Havemercy Page 34

  He’d told me to stay where I was—he’d gone out for some reason—I’d later followed a bird, I think, or a dog. Perhaps a kitten. I never did as he told, could never remember, and he was often angry with me. I found my way back only just as it was beginning to get dark, and the house was in flames, and there was a lady crying; these were all the bare pieces I remembered, and no more than that.

  Someone told me my brother was dead. I believed him, since my brother had always made it a point to get home before nightfall. I didn’t remember our parents, though when I was older I realized that they must have been among the countless other young couples who realized just how expensive it was to raise children. They’d cut their losses early and left me in John’s care. He hadn’t been old enough to take care of me, and yet he had.

  I hadn’t cried when our parents left. When I lost my brother, I’d cried for days and days without end.

  I was three then, and twenty-four now. Twenty-one years had passed in the interim—twenty-one years during which the one constant in my life was the specter of my dead brother—dead, I often thought, because he’d come back, thought me within the burning house, and run inside to save me. I only came to this conclusion when I was much older and sought to explain the occurrences that had stamped themselves, so unforgiving, on my memory in red-hot flashes.

  What must have actually happened—for my own peace of mind, I needed more than anything to fit the missing parts of the puzzle together—was that John must have returned sometime after the fire had been put out, after I’d been led away from the conflagration by the neighboring women of ill repute, who’d taken pity on me. He must have thought the same thing I had, or perhaps he’d been told by the same man that his brother was dead.

  He’d told me to stay where I was. He had no reason to believe I hadn’t done just as he said.

  I believed I suddenly understood Rook better—but even as the thought crossed my mind I was struck with guilt, fierce and swift. I was pacing the halls of the Airman, and each time my path led me again and again to Rook’s private door. I had a brother again.

  I leaned against the door for a moment, pressing my cheek against the frame and, on the most foolish of whims, tested the knob, barely thinking about what I was doing.

  It turned, and the door swung open. Before I could stop myself from intruding, I stumbled inside.

  Here I was: in the belly of the beast. It smelled faintly of ash, of sulfur and fire, and most pressingly of metal. The bed was unmade, three pairs of boots by the closet; there was a trapdoor that I knew led to Havemercy’s bay. There was a print of the famous portrait of Lady Greylace, the most renowned whore in all of Volstov, but no books at all. I nearly laughed; I nearly cried.

  It smelled of him—on everything, every shadow in every corner—a glass half-full of water on the desk and a jewel box full of his earrings. Earlier this night, or on any other night for that matter, my brother might have died a second time without my ever learning that he’d lived.

  I sat down on the edge of his bed and knotted my fingers in the sheets. When he returned to his room I would tell him—for he’d opened himself to me, whether it was from loss of blood or a sudden shift in altitude or any other stupid incomprehensible reason. He’d spoken my true name, and I would use his, and perhaps we might mend what had broken between us twenty-one years ago.

  It was possible. I knew it was.

  I waited there for hours, long past sunrise, rehearsing what I’d say and how I’d say it. Rook, I might begin, or perhaps John, though I thought the latter might be too sudden. You couldn’t spring this sort of realization on a man the way it had been sprung on me, though that had been an accident. I wished to spare him some of that pain—for despite all his cruelties, I remembered a time when he was gentle and kind, bandaging the knees I always scraped, or catching the fireflies I clamored for. Besides all that, he was my brother. It wasn’t every day that a man could be resurrected from the dead, and I knew that I must treat this as gently as he’d once treated me. It was more delicate, more precious, than any other secret I’d ever held.

  Yet it was also the first time I’d ever had something on Rook, and it gave me a disturbing flush of some feeling I didn’t want to identify, as similar as it was to victory. True, I was for the first time in a position of possessing some knowledge that Rook did not, and an important piece of information, to boot, but this was entirely different. This was family, and I was no airman who kept secrets just to be hurtful or to lord over them who didn’t know.

  At long last he returned, flinging the door open and half-kicking off one of his boots. They must have given him something to numb the burns—for there were great strides being made of late in medicines that eased almost any kind of pain—but his eyes were tired, and his shirt was open to reveal the bandage swathed across his chest.

  He saw me then and stilled, wary as a tomcat on the prowl in an alleyway. This was his territory, and I a threat, engaged in trespass.

  “You fucking waited up for me?” he said finally, his eyes still narrowed and all of him tensed and ready for a fight. He was too tired for it—despite his protestations, he was human before anything else—and I stood quickly. “Or were you snooping around?”

  “What?” All my rehearsal seemed for naught; I’d forgotten every line as if I’d never thought of them at all. “Snooping?”

  “I know about that pact you’ve got with th’Esar,” he snarled, ranging past me and shrugging out of his shirt with some delicacy. The burns clearly must have still troubled him. Of course they did. I’d seen what they looked like a few hours before.

  “About the—What?”

  “Jeannot’s got a friend in the palace,” he said, “and if you tell this to th’Esar, I’ll gut you from the belly up. But we know you met with him that night at the ball. We know he’s got you in his pocket like a fucking puppet.”

  I shook my head, trying to clear it. “No,” I said, “you don’t understand—”

  “You want to enlighten me, then, as to why it was you and His Majesty needed to meet so private-like?” He came close to me without any warning, nearly backing me up against the wall, and I could smell the burnt flesh, the medicinal stench of the balm on his chest, the metallic residue on his palms and, beneath that, blood lacing everything—always blood beneath. I should have told him then, should have let the knowledge come out of me all at once before I let my fear of it undo me, as it was already doing.

  Yet if I told him now, there was no telling what he’d do. He was unpredictable, he was purposefully cruel, he was probably insane: All these things added up suddenly and startlingly to make an inarguable case, a perfect equation for why I should keep my mouth shut. It wasn’t simply that I was afraid of Rook, for now that fear was laced with a kind of hurt running through it, a marbled vein of regret for what I’d lost from my brother because I did remember a time when he’d been kind. Looking at him now made all sorts of emotions rise that I didn’t want to deal with at present, and certainly not where anyone so cunning as Rook could see.

  So I held my tongue, and lifted my chin with instinctive defiance, and tried my best not to think about how he’d trusted me with his memories and the companionable silence that had followed.

  I’d been so desperate for such a sign from him—any sign at all that all my work had not been in vain, that I wasn’t simply pouring my efforts into an empty yawning mouth of contempt and trickery. Rook had seemed changed over our time since the ball, but faced with my own lack of perception now—my own brother in front of me, mad and bleeding and more than a little tired—I was forced to wonder. Perhaps I’d never even made a dent in that armor of his, thicker than dragon-scale and twice as resilient. Perhaps all this waiting I was doing, looking for the barest shadow of kindness, something I could misconstrue as affection, was because I knew that I would accept it from him, and gratefully. Perhaps this was because I’d sensed in him all along my long-lost brother, who had been kind once, before time and whatever stra
nge fate had befallen him ruined that instinct forever.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “I’m not spying on you,” I whispered.

  That much was at least the truth, but there were other truths I should have spoken—other truths I might have spoken—but when I opened my mouth to speak, the words abandoned me. He looked at me as though I were mad, gaping like a fish, and I had no means to protest this assumption. I was mad.

  He made a sound, rather more like a grunt than anything that could be misconstrued as human speech. He either believed me or didn’t, and the fact that I couldn’t tell the difference upset me just as it always had, so not everything had changed.

  “Better not be,” he said, and brought his face so close to mine that I felt momentarily off-kilter, as though the earth had tipped sharply beneath my feet.

  Then, just as suddenly, Rook turned away from me and the ground righted itself once more. I thought that I could say it then, unfair a thing as it was to sneak in on a man when he wasn’t looking. I swallowed, and cleared the dryness from my throat. It was a poor charade; I could no more speak than I could move.

  This wasn’t to be the first time I kept the truth from him.

  That night he didn’t even kick me from his room, just flung himself down onto his bed and was asleep almost before he hit the mattress; he must have known he had me pinned beneath his thumb like a bug, incapable of crossing him. This was the power Rook had over me.

  I watched him for a few guilty moments to see if his face eased at all, if the harsh lines of it grew peaceful with sleep. I wanted to recognize him, but I didn’t. Then I forced myself from the room and curled against this secret as if it were slitting me open the way Rook had promised.

  I think I understood now, if only a little, the reason for his sudden interest, his “change of heart”: It was to keep me close, keep me where he could watch me and make sure I wasn’t going to betray the corps. So long as there was a steady stream of reticent confidences and hesitant looks that suggested he would open up if only I stayed around, there would be no reporting to th’Esar. It was so clever that I would have experienced a grudging admiration were it not for the already-consuming wealth of guilt and confusion swamping me. Moreover, I was humiliated, for there had been some small part of me that had dared to hope at making a difference with Rook. And now, for all I’d thought it through so carefully, it was all dashed to pieces as surely as if thrown from his dragon as he sped her too quickly through the night.

  Everything had changed, and nothing. I had failed on more counts than I could possibly name because I had come no closer to understanding Rook than I’d ever been, and I myself was now possessed of a secret almost too large to keep. I could no longer fault him for his questionable morals. He was my own brother, and I could not even summon up the wherewithal to tell him so. I told myself that I only needed more time to sort out my feelings before I took them to Rook, but I knew that a larger part of it than I wished to admit was rather the gratification of wielding some new power over him, and the lie became harder and harder as time passed. If pressed to choose, I’d say that I was worse than he’d ever been even when he was at his most vindictive.

  I was too preoccupied with my own thoughts to notice the change that came over the city. Truth be told, I wasn’t paying attention. My focus had so turned inward that I’d completely forgotten there was a city living and breathing all around me. And, because Rook was off duty for the following week, I was allowed to forget there was a war.

  Yet I wasn’t living inside a complete vacuum. Now and then I’d catch moments of the other airmen’s conversation in the halls, hushed and grave. One afternoon I even heard Adamo shouting inside his private quarters, though to whom he was shouting I couldn’t be sure and had no right to ask.

  That night, when Rook cornered me in the hall, he grabbed my wrist hard, and said, “We have some talking to do.”

  Fear rose sharp and quick as the guilt, and I let him lead me, all numbness, into his room and shut the door behind us.

  He looked uncomfortable for a minute, then gritted his teeth as though what he was trying to say was about to kill him, or worse. Finally, he managed a curt, “Have ain’t right.”

  For a moment I didn’t understand him. I was expecting him to tell me he’d known—that he’d read my thoughts—that he knew me for what I was and he never wanted to see me again so long as we both lived. Breathing ceased to be an autonomic function, and I concentrated on drawing air, along with as little attention as possible. I’d been prepared for the worst, not some garbled sentence I couldn’t parse. “What?” I asked.

  “Have,” he snarled. “Havemercy. She ain’t—she isn’t—right. That mess I got myself into? Not for any reason I can figure. It’s like sometimes she’s okay and sometimes . . . she isn’t.”

  I stared at him, relieved and terrified all at once. This, more than anything, cemented my place among the morally bereft and bankrupt. He was confiding in me a second time, this time of his own volition and not due either to pain or to blood loss, with no alternative motive, while I was keeping from him so massive a secret that I hadn’t slept in days. “You . . . Havemercy,” I managed at last. “She’s—What do you mean she isn’t right?”

  Rook growled, clearly finding our means for communication ineffective. “She ain’t flying right. It’s like we’re not speaking the same language. It’s like we’re fucking strangers, is what it’s like, or worse. I tell her to do something and she just doesn’t do it—like she doesn’t hear what I’m saying or even recognize it for words.”

  “I don’t know anything about dragons,” I said carefully, moving to sit beside him. “I don’t understand why you’re coming to me—”

  “Because you can fucking tell th’Esar about it,” he said, nearly biting my head off with the words. “He’s expecting a report back from you—so, tell him. Tell him that Havemercy’s fucking off. It’s quicker than going through the proper channels.”

  “Well,” I said, understanding why he was confiding in me yet again. I didn’t bother to argue my case—I wasn’t spying on my brother, but he was close enough to the truth of what th’Esar had asked me to do that it didn’t really matter.

  He was looking at me, short-tempered and hot, and I realized that I hadn’t yet given him a proper answer. “Of course I will,” I said, quiet and low. He was my brother. I owed him that much.

  I knew that the longer I stayed silent, the more likely it was that one day the odds would become irrevocably stacked against me, that I would break something that could not be fixed and that this lie would be the end of us.

  “I’ll write to him,” I said.

  “When?” Rook asked.

  “Tonight,” I said. “Now.”

  Because I’d promised him—because I was still under the strange impression I was a man of my word, if little else—I did exactly as I said, and wrote th’Esar a brief, formal note that I’d discovered something in the Airman that might be of interest to him.

  I was almost grateful for th’Esar’s summons when it came the following morning, for the need to prepare a report was a welcome distraction from my own thoughts, confused and tangled as they’d become. I spent the morning attacking my new task with all the zeal of a hunted man.

  The summons had said that a carriage would be sent to meet me nearby—a special treatment that surprised me, but th’Esar was apparently very good to his spies. Just as I was observing the turn of the hour on the small round watch Marius had gifted me with to congratulate me upon some previous academic success, the carriage appeared, white and gold like something out of a roman, or some ludicrous rich man’s fantasy. The Mollyrat in me couldn’t quite get past being awed long enough to be contemptuous, but having spent so long as a penny-pinching student, I couldn’t help but wonder at how many hot meals that carriage would buy. Somehow I thought it would be better if I didn’t know the answer.

  I clambered inside, clutching tightly to the sheet of notes Rook had dictated to
me—and which I’d subsequently translated into the kind of talk I could use with a man like th’Esar—and attempted to calm myself. Thinking with a clear head was the only way I was going to get through this particular meeting with any kind of dignity, or more importantly, with my head still fixed firmly to my shoulders. During my time in the Airman, I’d adapted to thinking one way and speaking another. This need for duplicity was still no excuse for the way I’d behaved, the way I was still behaving, toward Rook, but it had been cultivated as a survival tactic the moment I’d stepped into that room on the dais facing those fourteen wing-backed chairs, and the undoing of it was proving more difficult than I ever would have anticipated.

  Now, it seemed, I would have to learn and fast, for th’Esar was a man who did not like to be lied to. And if he sensed a disparity between my mind and my lips, he would surely not hesitate to act.

  The carriage moved quickly across the cobblestone streets, and I watched out the window as the city passed by in what seemed to me now a meaningless blur of hustle and bustle. Thremedon was my home; I’d known it all my life, and yet for all I recognized it now it might have been any central metropolis, teeming with its own people, its own traditions, and completely severed from my heart.

  The servant sent to greet me bowed low, and I fought the urge to do the same back to him, as it would have damaged my standing considerably. I would never grow accustomed to being the sort of man to whom other men bowed. Perhaps it was something to be born into and not learned at all. That, more than anything, told me how much things had changed, the small worming ways in which Rook had got into my mind, because there was a time when I would have said that there was nothing that couldn’t be taught. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  Then I had to concentrate on following, keeping the servant’s back in front of me, or else risk getting lost in th’Esar’s winding hallways—little better than catacombs, I thought, for all their decoration and fancy curios.