Havemercy (49 page)

He’d as good as made his decision, and I had been too blind to acknowledge it, too caught up in suspicion and headaches. And now that I knew it, I could barely summon the strength to lift my arms around him. It was a cruel joke of some kind or another, but I would not give in to regret just yet.

“They wouldn’t let me in,” he mumbled, repeating the words as though they were a poison that needed to be bled from the hurt he’d received by not being able to see me, of all things. Yet not even the most selfish part of me could be touched at the effect my departure had had on him, for it went against everything I held dear to know that Hal should ever be hurt unnecessarily.

I did feel a curious sort of pride, though, mingled with my sympathy and frustration at the situation. Hal had found some way in to see me, and judging by the number of invalids, there were many more people yet waiting for news. I’d known Hal was clever, and I’d known he’d be suited to the city despite his misgivings. To me, this was irrefutable proof that my beliefs hadn’t been unfounded, nor clouded by whatever other feelings I harbored for him.

“Well, it isn’t exactly a very pleasant place to be,” I said, curling my fingers in his hair even as I spoke. He fit so neatly against me that it made my chest tighten for a moment, and I found it difficult to breathe. I’d never experienced such a symptom previously with the illness that had so thoroughly possessed me, so I had to assume it was Hal who caused it—a symptom of that other, quieter illness, which had nevertheless snatched my senses away as completely as the fever.

“Royston,” Hal said against my neck, like a plea or a prayer and not at all like my name.

I could have told him, “I believe the Well’s been poisoned and us along with it,” or, “You should leave, before anyone tries to make you, and I am forced to remonstrate with them,” but I paused for too long, and the fleeting urge to be sensible withered and dropped from my mind like old fruit.

Instead, I kissed the top of his head, breathing in the familiar soap-smelling cleanness of him. It soothed me in a deep and satisfying way, a cool sensation filtering all the way down to my core and cutting right through the heat in my fevered brain. “It’s all right,” I said, not entirely sure that it was. Yet I felt very much as though it might be, it could be, which was more hope than I’d possessed in all the time that had passed since being brought here. “Sometime soon you shall have to tell me the story of your daring break-in. I’m sure with your aptitude, it was much like something out of a roman.”

He laughed at that, quiet and diffident, and finally lifted his face to mine.

“I’m glad you came,” I said at last, because it was true, even if some part of me couldn’t bear to be seen in such a weakened state. It was the more frivolous side of me, vain and foolish, and I paid it little heed. There was no place for such preening idiocy in this room full of killing fever.

“You’re sick,” Hal said, carrying on even as his voice snagged on something low and unhappy. “That’s what they told me. Everyone here is sick.”

“Something like that,” I said, then, because I had resolved to be as honest with Hal as I possibly could, I continued. “I believe—though it is my own personal speculation, and nothing more—that what has struck us has something to do with the Well.”

I saw him struggle to understand, or perhaps to prioritize what I was telling him over his own feelings, which were plain as invitation on his face. “Then it’s something to do with the magic,” he said at last. “As a whole, and not just magicians?”

“I suppose it is,” I said after a moment, though admittedly I hadn’t been thinking of it in terms beyond my knowledge of what the poison was doing to me and my fellows, burning us from the inside out. In some ways, my worldview had shrunk to this room of the Basquiat, cramped and close with friends and strangers alike, and though I’d thought often of Hal, it was almost as though I’d lost the ability to think beyond the confines of it.

I supposed it was my own selfishness come full circle again that I could think of nothing but the ways in which a situation affected me and my immediate surroundings.

“Then it’s true what the airmen were talking of,” Hal said, then shook his head slightly, as though he’d caught himself in a misstep. “They’re how I got in, the Dragon Corps and their—Well, Thom. His name is Thom.”

The student Marius had often spoken of with the kind of pride reserved for a father had been named Thom, I thought, my fevered mind making the connection unbidden. Marius was here the same as I was, though he hadn’t opened his eyes since the room had been flooded with sunlight this morning.

“Do you mean to tell me,” I said very slowly, both out of a desire to be very clear and because my head felt inconveniently fogged all of a sudden, “that you went to the Dragon Corps first to find a way into the Basquiat?”

“Well, no,” answered Hal, flushing to the tips of his ears. “Thom found me waiting on the steps here, and he thought it might be a good idea—more helpful—to get the airmen involved, because the Esar was more likely to listen to them. And they—” He froze, looking around us suddenly as though expecting to see every face turned with interest toward our conversation. Finding no interest, he nevertheless leaned close, breath warm against my ear. “They’re worried because there’s something wrong with the dragons, do you see? Because of the magic in them as well. They aren’t flying properly—your friend, the Chief Sergeant, he said he refused to let them fly under the circumstances, that the dragons had become too unpredictable.”

“Bastion,” I swore, loudly enough that Marcelline looked over at me in surprise. She was drawn and pale, but at that moment I could think of nothing but my own blind stupidity, that I could ever have thought something as deadly as this could be affecting only the magicians who walked and breathed, and not the creations into which they poured their Talents. I’d never worked on a dragon myself—it was too specialized an endeavor—but I’d known some of the men who had, old and powerful. Such men had been some of the very first to fall ill. None of them had made the immediate connection either, which hardly comforted me, as some of those men were now dead.

I had to take control of my thoughts. I recalled the very earliest days of harnessing my Talent, all the while doing my best to ignore the sickening vacuum that existed now in its place. Working against the cluttered state of my mind was a task I could accomplish: I simply needed to concentrate. Hal’s hands were on my shoulders, kneading with absent, fretful motions. I closed my eyes, allowing the reality of his presence to calm me as it always did.

“In any case, I suppose what we did was storm the palace,” Hal went on, still so close that I couldn’t see his face. I thought perhaps that I’d misheard him, or that this was another trick of the fever turning words into what they weren’t, for if I knew anything I surely knew Hal, and the idea of his storming anything, let alone a palace, was so out of the realm of possibility that I felt it must be my delirium. How much could have happened since I’d been brought here that such a thing could change?

“Pardon?” I asked finally.

“Well, it wasn’t a real storming, not entirely, because the Esar let us in, but I got the feeling that we’d have gone even if he hadn’t. They were that serious about it. And I can’t think of much that would have stopped them.” I could feel his skin growing hot against my cheek, blushing at what he’d done or what he’d been caught up in by outside forces.

“Hal,” I said, and traced my knuckles down the curved length of his spine. I felt a smile playing about my lips; it was the first I’d worn in days. “You haven’t been here a month and you’re already storming the palace?”

He drew back, eyes bright with something that stood out starkly against my bleak surroundings of illness and misery, and it filled me like a cup to the brim. “I was worried about you,” he said.

I kissed him.

I might have blamed it on the fever, though I felt considerably more lucid now than I had since the onset in the Cobalts. And I might have blamed it on what Hal had done, for certainly the devotion apparent in it was a gesture that would touch even the most callous of hearts. Yet more than that—and I knew it as surely as I had felt my Talent drained away—was the fact that I loved him, and that people were dying, and though there were things I regretted, I wouldn’t allow Hal to become one of them.

His hands went still against my shoulders, then quickly slipped up behind my head, as if he were afraid I’d change my mind too soon and he’d miss his chance. I held him close, hands low to where his back narrowed, hoping to soothe his fears.

I knew it was foolish. If I could have chosen, I certainly wouldn’t have opted for a setting such as this, surrounded by the sick and likely dying, myself so infuriatingly weak that it was all I could do to go on holding Hal when he pressed close to me.

The kiss was too eager, Hal’s inexperience too evident, and my fever cut it short before its time. Yet when it ended, Hal’s hands were curled tight at the back of my collar, and his shirt bunched up underneath my own hands, and there was no one here to tell us to stop.

We were, after all, very far from the countryside.

He said something so quiet that I almost missed it, but then he said it again and it was my name, broken and soft and nearly unfamiliar.

His fingers trembled; I could feel them against my cheek as he stroked the overgrown roughness at my jaw, the gray at my temple.

“Hal,” I whispered against his mouth, and he shivered as though a current had passed between us.

“Find somewhere private and leave us in peace,” Alcibiades muttered from a cot somewhere to my left. Hal colored all at once—I could feel it as well as I could see it—and we parted, though I promised myself that one day I’d repay Alcibiades for the sentiment. Yet as embarrassed as I was, I knew he was right. “Hal,” I said, carefully. “This isn’t—”

“I know,” he agreed, though he refused to relinquish his part in our embrace and, as I admit it was the only thing that presently held me up, I was grateful he insisted upon being so tenacious. “I’m so glad. I thought, when I heard from the Esar that the magicians—”

“I don’t intend to die,” I told him firmly. “And as you can see, I am certainly not yet dead.”

He nodded mutely, and I saw him struggle visibly with the worry that plagued him until I wished there were anything at all I could do to reassure him. There was however nothing but dissembling and false promises, and I refused to lie to Hal.

“When this is over,” I said, avoiding the terrible word if, “I hope you’ll allow me to kiss you properly, in a place that is neither a carriage nor a sickbed.”

He flushed and bowed his head. “Royston,” he said, “I don’t think the Esar knows what to do.”

“No,” I agreed. “I don’t think he does either.”

“Then,” Hal asked, “then what are we to do?”

For the moment, all I could think was that I wanted to lie down and surrender—if only for a little while—to sleep. I fought the urge, however tempting, knotting my fingers in the sleeves of Hal’s shirt to keep myself upright. “We must do what only we can do,” I replied, taking my time with the words; it was the only way I knew to keep them crisp and certain and indeed anything other than wearily slurred. “We must put our minds to this. I don’t suppose we might call a man to fetch some of my books?”

Hal almost laughed at that, but there was something tearful behind the sound. “Between us both,” he promised, “we’ll remember.”

It wasn’t the most original plan I’d ever come up with, but it was the only one we had.

“Come,” I said, “let’s see if we can’t arrange these pillows more comfortably.”

In the bed next to mine, Alcibiades coughed something that sounded as if it might be derogatory. Let him scoff, I told myself; I was determined to save his life, along with mine, before the Ke-Han descended upon us all and none of our grand gestures in the hot, dark room mattered any longer to anyone.

THOM

It was quiet in the Airman, the sort of quiet I imagined descended upon soldiers before a battle, or upon the desert before a sandstorm. It was an unnatural, tentative quiet, and there was nothing in it I could use to distract myself from how badly my hands were shaking.

“Fucking stop that,” Rook said. “You’re like as not to make somebody nervous if you keep on fucking doing that.”

There was no one in the common room but him and me. Earlier, Evariste had passed through once on his way to make coffee, then once on his way back with a cup in his hand and the smell of the burnt grounds thick on the air. Other than that, we were completely alone. I didn’t think that Rook was capable of being nervous—I believe he’d forgotten how it was to feel anything of the sort—but nevertheless I clasped my hands together and put them between my knees.

There was the silence again.

It was better to know our fate, I was certain, than to be acutely, painfully unaware. Knowledge was the key; whether it was a knowledge you’d been seeking or something else entirely, it made no difference. You had to work with what knowledge you were given. Only if you weren’t given anything, you had to wait—and the waiting was interminable.

I flexed my hands between the bony press of my knees. I reminded myself of what we’d accomplished that afternoon and kept my own private relief as a small flame against the darkness. At least Rook and the other airmen wouldn’t be flying unarmed with the truth about their dragons. It was cold comfort, but it was nevertheless something.

“So,” Rook said, “what do you know about the magicians, anyway? I mean, that fucking Well. What do you know about it?”

The question nearly startled a sound out of me, and for a moment I found myself so distracted by my own tangled thoughts I didn’t even answer him. What I knew about the magicians was limited by my area of studies, but I knew magicians in particular, Marius being the most immediate example, and the handful of professors I’d had who’d been blessed, or perhaps cursed, with Talents of their own. I wondered where Marius was now; I could have used his guidance.

“Not very much,” I admitted.