Havemercy Page 24

  Some small irrational part of me knew that if I allowed myself to leave now, even for an hour, some sea change—some disastrous rolling of the collective mind—would destroy any work I’d managed to accomplish with these men, and they would go back to being exactly the way they’d always been, as opposed to exactly the way they’d always been with an ever-so-slight variation: the occasional kindnesses they afforded me, by habit or by forgetfulness. My only hope was that slight variations were all the fashion this season, and that th’Esar, while not providing me with a grant, would at least allow me to leave in one piece.

  Everything depended on Rook. That was the plain hard truth, and mine was not a comfortable position to be in. While the other airmen seemed to have taken to me with a reasonable tolerance—similar to what one might project toward a neglected family pet—Rook had experienced no such change of mind. In the end he held sway over the others—with perhaps the notable exception of Chief Sergeant Adamo—and I knew that they would follow his lead, both here and at the ball.

  In Molly there was a saying that you shouldn’t think too hard on the things you didn’t want to come to pass. It was superstitious nonsense, of course, woven by mothers who didn’t wish their children to dwell on negative thoughts, as though by merely contemplating something or someone you could draw it from the ether like a ghost from the darkness.

  My luck, however, was a matter entirely different when it came to suspicion, and when Rook stumbled from his room, reeking of acrid smoke and covered in ash, as if he hadn’t bothered to shower before he’d rolled off Havemercy and gone right back to sleep, I knew that it had nothing to do with whether I’d been thinking of him or not.

  He barely spared me a glance, pale-rimmed eyes bright and awake despite his rumpled appearance.

  “I,” I began before I could stop myself, and he halted.

  I realized with a fleeting panic that I didn’t know what I’d meant to say, that I’d only called out to keep him from ignoring me entirely the way he’d begun to do of late. Normally this would have been a blessing, to be overlooked after months of malevolent attention, but instead I only felt cut off, alone. I thought it must have been the flying, that in him somewhere there was the evidence that had stripped my theories from me as surely as old bark, and I couldn’t let it just pass by.

  I was certainly losing my mind, then.

  “I’m waitin’,” Rook said roughly.

  “I, ah, I wanted to thank you,” I said, taken aback at the words coming out of my own mouth.

  Judging by Rook’s expression, so was he.

  “Don’t know what for, unless it’s not killing you in your sleep.” He smiled then, and I waited for the familiar fear to grip me. It did not. Instead when he looked at me I felt his expression was not unlike my dreams of flying—the faint echo of something elusive and strange.

  “For, well, the additional perspective,” I answered honestly, recovering myself as best I could. “And for . . . not letting me fall.”

  “Yeah, well. I didn’t do it for you.” He shrugged, though whether he was talking about catching my wrist or taking me up into the air in the first place I couldn’t guess. His hair looked filthy, almost tan instead of golden, and I wondered how it would be possible for him to be clean by tomorrow night when it had taken me over a week to get to anything near resembling my state before I’d clambered onto that dragon in the first place.

  “No,” I agreed quickly, for no matter how I’d lost my mind, I was quite aware that nothing Rook did was for my own benefit. “I know that. I only—I didn’t know. I mean I suppose I knew, but not in the same way as, as when we were flying.”

  “You mean when I was flying,” Rook cut in. “You were hanging on and screaming like a whore either done real wrong or real nice.”

  I drew a deep breath, determined not to allow him to get the better of me so close to this trial set by th’Esar. “I was not,” I said, “screaming.”

  “And you don’t know everything about everything, even with that fancy ’Versity education of yours,” he went on as though he hadn’t heard me at all. “We act different ’cause we are different, not because we never had the right nannies come around to teach us all how to play nice and all that shit.”

  “You’re still human,” I said quietly. “So I suppose you can act like one.”

  “Then you’d be supposing dead wrong, professor,” he replied, looking down his long nose at me. “Can’t be human and fly the dragons. That’s just the way it works.”

  It was the most terrible thing I’d ever heard, and truly maddening if that was what all of them believed. Yet somehow I got the sense that this was a notion particular to Rook, though it didn’t make me feel any better. “You must be,” I insisted, with no real idea of what it was that I was so insistent against. “You’re just hiding behind the dragons, using them as . . . as an excuse for whatever reasons you have for wanting to act as though you’re completely emotionless. No man is made of metal.”

  He shook his head, and stepped so close that I could smell the night’s raid on him—dragonmetal and the burning strongholds of the Ke-Han. I wondered dizzily if it were possible that this man was made of metal. “You don’t listen, and I ain’t patient, but I’ll say it again: It’s not an act. In the air I can’t be thinking about how I feel, much less how my actions affect everything going on around me. You go up, you do the job, you come back. Isn’t anything other than that, and if you get it confused, you’ll die because some other son-of-a was smart enough not to.”

  “But you can’t spend your life on the ground as if you’re still in the air,” I said, clinging to my faint and crumbling resolve. For one wild moment I thought I could smell something below the fire, anger or something sharper. But scenting such human emotions was a particular skill of the airmen and not one I could have learned through propinquity.

  Rook swallowed something back, frowning like it nearly choked him to do it, then turned on his heel. “Shit, professor. And you think we’re the stubborn ones.”

  This time I was powerless to stop him as he walked away, my boots planted as though glued to the floor.

  “Anyway,” he called back over his shoulder, “I got some cleaning up to do. Have you heard? Seems we’ve been invited to a party—and from the looks of it, we’re the Ke-Han-fucking guests of honor!”

  He had impeccable aim. Perhaps it came from so long a time spent up in the air, or from his skill at the airmen’s complicated and seemingly incomprehensible game of darts, but he managed to hit home each time with his sly words. It was obvious that the airman Rook had my number, that for all my ’Versity schooling we were on uneven ground, and we both knew it instinctively, in the same way cats know to chase mice or hawks to drop down from the sky upon rabbits with deadly accuracy.

  I had the distinct sense that the ball was going to be a disaster. I knew my etiquette better than a single one of the airmen—except, perhaps, for Balfour, who’d been raised in high society—yet I wasn’t so vital to Volstov’s success in the war. And any slip I made, no matter how slight, would be on par with the most egregious of Rook’s errors.

  Th’Esar had no reason to be so lenient when punishing me as he did when punishing his elite Dragon Corps, scourge of the skies, heroes of the bastion.

  I hardly slept at all that night, and spent the day before the evening of the ball trying once again, however futile the endeavor was, to cohere my notes into some semblance of an order. Surely I must have learned something vital in all my time spent sleeping on a couch in the Airman and enduring the cruelest of the corps’ insults. Surely I must have in turn imparted some learning of my own. Yet the more I read over my notes, the more I noticed how uninformed I was. If the riders of the Dragon Corps were incapable of understanding the rules of the rest of society, then it was equally true that the rest of society was incapable of understanding the rules of the Dragon Corps. Each was governed by vastly different principles; the motivating factors for behaving politically were like the s
tructure of outlandish foreign grammar to the airmen, and I was at last beginning to understand why. Still, it was no excuse for them to behave as pigs to their fellowmen, or for them to treat women as objects to be bartered and discussed like horses, or to look down upon all of Arlemagne for doing their best to stay out of our war. The airmen didn’t have to agree with other opinions, and they certainly didn’t have to follow other men’s rules all that often, but they did have to acknowledge that these things existed.

  I couldn’t imagine what they would do once their services were no longer required.

  This was always the trouble with learning, I remembered from my first few courses at the ’Versity. The more you were informed, the less you realized you knew, and the point between grasping new knowledge and abandoning the old was as precarious as straddling a great divide, being torn in both directions and terrified of falling between with neither side to support your theories.

  I wished Marius were close by to tell me I was overthinking the issue and should take a deep breath and confront, as simply as possible, all the things I knew. If I were to do him proud, I would gather my results without any preconceptions and allow them to shape their own conclusion. This was the mark of a true scholar, if not a great one.

  Yet there was no real time for such intellectual pursuits. Sometime after midday the tailor brought my clothes for their final fitting, and meanwhile all of the Airman was gradually being filled with the sound of new boots being broken in before that evening’s dancing. While the tailor adjusted the inseam of my trousers, I managed to catch bits and pieces of a lively story Magoughin was telling about the daughters of the new Arlemagne diplomat—the other one, presumably, had been asked to cool his heels for a while, and was perhaps mending his now-tenuous relationship with his wife. I even caught, tacked on to the end of the story almost as an afterthought, Magoughin’s realization that: “Now we’ve been trained to act like proper gentlemen, though, I don’t suppose we can take them back with us afterward and show them a thing or two about Volstov?”

  Compagnon’s giggling nearly obscured Jeannot’s wry reply, which was, as far as I could make it out, “A thing or three, knowing your tastes.”

  “I’d rather be at Benoite’s party if all’s said and done,” Ghislain admitted, “but I guess a man can’t turn down th’Esar when he’s invited somewhere, and he’s th’Esar anyway, so chances are he’ll have the best wine, if not the friendliest ladies.”

  After that, all was drowned out by a chorus of laughter, whereupon the tailor said I was twisting around too much, and in order to make his job less impossible—and to avoid being stuck in the thigh by any needles—I stopped trying to eavesdrop on their conversation and consigned myself to my thoughts once more.

  By the time my suit was finished, the Airman clock had tolled six hours past noon, and the members of the corps were beginning to gather in the common room, each one of them dressed in Volstov’s most recognizable uniform.

  I myself was wearing the sort of fabric I never had the cause or the money to purchase for myself while I was a student. It was soft and heavy at once, and fit slim where it needed to, rather than bulking up as a less expensive grade would. The collar and lapels of the jacket were wide after the latest fashion, the sleeves long. The tailor had decided that the best color for my eyes and my complexion was a sort of bottle green, and the outfit had even come with handsome, tall leather boots, heavy buckles at the ankles, and stiff white gloves.

  It was safe to say, as the airmen came in to wait and laugh and joke with one another, and lounge easily in their finery, that I’d never felt so out of place in my entire life.

  I was a plain-looking sort of person—neither ugly nor handsome—and though, as the tailor said, the color of the suit did hint at the green in my eyes, whenever I caught sight of myself in the mirror I felt startled by how different my usual perception of myself was from the present reality. When compared to the airmen, each man striking in his own way, I felt even more ridiculously common, like a little boy from the Mollyedge dressed up but nevertheless revealed for what he really was.

  I wasn’t one of these men, part of their brotherhood. Never before had I felt so much of an intruder on their comfort, their rituals, their way of life.

  I sat on the arm of my couch-bed with my gloves held in my hands, waiting with the rest for our carriages to come, and yet not with the rest at all. When Jeannot came in, he was called over to talk with Ghislain, Ace, and Balfour; likewise, when Niall made his entrance, he was beckoned to the smaller group of Raphael and Compagnon. All the men were dressed in their Dragon Corps uniforms: dark blue jackets and silver buttons, gold epaulettes, slim white trousers, and high black boots. Grouped together, the airmen reminded me of a collection of gems, each one cut differently, but all of them polished so brightly they shone.

  The last man to make his arrival was, of course, Rook; it wasn’t because I was looking for him that I noticed this detail, but rather the ubiquity of his presence in any room. In that way he was exactly like a dragon: mythical, enormous, surreal.

  He entered in grand style, kicking the door open and immediately engaging Ivory in some heated discussion about what had been done with Rook’s favorite earrings, and how they fucking weren’t lying around just so some son-of-a could give them to his lady friend. They were apparently the finest Ke-Han gold, fashioned into Ke-Han loops, and I wondered, not for the first time, at Rook’s decision to wear his hair in Ke-Han braids and pierce his ears with demarcations of Ke-Han warrior status, when he was known throughout Ke-Han as a murdering god, capricious, merciless, and cruel.

  In the spirit of the evening—and perhaps to match the royal blue of the Dragon Corps jacket—he’d redyed the blue streaks in his golden hair, and his eyes were bright in the candlelight.

  There was a moment when I felt as if he were watching me, but all at once there was a commotion from without, then everyone was rushing toward the door.

  “That’ll be the carriages,” Balfour told me, adjusting his white gloves one last time before he, too, followed the crowd.

  I soon saw why they were all so quick to scramble for their carriages, for those left behind had no choice in where they sat, and everyone was shoving in every which way like children who didn’t want to be left behind. Since I brought up the rear, I was stuck in with Rook and Magoughin—three men to a carriage—with them telling lewd jokes the entire way and occasionally looking over to me with quite pointed expressions, leaving me no need to wonder if they were doing it on purpose.

  And then, we arrived at the palace.

  It was lit up with countless glittering lights—the spires aglow, no doubt with magic—onion domes the color of the crown, golden and pearl white and midnight blue. It was a scene I’d viewed only distantly over the years from my various rooms along the ’Versity stretch, which was, I realized now, too far away from the palace to do justice to the sight.

  I felt all my breath leave me at once. Yet, though I waited for Rook to mock me about my wide-eyed “civ” wonderment, he said nothing at all, although he did shove past me with no more than a grunt as he made his way out of the carriage and onto Palace Walk.

  It, too, was alight with the shimmering of countless paper lanterns. They lined the pathway and the narrow flight of stairs up to the palace’s main doorway. The whole palace itself, while dark and spindly in the daytime, had taken on new life. To say I was overwhelmed would be something of an understatement.

  The airmen had no reason to wait for me and so they didn’t, filtering off ahead in chattering groups of threes and fours. I stood frozen, admiring the colored lights like a common child as the sharp sounds of their new boots against the ground faded off into the distance.

  Then it occurred to me that it would be much worse to enter alone than in the wake of the airmen, where I might be able to escape attention entirely, and I moved quickly to catch up.

  “Palace Walk ain’t for running,” Adamo said to me as I came up to him. There was som
ething strange about his face, I thought, and I couldn’t place it until I realized that he’d shaved.

  “Isn’t,” I corrected him automatically, and slowed to the leisurely pace the other men were walking at.

  He raised his eyebrows at me.

  “Ah,” I said, beginning to worry at my gloves the way Balfour did. “I’m sorry about that.”

  He shrugged. “Can’t help being the way you are.”

  I nodded, offering him a shaky smile of truce. It felt uncomfortably as though he were trying to make a point, and I was too nervous to be taught any more lessons by the very men I’d been charged to teach.

  Up ahead tinkled a distinctly feminine peal of laughter, and I saw that Rook had been enveloped by a group of fashionably dressed women, their hair curled and pinned, gowns voluminous in gold and cream, as if they’d planned them to match the palace—which in a way I supposed they could have. I didn’t pretend to understand the minds of women, or at least these women. I knew that if I’d been female, the story of the Arlemagne diplomat’s wife would have kept me as far away from hanging off Rook’s arm as possible, and I would never have smiled so brightly at him, with teeth like rows of pearls.

  Then Rook and his entourage of attractive young ladies disappeared, swallowed up by the light spilling out from the palace, and I was left frowning at the open doors with little reason or understanding.

  “He’s doing very well,” said Adamo. I waited for a moment, to see if anyone else responded. Then, since I was still the only person next to him, I had to assume he was speaking to me.