Havemercy (6 page)

The room the chatelain had given his brother was one of our largest, with windows overlooking the Locque Nevers, a large desk against one wall, and a bed against the other. The curtains were drawn, though the days were long enough yet that the sun hadn’t set, and I got the uncomfortable feeling they hadn’t been opened all day. A thin shaft of purple evening light split the drapes in two, illuminating the dust swirling around the room and little else. Last week I’d not been bold enough to make any changes to the Margrave’s room. Today, borne by some strange fit of audacity, I set the bowl of stew on the desk along with my book and crossed the room to throw the curtains wide.

There was another sigh, from behind me this time, and I turned aside from the dusty folds of fabric. Margrave Royston was kneeling on the ground, sifting through an enormous black trunk with silver fastenings. Next to the trunk was a stack of romans in all range of shapes and sizes. He seemed to be looking for something.

“Have your orders extended to staying and making sure I eat?”

I blinked, feeling immediately guilty as though I’d been caught staring—which in a way I had. At least his irritability was a comfort, for if he still had it in him to snap at me, then I could at least feel assured he hadn’t given up entirely.

“No,” I said honestly, remembering the stew. It wasn’t my place to judge Mme’s cooking, but she could put together a mean dinner when she had a mind to—or when she was required, on days when our cook fell ill.

I went to fetch the meal I’d brought. The Margrave dropped another roman on top of his unsteady pile in response.

“It’s better warm,” I persisted. There wasn’t anyplace to set the bowl near the Margrave that I could see, so I kept ahold of it.

Finally, he looked up. I was still having trouble seeing the resemblance between Margrave Royston and the chatelain. They were brothers, of course, and I knew that, but I’d been looking for some small signifier, any sign at all that this man shared a relation to the kindly, blustering man I’d come to appreciate as my patron. They had the same nose, I decided, and perhaps they once might have had the same mouth, but then the chatelain didn’t have dark eyes that pinned me as surely as a beetle on a card. And their voices were so different it was hard to imagine them both men, much less relatives.

“You aren’t going to leave until I’ve eaten, are you?” The Margrave’s questions lately had been resigned, tinged with acquiescence, as though he didn’t really need to ask at all.

“No,” I said, surprising myself. I sat on the floor a good distance from the books in case any drops from the bowl should escape. “What are you looking for?”

“Poison,” the Margrave answered sourly, reaching across the distance between us to take the dish from my hands.

I didn’t know what to say to that.

He ate a spoonful of the stew—more than I’d seen him eat the entire previous day. Then his eyes found me again.

When I’d first come to the chatelain’s family, we’d gone to the lakeside country, where the waters were deep and wide. Here I felt again as if I was young, on a tiny boat in the middle of a deep lake, staring into the depths of water that had no sign of a bottom. It confounded me some, that I could spend so long gaining years and experience only to have them stripped away in a matter of seconds. If this was what everyone in the city was like, I decided it was a good thing I’d never been to the Volstov capital.

“So,” the Margrave said at last, rolling the word around in his mouth as though he were tasting it, like the stew. “What are you reading?”

I’d been staring at the romans again.

“It’s about the Ke-Han,” I answered, eager to have something to talk about. “Is it true they really have magicians like ours?”

“They do.” He swallowed another spoonful of the stew. The chatelain had been the proud owner of a beard for a little over a month, and he’d ended up with more food caught in it than his mouth. The Margrave did not share his brother’s problem. “They aren’t . . . exactly like ours, but they’re magicians, true enough.”

“How—How are they different?” The query was out before I could stop it. The chatelain had instructed his children not to pester their uncle with questions, and I had to assume the same rules were meant to apply with me as well—more strictly, in fact, than to the others.

He answered me, though, in the weary voice I’d come to recognize so well. “No one knows their source.”

“Oh,” I said. And then, hating myself for my own ignorance, “You mean like the Well?”

“Like our Well, yes.” He nodded, stirring his dinner in precise, careful motions. I watched his hands, imagination lending a paleness to them that could not have been real; he’d not been shut up in his room that long. Even so, I’d never before felt so inadequate, not even when I was new to the castle and constantly getting in the way of my adoptive family.

There were no simple rules to learn that would help me accustom myself to Margrave Royston.

“I’ve never understood everything about the Well,” I said before I could stop myself. “I mean, some of the books say that there was a time when men could drink from it directly, but there are others that say that such a straight dose of power would kill a man.”

The Margrave looked at me over the dinner I’d brought him, and I thought that I saw a glimmer of something like interest in his expression.

“It wasn’t guarded to begin with,” he said, “if that’s what you mean. The Ramanthines had a very different idea of how to go about things. They were much freer with who might be granted great power and who might not be. Our Esar likes things to be far more controlled—far more institutionalized, you might say—and he likes to know just how many magicians there are with pure Talents. By which I mean, those who haven’t bred with the common folk, or diluted their power by marrying someone with a completely different Talent from their own.” He paused to see if I was following, then carried on. “The Well water gets into your very blood, and it operates like a pedigree. Most magicians view dilution as an inevitability, that our powers will over the course of years, now that the Esar has his zealots to guard the Well and there’s no one drinking from it directly. Of course, every assembly of individuals has its recalcitrants. There are those who are very reluctant to lose their power, and who believe that it is of the utmost importance to keep their bloodline pure. Never mind that there are only so many times one can reproduce within similar categories before you’re marrying your own cousin. That’s how you get inbred but extremely useful lunatics like young Caius Greylace—from families too keen to preserve the purity of their Talents, and without the good sense it would take to fill a thimble.”

“And it’s guarded?” I asked, almost breathless. Hearing the Margrave speak was better even than reading the most thrilling of romans. And, even better, what the Margrave told me was true; the history of Thremedon, the story of the Well.

“By the Brothers and Sisters of Regina,” the Margrave said, “yes. Theirs is a story you don’t find in every history book. They’re devotees of a young Volstov woman who died for her country. Regina was tortured for information, but she never spoke a word. In honor of her, the Brothers and Sisters often sew up their mouths. So you can see why they are perfect for the task of guarding one of Volstov’s best-kept secrets.”

“Oh,” I said, trying not to look as painfully foolish and eager for knowledge as I felt. It wasn’t just that this was the most that Margrave Royston had spoken to me in all the time since he’d come to stay at Castle Nevers. It was that this was the first time anyone had answered a question of mine with more than a cursory reply, and a brusque warning not to spend all my time thinking of such nonsense.

“I doubt such knowledge will do you much good here,” the Margrave said after my silence, no doubt mistaking my lack of further response for a lack of interest. I could see it the moment the interest faded from his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said suddenly. “I don’t mean to bother you.” The chatelain had warned me of the possibility that his brother might be rude in his displeasure, but I’d not been prepared for the slow, unsettling misery that hung around the Margrave like a heavy fog, obscuring whatever precarious attachments he had grounding him to this room, to the countryside, and perhaps even to the world.

To my dismay, he lowered the bowl and placed it on the floor. He took a moment to adjust his cuffs, then reached back into the trunk, rustling softly as he searched for something that I hoped wasn’t poison.

Luck was with me, as what he drew out of the trunk was nothing more suspect than yet another roman, bound in red leather, title and author embossed in gold plating. I had to sit on my hands to keep them from reaching for it of their own accord.

“Would you like to read something besides histories, Hal?” He held the volume out to me without a care, as though it were not an item worth more than my own life—something which I was almost certain it was.

This civility from the Margrave was somehow worse than his previous defiance.

I took the roman, fingers hesitating over the pages before I could bring myself to open it. It fell open as easily as a door fitted with the right key, with no crack of stiffness from the spine. A story often read, then. I cleared my throat. Occasion sometimes called for me to soothe the children to sleep by reading to them, and though Margrave Royston was no child, I’d been charged with caring for him all the same.

Even if I hadn’t been, I felt a little sorry for this man, whose misery marked everything he touched.

There was a chair at the desk, and a perfectly serviceable bed, but the Margrave made no move to rise from the floor, so neither did I. He only closed his trunk and leaned his long arms against it, watching me with an unexpected patience, as though he had all the time in the world. Such exclusive attention made me nervous.

My fingers stilled against the first page.

“This is about Tycho the Brave,” I said, recognizing the words all at once.

The Margrave stirred with what I thought might be annoyance, but when I looked at him, his expression hadn’t changed any. He’d only lifted his head to speak.

“Yes.”

It was much thicker than my own volume. I found myself turning the pages ahead, to the place that I knew best: And they were very happy until the end of their days. There was a full roman’s length again after those words.

In fact, my finger was placed solidly in the middle of the book.

“Oh,” I said again, back to feeling foolish. “There’s so much more left to this one.”

The Margrave cleared his throat, and though I looked up too late to catch it, I thought he might have been smiling.

“Yes,” he said again. “You’ll find in this next part that he is quite unfortunate enough to have been struck by lightning.”

All at once I felt a curious reverence overtake me, the way I felt when I encountered a new and particularly wonderful story. There was no time to examine it, however, since the Margrave had been kind enough to entrust me with one of his books. He was waiting for me to start reading. With a prickle of excitement I could scarcely contain, I concentrated hard on the unfamiliar words in front of me, reading aloud until there was no longer any light to see the words by.

THOM

My thesis was of a different nature from Marius’s particular field, despite the considerable and fortuitous overlap. He specialized in politics, while I’d been studying the various peculiarities of a society raised exclusively on war. When Marius had said, then, that my time with the Dragon Corps would help me to write my thesis, he hadn’t been entirely incorrect. He’d helped me a great deal over the years by being a fount of knowledge and encouragement, but most of my studies had become independent once I’d refined my own field. That year was to mark my last as a student; Marius had promised to recommend me at the least as an assistant professor before I was found a supporter, either in the bastion or the Basquiat, to fund my work so that I might turn my treatise into a proper volume.

These were dreams: small and unassuming, but nevertheless mine. I set a considerable store by them.

“Think of it this way,” Marius said. He’d come earlier to take me to see the dragon compound, the Airman, and I was grateful for the company, though he would not be able to escort me to that first crucial meeting with the corps at th’Esar’s palace. “You can have an entire chapter devoted to the peculiar and fraternal behavior of the members of the Dragon Corps, raised not on mother’s milk but rather the innate knowledge of their own vital importance—who are allowed to do as they please without fear of any repercussion, and who think so highly of themselves that they are able, without pause, to call a diplomat’s wife from Arlemagne a Hapenny whore in the middle of Miranda, in broad daylight.”

I’d done my research for this particular test as I did my research for all other exams. I was well-read, up-to-date, and completely prepared. That wasn’t to say I didn’t feel a sick kind of nervousness churning and clenching in my stomach, because I did, and had for the past twenty-four hours, only two of which had approximated sleep.

“Well, you’re not getting the chop,” Marius reasoned with me gently, tugging at his beard. “Thom, I do think you can pull this off.”

His trust meant a great deal to me. I knew that if I failed, it would reflect very poorly on his standing in the Basquiat and in th’Esar’s bastion both. And after all Marius’s support, I didn’t want to let him down, either. “Don’t worry,” I said, then, lying through my teeth, “I’m not. Worried, I mean.”

“Thom,” he said, “you’re green.”

I didn’t look in the mirror to corroborate this assessment. I was almost certain he must be right, since I certainly felt green enough. “Do you think they’ll notice?” I asked instead.

“Yes,” Marius said. “They smell fear. They’re trained to.”

There was very little information about the corps accessible to the public. Margraves from the Basquiat bound me to secrecy about the preparatory knowledge I was given, as well as the knowledge I would come to gather in my own, personal experiences dealing with the dragons and their pilots. My thesis would have to deal with the corps’psychology alone, and not even approach the many secrets hidden behind the Airman’s doors. I’d only ever seen dragons from the ground, wheeling overhead in the sky on their way to deployment: great, metalline, sleek. Copper and silver and steel, catching the sunlight along the glint and arc of their spiny wings. They were as mythical as they were man-made. I was out-of-my-mind terrified, and the members of the corps would sense that as soon as they looked at me—if they even bothered to look.