Havemercy (46 page)

“Who’s the kid?”

Rather abruptly, I was torn out of the reverie, as I remembered the talk of the coarse manners of the airmen. Twelve pairs of eyes pinned me into place, and from behind me I was certain Balfour was doing the same. I cleared my throat, mouth suddenly dry.

“He isn’t—” Thom hesitated, then changed whatever it was he’d been about to say. “He’s a friend of mine.”

The handsome one I’d seen at the ball—Rook—gave me a look that was equal parts amusement and malevolence. He seemed about to say something when the redhead standing next to him elbowed him sharply in the ribs and indicated something over our heads.

I turned, helpless in my curiosity, and not wanting to stand out against any uniform motion that might underscore my position as an outsider. Standing opposite us was the fourteenth and final member of the Dragon Corps. He stood with his arms crossed, and his bearing was that of a man who knew full well that crossing his arms would be discouragement enough against any kind of insurrection. I recognized the Chief Sergeant of the airmen from Royston’s table at the night of the ball although he now had a beard and there were exhausted bags under his eyes.

I realized all at once that this was a coup. I was partially the cause of it, and I felt my cheeks and ears grow hot.

“And just where do you all think you’re going?” The Chief Sergeant didn’t appear pleased.

The men were momentarily very quiet, reminding me somewhat of a large passel of children who’d been caught worrying the chickens. Then Airman Rook stepped forward, crossing his arms just as neatly over his own chest, and I moved quickly out of the way, so that I wasn’t caught in their gaze as it met, straight and fierce as a path of fire.

“We’re going to see th’Esar,” Rook said. There wasn’t any room for a please or may I in his tone.

“Oh?” the Chief Sergeant asked. “Is that so? I don’t believe I signed the necessary paperwork for that.”

“You can take that paperwork . . .” Rook began.

Thom cleared his throat and stepped forward to join him. “You may already be aware of this,” he said, more gently, in what I assumed was an attempt to placate the Chief Sergeant, “but we are on the verge of something quite terrible. Inside the Basquiat at this very moment is some untold collection of magicians who are being kept there indefinitely for a reason it seems no one but th’Esar himself and those closest to him are privy to. Family and friends crowd outside the building, yet no one is being admitted entrance. Likewise, I believe that most—if not all—of your men are experiencing some manner of difficulty with their dragons.”

“So we’re thinking,” Rook cut in, “that if there’s something wrong with the magicians, and magicians made our girls, then knowing what’s wrong with the magicians might maybe explain what’s wrong with our girls.”

Thom colored just slightly—I believed I was the only one who’d caught the change—when the airman Rook used the word “we.” It was another interesting detail, but one I was ultimately too miserable to make very much of.

“So you’re going to meet with the Esar,” the Chief Sergeant said, “because you fancy yourselves a group of bastion-blessed diplomats.”

There was another long silence, as everyone was left to consider the Chief Sergeant’s words, rumbling and dark and strong as a physical blow.

Rook tossed his braids over one shoulder; I felt reminded of the stamping and posturing of a thoroughbred horse. “Th’Esar doesn’t give us some fucking answers,” he said, “then we ain’t gonna give him a fucking Dragon Corps.”

“The way we see it,” Thom translated quietly, “is that it’s impossible for him to expect the men to fly under such conditions. If he won’t listen to the reason of one man, then he must surely listen to the reason of his fourteen airmen, without whom his war might never be won.”

“I see,” said the Chief Sergeant. “And what, if you care to enlighten me, brought this pretty piece of inspiration on?”

I swallowed thickly as I heard Thom clear his throat again as he glanced toward me. Then, as surely as if Thom had pointed in my direction, fourteen pairs of eyes were drawn to me and fixed me soundly in place. More than anything, I wished I could have disappeared, quickly as a shadow, hiding myself along the wall or at their feet.

“This,” Thom said into the uncomfortable quiet, “is Hal.”

The Chief Sergeant cocked his head and looked at me. “I know you,” he said, unexpectedly, and I breathed an infinitesimal sigh of relief. “ You’re Royston’s . . . apprentice. Aren’t you?”

I nodded faintly, trying to work up the courage to speak. “His assistant,” I confirmed, when I could at last find the words. “He introduced us at the ball.”

“I remember,” the Chief Sergeant said gruffly. “Said a few other things about you, too. Like how you’re clever as a whip and sharp as tacking.”

This time, when I blushed, it was under such intense scrutiny that I wished more than anything for a Talent that might allow me to disappear entirely. This, however, would give me no aid in finding Royston.

“I received a letter,” I informed the Chief Sergeant miserably. “It said the Margrave Royston had returned from the front and was at this very moment inside the Basquiat, and that—per his request—I was to be informed of his whereabouts. But I wasn’t to be allowed admittance. I’ve been waiting outside the Basquiat all morning—you should see the crowds; family and friends, and no one knows anything—” I broke off, fists clenched so tightly at my sides that I could barely feel my palms where my nails bit into them. Thom reached out and put his arm around me, and over the sound of someone’s uncomfortable giggling behind us, I thought I heard the Chief Sergeant sigh.

“Royston’s a friend,” the Chief Sergeant said slowly, “and the corps is my business. I take care of you lot. Have you forgotten it?”

The silence that followed his question seemed to indicate that, even if they had forgotten it before, everyone was certainly reminded of the fact and once again quite impressed by it.

“So?” Rook asked darkly, the only man not even slightly impressed by the sheer force of will in the Chief Sergeant’s words. “You take care of us. What’re you gonna fucking do about it?”

“The Esar won’t listen to you if you storm his door like angry children,” the Chief Sergeant countered smoothly. “Why in bastion’s name don’t I have thirteen reports filed from you about the problems you’ve been having up in the air? Is it because you’re all too fucking proud to see straight?”

“It sort of . . . built up on us, sir,” said Balfour quietly. His head was bowed, his shoulders slumped with shame, and I saw him toying with his gloves, tugging the fingertips loose from his fingers.

“Didn’t seem as how we knew we were all experiencing the same thing,” Ghislain added.

“Fuck you all at your mother’s tit,” the Chief Sergeant snarled. “Don’t a single one of you move until I get back here in five.”

“What happens in five?” an impossibly pale man asked from the back. The man next to him burst once more into uncomfortable giggles.

“We call us some carriages,” the Chief Sergeant said. “Gets us to the palace much quicker than walking, doesn’t it?”

ROOK

So there we were—all fourteen of us and the professor, and the tagalong he’d managed to pick up out front of the Basquiat—waiting in th’Esar’s foyer nice as punch for His Majesty to grace us all with his imperial sun-blessed presence. I thought that if it’d do any of us a lick of good, I’d have gone for the throat right there, but like the professor said, more than anything we needed to know what the fuck was going on before we did anything. Most people are stupid ’cause they allow themselves to stay stupid, and I didn’t manage to get out of Molly by staying stupid for long.

So anyway; there we were, no matter what we were all thinking about, sitting in chairs or standing and ranging around because the waiting was starting to piss us off, like me for example, and Ace too, because we both knew how bad things must be if our girls weren’t listening to us proper. We were all sort of mad at ourselves, too, even though Adamo’d been a little over the top earlier because of whatever soft spot he had for that Mary Margrave of his, because this was halfway our own fault and we knew it. We hadn’t been looking after our girls properly, and fuck the damn paperwork; we should have brought it up to Adamo the first time it happened instead of letting it get so bad while we tried to ignore it.

Meanwhile, the professor had one arm around his tagalong’s shoulders and I could see Compagnon watching them all sidelong and trying not to giggle, which, if I hadn’t been so pissed myself, would’ve set me to giggling, too. Instead, I was just mad, and if teasing Balfour wasn’t going to make me feel better, then there wasn’t nothing that was going to work. I wanted to get something done, I wanted to march right into th’Esar’s fancy meeting hall and give him a piece of my mind, and maybe doing that’d distract me long enough from the guilt worrying at me, like maybe if I’d done something for Have sooner, then things wouldn’t have got to this state at all.

“Shit,” Ace said to me, drawing me aside all private-like. “They’re just doing this to make us sweat.”

“We’ll make ’em sweat before it’s through,” I promised. “I figure we gotta have a plan for it. Like when we’re flying.”

“Oh?” Ace asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “But I’m no fucking good at plans.”

Basically, there was one idiot in this entire room who knew people better than the rest of us, or did in theory anyway, and who could work these things out on the back of his hand or Balfour’s gloves if you gave him the pen for it. He was sitting there saying into his tagalong’s ear whatever soothing horseshit he had stored up from a lifetime of horse-shit memorization.

“All right,” I said, whistling sharp, and he looked up quick as that, which made me more pleased than I’d like to admit. “Yeah,” I confirmed, “you. Leave your boyfriend alone and get the fuck over here. Th’Esar’s making us wait, so we might as well use it against him, right?”

Everyone was watching me now, which meant I was the only one who saw the professor’s tagalong go red as a tomato all the way to the tops of his ears. It was like a circus sideshow.

“Ah,” the professor said, giving his tagalong a squeeze before he stood. “How do you propose we do that?”

“We gotta go to him like a team,” I said, spitting his own words straight back at him. “Right? We gotta use our strengths and his weaknesses against him. It’s your own theory.”

“Well,” said the professor, looking at me with his doe eyes, like I’d given him a present and making me real uncomfortable, “in a manner of speaking, I suppose it is a . . . bastardization.”

“Fuck you,” I said. “Who the fuck’re you calling a bastard?”

“I believe,” said Jeannot smoothly, “that he’s calling your ideas the bastards.”

“Shit,” I said, ’cause that much was more than halfway true. “Well, that’s all right, then.”

“Well?” Thom spread his hands before him. “What did you have in mind?”

“I figure it this way,” I said. “We’ve got a man here who—Esar or fucking not—needs a whole lot of convincing. We’ve gotta mix it so there’s no way he can’t tell us what we need to know.”

“You want to bargain with him,” said the professor. “You want to bargain with th’Esar.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Blackmail him. Whatever it’s called. But we’ve all got to do it together, because if one of us calls foul and the rest don’t back him up, we’re all screwed cheap as a Hapenny. You get that?” Compagnon started giggling, but all the boys were with me, even Adamo, whom I’d never thought of as one of the boys and still didn’t. The tagalong was watching us as if it were the best fucking theatre he’d ever seen, which in a way I guess it was. “All right,” I went on, turning to the professor. “So how do we do it? How do we make him do what we want?”

“Well,” the professor said, real slow like I hate, but I could see he was thinking it over properly, and I forced myself to be a little patient. “I suppose the best bargaining tool you have is what you do for him. What you’ve already done.”

“So we threaten to take it away,” I said.

“In a manner of speaking,” the professor agreed. “Yes. Only—I don’t think you can phrase it as such, in as many words. You have to be more subtle—”

And then, before we’d had time to talk it out good and proper, the door in the far corner swung open and one of th’Esar’s worm-mouthed servants made himself known to us with a stiff bow and a whining, “His Esteemed Majesty the Esar is waiting for you in his royal conference room.”

“Right,” Adamo growled out. “Step to it, men.”

We all fell into line for the first time in our lives. There wasn’t one in our number who wanted us to lose face in front of th’Esar, not when we knew we were cornered. What he hadn’t counted on was how every man fought like a dog when his back was pressed up against a wall like ours were right now, and we were fighting for more than just ourselves, too. We had our girls to think about.

I hated the royal conference room, ’cause it was a bitch to get to, and worse than that it made me feel all turned around, like I was flying sideways and didn’t know which way was up. Raphael’d said once that he read a book that explained why everything was built all winding and confused as shit in the palace. Actually, the way Raphael put it was “a very subtle intimidation tactic,” but what that meant in real talk was that it made everyone except th’Esar feel out of place, and when people felt out of place they made dumb mistakes like getting nervous, and that was right where th’Esar wanted to put people. Nervous people needed a leader; nervous people did exactly as they were told. ’Course that wasn’t taking into account how nervous often preceded panicky, and there wasn’t nothing you could keep panicky people from doing once they got it into their heads to do it.

Get enough people together like that and it wouldn’t matter what th’Esar said: They’d tear the Basquiat down to the ground to get at what they wanted. Part of that was caring, I guessed, from what the tagalong had said about it being all family and loved ones down there—and I knew I didn’t need to ask which he was, since we were talking about that Mary Margrave—and even me with no heart to speak of knew it plain as day that people aren’t ever crazier than when they’ve got caring mucking up their brains on top of everything else.