Steelhands (2011) (25 page)

As much as Toverre liked his crazy theories, I was starting to think he wasn’t so off base with this one. Not that it was a theory so much as it was a group of nasty suspicions. But once we had the chance to talk to Gaeth, I told myself, there was bound to be some simple explanation. Then I could have a good hearty chuckle at myself, and save the mystery solving to the pay-by-hour detectives.

“Here,” Toverre said finally, elbowing me out of the way with his pointy little limbs. “I can’t bear to watch this miserable attempt a minute longer.”

Quick as you please, and without throwing anything on the floor the way I usually did, he put together an outfit that passed both his approval and mine, though it involved stockings instead of socks, and one of my newer dresses instead of the plain cotton shift I’d been holding.

“The green will give you some color,” he explained, all but pushing me out the door, “and it’ll make your eyes stand out wonderfully; you’ll see. And even if you don’t,” he added, with what appeared to me to be just a slight hint of jealousy, “everyone else will.”

“We’re just going to lecture,” I protested.

“You’ve been
sick,
” Toverre said, as if that explained itself. “If you don’t put your best foot forward and make an effort not to look like a pickled herring, I guarantee you Professor Adamo will write you off as weak stock and that will be the end for us. Of course, if what you desire is to cultivate the impression that you’re about to drop dead at the foot of his desk, then by all means, the outfit you’d picked out was a marvelous choice.”

Somehow, he managed to compliment a girl and gravely insult her at the same time. He was lucky he was attached to me because nobody else in all of Volstov would
ever
have put up with it.

I stopped him just short of entering the ladies’ with me, though for a moment there it was a very near thing.

“You really did miss me,” I said, trying not to sound too smug. “The sound of my voice, my witty discussions, my inability to dress myself—”

“Do
not
scare me like that again,” Toverre snapped, looking quite serious for a minute. “It’s so … impolite. Not to mention that I have a crick in my back from sleeping in that chair all night.”

“I’ll do my best,” I promised him.

“See that you do,” Toverre said with a sniff. “I’m going to clean my room now.”

We’d both feel better after all our necessaries had been washed out. As much as I figured Professor Adamo didn’t give a hoot what I was wearing or whether I’d washed myself that day, it always made me feel more human to sluice off after I’d been sick. It seemed to me like I was washing the sickness off, and even Da had always told me that you could do half a physician’s job for ’em just by using soap and water.

Well, ex–Chief Sergeant Adamo was probably used to men showing
up in fighting condition, too. Toverre was right, and a little bit of preparation wouldn’t hurt.

I bathed and dressed without any of the other girls needing to use the facilities, which on a regular day would’ve seemed like a real piece of luck, but today just seemed a little eerie. Much as I hated to admit it, Toverre’d kind of gotten to me with all his talk about people getting sick and Gaeth disappearing. He was good at blending in, for a country boy. It was something I’d noticed right in the beginning, but there was a difference between being some trouble to track down and clean vanishing off the face of the earth.

Which he hadn’t done, I reminded myself. Coincidence was going to explain everything, and we were going to have a good laugh together later.

But I wanted to find him for more reasons than one. First of all, because he was my friend; and second of all, because I was starting to get the feeling like he could’ve been Toverre’s friend, too, and you didn’t find someone like that on every street corner. He was good to Toverre—even gave him an extra pair of gloves one time to warm his hands—and no one other than me had ever done something like that for Toverre before. It was important to keep this poor idiot around, and Toverre never had to be the wiser for how I’d helped him.

I tied my hair back with the ribbon Toverre’d picked out, hoping he wasn’t going to make a fuss about me hopping over to the ’Versity with wet hair. It was only a short little jaunt, and it wasn’t even snowing.

Toverre’s door was open when I reached his hallway, and he was on his hands and knees, scrubbing parts of the floor I was fairly certain I’d never been sick on.

“I’m ready to go,” I told him, just so he wouldn’t think I’d snuck out behind his back or anything like that. “Can I dump my laundry in with yours?”

“
Please
do,” Toverre said, straightening up and wringing out his little sponge into a brand-shining-new bucket. “I can’t stand the sight of your clothes when you do them. They come back all wrinkled, and then it’s so many hours I have to spend on ironing them.”

“You don’t have to bother with that,” I told him, feeling somewhat guilty as I dumped my clothes on top of the bed linens I’d mussed. “Then again, you’re you, so I guess you kinda do.”

“Stop stalling,” Toverre said, checking his watch. “Professor Adamo’s latest lecture should be letting out at any minute; if you talk to him straightaway and don’t waste too much time, you’ll still have time to make Professor Ducante’s general consultation hours.”

We heard the peal of the bells as we were crossing the grounds, which made Toverre pick up his pace. I had to do the same just to keep up with him; for someone with such skinny legs, he sure could run. I found myself looking for Gaeth’s face in the crowd, and occasionally I caught sight of a flash of golden hair, but it only ever let my hopes down when I craned to see a face that wasn’t his. Gray coats seemed to be “in” this year, as Toverre would have said, and eventually I gave up looking.

Where was he? And more importantly than that, was he all right?

“There he is,” Toverre hissed in my ear.

My heart jumped, and I jerked my head around. “Where?” I asked.

Toverre nudged me in the right direction, and I realized at once he hadn’t been talking about Gaeth but Professor Adamo. My thoughts were way too scrambled, as evidenced by my inability to concentrate, and I wished I’d had some better plan—one might even say “strategy”—laid out before I came to speak with him.

At least the professor was a fan of improvisation, I told myself. That might earn me some points if I didn’t choke on my own foot first.

“Now go talk to him before he’s surrounded,” Toverre instructed, still poking me in the back. Bastion, but it was annoying, and I swatted his hands away as I made my
own
way into the hall.

Professor Adamo—hard to think of a war-hardened man like him with a “Professor” tacked on in front of his family name, and I didn’t think he could much fathom the title, either—didn’t seem like he was swarmed by students to me. He was having some kind of argument with his assistant—a prissy little prancer if ever I saw one—and no one was even trying to get close to them.

I should’ve taken that as my cue, but Toverre was hissing what must have been his idea of encouragement behind me, and there was no turning back. Instead, I catapulted myself forward, before I could lose my guts, and landed right in the middle of what Adamo would’ve described as a “preexisting skirmish.”

“Ahem,” I said.

Both of them whirled on me; if they’d been wearing weapons, I suspected, right about then was when they’d’ve been drawn. Thankfully, they weren’t—although if it’d been that kind of fight, my money would’ve been on Adamo, no question. His skinny little note-taker was the worst kind of know-it-all; I doubted he could apply even a fraction of what he knew to real life.

“Well?” Adamo demanded. “What is it?”

“I …” I began.

As ever, I was reminded of how very
solid
Adamo was. He wasn’t even that tall—barely a few inches over me—but he was the squarest and most-sturdily built person I’d ever known, reminding me more of a brick storehouse than a man. His chest was particularly wide, which I imagined helped while he was shouting out orders to everyone; and, now and then, when he forgot himself in the middle of a lecture, he’d use that voice without any warning. Now,
that
woke all the sleepyheads up, and made some of ’em piss their trousers, too.

I loved it, which was why his was my favorite lecture class. You never knew when he was going to start shouting like the war was back on, and it gave me a feeling of genuine excitement.

Toverre just said it made him hyperventilate. Now,
there
were two men so completely different it was impossible to imagine they were both the same species, I thought, and rubbed at the back of my neck to keep from smiling.

“I believe you’ve intimidated her,” Adamo’s assistant said. I’d actually forgotten about him—which was what I usually did with people I didn’t care for, so that they wouldn’t annoy me. I wasn’t like Toverre; I didn’t like to let these things fester. Instead, I just cut them out. “Do you see what you’ve done? She can barely speak. Come with me, that’s a good girl, and I’ll get you some tea, or perhaps a cup of coffee, and we can speak like civilized people, without—”

“I don’t think so,” I replied, jerking away the moment he tried to touch me. “I came to talk to the Chief Sergeant—to
the professor
—to tell him where I was yesterday’s lecture,
and
today’s.”

“That’s right,” Adamo said, looking pleased for some reason. I had my suspicions that he had no use for his weasel of an assistant, either, but then again, what man in his right mind would? “I didn’t think I saw you. We were discussing battle tactics of the Ke-Han hordes.”

“Damn it,” I said, knowing that Toverre—wherever he’d hidden himself to eavesdrop—had probably lost consciousness over my language by now. “I was looking forward to that.”

“Well, then,” Adamo replied. “You probably should’ve come.”

“I was sick,” I explained, hoping he wouldn’t think I was one of those slack-jawed shirkers. And I
had
been looking forward to how the Hordes conquered the Xi’an peninsula. Apparently it wasn’t just to do with their special horses, but now I’d never know, since I’d gone and slept through the one lecture I was most looking forward to. “With the fever.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard a lot about this ‘fever’ the past few days,” Adamo said a little skeptically. “Lots of kids been out with that one lately. Guess it’s really becoming an epidemic.”

“I don’t like what your tone’s implying,” I replied. Somewhere above me, on the stairs, I heard a strangled groan. That was Toverre, on the verge of collapse. “You can ask my physician—Margrave Germaine—whether or not I was in her offices yesterday. If I
wanted
to skip out on one of your lectures, it probably would’ve been the one you spent getting sidetracked about how pointless naval battles are these days. And I wouldn’t’ve come up to tell you about it afterward, either. I’m no liar. But if I
was
, I wouldn’t be a bad one.”

Adamo blinked, so that for a second I almost thought I’d gotten one in past all his defenses. I hoped not. What kind of Chief Sergeant—ex or no—would he be if I could win a round with him? He was probably just trying to decide the best way to kick me out of the ’Versity, now that I’d gone and let my mouth get the better of me again.

“Margrave Germaine, you say,” Adamo said at last, just as I was about to offer to escort myself off the premises for him. “I’m gonna remember that.”

“You can, if you like,” I said, making a concentrated effort now to keep from banging the final nail into Toverre’s coffin all by myself. “And all you’ll find out is that I’m telling you the truth.”

“You’ll have to forgive my skepticism,” Adamo replied, not sounding like he wanted my forgiveness at all.

“Oh, will I?” I asked.

“And naval battles
are
pointless if there’s no water between you,” Adamo added. He crossed his big arms over his chest, like he couldn’t
quite let that one rest. “Even worse if you’re going after a string of islands like the Kirils, since it’s costing you all that money to go forth and back, and meanwhile they’re just sitting on their dockyards laughing at you as you waste good fuel.”

I wanted to laugh at the thought, but I felt like Toverre might’ve taken it as the last straw, so I smiled instead.

“Sounds to me like you don’t much like the water,” I pointed out.

“Ever been down to the Mollydocks?” Adamo asked, before he stopped, looking cross with himself. “No. ’Course you haven’t. And you shouldn’t go down there, either. And if you do go down there, don’t say
I
sent you. My point is, anyone who takes to
that
water’s been landed one too many blows to the head. Me, I’ll stick to the ground.”

“Well, not entirely,” I ventured. Adamo hmmphed. “I guess after having been up in the air, nothing else seems quite as good?”

“Nah,” Adamo said, scratching the back of his neck. “You can say that again.”

It felt like a moment to be quiet, so I somehow managed to button my lip for the pause, giving him a minute to remember whatever it was he was thinking about.

Da said the war did all kinds of things to people before it was over, and I’d seen some of the effects firsthand when a few of the boys came back and weren’t quite able to look anyone in the eyes. I figured that if I’d been the one riding a dragon every day for years only to wake up and be told I couldn’t do it anymore, I’d’ve been a little out of sorts, too. No wonder the man was so ornery all the time, like his britches were bunched up too tight.

The Chief Sergeant’s horrible little assistant cleared his throat, which I was probably meant to take as a sign to curtsy and get out. Either that, or he was real keen to get back to the debate I’d saved him from losing. Some people just didn’t know how to show gratitude.

“Look, if you’re really interested in hearing about Ke-Han strategies, you can come by my office sometime,” Adamo suggested, snapping to all at once. “At least, if I have one of those. They said something about me having an office. Radomir, where’s my office?”

“It’s Cathery 306,” Radomir said, looking greatly put-upon. “That’s
this
building,” he added, for my benefit.