Steelhands (2011) (13 page)

I was all for it, and about to tell him so, but before I could do so, something caught my eye.

“Hang on,” I said. “Isn’t that Gaeth?”

I knew it was before Toverre answered—we’d taken enough meals with him, even sat next to him in a few classes, for me to recognize the easy slope of his shoulders, the relaxation of every movement. He was definitely a country boy through and through, but the sort who came from the other side of Nevers, men and women renowned for their comfort in the sunlight and their lazy demeanors. Besides which, I recognized his threadbare gray coat because it was missing part of the collar, like some stubborn horse had bitten a piece out of it.

Maybe it had, but I couldn’t imagine any animal taking offense at
him
.

“Hey there!” I called out, startling a few of the people around me. “Gaeth!” As much as Toverre would be horrified by my clumsy tactics, saying hello to the one person you actually knew in a city as big as this one was only polite.

Everyone but Gaeth seemed to hear me at first. Then, very slowly, he turned around, like he was waking up from some deep dream.

“Oh,” he said, as we drew up to him. “Laure. And Toverre. What are you doing all the way out here on a school night?”

“Couldn’t we ask the very same thing of you?” Toverre demanded, the talons coming out. Apparently having latched onto Hal wasn’t making him any less sharp with Gaeth. I’d never known him to have it out for two people at the same time; I didn’t know whether that made Gaeth lucky or just a real poor son of a bitch. Maybe Toverre was just flustered.

“Suppose you could,” Gaeth agreed.

I sought out Toverre’s foot with my own and stepped on it lightly. He winced with his entire body, but for some reason, Gaeth didn’t seem to notice. It had to be that lackadaisical, old-country demeanor, I supposed, but then he’d never seemed as far off as this. Long day, maybe, I thought, and felt a little sorry for him.

“I was just on my way back from the Crescents,” Gaeth continued without further prompting, like he’d suddenly remembered an important
fact. “It’s dormitory protocol, to make sure no fevers make their rounds this early on. Guess, what with people living so close together, that kind of thing’s all too easy.”

“
Is
there something going around?” Toverre asked, face suddenly even whiter than before.

“It’s a
precaution,
” I told him. Honestly, did he not know how to listen? “I’m sure it’ll be all right.”

“You’ll be called in soon, like as not,” Gaeth said. “Just a simple blood testing, and nothing else too awful, I’d suspect.”

“Oh,
needles,
” Toverre murmured.

“Barely felt it,” Gaeth said.

“Some of us have very small veins,” Toverre shot back.

In an attempt to make sure nothing too awkward happened between them—Gaeth was easygoing enough, but Toverre had a way of provoking even the gentlest of folk—I decided to step in, and in my brand-new boots, no less. “We were just going to get something to eat,” I said, having decided that once my stomach’d started growling only a few moments ago. “You hungry, Gaeth?”

“She means to ask if you would like to join us,” Toverre corrected. At least he was picking at me now, but I was used to it. I could take it.

“Maybe another time, hey?” Gaeth suggested. “They said I should head straight back to my rooms after the visit. And I don’t want to argue with those in charge, at least not right away.”

“Who said?” I asked, but Gaeth had already turned and started off down the road, and not in the direction of the ’Versity Stretch, either. “Weird,” I said, turning to Toverre.

“Not very,” Toverre replied. “Because you would
expect
someone like that to have a coat that smells of horses.”

I arrived at Roy’s place in the Crescents about ten minutes too early. Leave it to a man of war to be early to meetings—never early on the battlefield, though, where being early was just as bad as being late. This tendency of mine was especially bad with Roy, who always liked to be fashionably late. And the last thing I wanted was to have the door answered with a scuffle of noise and laughter after the long pause it took
when the people you were calling on were trying to get dressed and make it look like they hadn’t just been going at it like rabbits. No one ever did a good enough job of tucking in their shirts or combing out their hair to put one past me.

No, I’d already had my life’s share of catching Roy
in flagrante
, and I wasn’t going to tempt fate any more than I already was, just by paying a social visit.

So there I stood, down on the street in the Crescents, ignored for the most part by anyone who did pass by, waiting for the city bells to ring out the hour. I was damn near certain that Roy—or his boy, if he even cared halfway what happened over the top edge of his current roman—knew I was already out there. I could assume I was being made fun of upstairs, in the top room of Roy’s Crescent tower. But I’d weathered worse insults than those. Dealt out worse ones, too. They’d roll off me.

At least the building wasn’t one of the crazier structures I always passed walking from my new place in the middle of Charlotte up to the Crescents, seeing for myself easy enough why th’Esar had trouble with magicians. They fancied form over function now and then—though I didn’t think they were so stupid as to live in buildings that would actually screw them over, or whatever they were working on. No, it was more a display of what they could do—how they could defy nature and still come out on top—that must’ve made the fire in th’Esar’s mustache stand out a little more against the gray, whenever he caught sight of it. It
was
a bit of a nose-tweak, if you asked me, and the kind of thing people with Roy’s disposition for tweaking noses really went in for.

It was a sight different from the simple buildings in Miranda, where all th’Esar’s people lived. There, the houses and the offices were just straight up and down, made of solid brick or white stone or marble, no rooms on stilts or hanging towers.

I didn’t prefer either since, by my taste, both were too fancy.

The first bell of the hour was struck up by the bastion, ringing down over the rest of the city, clear as day. Good, I thought, because I was starting to get just a little cold, what with the sun setting hours ago and me just standing there growing moss.

I rapped on the door without hesitating—I wasn’t one to question if I should wait until after the bell couldn’t be heard anymore, so as not to sound desperate or whatever these little details meant. After that, I
could hear some noise from within the house, and a quicker footfall on the stairs that told me all I needed to know.

The boy was answering the door for him.

If that meant Roy was trying his hand at cooking again, I thought, shifting my shoulders and grinding my teeth, then there was probably going to be a fire in Charlotte tonight. Tragedy for the ages, though wouldn’t it please th’Esar to have what remained of his little magician problem taken care of by one of their number?

The latch clicked and the door swung inward.

“Welcome, Adamo,” Hal said, leaning against the door for a moment and looking nervous. Well, he had
some
thoughts for self-preservation in his head, at least, while I was beginning to believe Roy had none at all. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long. Please, come in.”

Didn’t have to ask me twice. The wind picked up just as I stepped inside, stomped the frost off my boots on the mat, then sniffed the air suspiciously for any signs of something burning on the stove.

Hal cleared his throat. “Royston’s changing his vest,” he explained, almost too softly for me to hear him. How did he hope to get anywhere in life being so quiet like that? Whether he was a delicate flower by nature or not, it was up to the gardener to make sure his prized bloom didn’t get knocked over by somebody’s fart.

And that was enough flower-metaphoring for me for the rest of my days.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like Hal in particular. He seemed all right enough, and you had to have more than
just
dumb luck to help save an entire city. And it wasn’t that I was against Roy’s particular tastes, either, because if
that
’d been the problem, we wouldn’t’ve been friends for so damn long. I was just fine with whatever made a friend happy, provided of course that it
did
make him happy. But Roy had a type, and that type was always too damned young to see who he was and know him for a good thing. They always ended up leaving, which was why there was no point in me getting attached to them.

No point in Roy getting attached to them, either, but that was another story for another day, and I sure as shit wasn’t planning on meddling.

I sniffed the air again, shrugging out of my coat before Hal could
offer to take it or something, which would’ve embarrassed both of us, and Roy probably would’ve come down right in the middle of us struggling over it, demanding to know why Hal was trying to steal my coat in the inner hall.

Wouldn’t’ve been the
first
time Roy took up with someone who turned out to love stealing more than he loved Roy, and right up until that business with the Arlemagne prince, I’d’ve said he was the worst of the lot by a mile. You’d think that kind of thing would put a man
off
looking for partners half his age, but Roy was nothing if not stubborn as a mule, despite how he hated mules and all their country ilk. I guess the rat’d been charming, in his own slippery way, but he’d helped himself to several pieces of the good silver
and
sold one of Roy’s prized first editions before anyone was the wiser.

Never saw him again. Lucky for him, anyway.

How we’d gotten that book
back
was a story in itself, but the simpler version involved a lot of cracking heads together while Roy made things explode, then refused to speak to me, because I’d been right about that crook all along and he needed somebody to punish.

Before he’d taken up with the thief, he’d been with the actor, up-and-coming in the Amazement, who’d
quite
enjoyed the boost in status Roy’d brought him. Of course, he’d cut loose once he’d decided he’d met all the right people, and Roy wouldn’t go to the theaters at all that season for fear of running into him, which seemed like a damned waste of season tickets if anyone asked me. Which, of course, they never did.

The most recent—before the country boy—had been the infamous Crown Prince of Arlemagne, whom I’d only met the once, completely by accident, when I’d left the Airman to stretch my legs and ended up at Roy’s place in the Crescents as friends sometimes do. The prince’d looked like one of those dolls they sold to little girls along the Rue, blond ponytail and blue eyes and roses in his cheeks. They’d been having
tea
, of all things, and I couldn’t understand a damn word of Arlemagne myself, but Roy’d been kind enough to take pity on me, explaining that tea was not
all
they were having and would I very kindly escort my dragon-stinking ass elsewhere, since all my scowling was putting a damper on the mood.

There was no way that one could’ve ended well. Even if the Arlemagne
didn’t
get their knickers in a bunch about men kissing other men—and they did, as I understood it, almost as much as they didn’t
like being slapped on the ass in public—you couldn’t just up and have an affair with the heir to the throne and expect everything to run smoothly after that.

Honestly, I didn’t know who was stupider about that one.

For a man I knew could be impossibly clever—
when
he had the mind to be—Roy had about the same amount of good sense as a common house cat, but with less grace to stick the landing. He’d gone and got himself exiled for that one, and that was where he’d met Hal—the latest in a long line of young men who didn’t look back when they slammed the door. He’d lasted longer than the others, though. That was one good thing I could say for him.

It was with no small amount of trepidation that I was coming to accept him in my own way though I still felt like I was waiting for the other boot to come down, so to speak.

But it didn’t mean that I couldn’t be polite as I knew how in the meantime. Some people around here had manners, like greeting your friends when they paid a visit.

“You said he was changing, right?” I asked Hal, partly to make sure he wasn’t
really
cooking and partly because all the silence between us left me feeling distinctly uncomfortable. It wasn’t that he was unfriendly—quite the contrary, actually—but more like if you let him, he’d drift off to another place altogether. That usually left me holding the thread of the conversation and feeling like an idiot once I’d realized what’d happened. I was used to dealing with simple folk whose everyday thoughts didn’t work the same as dreaming. When Roy said
Hal’s different
, I believed him all right. “Hasn’t taken it into his head to try making dinner or anything like that, has he?”

“Bastion, no,” Hal said, shaking his head with a little laugh that didn’t seem unkind. There wasn’t any mocking in it, anyway. “I don’t think he’d eat at all if we didn’t go out.”

“True enough,” I agreed. “He burns bread just by looking at it. I’ve seen it happen.”

Hal laughed again, touching the knob of a coat hanger on the wall beside him. “I tried to bring him a cheese sandwich once. He told me to add lettuce, tomato, salt
and
pepper, then to take out the cheese and bring it back to him when I was done.”

“And you actually did it?” I asked, since not only would I have told Roy
exactly
what he could do with a good cheese sandwich, I’d probably
have threatened to give him a demonstration just so I’d know he’d received the message.

Hal shrugged lopsidedly, one shoulder higher than the other. “I don’t mind. If I’m home, then I usually have the time to spare anyway, and I’d rather he eats than doesn’t.”

“Now, there’s a sensible statement if ever I heard one,” I said, and I even meant it, too. “If he ever gets it into his head to start dieting again or something like that …”