The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives) (2 page)

             
“There was.” The lines around the duke's eyes deepened as he frowned at a point over Mr. Tobin's head, seemingly lost in thought. Try as she might, Scarlet couldn't comprehend his expression; it seemed strangely…sad. And why had Abigail's face gone so pale?

             
After a pause, Reece cleared his throat and spoke while watching his father out of the corner of his eye. “There was a second assassin, and he did wear a gold mask. But he was killed in the explosion.”

             
With a cough that barely passed for a laugh, Mr. Tobin picked up his goblet and tipped it at Reece as if offering a toast, all the while staring beadily at him. “Well, you're probably something of a hero at The Owl, I imagine. Unmasked an imposter, saved the duke and Parliament…killed a Vee, too, and that's no small feat.”

“
Actually, I just pushed him off a balcony.”

             
Nobody said anything for a long moment.

             
Finally, Abigail, whose eyes looked rather red, snapped, “Are we ready for the second course, or are we going to keep yapping our appetites away?”

             
The second course—fruit salad garnished with mint leaves—stretched impossibly longer than the first, with the Tobins always returning to the night of the masquerade, ferreting for gossip. The duke took it all with that dark grace of his, but Abigail's disdainful sniffs kept growing more and more pronounced.

             
“Blasted shame about Liem, by the way,” Mr. Tobin said as he cleaned the bottom of his fruit dish, affecting an appropriately mournful expression.

“
Terrible, just terrible,” Mrs. Tobin echoed. “But the funeral was lovely.”

             
The duke nodded grimly, and Abigail drank deeply from her goblet. There was definitely something there, Scarlet decided. She'd already had her suspicions, of course. Liem pronounced dead the same night as the horrific heliocraft crash? It was too great a coincidence. This settled it in her mind. For whatever reason, Liem
had
been on
The Jester
.

             
“I wonder,” Mrs. Tobin said in a conspiratorial voice, “if Headmaster Eldritch had something to do with Liem's abduction?”

             
Scarlet's keen eye picked up on the short glance passing between Reece and his father.

             
“I'd say that's likely,” the duke said, and Mrs. Tobin swelled with pride.

             
Sweet nut and honey bread and lamb stew came and was then replaced by apple pie and tea, and the conversation dragged, but still Scarlet listened, mentally filing valuable little tidbits—such as Reece and the duke's shared glance, and Abigail's red eyes and heavy drinking—away for later. It was boring, tedious work, but necessary.

             
“…can't blame a man for wondering, of course,” Mr. Tobin droned on. “But us in the Economics Department, we don't hear much of these things. The army is still being raised, then?”

             
Scarlet tipped her head in interest, swilling her tea gently. That particular nugget of information was one she had mined months ago. Parliament had enacted the involuntary draft to raise the numbers of Honora's ground and air forces, undoubtedly for war.
What
war, however, remained yet another mystery. Reece, along with his friend Hubert, had actually been drafted before his father had belatedly exempted them in accordance with The Duke's Rite of Imbuement, but if he knew any more about who his enemies would have been than Scarlet, he'd kept the knowledge to himself.

             
“Yes, Theodore,” the duke answered, sounding impatient at last. “The army is still being raised. Surely you are not
that
cut off in the D.E. offices. Several of your co-workers' sons were drafted, after all.”

             
Waving his goblet, Mr. Tobin bumbled, “Had to hear it from the mouth of the horse, as it were. No one seems to know what it's being raised
for
, you see.”

             
“I would have thought that'd be obvious. Charles Eldritch's extensive infiltration of Honora begs us to be prepared. I doubt it will be the last time aliens make a bid for our planet.”

             
“Is that what the creature was doing, then? Making a bid for our planet?”

             
“Oh, for pity's sake!” Startling them all, Abigail slapped a palm to the tabletop and glowered around at her company. “Can we speak of nothing else? I've been too busy to see daylight these past weeks because of that wretched night. Scarlet.”

             
Scarlet looked up expectantly, wiping her face of her look of concentration.

             
“How are your twin sisters? Are they liking The Academy?”

             
Scarlet inwardly grimaced and outwardly smiled—a skill she had honed with years of practice. “Well, they certainly like it…but I think they'd do better if there were fewer boys at The Academy to distract them.” Fewer boys meaning
no boys
. Kitty and Savannah could make a career out of chasing boys with no intention of chasing them back, and they'd excel at it, the silly things.

             
“Hmph,” Abigail snorted, clicking her fingers for a servant to clear away the empty dessert dishes.              “I'll have to keep my eyes on them. If I can't marry Reece off to you, that leaves me at least two other Ashdowns to pick from.”

             
“Abigail,” the duke chided, chuckling with Mr. and Mrs. Tobin as Lucious frowned to himself. He had looked a little
too
interested in Scarlet's mention of her younger sisters' fancies; she made a mental note to keep him clear of family picnics.

             
“What? I'm being perfectly serious, Thaddy. If we don't marry your son off before he heads into the Streams, we'll die without any grandchildren.”

             
“Please forgive my wife, Mrs. Ashdown.” The duke bowed his head to Scarlet's mother, who had barely said two words since the lunch began, though hardly for lack of thought, if Scarlet knew her at all.             

“
Of course,” Mrs. Ashdown said lightly, smiling. “Either girl would be delighted at the thought of an arranged marriage to our young captain.”

             
“There, you see?” Tossing her ashy brown hair and leaning back in her seat, Abigail said to Reece, “Well? Does my hopeless son have anything to say on the matter, or can I expect our family name to stop with your Uncle Uriah? Perish the thought.”

             
Reece, who had been staring into his apple pie, started and lifted his head. He looked from his mother to Mrs. Ashdown, and then turned to face the duke, wearing an unfathomable expression. “I'd like to make sure the Dryad is seen to before the storm gets any worse.”

             
“Go,” the duke said before Abigail could put words to the anger coloring her face. “For goodness' sake, just go. Before your mother starts performing the nuptials.”

             
Grinning, Reece stood and backed out from the table with a sloppy bow.

             
“I'll come with you,” Scarlet offered, standing.

             
Reece raised an eyebrow at her, then jerked his chin towards the door. It was as close to a formal invitation as she could expect.

             
“As will I!”

             
“No you bleeding won't,” Mr. Tobin growled at Lucious, who deflated quite comically. “You'll stay here and help your mother out to the carriage. You know how bad her ankles are in this ice.”

             
Reece led Scarlet through the entrance hall, whistling, and took a short detour to fetch his black flight jacket from where he'd hung it on the antlers of the stag over the fireplace. He paused before pulling it on to straighten the silver wings on its shoulder. He'd been waiting for those wings since the day the duke had brought him home his very first model Nyad and helped him assemble it on the library floor. There'd come a point over these last few tumultuous months when he'd begun to think he'd never get them. He'd learned to live with the idea—after all, in the face of trying to overthrow a tyrant alien and save his father from assassination, they were a little thing to care about—but since he'd gotten them, they'd come to symbolize something more than just his right to captain a ship.

             
Scarlet watched him slide into his jacket, amused.

             
“Well?” he asked her, holding out his arms and turning to model.

             
“It looks the same as your old jacket.”

             
“It
is
the old jacket. But the wings finish it off, don't they? Kind of give it a sort of…lackadaisical sophistication?”

             
“Lackadaisical sophistication?” Scarlet repeated as she pulled on a pair of winter gloves. “Honestly, Reece, you should be careful. If your head grows much larger, I fear it won't fit into the cockpit.” A servant brought her a white fur coat and bonnet, and she transformed into a walking snowball, albeit a pretty one.

             
They walked quietly through Emathia's back halls, which were lit by sputtering photon globes in gold brackets on the walls. The light of the stained-glass windows they passed was muffled by the snow piling on the outside sills. Winter had come on fast; it slowed Reece's plans to an irritating crawl.

             
Of course, Scarlet had a habit of slowing Reece's plans too. The girl could dig the truth out of a pile of lies without ever getting her hands dirty, and she had a nose for smelling out cover-ups Reece thought he'd made watertight.

             
“Have you been enjoying your holiday?” Scarlet asked, sweeping along beside Reece as he led the way towards the motor vehicle stables behind the mansion.

             
“It's been busy,” Reece said honestly.

             
“I noticed.” Of course she did. “You and your father seem to be getting along better nowadays.”

             
Hesitating briefly, Reece nodded, opening a squat oak door and pattering down the set of marble stairs behind it. That was actually one of the reasons he'd been so busy. For better or for worse, since the masquerade, his father had been doggedly trying to make up for the years he'd kept himself an arm's length from Reece to protect him from Charles Eldritch and essentially, The Kreft. Knowing what he did now—that the duke's first wife had been murdered by The Kreft while her son, Liem, had been baited into joining them—Reece could understand why the duke had felt the necessity to abstain from close relationships.

             
Which made it so much harder not to feel guilty about the duke's latest attempts at father-son camaraderie. Reece was leaving…maybe for good, peyeingrovided his mechanic got his ship,
The Aurelia
, functional. The airship had been sleeping on a museum floor for the last two hundred years; he couldn't very well expect her to yawn, stretch, and start living again after a quick kip. Luckily, he had not one genius working on her, but
three
. Po Trimble and her brothers could refashion a muffler, a mirror, and a couple of wheels into an automobile; they could get Aurelia airborne.

             
“Things are never going to change between us, are they?” Scarlet suddenly asked as Reece paused to pull on a pair of leather gloves before the windowed backdoor the servants used to come and go from the mansion.

             
Abigail's talks of betrothal were good for a joke and all, but sometimes—now, for instance—Reece got the uncomfortable notion Scarlet was waiting for them to evolve into something more. There didn't seem to be a tactful way to inform her that was a long wait for a ship not coming, so he just kind of ducked her flirtatious smiles and tried to make himself unattractive. Which shouldn't have been that hard, but…

             
Hesitating with his hand on the doorknob, Reece stared out the window and into the white wasteland winter had made of the fifty foot expanse between the mansion and the stables. He felt like he was pressing his face against the glass of an enormous snow globe.

             
“Scarlet, the last thing I want to do is give you the wrong idea about us,” he said uncomfortably.

             
“I know. If one thing can be said about you, it's that you're sincere.” She looked at him, her dark green eyes searching his face. “You have a good heart, Reece.”

             
Reece sighed.

             
“But sometimes, you can be an absolute idiot.”

             
Scarlet paused, smiling at him, and with a grunt, Reece pulled open the door and let the snow wash in with the wicked wind. He was starting to think Scarlet just enjoyed seeing the look of surprised relief on his face. Every time he thought he had her figured, she pulled out a trump card. Her furry sleeves were absolutely full of them.