Havemercy (27 page)

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.