Havemercy Page 22

  “I’m just saying, I get a sense of people. I’ve got good taste, and there isn’t anyone out there who’s ever smacked of you before. Though one of you’s quite enough, to be honest.”

  “Did I keep you on the ground too long, is that it?” Of course, dragons couldn’t go crazy the same as people did, but any machine stopped working if you kept it from doing what it was meant to long enough. Some of the prototype dragons had just—stopped—during the first really big lull they’d hit between battles. Since Have was the newest, not to mention the best, I hadn’t thought we’d be having that problem, but she was talking some dreadful nonsense now. “I ain’t nothing like that professor.”

  “Not a drop? Not a hint?” Have asked, sounding more like some sly, calculating mistress than my sweet girl. “Anyway, I didn’t say you had any of his good qualities, the brains and the fancy manners or anything like that. What I mean is, he’s got your bad qualities, the poor bastard. The stubbornness, and the language, too. Doesn’t smell as bad as you do, though.”

  “Never took you for a traitor,” I said. “You’re sure nothing hit you in the head when I was saving that idiot’s life?”

  I was getting real angry, and there wasn’t any point in getting angry with someone who couldn’t get angry back, so I just breathed real deep and clenched my fists in tight.

  “I’m not taking anyone’s side,” she said at last, which wasn’t a proper answer at all. “Go take a bath.”

  “Didn’t know you were my mother,” I snapped.

  “Am not,” Have replied smoothly, eyelids slipping shut. “I’d’ve raised you better.”

  I didn’t do as nice a job cleaning her off as I should have—I didn’t have any time for spending on turncoat traitors when I could’ve been catching some much-needed shut-eye—but the whole thing set me off so bad I didn’t have the time to talk to Adamo about how crazy the Ke-Han were acting, and by morning it didn’t seem half so important as I’d made it out to be in the dark.

  HAL

  The way I felt for Margrave Royston was at once a strange and terrifying sensation. I had no other experiences against which I could measure it. In my ignorance I kept it safe, treasured it, held it private and unanswered and often lonely inside my chest. But for all the misery I felt in not being allowed to express it, I knew also that I’d never exchange the way I felt for a safer, less painful course. It was my own wound, my own loss. Royston was kind and he was brilliant and he told me of the city and suffered my endless questions; he even gave me a gift without any occasion, a parcel of books he’d ordered specially from a friend. Their bindings were strong, their pages thick. They were so expensive that I did all I could not to accept them, but he insisted and insisted until I could no longer protest without seeming rude. I lined them up one next to the other on the little shelf next to my bed, and gazed at them with almost the same reverence I reserved for Royston himself.

  There were times when I cried. But it wasn’t for any purpose or reason in particular, and they were few and simple tears, and I kept such moments secret. I was being quite silly about everything, since in truth I was luckier than I could believe.

  I was happy. I knew I was. I felt alive and hungry for the first time in my life—and it was only now that I realized how little I’d known before Royston arrived, what darkness it was in which I’d have been content to live out my entire life had he not shown me there could be more to real learning than the handful of foolish tools I’d been given.

  The days were bright. He answered every question I posed to him. He’d forgiven me the kiss I stole from him—though it was still between us, a shadow like a blow whenever I forgot myself and remembered it. When I was alone, I traced the shape of his mouth over mine and wondered always if it were possible—if I gave him enough time—that Royston would ever return my feelings. But these were silly wonderings—foolish, juvenile, the mark of an innocent country boy. He must have thought me very careless to have fallen so quickly and with so little reservation.

  I’d promised myself and him not to make the same mistake a second time. If I did, I’d prove an unworthy student. I was determined not to lose that which I still had, and so I was doubly careful, and tried very hard not to take advantage of what concessions he afforded me.

  Yet, on the whole, things were well enough. I cherished the moments I had with him, the books he’d given me, our conversations that ran late into the night.

  Then everything changed at once.

  The post to Nevers arrived twice a week, once just after the weekend and once just before it. When the man on horseback arrived that afternoon, I thought I must be mistaken as to the day—or that it might have had something to do with the war, since last night’s raid had woken up half the countryside; the guard tower they’d hit had been nearer to us than Thremedon proper—but William sat bolt upright from where he was sprawled, creating a fortress out of pots that he’d stolen from the kitchens.

  “It’s the wrong day for mail!” he announced delightedly.

  As excited as William was, I felt a cold sort of dread settle over me. It was a premonition, perhaps, no more than a feeling—but in all the time I’d spent at the chatelain’s castle in Nevers, the post had only ever come at its appointed time and on its appointed day. The only variable that had changed was Royston’s presence here, and because I could think of no one else, I was certain this sudden development had to do with him.

  I was right.

  William tried to eavesdrop on the conversation in the lower hall, where Royston and the chatelain and Mme were talking with the man on horseback. And, although I wished to hear their words for more immediate reasons than William’s general curiosity, duty required me to guide him away from the banister and do my best to distract him from matters that weren’t any of his business. Nor were they, I supposed, any of mine.

  Though I tried my best to keep William entertained, I could no more keep his attention from wandering to the business with the untimely post than I could keep mine from doing the same. We were both wretched to each other, and I admit a pot handle was broken that afternoon when William had a fit over how strict I was being with him.

  Perhaps I was. I apologized to him, and we endeavored to fix the pot handle, but all the while I could think of nothing but Royston, standing there at the bottom of the stairs, his back to me.

  For all I knew, he was going to leave.

  It was later—too much later—that I spoke to Royston and learned what the trouble was. In fact, it was he who came to me, knocking twice upon my little door. He’d never done so before, and I knew at once that there was real trouble.

  I let him in, and we stood before each other awkwardly.

  “I’ve been called back,” he said at last.

  “Oh,” I replied stupidly. “To the city.”

  “Yes,” he confirmed. “It means they need my Talent.”

  “For the war?”

  “For the war.”

  The tales Royston told of battle were distant; I’d always assumed, however naively and stubbornly, that they were in the past, and he’d never be put in the path of such danger again. Yet he was still a young enough magician with a vitally useful Talent. I’d never had any cause to believe what I believed beyond my own private hopes. The idea of being separated from him was not so terrible as the knowledge that he would be leaving me to go to war.

  I felt as if I were going to be sick. A moment later my knees gave way and I was sitting down heavily upon the edge of my bed, gripping the sheets until my knuckles were white.

  “Hal,” he said. I barely heard him.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow,” he replied, his voice very distant, coming to me over the thrumming of blood in my ears. “As soon as possible, but I’ve been given tonight to set my things in order and settle up matters in the country. My carriage should arrive sometime tomorrow morning.”

  I shook my head against it, closing my eyes. If pressed to categorize how I’d come to feel
about Royston, I didn’t believe it in my capacity to phrase a response. I cared for him—more than anyone else, I cared for him. I knew what life here would become without him. This change was unimaginable. “I don’t want you to go,” I said. The selfishness inherent in the words made them sound poisonous to my own ears, but I couldn’t stop myself from speaking them.

  “I cannot very well shirk my duty,” he said, and I thought I saw the ghost of a smile in the corner of his mouth. No matter how bitter it seemed, I couldn’t bear to look at even the imitation of a smile on his face in that moment. “Not when the Esar has so . . . graciously agreed to end my term of exile in the country much sooner than expected.”

  I let the words roll off me, even as I recognized what he was doing.

  “But you live here,” I said, soft and insistent. I couldn’t make myself stop.

  “Hal,” he said again, and he knelt on the floor so that I would look at him. Under normal circumstances this might have stirred some small wonderment in me, for Royston was not given to such sweeping gestures. Yet all I could feel was the dull throbbing in my skull, the sound of my pulse proclaiming that Royston was leaving both the countryside and me. “Hal, I would like you to listen to me since I’m going to be gone in the morning and I—”

  “Stop saying that,” I said, meeting his eyes at last. “I heard you the first time, I’m not stupid.”

  He moved to take my hands, and found that he could not, as I was still holding tightly to my bed. Instead, he laid his palms somewhat awkwardly over my clenched fists. Something worked in his jaw.

  “I know you aren’t stupid,” he said. “It is one of your particularly unique qualities, Hal, and I don’t have a mind toward forgetting it anytime soon. No. Nevertheless, I’ve decided—at least, I thought—to have an eye toward asking you something.”

  He was thinking out loud, babbling in the way I’d only heard very rarely, which meant that he must have been quite nervous.

  I was in no mood to console him, terrible and selfish as my misery had become, but my hands unclenched a little from their iron hold on the bedspread to wrap around his own. “Say it, then,” I whispered.

  “Come with me,” he said, all at once, as if he were afraid it might lodge in his throat halfway before he had the chance to get it out.

  It startled both of us, and me so much that I found myself unable to speak.

  “I—I would be most honored if you would come with me,” Royston quickly revised, looking down at the floor with what appeared to be considerable interest. “I’ve thought about it. Or rather, since I received the news I have been thinking about it, and, well, I think it’s the best solution. In any case, there it stands. My invitation may come as quite a shock, but I am nevertheless very serious about it.”

  I was too shocked to laugh at the way he was speaking, overly serious, as though it was a business proposal, and so I did the only thing I could do: I just flinched. My surprise was tempered with pleasure and dismay at once; I wanted to pull my hands away to cover my face and found that I could not—of course, because Royston was still holding them.

  In all the strangest fantasies I’d entertained since I began studying with him—and there had been many, in this very room, extravagant and off center as my thoughts ever were—I had always imagined that I’d give anything to hear him ask this very question of me. I would be most honored if you would come with me.

  In as many words, that was all I’d wanted. Yet it was one thing to imagine it in the dusky moments between waking and sleeping, and quite another to be faced with the possibility, real and whole in the waking world.

  I knew at once the complications; they were why I’d always assumed it would be no more than a daydream.

  “I know that I would be depriving the children of a most excellent tutor,” he went on, seeking to draw me from my silence. “I merely find that I have grown . . . accustomed to your conversation, as well as your company, and while there are a rare few people in this world whom I consider my friends, I find quite suddenly that you are one of the dearest. As I said, the request is selfish. Yet it isn’t entirely ludicrous, either. We could—There are some things, Hal, that would be greatly facilitated by a move to the city.”

  I didn’t dare to imagine what he meant by that. In the moment, with all that I stood to lose, I couldn’t afford to presume myself into even further disappointment.

  “If you wish to stay with me, then you shouldn’t leave,” I said, horrified at my own selfishness but still unable to stop myself. I freed my hands to hold his face, tilting it up to get a real, full look at it. “Don’t leave.”

  He looked at me with dark, miserable eyes, and I felt guilt settle heavy in my chest like a burden.

  I hadn’t meant to be a burden.

  “Hal,” he said at last.

  “I can’t go,” I whispered, pulling my hands away and drawing my knees up to my chest. I wished quite suddenly that he wouldn’t kneel so before me: Our positions were abruptly reversed, and I found myself unexpectedly averse to the change. It was one of many changes. I couldn’t bear to look at it straight on. “Since I was a child, my father promised me. And the chatelain has done so much for me, funded my entire education, brought me here to live in his house and fed me, clothed me. My bed is his, the clothes on my back, all the books on my shelves, save for the ones you gave me. I couldn’t be so ungrateful. I can’t go.”

  “Please,” Royston said carefully, as though he had no idea what an effect such words had on me. He moved now, unfolding from where he knelt, and paused but a moment before he sat beside me on my bed. He almost knocked the back of his head against the sloped ceiling—something I’d done countless times before.

  “Be careful there,” I murmured. “The ceiling is very low.”

  “Ah,” Royston said. “Yes. I see.”

  We sat for a time in uncomfortable silence while I fought off the urge to cry, or indeed to think of anything at all. My thoughts were treacherous, and my fingers felt impossibly cold.

  At last, I heard Royston draw in a measured breath. “I would pay them very generously in thanks for their understanding,” he told me, with a straightforwardness that stunned me. “They would understand, I think—and it is not as if you are the only tutor in all of Nevers. You wouldn’t be leaving them in such dire straits as all that.”

  “That would be asking too much of you,” I replied, as soon as I’d found my voice.

  “I think it a negligible detail,” Royston replied, “when I have just asked so very much of you.”

  “It’s quite different,” I told him. On the whole I felt as if my mind had been oddly separated from all my emotions; I was speaking, certainly, but at the same time not entirely sure I was in control of the words I spoke. I might have been a mechanical dragon more than I was myself, for all I had control of my actions, or understood the recklessness of my own heart.

  “It isn’t so very different as all that,” Royston said. He turned his face as though he sought to capture my gaze and, after a moment of unnecessary perversity, I allowed our eyes to meet. There was something in his gaze that made me wonder if he was trying to say more than I’d heard. I felt something clench tight within me, unruly and curious despite myself. “If,” Royston continued, gently, “by this offer, I presume too much—”

  This was hard for him. I saw it in the tight lines around the corners of his eyes, the matching lines, just as tight, around the corners of his mouth. I knew enough of Royston to know he wasn’t the sort of man given to such persistence; when he was denied so firmly something he wanted for himself, he withdrew to prevent any further infliction of the same hurt.

  Yet here he was, importuning me further. I was repaying him for all his kindnesses by being stubborn as a mule and heedless as a child.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him, all at once and in a breathless rush. “Royston, please, you mustn’t think me ungrateful—”

  “I don’t.”

  “—and you mustn’t think I wouldn
’t want to go with you,” I went on, “because when I think about what it will be like once you’ve left, it’s too insufferable.”

  Royston’s eyes lit up for a moment with warmth and good humor, and something that looked a little like relief. “I’m glad to find us in agreement on that point, at least,” he said.

  I flushed, and pressed on, determined to make myself heard. “Only,” I stammered, “only I can’t do it. To leave without any warning—to abandon Alexander and William and Etienne, even Emilie—”

  “It is quite sudden, yes,” Royston agreed.

  “And what’s more,” I added, blush growing deeper, “I don’t know the first thing about the city.” I realized all at once that the majority of my altruism stemmed not from my desire to repay my distant aunt and her husband’s kindness, nor was it to save the children from the sadness of parting. Rather, it was my own intractable fear of the city herself, all three maidens, whatever specter of it I’d concocted. I was raised in the country, and I thought of it without reservations as my home. While I wished to follow Royston, and I did—it was almost feverish how completely I wished it—I was also terrified.

  I faltered then, and Royston saw through my protestations at once.

  “Hal,” he said, taking one of my hands in both of his own, “you are far more clever and far better-read than most students at the ’Versity. What separates you from them is their monstrous sense of self-entitlement, but no more than that, I assure you. The city, too, is no more than the countryside with a great many more houses and a great many more opportunities.” He paused for a moment, then allowed himself a slight, self-deprecating smile. “Perhaps that is somewhat oversimplified,” he continued, “but there is some truth to it. I asked you to come with me when I leave tomorrow with some considerable measure of selfishness, but at the same time I would never have made the offer if I didn’t think you would benefit from the arrangement just as much—if not more so—than I. There are some people who aren’t made for the limitations of the countryside. You are one of those people, Hal. If you say that you will be happier here reading what little my brother can procure for you, teaching the basic patterns of grammar to my nephews, then I will not press the matter further, and though I will be quite distraught to take my leave of you, I will do it. But can you truly look me in the eye and tell me with all honesty—and do not let fear temper your answer, Hal—that the city does not hold for you something you crave, something you have always craved, something you have longed for ever since you first imagined it might be out there, just beyond your reach, waiting for you to have the chance to attain it? Tell me—it is the same longing you foster when you read, is it not?”