Havemercy Read online

  He’d been busy, as part of the delegation formed by the Esar at the last minute to negotiate the terms of our peace treaty with the Ke-Han. He’d even have to leave yet again, however briefly, to see that the conditions were being carried out.

  Royston had explained the terms of the provisional treaty to me thusly: that all surviving dragons were to be retired, but that the pieces found past the Xi’an border were to be returned to Volstov. That the Kiril Islands were to be returned to Volstov, that the Ke-Han people would allow Volstovic occupation while they rebuilt their city, and that an established border would be fixed along the Cobalt Mountains. All in all it was fairly simple—at least, simple enough that I understood it all—and not even Royston could find anything about it to argue against.

  When I had gone to visit Thom at the Airman, he told me in a terrible sort of voice that only four members of the corps had made it back from their final flight, and that the rest of the airmen had most likely been captured and tortured, or killed.

  A funereal atmosphere hung over the whole building like a shroud, the airmen reduced to less than half their number, and I could see it on the faces of those who remained that not one of them was daring to imagine any of their fellows could escape if they’d lived long enough to be imprisoned.

  The airman Rook hadn’t been among the men who’d made it back, and for that brief, dark window of time when we’d all thought him dead, I’d spent many a day trying to alleviate the weight of Thom’s misery. It had given me a distraction from my own fears, for even then no one had been speaking of our certain victory with the assurance they’d exhibited during the time of the ball. Rather, everyone skirted around the issue, as though they were afraid they’d tempted fate quite enough for one lifetime, and now they were waiting to see on whose side she truly fell before they all began to congratulate themselves.

  The day I’d received my letter from Royston had been the day the Airman received word as well about Airman Rook, who was alive, and the status of the other airmen, who were not. It was a month after the battle. Thom had come to meet me soon after, rather than stay and show his relief in the face of the Dragon Corps’ staggering loss.

  “As much time as I’ve spent with them,” Thom had said, voice hooked low on some rougher emotion, “it isn’t something I would presume to . . . intrude on.”

  I understood, then, that he felt as strongly about Airman Rook as I did about Royston. I couldn’t say I particularly understood the reasoning behind it, but then if I were being perfectly fair, I supposed it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you could explain to anyone with reason alone. People are connected in many different ways, and I was only beginning to learn a few of them.

  Things happened very quickly after that.

  I’d half expected th’Esar to organize another ball, since winning the war seemed a much better reason to me than covering up an insidious plague, but after he’d returned, Royston told me that wasn’t the way that things worked. Apparently signing a treaty had all sorts of complicated connotations, such as how you couldn’t really celebrate your win too much because that would be too close to parading under the Ke-Han’s noses, and that wasn’t the way to foster proper peace between two nations.

  “But we are at peace,” I said, staring out of one of Royston’s many round windows at the city, cloaked that afternoon with the grayest rain.

  “Yes,” Royston said. I felt his rough cheek against my ear, and I smiled. “I never thought I’d be there to see it, but indeed, it would seem we are.”

  Even the city herself seemed to acknowledge it. It was a beautiful sight stretched out before us, all of Thremedon smiling privately to herself beneath the clouds.

  Then the invitations to the ceremony arrived, thick and ornate as everything else from the palace. That it was called a ceremony, Royston assured me, didn’t mean it was going to be anything particularly terrifying, even though he spent the better part of the day searching for his favorite cuff links and moving about as though he couldn’t sit still, which he only ever did when he was very nervous.

  “If you’re going to tell me not to worry about something,” I said, perched on the window seat of our drawing room with a roman in my lap, “then the least you could do is have the courtesy to pretend you’re not doing the exact same thing.”

  He paused in the middle of the room, then came to sit on the couch beside the window, leaning his head against my hip. I thought it couldn’t be very comfortable, but the flush of warmth low in my stomach prevented me from actually suggesting another position might be more favorable.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It would seem I set a very poor example on top of everything else.”

  I smoothed the gray at his temple with my fingers. “We could always stay home and read,” I suggested. It was not an entirely practical suggestion, and one he was bound to refuse, but I thought it was important I offer it nonetheless.

  Royston laughed then, hoarse as though he still hadn’t completely returned to his old health. “Hal,” he said, “I believe it is my duty to prepare you for the very real possibility that one day you may be reading a history of these very events we have so unexpectedly managed to survive and find yourself a character in it.”

  “Oh,” I felt my cheeks go warm. “Surely not.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for you, this all would have ended in the Basquiat—and I include myself in that assessment.”

  I crawled down off of the window seat to sit beside him instead, putting my arms about his shoulders and resting my face right against the break of his high collar where I could see his throat. “I did it for you,” I said quietly. “No one else needs to know.”

  “Ah,” said Royston. “Well, it’s a pity that I made mention of it to the Esar, then.”

  “What?” I blinked, sure that I’d misheard him, or that this was one of his dry jokes that I’d not yet entirely got the hang of and, sometimes, suspected I never might. “Are you—You aren’t serious?”

  “I certainly am,” he said, fingers making idle patterns against my shoulder blades so that I sighed. Somehow, his touches calmed me, despite the more and more alarming information he imparted. “I believe he made some mention of offering you a position of honor at the ’Versity.”

  “What?” I said again, feeling as though I’d missed some vital detail, or that perhaps I’d fallen asleep again the way I’d done for a time after the war had ended, dropping off without warning as if my body had just decided to catch up where it could whenever it felt like it, so that Royston would find me curled up in strange places and find himself inspired to move me to the bed.

  “Well, I’m sure it will all be sorted out at the ceremony,” he said, and kissed my forehead. “That is, if I can find my blasted cuff links.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THOM

  The ceremony was set in a long reception room at the palace that had plush red carpeting running down the center of it and chairs on either side where the noblesse sat. Behind them, the higher-ranking officers of the Volstovic army stood. At the very end of the room stood th’Esar himself, and seated next to him was th’Esarina, resplendent in crystal and pure white.

  This was ceremonial dress—it had been for generations—and none but a rare few were allowed to see it.

  At any other time, I might have felt out of place, but there was no room in my heart or my head for anything except the man standing not quite mended at the back of the room with his fellow airmen.

  They were a much smaller group than they’d been before.

  As th’Esar read the names, first of the magicians who had given their lives in the final battle, as well as those who had fought and lived, I found my gaze drawn irresistibly to what remained of the Dragon Corps, dressed that afternoon all in black instead of their customary royal blue with the gold epaulettes of their dress uniforms. Balfour held his new hands folded awkwardly in front of him, still not entirely comfortable with the prosthetics the magicians had c
reated for him. Once, I would have been fascinated to know that there were magicians who could employ the same technology they’d invented for the dragons to make prosthetics for a man who’d lost his own hands, but I felt no pleasure now to see the science in action. They shone silver and alien, and a little too big for him, but most poignant of all, I thought, was the fact that he had no gloves that would fit them. Ghislain stood still as a shadow at his side, his arms crossed over his chest. Adamo stood by himself, pointedly ignoring the moment when Luvander slipped in late to stand with the rest of them. He wore a bandage over one eye, and inclined his head toward Ghislain to ask what he’d missed, their mouths moving in near-silent whispers. Every now and then, Ghislain would nudge Rook with his shoulder, to get his opinion, and Rook would scowl the same way each time, knowing full well Ghislain hadn’t forgotten where he was injured and where he wasn’t.

  Rook hadn’t spoken to me since we’d set foot in the palace, not even to snap at me for following him watchfully, as though I was afraid his ankle would give out on him at any second. Rather, he ignored me completely and limped to the room where the ceremony was being held, melting in with the other airmen as soon as he arrived and not once looking back.

  I told myself it didn’t matter. Acknowledgment was more than I could ask for and I should have been thankful he’d lived at all. It was much more than many people in my situation had been left with.

  By rights, being neither a hero nor a soldier, I had no place among those attending, but Rook had made some bitter remark about family, and in the end no one seemed to have noticed me enough to object to my presence. Th’Esar himself even had some misguided impression that I’d done something instrumental in all this mess; that I’d aided Hal or put Hal in position to solve the riddle on his own with barely a second to spare. I wasn’t sure if this was true or not, but as always, there was no arguing with th’Esar. You did as you were told, and kept quiet about it.

  That left me here, in this somber, private room, watching Rook, as always, from afar.

  I noticed as some of the magicians passed me by that they were dressed all in black, just as the airmen, so that despite the finery of the noblesse and th’Esar and Esarina themselves, the ceremony was ultimately a dark one. The war had ended, and a provisional treaty had been signed, which was more progress than we’d previously made in my lifetime—in several lifetimes—but it had still come at an unimaginable cost. There were so few magicians remaining to us, and no more than the barest remnants of the Dragon Corps, not to mention their dragons. I’d overheard Adamo speaking to the Margrave Royston about it—of the fourteen girls, there were only five who still resembled themselves. Havemercy wasn’t one of them.

  When I thought of her in pieces on the other side of the mountains, I felt a distant sadness overtake me. She wasn’t my dragon, and it was often said that, because they were made of metal and machinery, the dragons had no souls at all for us to mourn their passing. But when I recalled Havemercy’s affinity for the dirty jokes Magoughin told, and the sharp, fond way she’d spoken to my brother, I couldn’t help but wish she’d made it through in one piece. If not for her own sake, I added more privately, then for my brother’s.

  We were given medals individually; that was the ceremony’s purpose. Mine was a small silver star for services rendered to the crown. Each of the airmen received a golden shield except for Rook, who received two, one of them inlaid with rubies, and the magicians were each given a crescent of ivory. There was no celebrating.

  Hal himself was honored separately, and I saw how uncomfortable it made him. There was no precedent for what sort of war medal he should receive, and so th’Esar had chosen to hang about his neck a silver key, which I thought fitting and which made Hal blush to the tips of his ears when he knelt to be decorated with it.

  And then, after a period that seemed both as swift as mere minutes and as endless as days, it was done.

  Marius caught my sleeve as we began to file out of the room, his hands shakier than usual, but his eyes as clear as they’d ever been before the disease had almost taken him. The sight of his familiar face so overwhelmed me that I was speechless while he fingered my silver star, a rueful smile playing across his lips.

  “I told you you’d manage it,” he said at last, clapping me on the shoulder. His voice was still rough from his ordeal in the Basquiat. “There was a time when I assumed I’d been talking out my ass, but I’m glad you’ve proved me wrong.”

  I ducked my head to hide the bitter turn my laugh took. “You were right about it,” I said. “It was an opportunity I could never forgive myself for passing over to another.”

  “There was no other,” Marius said. “I know you don’t entirely ascribe to my side of the philosophical border, Thom, but these things do happen for their own reasons—and not just because I’m a stubborn old man who was bored with hearing men argue foolishly over what was to be done over a trifling offense.”

  “Impatience or fate,” I murmured, too weary to be properly wry. “I wonder which it was?”

  “I’d say a combination of both,” Marius offered. “Compromise is all the rage these days.” He paused, then added, “Will I see you back in the ’Versity come spring? We’ve a dearth of keen minds since you left. Though in all fairness, I’m not supposed to say as much out loud to any of my students.”

  “You’ll have Hal soon enough,” I pointed out. “Famous throughout all of Volstov.”

  “And rightly so,” Marius said. “We all ought to go on missions to the countryside, same as Royston.”

  I smiled somewhat more honestly at that. Who knew what friends Marius had lost during this time? I shook his hand in mine, letting the grip linger, and his sharp eyes softened.

  “Well,” he said. “Whatever you choose, Thom, I hope it serves you as well as you have served.”

  There was nothing I could say to that, and we parted ways soon after, Marius in the company of a red-haired woman named Marcelline, and I alone, wishing I were the sort of man Marius believed I was.

  After that afternoon, Rook had something of a relapse, and because he was too feverish to protest, I tended to him. Adamo didn’t object—in fact, there was something in the set of his jaw that seemed to indicate he rather endorsed my stubbornness—but I was too busy tending to Rook to think about it. There were burns along his left side, and there had been some question as to whether or not he’d be able to fight off the infection that had crept into the raw, open wound over his chest. On his back—when I had occasion to see it—was a complicated web of precise, deep cuts, already healed over, that would one day be a map of scars. Those were no battle wounds; he’d suffered them at the hands of the Ke-Han, and every night as I tried to sleep I saw them before me like a tangled maze, out of which I might never find my way.

  It was foolish of the other airmen to have let Rook attend the ceremony—though in truth he’d insisted on it—and now he was suffering the effects of that rashness.

  “You might not even have the chance to see them unveil your own statue,” I told him one night a few days later, believing him to be asleep.

  He grunted, and opened one eye. It was piercing blue, not touched by any fever, and my heart dropped all at once.

  “Don’t fucking lecture me,” he said. “You got no right to it.”

  He was right, and I turned my face away from him, seeing to the basin of cool water and the wet cloth I’d been using to bring down his fever during the nights, when his temperature inevitably rose.

  “No,” I said. “That’s true.”

  I could feel his eyes on me a long time after that, even after he’d closed them, and his breathing had evened out into the regular patterns of sleep.

  On the fourth morning he was well enough to stand, and though I saw how bitterly he hated to do it, at midday he allowed me to help him to the window, out of which we could see the unveiling. The other airmen were in attendance, and so the Airman itself was once again pervaded by that eerie silence when she was lef
t all to herself. It was all the more eerie for the knowledge that it would never hold the same boisterous noise as once it had, and that the men I’d come to know and even, if only a little, to understand would never return to leave their boots lying in the entranceway, or play their confusing game of darts against the common-room wall, whose paint still bore the pocks and marks of the game. Perhaps it always would.

  I hoped, strangely, that no one would ever paint over that smaller tribute to the men who’d lived and died for all of us. In the most complicated of ways, I truly missed them, even if I’d never been their friend at all.

  “That big one,” Rook said, startling me out of my reverie. “That one me?”

  I turned to him, barely daring to hope—but his face was turned away from mine, caught in a shaft of sunlight, and so beautiful and still as to be a statue himself, though I doubted they’d included on his statue the small scar at the corner of his eye, tearing through his right eyebrow, or the sharp, unhappy line of his mouth.

  I longed to embrace him—to be embraced by him in turn. My brother needed me, and could no more reach out for me than he could rebuild his Havemercy. We were on opposite sides of the window from each other.

  “I’m not sure,” I replied, careful with my words. “Perhaps, when they return, the others will tell us.”

  “Maybe,” Rook agreed, nodding once, and seemed to believe that was final.

  I suppose it was.

  When he was again well enough to walk on his own and had no more need of me, I still sought to do the littler tasks for him, bringing him his meals when he preferred them and otherwise hovering around his doorway like a moth beside a lamp, just in case he might still require my assistance in some matter. This was how I caught him at packing soon after the unveiling of the statues.

  This was also the first time he ever truly invited me inside his room.

  “Stop fucking lingering,” he said, rolling up a pair of trousers into a ball and shoving them into a canvas rucksack. “Either get in or get out, but being in between like that can be fucking annoying.”