Havemercy (42 page)

The Reds had gone on fighting when we’d been stricken, that much I did remember. It was just that they went on fighting without us. The others who’d been . . . taken, I supposed I could call it, by this infernal numbness, were Alcibiades and Marcelline, both of them magicians. When I tried to think on it now, I found that I could not remember having seen any of the ordinary soldiers fall prey to whatever strange illness had taken hold of us. If it had struck magicians and magicians only, I thought against the pain in my head, then . . .

Then I had to be sick again, and I very nearly didn’t make it to the pan this time around.

I’d never heard of anything that could debilitate so selectively. There were illnesses that were intrinsically magic, of course, but they ravaged those with Talent and those without equally. That whatever had hit us in the mountains had hit only magicians was a curiosity I might have found fascinating if it had happened hundreds of years ago instead of just a handful of hours before.

An unsettling thought occurred to me, and I looked once more to Alcibiades. “The others. The captain?”

He shook his head, very slowly from left to right, and I felt a wave of sadness overtake my heart. “They thought we were all dead, I think—you were certainly lying there like you were—and I got pinned under Emeric while I was still out of it.” Alcibiades paused to clear his throat, as though he’d got something caught in it all of a sudden. “When I woke up, it was all quiet—they’d moved on—and I’d have gone right past you too if you hadn’t made a noise like you weren’t dead but dying, maybe.”

“Then I owe you my thanks,” I said, speaking more to distract myself from the memories I had of those who were now gone: of the easy companionability I had with Achille, and the idea of his kind eyes open and lifeless in the far reaches of the mountain range. “It’s fortunate that you were able to overcome whatever’s attempted to bleed us of our senses.”

“I was a soldier before ever I was a magician, Margrave,” he said, breathing shallow through his clenched teeth. “We learn how to go on through a little discomfort.”

I resented the implication that all magicians were soft, untested warriors, but I thought that it might be ungrateful to pick a fight with a man who’d in all likelihood saved my life. And besides, my headache was making it hurt to speak.

I grunted, instead.

Alcibiades went quiet after that, and I drifted into sleep, more passed out from the pain in my head than any kind of a real rest.

When I awoke a second time, it was to the sight of a silhouette in the open tent flap, and I’d no concept of the amount of time that had been lost to me while I was unconscious.

“Margrave Royston,” said the newcomer, in the curt, official voice of a bureaucrat or one of the Provost’s wolves. “And Alcibiades of the Glendarrow, by order of the Esar you are to accompany me to the Basquiat with all due haste.”

“Charming,” I said, just as soon as I could work up the energy to speak. “I cannot speak for my colleague at present, but rest assured we will follow you as soon as we are able to get up.”

The man didn’t laugh, but I was thinking more about what it meant that the Esar had become involved and what it meant that there was already a system set in place to cart us off to the Basquiat, of all places.

The Basquiat wasn’t the Esar’s province.

I thought of who had been missing at the ball, and came up with the same answer every time, that each of them—whatever other qualities they possessed—had been some manner or other of magician. Were they in the Basquiat, as well? If only I could have made myself think, think, beyond the dull arrhythmic pounding between my ears.

“You are not to speak with anyone,” the man went on, rolling his proclamation up as larger, burlier men with stretchers came in. “You will have no contact with the outside world. Any discussion of what occurred in the Cobalt Mountains will be viewed as inciting undue panic among the people and thus an act of treason.”

The thought of Hal came to me then, smiling and sudden and so vivid that it almost stopped the ache that plagued me.

“My . . . apprentice,” I said, too weak and out of sorts even to demand information from the medics. “I should get a message to him.”

“Your family members and associates will be informed of your situation,” said the man as rote, weary, and bored as if this were an everyday occurrence. I had to wonder how many times he’d recently said the same thing, rolled off the same reassurances. It was by no means a comforting thought.

“How long before we can leave?” From a ways off I heard the familiar voice, laced with irritability. Alcibiades had either just regained consciousness or chosen this particular moment to speak up.

Our only answer was the click-slam of twin carriage doors.

“Fucked as not,” Alcibiades said wearily.

I was slid off my cot and onto the stretcher, and another period of emptiness claimed me.

THOM

I left the medic room with ash on my hands and grease on my mouth and my heart clamped round with iron wire, the sort they used to keep urchins out of the shops in Molly.

I knew no other way to say it and there was no hiding from it, either. Rook was my brother; I had no doubt in my mind. It made a sick kind of sense, really, and the more I turned it over in my head, the more I found that I could get around it. This was the reason I could never just walk away from him, or couldn’t ever just let the matter lie, not even in my own head. I’d thought at first that it must have been some wild, proud streak in me that Marius had neglected to stamp out: a professor’s instinct to impart wisdom, or my own stubbornness in having wanted desperately to be right about him, right about my own theory that within everyone was some capacity for change.

What Rook had given me instead was the knowledge that, at the very least, I had better reason than the Isobel-Magrittes of the world to follow him around like a stray. After all, I’d begun doing it since birth, despite what obstacles and separations in the road between us had fallen since.

His name had once been John, almost too ridiculously simple for what he’d become since I was told he’d died in the fire. Mine had been Hilary; the whores who raised me called me Thom, and because it was a name my dead brother never called me, I allowed them to use it. Subsequently, it had stuck. I assumed a part of myself had died in that fire—the part of myself named by my parents—and I left it at that. Sometimes I dreamed of him, my dead brother, but he was always faceless, the features blurred. Understandable, since I’d been no more than three years old when the tragedy struck us.

He’d told me to stay where I was—he’d gone out for some reason—I’d later followed a bird, I think, or a dog. Perhaps a kitten. I never did as he told, could never remember, and he was often angry with me. I found my way back only just as it was beginning to get dark, and the house was in flames, and there was a lady crying; these were all the bare pieces I remembered, and no more than that.

Someone told me my brother was dead. I believed him, since my brother had always made it a point to get home before nightfall. I didn’t remember our parents, though when I was older I realized that they must have been among the countless other young couples who realized just how expensive it was to raise children. They’d cut their losses early and left me in John’s care. He hadn’t been old enough to take care of me, and yet he had.

I hadn’t cried when our parents left. When I lost my brother, I’d cried for days and days without end.

I was three then, and twenty-four now. Twenty-one years had passed in the interim—twenty-one years during which the one constant in my life was the specter of my dead brother—dead, I often thought, because he’d come back, thought me within the burning house, and run inside to save me. I only came to this conclusion when I was much older and sought to explain the occurrences that had stamped themselves, so unforgiving, on my memory in red-hot flashes.

What must have actually happened—for my own peace of mind, I needed more than anything to fit the missing parts of the puzzle together—was that John must have returned sometime after the fire had been put out, after I’d been led away from the conflagration by the neighboring women of ill repute, who’d taken pity on me. He must have thought the same thing I had, or perhaps he’d been told by the same man that his brother was dead.

He’d told me to stay where I was. He had no reason to believe I hadn’t done just as he said.

I believed I suddenly understood Rook better—but even as the thought crossed my mind I was struck with guilt, fierce and swift. I was pacing the halls of the Airman, and each time my path led me again and again to Rook’s private door. I had a brother again.

I leaned against the door for a moment, pressing my cheek against the frame and, on the most foolish of whims, tested the knob, barely thinking about what I was doing.

It turned, and the door swung open. Before I could stop myself from intruding, I stumbled inside.

Here I was: in the belly of the beast. It smelled faintly of ash, of sulfur and fire, and most pressingly of metal. The bed was unmade, three pairs of boots by the closet; there was a trapdoor that I knew led to Havemercy’s bay. There was a print of the famous portrait of Lady Greylace, the most renowned whore in all of Volstov, but no books at all. I nearly laughed; I nearly cried.

It smelled of him—on everything, every shadow in every corner—a glass half-full of water on the desk and a jewel box full of his earrings. Earlier this night, or on any other night for that matter, my brother might have died a second time without my ever learning that he’d lived.

I sat down on the edge of his bed and knotted my fingers in the sheets. When he returned to his room I would tell him—for he’d opened himself to me, whether it was from loss of blood or a sudden shift in altitude or any other stupid incomprehensible reason. He’d spoken my true name, and I would use his, and perhaps we might mend what had broken between us twenty-one years ago.

It was possible. I knew it was.

I waited there for hours, long past sunrise, rehearsing what I’d say and how I’d say it. Rook, I might begin, or perhaps John, though I thought the latter might be too sudden. You couldn’t spring this sort of realization on a man the way it had been sprung on me, though that had been an accident. I wished to spare him some of that pain—for despite all his cruelties, I remembered a time when he was gentle and kind, bandaging the knees I always scraped, or catching the fireflies I clamored for. Besides all that, he was my brother. It wasn’t every day that a man could be resurrected from the dead, and I knew that I must treat this as gently as he’d once treated me. It was more delicate, more precious, than any other secret I’d ever held.

Yet it was also the first time I’d ever had something on Rook, and it gave me a disturbing flush of some feeling I didn’t want to identify, as similar as it was to victory. True, I was for the first time in a position of possessing some knowledge that Rook did not, and an important piece of information, to boot, but this was entirely different. This was family, and I was no airman who kept secrets just to be hurtful or to lord over them who didn’t know.

At long last he returned, flinging the door open and half-kicking off one of his boots. They must have given him something to numb the burns—for there were great strides being made of late in medicines that eased almost any kind of pain—but his eyes were tired, and his shirt was open to reveal the bandage swathed across his chest.

He saw me then and stilled, wary as a tomcat on the prowl in an alleyway. This was his territory, and I a threat, engaged in trespass.

“You fucking waited up for me?” he said finally, his eyes still narrowed and all of him tensed and ready for a fight. He was too tired for it—despite his protestations, he was human before anything else—and I stood quickly. “Or were you snooping around?”

“What?” All my rehearsal seemed for naught; I’d forgotten every line as if I’d never thought of them at all. “Snooping?”

“I know about that pact you’ve got with th’Esar,” he snarled, ranging past me and shrugging out of his shirt with some delicacy. The burns clearly must have still troubled him. Of course they did. I’d seen what they looked like a few hours before.

“About the—What?”

“Jeannot’s got a friend in the palace,” he said, “and if you tell this to th’Esar, I’ll gut you from the belly up. But we know you met with him that night at the ball. We know he’s got you in his pocket like a fucking puppet.”

I shook my head, trying to clear it. “No,” I said, “you don’t understand—”

“You want to enlighten me, then, as to why it was you and His Majesty needed to meet so private-like?” He came close to me without any warning, nearly backing me up against the wall, and I could smell the burnt flesh, the medicinal stench of the balm on his chest, the metallic residue on his palms and, beneath that, blood lacing everything—always blood beneath. I should have told him then, should have let the knowledge come out of me all at once before I let my fear of it undo me, as it was already doing.

Yet if I told him now, there was no telling what he’d do. He was unpredictable, he was purposefully cruel, he was probably insane: All these things added up suddenly and startlingly to make an inarguable case, a perfect equation for why I should keep my mouth shut. It wasn’t simply that I was afraid of Rook, for now that fear was laced with a kind of hurt running through it, a marbled vein of regret for what I’d lost from my brother because I did remember a time when he’d been kind. Looking at him now made all sorts of emotions rise that I didn’t want to deal with at present, and certainly not where anyone so cunning as Rook could see.

So I held my tongue, and lifted my chin with instinctive defiance, and tried my best not to think about how he’d trusted me with his memories and the companionable silence that had followed.

I’d been so desperate for such a sign from him—any sign at all that all my work had not been in vain, that I wasn’t simply pouring my efforts into an empty yawning mouth of contempt and trickery. Rook had seemed changed over our time since the ball, but faced with my own lack of perception now—my own brother in front of me, mad and bleeding and more than a little tired—I was forced to wonder. Perhaps I’d never even made a dent in that armor of his, thicker than dragon-scale and twice as resilient. Perhaps all this waiting I was doing, looking for the barest shadow of kindness, something I could misconstrue as affection, was because I knew that I would accept it from him, and gratefully. Perhaps this was because I’d sensed in him all along my long-lost brother, who had been kind once, before time and whatever strange fate had befallen him ruined that instinct forever.