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He tacked on this last as if he hoped very much that it were true. On my other side, Adamo snorted; he didn’t even bother trying to hide it.

  I had never before felt so strongly the urge for a door of my very own that I could lock, not even when I’d been living in the very depths of Molly, where a lack of things to steal did not necessarily preclude break-ins.

  Small blessings, I told myself again. Rook would be out for the evening, likely the entire night, and might not have the care to coat my hand in something strange and wet. I felt some helpless frustration once again at my predicament, that I’d allowed myself so easily to be caught at the tender mercies of the very type of system I’d made strict measures to avoid my entire life.

  “Well,” I said, and was promptly cut off by a bloodcurdling scream that echoed down the hallways.

  “My books!”

  “Ah,” said Balfour. “That will be Raphael.”

  “My books,” said Raphael again, louder this time and with a quivering timbre to his voice, as though he was a volcano on the edge of eruption. “What have you done, you piss-drinking sons of Ke-Han whores?”

  “Shit,” Adamo said, the curse torn rough as crushed cobblestone from his throat. “I’d better go. Docks’re off-limits,” he repeated to me, as though I were simple.

  I could take no offense at his attitude, though, instead nodding to show that I really did understand. The Chief Sergeant was a man I did not want on any side but my own, and if that meant a little more bowing and scraping than usual, so be it.

  He marched off down the hallway to the tune of a muffled crash, followed by a series of undignified hoots and hollers that sounded like nothing so much as an entire band of wild chimpanzees let loose from the zoo.

  I thought about calm things: the surface of a lake on a windless day, the grant money I would receive for my studies upon completing this assignment. The knowledge that, even if they killed me, I was still much, much smarter.

  There was another scream.

  “Madeline!”

  “I bet it’s Niall and Compagnon,” said Balfour confidentially. “They’ve had this big secret project going for weeks now. Papier-mâché. I guess they ran out of paper.”

  “Oh,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Balfour nodded. “It was going to be a scale model of the city, only Compagnon gave it these, you know, enormous breasts, so now it’s just a misshapen sort of woman. She’s in the common room—not the private one, but the other one.”

  “And that’s . . . Madeline?” I asked, with a sense of looming dread.

  “Yes,” said Balfour. “She’s kind of like our mascot.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ROYSTON

  If asked, I couldn’t have pinpointed the exact time or day when Hal’s tradition of reading to me in the evenings became reversed, so that I was the one telling the stories, but it had happened. Some nights we would retire to the drawing room and—William having bragged to his siblings both younger and older—I would find myself seated hearthside, speaking to a rapt semicircle of bright, dark eyes as my brother’s wife drifted in and out, mostly to “tch” noisily at the most violent parts. I prided myself on only ever having made Emilie cry once, and I thought perhaps that if William hadn’t jeered at her so mercilessly, the whole mess might have been avoided entirely.

  It was during these stories that I was most aware of Hal, the open wonderment on his face, the careful attention he paid to my words, as though I were one of the romans to which he was so devoted. A folly of mine perhaps, but it inspired me to find somewhere inside myself the parts that hadn’t yet been ground down to rubble and compost by the country, and I was glad of it.

  There was little news from the city, though I freely admitted to my friends in written word that the fault was mine for allowing the lines of communication to dry up. A colleague of mine from the Basquiat wrote that there was some great uproar in the Dragon Corps, that they were being made to take etiquette classes. I immediately wrote to the only touchstone I had ever cared to have among the Esar’s colorful band of self-important animals: Chief Sergeant Adamo.

  The letter I’d got back confirmed everything I’d been told, and what was more—the man doing the teaching was a student barely out of the ’Versity.

  He seems very clever, Adamo’s letter read. And I think he’ll do all right so long as he survives the first few weeks, which he might not, and so long as he’s quiet enough that Rook forgets him completely when the lessons aren’t on. I don’t really know what th’Esar’s thinking having him stay here, of all places, but it’ll work out or it won’t.

  Everything’s going swimmingly in the country, I hope. Don’t go so long without writing again, or I’ll have to break th’Esar’s rules myself and fly upcountry way to pluck you out of there myself.

  At the very idea of this I laughed so long and loud that Hal came to investigate. The letters from home, coupled with my newfound audience for what stories I’d collected, had made a world of difference in what I no longer viewed as the most terrible of exiles.

  And then, of course, there was Hal.

  He was, I liked to tell myself, the ubiquitous essence of that part of the countryside I still couldn’t bring myself to hate. One of my mentors had told me that in order to be embraced by Thremedon, a man must cast aside all other lovers and take the city as his one and only—for then her secrets would be spread wide open, as in a card trick or a whorehouse. It seemed a very apt theory—though with my proclivities, I was required to modify the analogy somewhat.

  Yet at the same time—though Thremedon was always my other lover, as it were—and as much as I hated to admit it, the country was my home. I’d been raised not in Nevers but in Tonnerre, on its border, and no matter how much time I’d spent learning the city as I would have learned a lover—and no matter how I yearned for that other lover during my exile—no man could ever completely expunge all trace of his first lover from his heart. I, too, was a victim of this pattern. In my own way, I suppose I still yearned to be accepted by this place I couldn’t quite bring myself to accept in return.

  If I’d been a philosopher and not a Margrave, I would have solved this problem for myself already. Or, at least, I’d have owned a better vocabulary for grappling with it privately. Perhaps that would have assuaged my bruised ego somewhat.

  Unfortunately, the truth of the matter remained: I had conflated Hal with something taken from my own needs, and I found myself seeking out his company for reasons I should not have allowed myself to act upon or even to indulge in thought. His approval meant everything to me—the way he wrapped his arms around his knees and held them tight during the most frightening moments in my memoirs, or insisted on sitting on the floor at my feet, even when there were ample chairs for him to make use of. In his eyes I saw admiration and fascination both, as if he wished to read me like a book. And Hal, I knew, was a voracious reader.

  It sparked something untoward in me, some answering desire to be read. He had a sharp mind and was cleverer than he thought he was, than the country had allowed him to be. Still, it was hardly in selflessness that I offered him all the knowledge I had that was fit for more innocent ears, hardly in selflessness that I endeavored to keep him near to me whenever I could.

  To measure how impossible I had truly become, how stubborn and how self-involved, one need only take this for an example: I sought him out myself, though I always made it seem as if I hadn’t. After his cold had ended I even mentioned our usual walks by the Nevers, more than once, though I tried with the coy neediness of a schoolboy to seem thoroughly disinterested in whether he could spare the time for me or not.

  Hal wasn’t the sort of creature suited to such games. I didn’t think he had any idea I was playing them.

  What did I want? I was certain that I wanted something—I knew it because I’d found once more the will to rise and bathe and knock the dust out of my own curtains, to demand some servant’s punctuality to air the choking smell of dust
out of the entire room—but it was there that my self-awareness ceased to be useful. I had no doubt I was protecting myself from the nature of my eagerness to please and to be favored above all other members of the household. This last wasn’t very hard, for he was treated quite abominably, despite his tenuous kinship to my brother’s wife. I don’t mean that he was in any way overtly abused. It was simply that most pretended he wasn’t there, and while he seemed not to mind overly much, it was nevertheless true that every time I made overtures or reached out to engage him in conversation his warm eyes, the pale blue color of a dreaming sky, lit up immediately. Now that I was no longer steeped in my own self-pity I could recognize the signs at once. This was an affectionate young man who was being starved for warmth.

  He was also clever, and being starved of something to test his cleverness against. This, I supposed, was the reason for all the reading he did—for the way he tore into new books the way desert sands swallowed any and all water for which they were so burningly parched.

  It was once again selfish of me, but I loved to watch him read. He had nimble, long fingers and he turned the pages of his romans with a trembling reverence—trembling, I realized quickly enough, because he was keeping a necessary hold on himself, that he wouldn’t become so overeager as to tear a single page. He read as he walked; read in small, snug corners of every room; read outside in the branches of trees and tucked up against tree trunks. When he was at the table he wished he was reading. Only when he was at my feet and listening to my evening stories did that wistful expression fade from his face. Only then was the same hunger he usually reserved for the secrets between the pages fixed on someone alive and breathing in this world.

  I admit freely that I lived to be sole proprietor of that expression. I dreamed of it at night and waited all day long to see it again.

  Was this so selfish of me? Perhaps it was. Yet, in all honesty, I kept the children entertained and kept William from going mad during his confinement, which also kept the burden from resting solely upon Hal’s shoulders. The Mme even fainted less. In my own way, I was useful in a house that still didn’t entirely forgive my presence; and I was glad, also, to be wanted, by someone. It was a small thing, but it gave me a purpose, even if I’d never fancied myself the country bard before.

  One evening, William asked me, “Are those stories all true, Uncle Royston?”

  “As true as any story can be,” I replied with a smile.

  At that moment Hal caught my eyes, his own bright and wide. I understood, with a sudden and fierce thunderclap of epiphany, what it was I had cobbled together and pinned all my hopes to.

  I excused myself from the room at once, worrying Emilie and troubling Hal and sending William into a fit of a tantrum in which he made Etienne’s nose bleed all over the brand-new rug my brother’s wife had just procured for the sitting room.

  If we were to go about labeling things, then I will readily admit that was selfish.

  Sometime later, I heard a tentative knock on my bedroom door. I knew whose knock it was; I’d memorized it. How I hadn’t realized before the extent and the particular quality of my feelings, I didn’t know. I was an idiot.

  “Come in,” I said. Even in the depths of condemning myself, I couldn’t keep Hal out. I simply didn’t want to.

  He entered the room and closed the door very quietly behind him, perhaps to keep the light from the hallway from bothering me. There he stood, his back against the door and his hands behind him, still holding the doorknob, I presumed, and worrying his lower lip as he so often did. My heart made a strange revolution in my chest. I was sunk, as surely as I lay there.

  “Are you feeling unwell?” Hal asked at last, when the silence was too long and too thick for either of us to bear a second more. “I thought perhaps, since you left so suddenly—”

  “Something of a headache,” I replied lightly. I hated myself not simply for worrying him, but for lying to him now—as if it made even an inch of difference.

  “Oh,” said Hal. Then he nodded, as though this were a perfectly appropriate reason for leaving as abruptly as I had, rather than merely excusing myself as any gentleman would have done in my place.

  He would accept any answer I gave him, I felt certain. Except for the truth.

  I had a fleeting, foreign wish for my old fog of indifference. Then I might have something at least to shield me from this awareness, new and raw. It was rather akin to having a headache, in that every movement seemed magnified, but my affliction was—for mercy or tragedy—centered only and irrevocably around Hal.

  The doorknob clicked as he let go of it and came forward, hands clasped still behind his back.

  “Would you like me to read to you?” His brow creased in a rare frown. “No, I suppose that wouldn’t help, would it?”

  It would help neither my fictional headache nor what truly ailed me. And, as selfish as I was, I could not stomach the idea of lying in bed while Hal read to me as though nothing had changed.

  “No,” I agreed, too quickly for manners, too quickly to stop the hurt from flashing across Hal’s face, visible as print on the page. I felt like a brute, protecting myself at the expense of his ego, but trapped here as I was in the house, the country, I could think of no other way. I would not indulge in the same mistake twice.

  “Would you like the drapes shut, then?” Hal’s face had a curious look to it, wary and uncertain.

  I realized then what it looked like, and that his concern revolved around the idea that I might have given up once more on life in the country at large and decided to shutter myself away. How could I explain that it was quite the opposite? The idea itself was laughable. Only I wasn’t laughing.

  “That’s all right,” I said at length, then sat up straighter so as to reassure him. “It’s only a headache.”

  “Of course,” he said, relief passing smooth as glass over his face. Hal, I understood, had quite simply never been given cause to hide his emotions from anyone. It was rather a dangerous skill to be without. “Well, you’ll call if you need anything? There are always servants about—or me.”

  “I’m sure it will be gone come morning,” I said, no longer in control of my own lie nor even clear on the good it could possibly be doing. After all, I would doubtless wake up in the morning exactly as I was now, lest I took as desperate measures as the men in the historically inaccurate books Hal had been reading in earlier months: which was to say, cut my own heart from my chest and seal it away for safekeeping.

  “I hope so,” he confided. “Otherwise, William will be inconsolable. And, well, you’ve seen him when he’s inconsolable. It tends to lead to bloodshed.”

  I nodded and felt that this would be an appropriate place for an apology about the rug. “You may give him my deepest regrets,” I told Hal instead. “And inform him that no one was eaten by ravenous sea creatures.”

  “That will disappoint him,” said Hal.

  “He’ll get used to it,” I said, too coldly again. It wasn’t right or fair of me; I knew that Hal was made for no such pretenses, and that a good man, a better man, would have been perfectly clear with him.

  There was a short silence, wherein I could see Hal struggle for a clear direction to take the conversation from there. I should have warned him that it was impossible. In the country, as I might well have known, there were many trees to become tangled in.

  “Are you quite sure that there’s nothing I can get for you, Margrave Royston?”

  The mere fact that I’d grown less self-indulgent, dragged myself from a mire of self-pity, did not mean that my brother’s request had changed, or that Hal came to see me out of anything resembling his own volition. Remembering this fact made things a little easier, like digging one’s nails into the palm of one’s hand to ward off distraction, or the advances of those with mind-reading Talents. A bit perverse, perhaps, but it was a small and necessary pain, there for me to call out of the ether whenever I so happened to need the reminder.

  “Yes, Hal,” I assured
him. And then, buoyed by some fool capricious impulse, I looked at him directly. “You needn’t address me that way, in case you haven’t noticed. The rest of the family certainly doesn’t bother.”

  “Oh,” he said. The tips of his ears went a helpless, bright pink so that I had to look away. “I only thought—I’m not true family, see.”

  “Be that as it may,” I said patiently.

  I was not normally a patient man; it was the reason I’d turned down a position at the ’Versity Stretch when they’d offered it. Professors had to enjoy the gift of teaching and I was no teacher. I was too impatient, too scattered and self-interested. I wanted nothing to do with someone else’s ideas and wanted to share none of my own. This curious new generosity was a change and—despite the contempt I held for the country and its own fear of progress—it affected me.

  “All right,” he replied after a spell, and I thought he sounded pleased, though I couldn’t bring myself to look and see.

  HAL

  The night I learned for certain of Margrave Royston’s reason for coming to stay with us started just the same as any other night, with no warning signs nor any indication that it was to be something out of the ordinary.

  I’d prepared the children for dinner as best I could. Earlier that day, William celebrated his release from captivity by immediately finding the largest and squishiest mud puddle left by the rains; he’d used it to spark a war between himself and any of the others who came near, myself included. By the time we’d all got clean again, we’d run short on hot water, and that put Mme in a foul temper.

  Mme was in a foul temper often enough these days, though she was fainting less. I came upon her arguing with the chatelain in the study about influences—specifically, the sort of influence the Margrave was having on the children and William in particular, who now proclaimed to anyone who asked that he was going to move to the city just as soon as he was able. He’d also picked up one or two words that had slipped into the stories in the heat of the moment, words that caused our cook to chase him about the house with a wooden spoon.