Havemercy (23 page)

“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.