Havemercy (10 page)

“Here.” My brother handed me an oilskin raincoat. His own, I presumed—too wide in the chest and too short in the arms—but it would have to do. I put it on. “If you can’t find them,” he began, and I silenced him with a hand.

No matter what had passed between us, between my brother and me, I did not wish to see him harmed by the loss of his child.

“I’ll find them,” I said, and went out into the rain.

The lay of the land surrounding Castle Nevers could only have been designed by a countryman. There were no straight paths to anywhere, only the vague and winding curve that would lead you to the river if you followed it long enough.

In some ways, that reminded me enough of the city for it to weigh heavily on my heart.

Today, however, I had no time for the turning paths, counterintuitive to any man with logic at hand. The wind whipped at branches, drove rain sharp and bitterly cold against my face and hands. I wished I’d thought to bring some gloves, for in the cold your fingers were the first to be endangered.

Hal had pointed out the marsh on one of our walks, pleasant and innocuous as always. I’d not been paying attention at the time, but was thankful now for his insistence that I leave the house despite my contempt for both sheep and trees. If it hadn’t been for those walks, I’d be incurably lost now.

All things have a purpose. My mentor’s words came unbidden as they ever did, and I recalled them with the same deep regret that now tinged and tainted every part of my life.

I picked up speed.

To my surprise, much of the grounds were not unfamiliar, almost as though I truly hadn’t spent all my term of exile in an impermeable fugue of self-pity. There wasn’t a path to the marsh, not exactly, but it had a way all the same, past the ring of stumps where Emilie had her tea parties in the warmer months, and the burnt-out wreck of a caretaker’s cabin that had been destroyed in an accident involving the boys upriver.

Much as I liked to believe myself separate from the goings-on in my brother’s house, I knew with a sureness that flowed in me to the core that I could not—would not—go back to the house without my nephew and Hal. Those who knew me well might have called it stubbornness and they wouldn’t have been very wrong, for I was a stubborn man in all things, and especially the ones I thought could not be amenable to change—weather and law and the movement of the stars themselves. This warm closeness in my chest was a kin of stubbornness, then, but it was like nothing I’d ever felt before.

There would be time enough to examine my discovery later, I told myself; now was not the time.

The trees were beginning to thin out when my boot made a squelch instead of a thump, which meant that I was getting close. It also meant that the wind, while being deprived of branches to snap at my face, was also uninhibited by such trifling cover. It tore at my brother’s coat, freezing my wet skin and forcing my eyes to thin slits as I scanned the Nevers marsh for any signs of life. More than once I caught myself following the wind’s howl with my gaze, thinking it a voice in peril. I rubbed my arms briskly to keep them from going numb as my hands had, then continued more gingerly. The ground here was soft, and nearly as wet as the air. I thought of William and his short legs and his appetite for mischief, and I felt sick at heart.

A shrill whistle went soaring past my ears, and suddenly the wind was calling my brother’s name.

It was difficult to discern the direction from which the cry had come, but as I turned it came again, louder, stronger. Two voices instead of one, perhaps. I remembered various bits and pieces of lessons, training, how to narrow my focus, how to catch in my ears what I wanted to hear, and even as I put those theories to practice I forced my legs to move. There was water seeping into my boots, cold as the rest.

It made sense, in some strange way. Why should any part of me escape the frigid consequence of the rainy season?

I was thankful at least that the voices I was following were taking me back to the marsh’s edge rather than farther in. No matter what confidence I had in my own abilities, I hadn’t relished the idea of fishing two people from the watery depths of a piece of land that couldn’t make up its mind whether to be solid or liquid and was treacherous enough to be both.

I saw a flash of something pale waving among a tangle of branches and rain, and I realized with a shock that it was an arm. My sigh of relief was immediately snatched away by the wind. The boys were in a tree.

“Papa!” William’s voice was reed-thin, screamed ragged. I hated to disappoint him, but that was what came of wearing my brother’s coat. I struggled over to the tree, laid my hands against its gnarled trunk. Hal and the boy sat tangled together on a lower branch, hair and clothing glued to their skins. Neither was in danger of drowning in the marsh, but their chances of surviving the night outside would have been slim indeed. As it was, we could all be reasonably certain that in a matter of days, everyone in my brother’s castle would be sniffling and sneezing and harboring some version of the same cold.

“M-Margrave Royston,” said Hal, blue-lipped and shivering. He was holding tight to William, who looked ready to hurl himself out of the tree at the slightest provocation.

“Have the pair of you quite finished scaring my brother to death?” I asked.

William made a miserable sound that reminded me how young he was, so I checked my tongue and held out my arms for him, instead. My most-disagreeable nephew clung to me like a newborn kitten, tiny freezing hands crawling under my collar, thin arms looped about my neck. I felt something pierce the fog of indifference I’d held around me like the blanket in my bed, and I comforted him as I had when the children had been much younger and my brother visiting Miranda for the first and only time.

There was a rustling sound from above our heads, and I looked up to see Hal halfway out of the tree himself but moving slowly, careful of the limited response his frozen limbs must have been giving him.

“Here,” I said, shifting William to one arm so that I could hold out a hand to Hal.

He took it without compunction, squeezed my fingers tight, and slipped from the tree with a wet thump. His lips were pressed tightly together, I assumed to keep his teeth from chattering. When he opened his mouth, the words came rushing out in a halting flow, as though he had a lot to say and not the words to say it.

“William—I had to come. Didn’t think it would be so cold,” he managed, before falling against me much as William had done.

“Take my coat,” I said, though it was too late for any coat to do much more than trap the cold that had already got into them.

Hal shook his head, wet hair brushing against the curve of my chin as he did so.

“Here,” I said again, as reasonably as I could. I fumbled at the buttons of the coat with numb fingers until I could pull a side of it free. In a swift motion that let as little rain in as possible, I folded Hal in close, and brought the oilskin around him, so that it might serve a dual purpose.

“Oh,” I heard him say quietly, an icy and immediate presence against my chest. “Thank you.”

I swallowed, feeling the small movements of his mouth as he spoke against my shoulder. His hands were larger than William’s, but they clutched in exactly the same way, holding tight to my shirt as though I were an anchor in the storm. With a slowly trickling certainty, like the water running down my neck, I felt that same hand as surely as if it had clutched at something deeper within my chest.

“Well,” I said, gruff and businesslike. William was weeping against my shoulder. “We’d best get back to the house.”

ROOK

I didn’t have a mind to be sharing or caring again anytime soon. Only when I said as much to Adamo, he looked me square in the eye and said he’d string me up out the window even if I was the only soul who could fly Havemercy in a straight line. I wasn’t in a mood for that kind of horseshit—especially not with all the horseshit I’d been forced to swallow lately—so I told him as how he knew he wouldn’t; and then his jaw got hard, and we were just staring at each other for a while, breathing heavy like right before a fight. We’d’ve just about gutted each other on the spot, except then Ghislain stepped in with more news from th’Esar: that like as not we were going to have to show the little shit professor around our digs, let him observe us day to day, and not accidentally feed him to one of the girls. (That last being Ghislain’s own phrasing.)

We’d known, barely and sort of, what to expect when we all piled into the atrium for our rehabilitation. Before the fact, Balfour kept talking about how it was just a punishment in theory and not in actual practice, and how it was better than all the things the Arlemagnes were demanding for punishment, and how it was a clever idea when you thought about it, pleasing both sides—a real compromise instead of one of those fake ones where both parties leave the table dissatisfied. But I knew better than that. I knew it was a demotion in status and I knew how it made us all look, like kids who’d stolen cookies from the jar, like no better than naughty puppies, with th’Esar rapping news-print against our noses, and I was screaming pissed. No matter which way they tried to spin it, I wasn’t going to do what the little shit said, and I wasn’t going to cut him any breaks, either. Whatever he was here to accomplish it was all just more of the same: weak words ’Versity students and Margraves and members of the bastion tossed back and forth like birdies in some pussy’s badminton. We were different from all that—exempt, to use their own rhetoric—’cause this was the Dragon Corps. We weren’t supposed to abide by the usual rules, and whatever the fuck th’Esar thought he was going to accomplish, it sure wasn’t inspiring no fighting spirit in me, leastways not the kind he was looking for out of any one of us.

“I’m flying out,” I said.

“You aren’t,” Adamo told me.

But I was all energy and nerves and wanted to burn something, and we hadn’t been flying in months. “Havemercy’s pissed,” I said, which was true, and didn’t just mean I’m pissed. Havemercy liked flying better than anything, and these days when I visited her for a polish or a chat, she looked at me over one metal claw like I was a fucking disappointment. Yeah, sweetheart, I’d say, we’re all fucking disappointed right about now. Then I’d say a few other choice phrases, and Have’d just snort like she didn’t care one way or another, so long as I saw fit to get her up in the air again.

I needed to fly all that name-and-private-detail business off—and the idea that the little shit was coming to get the grand tour and we were all going to have to roll out the red carpet like he was some kind of king rather than all green and pissing his pants terrified of us.

Good, I thought. At least he had one thing straight, if nothing else.

“Don’t be a fool,” said Adamo. “You’ve already had your ride this month, same as the rest of the boys. It isn’t my fault none of you takes the time to understand rationing a thing out once in a while.”

Th’Esar had come to some sort of agreement with Adamo more than ten years back about how we each got one free ride a month during peacetimes. I guess he thought that any damage we could do up in the air was miles less than we could do on the ground, getting stir-crazy and all riled up at one another without nothing to let off the steam.

But mostly, we figured, he’d agreed for the dragons, partly ’cause keeping them locked up all the time made them cranky, and partly because he thought it made them rusty, too.

“I’m takin’ her out,” I repeated, and that was final-like. He wasn’t going to string me up, and he could give me dog rations all he liked knowing I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about it, and he sure as fuck couldn’t dismiss me.

He was right in some sense, ’cause the thing is, the tech the magicians use for making dragons is all pretty hush-hush, and you can’t risk some lucky Ke-Han getting his hands on you so he can figure it all out in his sweet time and start building up his own air force. When you’re an airman, you’ve got to be careful and you’ve got to be precise—but all that doesn’t mean anything unless you’re good, and out of all of them I was the best. Everybody knew it—even Ace, though he wouldn’t admit it, and especially Adamo, who was stubborn as a brick wall but smarter than he looked.

I wasn’t going to take her far, I said, getting on my gloves. I was just going to take her up, wheel her around a bit, give Volstov a show, then return her so she could sleep easier, having had the exercise.

And so I didn’t kill anyone from being so fucking mad.

“Thirty,” Adamo said, which meant if I was up for more than half an hour, he was going to string me up.

Whatever. We both knew who’d won that round.

So I went on down through the bunks and the mess and the showers and through the leisure door—rather than the one you take when the raid siren’s sounding, which shoots you straight from the bedroom to the docking bay—and then there I was, the wide, low-ceilinged room clean and dark and smelling of metal and burning things, and my palms itching to get Havemercy harnessed and get us both up in the air.

See, unlike most of the men here, I hadn’t been trained properly or anything. I’d volunteered to be one of the muck boys who run around after the real airmen and keep the harnesses polished and the dragonhide gleaming and all that bullshit, like with mops and yessirs and nosirs every two seconds, scraping and bowing and otherwise making an ass of myself. Only, I volunteered at the right time, just when Havemercy was fresh off the table, and she was being real picky and real precise about not having anyone flying her no matter how they coaxed, until she took one look at me and it was love at first sight, only we both knew the other one didn’t have any heart for loving to speak of. She was beautiful then, and she’s still beautiful now, though there’s a clip off her left wing from getting in too close to the real fighting one time, but we turned the tide of the skirmish and sent the Ke-Han packing back over the Cobalts where they’d come from all cocky and proud, so I guess we did all right by that.

“Hey, sweetheart,” I said.

Havemercy saw the harness in my hand, that I had my gloves and my riding boots on. She yawned and flicked her tail. “Bell didn’t ring,” she said.