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  “So you’re going to meet with the Esar,” the Chief Sergeant said, “because you fancy yourselves a group of bastion-blessed diplomats.”

  There was another long silence, as everyone was left to consider the Chief Sergeant’s words, rumbling and dark and strong as a physical blow.

  Rook tossed his braids over one shoulder; I felt reminded of the stamping and posturing of a thoroughbred horse. “Th’Esar doesn’t give us some fucking answers,” he said, “then we ain’t gonna give him a fucking Dragon Corps.”

  “The way we see it,” Thom translated quietly, “is that it’s impossible for him to expect the men to fly under such conditions. If he won’t listen to the reason of one man, then he must surely listen to the reason of his fourteen airmen, without whom his war might never be won.”

  “I see,” said the Chief Sergeant. “And what, if you care to enlighten me, brought this pretty piece of inspiration on?”

  I swallowed thickly as I heard Thom clear his throat again as he glanced toward me. Then, as surely as if Thom had pointed in my direction, fourteen pairs of eyes were drawn to me and fixed me soundly in place. More than anything, I wished I could have disappeared, quickly as a shadow, hiding myself along the wall or at their feet.

  “This,” Thom said into the uncomfortable quiet, “is Hal.”

  The Chief Sergeant cocked his head and looked at me. “I know you,” he said, unexpectedly, and I breathed an infinitesimal sigh of relief. “ You’re Royston’s . . . apprentice. Aren’t you?”

  I nodded faintly, trying to work up the courage to speak. “His assistant,” I confirmed, when I could at last find the words. “He introduced us at the ball.”

  “I remember,” the Chief Sergeant said gruffly. “Said a few other things about you, too. Like how you’re clever as a whip and sharp as tacking.”

  This time, when I blushed, it was under such intense scrutiny that I wished more than anything for a Talent that might allow me to disappear entirely. This, however, would give me no aid in finding Royston.

  “I received a letter,” I informed the Chief Sergeant miserably. “It said the Margrave Royston had returned from the front and was at this very moment inside the Basquiat, and that—per his request—I was to be informed of his whereabouts. But I wasn’t to be allowed admittance. I’ve been waiting outside the Basquiat all morning—you should see the crowds; family and friends, and no one knows anything—” I broke off, fists clenched so tightly at my sides that I could barely feel my palms where my nails bit into them. Thom reached out and put his arm around me, and over the sound of someone’s uncomfortable giggling behind us, I thought I heard the Chief Sergeant sigh.

  “Royston’s a friend,” the Chief Sergeant said slowly, “and the corps is my business. I take care of you lot. Have you forgotten it?”

  The silence that followed his question seemed to indicate that, even if they had forgotten it before, everyone was certainly reminded of the fact and once again quite impressed by it.

  “So?” Rook asked darkly, the only man not even slightly impressed by the sheer force of will in the Chief Sergeant’s words. “You take care of us. What’re you gonna fucking do about it?”

  “The Esar won’t listen to you if you storm his door like angry children,” the Chief Sergeant countered smoothly. “Why in bastion’s name don’t I have thirteen reports filed from you about the problems you’ve been having up in the air? Is it because you’re all too fucking proud to see straight?”

  “It sort of . . . built up on us, sir,” said Balfour quietly. His head was bowed, his shoulders slumped with shame, and I saw him toying with his gloves, tugging the fingertips loose from his fingers.

  “Didn’t seem as how we knew we were all experiencing the same thing,” Ghislain added.

  “Fuck you all at your mother’s tit,” the Chief Sergeant snarled. “Don’t a single one of you move until I get back here in five.”

  “What happens in five?” an impossibly pale man asked from the back. The man next to him burst once more into uncomfortable giggles.

  “We call us some carriages,” the Chief Sergeant said. “Gets us to the palace much quicker than walking, doesn’t it?”

  ROOK

  So there we were—all fourteen of us and the professor, and the tagalong he’d managed to pick up out front of the Basquiat—waiting in th’Esar’s foyer nice as punch for His Majesty to grace us all with his imperial sun-blessed presence. I thought that if it’d do any of us a lick of good, I’d have gone for the throat right there, but like the professor said, more than anything we needed to know what the fuck was going on before we did anything. Most people are stupid ’cause they allow themselves to stay stupid, and I didn’t manage to get out of Molly by staying stupid for long.

  So anyway; there we were, no matter what we were all thinking about, sitting in chairs or standing and ranging around because the waiting was starting to piss us off, like me for example, and Ace too, because we both knew how bad things must be if our girls weren’t listening to us proper. We were all sort of mad at ourselves, too, even though Adamo’d been a little over the top earlier because of whatever soft spot he had for that Mary Margrave of his, because this was halfway our own fault and we knew it. We hadn’t been looking after our girls properly, and fuck the damn paperwork; we should have brought it up to Adamo the first time it happened instead of letting it get so bad while we tried to ignore it.

  Meanwhile, the professor had one arm around his tagalong’s shoulders and I could see Compagnon watching them all sidelong and trying not to giggle, which, if I hadn’t been so pissed myself, would’ve set me to giggling, too. Instead, I was just mad, and if teasing Balfour wasn’t going to make me feel better, then there wasn’t nothing that was going to work. I wanted to get something done, I wanted to march right into th’Esar’s fancy meeting hall and give him a piece of my mind, and maybe doing that’d distract me long enough from the guilt worrying at me, like maybe if I’d done something for Have sooner, then things wouldn’t have got to this state at all.

  “Shit,” Ace said to me, drawing me aside all private-like. “They’re just doing this to make us sweat.”

  “We’ll make ’em sweat before it’s through,” I promised. “I figure we gotta have a plan for it. Like when we’re flying.”

  “Oh?” Ace asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I’m no fucking good at plans.”

  Basically, there was one idiot in this entire room who knew people better than the rest of us, or did in theory anyway, and who could work these things out on the back of his hand or Balfour’s gloves if you gave him the pen for it. He was sitting there saying into his tagalong’s ear whatever soothing horseshit he had stored up from a lifetime of horse-shit memorization.

  “All right,” I said, whistling sharp, and he looked up quick as that, which made me more pleased than I’d like to admit. “Yeah,” I confirmed, “you. Leave your boyfriend alone and get the fuck over here. Th’Esar’s making us wait, so we might as well use it against him, right?”

  Everyone was watching me now, which meant I was the only one who saw the professor’s tagalong go red as a tomato all the way to the tops of his ears. It was like a circus sideshow.

  “Ah,” the professor said, giving his tagalong a squeeze before he stood. “How do you propose we do that?”

  “We gotta go to him like a team,” I said, spitting his own words straight back at him. “Right? We gotta use our strengths and his weaknesses against him. It’s your own theory.”

  “Well,” said the professor, looking at me with his doe eyes, like I’d given him a present and making me real uncomfortable, “in a manner of speaking, I suppose it is a . . . bastardization.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. “Who the fuck’re you calling a bastard?”

  “I believe,” said Jeannot smoothly, “that he’s calling your ideas the bastards.”

  “Shit,” I said, ’cause that much was more than halfway true. “Well, that’s all right, then.”
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br />   “Well?” Thom spread his hands before him. “What did you have in mind?”

  “I figure it this way,” I said. “We’ve got a man here who—Esar or fucking not—needs a whole lot of convincing. We’ve gotta mix it so there’s no way he can’t tell us what we need to know.”

  “You want to bargain with him,” said the professor. “You want to bargain with th’Esar.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Blackmail him. Whatever it’s called. But we’ve all got to do it together, because if one of us calls foul and the rest don’t back him up, we’re all screwed cheap as a Hapenny. You get that?” Compagnon started giggling, but all the boys were with me, even Adamo, whom I’d never thought of as one of the boys and still didn’t. The tagalong was watching us as if it were the best fucking theatre he’d ever seen, which in a way I guess it was. “All right,” I went on, turning to the professor. “So how do we do it? How do we make him do what we want?”

  “Well,” the professor said, real slow like I hate, but I could see he was thinking it over properly, and I forced myself to be a little patient. “I suppose the best bargaining tool you have is what you do for him. What you’ve already done.”

  “So we threaten to take it away,” I said.

  “In a manner of speaking,” the professor agreed. “Yes. Only—I don’t think you can phrase it as such, in as many words. You have to be more subtle—”

  And then, before we’d had time to talk it out good and proper, the door in the far corner swung open and one of th’Esar’s worm-mouthed servants made himself known to us with a stiff bow and a whining, “His Esteemed Majesty the Esar is waiting for you in his royal conference room.”

  “Right,” Adamo growled out. “Step to it, men.”

  We all fell into line for the first time in our lives. There wasn’t one in our number who wanted us to lose face in front of th’Esar, not when we knew we were cornered. What he hadn’t counted on was how every man fought like a dog when his back was pressed up against a wall like ours were right now, and we were fighting for more than just ourselves, too. We had our girls to think about.

  I hated the royal conference room, ’cause it was a bitch to get to, and worse than that it made me feel all turned around, like I was flying sideways and didn’t know which way was up. Raphael’d said once that he read a book that explained why everything was built all winding and confused as shit in the palace. Actually, the way Raphael put it was “a very subtle intimidation tactic,” but what that meant in real talk was that it made everyone except th’Esar feel out of place, and when people felt out of place they made dumb mistakes like getting nervous, and that was right where th’Esar wanted to put people. Nervous people needed a leader; nervous people did exactly as they were told. ’Course that wasn’t taking into account how nervous often preceded panicky, and there wasn’t nothing you could keep panicky people from doing once they got it into their heads to do it.

  Get enough people together like that and it wouldn’t matter what th’Esar said: They’d tear the Basquiat down to the ground to get at what they wanted. Part of that was caring, I guessed, from what the tagalong had said about it being all family and loved ones down there—and I knew I didn’t need to ask which he was, since we were talking about that Mary Margrave—and even me with no heart to speak of knew it plain as day that people aren’t ever crazier than when they’ve got caring mucking up their brains on top of everything else.

  The professor was walking up by me and Ace, like he’d taken my appeal as free license to do as he pleased. Or maybe he just thought he’d have a better chance of talking th’Esar down like he had Adamo if he were standing close by. But he knew his stuff, however pointless it’d been in the past, and I thought maybe for the first time I could see my way around to looking at his viewpoint as not entirely cracked.

  Much as I hated to admit it—and I wouldn’t ever admit it out loud—some of what he’d said was even going to come in useful, this trick the professor had of manipulating folk just by learning things about them. Of course it’d backfired soon as I realized how well it worked for keeping the professor in line, too, though I doubt that’d been what he meant to accomplish when he started teaching us. Wasn’t the first time anyone had underestimated my cleverness though he was probably the first to get out without a scratch on him.

  Then the servant stopped, and a second door swung open, and I had more important things to think about.

  We filed into the receiving room, Adamo first ’cause he was the most impressive out of all of us, even the professor—who when it came down to it was only a ’Versity student. And, if we were saying all the what-came-down-to-whats, when it came down to it, we were Adamo’s airmen, and not th’Esar’s.

  There wasn’t room on the dais for fourteen men and two more besides, but some of us were scrawnier than others, and we crowded in like schoolboys at the back room of a burlesque show, jostling and elbowing for the glimpse of a creamy thigh or better. ’Course, looking at th’Esar was none so exciting as Lady Greylace, even though his clothes cost likely near as much as hers. I thought it was a little funny, looking around, that th’Esar was built powerful, like a sensible sort of man and not the sort who’d match his clothes to the cream of the walls with their fancy gold trim, but there we were.

  Then again, I supposed that was the sort of thing that happened when your parents were your cousins, and things’d been that way for generations.

  Th’Esar sat in his chair—not quite a throne, but still fancy enough that I was betting no one else’d make the mistake of sitting in it. He was toying with the signet ring on his finger like he was just waiting for us to make the first move when even the dumbest kid down in Molly knew that you didn’t speak to th’Esar before he spoke to you.

  Finally, after Ace had crossed and uncrossed his arms so many times that I was near to considering just throttling him right there, th’Esar cleared his throat.

  “To what do we owe the pleasure of this . . . unique visit?” he asked, like he didn’t know what to call it and like he didn’t know exactly the reason why we were here in the first place. I felt my blood start to heat like boiling water, threatening to bubble over everywhere at once.

  Someone put a hand on my arm and I knew that it wasn’t Ace, so it must’ve been the professor. For some fucking strange reason, instead of hitting th’Esar then and there, I checked myself. Threatening th’Esar wouldn’t be any way of helping our girls, as much fun as it might have been, and I knew the others wouldn’t have appreciated my rash behavior any. Not that I was doing it for them, or the professor’s stupid hand on my arm; I was doing it for Have, and I’d break any man’s face in that said different.

  “Your Majesty,” said Adamo, only his voice had changed, got real fine like he was some ’Versity professor dictating instead of a man used to barking orders at them who listened about half as often as not. “We’re here about our dragons.”

  “What about them?” said th’Esar, still studying that damn ring of his, although anyone with eyes could tell that he was listening good and proper now, his back gone rigid and his pale eyes sharp.

  Adamo paused, like he was wondering how best to put it, and it was then that I knew without a doubt that Proudmouth had been flying as off as all the rest, and that he was a damn hypocrite for not filing his own report to his own damn self. “They aren’t flying properly,” Adamo said at last.

  “We have considered the idea that they may be in need of maintenance,” th’Esar allowed, the fucking bastard.

  “We’ve considered,” I said, speaking loud and hot before anyone could stop me, “that it might have something to do with all those magicians locked away in the Basquiat.”

  It was then that th’Esar looked at me, and I guess it was supposed to be an intimidating look, but anyone could have told him that I didn’t intimidate, so he was just wasting his energy and all our time. Still, I thought I could feel it working on some of the others, ’cause they stood up straighter, and there was some spar
king, snapping thread of nervous energy running through the lot like we were all of us joined into a lit fuse.

  I half expected Compagnon to start giggling with the strain of it at any moment, though he was probably considering what Adamo would do to him if he did, and that was the only thing shutting him up even now.

  “What do you know of the magicians in the Basquiat, Airman Rook?” Th’Esar asked his question like he really thought I knew something more than what anyone with a brain could know; that there was some serious shit going down and a crowd big enough to choke the streets surrounding.

  “I know them magicians are the ones that made our dragons,” I said, since he’d addressed me and all, so I guessed Adamo and the professor would just have to get their fainting over with later. “If there’s something that’s happened to ’em, then I guess it’s not such a stretch to think that maybe it’s got something to do with the way our girls ain’t doing what they’re supposed to anymore.”

  Next to me, the professor winced, like using bad grammar in front of th’Esar was an unimaginable crime. I didn’t care. I wasn’t like Adamo, couldn’t turn it on and off like a switch. Even if I could’ve, I wouldn’t’ve, because as far as I was concerned th’Esar was a man the same as anyone, and just because his great-great-granddaddy had seen to conquering a nation didn’t give him any more rights than the rest of us, ’specially me, and especially when he’d had the nerve to tell us our dragons weren’t doing what we said they were.

  I’d’ve liked to see him try and fly one.

  He waited a long moment, examining each of our faces like we were a room of criminals and if he could get just one of us to crack, he’d have us all. “You are all experiencing this?” he began at last, and it was the first time I’d heard him sound anything other than smug and infuriating. “ This . . . wrongness with our dragons?”

  I didn’t like the way he said “our,” but I let it slide when the professor tightened his fingers on my arm.