Havemercy (53 page)

“Shall we, then?” I suggested.

Caius frowned. “Poisons and antidotes,” he said, as though it were troubling him. “Poisons, poisons—we’re getting nowhere.”

I bowed my head. “It’s true,” I admitted at length, though it pained me greatly to do so. I’d had such high hopes when we’d begun, but we’d effectively lost both Berhane and Alcibiades in the past two days, and we were no closer to understanding what was happening than we had been at the beginning.

“We must lay it all out, from start to finish,” Caius said. “What we don’t know is ruining us.”

We were at the task for most of the night, until Royston began to cough very near morning and I returned to tend to him. When Royston was sleeping peacefully once more, so was Caius.

On the fourth day, Marius became delirious with fever, and Marcelline could no longer help us due to ceaseless coughing; then there were only the three of us.

What we didn’t know was ruining us, I told myself, and while Royston and Caius slept, I repeated the list Caius and I had made—half chart, half questions—over and over again, until I saw it every time I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. The Ke-Han had taken a sample of the magic waters from the Well; they had invented a poison to work against it, presumably also of magic; it was this magic that worked as a fever through Royston’s veins, this magic that brought a flush to Alcibiades’ cheeks, and this magic that was beginning to blind Caius’s good eye.

We had to undo the poison, but we had no idea how to proceed, as it took so many forms.

On the fifth day, Royston could no longer control his vomiting. He apologized profusely, which seemed to me a waste of energy, and then slept once more for much of the day. I continued to read on my own while Caius watched me. Under any other circumstances this would have daunted me, but I refused to be distracted.

At last I reached the same point Royston had just the other day: the words no longer seemed to be ones I recognized, though they had been not a moment before. I rubbed wearily at my eyes, my own head pounding and aching between the temples and behind my eyes. I could barely see at all.

“You’ll drive yourself mad that way,” Caius said, and punctuated the statement with a crystalline laugh.

I sighed wearily, and for a long time I didn’t speak at all. Then I asked him, “Caius, what is your Talent?”

He smiled his snake-thin smile and breathed in deeply, almost reverently. “Ah,” he said. “My Talent lies in visions.”

“Visions?” I asked.

“It’s particularly useful when the Esar requires information from certain unwilling parties,” Caius explained.

“Oh,” I said. “So the . . . torture you mentioned earlier, that was—”

“Not physical,” Caius confirmed. “No. You are curious, perhaps, as to why the Esar banished me in the first place?” I nodded mutely, and whether or not he could see me, he took my silence as agreement. “I was too young for such a gift,” he continued, quiet, reminiscent. “I misused it. I drove a man mad for . . . private reasons.”

“And you couldn’t cure him afterward?” I asked, horrified by the ease of his admission.

“No,” Caius replied. “Though, if I die before he does, the general consensus is that he will return to the state he was in before I tore his mind apart. He would be very pleased to see me in such distress—would be, that is, if he were more than a drooling, wild-eyed mongrel.”

I rubbed at my eyes again, too weary to offer him a reply. He didn’t seek one, either, and I left it at that.

On the sixth day, Berhane died.

It happened before I woke, but the murmuring of distant voices broke into my dreamless sleep and I sat up quickly, my heart pounding fit to burst. There were men gathered above her cot who covered her with a simple gray coverlet and carried her from the room.

“I did write to her,” Marius said, his voice still tinged with delirium and fever. He turned away from us and pulled the blankets up over his head.

“She had such lovely hair,” Caius whispered, and for the first time, I thought I detected the shifting of emotions in his voice.

I turned my face against Royston’s shoulder and cried. If he was taken from me in the same manner, I was certain I’d never forgive myself.

I returned to reading, but it was no longer any use. I could barely concentrate—the words danced before my eyes, tantalizing but impossible to catch—and the sound of Royston’s rough, ragged breathing interrupted every thought I might once have had. At last I could manage it no more, and I admit that I surrendered, closing the book, pulling my knees to my chest, and crying myself to sleep.

It was then that the idea struck.

Inspiration woke me with the same jolting, electric shock that the sounds of Berhane being taken away had done earlier that morning.

“Royston,” I said, grasping his hand and shaking him. “Royston. Royston, please, wake up!”

He groaned with tired resistance and struggled to pull his hand from mine. I let him go, but only to grab his shoulder instead, shaking him harder. At last his face twisted into consciousness, and his eyes moved beneath their lids. A moment later he opened them blearily, staring at me for a long time without recognition.

“It’s Hal,” I said, on the verge of crying again. “Please, Royston, I need you to listen. I think I’ve had an idea about the poison, Royston. Please, listen to me—”

His eyes snapped into focus, though I saw it was with considerable effort that he managed to follow my words from the first to the last. “Tell me,” he said. His throat sounded rough enough as to pain even me; I could barely imagine what it must have felt like to him.

I ordered my thoughts into as much coherency as I could manage, and yet I still spoke them one after the other, jumbled and tumbling from my lips without any structure at all. “The Well,” I said, “Royston, it’s not—We can’t cure the magic from the Well, there’s been no cure found yet, but Caius said that the man who went mad will be cured if Caius dies—and what about the story of Tycho the Brave, who couldn’t cure his lady of the curse, so he killed the magician who’d placed the curse in the first place? The chatelain had a copy of that roman, and we read it together—Never mind, it’s just a story, only Caius said—And wouldn’t that be the same—wouldn’t it—if the magicians who made the poison were killed? It’s possible,” I concluded, helplessly and breathlessly both. “It’s—It sounded better when I first thought of it, but wouldn’t it be possible?”

Royston stared at me, uncomprehending. When he grasped it, understanding rose on his face like the dawn. I could see it, almost as though it had a particular color, come sudden into his eyes. “The Ke-Han magicians have a round, flat tower in the center of their great city,” he said, his voice trembling. But not, I thought, on the edge of fever. Rather, it was the edge of excitement. “It’s too far in to have ever been destroyed by our dragons; besides which, the Ke-Han magicians control the very air around the dome. That is where they operate. They concentrate their magic, which is what makes them so powerful—able to move the very rivers from their beds, roil the winds against our dragons and the oceans against their shores. But it also makes them . . . a giant blue target.”

I pressed my hand against my chest—as if somehow that could stop the wild, frantic pace of its beating.

“But how?” I asked. “How can we do it?” Looking all around me, I could see that it was hopeless. Without magic, we could never hope to get close enough to kill the Ke-Han magicians, much less every last one of them.

It was a shot in the dark, wild and desperate. I was certain it was the right answer. I was also certain it couldn’t be done.

“If the dragons are still flying,” Royston said.

“But how?” I repeated. “How can we even let the Esar know what we know?”

“Ah,” Royston said. “Leave that to me.”

That was when he started screaming.

ROOK

Fighting every night on a dragon who couldn’t even see her way past her own fucking wings and sometimes wouldn’t’ve been able to fly her way out of a wedding veil didn’t have too many fucking benefits, but there was one, and it was the one I was looking for: I didn’t have to think about nobody or nothing. It was just me, Have, the way she jerked and bumped beneath me, the way sometimes she fought me when I tried to steer her, and the belching of flames and smoke when I did my best to aim and fire, her whole metal body shaking between my legs and me just hanging on for dear life.

Like I’d told the professor—my fucking brother; fucking Hilary—there wasn’t any time to be thinking when you were up in the air. It was even more true now that Have’d gone out of her mind, and the only thing keeping me from plummeting to the ground—or worse, getting caught alive by the Ke-Han—was how tight I could hold on to her with both my thighs.

I developed a sort of trick for staying on her that involved wrapping the reins around both my wrists, underneath the gloves. This could fuck me or save me, depending on how things shook down. Like, for example, if Have got hit by a blast of wind which the madness didn’t make her even more determined to fight and she went down because of it, then I was going down with her without any way to wrangle myself to safety. And that would be it, lights out for good and forever. But if she did another one of the crazy flips she’d done the first time—which almost sent me flying to my death, and the only thing saving me sheer pissed-off determination, and me nearly tearing off my own two legs by the time she’d righted herself—then I’d be pretty glad for the reins holding me to her back. After all, two broken wrists were the sort of thing you had to barter to avoid a broken neck. It was just that simple.

Anyway, I didn’t have any choice. I had to take these chances, since now more than ever the only thing keeping the Ke-Han from kicking down th’Esar’s door was us, the Dragon Corps, and we were really fighting like dogs.

If I didn’t die—like, if these stunts didn’t kill me—I was going to wipe the smug look off every last Ke-Han face. I just didn’t know how I was going to go about doing that, or if I’d ever get the chance to see it done.

It’d only been a week—maybe less, now that all the days were blending together in one mess of almost dying and almost dying again—and already we were on the edge of being no more fucking use to anybody. Compagnon had done a run with Spiridon that put her out of commission, we guessed probably for good, and all of the swifts but Balfour’s Anastasia could barely lift their own heads for flying. We were fucked at both ends, and pretty soon we were gonna crack right in half with the pressure of it.

That didn’t stop me from flying out, though—’cause like I said, somebody had to do it, and besides which, it kept me from having the time to think about anything.

So I was out on my lonesome, just me and Have since it was all the corps could spare, flying low along the mountains all night long and blasting down fire whenever we thought the Ke-Han might’ve forgotten about our being there.

The thing was, it was just a game of tag at this point: We had to keep letting ’em know we were still okay for flying, because if they weren’t clear of us, they couldn’t leave the cover of the mountains. The main problem with this plan was that they could hold out a hell of a lot longer than we could, since the only girls we consistently had up in the air were my Have, of course, and the other two Jacquelines, those being Jeannot on Al Atan and Ace on Thoushalt. As for the rest, there was Adamo on Proudmouth, Ghislain’s Compassus, then, when they could wing it, Evariste and Niall on Illarion and Erdeni, in that order. All the other girls were fucking out. It pissed the others off, especially Ivory, who I’d never have pegged for it, but that was how it’d broken down, and that was how we had to abide by it.

It pissed me off, too. There wasn’t none of this that didn’t make me redder than Ke-Han wine with rage, but all I could do was keep picking them off one by one, if I got lucky.

Oh, and I had to get out well before sunup, too, since Have got confused by the light now, on top of everything else. The way we’d learned that was a real son-of-a, nearly taking the whole Airman down with us.

But that night was quiet, just me and the whole Ke-Han army hiding like rats in the mountain and Have occasionally spitting.

Then, she said, “We aren’t alone.”

“Yeah,” I said, “right, sure. Whatever you say, darlin’.”

“No,” she told me. “I’m not mad. Don’t use that tone with me or I’ll snap your neck, you foul-mouthed whoreson.”

“Leave my mother the fuck outta this,” I said. “She didn’t do a thing to you, and you know it.”

“She birthed you, didn’t she?” Have asked, real snide, just like old times. It wasn’t like old times, though, and I had to keep reminding myself of it.

“Yeah, guess so,” I said. “So who’s with us, then?”

“All of them,” Have said. “Everyone’s coming.”

Maybe this was a sign—maybe she really was losing it, and this was where my luck ran out. I’d been drawing too much on it lately anyway, and I guess I should’ve been expecting it.

Then, there was a sound like a swift coming up on my left. I twisted, assuming the Ke-Han’d taken the time in the Cobalts to figure out how to get their catapults to actually work—only I saw the glint of fading moonlight off metal wings.

“Shit,” I said.

It was Balfour, riding Anastasia.

Have was right; I should’ve known to trust my girl. Behind me I could see the winking of the other airmen and their rides, like the stars had come down from the heavens to dance with us, to interfere in the lives of mortal men just like they did in the old stories.

“Shit,” I said again.

“We have a target,” Balfour called out to me, voice almost swallowed up by the wind. He made a fast circuit around me, doubling back.

“The fucking coordinates,” I shouted back at him.

“We’re taking out the magicians,” Balfour howled. “We’ve got to hit them—at once!”

There might’ve been more to what he’d said, but I didn’t need to hear it. Every man jack of us knew that the magicians of the Ke-Han stayed all together in their blue dome. I hoped to the sky that they hadn’t decided to break that tradition and start working with their army rather than from back at home.