Havemercy (43 page)

“Well?” he asked.

“I’m not spying on you,” I whispered.

That much was at least the truth, but there were other truths I should have spoken—other truths I might have spoken—but when I opened my mouth to speak, the words abandoned me. He looked at me as though I were mad, gaping like a fish, and I had no means to protest this assumption. I was mad.

He made a sound, rather more like a grunt than anything that could be misconstrued as human speech. He either believed me or didn’t, and the fact that I couldn’t tell the difference upset me just as it always had, so not everything had changed.

“Better not be,” he said, and brought his face so close to mine that I felt momentarily off-kilter, as though the earth had tipped sharply beneath my feet.

Then, just as suddenly, Rook turned away from me and the ground righted itself once more. I thought that I could say it then, unfair a thing as it was to sneak in on a man when he wasn’t looking. I swallowed, and cleared the dryness from my throat. It was a poor charade; I could no more speak than I could move.

This wasn’t to be the first time I kept the truth from him.

That night he didn’t even kick me from his room, just flung himself down onto his bed and was asleep almost before he hit the mattress; he must have known he had me pinned beneath his thumb like a bug, incapable of crossing him. This was the power Rook had over me.

I watched him for a few guilty moments to see if his face eased at all, if the harsh lines of it grew peaceful with sleep. I wanted to recognize him, but I didn’t. Then I forced myself from the room and curled against this secret as if it were slitting me open the way Rook had promised.

I think I understood now, if only a little, the reason for his sudden interest, his “change of heart”: It was to keep me close, keep me where he could watch me and make sure I wasn’t going to betray the corps. So long as there was a steady stream of reticent confidences and hesitant looks that suggested he would open up if only I stayed around, there would be no reporting to th’Esar. It was so clever that I would have experienced a grudging admiration were it not for the already-consuming wealth of guilt and confusion swamping me. Moreover, I was humiliated, for there had been some small part of me that had dared to hope at making a difference with Rook. And now, for all I’d thought it through so carefully, it was all dashed to pieces as surely as if thrown from his dragon as he sped her too quickly through the night.

Everything had changed, and nothing. I had failed on more counts than I could possibly name because I had come no closer to understanding Rook than I’d ever been, and I myself was now possessed of a secret almost too large to keep. I could no longer fault him for his questionable morals. He was my own brother, and I could not even summon up the wherewithal to tell him so. I told myself that I only needed more time to sort out my feelings before I took them to Rook, but I knew that a larger part of it than I wished to admit was rather the gratification of wielding some new power over him, and the lie became harder and harder as time passed. If pressed to choose, I’d say that I was worse than he’d ever been even when he was at his most vindictive.

I was too preoccupied with my own thoughts to notice the change that came over the city. Truth be told, I wasn’t paying attention. My focus had so turned inward that I’d completely forgotten there was a city living and breathing all around me. And, because Rook was off duty for the following week, I was allowed to forget there was a war.

Yet I wasn’t living inside a complete vacuum. Now and then I’d catch moments of the other airmen’s conversation in the halls, hushed and grave. One afternoon I even heard Adamo shouting inside his private quarters, though to whom he was shouting I couldn’t be sure and had no right to ask.

That night, when Rook cornered me in the hall, he grabbed my wrist hard, and said, “We have some talking to do.”

Fear rose sharp and quick as the guilt, and I let him lead me, all numbness, into his room and shut the door behind us.

He looked uncomfortable for a minute, then gritted his teeth as though what he was trying to say was about to kill him, or worse. Finally, he managed a curt, “Have ain’t right.”

For a moment I didn’t understand him. I was expecting him to tell me he’d known—that he’d read my thoughts—that he knew me for what I was and he never wanted to see me again so long as we both lived. Breathing ceased to be an autonomic function, and I concentrated on drawing air, along with as little attention as possible. I’d been prepared for the worst, not some garbled sentence I couldn’t parse. “What?” I asked.

“Have,” he snarled. “Havemercy. She ain’t—she isn’t—right. That mess I got myself into? Not for any reason I can figure. It’s like sometimes she’s okay and sometimes . . . she isn’t.”

I stared at him, relieved and terrified all at once. This, more than anything, cemented my place among the morally bereft and bankrupt. He was confiding in me a second time, this time of his own volition and not due either to pain or to blood loss, with no alternative motive, while I was keeping from him so massive a secret that I hadn’t slept in days. “You . . . Havemercy,” I managed at last. “She’s—What do you mean she isn’t right?”

Rook growled, clearly finding our means for communication ineffective. “She ain’t flying right. It’s like we’re not speaking the same language. It’s like we’re fucking strangers, is what it’s like, or worse. I tell her to do something and she just doesn’t do it—like she doesn’t hear what I’m saying or even recognize it for words.”

“I don’t know anything about dragons,” I said carefully, moving to sit beside him. “I don’t understand why you’re coming to me—”

“Because you can fucking tell th’Esar about it,” he said, nearly biting my head off with the words. “He’s expecting a report back from you—so, tell him. Tell him that Havemercy’s fucking off. It’s quicker than going through the proper channels.”

“Well,” I said, understanding why he was confiding in me yet again. I didn’t bother to argue my case—I wasn’t spying on my brother, but he was close enough to the truth of what th’Esar had asked me to do that it didn’t really matter.

He was looking at me, short-tempered and hot, and I realized that I hadn’t yet given him a proper answer. “Of course I will,” I said, quiet and low. He was my brother. I owed him that much.

I knew that the longer I stayed silent, the more likely it was that one day the odds would become irrevocably stacked against me, that I would break something that could not be fixed and that this lie would be the end of us.

“I’ll write to him,” I said.

“When?” Rook asked.

“Tonight,” I said. “Now.”

Because I’d promised him—because I was still under the strange impression I was a man of my word, if little else—I did exactly as I said, and wrote th’Esar a brief, formal note that I’d discovered something in the Airman that might be of interest to him.

I was almost grateful for th’Esar’s summons when it came the following morning, for the need to prepare a report was a welcome distraction from my own thoughts, confused and tangled as they’d become. I spent the morning attacking my new task with all the zeal of a hunted man.

The summons had said that a carriage would be sent to meet me nearby—a special treatment that surprised me, but th’Esar was apparently very good to his spies. Just as I was observing the turn of the hour on the small round watch Marius had gifted me with to congratulate me upon some previous academic success, the carriage appeared, white and gold like something out of a roman, or some ludicrous rich man’s fantasy. The Mollyrat in me couldn’t quite get past being awed long enough to be contemptuous, but having spent so long as a penny-pinching student, I couldn’t help but wonder at how many hot meals that carriage would buy. Somehow I thought it would be better if I didn’t know the answer.

I clambered inside, clutching tightly to the sheet of notes Rook had dictated to me—and which I’d subsequently translated into the kind of talk I could use with a man like th’Esar—and attempted to calm myself. Thinking with a clear head was the only way I was going to get through this particular meeting with any kind of dignity, or more importantly, with my head still fixed firmly to my shoulders. During my time in the Airman, I’d adapted to thinking one way and speaking another. This need for duplicity was still no excuse for the way I’d behaved, the way I was still behaving, toward Rook, but it had been cultivated as a survival tactic the moment I’d stepped into that room on the dais facing those fourteen wing-backed chairs, and the undoing of it was proving more difficult than I ever would have anticipated.

Now, it seemed, I would have to learn and fast, for th’Esar was a man who did not like to be lied to. And if he sensed a disparity between my mind and my lips, he would surely not hesitate to act.

The carriage moved quickly across the cobblestone streets, and I watched out the window as the city passed by in what seemed to me now a meaningless blur of hustle and bustle. Thremedon was my home; I’d known it all my life, and yet for all I recognized it now it might have been any central metropolis, teeming with its own people, its own traditions, and completely severed from my heart.

The servant sent to greet me bowed low, and I fought the urge to do the same back to him, as it would have damaged my standing considerably. I would never grow accustomed to being the sort of man to whom other men bowed. Perhaps it was something to be born into and not learned at all. That, more than anything, told me how much things had changed, the small worming ways in which Rook had got into my mind, because there was a time when I would have said that there was nothing that couldn’t be taught. Now I wasn’t so sure.

Then I had to concentrate on following, keeping the servant’s back in front of me, or else risk getting lost in th’Esar’s winding hallways—little better than catacombs, I thought, for all their decoration and fancy curios.

This time I counted them as we passed: two antiquated mirrors, one very large portrait of th’Esar himself, a tapestry, a door with no handle, a window with bars. The farther we moved toward our goal, the dimmer the light became, until we were plunged into the same grasping darkness that I remembered. I could no longer discern the shape of my surroundings and I could do no more than follow after my guide, ever ahead and turning so swiftly and so sharply that at times I felt dizzy.

I found myself thinking that it seemed th’Esar should have a more accessible set of chambers, for it wasn’t logical to assume that the noblesse with whom he met daily would accede to being led through the depths of the palace like rats through a maze. No, it seemed more logical that he would only have such a room as the one to which I was being led for his own private dealings, ones he didn’t want subject to court gossip and whisperings.

This was his route for spies.

It was a long way to go for a little privacy, I felt, but then th’Esar’s secrets were considerably more important than those of most men. Then I thought of the woman who’d been with him on the night of the ball, dark and striking and, most notably, perhaps, incredibly familiar toward th’Esar. Perhaps some of the secrets he held were the same as all men’s.

It was only when the servant stopped, turning on his heel with a motion eerily similar to his predecessor’s, that I realized we’d arrived at our destination.

“Thank you,” I said to him, with all sincerity, for I was certain that the dizzying trip to th’Esar’s secret meeting room could not be an enjoyable one, and I was equally certain of just how lost I’d have been without the guidance.

He merely nodded, then offered me the briefest of smiles.

I steeled myself and opened the door.

Th’Esar was seated in the same seat he’d been in before, giving me the momentarily jarring sensation that no time had passed at all. Of course, his companion was no longer the woman, but a man I was surprised to recognize as the Provost of the city.

“ . . . panic in the streets, not to mention the Basquiat, Your Majesty, if you don’t mind me saying. The bereaved are gathering, and there isn’t anything that starts a riot faster than unhappy people who feel they’ve been mistreated.” He hesitated, as though this last had been too much, and bowed low in the court fashion. “Your pardon.”

Th’Esar held up one square, powerful hand. He’d seen me enter.

“I will continue my discussion with you at a later date, Provost,” he said. “Do not fear. If the situation is truly as bad as you say, then we will have to think on a way toward solving it.”

The Provost nodded like a man careful not to look too disappointed. His hair was the same shade as th’Esar’s and his chin very similar.

“Yes, Your Majesty.” He turned then, understanding his dismissal when he saw me hovering guiltily in the doorway like a child caught out late. I could do nothing but offer him an apologetic look, and he left the room by moving past me without so much as a glance.

“Now,” said th’Esar, switching tack with a voice full of command and purpose, “what news do you have of our Dragon Corps? I trust that in the time we have given you there has been more than one event worthy of our attention.”

“Well, there is one matter,” I said, immediately forgetting what it was I’d written in my notes—Rook’s speech full of curses, as well as half-remembered complaints from Niall and Raphael, dark remarks made by Ghislain, and Adamo’s shouting behind closed doors. I forgot it all, and swallowed the sudden fluttering of panic that threatened to break loose from my throat. Th’Esar had this effect on people. It was no wonder his networks for intelligence were so precise and effective. “Rook—that is, the airman Rook, who flies your dragon Havemercy—he says that she’s . . . off.”

Th’Esar regarded me with a look that bordered dangerously on disapproval. “Off?”

In for a chevronet, in for a tournois, I thought weakly to myself, and nodded. “Yes, Your Majesty. I overhead him saying that she, it—the dragon, that is—he said it isn’t flying the way it ought to.”

“Perhaps Airman Rook finds himself incapable of the task of flying our most prized dragon,” replied th’Esar. “We have heard that he exhibits traits of inconsistency in his behavior when flying.”