Steelhands (2011) (38 page)

“I know,” Laure said, twisting her hair back and off her neck, making a transient bun held up only by her fingers, which she dropped a moment later, waves of orange hair tumbling around her face. “I’ll think of something better eventually. I mean it. And I’m probably just making too much of things anyway. We don’t
know
that those appointments had anything to do with what happened to Gaeth, do we? Lots of people’ve gone and come back and haven’t had anything wrong with them.”

“Except for that awful fever,” I said.

“It was only a couple of days,” Laure pointed out, looking perturbed. “Not even bad, by a fever’s standards. I can handle a lot worse than that, now can’t I? I have and I will.”

There was no arguing with her when she was being so stubborn, I thought, and gave up for the time being.

Instead of squabbling pointlessly, I reached over to pick up my note cards, not sure of how to proceed. If she truly wished to get this physician’s appointment over with, and deal with it in her usual, indomitable fashion, then I supposed there wasn’t much I could do to stop her. I
certainly wasn’t capable of physically restraining her—not with the disparate nature of our strengths—and she was bullheaded enough that sometimes even the best-reasoned argument might as well have fallen on deaf ears. I found myself wishing irrationally for a third party—even simple Gaeth would’ve done—to help me reason with her. I was only one person, after all, and as a result it seemed my opinion tended to matter very little.

“I want you to think very carefully before you do make a decision, one way or the other,” I said, running the pads of my thumbs over the smooth surface of the note cards. The clean simplicity of their crisp edges and neat handwriting soothed me. A terrible thought occurred to me, and I hesitated before bringing it up. “But, Laure, you’re
not
planning to tell them you’ve been hearing voices … Are you?”

Laure sat down on the end of her bed with a flounce, skirts bunching up underneath her. I could see she was wearing the green stockings I’d bought her; they didn’t match at all with the dress she was wearing, but I kept that small detail to myself, touched that she’d made the attempt in the first place.

“I don’t want to get bundled off to some women’s hospital for raving idiots, if that’s what you’re asking,” Laure said, rubbing the back of her neck again. “But I don’t like feeling out of sorts and lying to a doctor when she asks me how I’m doing, either. I just want someone to fix all this—and isn’t that what a physician’s job is? Make me one of them nasty-smelling herbal teas, crush up some dried rats’ bones. I’ll take whatever she’s willing to give me, so long as it works.”

“I wouldn’t ask for the rats’ bones up front,” I suggested. “Just a thought.”

At least I managed to make her laugh, and her concentration was better that night than I’d been expecting, given her disposition when I’d first arrived. But there was nothing more I could do for her mood than distract her, and my ability to do that was only going to last for so long.

And so it was just when I was beginning to give up hope—and assume the gloves had been lost by an errant postman—that I went to check for new deliveries the next morning and found the flag in my postbox up. There was a letter waiting for me in the box, the corner smudged with what appeared to be a thumbprint of mud. I wrapped it with a kerchief and slid it into my pocket. And because of the time, I
was forced to read it in the lecture hall, just before Ducante began our first lecture that day. It burned against my side the entire walk along ’Versity Stretch. By the time I arrived at Cathery, the excitement and impatience had nearly given me apoplexy.

As the poor professor surveyed the small number of attendees in his room with a look of offended displeasure, I neatly slipped one of my pens underneath the blobby wax seal to break it. My name had been spelled wrong on the front—Tovere, with only one “r”—but the address itself was correct, and I supposed that was all that mattered for those in charge of ’Versity post.

“What’s that you’ve got there?” Laure hissed, peering curiously over my shoulder. “Something wrong at home?”

“Does this look like my father’s handwriting to you?” I asked, briefly showing her the letter before I hid it once again from any prying eyes that might have been lurking about. “I believe this was written by the only soul in Borland
able
to write—if one considers this ‘able.’ ”

“Borland?” Laure snorted. “What’re you corresponding with that place for?”

“Be quiet for a moment, and let me read it,” I told her. I felt her breath on my ear, which meant she was reading along with me.

Sir Tovere
, it read, and I felt a pang of tenderness and pity,
Thank ya for yer writing. The gloves are nice of ya. I will be wearing them. If only ma son should wear some himself. May be he will buy some. I know ya asked for his health, but he ent heer. He has schooling now in Versity. May ya be well. Jetta
.

“You wrote to Gaeth’s family,” Laure whispered.

“I wrote to his mother, yes,” I replied. I had a strange, chill feeling creeping through my chest, and I glanced at Laure to see if she felt the same way. “I had gloves that belonged to her—I thought I should send them back …”

“You thought you’d meddle, is what you thought,” Laure snapped.

“And it’s a good thing I did, isn’t it?” I asked. “Since now we know Gaeth never
did
go home.”

“Fat lot of good it does us,” Laure said miserably. “We still don’t know anything. This just makes it worse.”

“Now, be sensible,” I began, but Ducante cleared his throat, signaling a start to the lecture—and an end to all idle chatting.

Needless to say, I was incapable of paying attention to what he had
to say. I managed somehow to copy down word for word what he was dictating, but without properly listening to the sound of his voice. It all passed from my ear straight to my pen, without once passing through my brain.
That
part of me was full of dark and nervous thoughts.

If Gaeth had not gone home, yet those in charge of our dormitory believed he had, then he truly
was
missing. And with no one aware of it save Laure and me, the chance that he was in danger somewhere seemed greater than ever.

This was too large a matter for the two of us to take care of on our own—and yet I had no one in the city I felt I was able to confide in. If I took this quaint letter to the authorities—I supposed the Provost would be the most likely candidate—I knew without question I would only be laughed at. What evidence did I have? Who was Gaeth to them? Could I explain that the boy had been hearing voices before he disappeared—and back up that evidence with Laure’s situation? I most certainly could not.

The more I went over my suspicions in my head, the more dangerous they seemed to me, yet the sillier I knew they’d seem to someone else. And still, I felt the keen sense of responsibility driving me to find
some
solution—for Gaeth’s sake.

Where in Regina’s name
was
he?

I was tangled up in my thoughts when I heard the bell chime. My hand was cramping with how quickly I’d been taking notes, and I managed to ease my grip on my pen just as Hal took over speaking for Ducante.

“… if there’s anything you need help with,” he said in his kind, easy voice, “don’t hesitate to ask. Even if it’s not about the research or the studying—I’m here to talk, if need be.”

I felt as though a lamp had been lit suddenly over my head. In all the time I’d spent watching him—and with how carefully I had conducted my study of his behavior and his habits—I knew he would not be the sort of person to laugh at someone when they felt their companion was in need. If I took my concerns to him, perhaps
he
might know—from official class roster—whether or not Gaeth had withdrawn or made some excuse to the professor regarding his prolonged absence.

I rose at once from my seat, ignoring Laure’s questions as I pushed past the crowd of students desperate to escape the lecture hall.

This, I realized just before I arrived at Hal’s desk, would mark the
very first occasion I had actually convinced myself to speak with him. It seemed easier somehow to do it because it was not on my own behalf but someone else’s.

He was in the middle of stacking a few heavy books, and his back was facing me; I could have cleared my throat to let him know I was there, but suddenly I was seized with uncertainty and panic, and by the time I managed to wrestle control of myself, he had already turned around.

“Hello there,” he said, offering me a quizzical smile. I stared back at him, aware my mouth was hanging open. “Is there something I can do for you?”

Gaeth had saved me, I recalled, on that fateful day when I’d had my heart irreversibly crushed by the impossibility of ever getting to know Hal as I’d once wished. Now it seemed it was my duty to do something for Gaeth in return.

“I …” I managed, quite sure I felt Laure’s eyes boring holes into me. She was no longer in the room, but knowing her as well as I did, I was certain she was lurking just outside the door and watching me like a hawk. “That is, I heard what you said just now. About if anyone needed to talk.”

“Oh, really?” Hal asked, brightening. Once, that expression might have had my knees buckling, but today I was all business. “Don’t tell anyone, but you’re actually the first person who’s ever actually taken me up on that offer. There’s another class coming in about fifteen minutes from now that I’d wanted to sit in on, but I’m sure we could use the professor’s office in the meantime. Would that be all right?”

“That would be more than adequate,” I said, clutching my books stiffly to my chest as though shielding myself from a dragon. “Thank you.”

“It’s no trouble at all.
Really,
” Hal added, leading me out the door with a smile.

I was nearly certain I saw the top of a fiery red head disappearing behind the doorframe just as we passed through. Dear Laure never had been all that gifted with matters of subtlety, and I wondered if she intended to follow us all the way to the office, too.

Because of my own pragmatism—it made little sense to fall in love with someone whose affections lay elsewhere—my heart no longer jumped each time he spoke, and I could appreciate the slight bits of
humor in my current situation. It was slightly jarring to come to such a realization when faced so immediately with the former object of my affections, but there it was: simply another thing Gaeth had gone and ruined for me. Hal had the same complete lack of guile that Laure did, which caused him to sound almost excited by the prospect of someone else’s problems. Since I was doing this for Gaeth’s sake as well as to satisfy my own curiosity, I did my best not to say anything at all until I’d been spirited away to the upstairs offices, at which point Hal’s attentions could be fully focused.

Ducante’s rooms were blessedly clean, if slightly cluttered by scrolls of dusty parchment, and there was a large plant in the corner that badly wanted watering. I restrained myself from wiping down one of the bookshelves as I passed, even though I was certain Hal wouldn’t have noticed and everyone would have breathed a little better because of it.

He didn’t sit behind the desk but rather leaned back against it. I expected he was probably anxious to show me that we were peers, and that I could feel comfortable sharing all my deepest anxieties with him not as though he were a professor but a fellow student. It was a sweet gesture, yet due to the bizarre nature of my request, it was suddenly very tempting to clam up entirely or to invent something out of thin air.

Somehow—reminding myself of Gaeth in order to maintain my focus—I forced myself to sit down, lowering myself slowly into the leather chair so that it wouldn’t creak embarrassingly.

“So, are you worried about the exams?” Hal asked, bracing his arms back against the desk. “I know there’ve been a lot of students in about that lately. And it doesn’t help that some professors have been drawing up practice exams with all sorts of trick questions on them. They think it’ll help if the first-years overprepare, which I suppose is one strategy … But I’m sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself here. You’re … Toverre, aren’t you?”

“How did you know that?” I asked, instantly suspicious, the color rising high in my cheeks and no doubt making me look as though I had the pox. Had he known I was following him all along?

“I’m sorry,” Hal said, tucking a piece of hair behind his ear. He gestured toward the neat stack of notes and textbooks in my lap. “I didn’t mean to unsettle you. It’s just that you have very distinctive handwriting.
I have to read your essays out loud to Professor Ducante; he claims it’s going to drive him blind.”

I couldn’t hide my papers now without feeling self-conscious, but I rather desperately wished to. Also, I was going to have to be more careful when I answered Laure’s homework for her, in the future. It was a lucky thing I knew her handwriting so well.

“I hope his eyes don’t fail him before the end of semester,” I said, realizing it was my turn to speak again. I wished I had thought to grab Laure when we’d passed her by—these things were always so much easier with her along to make a joke and break the ice. Also, whenever she was in the room, no one so much as looked twice at me. Hal’s gaze—with his cloudy gray eyes—was unwavering, and I found it difficult to sit still without staring back at him.

“They’re very good essays,” Hal added, to soften the blow. “I suppose I shouldn’t have told you that, about the handwriting.”

I felt even more uncomfortable with the unexpected praise and cleared my throat quickly to distract him. “It’s not exams I wanted to talk to you about; I have organized a very precise system of studying, and I’m feeling extremely confident. No worries at all
there
. This is more of a personal problem.”

“I see,” Hal said, nodding once to show he was listening. He hesitated, then spoke again. “Is it that girl I always see you with? Not to pry, of course.”

“Laure?”
I said, momentarily horrified out of my deep concentration.

“I guess I was wrong,” Hal said, looking as though he was trying to keep from laughing. “My intuition’s all off today. Didn’t sleep very well last night. Perhaps you’d better just tell me, before I embarrass myself any further.”