by Jaida Jones
“I don’t have room for another R,” I said cheekily. “I’ll have to remember him as the one I forgot.”
Marius clapped me on the shoulder. “Well, then, Thom,” he said. “Are you ready?”
“Yes,” I said.
But I wasn’t.
ROYSTON
The tutor, Hal, took to reading to me near the end of my second week in exile. And, when I offered no immediate protest, the practice became first habit, then ritual. Resignation, boredom, the sheep, the incessant and constant proliferation of uninspiring trees, the coming of cold weather, my own idiocy and self-pity, my shame and loss—all these factors conspired against me until I was helpless against any external forces, incapable of making any choice or decision. I allowed Hal to do as he pleased when it pleased him, and while part of me grudgingly anticipated his arrival each evening to coax me toward food and conversation, I knew my brother had put him up to the task. Still, it was a break in the monotony of my day that interested me—even if this was only a vague interest, in that it was not expressly disinterest. I felt enveloped not in a blizzard but in a fog; I could barely muster the enthusiasm to roll out of bed in the morning, leave my dust-settled room, and roam the blocky, uninspired hallway.
I recognized the signs: This was depression, in its purest and most clinical form. Despite my self-awareness, I was incapable of warding off its advance—perhaps because I no longer cared if it swallowed me whole. It was quite possible I hadn’t noticed its first stages and was already long lost to its grip.
Then, one evening, in the middle of a passage on Ifchrist the Barbarous, Hal looked up, and said, “It’s going to get very cold soon.”
“That’s not part of the story,” I replied, too tired to be perplexed by this interjection.
“I only thought,” Hal said, struggling visibly, “that perhaps—if you wanted to go for a walk—you might do better to start now, before the rains come.”
“I wasn’t aware I’d expressed an interest in walks,” I said. Though I tried to keep the measured, humorless judgment from my voice, I saw him flinch and knew I hadn’t succeeded. Such self-loathing is cruel to others, though it’s cruelest to the self. “What I mean to say is,” I amended, “it’s already the rainy season.”
“Well, there are good spots of sunshine,” Hal went on bravely. “Noon is often very nice for walking by the Locque Nevers.”
“Is it,” I said. “Well. I see.”
“And I thought you might enjoy the fresh air,” Hal finished. “It’s dreadful in here—stuffy, dust everywhere. I don’t know how you stand it.”
“If it’s that unpleasant,” I replied, “you needn’t spend hours here every day.”
He colored at that, cheeks and ears pink and the freckles on his nose suffused with the blush, and I knew I’d been cruel to him again. I cast about for an apology, but before I could find something suitable he was speaking again. “I just—I just thought,” he said, “that you might like it. There aren’t so many mosquitoes. It isn’t so bad, not on the bank of the Nevers in any case, and on the weekends some of the boys from upriver have paper-boat races.”
I felt numb all over, with no more feeling than a boat folded out of paper and submitted to the whims and fancies of children. I rolled over in my bed and faced the wall, trying to gather my composure. “When do you suggest?” I said, at length.
Hal’s voice was warm. “Oh,” he said, as if he’d expected me to put up much more of a fight. “Well—Tomorrow after lunchtime, I think.”
I nodded slowly to the wall, then realized he couldn’t see it. “All right, then.”
“I think,” he insisted, “I think that it’ll do you good.”
I didn’t need to turn in order to know that he was smiling. As though all my cruelty had washed away to reveal clearer skies, like these so-called spots of sunshine he claimed existed.
I hoped he was not going to try anything like a picnic to trick me into eating.
It was a rare day in the country that I rose in time for lunch at all. Already my clothes were beginning to hang where they had once fit in perfectly cut lines—what happened, I knew, when you had to be cajoled into eating your requisite one meal a day by a young man barely out of adolescence. It was for the best, really. Dressing as I’d dressed in the city left me with a querulous helplessness, serving only to magnify my alien presence in the house. My tall boots were made to sound smartly against cobblestones, paved streets, or the marble floors of the Basquiat, not to slog through cow pastures.
After a moment of hopeful silence, Hal went back to his reading, voice surer with the written word than he was in conversation. It was evident even to me, mired as I was in my own private misery, that the young man held a natural proclivity for learning. It was rare to find in country lads at that age—or any age, really, I thought disparagingly, as most seemed more inclined to riding, and hunting, and thwacking at one another with large sticks, if my brother and his friends had been anything to go by. If Hal had been born in the city, he might have found a considerable peer group at the ’Versity, in time.
If Hal had been born in the city, I’d have had no one to read to me at all.
In a state less self-absorbed than my own, I might have taken more recognition, more of an interest in his obvious hunger for knowledge. Members of the Basquiat often took on assistants from the ’Versity in order to pass along their learning. It was often easier than apprenticing another magician, whose Talent might be so antithetical to your own that you ended up like Shrike the Bellows, buried in an avalanche by his own Talent of blasting sound in conjunction with his young apprentice’s capacity for exploding rock.
At my very best, all I could offer him were my romans, some of which were quite illegal—these being volumes written in the old Ramanthe, and several anthologies of Ke-Han verse that I’d picked up during my service toward the war—stacked in an undignified heap at the foot of my bed like corpses for the burning. Volstov was decidedly liberal when it came to what romans traveled beyond the pale, but since the call for the burning of all Ramanthine novels, one had to be careful to keep one’s library under lock and key.
As Hal read, I drifted in and out of a conscious state, turning the words over in my head to discern another meaning if I could. It was an old game, made for common rooms and peers. One of the things they taught you in the Basquiat was that nothing had only one use, one meaning, one state of being.
Magicians understood this, and thus were better able to change the realities around them. Of course, the true and greater source of our power was the closely guarded Well. But, as youths, the ideologies of our professors had ignited some whimsical spark within us, and many a night was spent reading passages and trying to understand not what was, but what could be.
In the war, such thinking saved my life, as not even allies can say what they mean—or mean what they say—in every instance.
Of course, such duality couldn’t be mistaken for malicious intent. As a soldier, one had to understand that there was a great deal that couldn’t come guaranteed, and that a man’s word was more like his intent. I had experienced such a dichotomy firsthand when the troops I’d been traveling with had been stranded in the mountains for nearly a month before there was any need for us. Of course our captain hadn’t intended it that way, and certainly the Esar would never intentionally doom any of his men to potential death and frostbite in the Cobalts, but that was what had happened nonetheless. There were men who were not as forgiving as I.
Silence settled over the room like an additional layer of dust, and I could hear Hal getting up to leave with quiet, uncertain movements. Halfway there already, I decided to feign sleep so as not to prolong this visit any more than was strictly necessary. He was only with me as per request, after all, and I was not so old that I couldn’t remember what it was like to have no time to call my own.
The door closed behind him with a soft but nevertheless grating creak. Everything in the country made noise, but it was never the ri
ght sort of noise. In the city everything was boisterous, vibrant, chasing you at the heels so that you had to step lively every second to survive.
In the country, everything sighed like a dying man.
I thought about what Hal had said, about the coming cold, and how I would possibly weather out the season trapped inside this house like a prisoner with a family I’d made a point of never visiting. Surely, I would sink as if to the bottom of a lake, slow and certain.
When I dreamed, it was of another cold, another time. The war crept often enough into my dreams; there was nothing I could do about it.
It had been a foul season in the mountains, frigid and unwelcoming when last the war had been at its peak, the Ke-Han magicians performing whatever barbaric rituals they needed to harness the wind. Blue was considered the color of our enemy, but it was also the color of the mountains, dark and deep as purest steel. The Cobalts bordered Volstov to the east and were our first defense against any attack.
It had been nearly a three-week wait, our fingers as blue as the Ke-Han’s coats, before we saw any action. Such things happened—we’d heard of them—but the years had given me a patience and understanding that I didn’t have in the dream. I hadn’t had it there in the mountains either. In the end we’d come across an enemy battalion simply by chance of remaining in one place for long enough that the Ke-Han had run into us.
The battle started very quickly. At that time, the fighting in the mountains was often a swift and violent business, ending when one side brought the rocky hills down onto the other. We were lucky enough to have come out victorious in that particular battle, leaving enough enemy magicians alive so that we could question them about their operations. The cold often aided such things, as the snow clotted the blood, so that we had a long time to question them. One of my fellows lost a hand in those hills.
I have hated the cold ever since.
THOM
I’d changed my shirt twice in the morning. I was not so foolish as to think it would make a difference one way or the other with men trained to sniff out fear the way most of us were trained to speak, but it made me feel a little calmer, and so I allowed myself the indulgence.
I was no longer quite so uneasy about my current project. As with anything—applying for the scholarship, taking the nation’s exams, et cetera—I found most of the worrying was spent in preparation for the event. When the event itself came, however, I was merely afflicted with the same fatalistic numbness that I’d heard afflicted soldiers during the war.
What would come would come, and I’d deal with it to the best of my abilities, using the knowledge I’d gained. Laid out like that, it didn’t seem so overwhelming.
Besides, I thought it rather unlikely that anyone would be taking it upon himself to slap my ass and call me Nellie. So it seemed I already had at least one advantage over the Arlemagne diplomat’s wife.
Navigating the palace would take some getting used to, though. More than once I wished I’d taken Marius’s offer of company for my first day.
“You’re more nervous than I am,” I’d accused him, after ensuring my materials were all in order.
“No, I’m not,” he’d said, tugging at his beard all the while—which meant that he was nervous and trying not to show it, and was failing miserably.
“Marius,” I’d said, familiarity and exhaustion both creeping up to make me rather more impertinent than usual. “Leave. It’s late, and I still cherish the idea that I may yet get some sleep.”
“Yes,” he’d said, but still had made no effort to get up, so that in the end I’d had to be quite firm with him, fairly ejecting him from the ’Versity at an hour that most decent people were abed anyway, so that the pair of us might get some rest.
It was a left, then a right, or a right, then a left. I breathed deeply to calm myself, feeling nerves disappear in a quick rush of annoyance. It wouldn’t do to begin my day by cursing the architect of the palace, but I quite felt like it by the time I’d passed that same statue of the current Esar for the sixth time, bronzed and brave and quite twenty years younger than he was now.
“Bastion,” I said heatedly, coming upon his courageous brow once more.
“Oh,” said a voice from behind me. “Are you lost?”
I turned and was surprised to see someone of about my own age. He had the dark hair and pale complexion of a nobleman and was fiddling absently with a pair of gloves. He was also, I realized a moment later, wearing a coat with large brass buttons and a high Cheongju collar, and I recognized the colors immediately. He was a member of the Dragon Corps.
I made to bow, before it occurred to me that teachers did not bow to their students—that bowing might be considered a sign of weakness—and then I didn’t know what to do, so I held out my hand.
He took it with a bemused smile, and shook it. He was most genteel.
“I’m Balfour,” he added helpfully, after a spell.
The newest member, my brain provided from the notes I’d made and committed to memory. Also, it pointed out, I’d not introduced myself yet.
I cleared my throat loudly, to cover up for the rather obvious breach in etiquette I’d just made, and hoped this wouldn’t make it back to the Chief Sergeant before I’d even had the chance to meet him. “Thomas,” I said. “From the ’Versity. I believe I’m supposed to be meeting your . . . the rest of the corps in the atrium, only I can’t seem to . . . that is . . .” I looked to th’Esar, large and bronzed, as though this were all his fault. And in a way it was—his and the airman Rook’s, and I blamed them both equally.
“Oh,” said Balfour, with a rush of gladness that threw me off. “I thought I was late! Merritt stole my alarm clock, see, to fish the bells out of it. Come along, then. It’s this way.”
He set off ahead of me, chattering still, so that I could only assume I was meant to keep up.
The atrium had walls of glass and a black-and-white-tiled floor that resembled a giant game board. I felt like an expendable and very small plebe piece in a round of Knights and Margraves, but it did me no good to indulge in thoughts like that.
It would be very warm in the atrium in the full flush of summer, I thought, but today was suitably overcast so as not to turn the room into a giant greenhouse. The sound of raucous laughter echoed from just around the corner.
I held my nerves in check as firmly as a horse’s reins and stepped after Balfour to meet the Dragon Corps.
Right away, I could see being outnumbered fourteen to one would make this no simple task. Once Balfour joined them in the row of graceful, gold-backed chairs, I found myself alone on a dais. Fourteen pairs of eyes pinned me. My throat was very dry.
“Well if it isn’t himself,” said one all the way on the end, whose coat was unbuttoned and whose boots were tall but slouched. He had the lazy, self-satisfied grace of a cat, and I was certain—though I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge—that this was Rook in all his infamy. The smug expression he wore, remorseless and amused, lit his cold blue eyes as if they were trapped behind stained glass. His mouth was unrepentant, almost cruel, his blond hair in knotted braids in the Ke-Han style, streaks of royal blue at his temple.
I disliked him, and I was frightened of him yet oddly intrigued by him as well.
“Come to teach us all to talk and act like the noblesse and keep our fucking private-like?” he went on, leaning forward and making a lewd Molly gesture between his legs. “’Cause we’ve been waitin’ on you. And I’ve heard it’s considered rude, in some places, to leave esteemed guests waitin’.”
“Rook,” said the eldest—a heavyset man with an even heavier brow and a square jaw like a nutcracker’s—in a voice that suffered no insubordination. “Sit the fuck back and shut the fuck up. Your pardon,” the man went on, giving me a once-over.
“You must be Chief Sergeant Adamo,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Adamo. “That’s right.”
“Well,” said Rook, who’d managed the art of sitting back but not, apparently, of shut
ting the fuck up, “when’s the sensitivity start?” The airman next to him giggled—at least I thought it might be a giggle—and I swallowed as hard as I could to prevent my own tongue from choking me.
This wasn’t simply going to be difficult. This was going to be suicide.
Of the fourteen men lined up and sitting before me like princes, there was only one kind face to be seen, which the rest soon shamed out of its kindness. I didn’t blame Balfour for falling in step with the others. I’d seen such behavior during my worst days at the ’Versity—but those young men had always fallen by the wayside quickly enough, as the ’Versity was an institution of learning, not a catchall house for fraternities and (to put it like a boy raised on the Mollyedge strip) fuck-ups.
Here, it seemed that such stupendously cruel hierarchical systems were encouraged rather than torn down before they could form.
“I thought we might first introduce ourselves,” I said, buying myself time. I had notes—files, papers, years of behavioral research—behind me, and yet I didn’t want to scrabble at odds and ends, nor seem as young as I felt. Not in front of these men. I thought of Marius’s reminder—that they could smell fear—and swallowed down my intimidation as best I could.
“You thought we might?” asked Rook. “How fucking old are you?”
“Rook,” said Adamo. Balfour made a high, disapproving noise.
“It’s just he looks fucking twelve, is what I’m sayin’,” Rook said.
“Rook,” Adamo repeated.
“And I don’t want to be taught fucking anything by a fucking twelve-year-old,” Rook finished, then shut his mouth easy as you please, as if he were a choirboy at week’s end and his parents were looking up at him from the pews.
I dug my fingernails into my right palm. Steady, Thom, I told myself. Steady. I thought of distant, soothing things: of the strength of my dead brother, of Ilsa on Hapenny Lane who always was kind to me, of Marius’s gentle laughter. In the face of what I’d lost and what I’d accomplished, a handful of self-important men were nothing I couldn’t handle. “We’re going to start by introducing ourselves,” I said. “Now. Who wants to begin?”
