Steelhands (2011) (30 page)

I wasn’t an expert, though, and I wasn’t going to go jumping to conclusions like my fool students. I’d wait and see what Royston thought about it—if he knew the woman, and had anything to say about her—and then I’d just have to do my best not to call
him
an idiot if the answer wasn’t the one I wanted to hear.

That was one of my most bothersome habits—according to Roy, at least.

The walk down to the Crescents gave me time at least to sort myself out, so I wasn’t blustering about like a dragon breathing fire once I finally did find myself on Royston’s street. There were dark clouds gathering overhead—the kind that’d soak you to the bone if you tried to fly through ’em—and I wondered if we were due for rain this time, or more snow.

Either way, I was getting my boots wet.

I made my way to Royston’s door—not too early this time, thanks to my unexpected run-in with Luvander. At least I didn’t have to worry about walking in on something nobody wanted me to see—and me least of all—since the last I’d seen him, Hal was still at the ’Versity, helping his professor come up with exam questions. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to have a lecturing assistant who wasn’t a thorny pain in my ass, but I guess Hal was proof that they existed somewhere.

I knocked on the door, rubbing my hands together and blowing on them for good measure. I hadn’t had a good pair of gloves since the ones I’d worn for riding. Maybe I was going to have to do something about that soon, though I already knew I wouldn’t be doing my shopping at Yesfir. I wanted something sensible that’d keep my hands warm and that smelled like real leather, not a flower shop.

“Just a minute!” I heard from beyond the door. Roy operated better when he had someone to greet people for him. I was sure he found it all too taxing to have to actually
go
to the front door and let people in before they froze off what made ’em men in the first place.

“You’re late,” Roy said. “You’re never late. I was almost about to
summon the Provost’s wolves and have them drag the Mollydocks for your corpse.”

“Too cold for swimming,” I told him. “Can I come in?”

Apparently my being late meant all sorts of terrible things, like Roy actually resorting to making the coffee himself instead of having me do it for him. The whole kitchen smelled like the darkest, most vile brew I could fathom; it couldn’t’ve been worse than if he’d made it out of stale piss and seaweed. The stench was making Roy’s eyes water, which made it the perfect strength as far as I was concerned, but it also smelled like he might’ve burned the grounds.

Roy’d also had time to do away with the fancy delivery boxes and actually arrange the food on plates like a human. If this was why civilians were always going out of their way to be fashionably late, then I guessed I’d take it.

If I hadn’t known him as well as I did, I might even have been duped into thinking he’d made the sandwiches. But they didn’t look like they were still alive, and the bread had been sliced evenly, so it was clear Royston couldn’t have had a hand in their creation.

“Well,” Royston said, settling in at the table. “What
have
you been up to, aside from making students cry and causing me to go gray with worry?”

“Hal told you about the weeper, huh?” I asked, making a grab for a sandwich.

“He said that a young man left your class sobbing. Sobbing
profusely,
” Roy confirmed. “He didn’t go into the details, so I was able to imagine them for myself.”

“Damn kid’s lucky he didn’t start leaking out of other places once I’d finished with him,” I said, tugging some of the unnecessary foliage out of my sandwich. Roy didn’t wait to ask me if he could take it before he relocated it onto his plate. “Tried to lecture
me
on political correctness, and how the Ke-Han were really just poor misunderstood bastards, with the only difference between us and them being
they
were born on the wrong side of the mountains, and now that the war’s over,
our
prejudice is the only thing keeping us from thinking of them as allies.”

“Oh dear,” Roy said, taking a sip of his coffee and grimacing elaborately at the taste. “I imagine he’s lucky to have escaped with his life—
though you
do
know that you’re the one who’ll pay for it, in the end. At the very least, you’ll have another sternly worded letter from a parent to add to your collection.”

“Can’t wait,” I grunted. At least the sandwich was good, meat and mustard and just a little bit of tomato. It was hard to feel sour about things with a good meal sitting in front of you, and that long walk had made me hungry. “I’ll let you keep it with the others.”

“They’re certainly an exciting read,” Royston said. “One day they might even be worth something.”

“Sure as shit aren’t worth anything now,” I agreed.

“Well, I can see that you’re not at all in the mood to hear what I have to say, but I feel obligated to tell you that no one’s seen hide nor hair of Margrave Ginette at the Basquiat,” Royston told me, now stirring liberal amounts of sugar into his coffee in an attempt to make it potable. “It’s truly as though someone lifted Thremedon’s skirts in the night and shook her out like a mouse. It’s unsettling. You know I like a good mystery as much as the next person, Owen, but that’s only if I can solve it at the end of the day.”

“Rotten business,” I agreed. “I hope she doesn’t have family looking for her.”

“I’m honestly not sure which is worse,” Royston said. “If she does, or if she doesn’t. I hope your companion is doing all right without her; I’m only sorry I couldn’t be of more help to you.”

“Well, here’s your chance to make it up to me,” I told him, knowing well just how much he’d appreciate it. “What can you tell me about a Margrave Germaine?”

“She has no eye at all for colors,” Royston said easily. He smiled in that self-deprecating way he was so good at and took an experimental sip of his coffee. I wish I could’ve framed the face he made after he did so to scare my students into paying attention. “This really is horrendous; I think we should throw it out before it poisons someone. In any case, I take it that’s not the kind of information you’re looking for?”

“She’s the one who ended up seeing to Balfour’s hands,” I explained, “since Ginette’s nowhere to be found.”

“Well, I suppose that makes sense,” Roy said slowly. “I don’t know her personally, but she’s one of the
new
Margraves—handpicked by the Esar to replace those
we
lost, so he can be sure that at least
someone
in
the Basquiat puts him first. I haven’t seen her at the Basquiat since her initiation, actually. I took it as a good sign. It seemed to me that meant she wasn’t spying on us.”

“Really does like to have his finger in every pie,” I said. It was common sense, I guessed, and if I couldn’t keep track of a classroom, then I probably wouldn’t have been able to keep track of an entire country. All those lords and ladies, magicians and Margraves, diplomats and servants and citizens—the more I thought about it, the more I figured I’d’ve gone mad long ago, my brain cracked down the middle like a rotten egg.

“He is the Esar,” Royston said with a shrug. He stood, crossing to the sink and pouring the coffee out, peering after it as it gurgled down the drain. “Shall I see what I can find out about Germaine? Other than her penchant for wearing brown?”

“She’s got a skill for machinery, it seems,” I explained.

“And so you are suspicious of her sudden appointment,” Roy concluded for me. “Since she
is
one of the Esar’s, it would make sense that—if he did anything about this new technology—he’d probably have her working on it right this very moment.”

I polished off my sandwich, wiping the crumbs on my napkin. “That’d make sense,” I agreed. “Except why would he have her doing common physician’s appointments with ’Versity students?”

“He wouldn’t,” Roy replied.

“Well, he is,” I told him. “And you’d better watch out for your … boy, too, since apparently there’s some kind of fever going around.”

“It means so much to me when you act concerned,” Roy said.

“Doesn’t matter to me one way or the other,” I explained, “because
I
haven’t gotten sick in over fifteen years. But
you—
”

“I don’t enjoy the feeling of congestion,” Roy replied tartly. “And once, when I sneezed, I exploded the living room.”

“I wish I had you in my classroom for practical demonstrations,” I said. “If those pansy-sniffers thought they had reason to cry
before
, I’d like to see them after—”

“No thank you,” Roy said, though I could see he was regretful. “As much as I enjoy teaching a good lesson, I’ve been in enough trouble for one lifetime. Still, I’ll see what I can do about this Margrave Germaine. Looking after ’Versity students
and
Balfour’s hands, you say?”

“For whatever reason,” I replied.

“Let’s hope I have more luck with this one,” Roy said.

At that, we heard the door down the hall swing open and Hal’s voice calling for Royston to see if he was in. Something shifted on Roy’s face, a change from loneliness to contentment, and he didn’t even try to hide it.

If Hal ever did anything to hurt that, I thought, I wasn’t just sitting by on the sidelines of Roy’s ill-fated love life anymore.

“You look positively gruesome,” Roy said, snapping me out of my vengeful thoughts. “Is something else wrong?”

“It’s that coffee stink,” I told him, and went to dump the contents of my own cup down the drain.

Toverre was supposed to meet me for supper, at which point I supposed I’d apologize to him for being sharp-tempered, but only if
he’d
apologize to
me
. Though it was hard to explain—even to myself—what I wanted him to apologize for.

But the more time I spent in the ’Versity, counting up the number of lecturers that were male versus them that were female—and the more time I spent seeing how some of the pretty students flirted with the professors to bring up their marks—the more frustrated I became. Even Toverre, with his picky little self and his barbed words, had a better chance of being who he wanted to be—whatever that was—because no matter which way I looked at it, I was only a girl. And being one of those meant using your tits more than your brains. At least, that was what everybody expected of you.

Back home it hadn’t mattered so much. Or maybe I’d just been too busy raking hay and doing everything Da expected of me to notice. But in Thremedon, where the girls did their hair and their rouge just so every day, so few of them coming to classes and those who did spending more time passing notes with the boys than listening, I wondered why I’d even been invited to come in the first place.

It was all just a show, and flirting with that dorm master only served to remind me of what was expected from me. I didn’t just want to be Toverre’s wife.

What I
did
want to be was harder to decide, but I was still young,
wasn’t I? The city meant a whole world of options I hadn’t even known about before I’d left home, and the idea that I wouldn’t get to experience
any
of them was too cruel. I wanted the freedom to be able to decide.

My mood was made worse by everything that had happened with Gaeth, and remembering that dark metal voice echoing through my dreams. Gaeth had heard it, too—he’d put it down on paper, in his own hapless way—and now I couldn’t pretend anymore that it hadn’t happened.

Of all the ways to wind up equal to a boy, hearing voices definitely wasn’t top
or
bottom on my list. So I was in a pretty foul mood for more reasons than one, and at least Toverre had gone against all his natural instincts and somehow refrained from asking me if I was on my monthlies. Which, thankfully, I wasn’t.

That was another thing about boys: No one assumed they blew a gasket for any reason other than they were just really upset. They were allowed to be, and nobody blamed where the moon was in its cycle, or whether or not they had the ill fortune of leaking from
their
privates. It was plain unfair.

I heard dainty footsteps coming up behind me in the hall and made up my mind once and for all to be forgiving—or to at least give Toverre a chance by begging for
my
forgiveness.

But it wasn’t Toverre at all. Instead, it was one of the little old owl-women who worked in the post center, where I mailed all my letters home and sometimes got a package back, when I actually remembered to check my cubbyhole. I wondered if she was coming to tell me that I’d forgotten to pick up some surprise from Da and the food had all rotted, but she didn’t look as mad as I was expecting, so it couldn’t have been that.

It’d happened once before, and I’d tried to
tell
Da that you couldn’t just send a good cut of meat in the mail and hope it’d come through all right on the other end. He never was that good at listening, though, and he wanted to make sure I was keeping my strength up. Little did he know I’d’ve had to cook the thing in the fireplace.

“Hello, Laurence,” said the woman. She was Barn Owl, because of how the way her hair framed her face reminded me of one. The other two were Snowy Owl and Screech Owl, both for reasons that were
pretty obvious if you knew anything about owls. “I hope I’m not interrupting your dinner.”

I hadn’t gotten anything to eat yet, so I didn’t see how she could’ve been, and I told her so.

“Not at all,” I said, as polite as you please. If I’d been standing, it would’ve gone nicely with a proper curtsy.

“I have this card for you from the physicians’ administrator,” Barn Owl said, pulling a stiff white card out of her pocket. “Now, you know how we normally don’t make deliveries, but post pickup’s closed for the evening, and they indicated to me that it was rather urgent. Given past precedent … the meat incident … well, you understand.”

“Sure,” I told her, distracted by the appointment card in my hand. I could recognize Margrave Germaine’s blocky, thick handwriting by now, though that didn’t make it a familiar comfort. I wasn’t suspicious like Toverre, and I didn’t believe in being afraid of something unless it gave me good reason, but I knew right away that I didn’t want anything to do with that physician’s appointment.