Havemercy (51 page)

While this wasn’t the worst I’d ever felt, it was certainly close.

It seemed that in the second meeting th’Esar had called, some manner of tentative truce had been called between him and the Chief Sergeant. The solution wasn’t an ideal one by all means, but the way Adamo had explained it sounded as though what they’d agreed upon was a kind of unofficial system of volunteering, the way the crush shifts worked only now it was every shift, and anyone who thought their dragon was good enough to fly that night could sign up and batter back the Ke-Han to the best of his abilities.

Much as I hated to admit it—and I did hate it these days though I’d always considered myself a loyal citizen—th’Esar was a shrewd thinker. In a group such as the Dragon Corps, tightly knit and yet infused with a sense of honor and pride that would rival His Majesty’s, asking for volunteers was a clever system to employ. In some ways, it became a competition, indicating you were a coward if you didn’t volunteer straightaway. It was the same mentality that had kept them quiet about their dragons in the first place, and yet for once, I made no notes for my own private documentation.

If I were to be completely truthful, I’d have expected more of a split within the group, with the more pragmatic men electing to stay out of the mess entirely, at least until their dragons were rehabilitated, and the wilder risk-takers signing up for all the shifts. Instead, though there were certainly some who took longer to sign up, I found myself seeing everyone taking to the halls in much the same manner, soot-soaked and cutting in line for the shower, or falling asleep right in their chairs in the common room due to having been up all the previous night.

I asked Ghislain about it, as, beyond the vague sense of unease I got around him, he’d nevertheless struck me as one of the more sensible men bunking in the Airman.

“You never played sports as a kid, did you?” He tugged at the blackened towel around his neck, waiting outside the shower room.

I didn’t see what sports had to do with anything, and said so.

He only smiled, sharp and always startlingly bright. “Do anything as a team?”

“No. Well, study projects, sometimes. With a group,” I amended. The closest thing I’d had to a team, I supposed, had been the whores who’d taken me in, but that had all been very long ago, and anyway I didn’t think it was what Ghislain was talking about.

“Well,” he said, “and this is only my own way of thinking, mind, but when you’re doing something you love—really love—you can’t let the way others play the game get in the way of that, if you follow. It don’t matter if your coach is hassling you, or whether you don’t like how some of your teammates indulge in the sport. When you’re out there, you’ve got a goal to accomplish, and you can’t see to letting all that mishmash weigh you down.”

In some ways, I felt as though I would never stop learning the lesson. What I’d set out to accomplish with the Dragon Corps had been foolish beyond recourse. I would never understand them the way they understood one another. No matter which way I turned, it seemed that I was to be reminded of my failings as a teacher. And Rook’s conspicuous absence reminded me of my failings in all other areas of life.

The nights were the worst. I lay on my couch listening to the far-off sounds of explosions, imagined or real, and all that stood between the Ke-Han and Rook was a dragon who wasn’t even flying properly. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was I thought I stood to lose with Rook’s death; I’d lost him this time just as surely as I’d lost my brother in the fire twenty-one years ago. Yet every night I listened just the same, terrified that every explosion would be the last, or that I wouldn’t hear the telltale sound of boots in the hallway, denoting another night’s return, whole if not entirely safe.

I couldn’t have said why I indulged in such a torture night after night. It certainly wasn’t my business to look after Rook, and there was no reason now to wait up for him as there once had been. The only thing I could come up with, staring at the ceiling in the darkened common room while my brother raced off to risk his life or give th’Esar’s men more time to win the war, was that I had a duty, however misplaced, and that it was mine and no one else’s.

Perhaps I’d given up the right to look after Rook when I hadn’t called him brother straightaway, but if I didn’t do it, I didn’t know who would, and that thought kept me up much later than the explosions ever did.

HAL

Two men died, and three women, making five in total since I’d come. This was why I refused to leave Royston; it was as if I thought that, by remaining at his side, I could ward off death simply with how fiercely I loved him. This was insane, but the room seemed to evoke that after a time in all its inhabitants, the close air laden with fever, the sickly smell of epidemic, of sweat, of unclean bodies tossing and turning without relief.

On the first day, Royston was so certain that we would be the ones to break the riddle of the fever and find its cure that I could do nothing but believe him.

“You must find those who are still capable of using their minds against this,” Royston told me, holding one of my hands with both of his. “I would suggest trying Alcibiades—he’s the blond man who keeps grunting at us—as well as Marius, if you can coax him into opening his eyes. You remember, I spoke with him at the party? And then there’s . . . ah, Marcelline, the redhead. Over there, do you see her?”

I lifted a cup of water to his lips, and he drank greedily. “Yes,” I told him. “I do. I’ll try my best.”

I had no trouble in coaxing Marius to come, though he insisted first on checking the condition of a pale woman with blonde hair. She was the same woman with the fluttering fan that Royston had been flirting with at the ball, though I hardly recognized her now. Alcibiades and Marcelline agreed to come, as well as a small young man who overhead my conversation and told me his name was Caius. I’d known all along that Caius Greylace was a real person, of course, and not a character from a roman like so many of the others I’d read about, but it was strange to see him living and breathing in front of me. It was almost like encountering Tycho the Brave under the golden dome of the Basquiat. The fever seemed to have struck one of his eyes—the left one—which was gray and filmy as death, but the other was so crystal clear an emerald color that it unnerved me; he reminded me of an old statue with one of its jewel eyes missing.

“The rest are bemoaning their fate,” he told me in a high, easy voice. “I don’t think you’ll find much help among them, only I did manage a game of High Kings with Berhane earlier this morning. You may ask after her.” He paused, noting my confusion, and added helpfully, “The blonde. With the curls. She may, however, vomit on you; it’s what she did when I won.”

I gathered Berhane as well, as per Caius’s suggestion, though she required my aid in helping her over to Royston’s cot, where our small group of the bedraggled and feverish was gathered.

“Ah,” Caius said, making way for the fifth and final addition. “Come sit here by me, darling; if you feel the need to exile your lunch in the same manner in which you exiled breakfast, feel free to do it once more in my hair.”

“Have you seen your hair lately?” Alcibiades asked wearily. “This isn’t the place for vanity.”

“Don’t tell Berhane that,” Marius said in a quiet voice, holding out a hand to steady hers while she settled. “She considers it still the highest of priorities.”

Somewhere far off in the corner of the room, the same young woman began yet another fit of coughing, and as I took my seat at Royston’s bedside we were all momentarily sobered by the sound. It strengthened Royston’s resolve, however, and he even sat up with minimal aid from me.

“First,” he said. “Caius. What do we know?”

Caius pushed limp, pale blond hair back from his eerie eyes. “What do I know, you mean,” he said.

Berhane pursed her lips, leaning her head against Marius’s shoulder. “ Rumors are rampant,” she said. “I don’t know if a single one of us here knows a damn thing about what’s happening. You’re closer to the Esar than all of us—or were, in any case.”

“Before I began to go blind,” Caius said, without a hint of anything more than cheerful acceptance. “Yes, that is true. I was working on devising some sort of cure, in fact, before the fever took me.”

“Well?” Royston demanded. “ Caius, now isn’t the time for tangents, and of the two of us—I believe, though I cannot be sure—I’m the better equipped for knocking sense into you than you are for escaping.”

Caius sighed. “Very well,” he said. “It was a snake.”

“A snake,” said Alcibiades.

“That’s preposterous,” Marcelline added.

“I saw it with my own eyes,” Caius insisted. “A snake. Black as onyx, with eyes like two opals, sparkling and changing color in the light. It was dead, but there it was, curled at the bottom of the Well. The Sisters fished it out, but by then it was too late—the color of the water was turning black as though someone had dumped a pot of ink into it. The only curiosity was that the inky color hadn’t yet finished dispersing, as if the whole thing were paused in time and the clouds of murky black unfurling with very slow precision.”

“A snake did that,” said Alcibiades.

“I’m telling you what I saw,” Caius said. “The Esar sent for a group of us. By that point, the Wildgrave and a few others had already taken ill.”

“He said that he had a fever,” Marius interjected. He sounded more angry than shocked.

“This was the time of the ball,” Royston said grimly. When Caius nodded, I saw pleasure at having been right mingle in Royston’s expression with displeasure at what being right meant. I offered him water another time, but he shook his head slightly.

“This was the time of the ball, indeed,” Caius confirmed. “The ball was something of a ruse—I suspected more than a few would realize it. You may have noticed the incongruous lack of our esteemed Majesty at his own party. Grievous poor manners, and I told him as much, but he needed the time to show us what had happened. Then, of course, we set to torturing the Brothers and Sisters of Regina to find out which of the guards was responsible for this. We suspected foul play—naturally, for it could be nothing other—but we had no idea what sort it was, or why a snake, however clearly of magical origin, could poison the Well simply by crawling into it and dying there.” Caius paused for a moment, and without thinking I offered the glass of water to him. Unlike Royston, he took it gratefully, and I steadied his hands against the glass with my own as he drank deeply from it. “Ah. That’s better,” he said, voice indeed sounding much less dry and harsh. “Where was I? Mm, the Brothers and Sisters, and how we tortured them for answers. Yes. As you might suspect, we went through a number before we came to one who knew anything at all.”

I winced, and turned away. Royston covered my hand on his coverlet with his own, and I tried to force the image from my head. This was a problem that needed solving, and there was no time to let my emotions get the better of me. Yet I became this involved even in my romans, so telling myself it was “only a story” did little good to erase the injustice of the innocent Brothers and Sisters undergoing such an ordeal.

“Go on,” Royston said quietly.

Caius nodded. “It was one of the Brothers,” he continued. “He’d been bribed into it—at quite the exorbitant price, I’ll have you know; he would have been a rich man when this was all over if I weren’t so very good at my job. They must have offered to take the stitches out of his lips and everything! In any case, the Ke-Han had reached him, and we’re damned to bastion and back if we know how they did it, but he stole a sample for them. We can only assume it was the analysis of that sample that the Ke-Han employed in formulating their poison. When they had it perfected, they gave it tangible form in the guise of a snake—it’s a powerful thing, or was before it served its purpose and died there. And, when last I spoke of the matter, common theory was that it was the work of a great many Ke-Han magicians, since their Talents lie more in the natural realm than the subversion of nature. The snake, we have also surmised, was merely for the sake of function; it must have slipped in entirely unnoticed. That, too, was exceedingly clever. I should like to congratulate the man who thought of it.”

“Before you torture him to death, you mean,” Alcibiades said.

“Credit where credit is due,” Caius replied smoothly.

“All this time, then,” Royston said, steering the conversation smoothly back to its purpose, “you can assure us that the men working on the problem have been attempting to devise an antidote to the poison the snake released into the waters of the Well?”

“Exactly that,” Caius confirmed. “They’ve taken samples from the Well, in much the same way as the Ke-Han did to fashion the poison in the first place. We’ve been seeking to combat this trouble from the same standpoint taken to begin it. I wonder if that’s the proper tack to choose, but I’m no longer, as you may see, on the team of scientists still working to find a cure.”

“And they’ve tested the snake,” Royston asked.

“Of course they have,” Caius replied.

“And they’ve found no cure,” Marius said in a dull voice.

Caius said nothing at all, though he did gesture around the room. The woman began her coughing again, and our group seemed all too suddenly distracted by the sound.

“How long have they been working to find it?” Berhane asked, wincing even as she did so.

“I would say it’s been a month,” Caius answered. “Perhaps a little more than that. I am uncertain as to how long it had been before I was called to the scene, but I assume it was a few days to a little more than a week, and no more.”

“Seeing as how they wanted you for all the torturing,” Alcibiades said.

Caius’s smile gleamed. “Something to that effect.”

“We must read up on everything we know about the Ke-Han magic,” Royston interjected.

“With what romans?” Marcelline asked. “Whom shall we send to fetch the relevant material? Who will be granted access back inside?”

I feared at that moment Royston would ask me to do the job, and that I would have to refuse him—for Marcelline was right, and once I left, I’d have no such luck returning.