Havemercy (38 page)

There was, after all, only one reason I could think of for the Esar to contact Royston.

As the minutes ticked by, measured by the large grandfather clock in the drawing room, I wrapped a hand around Royston’s arm below the elbow. I was still nervous about touching him first, since there was always the chance that he would remember his rules and become stern with me. It had never happened yet, but my anxiety remained all the same.

“Hal,” he began, careful and slow, as though I were a nervous horse that needed gentling to avoid being spooked.

“When?” I interrupted, startled by the hardness in my voice.

It must have startled Royston, too, because he refrained from answering, only put his arms close around me and held me tight the way he’d only ever had occasion to do a handful of times before.

I put my head against his shoulder and hated the war.

ROOK

I half expected the professor to have stormed his way back to the ’Versity by the time the ball ended, but to my surprise, when I got back to the Airman, I found him right where he’d always been: sleeping or not sleeping or whatever it was he did on his pathetic little couch.

Jeannot’d told me right before the carriage ride back that the little snot’d met with th’Esar private-like sometime during the night—which Jeannot knew because he was friends with all the oldest servants in the palace. You can’t buy the respect old blood can get you some places. From the reports Jeannot and Ghislain had got out of ’em, it was pretty clear that th’Esar wasn’t just trying to keep us acting proper, but was also using the professor to get all the information on us he could without us knowing about it. It was pretty fucking clever of both of them, and I only saw it as a shame we hadn’t acted up enough to get the professor sacked, though maybe I’d wasted too much of my time with that stunt on the balcony and I doubted he’d be telling anyone about that anytime soon, even threatened by th’Esar, seeing as how I had him pinned. The last thing a snot like him wanted was everyone to know he didn’t have a pedigree—and besides which, if Isobel-Magritte’s father was to find out I’d cornered her so nice and easy on the balcony at th’Esar’s own ball, there was no accounting for the shit the professor’d be armpit deep in.

Truth was that, after learning we had a real son-of-a spy in our midst, I hadn’t had much mood for sport. I was too angry, and while there are some girls who like that kind of thing just fine, the overwhelming majority tend to call you a pig or worse, and I already had one professor to deal with. I wasn’t completely fucking crazy. There are some things you just don’t bring down upon yourself twice, and the professor was one of them.

Not because he was anything in particular, mind. Just because he was so fucking annoying.

The carriage ride back everyone was in a mood ’cause we were all wondering what that meeting meant for us, and whether we were going to have to hang the professor out the window the same way we did to new recruits who couldn’t keep their stupid mouths shut.

Finally, I said, “I’ll take care of it. Don’t tell anyone.”

“Oh?” Jeannot lifted a brow, sliding back in his seat. “And how are you planning on doing that?”

“I’m thinking,” I snapped. “Just keep quiet about it.”

It was just me, Jeannot, and Ghislain in the carriage. Jeannot and Ghislain could be out of their minds sometimes and they’d pulled some crazy stunts, but the one good thing about them was that you could always trust them to keep their mouths locked up tighter’n th’Esarina’s cunt when it suited their best interests.

We were safe with the information being ours. For now, anyway.

But we had to do something, on top of that.

After a while I realized Ghislain was looking at me, which meant he had something to say about it and was waiting to be asked with proper grammar and everything to grace us with his brilliance. Ghislain was more or less that smug, but he was big enough no one could complain about it, and I didn’t have the time or patience to be all coy like some Margrave’s daughter.

“Spit it out,” I said, “or quit looking at me like that.”

Ghislain took his time, cracking the knuckles of his left hand and inspecting his nails. “It’s you,” he said at length, all cryptic and as smug as ever, like he wasn’t spouting total horseshit. “You’re the one who has to do it.”

“Kill him?” I asked. I was only half-joking.

Jeannot snorted and rolled his eyes. “Don’t you know anything?” he asked, like he didn’t know how dangerous it was to say something that stupid to me. “Why do you think he sticks around?”

“Because he’s got shit for brains,” I said, but by now I was more than half-interested in what the boys were saying.

“Because he’s as stubborn as you are,” Jeannot said, and Ghislain nodded in agreement.

“And because he’s got shit for brains,” I added.

“Look,” Jeannot said, leaning across the space between us as the carriage jostled us down the road. “If he was given reason to believe he’s got through to you—if he was to think you’d had a change of heart, or perhaps had seen the error of your ways—”

“You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” Ghislain said, like some sort of Brother of Regina preaching to his followers. I wanted to punch him in his square jaw, but even I wasn’t so stupid. Only thing that would’ve given me was five broken fingers.

“So you’re saying I’ve gotta pretend like all this talk of—seeing the other side of things and opening myself up to my feelings has made a difference in my poor, deluded life,” I concluded for them. “And this way, we can control whatever information he thinks he’s found to feed th’Esar.” An idea was sort of half-forming, and I liked the way it looked from where I sat. I was sick and tired of having some green-as-grass professor, barely out of the ’Versity, lording himself over me. I wasn’t letting him spy on us, either, and the thought of seeing him trip all over himself just thinking I’d seen the light suited me just fine.

“You are the toughest pupil,” Jeannot finished, leaning back again, for all the world as if he wasn’t going back to a building infiltrated by an outsider, one of th’Esar’s lackeys, a whoreson spy.

I wasn’t just going to sit back and eat whatever th’Esar fed us. We were winning his war for him. I could take the professor. I’d taken worse.

“Seems like a plan,” I said.

Then we were quiet, and I had the rest of the ride to think about how I was going to handle this.

The way I figured it—and it was sort of like a plan of attack, which occasionally I had the inspiration for—I’d have to keep him guessing, keep him on his toes. Had he changed me or hadn’t he? He didn’t have to know. If I seemed to be reformed too sudden-like, all the red flags in his head would start waving. I would still keep him scared as a rabbit who’s just seen a fox, but I would also start to give some, to play to his sense of duty, his twisted-up morals he’d read out of a book somewhere and fancied himself the keeper of. I’d be some kind of an idiot not to use what Jeannot and Ghislain saw to our advantage, and I wasn’t any kind of an idiot—no matter how mad I was I hadn’t seen it in the first place for myself.

So anyway, when we got back to the compound and saw the professor sleeping, or pretending to sleep, Ghislain gave me one of his unreadable looks, like he was some god on high and whatever it was he was thinking couldn’t be figured out by mere mortal men. Then he looked over at the professor and a kind of understanding passed between us, like how he knew what I had in mind and if it kept the professor’s mouth shut, then he wasn’t going to say a single thing against it.

Good man, Ghislain. Bat-shit bell-cracked, I sometimes thought, or just a hundred times smarter than any of us. But whatever way you cut it, he was still on my side—in a manner of speaking—and that was all that counted.

I closed the door behind me and came up on the professor real slow. This was my world now, not the professor’s, and I could do whatever I wanted.

That was about the time I figured out he wasn’t asleep: when his back stiffened as I came close, and I could all but see his face, eyes wide open and ready for the attack.

“I’ve been thinking,” I said.

That sure as bastion wasn’t what the professor was expecting me to say, and I had to clamp down hard as the vise of a dragon’s mouth not to grin. I had the professor right in the palm of my hand, like Havemercy’s reins.

The professor didn’t say anything—not that I figured he would—but I sat down on the edge of the couch right up close to him, slipping off my gloves and easing out of my boots and pretending like I was struggling with what I had to say, when in reality the only thing I was struggling with was not laughing then and there. It was almost the same as acting at one of th’Esar’s balls, pretending like I was listening to what my dancing partner was saying while she let me twirl her a little too close in the midst of the crowd, and maybe let me keep one of her handkerchiefs, a prize of a different kind of war.

The professor must’ve been too on edge to speak or move, and when I cleared my throat he might’ve jumped straight up into the air if he hadn’t been lying down. “Like I said, I’ve been thinking,” I repeated. “About what you said at the ball.”

“Oh,” the professor said. “What I said. At the ball. I said a lot of things. Most men do when they’re feeling, feeling cornered, attacked. We say a lot of things we don’t mean—”

“Don’t fuck around,” I said. “You said it, you meant it. I don’t want to play any games. It’s too fucking late for that.”

“Oh,” the professor said again. “I see. Yes. Too late, indeed.”

“It’s just, the way I see it,” I said, swallowing back another laugh, “some of us aren’t lucky enough to get to the ’Versity and make fine, respectable civs out of themselves. What I’ve got is flying. Maybe you can’t teach me anything. Maybe you’re too fucking late.”

The professor turned real quick, like he just couldn’t stop himself, like he just couldn’t help it, and I knew I’d hit him deep and hard and in the place that wondered—same as I did, but only when I wasn’t in my right mind—just how different we were. I knew the truth, because I was the one calling all the shots, and if I fed him the right combination of lines, gave him what he wanted, his standards would keep him here, trying to help me. As if I needed to be fucking helped. He was the one who needed help, and maybe after all this was over he could take a good, long look at himself and change his mind on a few things.

None of that mattered now, though. What mattered now were his big green eyes staring up at me like I’d just admitted my mother didn’t love me enough when I was little, or my drunken Molly father beat me. Or no matter what, deep down, I was scared and alone and just lashing out so no one would see it. I wasn’t any of those things, didn’t have any memory of my parents and didn’t much care, but the one thing that was important here was to keep the professor guessing.

“What are you saying?” he asked, eyes bright in the darkness.

I chewed my lower lip for a little while. I used to be the best grifter on all of Hapenny, before I met Have and put an end to that business, but there are some things you never forget how to do, and conning a man is one of those things.

“Sometimes,” I said, “I do think about it. What I might’ve been.”

“Oh,” the professor said.

He wasn’t so brilliant, just saying “oh” all the time and nodding, staring at me like that could fix anything.

I let the silence hang all heavy and important between us for a good, long while, then, without any warning, I stood up, leaving my boots behind.

“Doesn’t fucking matter now,” I said, and left him where he was. I could feel him watching me all the way out.

And that was how it started.

I mean, if you want to get precise, you could really say it started on the balcony; but that was just the beginning, a kind of prelude to the main event. This was when I knew the way to keep the professor guessing and keep his loyalties all mixed up like signals in the dark. It would be by dangling what he wanted so bad in front of his nose, and that was exactly what I did. Most would say that being an airman must’ve dulled any kindness I ever had in me, but the truth was that by the time I came to sign up for the corps I didn’t have any of that kindness left, not even so much as a scrap, and it wasn’t as if that sort of horseshit mattered to me, anyway.

I hit him with moments of my “vulnerability” like we hit the Ke-Han with the air raids, though it was more unpredictable than that; the Ke-Han pretty much knew to look to the skies soon as the clouds covered the moon. But with the professor, I had to be a whole lot less easy to anticipate and prepare for.

What really throws people off is if you don’t give them any pattern to plan around. People are real routine-based creatures; they like it best when their days have some semblance of familiarity. So when you throw them off the scent like that, mixing it up every time, you get them below the belt no matter what they think they’re expecting.

First and foremost, there were a couple of rules, and I made sure he knew them. One: I was gonna come to him, if I came to him at all. He couldn’t seek me out or he’d ruin it, get my defenses up and my blood hot, and there’d be no talking to me at all, just silence or the sound of me sharpening my knives. I don’t think the professor much liked those knives, since they were a reminder of where we both came from, and soon enough the professor picked up on the fact that if he was going to “get” to me, he’d have to be cagey. That made it pretty hard to go anywhere or meet any of th’Esar’s men in case he had something to report, so I had to be sure the professor didn’t want to miss a fucking minute of time just being nearby—just in case I did have something to say to him, some kind of admission to make, some kind of breakthrough thanks to his guidance.

The professor could sense I was on the verge of something. Then again, the professor was real smart.

Two: There was no talking about it. When everyone else was around and the sun was up and we were having a grand old time of it, he had to learn how to keep his eyes to the floor, as that was the only way he wouldn’t look straight at me like he was starving for knowledge, for any little bit of information that could explain who I was, and give the game away. This was private business. I was a private man. I wanted him to think I didn’t want the other boys to know I was questioning who I was.