Havemercy (4 page)

“Are you interested in the Basquiat, boy?” I smoothed my fingers down the roman’s spine, judging how long it would be before the pages began to fall out. Cheap books were a terrible shame, and no doubt a result of spending all your money on sheep.

“No,” he said. “Well, yes, that is—I do like to read.”

My brother’s wife made a soft, clucking sound, the rooster emerging again in quiet disapproval.

“When I’m not studying, of course,” Hal corrected himself before he smiled openly and unself-consciously. “I have a lot to learn before next summer. I’m sorry about your pocket watch.”

“William!”

I’d scarcely had the time to turn around before I heard the faint wrench of machinery. Minute pieces of clockwork sprang out in every direction, raining down on the steps and over my young nephew’s shoes. If I closed my eyes, it was almost a musical sound, like the chimes some magicians hung in their windows to ward off bad luck.

When I opened them, I was still in the country.

“That’s all right,” I said, as the boy in question raised round saucer eyes to his mother, then me. This one I had met before, though it seemed in the passing years he’d grown wild. There was an unhappy set to his mouth, halfway between rebellion and a fit of sulking. I felt an instant kinship with him and ruffled his hair where a handshake might have done. “Never mind,” I said, and in my own selfish way it might have been to keep Mme my sister-in-law from punishing him, as she seemed so keen on doing. “I have others for you to break.”

When he smiled, I saw that he was missing a tooth.

“Ah, Roy.” My brother’s voice sounded bell-clear across the grounds. I turned to greet him as he came striding toward us. The chatelain, my estranged country blood, had grown a little wider over the years, spread, settled into his skin. His face was red as it had ever been, suggesting either a very good constitution or a very poor one. Or perhaps it was sunburn.

I wondered if, living in the country, my face would grow as red. I would have to kill myself, I decided; I would take death before growing to resemble something so round and red as a tomato. I said none of this, however, and merely held out a hand for my brother to shake. There had been too many years and too many miles between us to foster an embrace, and even with our kinship it seemed a folly to pretend otherwise.

“I’ve come to be a burden,” I said, the jest falling flat as it left my lips.

My brother’s broad face creased with uneasiness. I struck his shoulder genially, in keeping with the ancient custom of male bonding that I abhor and was quite content to leave behind at seventeen. “I’ve just been introduced to your lovely children, brother. You’ve been very productive.”

“Yes,” he said, looking around at my impromptu welcoming committee as though gathering his bearings. I could almost see the workings of his mind, laid bare as my broken watch. Then he offered a smile, though it came less easily than either Hal’s or William’s. “Welcome to Castle Nevers.”

I tried to keep the disdain from my face as I examined the house in a broad sweep once again. Surely the house could only be called a castle in the loosest sense of the word. It had been a castle once, but now it resembled its former self about as closely as I resembled a member of the Basquiat—which is to say, not at all.

“Well,” my brother continued, anxious to be elsewhere. “We were just in the middle of breakfast. We’ll have someone show you to your room.”

As if reminded suddenly of some hidden cue, the tutor—Hal—nodded and smiled at me again. I didn’t know how anyone could smile so often, especially at a complete stranger who’d stolen his book. Perhaps he was simple.

I trusted my brother not to leave me, much less his children, in the hands of anyone incapable, however. He knew the limits of my patience as far as fools went, and I couldn’t see my sister-in-law trusting her precious ducklings to anyone she deemed unfit.

They filed inside in a staggered line, the girl holding hands with her brother, Etienne-whom-I-had-not-met, with William stepping determinedly upon the backs of Alexander’s shoes.

This left me alone on the steps with Hal, not quite a tutor, not quite a relation. He moved past me and crouched to examine the remains of my pocket watch.

“That was very kind of you,” he said, carefully sweeping the pieces of the watch into a neat little pile on the path. “Not to be cross with William.”

I eyed him. “You have servants for that, do you not?”

“Oh,” he shrugged, as though it weren’t important. “That’s all right, I’ve almost finished. William makes so much mess throughout the day, I hate to burden them with extra work if I don’t have to.”

I nodded after a moment, as though this made sense, which it didn’t. “Would you like your book back?”

“Please,” he said, looking up in surprise as if the idea hadn’t occurred to him.

“I suppose the country can’t be so very terrible,” I said insolently. “Is there at least a library in the house?”

“Oh,” said Hal. “No.” He must have been frightened by what my face did then—quite of its own accord—for he added quickly, “But your brother, the chatelain, has bought a good many books for my education, and for Alexander’s.”

I shielded my eyes against the glare of sunlight, looking out into the trees. There was a dreadfully large number of them, and like the sheep they were everywhere.

Our esteemed Esar had phrased my exile thus: that it would be relaxing, that it would be a quiet place to consider my actions, and that—were I lucky enough to be called back one day—I would return from it as I would from a jaunt to the islands, refreshed and with a revised perspective on my country and my duties as a citizen. The particular tone of his voice implied that I would not be so lucky as to be called back anytime soon, if at all. Thus, here I was, trapped as if I were jailed, my only recourse children and children’s books, a woman I hated, and a brother I barely knew. The truth was evident. I’d never felt so indulgently sorry for myself, not even when I was much younger.

At least, in those days, I hadn’t known what it was like not to feel helpless.

ROOK

“So he says, ‘I wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole,’ and the whore says, ‘Which one, my lord?’” The usual chorus of halfhearted laughter greeted Magoughin’s conclusion—the sound of Compagnon’s just shy of a giggle, I always thought, and rising above the rest because as soon as you said the word “whore” he was off, no matter whether the joke was funny or not, and Luvander slapping his leg like he hadn’t heard that one three times already. I didn’t care a minute for any of it, because Ace and I were playing darts, and you can’t let Magoughin’s whore jokes or nothing distract you when you’re playing darts with Ace, seeing as how distraction leads to almost taking one of Ivory’s eyes out with a throw gone sour.

The truth was, nobody wanted to do any thinking about what was in store for us, and nobody wanted to do any thinking about how we hadn’t been up in the air since the cold front hit. Or, to be more precise, since we wiped out the Blue Horde just outside of Lapis and left the whole Ke-Han licking their wounds like the dirty bitches they were. They’d taken back the Kiril Islands after that, and it’d set th’Esar roaring mad, but there wasn’t a thing we could do since the Islands were so far out seaward that there was hardly any chance of getting out there, let alone there and back all in one flight. Anyway, the Kiril Islands had changed hands more times than good coin in a whorehouse, so it wasn’t like we wouldn’t be getting them back one of these days. The Dragon Corps couldn’t fight all of Volstov’s battles for her, but if we could’ve, there wouldn’t have been a dispute over the Kirils in the first place. Leastways, not any kind of dispute that could be backed up with solid firepower. Simple truth was, the Ke-Han didn’t have an air force at all, much less one as fucking precise as ours, as fucking deadly. And so th’Esar and all of Volstov needed us real special—but they didn’t need us if we weren’t fighting, and since we weren’t fighting, everyone was edgy, like we were all balanced on the blade of the knife and if anyone moved for certain one way or the other, we were all screwed at both ends.

I wasn’t worried. Just because the Ke-Han were quiet since Lapis didn’t mean they weren’t going to get loud again, and soon. They always bounced back, neat as you like, and th’Esar knew that, too. He wouldn’t squander his surest bet; he wasn’t going to send us into exile like old Mary Margrave, which was what they were calling the Cindy down around Mollyedge, where they could get away with it, and I was all for the nickname seeing as how he was queerer than a three-chevronet. The corps was a different matter. We were needed in the city with our dragons polished and ready to respond like always, in case anything came up real sudden, so like I said, I wasn’t worried about horseshit like that.

But it all still kept me guessing, same as the rest, what th’Esar was going to do about us, since the Arlemagnes were pissed off already due to the incident with their cindy-prince and the Margrave. Maybe I shouldn’t have slapped the diplomat’s wife on the ass in public and maybe I shouldn’t have tried to pay her after the sex, but the point was: She was asking for it, wearing a dress like that, and so how was I supposed to know who she was? You don’t wear a dress like that and not expect to get all kinds of attention, and none of it from your husband. You buy a dress like that to make it happen, and she knew it same as I did. Th’Esar knew it, too.

“Shit,” Ace said, because he’d missed the mark. It was worrying Ace, too, which was where the line between us was drawn. Ace got worried; I didn’t. Sometimes it didn’t make a difference, but by my count I was three points ahead of him, and it was only on bad days that went below two. Worrying was why: Ace doing it and me not.

“What if we are exiled?” Balfour was asking Jeannot. Balfour was also fiddling with his gloves, taking them off and putting them back on again, and if I hadn’t been busy aiming for bull’s-eye, I would’ve aimed at his head.

It was true that the diplomat—who had a name, only I preferred to call him Mr. Mustache—was kicking up a real fuss, and wouldn’t be satisfied until he thought his honor avenged. I’d offered a duel so he could win it back, but he didn’t seem too keen on that option, and th’Esar was still talking things over with the bastion and some of the members of the Basquiat he actually trusted.

Jeannot took Balfour’s gloves away. It wasn’t a permanent solution, not as permanent as I’d have gone for, but it’s been said I have less patience than most. “They won’t exile us,” he said, for maybe the eight thousandth time.

“Yeah, it’s not like we all slept with her,” said Ghislain, laughing wickedly and ducking swift as a shadow to miss my dart as it ricocheted off the wall where his head had been.

“That counts as your shot,” said Ace.

“Like hell,” I said, and marched over to find where it had landed.

Evariste hissed for quiet, sounding for all the world like someone’s grandmother, or an angry goose, or both. I didn’t know why he bothered; no one could ever beat Adamo at chess, even if he gave you the first three checks and a fair head start. I didn’t know what for he was kicking up such a fuss, his defeat hanging so obvious around him the way it was. See it often enough and defeat gets a certain look to it, a certain smell; gets so that you can predict it as easy as the old coots in lower Charlotte predict the weather. Anyway, no winning man tears at his hair so. Evariste would like as not be bald by thirty if he kept that up, a fact I took upon myself to remind him of as often as possible.

“I’m not waiting forever,” Ace piped up.

“Talk about waiting forever,” Raphael snarled, too out of sorts even to come up with something appropriately cindy to say about the great hands of time and men wasting away to nothing. Ghislain toed my dart across the floor. I picked it up.

We weren’t made to wait, the fourteen of us. Th’Esar knew it, had us trained all but a few from the age when most milksuckers are still firmly attached to their mama’s teat. Keeping us pent-up—and even worse, keeping us on the ground—was like lighting the fuse to a powder keg. Eventually something was going to blow up, and when it did, it wasn’t going to be pretty.

“Maybe he’s forgotten about us,” said Merritt, counting out beats against his jiggling knee, then scribbling on a sheet of paper.

“He won’t really exile us,” said Balfour again to Jeannot, not a question, but like he needed to say it.

Some years back, when the war was real bad, we’d seen a lot of fugees—people with no place to go, no homes, just mowed right down by the Ke-Han. Probably it was because we hadn’t been the only country to go to war with the Ke-Han, just the only one able to hold out worth a damn. That was just what happened when you ended up sharing a border with crazed, greedy bastards who didn’t know they’d got enough land once they had it and were always peekin’ their damned heads over the mountains to see what else there was. Never mind if there were other people living there. The Ke-Han’d done well enough in building themselves a big blue empire, or whatever the fuck it was they were after until they ran up against us. The people they’d displaced repeated themselves a hell of a lot when they talked though, like they needed to hear something more than once for reassurance. Now, Balfour was no fucking shell-shocked fugee but occasionally he did this, like we’d traumatized him or something.

No one ever listened to my clever theory that he was really a girl in disguise. I even took his pants off once to prove it, but it just pissed Adamo off.

Jeannot only handed his gloves back, like he had access to some infinite well of patience—maybe that fairy-story Well the magicians were always on about. “He won’t. We’re still at war, even though things have quieted down for now. If word got out that th’Esar had done away with Volstov’s dragons, I can’t imagine what the people would do.”

I could. It’s not every man who can say a riot’s been held on their account, but if th’Esar was somehow persuaded into doing something so damn foolish as to send us all packing, then I knew at least fourteen who could and would. No one took care of business like we did, and no one could fly those dragons like we could. The Basquiat had seen to that, and now they were paying for it. Good. Let them pay. We went down to the wire for our country when they needed us, and now some prissy little diplomat wanted to tell me what ass I could or couldn’t slap?