Havemercy (9 page)

“Oh,” said Balfour, from whom I hadn’t expected an outburst. He looked as though he’d just heard something very sad. “Sorry,” he said, by way of realizing he’d interrupted. “Only, I didn’t know that.”

“I told you he was a girl,” said Rook with savage triumph. “Got feminine parts between his legs, airman’s honor.”

I bit my tongue and counted slowly to five. Balfour put his gloves back on and stared down at his hands.

“Merritt, I swear by the bastion, if you don’t sit still I am going to lynch you in the showers.”

At the opposite end of the line, a man entirely too freckly for his own good scowled in hurt dignity. His companion, the one who’d spoken, turned in his chair to face me.

“This training, will it make Merritt less irritating?”

“Well,” I began.

“Fuck off, Evariste.” The freckled one crossed his arms across his chest, then his legs at the ankle, like a sullen child who’d been scolded.

“Ah,” I tried again. “It’s not exactly—why don’t the pair of you tell us something about yourselves.” This was progress, I told myself. Real progress.

And if not, it would make for excellent research material once I’d picked the shattered fragments of my dignity up from off the black-and-white floor.

The one who’d complained—Evariste—chewed at his lip. His hair stood at ends, like he’d often tugged at it in thought. “I fly Illarion. What about me, what about me . . . oh yes! Once I ate a pound of butter.”

The giggler—Compagnon; I drilled it into my memory—started up again.

I had a feeling I didn’t want to ask after the story that went with that anecdote. If anything, I could save it for a later exercise.

Merritt’s cheeks were stained bright red with either anger or embarrassment, I couldn’t tell which, though it made me wonder how many of the airmen were happy being tied together in such an intimate way. Several of them seemed as though they’d function best as individuals and not smaller parts of a greater whole.

“I’m Merritt,” he said gruffly. “I’ve got Vachir. My sister got married last month.”

“And you didn’t invite us to the wedding?” A man who’d turned his chair the wrong way around, seemingly for the sole purpose of leaning his arms across the back, turned his head to leer at Merritt. “Might have liked the opportunity of seeing your sister again.”

Adamo cleared his throat from the center of the room, as though he was growing short of patience. I was grateful, even if his impatience was sure to be directed toward me in due time.

“Oops,” said the man in the backward chair. His mouth would have looked distinctly feminine on anyone else, round and full as it was. He flashed a careless smile. “Niall. I fly Erdeni. I’ve found the perfect place to nap in th’Esar’s orchard, and I’m not telling a man of you where it is.”

“Fuck, Magoughin told us that joke last week,” Rook pounded his fist against the chair. Then, he smiled like a cat having helped himself not only to the canary, but to the entire Esarian aviary of birds. “It’s th’Esarina’s lap.”

Someone laughed, broad-faced and friendly. He waved his one enormous shovel-pan hand in the air like a child at school eager for recognition.

“Magoughin?” I asked, even though I was fairly certain of the response.

“Chastity’s mine. And I collect jokes, of a sort,” he replied.

I nodded, though presumably this was not a private piece of information. I would have to bend a little, I’d realized, in order to get anywhere successfully with the Dragon Corps. They no longer seemed as one, a wall of intimidation stark against me, but rather like a mob of jackdaws, pecking at each other, and cawing, and preening their own feathers. I could manage this. I would.

“He’s Ivory,” Magoughin added helpfully, nodding to the man at his left, so blond and pale that he looked almost unreal.

“They call me that because I’m good at the piano,” he said, in a voice as dry as sandpaper. “Not because of my skin, so don’t even bother asking. Oh, and I ride Cassiopeia.”

“I—I wasn’t going to,” I assured him, quickly stifling the sudden, insistent notion that I should and could have been taking notes this entire time. They may have seemed like trivial bits of information, but anything additional I could learn about this merry band of lunatics might very well help me in the future. You never knew what was going to be important, as Marius was often fond of pointing out when my patience with studies had worn thin. Jokes, the piano, the giggling—even Merritt’s tapping and Balfour’s gloves—there was something to be gleaned from all of this, if I were to treat them as individuals.

Divide and conquer—it was an old adage.

“Luvander,” the final voice piped up, and I forced myself to acknowledge him politely instead of slumping to the floor with relief. He wore dark hair tied back from his face, and his coat was unbuttoned. “I fly Yesfir, though I like to think it’s more as how she deigns to let me hop on once in a while. In any case, I really hate going last.”

“Ah,” I said, most cleverly. And then, when no one jumped in immediately to comment, I straightened my shoulders and allowed the success of the moment to buoy my spirits, however briefly. “Well. Thank you, everyone. I appreciate the . . . enthusiasm some of you exhibited in sharing.”

“Whoa there just a second, ’Versity boy.” Rook had leaned forward in his chair again, eyes like twin chips of bright ice. “Where’s your introduction?”

Ah, yes, I thought. I’d forgotten that. I’d prepared something in advance—something clever and noncommittal, something which wouldn’t prove fuel for the fires—but at the moment my energy was sapped, my nerves jangling, Rook’s eyes skewering me like I was the board in a game of darts. I knew immediately that I’d forgotten all of it—my introduction and my speech, my purpose in neat and precise order; everything I’d prepared and memorized.

I looked out over the group, all fourteen of them against the one of me. They were only men, I thought; they flew great steel beasts that were quirky and capricious, but these were only men, and all men had some human tenderness.

“Well, as you may already know,” I said, hating myself for the uncertainty in my voice, “my name is Thom, and I—” I remembered it out of the blue, like a thunderclap. “I’ve never actually seen a dragon up close.”

HAL

I was supposed to meet the Margrave for our daily walk. I don’t know how it became a ritual but it did. And, after a few days, I couldn’t imagine my life without the ambling path we took every noontime along the Locque Nevers, occasionally speaking, but most often not. It was awkward at times, and once I stumbled so that I almost took a dive into the water, but I think it did the chatelain’s brother some good to be out and about. Fresh air was the cure for all ills, or so said Cooke, the chatelain’s stableboy, with a laugh and a toss of his head much like a horse. And the Mme said it as well, though she never took fresh air for herself, claiming it made her dizzy.

The first time I’d thought it would be worse than it was, the two of us walking not quite side by side, and the Margrave’s profile very sharp and lean against the sunlight.

“Well,” I said.

I’d said “Well” three times now. It seemed only fair that I continue to fish for conversation like any other man would for—well, fish, I supposed—casting the line out into the dark, quiet waters and waiting each time hopefully, though I was granted no answering bite. The Margrave didn’t enjoy talking, which was funny, since he seemed as if he might have been the sort of man who had enjoyed it. Once.

His unhappiness had begun to poison him, though I wasn’t sure exactly how. I’d never seen someone so unhappy in my life. I wanted to reach out to him with something more than a Well, halting and inadequate.

This time, however—the fourth time—the Margrave stopped by the edge of the river.

“What fish,” he said, “do you suppose frequent these waters?”

“I have no idea,” I replied.

That was the extent of our first conversation. From the sigh of disappointment he heaved, I assumed I’d let him down somehow, but it wasn’t my job to teach William or Alexander about the Locque Nevers, which meant I’d never been given cause to teach myself this unexpectedly necessary information.

I asked Cooke that evening, and he said there weren’t any fish at all in Locque Nevers, though in some places there were tadpoles and newts and bullfrogs.

“Interesting,” the Margrave said, when I relayed this knowledge.

That was the extent of our second conversation.

The third was longer, and seemed to make him almost happy before it made him much more unhappy. He spoke to me about the city—his own inspiration, though I felt guilty nonetheless.

“What sort of man you are depends on the bar you frequent,” he explained to me, quite patiently, while I listened wide-eyed as a child—and to him, I suppose, I was one. “And I don’t mean bar as in your provincial equivalent—a roof and a few stools and a great sweating hulk of a man slamming out dreadful, diseased drink for fools who don’t know the difference. No. Pantheon Bar, for example, is a great cobbled stretch right by the Amazement, which is the entertainment district, though I’m sure you’ve heard of that. Men from the Basquiat tend to prefer Pantheon over Reliquary, which I’d say is something of a more . . . old-school feel, for those who still claim loyalty, for whatever reason, to the spirit of the Ramanthe, while the students at the ’Versity are all for Chapel, which is cheaper, you see, and caters to the flashier sensibilities of the young.”

I soaked it all in like a wet stone soaks in sunlight. “Oh,” I said happily, but I couldn’t imagine it.

Then, all at once, the Margrave’s eyes shuttered and closed completely. I could see pain etch itself deeply around his eyes and mouth, so that it was hard for me to believe that he was a good many years younger than the chatelain himself.

“Are you all right?” I asked, worrying my lower lip but not daring to reach out to him. A cold wind was blowing in over the water.

“I’m going back,” he said.

I didn’t understand his moods, nor did I understand the private miseries he nursed. The Mme needed her smelling salts whenever his name was mentioned, and the rumors Cooke passed back and forth with Collins and Ramsey and Miller—who might not have known what they were talking about, but might also have known more than I did—were vicious.

I couldn’t ask the chatelain. It wasn’t my place, and he would have bellowed all the window glass out of their frames.

I wondered to myself, the night I heard Cooke and Collins and the rest talking about it, whether or not it mattered what he’d done—if it was what they said, or something like they said but different, or something truly bad, or something so stupid it didn’t merit thinking about. I decided that it wasn’t, rolled over in my little bed, and fell asleep soon after.

ROYSTON

It was raining, hard like walls of water whipped sideways by the howling wind, when my brother came to me, hair wet and plastered over his brow, face wet, lips blue. I’d been sleeping—or rather, lying in my bed with my face to the wall—and was about to muster some snide quip from the depths of my weariness when I saw his expression fully, not just obscured and backlit from the hall.

I sat up. “William,” my brother said, dripping all over the floor. It would warp the wood. “Damn child, always thinks he’s playing when he isn’t—never mind, never mind. He was out earlier, before the storm hit. Hal went out to find him, only the idiot boy didn’t tell anyone, and we’d only just noticed them missing when Cooke came in to tell us he’d seen Hal set out—”

I was already pulling on my boots. What my brother thought he’d accomplish by running out into the rain was beyond me, but it stirred some trembling emotion in my chest to see how deeply he loved his children, despite how helpless he was to express any of it.

“What do you think?” I asked, not relishing the idea of going out into the rain. My left boot was giving me trouble, but unlike my brother’s, my hands weren’t shaking. “Where do you think they’d be?”

“William thinks it’s funny,” my brother said, then his voice broke on something wet and cold, “to play by the marsh.”

“And that’s where you think they are?”

“Hal would have gone there to check for him,” my brother confirmed. He pushed his wet hair back off his forehead, then grabbed my arm with his wet hand. “Can you—?”

He meant: Was my magic something that could help in this matter. My brother had never bothered to learn the specifics of my Talent, which had hurt me once and now no longer mattered. It was too complicated to explain to a man so bent on remaining mired in country feudalism. In short, my Talent wasn’t going to be especially helpful, no, but I had common sense and experience in similar matters; I’d saved an entire garrison of Reds on an afternoon as piss-poor as this one, and I was the only person in the entire household who had the head for doing what needed to be done to make sure no one was marsh-drowned by morning.

“No,” I told my brother. “ But I’ll find them.”

“Yes,” said my brother. “Right. What do you need?”

“I’ll need a coat,” I said at length, for I realized that none of my clothes had been tailored specifically for a downpour in the countryside.

“A coat,” my brother repeated.

“Yes,” I confirmed, then stood up. There was a moment when it seemed I’d done it too quickly, and the blood rushed from my uppers too soon, but I held in place for a moment and the dizziness passed. I took my brother by his wet arm and steered him out of the room and down the stairs. I was not unaccustomed to telling men and women what to do in their own homes; mercifully my brother seemed to have gone into a kind of frozen waterlogged trance, where he was numb to trifles such as hurt dignity or misplaced rivalry.

Once on the landing, he went to the closet while I kicked the toe of my left boot against the floor, still dissatisfied with the fit and feel of it.

The rain hammered down against the roof with a force that sounded as though it had the entirety of the Locque Nevers behind it. This was foolish, I knew, as rivers could not be pulled from their beds without at least three days’ advance planning and a geographical knowledge of the area.