Havemercy (52 page)

“My dear Marcelline,” Royston said, closing his eyes and leaning somewhat heavily against my side. “We are in the Basquiat. Hal has two good legs, two good hands, and two good eyes, in case these facts have all escaped you, and there are in fact fifteen libraries within this building at our disposal.”

“He won’t be granted access to any of them, either,” Marcelline pointed out, but her dark eyes had been gifted with sudden light.

“Then he’ll just have to be devious,” Caius replied. “He’s small. He seems clever. He should be able to manage.”

I didn’t know whether to be touched at their faith in me or overwhelmed by the task now set upon my shoulders. Royston breathed against my side, rasping occasionally but a warm weight that hardened my resolve all the same. There was no time for hesitation, or my own uncertainty in the face of a foreign and somewhat terrifying authority.

Thom had faced down the Esar for me, after all. I could certainly fetch some romans.

Royston gave me directions to the nearest of the libraries, then the most thorough, and also the one that was likeliest to have a collection of all accounts of known poisons and their antidotes, until he had to stop halfway through at the perplexed look on my face and call for paper so that he could dictate as I wrote it all down. I was cheered by the smallest of things. That Royston’s voice was yet strong enough to pitch to a yell in order to be heard when many of the others were arguing lit a tiny spark near my heart. It stayed there, glowing and ebbing with Royston’s progress, and I found it harder than I’d thought it might be to actually leave the room with the golden dome to find the romans.

“Hal,” Royston said, and though his eyes were closed, he was smiling at me. “We can’t do anything more without romans, do you understand?”

“Forget this mysterious bastion-forsaken snake plague,” said Alcibiades. He didn’t sit up very often anymore, but his opinions were as strident as ever. “You two are what’s going to make me ill.”

I held very tightly to Royston’s hand, then forced myself to release it, stepping gingerly around the cots strewn haphazardly across the floor. The quicker I left, I reasoned, the quicker I could return, then give the romans to minds that would understand them, unravel this mystery, and take Royston home with me.

The first library I went to—the one Royston had told me had the most extensive collection of publications on known poisons and antidotes—was a room at the bottom of a spiraling staircase. The walls were fitted with high windows covered in metal filigree, and there was row upon row of impossibly tall stacks that seemed to reach from the floor to the very high ceiling. Hidden in the shadows against the left-hand wall there was a wheeled ladder, and scattered thoughtfully here and there were low, squat chairs with gold feet and small round end tables supporting stained-glass lamps. It was a room clearly designed for the access and reading of romans, and for one full minute I could do nothing but stand there in admiration and longing.

After a moment of wide-mouthed wonder I thought of Royston, and also of Alcibiades in the cot next to his; of Berhane, who could barely manage to move, of Marius, who looked gaunt as a skeleton, and Marcelline and her red-rimmed eyes, and of Caius, who had tortured people to come to the bottom of this mystery and was nevertheless going blind. I couldn’t take the time to savor the view before me, I told myself rather angrily. There were people depending on my work here.

Thankfully, the scrap of paper I held in my hand suggested the best place to begin, denoting organization of the romans as set by binding color, then by faded golden number on the spine.

When I wanted to reach the higher stacks I had to first pile the romans neatly on one of the little round tables, then make my ascent, clutching tightly to the paper list and all the while praying I didn’t fall off and break my neck or anything similarly embarrassing and ruinous.

It was when I descended for the third time, having at last settled into something of a functioning routine, that I noticed I was no longer alone.

A woman sat in one of the low chairs, posture-perfect with her legs neatly crossed, making her seat seem more like a throne than a cushioned reading chair. Her dark hair was twisted back from her face in the same fashion as worn by the women in portraits of the old Ramanthine nobility. Her dress was a deep, bloody crimson, and the hem brushed delicately against the floor as she tapped her foot. That was the only delicate thing about her, I thought, and though it was a strange thought to have, I’d never been quite so intimidated by anyone in my life, not even the Esar.

She was reading the topmost roman I’d left stacked on the table, one finger idly tracing the line of the words, as if she hadn’t seen me yet. When I stepped off the bottom rung of the ladder her head lifted immediately, and I felt as though her black eyes would bore a hole right through my head and out the back if I couldn’t escape the force of her gaze.

“You aren’t a magician,” she said. Her voice was like the wine Royston had bought in Bottle Alley, the same color as her dress.

“No,” I said, knowing full well that I had no skill at lying, and that even if I wanted to try, now was certainly not the time to start. “I’m not.”

“You are the Margrave Royston’s—Hal,” she said, pausing to tuck away a curl that had fallen loose from her chignon.

I felt the blush before it came, staining my cheeks and throat, but she only smiled, full-lipped and amused, as though I’d done something particularly entertaining.

“Surely Royston must have explained to you the rules of the Basquiat and its libraries,” she went on. “There is information here that cannot be read by anyone other than sworn magicians.”

I drew a breath, thinking once again of that room with all the sick people lying jumbled together on their cots, and how I might very well be their best and only hope at this point to solve anything. I could see, too—and thought I might never forget—the looks of frustration in the magicians’ eyes at being able to do nothing. If I could help in any way, I knew that I had to at least try.

“We—that is, Royston and I, and some others; I’m not sure of their titles—we believe that there might be an answer in one of these romans as to what’s making everyone sick,” I said at last, in a voice as assertive as I could make it.

She regarded me for a moment longer, and I had the most curious sensation of something soft sweeping in the corners of my mind.

“Berhane is a friend of mine,” she said at last. “And little Caius will need something to occupy his mind now that he is no longer the Esar’s lapdog.”

“I—Oh,” I said. Then, I nearly jumped, for I’d realized all at once what her Talent was—or rather, what it had to be. I hadn’t seen the badge on her chest that would have declared her status as a velikaia, but now, I no longer needed to. She’d taken what information she’d needed from my mind with more precision than I’d removed the romans from their stacks, which meant that she was also a magician, though she didn’t seem nearly as sick as the others.

She closed the roman and set it to rest on top of the pile with the others, and I saw then that her hands were shaking. As soon as she followed my gaze, she placed them in her lap as if there were nothing at all the matter, and I wondered just how much control she was exerting over her own mind in order to override whatever effect the illness was having upon her body. I wondered why she wasn’t upstairs with everyone else.

“I remain in the library because the Esar keeps us here as though it is a prison, and not our own palace. A palace truly fit for magicians, and Margraves, and velikaia,” she told me. “I find my comfort among the books.”

Then she smiled again, and her teeth were impossibly white against the dark of her face.

“‘Hang the rules,’ I believe, is the expression Royston would use under these circumstances,” she said, and I felt hope bloom wild like a sunflower within my chest. “Though you’d best be more clever about keeping yourself from view in the future.”

“Thank you,” I whispered, holding the romans I’d brought down with me off the ladder tight against my chest.

“And you might start with this volume,” she added. With one of her large, graceful hands she indicated a volume about halfway down from the top. “It contains a few treatises on magical illness, though, sadly, not illness that attacks magic itself.”

“Thank you,” I said again, too overwhelmed to do anything but go on expressing my gratitude to her repeatedly.

It was only when I reached the door, stack of romans threatening to topple unsteadily one way or the other at any moment, that I realized I’d missed one very important detail. I turned around precariously, and though I knew it was rudeness unimaginable to shout within the confines of the library, I called back to her.

“What is your name?” I was certain there was a more proper way to address a velikaia—I was certain Royston might even have mentioned it to me—but countless nights without sleep had driven all but the most basic knowledge from my mind. I hoped she would forgive me.

“You may call me Antoinette,” she answered, and though I’d heard her quite clearly, she didn’t seem to have raised her voice at all.

When I came back to the sickroom, Royston was sleeping, and I was careful to put my load of romans down before arranging the covers carefully around him where he’d thrown them off in a fit of tossing.

“My,” Caius remarked from his bed, waving an idle, white hand. His cot was aligned now with Royston’s; he must have moved it while I was gone on my errand. “You would have made an excellent student of the ’Versity. Or a pack mule, possibly, as both are prone to carrying disproportionately heavy loads.”

The unsettling thing about Caius—or perhaps the most unsettling, as there seemed to be a consistently growing supply—was that at times I was sure he could be no more than a few years above me in age, if that.

“Antoinette suggested we start with this one,” I said, holding it up from the rest.

A sly look passed over his sharp-featured face. Next to him, Berhane stirred in her own bed and fought to sit up, hair clinging limply to the side of her face.

“Antoinette is here?”

“Well,” I amended, “not here, but in the Basquiat. I saw her in the library, I thought she was going to tell me to leave. Only then . . . she didn’t.”

Marcelline coughed the way she’d begun to that morning, and Marius began to stir in his bed, fighting his way free from the blankets to help Berhane into a more comfortable position on the little cot. It was then that I noticed the beds had been rearranged, and that our little group had moved to form a misshapen sort of circle to one side of the room. I felt the beginnings of hope fill my heart with warmth. We were going to solve this.

We had to.

“Pass us the romans then,” said Marcelline, once she’d had a glass of water and could speak properly.

They felt heavier as I passed them out, and I was worried that some of the magicians might not be able to hold them up properly, but of course I had underestimated them, and even Berhane balanced her own text neatly against her lap with hands that didn’t have the strength to hold it properly.

I sat on the edge of Royston’s bed as lightly as I could so as not to wake him, but soon enough I heard the sigh and felt the stirrings that meant I’d done so anyway.

“Hal?” His voice was rough with sleep, and something deeper that I knew was the sickness rooted deep within him. I moved immediately to sit next to him, adjusting his pillows so that he could sit up and remaining close in case he felt the need to lean against me once more.

“Shall we begin, at the behest of our dear colleague, with nature and the known magical plagues?” Caius’s one bright eye nearly sparkled. I tucked in close to Royston, and held his book open for the two of us. In some ways it was so like our earliest days in the country that I felt the change all the more keenly.

This was how our days passed.

On the second day, as Berhane could no longer read, we began our work afresh—sometime, I judged, in the very late morning—and I read loud enough for both her and Royston to hear. I noticed that Marius was more distracted by her condition than he would have liked, and he kept asking for theories to be repeated over, weariness and apology beat into every line of his face. By evening, she’d fallen into fitful sleeping, and before I fell asleep, curled in at Royston’s overwarm side, he whispered softly against my temple, “We cannot strain her by letting her join us tomorrow.”

On the third day, both Berhane and Alcibiades were no longer capable of reading with us, the former asleep and the other intermittently—but very rarely—offering sharp yet weary criticism. We’d still come no closer to a solution by the time Royston rested a shaking hand upon my arm and admitted to me that he could no longer understand the words I was speaking as a language he knew.

“Well,” said Marius, soft so as not to disturb Berhane. “I didn’t want to be the first one to admit it.”

“Hal and I will continue,” Caius said, his voice never losing its keen edge.

“Hal must also—occasionally—rest,” Royston suggested. I wrung out the damp flannel I kept in a basin of cool water by the foot of his cot and draped it over his forehead.

Very quickly after that, his breathing evened out, and I knew he was sleeping.

“Doesn’t it trouble you, as well?” I asked Caius, softly, so as not to wake the others.

He shrugged, barely more than a disconcertingly pale shadow in the dark room. All the lamps were being kept at half-light, perhaps to avoid troubling the magicians whenever they wished to sleep, but the effect was such that, after all the squinting I’d been doing, I felt as though I, too, were going to go blind.

“At certain hours it’s worse than others,” he said. “However, I am uncertain of how much more time I’ll have to work on the problem at hand. I thought it might be best to make the most of it—‘it’ being that short period of blessed wakefulness, while I still have one eye.”

I took up a book we’d not yet started and flipped it open, even as I moved to sit by the foot of Caius’s bed. It was the best position to take, I thought; this way, I could read a little more loudly and leave Royston undisturbed as he slept.