Steelhands (2011) (52 page)

Raphael had managed to fight his way free in the last few seconds, looking at least less deathly pale than he had before, now that he was flushed with exertion. Luvander was grinning like a maniac, and even Balfour looked pleased, if also pink and embarrassed over going wild like that. I didn’t blame him for letting loose, though. Seemed to me like people spent too much time in the country
and
in Thremedon on trying to hide what they were really feeling—and so long as it wasn’t a
rude
feeling, then what did it matter, letting it show?

I’d’ve greeted Toverre the same way, probably. Maybe I’d even do the same with Adamo, if we ever got to see him again.

“Honestly, Ghislain, when you said you were looking for ‘something,’ I never imagined …” Luvander trailed off, seeming confused because, probably for the first time in his life, he didn’t know what to say. I only hoped Ghislain had a whole cartful of his old companions to render Luvander speechless more often. “I mean I
never
thought … Well, would you listen to me? It’s a fine state of affairs indeed when I can’t even form a complete sentence! No, I’ve changed my mind; don’t listen to me. Everyone pay close attention to Balfour instead.”

Balfour looked startled, then resigned himself to the fact that everyone
was
staring at him now, and he was still flushed as a schoolboy caught in a snowstorm.

“Just like old times,” Raphael said, looking about the room. “Well, perhaps not
exactly
. There are more hats downstairs, for instance. And this lovely woman is far too young for you, Luvander. I can see I arrived just in time to prevent a crime from taking place.”

“How do you know she isn’t Balfour’s woman?” Luvander asked. “It seems to me an egregious oversight.”

“Because she’s not Balfour’s type,” Raphael replied simply.

“You want her for yourself,” Luvander huffed. “I’ll have you know that she’s
spoken for
. Not to mention that if you continue talking about her in this way, I’m quite certain she’ll attack us both with a fire poker.”

“It’s true,” I said, twirling it in my hand to show I hadn’t forgotten. I appreciated Luvander speaking up for me, though, so some people didn’t think I was an object instead of a person.

“New recruits?” Ghislain asked, and Toverre jumped a little, almost
like he’d forgotten he was there. Even though Ghislain was three times Luvander’s size, he was three hundred times quieter. “One of them’s scrawny. Jumps a lot. Like a field mouse.”

“We’re here because Adamo’s been arrested,” I said, letting the reminder of what was actually going on sink in for myself as much as everyone else. I didn’t blame them for getting caught up in the moment, but just because there was another airman walking around now didn’t mean we could afford to forget about the other one, who’d been alive all this time but might
not
be alive for much longer.

“Really? Thought he was teaching,” Ghislain said.

“He
was,
” I said, while Luvander and Balfour returned their pokers to the fireplace. I held on to mine for a while longer. It was calming me down some to have it in my hand. “That’s how I met him.”

“Oh, I
see,
” Raphael said, settling himself on Luvander’s couch. He made a big show of it, but I could tell he was tired and grateful not to be on his feet anymore. “Well, it’s a minor infraction at best, and they can’t necessarily
prove
the two of you did anything untoward unless you testify against him.”

“Beg pardon?” I asked. I was starting to wish Raphael had come in through the door first, so I could’ve clonked
him
one instead. Might’ve finished him off, though, the way he was looking.

“It’s not exactly like that,” Balfour said, sitting down next to Raphael. He couldn’t keep his eyes off him—like he thought if he blinked, the man was gonna disappear. “We can explain it all later, but the Esar seems to have taken exception to some of Adamo’s actions. He thinks Adamo was plotting against him.”

“Seems like I picked a perfect time to drop anchor,” Ghislain said. “Could’ve sailed all the way up to the Kirils and back first, make myself a nest egg, but Raphael here was feeling homesick.”

“You’d be feeling homesick, too, if you’d spent every day between the end of the war and now in a fisherman’s village,” Raphael pointed out. “I’ll be smelling tuna in my dreams for the rest of my life.”

“Just pretend it’s mermaids,” Ghislain suggested, lowering himself into one of Luvander’s chairs, which creaked ominously under his weight.

“That would ruin all my other dreams,” Raphael replied dryly. “The good ones.”

“Are you going to tell us where you found him?” Luvander asked,
setting an enormous pot on the stove and bringing a few fat, shiny eggplants out of a drawer above the counter. How on earth he could be thinking about dinner at a time like this was beyond me, but I guess that was the difference between me and a trained airman. They knew to eat when the eating was good and probably didn’t lose their dinners in the air if the flying got too rough.

Probably. I’d have to ask Adamo about that, too, someday.

“Not to mention how you even …” Balfour began, then trailed off as his voice cracked. “I mean, none of us even knew that you were
alive.
”

“Neither did I, for about two weeks after the war ended,” Raphael admitted, rubbing at a scar I hadn’t noticed before—it curved down from the corner of his mouth, twisting his mouth into a jester’s grimace when he wasn’t talking. I had to wonder if he’d gotten it during the real fighting, or sometime after, by offending someone in his fishing village. “I got thrown well clear of Natalia in the final battle, which is what might’ve saved me, come to think of it—especially considering what happened to her when she … exploded. I was taken in by a young woman fleeing the capital—returning home to her village by the sea, more accurately, wanting to get out of that mess. And who can really blame her? I
believe
she took pity on me because I reminded her of her brother, and that’s … about all I managed to gather, really. The Ke-Han language is a terribly difficult one to master. Mostly we signed to get the point across.” To illustrate, Raphael made a lewd gesture in the air that caused Luvander to laugh richly, while Balfour looked away and blushed. “Yeah, she got that one all right. So did her father, unfortunately. Apparently it’s universal, and he was none too pleased. But when I was brought to the village, suddenly all this good luck started happening to its people. The ocean was full of these giant, silver-scaled fish, practically floating to the top of the water. For a simple little town, they were starting to turn a major profit. And they considered me their good-luck charm. Despite my behavior, they tended my wounds, fed me plenty of horrible food, and put me up. And all I had to do was sit there and babble to them in Volstovic—of which they didn’t understand a single word—to secure my position as god of the fishy seas.”

“You’re making all this up,” Luvander accused.

“Only some of it,” Raphael replied.

“I was sailing around Tado when I started hearing rumors about a crazed foreigner living as a fisherman near the Seon border,” Ghislain
interjected, clearly sensing that Raphael was becoming sidetracked. At least one of these ex-airmen knew how to get to the point. “Didn’t seem like anything to get excited about. You know how many crazies this country churns out. But I wanted to check it out, just to be sure. Some of the descriptions matched.”

“And
some
indicated I had a massive penis,” Raphael added cheerfully. “A rumor which my friend the fisherman’s daughter must have spread after bathing my naked body with seawater to break my fever. Oh, dear, I forgot there was a lady present.”

“So you just … found him?” Balfour asked, eyes wide like a kid up way past his bedtime. “He was really there?”

“Must’ve been,” Ghislain pointed out.

“Fearsome pirates landed in our village and terrorized its residents first,” Raphael corrected, crossing his legs and folding his hands atop his knees, “because of all the extra fish they were exporting and money they were importing. Funny how good luck works that way, isn’t it? In any case, I was quite prepared to defend my newfound home—as their foreign benefactor, refusing to abandon them in their time of need—when I realized that I recognized one of the principal threats. Imagine my surprise!”

“Spent the next three days going on and on at those people in sign language, trying to convince them not to burn my boat and hang me,” Ghislain said, rolling his eyes.

“I told them it would be bad luck,” Raphael explained. “Very, very bad.”

Ghislain snorted. “We
could’ve
taken ’em, though. Little village like that? Would’ve been easy.”

“Yes, well, excuse me for retaining some form of gratitude toward the people who took me in and saved my life,” Raphael said with a sniff.

“Wasted time,” Ghislain said. “Could’ve been here sooner; maybe Adamo wouldn’t’ve been hauled off as easily with somebody actually looking after things.”

I was starting to like this Ghislain fellow, or at least the way he thought. Judging by the look on Toverre’s face, he preferred Raphael—though probably for different reasons.

Life was going to be rough for my husband-to-be.

“At least you returned just in time for our rescue mission,” Luvander said. “Whatever it may be.”

“Some rescue,” Ghislain said, cracking the knuckles on his left hand. “We busting him out with our minds? I sure hope the scrawny one’s a
velikaia.
”

“We’re using someone else’s mind, actually,” Luvander said, leaning back against his countertop. “That is, we’re waiting for Margrave Royston to return and give us the go-ahead.”

“Ah.” Raphael sighed. “How strange is fate!”

“Not really,” Ghislain grunted. “Just that some things, in some places, never change.”

“Well, they’re going to have to change,” I said, “unless th’Esar’s the type of man who
pardons
someone after calling him out as a criminal.”

“Only if they’re more useful to him alive than dead or behind bars,” Luvander said. “But he does do it.”

“Margrave Royston being one of them, if I recall correctly,” Raphael added. “Sweet Mary Margrave, was it? But we’re not allowed to call him that in front of Adamo. The nostalgia is killing me.”

“See that it doesn’t,” Ghislain suggested. “I worked hard bringing you back.”

“I get seasick,” Raphael explained.

“So do I!” Toverre exclaimed suddenly. Everyone paused to look at him, and he bristled. “It’s difficult to break into the conversation,” he sniffed. “You all have your own preestablished rapport; it makes outsiders feel somewhat excluded.”

“Anyway, while my boat’s airing out,” Ghislain said, ignoring him completely, “guess it wouldn’t hurt to do something about this bad situation.”

“We have to wait for Margrave Royston,” I told him, though it nearly killed me to admit it. “He’s talking to people, gathering information, learning what we need to know about where Adamo is and maybe why he’s been taken there.”

“And here I’d been hoping it was another Arlemagne scandal.” Raphael sighed sadly. “To remind us of the good old days.”

“Hear, hear,” Luvander said.

“How can you lot joke around when Adamo’s in trouble?” I demanded, no longer able to control myself. “Wasn’t he your Chief Sergeant? Don’t any of you have any respect for him?”

“Of course we do,” Luvander said, blinking widely.

“Like he was my own father,” Ghislain agreed. “Except better. And not fired from his position as stableboy for sleeping with my mother.”

“My fear of the man is equal only to my enormous affection for him,” Raphael concluded.

“They cope with their emotions by burying them under their idea of humor,” Balfour explained gently. “They’ve always done it, and, taking everything that’s happened since the end of the war into consideration—Ghislain’s choice to become a pirate; Raphael’s stint as a Ke-Han god of fortune; Luvander and his hat shop—I doubt they’ll ever change. Does that answer things for you?”

“Guess it does,” I admitted. I supposed it wasn’t my place to judge them—not when they’d seen a lot more than I had.

“
Balfour’s
changed, at any rate,” Raphael said, looking him over with newfound appreciation. “Bastion—if only Rook were here. Then we’d have a real showdown.”

“I don’t know if I’m ready for that just yet,” Balfour admitted. “Someday. We can only hope I’ll get the chance.”

“If someone else doesn’t shut his mouth for you first,” Raphael said, indulging in a happy little sigh. “I really have missed this place. Being worshipped was nice, but I’m hoping I can get a little worship here, too. Along with some old-fashioned Volstovic cooking.”

“Coming, my dear,” Luvander said.

“If they don’t arrest you tomorrow,” Balfour added darkly, “for the crime of being alive when the Esar thought you were dead.”

“Like to see him try that with me here,” Ghislain said. He shifted his weight from one side to the other, folding his arms over his chest as he did so. I was pleased as Punch he was here, and not on somebody else’s side, either. “So we wait for Margrave Royston to show up, is that it? No wonder we needed Adamo. We’re shit at planning.”

“He should be here soon,” Luvander said. “Unless he’s been arrested, too. Which, when you think about everything we’ve burdened him with doing, is actually entirely possible.”

The heroes of the war, I thought, and the most they were capable of so far was sitting around and having a tea-party reunion. It was weird now to think of how safe I used to feel when I imagined them soaring through the clouds on their way to enemy ground.

But I didn’t have any better ideas, either.

“In the meantime, make something nice for Raphael,” Ghislain suggested. “To fill his empty stomach after he filled my boat with puke.”

“He’ll never let me live it down, I suspect,” Raphael said.

“Not until you’re healthy enough to clean it up,” Ghislain agreed.

“I think I hear something down below,” Balfour murmured. He didn’t have to speak up for us all to snap to; I was glad I was still holding that poker.