Havemercy (44 page)

I wondered then just how many spies th’Esar had set about the Airman, and whether I would have to keep a closer eye now on the men who came to collect the laundry, and the women who cleaned the rooms; even the young boys who kept the dragons clean and well oiled.

Not that this was my place, of course. I owed no loyalty to the airmen; I had no reason to inform them of th’Esar’s spies, especially not when I myself could still be counted among them. I couldn’t explain this sudden troublesome loyalty, only knew with a familiar helplessness that it had everything to do with Rook, the way it all did—the way it all would until I revealed the truth.

“I—” I paused, marveling weakly at the realization of what I’d been about to do. Rook had tainted every corner of my mind to the point where I would defend an imagined slight on his prowess to th’Esar himself. I felt ill. “As I understand it, he is the best flier among his fellows. If he thinks there’s something wrong with Havemercy—”

“There is nothing wrong with our dragons,” th’Esar said, with a clear note in his voice that this was the final pronouncement on the subject. “You have clearly misunderstood what it is we asked you to do in the first place.”

Disappointment flooded my mouth, hot and bitter. I held my tongue.

When he’d found I had no more to report other than what th’Esar clearly regarded as the fanciful misgivings of a man whose skills he appreciated but whose opinions he had no use for, I was dismissed promptly and without hesitation.

I’d failed on both sides of the equation. Th’Esar refused to see the truth—no doubt he had his reasons, yet I was infuriated all the same—and, what was more, when Rook demanded an answer, I could no more defend my ineffectiveness than I could prove to him the sky was green. I’d got nothing but a curt dismissal regarding the matter of the dragons, and I knew that it wouldn’t be good enough to take back. I should have pressed th’Esar; I should have made him listen.

Rook would have done it that way. No matter what happened, his voice would have been heard if he were the one in charge of speaking his mind. Whatever other shortcomings he had, getting his point across was never a problem.

I left, thinking that the long struggle back through the crooked hallways would wear me out, but I exited the palace fairly brimming with excess energy, as though I’d been caught in a fight and sent home before the knives had even been drawn. My hands were shaking, my cheeks hot. I decided to walk back to the Airman, as the weather was fair, and besides which I’d seen too much of the city from carriage windows of late. Perhaps I would feel more at home in Thremedon if I truly immersed myself in it once more; it was an approach that couldn’t hurt.

Before I’d even passed very far from the palace I stopped again. Something was bothering me, and it took a moment to realize that it was the memory of the Provost’s curious meeting with th’Esar. What snatches I’d heard of their conversation rose clear into my mind, and I turned my head toward the sun.

The stark, proud lines of the Basquiat stood off in the distance, serene shape belying the true chaos surrounding it if what I’d heard hadn’t been an exaggeration.

Perhaps it was a desire to speak with Marius, who was often at the Basquiat late into the day, or perhaps it was that I didn’t wish to face Rook with my stubborn and unexpected defense of him still ringing in my ears. For whatever reason, I turned around and headed in the direction of the Basquiat.

I hadn’t noticed it before from the window of the carriage, probably because I was so wrapped up in thinking about Rook and of what I would say to th’Esar, but I did now: the people keeping their distance, huddling together in small groups and whispering about a plague, or about th’Esar covering something up. That there was nerve enough for this sort of talk in broad daylight, on the streets no less, told me more than I thought I wanted to know. When I cut through the Rue d’St. Difference, I saw a woman crying in a hat shop, and when I doubled back for having come too close to Charlotte, I came upon the ’Versity Stretch, as busily populated as I’d ever seen it. It was as though everyone was out of doors instead of in, and when I stopped a girl on the street to ask, she shook her head.

“Most of our professors have gone off sick,” she explained. “At least I think that’s what they say it is. The explanation was actually surprisingly vague.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Yes,” she replied. “Only it’s sort of funny that the lot of them would have gone off sick all at once, don’t you think? It’s got a bit of a stink to it.”

I knew—as she was a student of the ’Versity—that if I didn’t make my escape now, I’d be there three hours listening to her particular theory on what had happened. Feeling rude but desperate, I quickly thanked her, then went along my way, picking up my pace as I came to the familiar turn of Whitstone Road that would lead me straight to the Basquiat.

If asked, I couldn’t have said what I was rushing for, but I thought that it was something more than a student’s curiosity or interest in a problem unsolved.

The Basquiat was almost too colorful, although I’d heard that it had come about as a disagreement between the founders, and that in order to please everyone they had simply used each suggestion of color that had been presented. The result was something spectacularly striking, which I suspected was what they’d been after in the first place. The seven domes atop its staggering towers were no two the same. Some were done in swirling patterns, and others had the checkered effect of a chessboard. The largest dome—not the topmost, but the largest—was a hollow onion of pure gold, and beneath it was the open tower magicians used to chart the weather or converse with the falcons. The center tower was a round room with arched windows that stretched from floor to ceiling, and it was here that the members of the Basquiat met. At ground level there were two doors, one large and perfectly centered and the other smaller, framed by a pointed capstone and off to one side.

This was the entrance for nonmembers of the Basquiat, and the one I saw the people crowding around before I’d even managed to get close enough.

No one, I saw, seemed to be using the official door, though when I neared it there was someone sitting there on the steps in front of it. His hair looked a little long—it was in his eyes—and he had drawn his knees up to his chest in what appeared to be abject misery. It was hard to place him without his eager smile and tentative kindness, but I thought all at once that I knew him.

“Excuse me, is that . . . Hal?”

His head flew up so fast that I half expected to hear his neck pop, and he blinked at me for a moment before I saw the flicker of recognition pass through his red-rimmed eyes. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days.

“I—It’s Thom, isn’t it?” His voice caught on something, faltering and wretched.

I felt again the unfamiliar kinship I had when we’d met in the bathroom, or perhaps it was simply that here was a person as miserable as I was, and in him I recognized some likeness of myself.

“It is,” I said, and moved to sit next to him on the stair.

“Oh,” he said, and sniffed as though he had a cold. “It’s good to see you again. I thought I’d offended you at the party. I didn’t mean to. If I did, I’m very sorry.”

I didn’t know where to begin. Should I start by telling him the fault was obviously mine, or that there were clearly more important things on his mind than some foolish fit of temper I’d had at th’Esar’s ball? I settled for reaching out to place a hand on his shoulder.

“Have you been here long?” I asked.

He nodded, and I saw his throat work for a moment as though he were trying to keep from crying. “It’s Royston,” he said at last. “Margrave Royston. I had a letter. It told me that he’s here, only I don’t know how to—They’ve said I’m not to see him.”

I felt a sweeping rush of sympathy, imagining what I would do if anyone had tried to tell me I had to stay away from Rook, even though I’d tried to tell myself that very thing time and time again. Besides which, it wasn’t the same situation at all. For one, this was clearly more serious. Anyone at all could see there was something being kept secret within the walls of the Basquiat. Having no idea what that secret could possibly be made it worse, not to mention the rumors I’d heard, the missing professors, the talk along ’Versity Stretch.

At once, with what wits I had left, I endeavored to think about this logically. “Hal,” I said, “what did your letter say?”

He smiled faintly, but there was no spirit, no heart at all, in the expression. “I thought there might be some clue, but it said no more than I told you. The Margrave Royston is here and he is not receiving visitors at this time. When I came here—I came here straightaway; I only received the letter this morning—there were others. It’s just as you see it. They’re not letting anyone who isn’t a magician enter, and we’ve seen no one at all come out again.” He drew a deep breath; I saw his mouth tremble and twist, and I knew he was on the verge of tears. He’d already been crying: his eyes showed me that. “I spoke with a young woman—her father’s within, she told me, or so it was written on her letter. She said that he told her once of a different entrance, a secret one, but as secrets go it may be better hidden than what’s happening to the magicians being kept inside there. But all I can do is sit here, useless and crying.”

“Come,” I said gently, resting a hand on his shoulder. “Shall we talk to the young woman you spoke to? It seems she knows more than we.”

“She doesn’t like to be interrupted,” Hal replied. “She’s much too busy threatening people. I only got a moment of her time, because she seemed to know what she was talking about—her rights as kin—but then, I’m not kin at all. I’m just—” He bit off without warning and shook his head almost savagely, and I gave his shoulder what I hoped was a reassuring squeeze. It was quite possible that it wasn’t anything of the sort, but it seemed to steady him somewhat. “I’m sorry,” he said at length. “I’m—I believe the phrase is at my wit’s end, and that’s exactly how it feels. At the end of my wits; at the end of everything.”

“I don’t blame you,” I said.

“I just—I don’t know what to do,” Hal whispered helplessly. He turned blue eyes on me, clear and pale and worlds apart from Rook’s icy blue. There was no guile at all in Hal’s eyes; the only bruise upon their clarity was sadness and fear. “I only know that I must do something. He’d . . . he’d do the same for me. Only he knows everyone. He’d go to his connections, he’d find a way, whereas I haven’t even been here a month. You’re the only person I know. It’s almost funny that I’ve run into you. The city is so big, I wouldn’t think—”

It was a cruel thing to offer Hal hope when chances were there wasn’t any, but I felt a sort of twinge, familiar as it was foreign from my days at the ’Versity, and I gently tuned him out. The beginning of a plan was forming in my mind. It was inspiration; it was a thesis.

“Hal,” I said. He must have noticed the change in my voice, the trembling excitement of something we might do, for he looked up at once, his expression a thousand forms of pleading: all of them desperate that I could help. “I don’t want to promise you anything I can’t deliver,” I continued, trying to temper that excitement, “but I am your connection in the city. I’ve just been to speak with th’Esar,” I said, close and private that no one else would hear us. “Something is happening—something is happening here. He wouldn’t listen to me because I’m not anyone he needs to listen to, but he’ll listen to the Dragon Corps. They’re his Dragon Corps.”

“Oh,” Hal said, quite breathlessly. “You can—I’d forgotten you know them. Can you do that?”

I paused for a moment to ask myself the very same question.

The answer was no, or at least probably not. But it wasn’t just for Hal’s sake that I’d be asking them to help; it was also for their own sakes, and the sakes of their dragons. Surely if I phrased it in that way—surely if I told Rook it was the only way they’d listen to him about Havemercy, which wasn’t entirely a lie—then at least I could give Hal the reassurance of a little knowledge. Not knowing what had happened to the Margrave was clearly driving him mad with misery, and his was a truly guileless face. I couldn’t simply leave him there, sitting on the steps of the Basquiat, the rumors sending him further into the depths of worry and his own traitorous imagination.

“Come,” I said, standing and offering him a hand. “We’ll find a way.”

He took my hand and stood, but then he hesitated, looking back at the Basquiat over his shoulder. “What if something happens?” he asked. “What if they open the doors? What if they start letting people in?”

I thought of the Provost’s words of caution, of th’Esar’s expression. I thought of the Volstov’s iron fist, the curtain that Thremedon drew over the most important of her dealings.

“They won’t,” I told him. “This is your best recourse.”

“My only recourse,” Hal replied. He paused for a moment, weighing the matter at hand, then squared his jaw. “Yes, I’ll come with you. It’s—Royston would do it, were it the other way around.”

I gave his shoulder another squeeze, then we left the Basquiat behind. Hal didn’t look back.

Once we were out on Whitstone Road I flagged a hansom and told the driver there was an extra tournois in it if he’d get us to the Airman faster than if we were flying a dragon.

“Sir has a way with words,” the driver said.

It was the most uncomfortable, jostling ride I’d ever experienced, for the driver was a man of his word, and when we arrived not half an hour later, I was covered all over in bruises. And, I suspected, Hal was as well.

“Should I,” Hal asked, hesitating at the door, “wait out here?”

I thought of how cruel the airmen could be when faced with a stranger. I’d had theories on why once—their distrust of the rest of the world which, I’d argued, they needed in order to foster a disproportionate trust among one another. It was their mechanism: the corps against the rest of the world. It was what allowed them to be so deadly and so fierce. I’d sought to condemn this behavior once, but now I was less sure if they weren’t in some ways, at least, partially justified—especially in light of what was happening right now in the rest of the city.