Havemercy Page 42

  “I remain in the library because the Esar keeps us here as though it is a prison, and not our own palace. A palace truly fit for magicians, and Margraves, and velikaia,” she told me. “I find my comfort among the books.”

  Then she smiled again, and her teeth were impossibly white against the dark of her face.

  “‘Hang the rules,’ I believe, is the expression Royston would use under these circumstances,” she said, and I felt hope bloom wild like a sunflower within my chest. “Though you’d best be more clever about keeping yourself from view in the future.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered, holding the romans I’d brought down with me off the ladder tight against my chest.

  “And you might start with this volume,” she added. With one of her large, graceful hands she indicated a volume about halfway down from the top. “It contains a few treatises on magical illness, though, sadly, not illness that attacks magic itself.”

  “Thank you,” I said again, too overwhelmed to do anything but go on expressing my gratitude to her repeatedly.

  It was only when I reached the door, stack of romans threatening to topple unsteadily one way or the other at any moment, that I realized I’d missed one very important detail. I turned around precariously, and though I knew it was rudeness unimaginable to shout within the confines of the library, I called back to her.

  “What is your name?” I was certain there was a more proper way to address a velikaia—I was certain Royston might even have mentioned it to me—but countless nights without sleep had driven all but the most basic knowledge from my mind. I hoped she would forgive me.

  “You may call me Antoinette,” she answered, and though I’d heard her quite clearly, she didn’t seem to have raised her voice at all.

  When I came back to the sickroom, Royston was sleeping, and I was careful to put my load of romans down before arranging the covers carefully around him where he’d thrown them off in a fit of tossing.

  “My,” Caius remarked from his bed, waving an idle, white hand. His cot was aligned now with Royston’s; he must have moved it while I was gone on my errand. “You would have made an excellent student of the ’Versity. Or a pack mule, possibly, as both are prone to carrying disproportionately heavy loads.”

  The unsettling thing about Caius—or perhaps the most unsettling, as there seemed to be a consistently growing supply—was that at times I was sure he could be no more than a few years above me in age, if that.

  “Antoinette suggested we start with this one,” I said, holding it up from the rest.

  A sly look passed over his sharp-featured face. Next to him, Berhane stirred in her own bed and fought to sit up, hair clinging limply to the side of her face.

  “Antoinette is here?”

  “Well,” I amended, “not here, but in the Basquiat. I saw her in the library, I thought she was going to tell me to leave. Only then . . . she didn’t.”

  Marcelline coughed the way she’d begun to that morning, and Marius began to stir in his bed, fighting his way free from the blankets to help Berhane into a more comfortable position on the little cot. It was then that I noticed the beds had been rearranged, and that our little group had moved to form a misshapen sort of circle to one side of the room. I felt the beginnings of hope fill my heart with warmth. We were going to solve this.

  We had to.

  “Pass us the romans then,” said Marcelline, once she’d had a glass of water and could speak properly.

  They felt heavier as I passed them out, and I was worried that some of the magicians might not be able to hold them up properly, but of course I had underestimated them, and even Berhane balanced her own text neatly against her lap with hands that didn’t have the strength to hold it properly.

  I sat on the edge of Royston’s bed as lightly as I could so as not to wake him, but soon enough I heard the sigh and felt the stirrings that meant I’d done so anyway.

  “Hal?” His voice was rough with sleep, and something deeper that I knew was the sickness rooted deep within him. I moved immediately to sit next to him, adjusting his pillows so that he could sit up and remaining close in case he felt the need to lean against me once more.

  “Shall we begin, at the behest of our dear colleague, with nature and the known magical plagues?” Caius’s one bright eye nearly sparkled. I tucked in close to Royston, and held his book open for the two of us. In some ways it was so like our earliest days in the country that I felt the change all the more keenly.

  This was how our days passed.

  On the second day, as Berhane could no longer read, we began our work afresh—sometime, I judged, in the very late morning—and I read loud enough for both her and Royston to hear. I noticed that Marius was more distracted by her condition than he would have liked, and he kept asking for theories to be repeated over, weariness and apology beat into every line of his face. By evening, she’d fallen into fitful sleeping, and before I fell asleep, curled in at Royston’s overwarm side, he whispered softly against my temple, “We cannot strain her by letting her join us tomorrow.”

  On the third day, both Berhane and Alcibiades were no longer capable of reading with us, the former asleep and the other intermittently—but very rarely—offering sharp yet weary criticism. We’d still come no closer to a solution by the time Royston rested a shaking hand upon my arm and admitted to me that he could no longer understand the words I was speaking as a language he knew.

  “Well,” said Marius, soft so as not to disturb Berhane. “I didn’t want to be the first one to admit it.”

  “Hal and I will continue,” Caius said, his voice never losing its keen edge.

  “Hal must also—occasionally—rest,” Royston suggested. I wrung out the damp flannel I kept in a basin of cool water by the foot of his cot and draped it over his forehead.

  Very quickly after that, his breathing evened out, and I knew he was sleeping.

  “Doesn’t it trouble you, as well?” I asked Caius, softly, so as not to wake the others.

  He shrugged, barely more than a disconcertingly pale shadow in the dark room. All the lamps were being kept at half-light, perhaps to avoid troubling the magicians whenever they wished to sleep, but the effect was such that, after all the squinting I’d been doing, I felt as though I, too, were going to go blind.

  “At certain hours it’s worse than others,” he said. “However, I am uncertain of how much more time I’ll have to work on the problem at hand. I thought it might be best to make the most of it—‘it’ being that short period of blessed wakefulness, while I still have one eye.”

  I took up a book we’d not yet started and flipped it open, even as I moved to sit by the foot of Caius’s bed. It was the best position to take, I thought; this way, I could read a little more loudly and leave Royston undisturbed as he slept.

  “Shall we, then?” I suggested.

  Caius frowned. “Poisons and antidotes,” he said, as though it were troubling him. “Poisons, poisons—we’re getting nowhere.”

  I bowed my head. “It’s true,” I admitted at length, though it pained me greatly to do so. I’d had such high hopes when we’d begun, but we’d effectively lost both Berhane and Alcibiades in the past two days, and we were no closer to understanding what was happening than we had been at the beginning.

  “We must lay it all out, from start to finish,” Caius said. “What we don’t know is ruining us.”

  We were at the task for most of the night, until Royston began to cough very near morning and I returned to tend to him. When Royston was sleeping peacefully once more, so was Caius.

  On the fourth day, Marius became delirious with fever, and Marcelline could no longer help us due to ceaseless coughing; then there were only the three of us.

  What we didn’t know was ruining us, I told myself, and while Royston and Caius slept, I repeated the list Caius and I had made—half chart, half questions—over and over again, until I saw it every time I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. The Ke-Han had taken a sample of the
magic waters from the Well; they had invented a poison to work against it, presumably also of magic; it was this magic that worked as a fever through Royston’s veins, this magic that brought a flush to Alcibiades’ cheeks, and this magic that was beginning to blind Caius’s good eye.

  We had to undo the poison, but we had no idea how to proceed, as it took so many forms.

  On the fifth day, Royston could no longer control his vomiting. He apologized profusely, which seemed to me a waste of energy, and then slept once more for much of the day. I continued to read on my own while Caius watched me. Under any other circumstances this would have daunted me, but I refused to be distracted.

  At last I reached the same point Royston had just the other day: the words no longer seemed to be ones I recognized, though they had been not a moment before. I rubbed wearily at my eyes, my own head pounding and aching between the temples and behind my eyes. I could barely see at all.

  “You’ll drive yourself mad that way,” Caius said, and punctuated the statement with a crystalline laugh.

  I sighed wearily, and for a long time I didn’t speak at all. Then I asked him, “Caius, what is your Talent?”

  He smiled his snake-thin smile and breathed in deeply, almost reverently. “Ah,” he said. “My Talent lies in visions.”

  “Visions?” I asked.

  “It’s particularly useful when the Esar requires information from certain unwilling parties,” Caius explained.

  “Oh,” I said. “So the . . . torture you mentioned earlier, that was—”

  “Not physical,” Caius confirmed. “No. You are curious, perhaps, as to why the Esar banished me in the first place?” I nodded mutely, and whether or not he could see me, he took my silence as agreement. “I was too young for such a gift,” he continued, quiet, reminiscent. “I misused it. I drove a man mad for . . . private reasons.”

  “And you couldn’t cure him afterward?” I asked, horrified by the ease of his admission.

  “No,” Caius replied. “Though, if I die before he does, the general consensus is that he will return to the state he was in before I tore his mind apart. He would be very pleased to see me in such distress—would be, that is, if he were more than a drooling, wild-eyed mongrel.”

  I rubbed at my eyes again, too weary to offer him a reply. He didn’t seek one, either, and I left it at that.

  On the sixth day, Berhane died.

  It happened before I woke, but the murmuring of distant voices broke into my dreamless sleep and I sat up quickly, my heart pounding fit to burst. There were men gathered above her cot who covered her with a simple gray coverlet and carried her from the room.

  “I did write to her,” Marius said, his voice still tinged with delirium and fever. He turned away from us and pulled the blankets up over his head.

  “She had such lovely hair,” Caius whispered, and for the first time, I thought I detected the shifting of emotions in his voice.

  I turned my face against Royston’s shoulder and cried. If he was taken from me in the same manner, I was certain I’d never forgive myself.

  I returned to reading, but it was no longer any use. I could barely concentrate—the words danced before my eyes, tantalizing but impossible to catch—and the sound of Royston’s rough, ragged breathing interrupted every thought I might once have had. At last I could manage it no more, and I admit that I surrendered, closing the book, pulling my knees to my chest, and crying myself to sleep.

  It was then that the idea struck.

  Inspiration woke me with the same jolting, electric shock that the sounds of Berhane being taken away had done earlier that morning.

  “Royston,” I said, grasping his hand and shaking him. “Royston. Royston, please, wake up!”

  He groaned with tired resistance and struggled to pull his hand from mine. I let him go, but only to grab his shoulder instead, shaking him harder. At last his face twisted into consciousness, and his eyes moved beneath their lids. A moment later he opened them blearily, staring at me for a long time without recognition.

  “It’s Hal,” I said, on the verge of crying again. “Please, Royston, I need you to listen. I think I’ve had an idea about the poison, Royston. Please, listen to me—”

  His eyes snapped into focus, though I saw it was with considerable effort that he managed to follow my words from the first to the last. “Tell me,” he said. His throat sounded rough enough as to pain even me; I could barely imagine what it must have felt like to him.

  I ordered my thoughts into as much coherency as I could manage, and yet I still spoke them one after the other, jumbled and tumbling from my lips without any structure at all. “The Well,” I said, “Royston, it’s not—We can’t cure the magic from the Well, there’s been no cure found yet, but Caius said that the man who went mad will be cured if Caius dies—and what about the story of Tycho the Brave, who couldn’t cure his lady of the curse, so he killed the magician who’d placed the curse in the first place? The chatelain had a copy of that roman, and we read it together—Never mind, it’s just a story, only Caius said—And wouldn’t that be the same—wouldn’t it—if the magicians who made the poison were killed? It’s possible,” I concluded, helplessly and breathlessly both. “It’s—It sounded better when I first thought of it, but wouldn’t it be possible?”

  Royston stared at me, uncomprehending. When he grasped it, understanding rose on his face like the dawn. I could see it, almost as though it had a particular color, come sudden into his eyes. “The Ke-Han magicians have a round, flat tower in the center of their great city,” he said, his voice trembling. But not, I thought, on the edge of fever. Rather, it was the edge of excitement. “It’s too far in to have ever been destroyed by our dragons; besides which, the Ke-Han magicians control the very air around the dome. That is where they operate. They concentrate their magic, which is what makes them so powerful—able to move the very rivers from their beds, roil the winds against our dragons and the oceans against their shores. But it also makes them . . . a giant blue target.”

  I pressed my hand against my chest—as if somehow that could stop the wild, frantic pace of its beating.

  “But how?” I asked. “How can we do it?” Looking all around me, I could see that it was hopeless. Without magic, we could never hope to get close enough to kill the Ke-Han magicians, much less every last one of them.

  It was a shot in the dark, wild and desperate. I was certain it was the right answer. I was also certain it couldn’t be done.

  “If the dragons are still flying,” Royston said.

  “But how?” I repeated. “How can we even let the Esar know what we know?”

  “Ah,” Royston said. “Leave that to me.”

  That was when he started screaming.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ROOK

  Fighting every night on a dragon who couldn’t even see her way past her own fucking wings and sometimes wouldn’t’ve been able to fly her way out of a wedding veil didn’t have too many fucking benefits, but there was one, and it was the one I was looking for: I didn’t have to think about nobody or nothing. It was just me, Have, the way she jerked and bumped beneath me, the way sometimes she fought me when I tried to steer her, and the belching of flames and smoke when I did my best to aim and fire, her whole metal body shaking between my legs and me just hanging on for dear life.

  Like I’d told the professor—my fucking brother; fucking Hilary—there wasn’t any time to be thinking when you were up in the air. It was even more true now that Have’d gone out of her mind, and the only thing keeping me from plummeting to the ground—or worse, getting caught alive by the Ke-Han—was how tight I could hold on to her with both my thighs.

  I developed a sort of trick for staying on her that involved wrapping the reins around both my wrists, underneath the gloves. This could fuck me or save me, depending on how things shook down. Like, for example, if Have got hit by a blast of wind which the madness didn’t make her even more determined to fight and she went down because of it
, then I was going down with her without any way to wrangle myself to safety. And that would be it, lights out for good and forever. But if she did another one of the crazy flips she’d done the first time—which almost sent me flying to my death, and the only thing saving me sheer pissed-off determination, and me nearly tearing off my own two legs by the time she’d righted herself—then I’d be pretty glad for the reins holding me to her back. After all, two broken wrists were the sort of thing you had to barter to avoid a broken neck. It was just that simple.

  Anyway, I didn’t have any choice. I had to take these chances, since now more than ever the only thing keeping the Ke-Han from kicking down th’Esar’s door was us, the Dragon Corps, and we were really fighting like dogs.

  If I didn’t die—like, if these stunts didn’t kill me—I was going to wipe the smug look off every last Ke-Han face. I just didn’t know how I was going to go about doing that, or if I’d ever get the chance to see it done.

  It’d only been a week—maybe less, now that all the days were blending together in one mess of almost dying and almost dying again—and already we were on the edge of being no more fucking use to anybody. Compagnon had done a run with Spiridon that put her out of commission, we guessed probably for good, and all of the swifts but Balfour’s Anastasia could barely lift their own heads for flying. We were fucked at both ends, and pretty soon we were gonna crack right in half with the pressure of it.

  That didn’t stop me from flying out, though—’cause like I said, somebody had to do it, and besides which, it kept me from having the time to think about anything.

  So I was out on my lonesome, just me and Have since it was all the corps could spare, flying low along the mountains all night long and blasting down fire whenever we thought the Ke-Han might’ve forgotten about our being there.