Havemercy (37 page)

“I thought perhaps,” Royston said that evening, “that we might see about enrolling you in a few classes at the ’Versity.”

He was reading some letter that had come for him earlier, the importance of which he’d protested was completely negligible, but I saw the way he read it and couldn’t help my curiosity.

As far as distractions went, however, Royston was quite the master.

“But I’ve no primary education at all,” I protested, almost forgetting the letter completely. Royston seemed to have done the same; it lay folded by his cup of after-dinner coffee as if it were no more than a napkin.

“Nonsense,” Royston said. “You’re quite intelligent. I wouldn’t have brought you here if I meant to keep you locked away inside this tower like some sort of maiden of old.”

“Well,” I said carefully. “But it seems—The expense—”

“No matter,” Royston said. “I’m a wealthy man, unless I failed to impress that upon you earlier with my displays of foolish extravagance. And their purpose was to impress you, by the by. I thought I’d succeeded with the carriage.”

“Four white horses,” I said, toying unhappily with my spoon. “Yes, I was aware—”

“But something disturbs you.” Royston’s tone immediately grew serious, and I saw the creases along his brow deepen. “What is it?”

I struggled to find the proper words to express my concerns without seeming ungrateful. “I would like to attend the ’Versity,” I said. “Very much, in fact. I never thought it would even be a possibility. But the cost is something. I wouldn’t wish to take your money, any more than I already have—which has been too much, despite what you may think. I would feel . . . uncomfortable, knowing that you’d spent so much on me, without my having any way to repay you—”

“Your education would be an investment,” Royston began reasonably. “It would be payment in itself to see your mind put to the tasks for which it was meant.”

“If I attend the ’Versity,” I said firmly, and with no room for argument, “then I will do so on my own chevronet.”

Royston was silent for a moment. I saw him soften, and at last he said, “We use tournois primarily. In the city.”

I flushed to the tips of my ears. I’d known that, of course, but old country habits died hard. “I thought perhaps I might offer myself as a tutor,” I said. I’d been thinking it over since I scrambled into the carriage with him, and I thought it the most viable of my options. “Not children so old as Alexander or even William. Surely there are preparatory schools? Before the primary education? I might even act as an assistant. It wouldn’t entirely pay handsomely, but at least I wouldn’t be a burden.”

“Whatever you do or do not choose to do,” Royston told me sharply, “do not ever call yourself a burden, Hal.”

I was blushing again. I hadn’t meant to imply that, either. “No,” I promised. “I won’t. I’m very sorry. But I would feel it, Royston, if I simply did nothing.”

Royston was silent again, mulling this over, stirring the coffee in his cup. I nearly dropped my spoon at one point, and so gave up my fidgeting. It was a disagreement between us—as close to any sort of argument as we’d ever come—and I felt miserable for it. But above all I couldn’t allow him to spend money so heedlessly on me when I had nothing to offer him in return except myself if I ever managed to overcome his stubbornness, and I didn’t wish for that to feel like any sort of common exchange between us.

“No,” Royston said at length. “You are right. Of course you are. I’ve been distracted; I haven’t been thinking clearly.”

I stood then, and went over to sit on the floor at his side as I’d done countless times before when he was spinning his stories. “You haven’t,” I said. “Tell me what’s been troubling you.”

“In truth, I should not,” Royston said. He paused, though, and I could see him waver on the edge of sharing it with me.

I pressed on, however recklessly. “I know the chances of my being able to help you with it are very slim,” I said, “for I know little about the intrigues of the city. But perhaps I might be able to help even by listening. I’d be glad to,” I added, letting my palm rest against his knee for a moment before I thought the better of it and let it fall. He dropped his hand to my hair and sighed.

“I don’t believe the war is about to end,” he replied carefully. “In fact, I think that we are all—very efficiently, mind you that—being lied to, but for what purpose I cannot divine. And the thought that something important is being kept from even those with reason to know it . . . I admit that it’s driving me to distraction just thinking about it.”

I let this information sink in. Despite Royston’s assurances to the contrary, I couldn’t help but feel my own ignorance when it came to discussing matters of the city, or its oddly structured politics—much like a tower in the Crescents, as far as I could see, in that there was no way of telling how it stayed up from the outside. “You don’t have any idea as to what it might be about?” I said at last. Royston was the cleverest person I knew, and I found I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the concept that there was anything he didn’t understand.

He hesitated, then I felt his fingers begin to stroke my hair a little, as though he were in deep thought. I tried not to let the motion distract me too much, though I liked the small reassurance that these moments gave me. Some days, it was very hard to remember what Royston had told me in the carriage, and even harder when he hadn’t told me outright. When he touched my hair, or placed a hand against my back to guide me up the stairs, it became easier to believe that I hadn’t imagined all sorts of implications which hadn’t really been there. Royston did care for me.

“I don’t have any idea,” he said at last, sounding as frustrated as I’d ever heard him. “There have only been . . . anomalies, of a sort.”

“Oh yes?” I asked, and looked at him encouragingly. For all his brilliance, Royston was often a man who needed to be led like a horse by a carrot if you wanted him to finish his thoughts out loud rather than retreat back into his own mind.

He cast a glance at me and smiled just slightly in the very left corner of his mouth, as though he knew exactly what I was doing. “Only the paranoia of the rich and powerful, I’m afraid,” he said, and I knew he was joking, could see it dancing in the depths of his eyes, warm and brown. “Spend enough time at the palace and everything starts to seem like a conspiracy.”

If he really thought that, then there would have been no reason at all for him to behave the way he was, with considerably more distraction than had ever occupied him in the country, no matter his disinterest in sheep and trees alike.

As seemed to be my curse, I couldn’t help but wear my thoughts plain as the nose on my face.

“I’m sorry, Hal,” he said, fingers still making restless, nesting motions at the back of my head. “If you are keen on the specifics, it is only that there were fewer faces at the ball than I’d expected to recognize.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to divine his meaning as he obviously expected me to. “Do you think they’re at war, then? Off with the fighting?”

He closed his eyes to think it over, then sighed. “Hal,” he said, “forgive me for burdening you with this; it is most unfair of me. But I must confess that the state of the war itself is what troubles me.”

I felt a sudden plummeting in my chest. “Why?” I asked, and put an entreating hand once more on his knee. “Have they told you—Do you have to go away already? Was that what was written in the letter?”

“What?” His eyes went to the object in question though he didn’t turn his face from mine. “No! Oh, certainly not, Hal. Of course I would have mentioned anything such as that much earlier. I only wonder how close to the end we can truly be if the Esar is so keen on calling back so many of my fellows in relative states of disgrace with the crown. That is what I was discussing with my fellows when I so rudely excused myself from your company in the hall.”

“With the blonde woman?” I realized my hand was still on his knee, and felt a flush rising in my cheeks when I remembered how jealous I’d been.

“Yes,” he said. “And what I can’t make out for the life of me is why the Esar would bother if we were just meant to attend fancy parties. Not that I’m not a devotee of fancy parties, by all means; they are infinitely preferable to leaving for war, yet not entirely as pressing a matter, if you catch my meaning.”

Still bearing the emotional bruises I’d obtained from my first fancy party, I declined to offer my opinion on the subject.

“Most people do seem to think the war’s quite over,” I said, after a moment. It was the first time I’d said aloud what Royston must also have noticed. I didn’t have any particular reason for keeping it to myself, only the unfounded fear that exposing it to the light and air would send it crumbling away as surely as ash.

As far as I could tell, it was the talk all over town: in colorful Bottle Alley, where Royston had taken me so that he could buy “something to reassure him that all of Thremedon hadn’t gone mad for horse’s piss in his absence,” then all along the wide rows of the Shoals, where we’d gone to buy fish for dinner. Little old women with black teeth had even proclaimed it cheerfully, announcing the catch of the day as a special in celebration of Volstov’s imminent victory.

So it was silly of me, perhaps, to have held my tongue on the subject as long as I had, as though it were a wish I’d made on a shooting star or something equally childish.

When I saw Royston’s face, however, fondness mixed with a kind of deep sadness, I knew why I’d done it; I hadn’t wanted to see that look.

“I know it’s silly of me to say,” I said, quickly, before he could speak again. “Why else would they have called you back if they didn’t need you? Of course the war can’t be over. I only thought that perhaps, with what everyone’s been saying, there might be something else. Something you’re missing?”

“Hal,” he said, frowning as though he were unhappy with something, though I knew it wasn’t me. “I can’t say many things for certain at the moment, but one thing I feel as though I must prepare you for is that I will still very likely be called away.”

I swallowed around something that rose in my throat. “I know that,” I told him.

In truth I felt a little at odds with myself, not wanting to require the special treatment Royston often afforded me, and yet still craving the kind of reassurance—unreasonable to ask for, unreasonable to promise—that everything was going to be all right.

I was going to say something more when there was a knock at the downstairs door.

When first I’d come to live in Royston’s rooms at the tower, the layout had confused me terribly. There seemed to be staircases with no visible destination, doors without any handles that couldn’t possibly lead into new rooms. There was even a bright green trapdoor set into the ceiling, but when I’d asked after it he only mentioned something about the best houses having alternative points of exit and left the matter at that.

My consternation—weighted with the fact that this was in every way still Royston’s house—kept me seated and waiting while he stood to answer the knock. I did clamber into his chair, though, watching the firm lines of his back fondly, as I tended to whenever I thought I could steal a look.

“There are people I might speak to,” he said in passing. “If you are anxious to find a place as a tutor.”

“Yes.” I nodded. “I would be very grateful.”

He smiled over his shoulder at me—seemingly in no hurry to answer the door—and then all at once a change came over his face, sudden and still as though he’d missed a step in the staircase. I watched his hand around the banister go white at the knuckles, as though he was forced suddenly to hold on very tightly, and I was out of the chair before I could help myself.

“Are you all right?” I was so close that I could hear his breathing, even and deep, the way it only ever was in sleep, or when he was steadying himself before trying to control some more basic human impulse.

It was a long time before he answered, so long that I’d begun to think he hadn’t heard me at all. I asked again, near to feeling ill. “Royston? What is it?”

His head snapped up all at once, clearly startled, and he shook it quickly as if to clear it. “I’m sorry,” he said, and there was a rough note in his voice that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “It’s nothing.”

I thought it was self-evident that it had indeed been something, and I took his hand before I could think better of it. “I’ll see who was at the door,” I offered, and once I was sure Royston could stand on his own I hurried down the steps.

Whoever had knocked was at the door no longer, but when I closed it again I felt something slippery under my foot, and moved aside to examine it. At the bottom of the landing someone had pushed a square white envelope under the door. It felt expensive, heavy, when I picked it up, with sharp corners and stiff stationery. The handwriting on the front was impeccable and addressed itself to the Margrave Royston.

When I carried the envelope back up the stairs, Royston was sitting at the top. He still didn’t look entirely right, and I had the useless, fluttering urge to offer him a cup of tea even though he preferred dark coffee or coax him into the comfortable chair by the fire.

What I did was neither of these things, but instead gave over the letter that had been delivered, then sat too close beside him on the top step.

He looked at me sidelong and I realized what it looked like: that I was trying to read his mail. Then he smiled, and it was something like watching the shadow over his face pass away with the advent of day.

“Thank you,” he said, and opened his letter with ruthless precision.

The letter must have been short, as he glanced at it only briefly before crumpling it in his hand. All I could think, against the sudden hammering of my heart, was that it was not paper made for crumpling. It was of very fine quality, much too thick to be of no importance.

We sat in uncomfortable silence there on the stairs, Royston not willing to tell me whatever had been in the letter, and me too cowardly to ask outright, and both of us knowing it was inevitable. In the dull, dark stretch at the back of my mind that perhaps had known what was coming all along, I thought that surely the Esar would be the only man to use such fine stationery. After that realization, it was only a small jump to come to a reasonable conclusion about what exactly had been written there.