Steelhands (2011) (68 page)

“Bathroom,” I finally managed, and the Wildgrave pointed me in the right direction. I was grateful to escape though I felt him staring at me as I fled.

I didn’t like it much, but at least I could talk to Toverre about it still, and Adamo, if I needed to. And I submitted to it because I knew it was a necessary precaution; Antoinette was just doing what she had to. And maybe it’d make her crazy someday the way it’d made the Esar, but I hoped she was too strong to let that happen.

After everything was tied up, and everyone was still walking around like ghosts mourning the end of th’Esar’s rule, Gaeth and Toverre and I had one last, late supper in Toverre’s room—since it was the cleanest—to celebrate Toverre’s success and the end of the only semester of schooling I’d ever be attending. We ate food we brought up from the dining hall, on Toverre’s clean little plates, and even though it was supposed to be a party, it felt more like a funeral.

The entire week’d been leading up to something I knew I had to do—but there’d never been a good time for it, or even time for it at all since we’d all been so busy. If I didn’t get the chance to do it soon, I was gonna turn chicken. Finally, when everyone was finished eating and no one was talking, I decided it was now or never.

“You mind excusing us for a bit, Gaeth?” I asked.

Despite being a little slow sometimes, like a horse that was bred for racing but turned out placid, Gaeth always picked up on things when you least expected him to, and he never made things uncomfortable by asking too many questions.

“I’ve been needing to pack, anyway,” he said. He folded his napkin—a habit he’d picked up from Toverre—and excused himself from the table.

“But I was going to help him,” Toverre protested, already getting twitchy. Now,
he
was someone who could read all the books in all the libraries in
all
of Volstov but never know how to read a room. “Otherwise he’ll mix all his socks together.”

“It’ll be okay,” Gaeth assured him. “I’ll just be taking them out again, anyway.”

“But you’ll be taking them out in the wrong order,” Toverre said.

“I’ll see you both later,” Gaeth said with a half-salute and slipped out of the room.

“Well, I hope you’re happy,” Toverre told me peevishly. “Now he’ll be wearing mismatched socks for the rest of his life.”

“You won’t even be with us at Antoinette’s place most of the time,” I pointed out. “You’ll be here, studying, terrifying professors with your handwriting.”

“But I’ll
know,
” Toverre explained. “And what about when I come out to visit?”

I was surprised he even wanted to—I could tell the dragons made him uncomfortable, though thank bastion he hadn’t given me tips yet on how to polish one. I couldn’t really blame him since to anyone on the outside, it was impossible to tell what they were thinking because no one else but us connected ones could hear ’em talking. And after the big display in the tunnels, we knew how dangerous they could be. Ironjaw was still recovering, so my girl told me,
and
being tetchy about it to boot. But she didn’t have the same constitution my girl had; Troius was probably going crazy from listening to all her complaints.

Still, it was good to know there’d be something familiar amidst everything new, a face I recognized that’d remind me of who I used to be, not who I was changing into. Toverre was my best friend, and I wanted things to stay that way.

One thing, however, had to change.

“Hey,” I said, never one to put off what needed to be said, “don’t you think maybe we shouldn’t get married?”

“Oh,” Toverre said, wilting but also looking very relieved. “Yes, I rather think that’s an excellent idea.”

“All right, then,” I replied. “So it’s off. That’s a relief.”

“You could have been a
little
more delicate about it,” Toverre added, reaching across the table to pile the crumbs from Gaeth’s dinner together, swiftly sweeping up the pile with his napkin. “Because I would have been a very
good
husband.”

“I wouldn’t have been clean enough for you,” I replied.

“I would have been clean enough for both of us,” Toverre said, but he was smiling wistfully. “This means I will
never
be married, you know.”

“Me neither,” I told him, bristling. “I mean …”

“You never know what could happen,” Toverre cautioned. “You’ll have thousands of offers—but it will take only one.”

“It’s not something I wanna think about yet, anyway,” I said, wishing this conversation was over with already. Talking about suitors was making me uncomfortable, all the more so because the idea wasn’t so fuzzy as it used to be. Had a face attached to it, so to speak, which made it all the more terrifying. “I’m eighteen, and I’ve got things I want to take care of. I don’t wanna be
anybody’s
fiancée. No offense. Though it
was
funny since everybody always looked shocked to hear it.”

“Much to my embarrassment,” Toverre said.

We sat in silence for a little while, and I thought about how free I felt but also how sad. It’d just been a fact of life for so long that being without it made me feel like I was adrift at sea. It
was
important though, mostly because I was positive now that neither of us thought about the other in that way—not even a little—and it didn’t seem right to force ourselves. It would’ve been like making the dragons live underground, when they needed room to stretch and breathe as much as anyone else.

I’d get over it, sure, but I didn’t want Toverre to be lonely. Then again, I was doing this for his sake as much as for mine. He had Gaeth, to scare off or—this being the more frightening prospect—to latch onto in his own prickly way. I’d have to come up to the city proper to let ’em both know what’d happen if they messed things up. If Gaeth was worth it, he’d stay the course. But something told me he wasn’t the type to spook easy.

“Thank you,” Toverre said finally, breaking the silence. “Mother will be so sad, though.”

“Da’s going to be scandalized.” I sighed. “It just doesn’t seem fair to anyone else—if there ever
is
anyone else, I mean, so don’t get that look, ’cause so far there isn’t—to make ’em live with me having a fiancé when we both know that doesn’t mean anything to either of us.”

“It did mean
something,
” Toverre corrected me, a stickler for details, no matter how sensitive the topic. “Just not what anyone else would assume a betrothal meant. I will say that if I had to be engaged to anyone, I count myself incredibly lucky that it was you.”

“Well, same to you,” I said; I couldn’t keep from grinning like a puffed-up pigeon. It wasn’t every day Toverre handed out compliments, and he gave them to me least of all on account of how I was the one who knew him best and he didn’t
have
to charm me. “Just imagine if you’d been engaged to some skinny little wisp. Who’d’ve killed all the spiders in your dorm room for you?”

“Please,” Toverre said, holding up his hand with a brief, violent shudder. “I’ve only finished eating. Don’t speak of it.”

We were gonna be just fine, Toverre and me. Now that we weren’t engaged anymore, we could focus on being friends, which’d always been the best part of the arrangement—at least, that’s how it was for me, anyway. I figured it’d do him some good to come visit me and Gaeth at the estate, too; he’d already proven he could get down and dirty the same as the rest of us if he really needed to, and a little dirt hadn’t killed him. Knowing that’d made me real happy—I could believe there was hope for us yet if even Toverre was capable of getting over himself.

Judging by the way he acted around Gaeth, he’d gotten over more than just his quirk about keeping everything shipshape. All them dragons and missing students seemed almost to have knocked the notion of falling in love with someone new right out of his head. Even if that’d been all we got out of coming to the city, it would’ve lived up to Toverre’s high expectations.

And even if neither of us had expected things to shake down the way they did, I figured we’d handled ourselves okay for two hayseeds from the country who nearly got robbed our very first day in Thremedon.

“If that’s all, I suppose I’d better go and help Gaeth pack,” Toverre said, folding his napkin and stacking the plates up neatly, cutlery sorted by order and balanced on the very top plate. “Otherwise he really
will
be a mess when the two of you get up there. I should think you’d be more concerned about your corps looking dignified.”

“It’s not
my
anything,” I pointed out quickly. “And don’t call us that. We don’t have a name.”

“Speaking of names,” Toverre began shrewdly, “have you named your dragon yet?”

I sighed, casting a glance toward Toverre’s gleaming window, the only one in the first-year dorms that you could
actually
see through when it was closed. Maybe I’d been overthinking the whole name thing, but once I named this dragon, she was gonna be the one to live with it. I didn’t want to pick something like Troius had, just because it sounded strong, and it didn’t seem like proper tribute to name her after my ma, even if she would’ve liked it.

There was a third option that’d been swirling around in my head for
a while now—since I’d first clapped eyes on her, in fact—and Toverre wasn’t gonna accept an “I don’t know” for an answer. All the dragons I’d ever been mad for had been given real specific names, and even if the Margraves who’d named them had been one broken runner short of a rocker, you couldn’t deny the names sounded real powerful when spoken aloud. I guess those Brothers of Regina knew what they were doing when they wrote down those prayers, because some of ’em had a real impact. It was make up my mind now or never, and I guessed I was gonna go with my gut instinct, since that usually saw me through all right. Toverre was probably gonna laugh at me, but he could go and suck a knob, since I was the one with the dragon.

“Inglory,” I told him.

“Ah,” Toverre said, like the first drop of rain before a whole downpour came flowing out of his mouth. I braced myself, just in case.

“Got something to say?” I asked. I didn’t take his reaction personally since I knew it was just because of Toverre’s high standards. If
he’d
been put in charge of naming anything, even something small like a mouse, he’d’ve devoted two whole weeks to searching in books until he found the most ridiculous name imaginable. He’d call it appropriate; everyone else’d call it bat shit.

And that was another reason we couldn’t get married. I’d never doom a child to walking around with a name worse than my friend Ermengilde had been stuck with.

“Not at all,” Toverre said, surprising us both, I think. “Given the circumstances, I feel it’s rather appropriate; it’s as if you’re paying tribute to the legacy that came before you. You and Gaeth have both done quite well for yourselves.”

“Gaeth named his after a cow,” I pointed out.

“Yes, well,” Toverre said, suddenly busying himself with straightening the napkins. “I didn’t say there was anything
wrong
with it; I was just surprised.”

I could tell he was dying to get all the dirty flatware out of his room so he could go torture the life out of poor Gaeth by teaching him how to fold socks, and it was probably time for me to go and get some of my own packing done as well, for once free of Toverre’s “help.” Neither of us was much for proper good-byes, and it definitely didn’t make sense to make a big deal out of my leaving the ’Versity—not when I knew Toverre would be visiting as often as he could, or else.

I probably should’ve been nervous about starting my new life, or maybe even a little scared, but I wasn’t either of those things. So far, I was the only one of the four without the proper means of controlling my dragon, but we were getting to know each other—and getting to like each other, too.

Besides, the others hadn’t been dealing with a man like Toverre their whole lives, like I had.

Compared to him, reasoning with a dragon was bound to feel downright simple.

It wasn’t the first time I’d packed my life up to go and live with Volstov’s dragons, but there were a few key differences between this time and the first.

The most important was the secrecy surrounding my new position. When I left for the Airman, my family was proud of me, and my childhood companions envious. This time, I could tell no one what I was doing nor why I’d resigned my diplomatic post dealing with the Arlemagne embassy. In some ways, my very public breakdown with the fever had done me a service since I could simply allow everyone to assume that I’d cracked under the pressure and was retiring to lead a quiet life in the countryside somewhere to focus on my health. My family would worry for a time, but I would devote myself to writing as many reassuring letters as it took. Eventually, even my mother would come around. The rest of the city might amend a few of the stanzas to “Balfour Steelballs,” but I found that I didn’t altogether mind the idea as much as I’d thought I might. I was even looking forward to what the new lyrics might be.

In the face of recent events, having all of Thremedon questioning my sanity seemed like a very small price to pay for actually managing to maintain it.

The second difference—this one perhaps even stranger than the first—was that I had an entire host of company,
real
friends, who had volunteered to help me pack up my belongings.

I’d had my doubts about whether or not we’d manage to fit into the tiny apartment, especially with Ghislain among us, but Luvander had
soundly ignored all my protests in his usual way, and once Luvander had announced he was coming to help me, it seemed the others couldn’t resist joining in. Adamo had committed himself last, stating that with Ghislain along, I probably wouldn’t need any further help with the boxes, but that I might need
him
to corral all that extra help the other airmen were giving me so, as he put it, shit actually got packed.

Fortunately, I hadn’t been living in the apartment long enough to accumulate anything very valuable
or
breakable, so I wasn’t too worried about losing any heirlooms. My apartment did look as though an earthquake had hit it, but since I was leaving it behind, I figured it didn’t matter that much—save maybe for the poor fellow doomed to move in behind me.