Havemercy Read online

  “Not very much,” I admitted.

  “Fuck,” Rook said, but there was less malevolence in it than usual. “I thought you knew everything, ’Versity boy.”

  I rubbed wearily at my eyes. “Yes,” I said, “well. Not everything.”

  Rook gave me a look that seemed to intimate I’d suddenly grown a pair of horns, or perhaps a tail. “Don’t start gettin’ women’s moods on me,” Rook said. “I’ve got enough fucking trouble right now without it being your time of the month.”

  “Hardly,” I said. “I’m simply feeling somewhat sobered by the day’s events.”

  “Simply feeling somewhat sobered by the day’s events,” Rook parroted back at me, giving each word a sneer. There was that malevolence I’d been missing. I’d spoken too soon about the change I’d imagined in him. It seemed I was much better at imagining changes than I was at effecting them. “Bastion. You ever listen to yourself? It’s like you really are useless.”

  I recalled my earlier triumph with Hal, and felt heartened, however momentarily. “Not entirely that, either,” I said.

  “No,” Rook agreed, throwing me off somewhat. “Guess not, though it sure took you long enough to make yourself useful.” He chose that moment to stop pacing the length of the common room and sit down hard next to me on the opposite end of the couch, crossing his legs wide, and moving lazy as a cat. There was a certain tension beneath his movements, though, noticeable only when he came close, and even then it was rare. In some ways though, I had been training myself to do exactly that, notice the subtle changes, the slight variations in his nonchalance. I was only just now growing aware of how dedicated I was to the study of him, my long-lost brother.

  It was a troublesome propensity of mine, and one I had no right to cultivate under these peculiar circumstances. I felt childish, and exhausted with the day’s efforts. I wanted to curl up on my couch and go straight to sleep, but to do that would have meant asking Rook to leave, and I could no more command him than I could th’Esar himself.

  I pressed the heels of my hands against my forehead instead, staving off the advent of a headache. “I barely studied the Well,” I said softly. “I wish now that I had, but it never interested me.”

  “Idiot,” Rook said.

  “Indeed,” I replied.

  “S’not what I’d’ve studied,” he added, after a pause. “If I’d ever lost my fucking mind and decided school was what I wanted to do with most of my life.”

  “You would have done quite well,” I told him. If not for his cleverness, I added to myself, then certainly for his ability to intimidate others into giving him exactly what he wanted.

  “Fucking right I would’ve,” he said. “But I chose Have. Shit.” He tore off and shook his head, his face angry and harsh in the fading sunlight, his blue eyes narrowed and his wide mouth tight. All his features, I decided then, seemed each to be taken from many different men’s faces; they were a strange and startling assortment, and the ferocity behind his every expression was what made him so painfully handsome.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, as if I were talking to John and not Rook. “For your dragon, that is. It may be that th’Esar and those close to him will divine a solution—”

  “Or it may be that th’Esar and those close to him may never divine a way to unstick their heads from being shoved so far up their own rumps they can barely see the light of day,” Rook offered.

  “That,” I agreed, “is also a possibility.”

  “You did a pretty decent job in there,” he said then, as though every word of it were painful to him. “Not like you taught us a fucking thing, but you were all right.”

  I felt a strange suffusion of warmth—pleasure, I supposed, at being complimented as though I were a stray dog who’d done right for the first time in his flea-ridden existence. I couldn’t help my starved gratitude from showing plainly on my face; as soon as Rook saw it his mouth curled down at the corners and he looked sharply away.

  “Th’Esar—the Esar—had no right to keep what he knew from you,” I said, choosing my words with the utmost care. “He might have killed all of you for pride. It is treason to say so, but he has behaved more like a fool than a leader.”

  “If he’s fucked my girl,” Rook said, “I’ll pay him back for it.”

  “That mightn’t be too wise,” I cautioned.

  “You’re not my fucking mother,” Rook said, “so don’t act like you are.”

  I turned away from him, feeling the blow more deeply for the hope he’d given me. Perhaps that had been his plan all along. Even with the feverishness with which I applied myself to studying him, I could no more predict him than I could predict the outcome of this war. But the hurt and my own shame coursed through me all the same, hot chasing cold in my blood. I had no room to judge him, nor room to love him, either.

  I bowed my head.

  That was when he took my chin in his hand, simple as reaching across the table for a slice of toast at lunch, and looked at me, really looked, while I fought the urge to run as far and fast as I could in the other direction. He was looking at my eyes. Something turned over in my stomach, uncomfortable and real, like the first moment of falling or the first time he’d taken a dive on Havemercy when I was up in the air with him. He let his hand drop after a moment, but he went on looking like I was a puzzle, something he couldn’t quite figure out. I couldn’t find it in my heart to drop my gaze a second time. I was fixed like an insect, caught in a box of my own making. Pinned. Trapped.

  “Don’t fucking know why you did it,” he said. “Don’t even know if it’ll help.”

  I realized all at once this was his way of thanking me, whether he acknowledged it or not. My heart turned to glass in my chest, and I knew that at its next beat it was bound to shatter.

  “John,” I said.

  His face changed in an instant, more quickly than the turns he’d taken on Havemercy. There were shards of glass in my veins, and he shoved me away from him.

  “What the fuck did you just call me?” he said. His voice was low and deceptively smooth; I felt certain it would whip around, fast as a dragon’s tail, to strike me the moment my back was turned.

  “John,” I said, the words drawn out of me by some force too powerful for me to stop, too powerful for me to name. I suppose it was the truth at last, at the wrong moment, at the most ruinous one. This was disaster, rolling like an avalanche. I couldn’t stop speaking. “Your name is John—was John—you told me to stay where I was, and I—”

  “Who put you up to this?” Rook said. “Who fucking told you to say that?”

  They weren’t questions; they were too terrifying to be questions. I knew he’d beat the answers out of me as soon as demand them, but I could admit no feeling that would allow me to be afraid of him.

  “I’m your brother,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” said Rook. “My brother’s dead.”

  “I went to live with the whores on Tuesday Street,” I said, frozen helpless in place for all I couldn’t keep my tongue still. “They took me in, they called me Thom. I . . . there was a man; he told me you were dead. I thought that you must have gone back inside to look for me, and that was why—”

  “Shut up,” he said.

  I wished that I could.

  “I never thought I’d see you again.” It wasn’t the way I’d meant to do it. In fact it went against everything I’d planned, right down to my best of intentions in the very beginning. It was too late now, too late to cushion the blow for him as I’d wished it could have been for me.

  He lunged forward then, and I thought he was going to hit me. Of course, he had every right to do so if he wished, as I’d hurt him in far worse ways. No matter what faults Rook possessed—and they were many; I was not so blinded by my guilt to believe otherwise—I knew that what I’d done was worse. I’d betrayed him; he was my brother and for a long time—such a long time—I’d known it.

  Instead, he only took my face in one hand again, and pushed my hair back at the
right temple where it hid a small white scar, a relic of running too fast on legs too short when I’d been younger and heedless of anyone’s remonstrations to be careful.

  “You were always fucking running near the stairs,” he said at last. Something squeezed tight in my chest, so that I had to exhale a nervous sound of release.

  “I’m sorry,” I said quietly, and he dropped his hands from me as quickly as he’d moved before, though there wasn’t any real urgency behind his movements. Rather, it was more as if he was so disgusted that I didn’t matter to him one way or the other and especially not because I had some silly scar proving we shared the same blood.

  He didn’t say anything after that, only sat still and stony as a mountain. My hands were starting to hurt, and I realized I’d been squeezing them between my knees since he’d told me to do something about their shaking. I felt a sudden and desperate wish for things to go back to the way they’d been, even before knowing I had a brother, because if I hadn’t known, then I wouldn’t ever have hurt him in this fashion. Even if all the parts of him that could hurt had disappeared along with the boy who had been John, that knowledge didn’t preclude my own guilt, and it certainly didn’t change what I’d done to him.

  I put my head in my hands. “I’m sorry,” I said again, though it sounded tinny and meaningless even to my own ears. “I meant to tell you sooner.”

  I felt a change come over the room, in the small space between us, as though I’d somehow gleaned the same ability the airmen boasted, to be able to taste danger in the air or smell the stronger emotions. My mouth was impossibly dry.

  “How long,” he said, calmer than I’d ever heard him and all the more terrifying because of it, “have you known?” He was adding up the details in his head, searching for the possible moment of revelation; his eyes held none of the callous distance to which I’d grown accustomed, but they were focused on the wall behind me, and not my face. Even then I wished he’d look at me, though the desire spoke only to the depths of a place in me I wished never to accept as mine.

  I should have been straightforward from the start. Or, barring that, I should have gone on lying. Anything at all seemed better than this: this awful careening path I’d taken that tore up everything I’d carefully sown.

  “Since you told me,” I whispered, as though by softening my voice I could somehow soften the impact of the blow. “That night, when you were hurt, and I—I’m Hilary.” For all my restraint and the careful compartments in which I’d tried to keep my feelings, I couldn’t prevent the desperation from crawling into my voice.

  I didn’t deserve to ask anything of Rook, and I wanted everything from him. It had been the same when we were boys, I thought. A familiarity, deep and irrational as blood, and I wanted to tear at my hair for what it had done to me. What I had done to him in return. John, Rook. My own brother, who was meant to make everything right.

  He moved at that last and I flinched, though there was no need. He didn’t even look at me. I began to think it might have been better if he had struck me, or at least reacted in some way that might have alleviated my guilt, however briefly. Instead, he got up, unfolding his legs very slowly, but with no ambiguity that could leave anyone to mistake it for hesitance. No, it was a deliberate pulling away, piece by piece, to sever all ties, and I felt it with a wrench, as though I’d somehow lost something more than a brother whom I’d never truly had to begin with. It was worse than being struck, worse than my bones breaking. But Rook, of course, was clever enough to know that.

  I watched him go, helpless, with no right to call him back and no reason to believe his reluctance to do violence went beyond this silent exit. If I tried to stop him, I thought, it would most certainly push him into something regrettable.

  He paused in the doorway, so fierce and unhappy that I felt it underneath my skin. How my brother had come to be such a person with his wild braids and quick jeering I couldn’t understand. Whenever I studied his face I found not even a hint of the John I remembered. Of course, twenty-one years was a very long time, and perhaps the things I remembered were remembered all wrong. Perhaps in my brother had always been this man, just as in me there had always been someone who would grow up to develop the ability to manipulate others and a questionable code of what was right and wrong.

  “You don’t talk to me,” said Rook, and for one wild moment I thought it was a complaint before the honest hand of reality came up to slap me in the face. This was the way things would be from now on. Our new rules, just when I’d made peace and felt comfortable enough to leave a handful of the old ones by the wayside. “I don’t talk to you, and this? It never happened. Far as I’m concerned, my brother died when he was three. You go long enough believing something like that’s true, then it becomes true, you see what I’m saying?”

  I didn’t. I couldn’t. After all, I’d spent my whole life believing him to be dead, only to have it proved wrong, and the contradiction hadn’t made me any less glad to discover him alive and—in most ways—well.

  “It isn’t true, though,” I said, unable to keep from pushing my luck, as though I was compelled by some greater force to see this to its bitter conclusion with no holds barred, nothing held back. “You can’t just—We are brothers.”

  “I think it’s a little rich, gettin’ a lecture from you on what a man can and can’t do to his own brother,” said Rook flatly. There was no malice, or spite, or even the rare tolerance I’d come to cherish in his voice. There was only nothing, empty and clean the way I imagined his chest to be, a hollow echoing where his heart should be.

  “My brother is dead,” said Rook again, as though I hadn’t heard him properly in the first place. I half expected him to follow up the statement with a threat detailing what would happen to me if I brought it up again, or at the very least something to forbid my coming near him in the future, but he merely turned away from me and walked out the door as though I’d ceased to exist altogether.

  After that, I didn’t see him at all. When I mentioned it as casually as I could to Adamo, he said that Rook had signed up for all the extra shifts he could to give th’Esar the time he needed to work things out.

  I tried to slide a wall of glass between my thoughts and my heart, just as my brother had done for some reason I hadn’t understood, and now would never know. With him flying the way he was, and under such dire conditions, it seemed likely I should prepare myself for the possibility that I might never see him again.

  While this wasn’t the worst I’d ever felt, it was certainly close.

  It seemed that in the second meeting th’Esar had called, some manner of tentative truce had been called between him and the Chief Sergeant. The solution wasn’t an ideal one by all means, but the way Adamo had explained it sounded as though what they’d agreed upon was a kind of unofficial system of volunteering, the way the crush shifts worked only now it was every shift, and anyone who thought their dragon was good enough to fly that night could sign up and batter back the Ke-Han to the best of his abilities.

  Much as I hated to admit it—and I did hate it these days though I’d always considered myself a loyal citizen—th’Esar was a shrewd thinker. In a group such as the Dragon Corps, tightly knit and yet infused with a sense of honor and pride that would rival His Majesty’s, asking for volunteers was a clever system to employ. In some ways, it became a competition, indicating you were a coward if you didn’t volunteer straightaway. It was the same mentality that had kept them quiet about their dragons in the first place, and yet for once, I made no notes for my own private documentation.

  If I were to be completely truthful, I’d have expected more of a split within the group, with the more pragmatic men electing to stay out of the mess entirely, at least until their dragons were rehabilitated, and the wilder risk-takers signing up for all the shifts. Instead, though there were certainly some who took longer to sign up, I found myself seeing everyone taking to the halls in much the same manner, soot-soaked and cutting in line for the shower, or falling
asleep right in their chairs in the common room due to having been up all the previous night.

  I asked Ghislain about it, as, beyond the vague sense of unease I got around him, he’d nevertheless struck me as one of the more sensible men bunking in the Airman.

  “You never played sports as a kid, did you?” He tugged at the blackened towel around his neck, waiting outside the shower room.

  I didn’t see what sports had to do with anything, and said so.

  He only smiled, sharp and always startlingly bright. “Do anything as a team?”

  “No. Well, study projects, sometimes. With a group,” I amended. The closest thing I’d had to a team, I supposed, had been the whores who’d taken me in, but that had all been very long ago, and anyway I didn’t think it was what Ghislain was talking about.

  “Well,” he said, “and this is only my own way of thinking, mind, but when you’re doing something you love—really love—you can’t let the way others play the game get in the way of that, if you follow. It don’t matter if your coach is hassling you, or whether you don’t like how some of your teammates indulge in the sport. When you’re out there, you’ve got a goal to accomplish, and you can’t see to letting all that mishmash weigh you down.”

  In some ways, I felt as though I would never stop learning the lesson. What I’d set out to accomplish with the Dragon Corps had been foolish beyond recourse. I would never understand them the way they understood one another. No matter which way I turned, it seemed that I was to be reminded of my failings as a teacher. And Rook’s conspicuous absence reminded me of my failings in all other areas of life.

  The nights were the worst. I lay on my couch listening to the far-off sounds of explosions, imagined or real, and all that stood between the Ke-Han and Rook was a dragon who wasn’t even flying properly. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was I thought I stood to lose with Rook’s death; I’d lost him this time just as surely as I’d lost my brother in the fire twenty-one years ago. Yet every night I listened just the same, terrified that every explosion would be the last, or that I wouldn’t hear the telltale sound of boots in the hallway, denoting another night’s return, whole if not entirely safe.