Havemercy (13 page)

My stomach turned over at the scent, but it was a grounding revulsion, one that reminded me who I was and the relative insignificance of what I’d been asked to accomplish. I didn’t know where the dragons themselves were—I assumed I wasn’t important enough to see them up close—and rather than overstepping my bounds, I simply allowed a young, rather grimy man to take my suitcase.

“Your quarters’re this way,” Adamo grunted.

Balfour fiddled with the thumb of his left glove. “It’s only a couch,” he said. “And a sort of . . . standing curtain. It won’t be very quiet. Niall wakes up early and he likes to sing while he makes breakfast, but in any case—I wanted to tell you—if you wake up and your hand feels funny, wet sort of, whatever you do don’t bring it up to your face.”

“Oh,” I said, and I must have looked something awfully unhappy, because Balfour’s face fell.

Adamo stifled what might have been a laugh or might have been a cough behind the palm of his broad hand. “If you’re stupid enough to fall for it,” he said gruffly, “then you get what you deserve.”

“No one deserves a blue face,” Balfour said quietly.

I was inclined to agree with him.

As I already knew, the Airman was a hideous, blunt building, erected in the modern style and designed for efficiency over beauty. It was somewhat nicer on the inside, I was relieved to note, though not by very much. It was also a mess. There were boots strewn about the hallway, and coats in disarray, so that I almost tripped over one. There was even a shirt and what appeared to be a pair of ladies’ undergarments. I realized all at once that these men had no idea how to clean up after themselves, and no awareness that they even should. I wondered what unpleasant smells the permeating scent of burning and the clove cigarettes masked, and found myself quite relieved I might never have cause to know.

I wasn’t their nanny, and I wasn’t their maid. I was their instructor in the skeleton of basic decency; I would teach them how to interact as humans rather than animals. What they did with their women’s undergarments was up to them.

“And there’s Niall’s bunker, and Magoughin’s,” Balfour was in the process of telling me, “and there’s the first row of showers. You sign up in advance, unless you’ve been out on a raid, and then you’ve got first priority whether you’ve signed up or not.”

“Um,” I said, though I didn’t mean to sound stupid. “Why’s that?”

“Oh,” Balfour said, as if it were perfectly common sense, “to wash off all the ash, of course.”

“Ah,” I said, and promptly decided to keep my mouth shut.

“That’s the common room, the one for music and smoking—and there’s the private common room, for when you’re engaged with a . . . ah . . . companion for the evening, or the afternoon, or whenever you’ve got off-hours.”

A belch of perfume hit me from beyond the half-open door. It reminded me of my childhood, and I stepped quickly past it.

“That’s command,” Adamo said, jerking a hand toward a room across the way. “You don’t go in there.”

“Yes,” Balfour agreed. “No one goes in there but Chief Sergeant.”

“Duly noted,” I assured them both.

I wondered where the rest of my welcoming committee was, or if they’d sent Balfour and Adamo ahead to lull me into a false sense of security while they waited just around the corner like jumping spiders, ready to strike.

“And there’s my bunker, and there’s Rook’s, and there’s Merritt’s,” Balfour continued, still giving me the grand tour. I didn’t entirely see that it was necessary. I didn’t think I would be spending much time inside any of these forbidding little rooms, their doors staunchly, disapprovingly, locked against me. It was, however, good to make note of which room not to stumble into in the dead of night, thinking it would be the right place to have a drink of water or to relieve myself.

“You may notice the rooms are all scattered-like,” Adamo said. Indeed, I had, and I said as much. “The docking area’s below,” he explained. “Each man sleeps above his dragon.”

“When we’re needed, the air-raid bell sounds,” Balfour added. “There’s a trapdoor for each of us that lets us down into each of our private bays directly.”

“The long way ’round isn’t one you need to know, either,” Adamo said. “The docks are off-limits.” And that was most emphatically the end of that.

“Understood,” I assured him.

“Now, Rook’s out tonight,” Adamo added, privately, and I was embarrassed to learn how easily everyone had seen through me, embarrassed to feel Balfour’s eyes moving between the two of us. “We thought it’d be for the best. And, knowing him, he won’t be back for a day at the least.”

Before I could stop myself, I said, “But th’Esar—”

Adamo’s look hardened. “We’re not much used to having th’Esar in direct command of us,” he said evenly. “Seeing as how he doesn’t pilot a dragon, himself.”

“Ah,” I said. As they’d have noted in Molly, I’d stepped in it. “Of course.”

I was quickly beginning to understand that conversation with any of the airmen outside of the requisite teachings would be akin to running the gauntlet. In a Ke-Han minefield.

“Here you are,” Balfour piped up, gesturing to a plain standing screen that had been pulled haphazardly across an alcove. This was where the couch was.

I examined my new living space—it could hardly be called a room—with trepidation.

It was a largish couch, I’d give them that. Of course, it made sense that th’Esar would spare no luxury when it came to his precious Dragon Corps. I wondered if he even knew the extent of what went on down at the Airman when his influence wasn’t physically present. I wondered if there would be certain things that I was to omit from my reports, and how I would know what was to be deemed information to which th’Esar didn’t need to be privy. I felt the onset of a headache creeping from my temples to the bridge of my nose, knowing that if I got it wrong, the airmen would likely feed me to the dragons.

You are accountable only to the Chief Sergeant, I reminded myself. I would make my report, then Adamo himself could discern what information he wanted to share with the head of the nation. That would save me from trying to navigate the pitfalls of that particular arrangement, and also from trying to understand the strange circadian logic that governed these men. I did not at all cherish the deep anxiety fostering in my gut that came from not knowing what to expect.

“Ivory’s on your left.” Balfour tugged his right glove on tighter, gesturing farther down the hall to another room, which had been placed as all the rest: with no real rhyme or reason. The man who had designed the building must have been a genius or a madman or both. “He’s very quiet, so you might not be . . . bothered.”

He tacked on this last as if he hoped very much that it were true. On my other side, Adamo snorted; he didn’t even bother trying to hide it.

I had never before felt so strongly the urge for a door of my very own that I could lock, not even when I’d been living in the very depths of Molly, where a lack of things to steal did not necessarily preclude break-ins.

Small blessings, I told myself again. Rook would be out for the evening, likely the entire night, and might not have the care to coat my hand in something strange and wet. I felt some helpless frustration once again at my predicament, that I’d allowed myself so easily to be caught at the tender mercies of the very type of system I’d made strict measures to avoid my entire life.

“Well,” I said, and was promptly cut off by a bloodcurdling scream that echoed down the hallways.

“My books!”

“Ah,” said Balfour. “That will be Raphael.”

“My books,” said Raphael again, louder this time and with a quivering timbre to his voice, as though he was a volcano on the edge of eruption. “What have you done, you piss-drinking sons of Ke-Han whores?”

“Shit,” Adamo said, the curse torn rough as crushed cobblestone from his throat. “I’d better go. Docks’re off-limits,” he repeated to me, as though I were simple.

I could take no offense at his attitude, though, instead nodding to show that I really did understand. The Chief Sergeant was a man I did not want on any side but my own, and if that meant a little more bowing and scraping than usual, so be it.

He marched off down the hallway to the tune of a muffled crash, followed by a series of undignified hoots and hollers that sounded like nothing so much as an entire band of wild chimpanzees let loose from the zoo.

I thought about calm things: the surface of a lake on a windless day, the grant money I would receive for my studies upon completing this assignment. The knowledge that, even if they killed me, I was still much, much smarter.

There was another scream.

“Madeline!”

“I bet it’s Niall and Compagnon,” said Balfour confidentially. “They’ve had this big secret project going for weeks now. Papier-mâché. I guess they ran out of paper.”

“Oh,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Balfour nodded. “It was going to be a scale model of the city, only Compagnon gave it these, you know, enormous breasts, so now it’s just a misshapen sort of woman. She’s in the common room—not the private one, but the other one.”

“And that’s . . . Madeline?” I asked, with a sense of looming dread.

“Yes,” said Balfour. “She’s kind of like our mascot.”

ROYSTON

If asked, I couldn’t have pinpointed the exact time or day when Hal’s tradition of reading to me in the evenings became reversed, so that I was the one telling the stories, but it had happened. Some nights we would retire to the drawing room and—William having bragged to his siblings both younger and older—I would find myself seated hearthside, speaking to a rapt semicircle of bright, dark eyes as my brother’s wife drifted in and out, mostly to “tch” noisily at the most violent parts. I prided myself on only ever having made Emilie cry once, and I thought perhaps that if William hadn’t jeered at her so mercilessly, the whole mess might have been avoided entirely.

It was during these stories that I was most aware of Hal, the open wonderment on his face, the careful attention he paid to my words, as though I were one of the romans to which he was so devoted. A folly of mine perhaps, but it inspired me to find somewhere inside myself the parts that hadn’t yet been ground down to rubble and compost by the country, and I was glad of it.

There was little news from the city, though I freely admitted to my friends in written word that the fault was mine for allowing the lines of communication to dry up. A colleague of mine from the Basquiat wrote that there was some great uproar in the Dragon Corps, that they were being made to take etiquette classes. I immediately wrote to the only touchstone I had ever cared to have among the Esar’s colorful band of self-important animals: Chief Sergeant Adamo.

The letter I’d got back confirmed everything I’d been told, and what was more—the man doing the teaching was a student barely out of the ’Versity.

He seems very clever, Adamo’s letter read. And I think he’ll do all right so long as he survives the first few weeks, which he might not, and so long as he’s quiet enough that Rook forgets him completely when the lessons aren’t on. I don’t really know what th’Esar’s thinking having him stay here, of all places, but it’ll work out or it won’t.

Everything’s going swimmingly in the country, I hope. Don’t go so long without writing again, or I’ll have to break th’Esar’s rules myself and fly upcountry way to pluck you out of there myself.

At the very idea of this I laughed so long and loud that Hal came to investigate. The letters from home, coupled with my newfound audience for what stories I’d collected, had made a world of difference in what I no longer viewed as the most terrible of exiles.

And then, of course, there was Hal.

He was, I liked to tell myself, the ubiquitous essence of that part of the countryside I still couldn’t bring myself to hate. One of my mentors had told me that in order to be embraced by Thremedon, a man must cast aside all other lovers and take the city as his one and only—for then her secrets would be spread wide open, as in a card trick or a whorehouse. It seemed a very apt theory—though with my proclivities, I was required to modify the analogy somewhat.

Yet at the same time—though Thremedon was always my other lover, as it were—and as much as I hated to admit it, the country was my home. I’d been raised not in Nevers but in Tonnerre, on its border, and no matter how much time I’d spent learning the city as I would have learned a lover—and no matter how I yearned for that other lover during my exile—no man could ever completely expunge all trace of his first lover from his heart. I, too, was a victim of this pattern. In my own way, I suppose I still yearned to be accepted by this place I couldn’t quite bring myself to accept in return.

If I’d been a philosopher and not a Margrave, I would have solved this problem for myself already. Or, at least, I’d have owned a better vocabulary for grappling with it privately. Perhaps that would have assuaged my bruised ego somewhat.

Unfortunately, the truth of the matter remained: I had conflated Hal with something taken from my own needs, and I found myself seeking out his company for reasons I should not have allowed myself to act upon or even to indulge in thought. His approval meant everything to me—the way he wrapped his arms around his knees and held them tight during the most frightening moments in my memoirs, or insisted on sitting on the floor at my feet, even when there were ample chairs for him to make use of. In his eyes I saw admiration and fascination both, as if he wished to read me like a book. And Hal, I knew, was a voracious reader.

It sparked something untoward in me, some answering desire to be read. He had a sharp mind and was cleverer than he thought he was, than the country had allowed him to be. Still, it was hardly in selflessness that I offered him all the knowledge I had that was fit for more innocent ears, hardly in selflessness that I endeavored to keep him near to me whenever I could.

To measure how impossible I had truly become, how stubborn and how self-involved, one need only take this for an example: I sought him out myself, though I always made it seem as if I hadn’t. After his cold had ended I even mentioned our usual walks by the Nevers, more than once, though I tried with the coy neediness of a schoolboy to seem thoroughly disinterested in whether he could spare the time for me or not.