Havemercy (57 page)

I don’t know how long it went on. Like I said, I lost track of time, and I’d have better luck asking the rats than my captors.

And then one day—no fucking warning or nothing—this trapdoor above my head opened up, which wasn’t the usual route they took when they were coming to visit me special and ask me their questions again, and I was hauled out into the sunlight, people talking in the Ke- Han babble all around me and the sun so bright I had to close my eyes against it. I was shivering, this close to puking all over someone, and what I really wanted to do was spit on somebody—only I didn’t think I had any saliva left in my entire mouth, so that little show of defiance was out of the question.

I was shaking too much to be mad.

They wrapped a blindfold around my face—which I should’ve thanked them for, ’cause at least I didn’t have to deal with the sun directly—and shoved me along some path that felt like I was walking on shards of glass the entire time. I figured it for rubble, but it could have been some brand-new kind of torture for all I knew. I was close to throwing myself down on it and hoping I hit something particularly sharp by the time they finally let me stop, and by then I was walking on something smoother but too hot, like sand under the sun at noontime.

They’d taken my boots at some point, probably days ago, so the whole ordeal was a real pisser.

I stood there for a little while, Ke-Hans whispering close by and some not so close by, and as far as disorienting me completely went, this was a pretty good trick. Finally, I felt someone’s fingers at the back of my head, and when they took off the blindfold and I got a chance to get my bearings, I realized I was standing in what used to be the magicians’ dome. I was surrounded by a group of men and women, all of them Ke-Han, and most of them looking pretty much the way I felt, all shelled out with no home anymore.

For some reason, they’d all gathered together like a bunch of toys in the torn-up shell of the dome. If this was some ritual killing, I just wanted them to get it over with.

In front of me was a man who dressed so fine and held himself so straight I knew who he was without even needing to be introduced. No matter what a man was, Volstovic or Ke-Han or Arlemagne or anything, there was no mistaking royalty.

I’d come pretty far in life for the Ke-Han warlord himself to be requesting an audience with me.

I probably should have bowed or something, but if I’d tried it I’d’ve gone completely off-balance, what with my hands being tied behind my back, and the rest of me being dizzy in the first place.

The warlord had his hands folded behind his back and for a long time he didn’t even acknowledge me; he was just surveying the damage, drinking it all in, like some sort of sick game he was playing with himself. When he turned around, there was a cat’s kind of anger in his eyes, wild and fierce and narrow. I lifted up my chin. It was the only show of defiance I had left.

“You wear your hair the way we wear ours,” he told me, and though his accent was rough and his words stilted, at least it was a language I fucking recognized.

“Yeah?” I asked. I was dizzy and half out of my mind; there was blood under my fingernails, and this cut Have’d scored across my chest when her wing snapped was festering. I could smell it, rotten and sick, especially in open air. “Looks better on me, though.”

The warlord smiled, the expression thin and sharp. I wondered for a moment why he didn’t just kill me for my insolence, because it was clear as the mustache on his face that he wanted to, but instead he lifted one hand with his palm facing out and complete silence descended over all of us. There wasn’t even a whisper or the sound of somebody breathing too loud on the air—that’s how quiet everyone was, and just ’cause their warlord had shown them the palm of his hand.

“It is because of the terms of the treaty,” he said, “that I refrain from killing you.”

“Treaty,” I said. The sun was getting to be too much. “What fucking treaty?”

“The one we have just signed,” he replied. “I believe it was an hour ago.”

With a bow, one that was stiff and curt because bowing to nobodies was something he’d never had to do before, he nodded to his left, and I saw that it wasn’t just the Ke-Han who were gathered around in a circle watching me like I was the main attraction at carnivale. There were a group of people I didn’t recognize but who sure as fuck weren’t Ke-Han standing there, most of them inspecting a pile of scrap metal I could only assume was the last of our girls, but a few must’ve broken away from the rest at my arrival, and at this signal from the warlord, they came forward.

“Shit,” I said, when they got close enough for me to see. “I know who you are.”

“Is that so?” the man asked, motioning for the man with him—and he was one I didn’t recognize at all—to untie my hands. I winced the second he touched me and swore in the Old Ramanthe.

“Yeah,” I said, pain coloring my voice enough so I cursed again to chase it out. “You’re the one they exiled for fucking the Arlemagne prince.”

“Ah,” said the Mary Margrave, not even blinking. “Indeed, you are correct in that regard. It is thrilling to see you still possessed of all your wits.”

“Well,” I said. “Some of ’em. Maybe.”

“You have suffered less than the rest,” the Margrave told me. “None of the others we hoped to find here in confinement is still living.”

I felt this strange thing happen inside my stomach. I really would’ve been sick, and all over too, except there was nothing for me to get rid of inside my stomach. Instead, I guess I must’ve groaned, or moaned, or something. It sounded real pathetic, even to me, but then I barely heard it.

“Nobody else?” I asked. “Fucking none of ’em?”

“Four made it back to Thremedon,” the Margrave said. “You are the fifth and final survivor—all that remains, I am sad to say, of the Esar’s Dragon Corps.”

I licked my lips like I thought that would do anything toward making them feel any less dry. “We ain’t th’Esar’s Dragon Corps no more,” I said, sounding just like the real kid from the streets I was.

If there was a treaty, there wasn’t a war anymore. And if there wasn’t a war, there wasn’t any Dragon Corps; it was simple as that. With only five of us still living, and most of our girls no more than junk metal by now, then there wasn’t anything left of us—literal or figurative, in body or in soul.

I could smell it about to happen before it did, could feel my vision waver as I lost all feeling in my hands.

“Airman Rook,” the Margrave said, but if there was anything more he said, I didn’t hear it, seeing as how I blacked out right then and there and didn’t even feel it when I hit the ground.

When I woke up, I guessed I was somewhere else; in any case I wasn’t standing, and the Margrave wasn’t there. I thought I saw my brother—real this time, and not some dead hallucination—and he called me by two different names, Rook and John both, ’til I didn’t know who I was, and it didn’t really even seem to matter over the hurt rooted deep down like it was a permanent part of me.

He told me to sleep, and I wanted to tell him he was my fucking little brother, which meant he couldn’t tell me what to do, but then the blackness reached up again with nimble fingers and pulled me down into the quiet where there wasn’t nobody, not even me.

HAL

I wasn’t made for this sort of excitement. As much as I enjoyed the stories found within my favorite romans, of daring escapes and heroic battles and discoveries made in the eleventh hour, I found living them a far less attractive proposition than reading about them, and the strain of it had left me ill and exhausted more often than not. I didn’t have the constitution for large, sweeping events; or, at least, that had been what I’d told Royston in the days after his return, when we had time to spare for speaking.

He’d been busy, as part of the delegation formed by the Esar at the last minute to negotiate the terms of our peace treaty with the Ke-Han. He’d even have to leave yet again, however briefly, to see that the conditions were being carried out.

Royston had explained the terms of the provisional treaty to me thusly: that all surviving dragons were to be retired, but that the pieces found past the Xi’an border were to be returned to Volstov. That the Kiril Islands were to be returned to Volstov, that the Ke-Han people would allow Volstovic occupation while they rebuilt their city, and that an established border would be fixed along the Cobalt Mountains. All in all it was fairly simple—at least, simple enough that I understood it all—and not even Royston could find anything about it to argue against.

When I had gone to visit Thom at the Airman, he told me in a terrible sort of voice that only four members of the corps had made it back from their final flight, and that the rest of the airmen had most likely been captured and tortured, or killed.

A funereal atmosphere hung over the whole building like a shroud, the airmen reduced to less than half their number, and I could see it on the faces of those who remained that not one of them was daring to imagine any of their fellows could escape if they’d lived long enough to be imprisoned.

The airman Rook hadn’t been among the men who’d made it back, and for that brief, dark window of time when we’d all thought him dead, I’d spent many a day trying to alleviate the weight of Thom’s misery. It had given me a distraction from my own fears, for even then no one had been speaking of our certain victory with the assurance they’d exhibited during the time of the ball. Rather, everyone skirted around the issue, as though they were afraid they’d tempted fate quite enough for one lifetime, and now they were waiting to see on whose side she truly fell before they all began to congratulate themselves.

The day I’d received my letter from Royston had been the day the Airman received word as well about Airman Rook, who was alive, and the status of the other airmen, who were not. It was a month after the battle. Thom had come to meet me soon after, rather than stay and show his relief in the face of the Dragon Corps’ staggering loss.

“As much time as I’ve spent with them,” Thom had said, voice hooked low on some rougher emotion, “it isn’t something I would presume to . . . intrude on.”

I understood, then, that he felt as strongly about Airman Rook as I did about Royston. I couldn’t say I particularly understood the reasoning behind it, but then if I were being perfectly fair, I supposed it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you could explain to anyone with reason alone. People are connected in many different ways, and I was only beginning to learn a few of them.

Things happened very quickly after that.

I’d half expected th’Esar to organize another ball, since winning the war seemed a much better reason to me than covering up an insidious plague, but after he’d returned, Royston told me that wasn’t the way that things worked. Apparently signing a treaty had all sorts of complicated connotations, such as how you couldn’t really celebrate your win too much because that would be too close to parading under the Ke-Han’s noses, and that wasn’t the way to foster proper peace between two nations.

“But we are at peace,” I said, staring out of one of Royston’s many round windows at the city, cloaked that afternoon with the grayest rain.

“Yes,” Royston said. I felt his rough cheek against my ear, and I smiled. “I never thought I’d be there to see it, but indeed, it would seem we are.”

Even the city herself seemed to acknowledge it. It was a beautiful sight stretched out before us, all of Thremedon smiling privately to herself beneath the clouds.

Then the invitations to the ceremony arrived, thick and ornate as everything else from the palace. That it was called a ceremony, Royston assured me, didn’t mean it was going to be anything particularly terrifying, even though he spent the better part of the day searching for his favorite cuff links and moving about as though he couldn’t sit still, which he only ever did when he was very nervous.

“If you’re going to tell me not to worry about something,” I said, perched on the window seat of our drawing room with a roman in my lap, “then the least you could do is have the courtesy to pretend you’re not doing the exact same thing.”

He paused in the middle of the room, then came to sit on the couch beside the window, leaning his head against my hip. I thought it couldn’t be very comfortable, but the flush of warmth low in my stomach prevented me from actually suggesting another position might be more favorable.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It would seem I set a very poor example on top of everything else.”

I smoothed the gray at his temple with my fingers. “We could always stay home and read,” I suggested. It was not an entirely practical suggestion, and one he was bound to refuse, but I thought it was important I offer it nonetheless.

Royston laughed then, hoarse as though he still hadn’t completely returned to his old health. “Hal,” he said, “I believe it is my duty to prepare you for the very real possibility that one day you may be reading a history of these very events we have so unexpectedly managed to survive and find yourself a character in it.”

“Oh,” I felt my cheeks go warm. “Surely not.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for you, this all would have ended in the Basquiat—and I include myself in that assessment.”

I crawled down off of the window seat to sit beside him instead, putting my arms about his shoulders and resting my face right against the break of his high collar where I could see his throat. “I did it for you,” I said quietly. “No one else needs to know.”

“Ah,” said Royston. “Well, it’s a pity that I made mention of it to the Esar, then.”

“What?” I blinked, sure that I’d misheard him, or that this was one of his dry jokes that I’d not yet entirely got the hang of and, sometimes, suspected I never might. “Are you—You aren’t serious?”

“I certainly am,” he said, fingers making idle patterns against my shoulder blades so that I sighed. Somehow, his touches calmed me, despite the more and more alarming information he imparted. “I believe he made some mention of offering you a position of honor at the ’Versity.”

“What?” I said again, feeling as though I’d missed some vital detail, or that perhaps I’d fallen asleep again the way I’d done for a time after the war had ended, dropping off without warning as if my body had just decided to catch up where it could whenever it felt like it, so that Royston would find me curled up in strange places and find himself inspired to move me to the bed.