Steelhands (2011) (42 page)

“Do they cry?” I asked, suddenly interested.

“Like babies,” Adamo said, draining the rest of his coffee with a noise of appreciation. I was starting to think
he
was a dragon, the way he guzzled down hot stuff like he couldn’t feel it. They could’ve called
him
Ironmouth.

“Toverre made one of our tutors cry once,” I confided, picking at the tape over the hole in the chair. “He corrected everything she said; she couldn’t finish a single sentence, much less teach us anything, and he kept at it until she finally lost it. Think she had a few fits and had to move back home.”

“I can imagine that,” Adamo said, a faraway look in his eyes like he imagined
he
was on the verge of a breakdown any day and was ready to get in a carriage and roll away. “Toverre’s that friend of yours, isn’t he? The one with all the pens?”

“My fiancé,” I corrected automatically, licking at the corner of my mouth to make sure there wasn’t chocolate there.

“Huh,” Adamo said, sitting back in his chair. For a second he looked confused—I took the engagement for granted, but it tended to surprise other people—but the moment passed quickly enough. “Are you here about the, uh, engagement?”

“What?” I asked. Now it was my turn to look confused. “Of course not. I’d like to kill him sometimes, of course, but he’s been all right lately.”

Adamo stared at me for a moment longer, then shrugged something off. “Well, since you’re not here about exams, and you didn’t bring
Toverre your fiancé to pick at my grammar and make
me
cry, you’re gonna have to enlighten me as to why you really came.”

“Oh, that,” I said, not giving myself time to overthink anything. I’d come all the way here, hadn’t I, and I could feel the crisp edges of my latest summons digging into my side through my pocket. “It’s not … anything to do with school, actually.”

“That’s a relief,” Adamo replied.

“Wish it was,” I said. “See, whoever’s in charge has been scheduling these checkups for all the new students—I guess to make sure we’re all protected from whatever fever’s running through the dormitories and whatnot, or to make sure we aren’t bringing anything into the city with us that we picked up from the farm. Everyone’s had ’em, or at least, most of us have, but then … It started to seem like everyone who went came back with this mean kind of fever. Like somehow getting the checkup was making us sick.”

“Physician wouldn’t be doing his job, if that was the case,” Adamo said.

“
Her
job,” I corrected him. “And that’s exactly what I thought. I’ve got a healthy constitution—only been sick five days in my whole life—and after my second visit, all of a sudden, I’ve got this awful fever. Sweating, vomiting—no use coating it with sugar; I was doing a
lot
of things I wish I wasn’t—and having these weird dreams where I kept hearing things that weren’t actually there.”

“Hearing things?” Adamo asked, suddenly looking sharp.

“I’m
not
screwy,” I told him firmly, suddenly regretting all the sweet cocoa in my stomach since some amount of being nervous was finally settling in. “At least, I never was before I came to the city. And I know how it sounds—like I’m out of my mind—but maybe I’m half expecting you to tell me I’m being cracked and all I need is to pull myself out of it. The thing is, they want me coming again, for another one of those checkups, but
I
don’t want to go and find myself sick again. It’s just a feeling I have, but it doesn’t sit right with me. Goes against my instincts, and I don’t like doing that.”

“When’re you due?” Adamo asked. I pulled the card out of my pocket, setting it down on the table.

4:00 PM
, it read, and under that,
M. GERMAINE
.

“Stands for Margrave Germaine, I’m assuming?” Adamo asked.

“She’s the one,” I replied. “Seems all right enough, even though her place is full of these
instruments
—metal ones, all of ’em kept out of sight so as not to make us shudder. But I caught sight of ’em, and damn me if it wasn’t eerie.”

Adamo picked up the card, turning it back and forth. It looked small and silly in one of his enormous hands, but I didn’t know what he thought he’d get out of inspecting it so closely. He must’ve known something I didn’t because he couldn’t stop staring at it.

“Didn’t lend yourself much time to get out of it,” he said finally.

“Sure I did,” I said. “The
first
notice was when I came to see you last week.”

“But you didn’t tell me about it,” Adamo added.

I felt myself color and cleared my throat, trying to keep any signs of
blushing
off my face. “Guess I didn’t want to tell you,” I explained, “because it sounds so loopy.”

“You’re saying others had this same fever after going to visit her?” Adamo asked.

“Sure did,” I said, remembering Gaeth suddenly. A feeling of dread crept through me, and Adamo must’ve seen some of it on my face because he gave me a sharp look.

“Anything else you want to tell me?” he asked.

“Someone I know, another first-year,” I told him. “He got the fever, too. Had his appointment before me and suffered from it for a little while. And then, out of nowhere, he just disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Adamo repeated. His tone wasn’t skeptical—at least, not skeptical of the information I was giving him, I didn’t think—and it encouraged me.

“I thought maybe he’d gone home, but he left everything behind in his room,” I explained. “Like he meant to come back to it. Like something happened to him. And then Toverre—you remember, my fiancé—wrote a letter to his mother back home, and when she replied, she seemed to think he really was still here. But nobody’s seen him for over a week now.”

“Sounds like he disappeared to me,” Adamo replied.

I set my cocoa down on his desk. It was too cold—having passed the perfect point where it wasn’t scalding hot but wasn’t warm enough, either.

“So,” I said. “I’m crazy, right?”

“You shouldn’t go to that appointment,” Adamo told me. “That’s what I think.”

It hadn’t been what I was expecting, not by a wide mark, and I had to repeat it a few times in my head to make sure I hadn’t just misheard him. “I shouldn’t?”

“Instincts are there for a reason,” Adamo replied. “All this city living tells you to go against ’em a lot of the time, but sometimes they’re all you’ve got to protect you. And I say, why ignore ’em when they’re so clear?”

“Well, because they’re gonna tell my da, for one thing,” I replied, aware of how childish it sounded. “And if I get in too much trouble here, he’ll call me back home for sure. But for another, Margrave Germaine’s gonna come and get me at this point; had another note from her a few days back that said if I missed
this
appointment, she was gonna be real worried about my health, and she’d have to come see me in the dormitories. Felt like intimidation to me, but what do I do about it? I don’t have anywhere else to live.”

“Four this afternoon,” Adamo said, clearly thinking over something heavy. He turned the note card over in his hand one more time. “You mind if I take this?”

“Go ahead,” I told him. “I sure don’t want it.”

“Guess it wouldn’t be looked on as decent if
I
came with you to that appointment,” Adamo said, more like thinking out loud than asking me a question.

“Not even one way,” I agreed, since it wasn’t polite not to answer someone.

“And I’m not sending you in there like a soldier for some answers, either,” Adamo added. “Felt bad enough when I had to send one of my
boys
on a mission like that.”

“I could go on a mission,” I told him, folding my arms over my chest. “Even if I’m
not
one of your boys.”

Adamo snapped out of whatever’d taken control of him, looking at me for the first time since I’d shown him Germaine’s summons. “Yeah, I guess you could,” he admitted. “But that doesn’t mean it sits right with me, and I’m not gonna do it that way.”

“Guess you just can’t trust someone who hasn’t been tested in the field,” I said, managing to make it only a little sulky. For a second there, I’d almost thought he was starting to think of us as equals.

“Guess I can’t,” Adamo replied. “But I got another idea for you, though. You ever heard of Yesfir? It’s a hat shop.”

I had a whole lot of junk in my head that needed sorting out, and for once I didn’t have any idea of where to begin.

I didn’t know when I’d become some kind of counselor, but first Balfour’d spilled his guts to me, and now I had one of my own students following suit. Both of ’em were equally mad—not in the way they thought, but because they’d decided I’d make a good listener when all signs pointed to how piss-poor I’d be at it.

The problem was that I’d picked up on a few similarities in their separate stories—things that shouldn’t and by all rights
couldn’t’ve
been the same, but were anyway—and I was the one putting both sides together. That is, if I could even find a way to make things fit.

I really didn’t like it. Sure, everyone at the Airman’d had their own opinions about whether or not Balfour was man enough for the job he’d inherited, but he’d handled the same shit as any of us and then some, on account of all that hazing. He was a tough little bugger underneath it all. This girl Laure I knew less about, but what I did know seemed pretty sturdy to me.

She wasn’t one of them fainting flowers, and she wasn’t the sort to make up stories for attention, either. At least that was what it seemed like to me, and I was gonna feel real blockheaded if it turned out I was wrong. But I had a few instincts of my own and they were usually good ones. She wasn’t a rotten egg. After dealing with all the nutters th’Esar sent my way for airman training, and before that working with my fair share of deserters, I knew a liar when I saw one.

I’d taken her appointment card just to make sure I wasn’t imagining things, and I kept staring at it, like
that
would somehow help me make sense of this whole mess. Maybe I was hoping that the next time I looked at the name on the card, it’d be something different and I could unclench.

Royston would’ve said I was acting like some young schoolboy who’d snagged a trinket from an admirer, but I wasn’t going to give him a chance to get that far. Never mind the fact that the thought’d gone
and entered my head in the first place. I had a lot more to be concerning myself with than simple nonsense.

Normally we’d have met in a coffee shop, but I was starting to feel kinda paranoid, and the topic was sensitive enough that I didn’t want anyone eavesdropping—not an idle café gossip, which Royston was himself sometimes. I’d promised Balfour I’d be discreet, and even if no one knew or cared about a country girl studying at the ’Versity, that didn’t mean a man could go blabbing about the condition of
her
mind all over the city, either.

It was only common decency.

As far as I was concerned, the only place where I was comfortable having this discussion was my very own home. It wasn’t as fancy as Roy’s place in the Crescents, and it didn’t serve fancy little vegetable sandwiches with no crust like they did at Piquant—which was “our place,” according to Roy—but Royston was just going to have to saddle up and deal with roughing it for an afternoon.

Probably wasn’t the exact attitude I wanted to have toward someone I needed to help me, but there it was.

My place was clean, even if it did smell like “dragon and dirty boots and the inside of an old coffeepot.”

Roy arrived late, of course, but since I knew his style, I’d told him to come about an hour before I needed him to, and it all worked out. There were certain strategies for dealing with people, same as in battles, and when you had friends as complicated as mine were, you needed to arm yourself in advance.

“I can’t say I wasn’t intrigued by the message you left for me at the Basquiat,” Royston said, peeling off his scarf and hooking it over the rack I never used. Why have one of those at all when the back of a chair served your purpose just fine? “All this secrecy! The messenger told me you threatened to find him and do him bodily harm if he went ‘flapping his mouth’ to anyone else. That’s
one
way to make
everyone
paranoid, you know. You really should be more discreet sometimes.”

“I said that?” I grunted. It wasn’t because I was playing coy but because I honestly didn’t remember.

Royston gave me one of his long-nosed looks. “It does sound like you,” he said.

“Guess it does,” I admitted.

“You
are
going to tell me what’s bothering you, I hope?” he asked.
“There’s only so much I can take of you stalking the streets like a wild bear in search of prey. I never know when you’ll claim your next victim, and I can’t handle the responsibility.”

“Bastion,” I said, momentarily distracted. “You really would get on with Luvander. Or else you’d kill each other; I’m not really sure.”

“I’ll pretend that’s a statement I understand, shall I?” Royston asked, folding his coat neatly over the rack and heading off ahead of me down the hall. “It’s not some sort of code, is it? If you’ve resorted to code, I’m leaving right now. The tiger strikes when the moon is full; the lion leaps at midnight; you really would get on with Luvander. Et cetera.”

“Have some coffee,” I said, following him into the kitchen. “And shut up.”

“Such ambiance,” Royston said, settling down into one of my chairs, wasting no time in making himself feel at home. “You wonder why I don’t come here more often. Why
am
I here, by the way?”

I still had Laure’s card in my pocket, and I pulled it out, setting it down on the table. Not that it meant anything by itself; I just wanted to have it there. Serving as a reminder, maybe. “Got a few more things to talk to you about. Remember Margrave Germaine?”

“The woman who dresses like a mushroom,” Royston said, leaning across the table to peer at the card. “Quite distinctly. You
could
have told me that’s what this was about. I’ve been making my own discreet inquiries into the matter already. You’d be shocked—or perhaps you wouldn’t—at how quickly my fellow Margraves and Wildgraves in the Basquiat are willing to gossip about someone they consider to be a spy. Her well-known liaison with the Esar did her no services among us, fortunately for you. Everyone has some little bit of dirt or another, though it’s slow going when you have to piece together something useful from all that idle chatter.”