Havemercy Read online

  “I don’t have any idea,” he said at last, sounding as frustrated as I’d ever heard him. “There have only been . . . anomalies, of a sort.”

  “Oh yes?” I asked, and looked at him encouragingly. For all his brilliance, Royston was often a man who needed to be led like a horse by a carrot if you wanted him to finish his thoughts out loud rather than retreat back into his own mind.

  He cast a glance at me and smiled just slightly in the very left corner of his mouth, as though he knew exactly what I was doing. “Only the paranoia of the rich and powerful, I’m afraid,” he said, and I knew he was joking, could see it dancing in the depths of his eyes, warm and brown. “Spend enough time at the palace and everything starts to seem like a conspiracy.”

  If he really thought that, then there would have been no reason at all for him to behave the way he was, with considerably more distraction than had ever occupied him in the country, no matter his disinterest in sheep and trees alike.

  As seemed to be my curse, I couldn’t help but wear my thoughts plain as the nose on my face.

  “I’m sorry, Hal,” he said, fingers still making restless, nesting motions at the back of my head. “If you are keen on the specifics, it is only that there were fewer faces at the ball than I’d expected to recognize.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying to divine his meaning as he obviously expected me to. “Do you think they’re at war, then? Off with the fighting?”

  He closed his eyes to think it over, then sighed. “Hal,” he said, “forgive me for burdening you with this; it is most unfair of me. But I must confess that the state of the war itself is what troubles me.”

  I felt a sudden plummeting in my chest. “Why?” I asked, and put an entreating hand once more on his knee. “Have they told you—Do you have to go away already? Was that what was written in the letter?”

  “What?” His eyes went to the object in question though he didn’t turn his face from mine. “No! Oh, certainly not, Hal. Of course I would have mentioned anything such as that much earlier. I only wonder how close to the end we can truly be if the Esar is so keen on calling back so many of my fellows in relative states of disgrace with the crown. That is what I was discussing with my fellows when I so rudely excused myself from your company in the hall.”

  “With the blonde woman?” I realized my hand was still on his knee, and felt a flush rising in my cheeks when I remembered how jealous I’d been.

  “Yes,” he said. “And what I can’t make out for the life of me is why the Esar would bother if we were just meant to attend fancy parties. Not that I’m not a devotee of fancy parties, by all means; they are infinitely preferable to leaving for war, yet not entirely as pressing a matter, if you catch my meaning.”

  Still bearing the emotional bruises I’d obtained from my first fancy party, I declined to offer my opinion on the subject.

  “Most people do seem to think the war’s quite over,” I said, after a moment. It was the first time I’d said aloud what Royston must also have noticed. I didn’t have any particular reason for keeping it to myself, only the unfounded fear that exposing it to the light and air would send it crumbling away as surely as ash.

  As far as I could tell, it was the talk all over town: in colorful Bottle Alley, where Royston had taken me so that he could buy “something to reassure him that all of Thremedon hadn’t gone mad for horse’s piss in his absence,” then all along the wide rows of the Shoals, where we’d gone to buy fish for dinner. Little old women with black teeth had even proclaimed it cheerfully, announcing the catch of the day as a special in celebration of Volstov’s imminent victory.

  So it was silly of me, perhaps, to have held my tongue on the subject as long as I had, as though it were a wish I’d made on a shooting star or something equally childish.

  When I saw Royston’s face, however, fondness mixed with a kind of deep sadness, I knew why I’d done it; I hadn’t wanted to see that look.

  “I know it’s silly of me to say,” I said, quickly, before he could speak again. “Why else would they have called you back if they didn’t need you? Of course the war can’t be over. I only thought that perhaps, with what everyone’s been saying, there might be something else. Something you’re missing?”

  “Hal,” he said, frowning as though he were unhappy with something, though I knew it wasn’t me. “I can’t say many things for certain at the moment, but one thing I feel as though I must prepare you for is that I will still very likely be called away.”

  I swallowed around something that rose in my throat. “I know that,” I told him.

  In truth I felt a little at odds with myself, not wanting to require the special treatment Royston often afforded me, and yet still craving the kind of reassurance—unreasonable to ask for, unreasonable to promise—that everything was going to be all right.

  I was going to say something more when there was a knock at the downstairs door.

  When first I’d come to live in Royston’s rooms at the tower, the layout had confused me terribly. There seemed to be staircases with no visible destination, doors without any handles that couldn’t possibly lead into new rooms. There was even a bright green trapdoor set into the ceiling, but when I’d asked after it he only mentioned something about the best houses having alternative points of exit and left the matter at that.

  My consternation—weighted with the fact that this was in every way still Royston’s house—kept me seated and waiting while he stood to answer the knock. I did clamber into his chair, though, watching the firm lines of his back fondly, as I tended to whenever I thought I could steal a look.

  “There are people I might speak to,” he said in passing. “If you are anxious to find a place as a tutor.”

  “Yes.” I nodded. “I would be very grateful.”

  He smiled over his shoulder at me—seemingly in no hurry to answer the door—and then all at once a change came over his face, sudden and still as though he’d missed a step in the staircase. I watched his hand around the banister go white at the knuckles, as though he was forced suddenly to hold on very tightly, and I was out of the chair before I could help myself.

  “Are you all right?” I was so close that I could hear his breathing, even and deep, the way it only ever was in sleep, or when he was steadying himself before trying to control some more basic human impulse.

  It was a long time before he answered, so long that I’d begun to think he hadn’t heard me at all. I asked again, near to feeling ill. “Royston? What is it?”

  His head snapped up all at once, clearly startled, and he shook it quickly as if to clear it. “I’m sorry,” he said, and there was a rough note in his voice that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “It’s nothing.”

  I thought it was self-evident that it had indeed been something, and I took his hand before I could think better of it. “I’ll see who was at the door,” I offered, and once I was sure Royston could stand on his own I hurried down the steps.

  Whoever had knocked was at the door no longer, but when I closed it again I felt something slippery under my foot, and moved aside to examine it. At the bottom of the landing someone had pushed a square white envelope under the door. It felt expensive, heavy, when I picked it up, with sharp corners and stiff stationery. The handwriting on the front was impeccable and addressed itself to the Margrave Royston.

  When I carried the envelope back up the stairs, Royston was sitting at the top. He still didn’t look entirely right, and I had the useless, fluttering urge to offer him a cup of tea even though he preferred dark coffee or coax him into the comfortable chair by the fire.

  What I did was neither of these things, but instead gave over the letter that had been delivered, then sat too close beside him on the top step.

  He looked at me sidelong and I realized what it looked like: that I was trying to read his mail. Then he smiled, and it was something like watching the shadow over his face pass away with the advent of day.

  “Thank you,” he said, and opened his letter
with ruthless precision.

  The letter must have been short, as he glanced at it only briefly before crumpling it in his hand. All I could think, against the sudden hammering of my heart, was that it was not paper made for crumpling. It was of very fine quality, much too thick to be of no importance.

  We sat in uncomfortable silence there on the stairs, Royston not willing to tell me whatever had been in the letter, and me too cowardly to ask outright, and both of us knowing it was inevitable. In the dull, dark stretch at the back of my mind that perhaps had known what was coming all along, I thought that surely the Esar would be the only man to use such fine stationery. After that realization, it was only a small jump to come to a reasonable conclusion about what exactly had been written there.

  There was, after all, only one reason I could think of for the Esar to contact Royston.

  As the minutes ticked by, measured by the large grandfather clock in the drawing room, I wrapped a hand around Royston’s arm below the elbow. I was still nervous about touching him first, since there was always the chance that he would remember his rules and become stern with me. It had never happened yet, but my anxiety remained all the same.

  “Hal,” he began, careful and slow, as though I were a nervous horse that needed gentling to avoid being spooked.

  “When?” I interrupted, startled by the hardness in my voice.

  It must have startled Royston, too, because he refrained from answering, only put his arms close around me and held me tight the way he’d only ever had occasion to do a handful of times before.

  I put my head against his shoulder and hated the war.

  ROOK

  I half expected the professor to have stormed his way back to the ’Versity by the time the ball ended, but to my surprise, when I got back to the Airman, I found him right where he’d always been: sleeping or not sleeping or whatever it was he did on his pathetic little couch.

  Jeannot’d told me right before the carriage ride back that the little snot’d met with th’Esar private-like sometime during the night—which Jeannot knew because he was friends with all the oldest servants in the palace. You can’t buy the respect old blood can get you some places. From the reports Jeannot and Ghislain had got out of ’em, it was pretty clear that th’Esar wasn’t just trying to keep us acting proper, but was also using the professor to get all the information on us he could without us knowing about it. It was pretty fucking clever of both of them, and I only saw it as a shame we hadn’t acted up enough to get the professor sacked, though maybe I’d wasted too much of my time with that stunt on the balcony and I doubted he’d be telling anyone about that anytime soon, even threatened by th’Esar, seeing as how I had him pinned. The last thing a snot like him wanted was everyone to know he didn’t have a pedigree—and besides which, if Isobel-Magritte’s father was to find out I’d cornered her so nice and easy on the balcony at th’Esar’s own ball, there was no accounting for the shit the professor’d be armpit deep in.

  Truth was that, after learning we had a real son-of-a spy in our midst, I hadn’t had much mood for sport. I was too angry, and while there are some girls who like that kind of thing just fine, the overwhelming majority tend to call you a pig or worse, and I already had one professor to deal with. I wasn’t completely fucking crazy. There are some things you just don’t bring down upon yourself twice, and the professor was one of them.

  Not because he was anything in particular, mind. Just because he was so fucking annoying.

  The carriage ride back everyone was in a mood ’cause we were all wondering what that meeting meant for us, and whether we were going to have to hang the professor out the window the same way we did to new recruits who couldn’t keep their stupid mouths shut.

  Finally, I said, “I’ll take care of it. Don’t tell anyone.”

  “Oh?” Jeannot lifted a brow, sliding back in his seat. “And how are you planning on doing that?”

  “I’m thinking,” I snapped. “Just keep quiet about it.”

  It was just me, Jeannot, and Ghislain in the carriage. Jeannot and Ghislain could be out of their minds sometimes and they’d pulled some crazy stunts, but the one good thing about them was that you could always trust them to keep their mouths locked up tighter’n th’Esarina’s cunt when it suited their best interests.

  We were safe with the information being ours. For now, anyway.

  But we had to do something, on top of that.

  After a while I realized Ghislain was looking at me, which meant he had something to say about it and was waiting to be asked with proper grammar and everything to grace us with his brilliance. Ghislain was more or less that smug, but he was big enough no one could complain about it, and I didn’t have the time or patience to be all coy like some Margrave’s daughter.

  “Spit it out,” I said, “or quit looking at me like that.”

  Ghislain took his time, cracking the knuckles of his left hand and inspecting his nails. “It’s you,” he said at length, all cryptic and as smug as ever, like he wasn’t spouting total horseshit. “You’re the one who has to do it.”

  “Kill him?” I asked. I was only half-joking.

  Jeannot snorted and rolled his eyes. “Don’t you know anything?” he asked, like he didn’t know how dangerous it was to say something that stupid to me. “Why do you think he sticks around?”

  “Because he’s got shit for brains,” I said, but by now I was more than half-interested in what the boys were saying.

  “Because he’s as stubborn as you are,” Jeannot said, and Ghislain nodded in agreement.

  “And because he’s got shit for brains,” I added.

  “Look,” Jeannot said, leaning across the space between us as the carriage jostled us down the road. “If he was given reason to believe he’s got through to you—if he was to think you’d had a change of heart, or perhaps had seen the error of your ways—”

  “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” Ghislain said, like some sort of Brother of Regina preaching to his followers. I wanted to punch him in his square jaw, but even I wasn’t so stupid. Only thing that would’ve given me was five broken fingers.

  “So you’re saying I’ve gotta pretend like all this talk of—seeing the other side of things and opening myself up to my feelings has made a difference in my poor, deluded life,” I concluded for them. “And this way, we can control whatever information he thinks he’s found to feed th’Esar.” An idea was sort of half-forming, and I liked the way it looked from where I sat. I was sick and tired of having some green-as-grass professor, barely out of the ’Versity, lording himself over me. I wasn’t letting him spy on us, either, and the thought of seeing him trip all over himself just thinking I’d seen the light suited me just fine.

  “You are the toughest pupil,” Jeannot finished, leaning back again, for all the world as if he wasn’t going back to a building infiltrated by an outsider, one of th’Esar’s lackeys, a whoreson spy.

  I wasn’t just going to sit back and eat whatever th’Esar fed us. We were winning his war for him. I could take the professor. I’d taken worse.

  “Seems like a plan,” I said.

  Then we were quiet, and I had the rest of the ride to think about how I was going to handle this.

  The way I figured it—and it was sort of like a plan of attack, which occasionally I had the inspiration for—I’d have to keep him guessing, keep him on his toes. Had he changed me or hadn’t he? He didn’t have to know. If I seemed to be reformed too sudden-like, all the red flags in his head would start waving. I would still keep him scared as a rabbit who’s just seen a fox, but I would also start to give some, to play to his sense of duty, his twisted-up morals he’d read out of a book somewhere and fancied himself the keeper of. I’d be some kind of an idiot not to use what Jeannot and Ghislain saw to our advantage, and I wasn’t any kind of an idiot—no matter how mad I was I hadn’t seen it in the first place for myself.

  So anyway, when we got back to the compound and saw the profe
ssor sleeping, or pretending to sleep, Ghislain gave me one of his unreadable looks, like he was some god on high and whatever it was he was thinking couldn’t be figured out by mere mortal men. Then he looked over at the professor and a kind of understanding passed between us, like how he knew what I had in mind and if it kept the professor’s mouth shut, then he wasn’t going to say a single thing against it.

  Good man, Ghislain. Bat-shit bell-cracked, I sometimes thought, or just a hundred times smarter than any of us. But whatever way you cut it, he was still on my side—in a manner of speaking—and that was all that counted.

  I closed the door behind me and came up on the professor real slow. This was my world now, not the professor’s, and I could do whatever I wanted.

  That was about the time I figured out he wasn’t asleep: when his back stiffened as I came close, and I could all but see his face, eyes wide open and ready for the attack.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said.

  That sure as bastion wasn’t what the professor was expecting me to say, and I had to clamp down hard as the vise of a dragon’s mouth not to grin. I had the professor right in the palm of my hand, like Havemercy’s reins.

  The professor didn’t say anything—not that I figured he would—but I sat down on the edge of the couch right up close to him, slipping off my gloves and easing out of my boots and pretending like I was struggling with what I had to say, when in reality the only thing I was struggling with was not laughing then and there. It was almost the same as acting at one of th’Esar’s balls, pretending like I was listening to what my dancing partner was saying while she let me twirl her a little too close in the midst of the crowd, and maybe let me keep one of her handkerchiefs, a prize of a different kind of war.

  The professor must’ve been too on edge to speak or move, and when I cleared my throat he might’ve jumped straight up into the air if he hadn’t been lying down. “Like I said, I’ve been thinking,” I repeated. “About what you said at the ball.”