whipped around us and Havemercy started to sing.

“I didn’t know they taught that sort of pretty speak at the ’Versity, professor,” I called without looking back at him. When we got closer, I let Have take out a barracks Ghislain had been heading for with Compassus, because I knew it would get his attention.

“No, that I learned from you,” the professor answered. He sounded almost sullen.

I laughed, wild and exhilarated with the wind in my blood. Have laughed, too, all creaking and sweet, rattling beneath us and making the professor curse again—so that I had to wonder if he wasn’t really a Mollyrat, same as I was.

Have and I circled once around Compassus, in case Ghislain hadn’t got the message and thought I was trying to start some kind of a game on my own with the barracks, which I’d also been known to do.

He got the message though, and I let them go tearing out ahead of us, smoke spewing in all directions and streaming into my nose and mouth.

The smoke you got used to, but for the first few nights it was pretty terrible, and when the professor started coughing behind me I knew it’d be at least a week before I heard the end of it.

I thought I could hear cheering when we went back over the mountains, like we hadn’t just razed their city forces to the ground, and over half the towers they used for their magicians with it.

It was like they weren’t even trying to win anymore—which of course I’d heard could happen when you just wore a man down for so long he didn’t even care what the outcome was, so long as he could get out. But this didn’t feel the same as that.

I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like having to think about it neither, but with the professor breathing quick and uneven in my ear, Ghislain up ahead, and Balfour out in front, it was all I could do.

Well, almost all, I thought, and joined Havemercy just in time for the verse about ladies’ undergarments. There was a moment where I wondered if a third voice hadn’t joined in with ours, but that wasn’t too fucking likely, and in the end I blamed it on the wind.

We got back to the Airman a little more than an hour later, with the sun just peeking her head up above the horizon at our backs. Ghislain and Balfour were flying on ahead and not looking back, so I figured I might’ve made it out of this without it being noticed I’d taken the professor out for a spin with me—though of course if the boys noticed the soot under his fingernails and the grease in his hair, they’d pretty much realize straightaway what we’d been up to, what I’d done, and have a list of all the rules I’d broken. Whether or not they actually set that list down on Adamo’s desk was another matter. It depended on what kind of a mood they were in and whether or not they saw me sharpening my knives beforehand. Anyway, Adamo had more important things to be worrying about than something that hadn’t made any difference in my performance in the first place.

I’d make sure they saw me sharpening my knives.

When we got back into the hangar and I got myself unstrapped, easing my aching feet out of them stiff boots and tossing them aside for the mess-men to deal with and have polished and ready for me by sundown that same day, the professor came down off of Have’s back like his legs didn’t have bones in them any longer and his knees were made out of nothing more useful to him than water. The airmen called that kind of wobbling Civ Legs, short for civilian legs, and those who’d got over all that shaking soon forgot their own misery about how it felt, all your body gone numb from the force of riding a dragon all night long.

The professor was lucky. He’d made it out alive, and he hadn’t had to fucking steer her or anything, just hold on and make sure he didn’t slide off, and he could barely even manage to do that. He hardly deserved a fucking medal just for staying alive.

I took off my gloves next, pretending like I didn’t see him wobbling all around and fumbling with the straps of his goggles, trying to get them off so he could actually see. My fingers were stiff from gripping the harness reins all night long and didn’t move quick as they might’ve done. There’s some things a body can’t get used to, no matter how many calluses it builds up, no matter how much the muscles shift to accommodate whatever crazy flying you’ve been doing of late.

At last, when I was sorted out and all the things that needed washing were in a corner of Have’s dock—my jacket and my gloves thrown over to join my boots—and I made sure Have was settled in nice and comfortable for the night, I turned finally to look at the professor. He was watching me with his big green eyes sort of eerie—but not accusing—with the rest of his face soot black in streaks, and only the shape of the goggles marked pale as a backward raccoon.

“Why?” he asked at last.

I scratched the back of my neck, just to get my fingers working again. “Don’t know,” I answered lazily. “Thought, in the interest of sharin’ and carin’—”

“What did you think I’d learn?” he pressed—not quite snapping, and his voice trembling beneath its calm. “Or did you think perhaps you’d kill me while we were up there?”

“I coulda done,” I pointed out. “But I didn’t. Even caught you once.”

The professor barely moved his blackened lips as he spoke. “And as I said, I want to know why.”

“Would’ve landed me in fuck-all trouble,” I said. “Would’ve been some nasty explaining.”

“No one knew I was up there with you. There’d be no body. It wouldn’t be any trouble at all.”

The professor was smarter than he looked. Must’ve been, any case, in order to get so far as to be given this position of wrangling us. I could’ve hit him right there, but my hands would’ve cramped up if I tried to clench ’em into fists. Instead, I said, “So what do you think, then? Bein’ the genius among us.”

“I don’t know,” he replied, almost helplessly. “That’s why I asked.”

“You want to know that bad?”

“That badly,” he said, then winced. “Yes. I do.”

“Inspiration, I guess,” I said. “Thought maybe I could scare you off, make you piss yourself. I don’t fucking know.”

“I just,” the professor began. He cut his own self short, though, and had to swallow around something that seemed a little too thick for him for a moment, like he was choking on his own thoughts. Not many men could have held on the way he did—not many men would still be standing now. Any second I expected him to collapse to the floor, but he didn’t. “I wish you’d tell me,” he finished, finally.

“You want to know why?” I stepped closer to him, too tired to be real intimidating, but drawing myself up to full height and managing a grin—covered in soot and ash and grease as I was, I must’ve looked like some kind of monster out of a storybook. He met my eyes, and there was this weird electric kind of charge between us, like when two dragons fly close enough that their tails or wings scrape against each other and sparks rain down onto the world below. I’d never got that feeling anywhere other than in the air before. I hated it; I wanted to be sick. When my words came, they were even angrier than I thought they’d be. I wasn’t so tired I couldn’t get charged up by some idiot ’Versity civ thinking he had me figured. “I’ll tell you why,” I went on, ignoring how strange it was. “It’s ’cause all those pretty things you say—all that horseshit you try to feed us about weighing both sides and learning every man’s story and getting to know your fellows—all of that doesn’t mean fuck when you’re up there. I can’t stop to ask myself questions when I’ve got Have to think about. I can’t even balance out what my own fucking feelings are when I’m in the air—and I sure as shit don’t have time for anyone else’s. All I gotta know—all I’ve been trained to know—is how to not get my ass killed. And maybe tonight I figured that was something you needed to know, so as you could get a clearer vision of your big picture.

I was breathing pretty heavily by the time I was finished, since I wasn’t usually a man who talked so much in one go. The professor—who usually was the sort of man who talked so much in one go—didn’t seem to have anything in particular to say to that. No two ways about it: It felt good to get it off my chest. Now it was all out there on the table, how much of a stupid civ he was and how he didn’t know the first fucking thing about any of us. All he was doing was coming in uninformed, disrupting our flow and looking down his snub nose at us—like we weren’t saving his ass and every other ass in the whole of Volstov, leastways when the war was on.

My blood was up and I could barely see straight, I was so tired, my skin heavy with dragonsmoke. He deserved what I threw at him, whether he’d been man enough to keep his feet after first flight or not.

He did, but only barely. When he wobbled out, if I’d been less firing mad, I would have chased him out of the room just laughing at him, the way he had to hang on to the doorframe and the wall just to keep himself upright.

“You weren’t any better your first time up,” Have said, snorting through her flared nostrils. Dim light from the hangar glinted off them, and I turned back to see her trying to wipe grease and soot off the corner of her mouth. She didn’t like the way it tasted, and it was a bitch to clean if it hardened overnight. I didn’t trust snot-nosed Perkins, or anybody else for that matter, with her.

No one knew how to take care of my girl but me.

“Was fucking too,” I said, rubbing down her neck next. “You told me I was the sweetest ride you’d ever had.”

“I was young then,” Have said. She sounded wry and echoed like inside she was grinning. “Impressionable. I didn’t know any better.”

“Save it,” I told her. “I’m too tired.”

“I’m just a Jacqueline,” Have replied. “I can’t do anything but tell the truth. He wasn’t half-bad. Didn’t even piss himself on me. I appreciate that in a man. He reminds me of you. Not so dirty, but no one is.”

“Are you on his fucking side or something? Is that it?”

Have looked at me the same way Have always looked at me, ever since we first met and my fingernails were dirty and she didn’t waste any fucking time in letting me know what she thought about that—and all the other things, for that matter. It wasn’t a way I enjoyed being looked at, not even when Have’s dark eyes were doing the looking.

“I’m just saying, I get a sense of people. I’ve got good taste, and there isn’t anyone out there who’s ever smacked of you before. Though one of you’s quite enough, to be honest.”

“Did I keep you on the ground too long, is that it?” Of course, dragons couldn’t go crazy the same as people did, but any machine stopped working if you kept it from doing what it was meant to long enough. Some of the prototype dragons had just—stopped—during the first really big lull they’d hit between battles. Since Have was the newest, not to mention the best, I hadn’t thought we’d be having that problem, but she was talking some dreadful nonsense now. “I ain’t nothing like that professor.”

“Not a drop? Not a hint?” Have asked, sounding more like some sly, calculating mistress than my sweet girl. “Anyway, I didn’t say you had any of his good qualities, the brains and the fancy manners or anything like that. What I mean is, he’s got your bad qualities, the poor bastard. The stubbornness, and the language, too. Doesn’t smell as bad as you do, though.”

“Never took you for a traitor,” I said. “You’re sure nothing hit you in the head when I was saving that idiot’s life?”

I was getting real angry, and there wasn’t any point in getting angry with someone who couldn’t get angry back, so I just breathed real deep and clenched my fists in tight.

“I’m not taking anyone’s side,” she said at last, which wasn’t a proper answer at all. “Go take a bath.”

“Didn’t know you were my mother,” I snapped.

“Am not,” Have replied smoothly, eyelids slipping shut. “I’d’ve raised you better.”

I didn’t do as nice a job cleaning her off as I should have—I didn’t have any time for spending on turncoat traitors when I could’ve been catching some much-needed shut-eye—but the whole thing set me off so bad I didn’t have the time to talk to Adamo about how crazy the Ke-Han were acting, and by morning it didn’t seem half so important as I’d made it out to be in the dark.


HAL

The way I felt for Margrave Royston was at once a strange and terrifying sensation. I had no other experiences against which I could measure it. In my ignorance I kept it safe, treasured it, held it private and unanswered and often lonely inside my chest. But for all the misery I felt in not being allowed to express it, I knew also that I’d never exchange the way I felt for a safer, less painful course. It was my own wound, my own loss. Royston was kind and he was brilliant and he told me of the city and suffered my endless questions; he even gave me a gift without any occasion, a parcel of books he’d ordered specially from a friend. Their bindings were strong, their pages thick. They were so expensive that I did all I could not to accept them, but he insisted and insisted until I could no longer protest without seeming rude. I lined them up one next to the other on the little shelf next to my bed, and gazed at them with almost the same reverence I reserved for Royston himself.

There were times when I cried. But it wasn’t for any purpose or reason in particular, and they were few and simple tears, and I kept such moments secret. I was being quite silly about everything, since in truth I was luckier than I could believe.

I was happy. I knew I was. I felt alive and hungry for the first time in my life—and it was only now that I realized how little I’d known before Royston arrived, what darkness it was in which I’d have been content to live out my entire life had he not shown me there could be more to real learning than the handful of foolish tools I’d been given.

The days were bright. He answered every question I posed to him. He’d forgiven me the kiss I stole from him—though it was still between us, a shadow like a blow whenever I forgot myself and remembered it. When I was alone, I traced the shape of his mouth over mine and wondered always if it were possible—if I gave him enough time—that Royston would ever return my feelings. But these were silly wonderings—foolish, juvenile, the mark of an innocent country boy. He must have thought me very careless to have fallen so quickly and with so little reservation.

I’d promised myself and him not to make the same mistake a second time. If I did, I’d prove an unworthy student. I was determined not to lose that which I still had, and so I was doubly careful, and tried very hard not to take advantage of what concessions he afforded me.

Yet, on the whole, things were well enough. I cherished the moments I had with him, the books he’d given me, our conversations that ran late into the night.

Then everything changed at once.

The post to Nevers arrived twice a week, once just after the weekend and once just before it. When the man on horseback arrived that afternoon, I thought I must be mistaken as to the day—or that it might have had something to do with the war, since last night’s raid had woken up half the countryside; the guard tower they’d hit had been nearer to us than Thremedon proper—but William sat bolt upright from where he was sprawled, creating a fortress out of pots that he’d stolen from the kitchens.

“It’s the wrong day for mail!” he announced delightedly.

As excited as William was, I felt a cold sort of dread settle over me. It was a premonition, perhaps, no more than a feeling—but in all the time I’d spent at the chatelain’s castle in Nevers, the post had only ever come at its appointed time and on its appointed day. The only variable that had changed was Royston’s presence here, and because I could think of no one else, I was certain this sudden development had to do with him.

I was right.

William tried to eavesdrop on the conversation in the lower hall, where Royston and the chatelain and Mme were talking with the man on horseback. And, although I wished to hear their words for more immediate reasons than William’s general curiosity, duty required me to guide him away from the banister and do my best to distract him from matters that weren’t any of his business. Nor were they, I supposed, any of mine.

Though I tried my best to keep William entertained, I could no more keep his attention from wandering to the business with the untimely post than I could keep mine from doing the same. We were both wretched to each other, and I admit a pot handle was broken that afternoon when William had a fit over how strict I was being with him.

Perhaps I was. I apologized to him, and we endeavored to fix the pot handle, but all the while I could think of nothing but Royston, standing there at the bottom of the stairs, his back to me.

For all I knew, he was going to leave.

It was later—too much later—that I spoke to Royston and learned what the trouble was. In fact, it was he who came to me, knocking twice upon my little door. He’d never done so before, and I knew at once that there was real trouble.

I let him in, and we stood before each other awkwardly.

“I’ve been called back,” he said at last.

“Oh,” I replied stupidly. “To the city.”

“Yes,” he confirmed. “It means they need my Talent.”

“For the war?”

“For the war.”

The tales Royston told of battle were distant; I’d always assumed, however naively and stubbornly, that they were in the past, and he’d never be put in the path of such danger again. Yet he was still a young enough magician with a vitally useful Talent. I’d never had any cause to believe what I believed beyond my own private hopes. The idea of being separated from him was not so terrible as the knowledge that he would be leaving me to go to war.

I felt as if I were going to be sick. A moment later my knees gave way and I was sitting down heavily upon the edge of my bed, gripping the sheets until my knuckles were white.

“Hal,” he said. I barely heard him.

“When?” I asked.

“Tomorrow,” he replied, his voice very distant, coming to me over the thrumming of blood in my ears. “As soon as possible, but I’ve been given tonight to set my things in order and settle up matters in the country. My carriage should arrive sometime tomorrow morning.”

I shook my head against it, closing my eyes. If pressed to categorize how I’d come to feel about Royston, I didn’t believe it in my capacity to phrase a response. I cared for him—more than anyone else, I cared for him. I knew what life here would become without him. This change was unimaginable. “I don’t want you to go,” I said. The selfishness inherent in the words made them sound poisonous to my own ears, but I couldn’t stop myself from speaking them.

“I cannot very well shirk my duty,” he said, and I thought I saw the ghost of a smile in the corner of his mouth. No matter how bitter it seemed, I couldn’t bear to look at even the imitation of a smile on his face in that moment. “Not when the Esar has so . . . graciously agreed to end my term of exile in the country much sooner than expected.”

I let the words roll off me, even as I recognized what he was doing.

“But you live here,” I said, soft and insistent. I couldn’t make myself stop.

“Hal,” he said again, and he knelt on the floor so that I would look at him. Under normal circumstances this might have stirred some small wonderment in me, for Royston was not given to such sweeping gestures. Yet all I could feel was the dull throbbing in my skull, the sound of my pulse proclaiming that Royston was leaving both the countryside and me. “Hal, I would like you to listen to me since I’m going to be gone in the morning and I—”

“Stop saying that,” I said, meeting his eyes at last. “I heard you the first time, I’m not stupid.

He moved to take my hands, and found that he could not, as I was still holding tightly to my bed. Instead, he laid his palms somewhat awkwardly over my clenched fists. Something worked in his jaw.

“I know you aren’t stupid,” he said. “It is one of your particularly unique qualities, Hal, and I don’t have a mind toward forgetting it anytime soon. No. Nevertheless, I’ve decided—at least, I thought—to have an eye toward asking you something.”

He was thinking out loud, babbling in the way I’d only heard very rarely, which meant that he must have been quite nervous.

I was in no mood to console him, terrible and selfish as my misery had become, but my hands unclenched a little from their iron hold on the bedspread to wrap around his own. “Say it, then,” I whispered.

“Come with me,” he said, all at once, as if he were afraid it might lodge in his throat halfway before he had the chance to get it out.

It startled both of us, and me so much that I found myself unable to speak.

“I—I would be most honored if you would come with me,” Royston quickly revised, looking down at the floor with what appeared to be considerable interest. “I’ve thought about it. Or rather, since I received the news I have been thinking about it, and, well, I think it’s the best solution. In any case, there it stands. My invitation may come as quite a shock, but I am nevertheless very serious about it.”

I was too shocked to laugh at the way he was speaking, overly serious, as though it was a business proposal, and so I did the only thing I could do: I just flinched. My surprise was tempered with pleasure and dismay at once; I wanted to pull my hands away to cover my face and found that I could not—of course, because Royston was still holding them.

In all the strangest fantasies I’d entertained since I began studying with him—and there had been many, in this very room, extravagant and off center as my thoughts ever were—I had always imagined that I’d give anything to hear him ask this very question of me. I would be most honored if you would come with me.

In as many words, that was all I’d wanted. Yet it was one thing to imagine it in the dusky moments between waking and sleeping, and quite another to be faced with the possibility, real and whole in the waking world.

I knew at once the complications; they were why I’d always assumed it would be no more than a daydream.

“I know that I would be depriving the children of a most excellent tutor,” he went on, seeking to draw me from my silence. “I merely find that I have grown . . . accustomed to your conversation, as well as your company, and while there are a rare few people in this world whom I consider my friends, I find quite suddenly that you are one of the dearest. As I said, the request is selfish. Yet it isn’t entirely ludicrous, either. We could—There are some things, Hal, that would be greatly facilitated by a move to the city.”

I didn’t dare to imagine what he meant by that. In the moment, with all that I stood to lose, I couldn’t afford to presume myself into even further disappointment.

“If you wish to stay with me, then you shouldn’t leave,” I said, horrified at my own selfishness but still unable to stop myself. I freed my hands to hold his face, tilting it up to get a real, full look at it. “Don’t leave.”

He looked at me with dark, miserable eyes, and I felt guilt settle heavy in my chest like a burden.

I hadn’t meant to be a burden.

“Hal,” he said at last.

“I can’t go,” I whispered, pulling my hands away and drawing my knees up to my chest. I wished quite suddenly that he wouldn’t kneel so before me: Our positions were abruptly reversed, and I found myself unexpectedly averse to the change. It was one of many changes. I couldn’t bear to look at it straight on. “Since I was a child, my father promised me. And the chatelain has done so much for me, funded my entire education, brought me here to live in his house and fed me, clothed me. My bed is his, the clothes on my back, all the books on my shelves, save for the ones you gave me. I couldn’t be so ungrateful. I can’t go.”

“Please,” Royston said carefully, as though he had no idea what an effect such words had on me. He moved now, unfolding from where he knelt, and paused but a moment before he sat beside me on my bed. He almost knocked the back of his head against the sloped ceiling—something I’d done countless times before.

“Be careful there,” I murmured. “The ceiling is very low.”

“Ah,” Royston said. “Yes. I see.”

We sat for a time in uncomfortable silence while I fought off the urge to cry, or indeed to think of anything at all. My thoughts were treacherous, and my fingers felt impossibly cold.

At last, I heard Royston draw in a measured breath. “I would pay them very generously in thanks for their understanding,” he told me, with a straightforwardness that stunned me. “They would understand, I think—and it is not as if you are the only tutor in all of Nevers. You wouldn’t be leaving them in such dire straits as all that.”

“That would be asking too much of you,” I replied, as soon as I’d found my voice.

“I think it a negligible detail,” Royston replied, “when I have just asked so very much of you.”

“It’s quite different,” I told him. On the whole I felt as if my mind had been oddly separated from all my emotions; I was speaking, certainly, but at the same time not entirely sure I was in control of the words I spoke. I might have been a mechanical dragon more than I was myself, for all I had control of my actions, or understood the recklessness of my own heart.

“It isn’t so very different as all that,” Royston said. He turned his face as though he sought to capture my gaze and, after a moment of unnecessary perversity, I allowed our eyes to meet. There was something in his gaze that made me wonder if he was trying to say more than I’d heard. I felt something clench tight within me, unruly and curious despite myself. “If,” Royston continued, gently, “by this offer, I presume too much—”

This was hard for him. I saw it in the tight lines around the corners of his eyes, the matching lines, just as tight, around the corners of his mouth. I knew enough of Royston to know he wasn’t the sort of man given to such persistence; when he was denied so firmly something he wanted for himself, he withdrew to prevent any further infliction of the same hurt.

Yet here he was, importuning me further. I was repaying him for all his kindnesses by being stubborn as a mule and heedless as a child.

“I’m sorry,” I told him, all at once and in a breathless rush. “Royston, please, you mustn’t think me ungrateful—”

“I don’t.”

“—and you mustn’t think I wouldn’t want to go with you,” I went on, “because when I think about what it will be like once you’ve left, it’s too insufferable.”

Royston’s eyes lit up for a moment with warmth and good humor, and something that looked a little like relief. “I’m glad to find us in agreement on that point, at least,” he said.

I flushed, and pressed on, determined to make myself heard. “Only,” I stammered, “only I can’t do it. To leave without any warning—to abandon Alexander and William and Etienne, even Emilie—”

“It is quite sudden, yes,” Royston agreed.

“And what’s more,” I added, blush growing deeper, “I don’t know the first thing about the city.” I realized all at once that the majority of my altruism stemmed not from my desire to repay my distant aunt and her husband’s kindness, nor was it to save the children from the sadness of parting. Rather, it was my own intractable fear of the city herself, all three maidens, whatever specter of it I’d concocted. I was raised in the country, and I thought of it without reservations as my home. While I wished to follow Royston, and I did—it was almost feverish how completely I wished it—I was also terrified.

I faltered then, and Royston saw through my protestations at once.

“Hal,” he said, taking one of my hands in both of his own, “you are far more clever and far better-read than most students at the ’Versity. What separates you from them is their monstrous sense of self-entitlement, but no more than that, I assure you. The city, too, is no more than the countryside with a great many more houses and a great many more opportunities.” He paused for a moment, then allowed himself a slight, self-deprecating smile. “Perhaps that is somewhat oversimplified,” he continued, “but there is some truth to it. I asked you to come with me when I leave tomorrow with some considerable measure of selfishness, but at the same time I would never have made the offer if I didn’t think you would benefit from the arrangement just as much—if not more so—than I. There are some people who aren’t made for the limitations of the countryside. You are one of those people, Hal. If you say that you will be happier here reading what little my brother can procure for you, teaching the basic patterns of grammar to my nephews, then I will not press the matter further, and though I will be quite distraught to take my leave of you, I will do it. But can you truly look me in the eye and tell me with all honesty—and do not let fear temper your answer, Hal—that the city does not hold for you something you crave, something you have always craved, something you have longed for ever since you first imagined it might be out there, just beyond your reach, waiting for you to have the chance to attain it? Tell me—it is the same longing you foster when you read, is it not?”

When he was finished speaking, I found I could scarcely breathe. Royston was a peerless speaker, and had he asked me at that moment to leap out a window, I suspect I would have done it for him without hesitation. His eyes were very bright and his face alive with the meaning behind his words. I felt my heart stutter in my chest as my breath stuttered in my throat.

This was one of many reasons why I so often dreamed of kissing him. He spoke more beautifully than the most exquisite passages I’d ever read.

The expression on his face was too overwhelming, the force of his words too pure. I looked away from him and knotted my fingers in the bedsheets.

“It is,” I whispered. “I do wish for that.”

“When I was somewhat younger than you,” Royston told me, “I left my home in the countryside. I had no such offer as you have before you now, and—I’ve never told this to anyone—I was completely terrified of all that lay ahead of me.”

“But you did it yourself,” I replied. “You have no reason to feel beholden to anyone now, for the . . . the price they paid for you when you were that age, to rescue you, to show you all the things you speak so eloquently about.” I was near to shredding the sheet, and I forced myself to let go of it before I really did tear it. “It is almost . . . too kind of you. Your offer.”

“I won’t hold you to it,” Royston promised. “I don’t expect to be repaid.”

I shook my head. “Then you undervalue me,” I said. “It would seem that I owed you too much.”

“Then think of it in terms of my selfishness,” Royston said candidly. “In the terms I have tried my hardest not to think of it. As I said, you are more than worthy of the city, but if you would do me the favor of considering it from my perspective—Hal, I am quite close now to begging for your company.”

It was much the same as the way I’d begged for him to stay.

We were unexpectedly equals, at least in terms of how greatly opposed we were to being parted from one another. After a moment, I found myself laughing, then Royston was laughing with me; we ran the gamut from nervous to relieved in no more than a second, and I fell against him, hiding my face against his shoulder, muffling the sound of my laughter in shades of gratitude and delight.

“Would you really?” I asked him, when I’d quite composed myself once more. “Would you really take me away from here, take me with you to the city?”

“This is no jest, Hal,” he said. “I would never have offered it if I didn’t have every intention of seeing it through. A good assistant is a rare thing to come by; a good student even rarer.”

“Mme will be so angry,” I added. “She’ll be likely to faint all week.”

“Let her be angry,” Royston said. “She deserves you less than anyone else here.”

I sobered for a moment when I thought of the others. “I will miss them,” I said softly. “I’m very fond of the children.”

“They shall come to hate me, no doubt, for whisking you away from them,” Royston replied. “I will be their evil uncle, who stole the light out of their lives without any warning.”

“Don’t,” I murmured, and nudged his shoulder lightly with my own, but there was no vehemence in my rebuke.

“Hal,” he said, and I wondered what it was about his voice that could make my own name sound like a title both foreign and beautiful. Despite what good sense had taught me about the extent of Royston’s personal feelings, I turned slightly, and tilted my head up.

He touched my cheek, and looked at me with an expression that I’d only ever seen him wear when he spoke of Thremedon, his beloved city. Then he winced, and took his hand away to press it against his forehead, a faint glimmer of unhappiness crossing his face.

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. I didn’t know why I had thought . . . but it didn’t matter. If Royston was going to take me to the city with him, I would have to be more circumspect.

“No,” he said, though his argument sounded halfhearted at best. “It isn’t that. I’ve only . . . I’ve got something of a headache, that’s all.”

“Oh,” I said, accepting the lie, because it was clear that was what Royston wanted me to do. “That’s all right. We can—we don’t have to talk.”

We were silent for a while after that, but this time it was without the prior awkwardness. I toyed with one of the rings on Royston’s left hand, and he allowed me to do it. It was a ring for poison, with a complicated, stiff catch, and the silence that stretched between us was punctuated by the sound the ring made when I managed to open it.

At last, Royston said, “Will you come with me, then?”

“Yes,” I told him, without hesitation. “Yes, I’ll come.”

“Ah,” he replied. The pleasure and relief flooded his voice, deepening it. “Well,” Royston went on, and I was sad to hear that quality disappearing from his voice, “it’s rather late to talk to my brother about the matter.”

I hid a yawn against the inside of my elbow. “I don’t know what I should pack,” I admitted.

“Don’t worry,” Royston said. “I shall see to that. Would you . . . ah, would you like me to stay with you awhile? If you have any questions about the city—about what will be expected of you there—I wouldn’t mind answering them.”

I had a few, and we stayed up a while longer, talking in hushed voices. Only once more did Royston show signs of the headache that had bothered him earlier, but he insisted it was nothing. He spoke instead of what Thremedon would be like this time of year, what plays would be having their runs in the theatres, and how he was friends with one of the airmen in the Dragon Corps—none other than the Chief Sergeant himself. It all seemed rather like a dream, and indeed I must have drifted off without noticing it, for all at once I was opening my eyes to the sound of birds chirping outside.

The first thing I understood was that I was alone; there was no other warmth curled against me in my small bed.

I jerked awake all at once. Something was wrong, but for the first few reeling seconds of consciousness, I couldn’t remember what.

Then, I remembered everything all at once. Today I was leaving for the city—Royston had been with me before I’d fallen asleep; he’d asked me to go—but he was beside me no longer, and all at once I couldn’t tell if what had passed the night before had indeed been no more than a dream. I could remember, only in bits and pieces, what it had been like in the night with Royston beside me, the anxieties that plagued me waking me and his warmth at my back. At one point—if I could be certain that I hadn’t dreamed it all—I’d even turned to press up against him, one arm around his shoulders. He’d let me.

My cheeks were too hot and I was frozen in place—not just because of the cold—staring with unthinking misery at the rumpled sheets drawn clumsily but unmistakably around me.

So Royston had been with me last night, and before he’d left, he’d seen fit to cover me.

We’d spent the night together. I’d slept with Royston by my side, a thrilling and awful realization at once. What if I’d kicked him in my sleep, or elbowed him in the stomach? What if I’d snored, or mumbled while dreaming? And where had he gone, leaving me here alone?

There was no clock in my little room. I didn’t know what time it was, if I had overslept or imagined everything. For all I knew, Royston was gone already.

I was beginning to doubt myself for a complete raving madman when there were two short knocks against the door.

That was our signal.

My hands froze, and I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps I hadn’t imagined the whole thing after all.

A moment later my suspicions were dispelled. “Are you decent?” Royston’s voice called through the doorway, and I could have laughed or cried for gladness, however much the question made me blush.

“I am always decent,” I replied, feeling somewhat impish in my relief. Though that wasn’t entirely true—a few of the buttons on my shirt had come undone—and I was in the middle of fixing them when the door swung open and Royston stepped inside.

Royston stood there, expression inscrutable but his eyes impossibly warm. In his left hand he held my best pair of boots, the leather ones that the chatelain had bought for me when it was first decided I’d be staying at Nevers to teach Alexander and William their basic grammar and histories.

“Those are my boots,” I said lamely, pausing mid-button.

“Yes,” Royston said, not looking away from me. “They are indeed. You’re going to need them, I should think, if you’re to leave with me in ten minutes. I’ve settled it all with my brother; I have miraculously managed to convince him that you deserve a finer education than is available to you here.” Without betraying a single emotion, Royston set the boots down just inside the door. “I believe you might also want to change into your weekend finest, though of course once we come to Thremedon I’ll have an entirely new wardrobe made for you, should you like it. They’re terribly obsessed with fashion there, and I think you’d look very fine in high-collared blue, unless that’s gone out while I’ve been away.” He must have seen my bafflement, for after a moment’s pause he continued, “Don’t worry. It won’t be any trouble at all. I shall have to have my tailor make up new clothes for me as well if I want to look presentable. I simply thought that I might bring you along and make a day of it.”

“Royston,” I began, then snapped to attention at once. “When must I be ready?”

“Ten minutes, if you can,” Royston said. “I’ll leave you to it.” He gave me a private smile before ducking out.

I was ready in six.