Havemercy Page 3

  Breakfast on the fourth day was one of the most awkward meals I’d ever had at the table, rivaling the time Alexander had eaten too much ice cream and been sick all over me and his birthday cake.

  The Margrave would be arriving by carriage, we’d been told, and the letter had held a date but no specific time.

  The chatelain fiddled absently with his silver coffee spoon.

  From the drawing room, where the windows were wide and the view was best, we at last heard a small shriek and the patter of shoes as Emilie went running to the front door in a manner unbefitting a lady, exactly the way Mme had warned her against.

  There was a short silence. Then, chaos broke loose in a clamor of scraping wood, chairs being pushed back from the table so the three boys could follow their sister in a most undignified rabble. I hoped that it did not reflect on my own influence in any way. At least I wasn’t yet their tutor.

  “Well,” said the chatelain, wiping his mouth with a linen napkin. “I suppose we should go and ensure my brother’s well-being in the face of the young herd of elephants I’ve apparently raised.”

  I nodded and got up from the table too quickly, almost knocking over my chair.

  The lines around Mme’s mouth looked as deep and permanent as if they’d been carved with a chisel, but she rose with enviable grace. Together, the three of us stepped into the hall and made our way to the front door, where the Margrave was waiting for us.

  ROYSTON

  The terrible thing about the country—and this was why I’d left in the first place—is that you can’t spit sideways without hitting a sheep. They’re smelly, cruel creatures, malevolent and unclean. They clog the roadways, chew their cud, and clutter the landscape, abundant as the grass—gray and misshapen and utterly depressing. My brother’s castle in Nevers was exactly like every country castle on the continent, and I was jostled by the country roads, nauseated by the country smells, and assaulted by the country architecture, so that I arrived late with a headache sharp between my eyes.

  My brother’s men were waiting to greet me, suspicious eyes sidelong and unwelcoming, though they were dressed as if they did indeed know what civilization was. Then all at once my brother’s children, two of whom I’d met when they were on holiday in Miranda some years earlier, were piling out the door into the sunlight, shrieking my name and kicking up dust.

  “Have you brought anything for us?” the girl asked. She was the youngest; I hadn’t met her before, though I had sent her a tiger rug once, much to the distress of my brother’s simple wife. I tried to remember her name, but I found I could not.

  “I might have done,” I replied, stepping back to avoid letting her clamber up my leg as if it were a tree trunk.

  “Emilie!” I knew before lifting my head that this was the wife come out to greet me. I procured my pocket watch for the eldest of my nephews to examine, while Emilie jumped away from me and smoothed out her skirts, her cheeks bright red.

  “It’s no trouble,” I said.

  “She must behave as befits her,” the wife sniffed, keeping her distance. “I know standards are . . . different in the city, but in the country a young lady’s upbringing is a serious matter.”

  “Naturally,” I replied.

  The house was ugly but large, with a sloping shingled roof over the old castle walls and windows like gaping eyes. I shuddered to think what it would be like inside during the winter, when the snow was deep and the wind sharp. The courtyard was neatly kept, the stable far enough from the house that at least the smell of animals would not invade our living quarters except in the height of summer, and nearby I could hear the Locque Nevers rushing desperately onward. I felt a momentary kinship with the river, as if we were both aching yet helpless to escape, bound each in our own way to our eternal, shackling paths. But I was no poet, nor was I a river, and at some point I presumed the waters of Locque Nevers would reach the sea—whereas I was here indefinitely, with no similar prospects of escape.

  One of the younger boys, William, was busy trying to break and not to break my pocket watch all at once. My brother had gone to see to the horses, which I’d expected of him, and I was glad he remained the same as ever. Too much change isn’t good for a man. It troubles him and hinders him from digesting his meals properly. However, it left the wife, the children, the servants, and me alone together, and not one of us able to speak.

  “Well,” the wife said at length, though it seemed every word she spoke pained her, “these are the children.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “They are indeed.”

  “Alexander is the eldest,” said a new voice, warm and uncertain. “William is about to break your pocket watch.”

  I refocused my attention just over the wife’s shoulder and noticed someone unfamiliar hanging back not as a servant would, but neither like a true member of the family. I decided right away that he must have been no more than a distant cousin, which was why no one had seen fit to trim his hair.

  “Then there are Etienne and Emilie,” he went on, shifting a poorly bound roman from under his left arm to under his right.

  “Emilie and I have already met,” I said.

  “Etienne is shy,” the young man explained, shrugging. He had a strange sort of grace about him, the unusual and post-adolescent combination of complete self-consciousness and blissful distraction. He bore it well despite the hair.

  “Which we will very soon break him of,” the wife added sharply. She seemed to be on the verge of having the vapors.

  “Like a horse, I presume,” I replied, and then added smoothly, coming up to take her hand and press it against my lips in my most formal of bows, “I am your servant, Mme, in all things. Your hospitality overwhelms me. I shall repay it any way I can.”

  “Oh, well,” she said, fluttering like a poor man’s peacock—a rooster with too much tail for its own good but a rooster nonetheless. “You’re family, of course.”

  I was, for good or for ill. “And who is this?” I asked, gesturing to the young man. I realized now the dreamy air that hung about him—like dust motes in a shaft of light—must have been a reflection of the great and secret desire he was harboring even now: that he wished to be elsewhere, reading his book, completely unbothered by our posturing.

  “Who? Oh, Hal,” the wife said. “He’s to be Alexander and William’s tutor, when Alexander comes of age.”

  “Next summer,” Alexander said proudly.

  “Very good,” I replied, distracted. The tutor-to-be was pale but freckled along the bridge of his nose, and he was neither awkward nor shy but acutely polite. I shook his hand. “What are you reading?”

  “This? Nothing,” he said, and endeavored to hide it from me.

  “Hal very much enjoys his romans,” the wife said. She was sniffing again.

  I thought about offering her a handkerchief, then discarded the notion. It would not do to offend my brother’s wife all at once. There would be no sport left for later on, and now that I was in the country, I needed to ration my amusements as meagerly as I could.

  Instead, I offered the youth a thin smile, taking advantage of his preoccupied state to lift the badly concealed volume from his hands. It was uncouth of me, but I did not expect to be reprimanded by the lady of the house, who had already made it quite evident that Hal was not among her chief priorities.

  “Oh,” he said, not sounding distressed but merely surprised.

  The roman was a familiar one, though not the most widely respected or circulated collection of information on the Basquiat. The author had taken several creative liberties with the origins of the thing, for one, and there was scarcely even a mention of the Well. It skirted the matter of its overzealous guardians entirely, save a small notation that they called themselves the Brothers and Sisters of Regina. Yet I raised an eyebrow, surprised in turn, for I hadn’t expected to find any touchstone to the city here.

  “Are you interested in the Basquiat, boy?” I smoothed my fingers down the roman’s spine, judging how long it would
be before the pages began to fall out. Cheap books were a terrible shame, and no doubt a result of spending all your money on sheep.

  “No,” he said. “Well, yes, that is—I do like to read.”

  My brother’s wife made a soft, clucking sound, the rooster emerging again in quiet disapproval.

  “When I’m not studying, of course,” Hal corrected himself before he smiled openly and unself-consciously. “I have a lot to learn before next summer. I’m sorry about your pocket watch.”

  “William!”

  I’d scarcely had the time to turn around before I heard the faint wrench of machinery. Minute pieces of clockwork sprang out in every direction, raining down on the steps and over my young nephew’s shoes. If I closed my eyes, it was almost a musical sound, like the chimes some magicians hung in their windows to ward off bad luck.

  When I opened them, I was still in the country.

  “That’s all right,” I said, as the boy in question raised round saucer eyes to his mother, then me. This one I had met before, though it seemed in the passing years he’d grown wild. There was an unhappy set to his mouth, halfway between rebellion and a fit of sulking. I felt an instant kinship with him and ruffled his hair where a handshake might have done. “Never mind,” I said, and in my own selfish way it might have been to keep Mme my sister-in-law from punishing him, as she seemed so keen on doing. “I have others for you to break.”

  When he smiled, I saw that he was missing a tooth.

  “Ah, Roy.” My brother’s voice sounded bell-clear across the grounds. I turned to greet him as he came striding toward us. The chatelain, my estranged country blood, had grown a little wider over the years, spread, settled into his skin. His face was red as it had ever been, suggesting either a very good constitution or a very poor one. Or perhaps it was sunburn.

  I wondered if, living in the country, my face would grow as red. I would have to kill myself, I decided; I would take death before growing to resemble something so round and red as a tomato. I said none of this, however, and merely held out a hand for my brother to shake. There had been too many years and too many miles between us to foster an embrace, and even with our kinship it seemed a folly to pretend otherwise.

  “I’ve come to be a burden,” I said, the jest falling flat as it left my lips.

  My brother’s broad face creased with uneasiness. I struck his shoulder genially, in keeping with the ancient custom of male bonding that I abhor and was quite content to leave behind at seventeen. “I’ve just been introduced to your lovely children, brother. You’ve been very productive.”

  “Yes,” he said, looking around at my impromptu welcoming committee as though gathering his bearings. I could almost see the workings of his mind, laid bare as my broken watch. Then he offered a smile, though it came less easily than either Hal’s or William’s. “Welcome to Castle Nevers.”

  I tried to keep the disdain from my face as I examined the house in a broad sweep once again. Surely the house could only be called a castle in the loosest sense of the word. It had been a castle once, but now it resembled its former self about as closely as I resembled a member of the Basquiat—which is to say, not at all.

  “Well,” my brother continued, anxious to be elsewhere. “We were just in the middle of breakfast. We’ll have someone show you to your room.”

  As if reminded suddenly of some hidden cue, the tutor—Hal—nodded and smiled at me again. I didn’t know how anyone could smile so often, especially at a complete stranger who’d stolen his book. Perhaps he was simple.

  I trusted my brother not to leave me, much less his children, in the hands of anyone incapable, however. He knew the limits of my patience as far as fools went, and I couldn’t see my sister-in-law trusting her precious ducklings to anyone she deemed unfit.

  They filed inside in a staggered line, the girl holding hands with her brother, Etienne-whom-I-had-not-met, with William stepping determinedly upon the backs of Alexander’s shoes.

  This left me alone on the steps with Hal, not quite a tutor, not quite a relation. He moved past me and crouched to examine the remains of my pocket watch.

  “That was very kind of you,” he said, carefully sweeping the pieces of the watch into a neat little pile on the path. “Not to be cross with William.”

  I eyed him. “You have servants for that, do you not?”

  “Oh,” he shrugged, as though it weren’t important. “That’s all right, I’ve almost finished. William makes so much mess throughout the day, I hate to burden them with extra work if I don’t have to.”

  I nodded after a moment, as though this made sense, which it didn’t. “Would you like your book back?”

  “Please,” he said, looking up in surprise as if the idea hadn’t occurred to him.

  “I suppose the country can’t be so very terrible,” I said insolently. “Is there at least a library in the house?”

  “Oh,” said Hal. “No.” He must have been frightened by what my face did then—quite of its own accord—for he added quickly, “But your brother, the chatelain, has bought a good many books for my education, and for Alexander’s.”

  I shielded my eyes against the glare of sunlight, looking out into the trees. There was a dreadfully large number of them, and like the sheep they were everywhere.

  Our esteemed Esar had phrased my exile thus: that it would be relaxing, that it would be a quiet place to consider my actions, and that—were I lucky enough to be called back one day—I would return from it as I would from a jaunt to the islands, refreshed and with a revised perspective on my country and my duties as a citizen. The particular tone of his voice implied that I would not be so lucky as to be called back anytime soon, if at all. Thus, here I was, trapped as if I were jailed, my only recourse children and children’s books, a woman I hated, and a brother I barely knew. The truth was evident. I’d never felt so indulgently sorry for myself, not even when I was much younger.

  At least, in those days, I hadn’t known what it was like not to feel helpless.

  ROOK

  “So he says, ‘I wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole,’ and the whore says, ‘Which one, my lord?’” The usual chorus of halfhearted laughter greeted Magoughin’s conclusion—the sound of Compagnon’s just shy of a giggle, I always thought, and rising above the rest because as soon as you said the word “whore” he was off, no matter whether the joke was funny or not, and Luvander slapping his leg like he hadn’t heard that one three times already. I didn’t care a minute for any of it, because Ace and I were playing darts, and you can’t let Magoughin’s whore jokes or nothing distract you when you’re playing darts with Ace, seeing as how distraction leads to almost taking one of Ivory’s eyes out with a throw gone sour.

  The truth was, nobody wanted to do any thinking about what was in store for us, and nobody wanted to do any thinking about how we hadn’t been up in the air since the cold front hit. Or, to be more precise, since we wiped out the Blue Horde just outside of Lapis and left the whole Ke-Han licking their wounds like the dirty bitches they were. They’d taken back the Kiril Islands after that, and it’d set th’Esar roaring mad, but there wasn’t a thing we could do since the Islands were so far out seaward that there was hardly any chance of getting out there, let alone there and back all in one flight. Anyway, the Kiril Islands had changed hands more times than good coin in a whorehouse, so it wasn’t like we wouldn’t be getting them back one of these days. The Dragon Corps couldn’t fight all of Volstov’s battles for her, but if we could’ve, there wouldn’t have been a dispute over the Kirils in the first place. Leastways, not any kind of dispute that could be backed up with solid firepower. Simple truth was, the Ke-Han didn’t have an air force at all, much less one as fucking precise as ours, as fucking deadly. And so th’Esar and all of Volstov needed us real special—but they didn’t need us if we weren’t fighting, and since we weren’t fighting, everyone was edgy, like we were all balanced on the blade of the knife and if anyone moved for certain one way or the other, we
were all screwed at both ends.

  I wasn’t worried. Just because the Ke-Han were quiet since Lapis didn’t mean they weren’t going to get loud again, and soon. They always bounced back, neat as you like, and th’Esar knew that, too. He wouldn’t squander his surest bet; he wasn’t going to send us into exile like old Mary Margrave, which was what they were calling the Cindy down around Mollyedge, where they could get away with it, and I was all for the nickname seeing as how he was queerer than a three-chevronet. The corps was a different matter. We were needed in the city with our dragons polished and ready to respond like always, in case anything came up real sudden, so like I said, I wasn’t worried about horseshit like that.

  But it all still kept me guessing, same as the rest, what th’Esar was going to do about us, since the Arlemagnes were pissed off already due to the incident with their cindy-prince and the Margrave. Maybe I shouldn’t have slapped the diplomat’s wife on the ass in public and maybe I shouldn’t have tried to pay her after the sex, but the point was: She was asking for it, wearing a dress like that, and so how was I supposed to know who she was? You don’t wear a dress like that and not expect to get all kinds of attention, and none of it from your husband. You buy a dress like that to make it happen, and she knew it same as I did. Th’Esar knew it, too.

  “Shit,” Ace said, because he’d missed the mark. It was worrying Ace, too, which was where the line between us was drawn. Ace got worried; I didn’t. Sometimes it didn’t make a difference, but by my count I was three points ahead of him, and it was only on bad days that went below two. Worrying was why: Ace doing it and me not.

  “What if we are exiled?” Balfour was asking Jeannot. Balfour was also fiddling with his gloves, taking them off and putting them back on again, and if I hadn’t been busy aiming for bull’s-eye, I would’ve aimed at his head.