Havemercy (8 page)

“Marius,” I’d said, familiarity and exhaustion both creeping up to make me rather more impertinent than usual. “Leave. It’s late, and I still cherish the idea that I may yet get some sleep.”

“Yes,” he’d said, but still had made no effort to get up, so that in the end I’d had to be quite firm with him, fairly ejecting him from the ’Versity at an hour that most decent people were abed anyway, so that the pair of us might get some rest.

It was a left, then a right, or a right, then a left. I breathed deeply to calm myself, feeling nerves disappear in a quick rush of annoyance. It wouldn’t do to begin my day by cursing the architect of the palace, but I quite felt like it by the time I’d passed that same statue of the current Esar for the sixth time, bronzed and brave and quite twenty years younger than he was now.

“Bastion,” I said heatedly, coming upon his courageous brow once more.

“Oh,” said a voice from behind me. “Are you lost?”

I turned and was surprised to see someone of about my own age. He had the dark hair and pale complexion of a nobleman and was fiddling absently with a pair of gloves. He was also, I realized a moment later, wearing a coat with large brass buttons and a high Cheongju collar, and I recognized the colors immediately. He was a member of the Dragon Corps.

I made to bow, before it occurred to me that teachers did not bow to their students—that bowing might be considered a sign of weakness—and then I didn’t know what to do, so I held out my hand.

He took it with a bemused smile, and shook it. He was most genteel.

“I’m Balfour,” he added helpfully, after a spell.

The newest member, my brain provided from the notes I’d made and committed to memory. Also, it pointed out, I’d not introduced myself yet.

I cleared my throat loudly, to cover up for the rather obvious breach in etiquette I’d just made, and hoped this wouldn’t make it back to the Chief Sergeant before I’d even had the chance to meet him. “Thomas,” I said. “From the ’Versity. I believe I’m supposed to be meeting your . . . the rest of the corps in the atrium, only I can’t seem to . . . that is . . .” I looked to th’Esar, large and bronzed, as though this were all his fault. And in a way it was—his and the airman Rook’s, and I blamed them both equally.

“Oh,” said Balfour, with a rush of gladness that threw me off. “I thought I was late! Merritt stole my alarm clock, see, to fish the bells out of it. Come along, then. It’s this way.”

He set off ahead of me, chattering still, so that I could only assume I was meant to keep up.

The atrium had walls of glass and a black-and-white-tiled floor that resembled a giant game board. I felt like an expendable and very small plebe piece in a round of Knights and Margraves, but it did me no good to indulge in thoughts like that.

It would be very warm in the atrium in the full flush of summer, I thought, but today was suitably overcast so as not to turn the room into a giant greenhouse. The sound of raucous laughter echoed from just around the corner.

I held my nerves in check as firmly as a horse’s reins and stepped after Balfour to meet the Dragon Corps.

Right away, I could see being outnumbered fourteen to one would make this no simple task. Once Balfour joined them in the row of graceful, gold-backed chairs, I found myself alone on a dais. Fourteen pairs of eyes pinned me. My throat was very dry.

“Well if it isn’t himself,” said one all the way on the end, whose coat was unbuttoned and whose boots were tall but slouched. He had the lazy, self-satisfied grace of a cat, and I was certain—though I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge—that this was Rook in all his infamy. The smug expression he wore, remorseless and amused, lit his cold blue eyes as if they were trapped behind stained glass. His mouth was unrepentant, almost cruel, his blond hair in knotted braids in the Ke-Han style, streaks of royal blue at his temple.

I disliked him, and I was frightened of him yet oddly intrigued by him as well.

“Come to teach us all to talk and act like the noblesse and keep our fucking private-like?” he went on, leaning forward and making a lewd Molly gesture between his legs. “’Cause we’ve been waitin’ on you. And I’ve heard it’s considered rude, in some places, to leave esteemed guests waitin’.”

“Rook,” said the eldest—a heavyset man with an even heavier brow and a square jaw like a nutcracker’s—in a voice that suffered no insubordination. “Sit the fuck back and shut the fuck up. Your pardon,” the man went on, giving me a once-over.

“You must be Chief Sergeant Adamo,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Adamo. “That’s right.”

“Well,” said Rook, who’d managed the art of sitting back but not, apparently, of shutting the fuck up, “when’s the sensitivity start?” The airman next to him giggled—at least I thought it might be a giggle—and I swallowed as hard as I could to prevent my own tongue from choking me.

This wasn’t simply going to be difficult. This was going to be suicide.

Of the fourteen men lined up and sitting before me like princes, there was only one kind face to be seen, which the rest soon shamed out of its kindness. I didn’t blame Balfour for falling in step with the others. I’d seen such behavior during my worst days at the ’Versity—but those young men had always fallen by the wayside quickly enough, as the ’Versity was an institution of learning, not a catchall house for fraternities and (to put it like a boy raised on the Mollyedge strip) fuck-ups.

Here, it seemed that such stupendously cruel hierarchical systems were encouraged rather than torn down before they could form.

“I thought we might first introduce ourselves,” I said, buying myself time. I had notes—files, papers, years of behavioral research—behind me, and yet I didn’t want to scrabble at odds and ends, nor seem as young as I felt. Not in front of these men. I thought of Marius’s reminder—that they could smell fear—and swallowed down my intimidation as best I could.

“You thought we might?” asked Rook. “How fucking old are you?”

“Rook,” said Adamo. Balfour made a high, disapproving noise.

“It’s just he looks fucking twelve, is what I’m sayin’,” Rook said.

“Rook,” Adamo repeated.

“And I don’t want to be taught fucking anything by a fucking twelve-year-old,” Rook finished, then shut his mouth easy as you please, as if he were a choirboy at week’s end and his parents were looking up at him from the pews.

I dug my fingernails into my right palm. Steady, Thom, I told myself. Steady. I thought of distant, soothing things: of the strength of my dead brother, of Ilsa on Hapenny Lane who always was kind to me, of Marius’s gentle laughter. In the face of what I’d lost and what I’d accomplished, a handful of self-important men were nothing I couldn’t handle. “We’re going to start by introducing ourselves,” I said. “Now. Who wants to begin?”

Silence was my only reply, and the sound of the wind against the glass walls. I saw Balfour look nervously about at his fellow airmen, as if he wanted to volunteer but knew he couldn’t. And then at last, as if it were being drawn out of him by the screws, Adamo cleared his throat.

“Thank you,” I said, and meant it with all my heart.

“Tell us how it’s done,” Adamo said, a little grudgingly, as if he knew as well as I did that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing; that I was green as the grass, and that I was going to mess all of this up.

I licked my lower lip. “We’re going to say our names, which dragon we fly—well, that’s not for me to say, obviously, but for the rest of you—and something the others have never known about you.”

“Something private?” said the giggler.

“How private?” Balfour asked nervously.

“It can be anything,” I said. “Anything at all.”

“Right,” said Chief Sergeant Adamo. “Well, I’m Chief Sergeant Adamo. Proudmouth’s my girl, and if another one of you little shits brings up ‘Mary’ Margrave again, it’s dog rations for you for a month afterward.”

Another silence followed. The giggler was gaping; Balfour had pulled off both his gloves and was worrying them in his fingers as if he sought to tear them to shreds. Rook’s smile had turned outright nasty, twisted down at the corner.

“I’m not sure that entirely constitutes a private detail,” I said at length.

“Doesn’t it?” Adamo asked, lifting one heavy brow at me.

“You’re not some fucking pillow-biter,” Rook said sullenly, crossing his arms over his chest.

“I don’t believe that’s exactly what I said,” Adamo said, like any Margrave or professor I’d ever met for diction, but with an edge to it, and showing more teeth than was necessary. “He’s an acquaintance of mine.”

“I’m just saying,” Rook began, but before this came to blows, I knew I had to cut him off.

“Thank you for volunteering to go second, Rook,” I said.

He turned his eyes to me, colder than glass but more indifferent than ice, blue and sharp in his lean face. On the whole, he was simply a sharp-looking man, and admittedly almost painfully handsome, but it was a statue’s beauty he possessed, a bit roughed up around the edges—for his nose was broken, and there was a scar along his left cheekbone like a half-moon, crescented, just under his eye. And, like some artists’ portrayals of beauty, there was too much spite and malice in him; one could hardly bear to look at him for long.

“You already know my name,” he said. “Don’t you?”

He said it like a challenge; I knew I couldn’t back down, though I felt cornered and trapped and on the verge of complete humiliation.

“For the others, then,” I said patiently.

“They know my name, too.”

“Yes,” said the giggler. “It’s Rook.”

“The other part,” I insisted, refusing to be bested.

“I fly Havemercy,” Rook said. “She’s pretty famous. You might even have heard of her.”

“And the last?” I prompted. It wouldn’t do to let him get away with anything, no matter how minor.

“Oh, that.” Rook bit his thumbnail, looking up at the ceiling, putting on an excellent show of being in deep thought. Finally, he said, “I sure like fucking women.”

“That’s not exactly news,” Balfour said, somewhat darkly.

“Yeah, well, it’s true,” Rook went on, relishing every second of it. “I like to grab ’em around the waist and shove their legs wide open and make ’em beg for it, ’cause you know—”

“My name’s Balfour,” Balfour said very quickly. “I fly Anastasia. We met in the hallway. I . . . I’m very fond of certain philosophical treatises.”

At that moment, I was more grateful to Balfour than to anyone else in my entire life. I couldn’t show favoritism, but I knew my expression revealed the wealth of my gratitude, for he responded with a halfway sort of grin—as if it were no trouble at all, and he was in fact glad for the excuse to get the better of his fellow airman.

“You know, a lot of fucking pillow-biters like philosophy,” Rook said.

“Oh, yes,” said the giggler, giggling again. “And d’you know where they like it?” Adamo gave him a look then like melting steel, and he cleared his throat. “By which I mean to say, I’m Compagnon. I ride Spiridon, and I own the most thorough collection of indecent imprints in the entire city.”

“It’s true,” said a swarthy man with a hook nose and impossibly white teeth. He sighed fondly.

“And your name, please?” I asked.

He shrugged broad, graceful shoulders. “Ghislain,” he said. “Compassus. My great-great-grandfather died for th’Ramanthe.”

I was surprised, though I knew I shouldn’t have been. Many families had originated as Ramanthe supporters, as once there had been no one else to support. Ghislain had the dark eyes and the burnt-sugar coloring of someone from an old Ramanthine family—one that had declined to interbreed with the Volstovic invaders from the west. It was a rare thing to see in a man of our generation, unless he was a part of the nobility.

Not even Rook could think of a clever way to make what he had said into an insult, though, so I put my curiosity aside and took the opportunity to move along down the line.

There was a man with a chin sharp and pointed as an arrow seated next to Ghislain. He looked bored, his legs stretched out in front of him, and paused midway through a yawn when he realized I was looking at him.

“I think you’re up.” Ghislain elbowed him harder than seemed necessary, and he straightened in the chair.

“I’m Ace.” He had bright red hair and a sleep-thick voice, as though he’d only just woken up. “Thoushalt’s mine. When I was little my mam caught me tryin’ to take a swan dive off our terrace; ever since I’ve wanted to be up in the air.”

“That’s a load of horseshit,” said Rook. “What is that, a fucking poem? You sound like Raphael.”

“Yes, and I so love it when you insult me where I can hear you, Rook.”

There were so many of them, screamed a panicky voice in my head. I quelled it quickly, gaze flicking over to a man with black, curly hair. He’d leaned halfway out of his chair to shout down the line.

“You must be Raphael,” I said bravely, attempting to regain the thread of what I’d started.

He looked at me as though he’d forgotten I was in the room at all. I nodded encouragingly.

“Oh,” he leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs with a fluid motion. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize we’d reached my place in line yet.”

I couldn’t tell from his tone whether that was meant as a jibe at me or an honest apology. My money was on the former, but before I could decide, he was speaking again.

“I am Raphael,” he said with an illustrative wave of his hand. “I’ve been blessed with flying Natalia, the beauty. Truth be told, I was getting very bored with the monotony of our days with hardly any battles to fight. Perhaps this will prove interesting.”

“Thank you, Raphael,” I said quickly, over a loud and disbelieving sound from Rook down at the far end. I was beginning, I felt, to get the hang of this. The key was to speak quickly, before Rook could get his comments in and set off the others. “Next,” I said, a little too sharply and a little too closely to the way one of my least favorite professors had, but I couldn’t afford to wince.

Mercifully, there was only a short silence this time, as those who’d introduced themselves glared at the stragglers.

“I’m Jeannot,” said another man with the dark hair and eyes of a Ramanthine, which meant that his family too must have been very old or very inbred. His nose was thin, like the blade of a knife. “I’m on Al Atan, and I’ve never seen the ocean at anything closer than a dragon’s height.”