Steelhands (2011) (59 page)

“Ah,
Germaine,
” Antoinette said, drawing out the syllables in a way
that made me real glad I wasn’t the woman in question, or even a distant relative, for that matter. “We’ll want to deal with her as well, I imagine. Since she was so eager to take the title of Margrave, then the Basquiat will try her as one. We should call a meeting.”

“Then it seems pretty clear, doesn’t it?” Laure asked. “Who’s going where?”

“I think some of us should be going home,” the cricket muttered, but he didn’t sound like he had hopes of it.

“Let the girl speak,” Antoinette said sharply.

Laure coughed but looked pleased. “Thanks,” she said, straightening out her shoulders. “The way I see it is this: Magicians go to the Basquiat to call that meeting, and the rest of us take a delegation to the palace to speak with th’Esarina. I’m assuming that’d be you,” she added, nodding at Antoinette, “since you’re the only one here who knows her by her first name.”

Antoinette smiled, clapping Laure on the shoulder the same way I would’ve done for one of my boys, coming back from a successful raid. “It gives me hope to meet someone like you,” she said. Then, in clearer tones, she delineated the plan, instructing her fellow magicians to head to the Basquiat at once. If they ran into any trouble, she was clear enough about what they were to do—just obliterate it by any means and worry about being called to task for it later. None of them seemed ready to disagree with her, though Wildgrave Ozanne took a handkerchief from his pocket, dabbing the hair at his temples, where sweat had begun to bead.

“I really do wish I could stop being arrested for no reason,” he said.

Splitting up into two groups made me uncomfortable, but it was a necessary measure. And knowing that the Basquiat was being gathered was a nice piece of backup. We just had to buy them some time—and since Roy’d done that for me, I figured I could do the same for him.

“Then we’re ready,” Antoinette said, as the other magicians slipped like shadows down the hall. “Balfour, lead the way.”

“He always does,” I replied.

Toverre was wrapped up enough with making sure Gaeth was all right, and that left me free to cast glances at Adamo in the dark—just to make sure he wasn’t trying to pull one over on us, telling everybody he was feeling okay when he wasn’t. I wasn’t the sort to pull a sneaky maneuver like trying to keep an eye on someone without him knowing it, but then I wasn’t the sort to go inviting men to dinner, either. I imagined Toverre would have a thing or two to say about
that
once we were out of here, but for once it didn’t matter to me what he thought. Or what anyone else thought, really.

For the time being, I was content enough to keep an eye on Adamo. There was being strong-willed, then there was getting your troops into trouble because of your stubbornness, and while I shouldn’t’ve been thinking I needed to tell him how to do his job, I still had to make sure he was feeling all right.

At least he didn’t seem to be limping or anything like that. The most I could pick out was that there was a cut on the back of his neck, real shallow, like he’d accidentally broken skin while scratching. If that was the extent of his injuries, then I guessed he was gonna make it, and I could turn my attention back to more important things—like focusing on where I was going, and maybe also what I was gonna do once we got there.

And I wasn’t hearing anything anymore, so I could thank whoever was listening for the small favors they were finally granting me.

It’d started out quiet enough, back when we’d first come down the stairs. I’d heard the voice before, too, though now that it’d disappeared, I wondered if I hadn’t been overthinking things, spooked because of how creepy that workroom was, with all those scattered pieces.

It made me feel stupid once I realized what those metal parts’d been for—like I maybe should’ve thought of it earlier, only how could I have known? It wasn’t like the Dragon Corps did parades through the countryside; everyone knew what the dragons were, but I’d never seen one up close, and definitely not enough to know what one would look like broken down into doll-size pieces.

Still, if I’d been smart enough to figure it out right away, then maybe I could’ve told Adamo sooner, and a big chunk of the mess we’d got into might’ve been outright avoided.

I hated feeling useless more than anything. It wriggled in deep under my skin and stuck there like milk thistles in cotton.

But if it made
me
mad, then I figured that was barely scraping the surface of what Adamo and the others must’ve felt like. I’d tried to come up with some kind of comparison, but the only one that even came close was if someone’d gone and dug up White Star, my first pony, from behind the barn. Most people would’ve told me the comparison was crazy—Toverre, for one—but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to fit.

She’d been an old girl, but sweet as sugar and gentle as mother’s milk when I’d first been learning to ride, and she’d been a fast racing horse in her day. The way I saw it, the only thing harder than saying good-bye to her in the first place would be if some rich neighbor who thought everything in the world belonged to
him
, including my da’s property and everything on it, took it into his head to bring her back, just to ride her for fun.

Something like that was impossible, of course, and that was the difference between a beast made of machinery and one made of flesh and bone. But at the same time, I didn’t think the two were as separate as most people would’ve liked to think. The dragons had definitely been alive to them that’d ridden them—I could tell by the way Luvander had gone all silent, not to mention the way Adamo looked gut-punched whenever he talked about the new ones.

Compared to that kind of suffering, thinking I’d heard a few whispers seemed like a minor concern. Guess I felt a little silly worrying
about
myself
when the others had just as much riding on what happened, and maybe more. I only wished I could’ve had a chance to talk to Balfour a bit more about whether or not he’d been hearing anything—since apparently he was my hearing-things buddy in all this mess, and I’d noticed him looking around a couple of times like he thought his mam was calling for him.

I was probably imagining it. Deep dungeons could do something like that to a soldier, and with all we’d been through, I supposed I wasn’t as immune to flights of fancy as I’d always thought. It wasn’t as loud as it’d been during the fever, and like I’d said, that workroom had been fucking eerie. Not to mention we were traveling with a
velikaia
now. I’d never met one before, but I knew they got right into your head and stirred everything around like it was a pot of mashed potatoes. It was possible that had something to do with it. I sure didn’t know how it worked—I just knew enough not to trust that kind of magic for a second.

No one was saying anything, which made matters worse. Even Toverre had fallen silent, giving up on telling Gaeth off to trudge beside him in the dark, casting glances toward him every so often just like I’d been doing with Adamo. Gaeth’d been gone a long time; Toverre could’ve been worried about his health or whether or not he’d been bathing properly. Either was likely, the latter even more than the former. But then there was something else I recognized, part of the same concern I felt for Adamo that I’d never felt for Gaeth, though I
had
been worried about him.

I didn’t want to think about the meaning of that too closely, and since there were more important things going on, I could afford not to. We were all on edge, tense as nervous cats, and while I’d assumed earlier that the corps’s babbling was their way of bleeding off extra energy, apparently they had another stage that came right after that, when a situation got about as serious as it could.

As much as I’d wanted it before, I found I really didn’t care for the silence.

“Ah,” Gaeth said, the single syllable bouncing off the passage walls and echoing back at him. He looked nervous when everyone halted and rounded on him—we’d all been thinking we were under attack—but he held his ground all right. “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt our progress none, I just realized that I’ve been this way before.”

“And?” Antoinette asked, keeping a rein on her impatience but only just.
She
was someone I would’ve liked to get to know a little better—the kind of person who seemed like she could teach me more than I’d ever learned at the ’Versity if she didn’t decide one day that she didn’t like me and scrambled my brains like eggs at breakfast. But now wasn’t the time to think about that.

Toverre was scowling at her, but only because she’d snapped at Gaeth, and I knew her magic had to make him fighting-anxious.

“There’s another tunnel,” Gaeth explained, cutting through the group to stand at the front, with Toverre scurrying in his wake like he wasn’t about to let him out of his sight for an instant. I didn’t blame him. Gaeth was good at disappearing. “Should be right around here. They took me up it once with Cornflower, when I was supposed to meet th’Esar. We came out right in one of his audience chambers—
huge
room, that was. Big hole in the ceiling made of glass. I’d never seen anything like it, and Cornflower neither.”

“Cornflower,” Luvander repeated, shaking his head faintly. It seemed like he felt the need to remark on the name every time it was brought up.
I
didn’t see what was so wrong with it. No need being stuck-up. “I’m sorry, I merely can’t reconcile the name with the image in my head. If I get the chance to meet her, I think I’ll be expecting a cow.”

“I rather like it,” Raphael murmured. At least he was making an effort to keep his voice down. “I mean, just think—if we’d been allowed to name our own dragons, there could be worse decisions than a simple flower theme.”

“I can’t even imagine what some of them might’ve come up with,” Luvander admitted with a sad nod. “ ‘Titsmercy’ would only have been the beginning.”

“Would you boys have some fucking sense?” Adamo demanded. He turned to me and cleared his throat. “Pardon,” he said.

“Just think of me like one of the boys,” I suggested, not wanting any special treatment for any reason.

“Now, that might be difficult,” Luvander said with a knowing wink.

“Here it is,” Gaeth called in a reckless whisper, having trekked on ahead of us down the tunnel.

He pressed his hand against the wall, and I saw a flash of metal in
his palm before the heavy grinding of stone sliding against stone filled my ears.

“Secret tunnel hidden in a secret passageway,” Adamo snorted, low enough so that I was the only one who’d hear him. “What a piece of work. The man has an inflated sense of self-worth.”

“He
is
th’Esar,” I pointed out. “At least it’s convenient for us since it’ll take us right to him.”

“What’s that in your hand?” Toverre demanded, pulling at Gaeth’s fingers so he could see his palm.

“Dunno what it’s called,” Gaeth admitted. He looked pretty uncomfortable—especially since Toverre hadn’t exactly kept his curiosity quiet, and now everyone was craning around to get a look at what he’d seen. “It’s what keeps me and Cornflower together, that’s all I know. It means she’s supposed to listen to me, even when she doesn’t.”

“I don’t suppose it comes off?” Luvander asked, like he already knew the answer to that.

“No, sir,” Gaeth said, shaking his head. “It’s planted real good into the skin. Only way to take it off is cutting the hand off, and Cornflower wouldn’t like that too much. So I expect they didn’t want anyone else to have control of her—excepting th’Esar maybe, but even I ain’t sure how he does that.”

Far as I could tell, it was a circle of silver metal with a deep red jewel in the center. It looked clean enough, and the skin around it wasn’t angry, but the sight of it still made me wince. I didn’t like to think about how they’d gotten it in there in the first place, or how much it hurt at first. Poor Gaeth. I could just see Toverre doing his best to keep it polished, though, and came near to laughing despite myself.

“Interesting that Nico should take such an exception to the former Ke-Han emperor’s use of blood magic, only to turn to it himself,” Antoinette said, studying the jewel. “Or turn it
on
himself, as the case may be.” The way she was looking at it reminded me of the way an owl studied a mouse—right before dinnertime.

All at once Gaeth drew in a sharp breath and tugged his hand out of Toverre’s grip.

“What is it?” Toverre asked immediately. “Does it hurt?”

“I’m fine,” Gaeth said, pressing a hand to his head, like he’d got one of them killer aches my da got, right between the eyes. “It’s nothing;
well, nothing bad. It’s Cornflower. She knows I’m getting farther away, and it makes her restless.”

“Can you talk to her?” Adamo asked, coming to the foreground. “Might come in handy if we turn out to need a little backup.”

“I can tell her where we’re going,” Gaeth said, nodding after a minute. His whole body relaxed, so that it didn’t look like he was in pain anymore. “Her pen—I mean, the room where they keep them; she doesn’t take much to being cooped up like a barn animal—is right below this one. ’Course, if anything happens to me, she’ll come running, whether or not we want her to.”