by Jaida Jones
“Hey, sweetheart,” I said.
Havemercy saw the harness in my hand, that I had my gloves and my riding boots on. She yawned and flicked her tail. “Bell didn’t ring,” she said.
The thing you have to understand about the way dragons sound is this—they’re not really talking. I mean, they’re machines. They’re made out of metal, and then there’s a little hole in their chests where a magician pours some vital piece of his Talent and his love, and that’s the dragonsoul. And if the magician’s peculiar or eccentric or completely off his nut, the way they usually are, then that comes out in the dragon’s personality. Only they don’t have any blood, and their voices grate out from their hollow metal bellows, so it’s more the echoing memory of words than actual words themselves. They aren’t hes or shes, either, only I liked to think of riding her like I’d ride any woman, only it was better than all those times rolled up into one, my legs wrapped around her powerful neck and her wings beating the air, throwing it against my back and whipping my hair around my face.
“Just a spin,” I said.
“Good,” said Havemercy. “I’m getting rusty.”
“Shit,” I said, “you ain’t.”
“Aren’t,” Havemercy said. “You common little fucker.”
There was a time when the powers that be were concerned I was going to be a bad influence on Havemercy, the pride of the entire dragon-fleet, but she wasn’t some prissy little politician’s wife, just power and musculature and sleeking grace, and she didn’t fuck around with being proper even from the start. I taught her all the good curses and she’d melt any man tried to separate us, leastways until I could get my knife in between his ribs and stick him like a pig.
Anyway, I harnessed her up and she lowered her neck for me to swing myself around. There were loops in her jaw like chain links for me to latch the harness on and I did, then she’d turned herself around and the door to her stall was lowering like a bridge-ramp, same as always, though slower since this was no more than a leisure jaunt, and also for reminding everyone as had a pair of eyes on them who really ran this city.
Us.
I snapped the goggles down over my eyes. They’re made more for actual emergencies, when the flying’s going to get sticky and there’s ash and smoke and all sorts of shit you don’t want getting into your eyes, not to mention clouding up your vision. I put them on, though, out of habit and because all I needed was to catch a bug under my lid to piss me off even more.
Havemercy stretched her wings—not all the way, since she wouldn’t have the room ’til we really got out of this damn room and off this damn ground. If she’d been a horse, or some common animal made of meat and bone, I’d’ve dug my heels in a bit—so keen I was to get in the air—but Havemercy wasn’t any kind of common anything, and even with my boots on it would’ve hurt my feet more than she could’ve felt it at all.
“So,” said Havemercy, making a thoughtful sound like metal grinding. “Any direction in particular?”
“Anywhere,” I said, then, “everywhere. Shit, Have, let’s just make sure the city hasn’t forgot about us.”
She snorted and unfurled her wings with the sharp whistle of steel through air. They caught the sun, flashed bright and blinding down to the ground below. I laughed my approval, loud and indifferent to the people who turned away and those who pointed and stared alike. My girl knew how to get attention.
We rose into the air, and all them people with their cares and concerns fell away at once, the steady beat of Have’s wings buffeting the currents all around me. On a clear day, a no-war-fucking-lull day, flying could be as smooth as a virgin’s thighs, and as soft and easy, too. On a rough day, it was like riding the eye of a storm, snaking metal and magic under me.
“Let’s go to the water, then,” said Havemercy.
Volstov was a city built on a hill, with everything slowly sliding down to ruin in the water. That wasn’t how the ’Versity types put it—“tiers” they said, the city was built on three tiers, Molly closest to the water and Miranda closest to the palace, with Charlotte in the middle, cold and unhappy as a child in the same position. It was all like some complicated cake for weddings, and right on top was the Basquiat. It rose from the center of Miranda, tall and arrogant as any one of the damned magicians and Margraves who occupied the place, with swirled onion-shaped domes set in too many colors. The only thing I liked about it was that it near rivaled the palace in size, and that pissed th’Esar off real nice every now and again when he caught sight of it out the windows. Or so I’d heard.
Nearest landmark to the Basquiat—stuck up on a nice little hill of its own, neat as you please—was the ’Versity Stretch. That was where good boys and girls went to drain their mamas and papas of their hard-earned cash in order to learn how to speak all proper and read things in dusty books that happened to no one left alive today. Not nothing or no one useful ever came out of the ’Versity Stretch, and our sensitive new piss-pot professor was only further proof of it.
“You’re clenching the reins,” said Havemercy.
I was. Just thinking about that little whoreson and his plans and his research made me want to spit, so I did, since there was no one to give me black looks in the air.
’Versity students didn’t have much money, of course, after spending it all on books and whatever the fuck, so if you followed the Stretch it’d run you right into the Rue. The Rue d’St. Difference—where you could buy anything except slaves and sex—was where the merchants established themselves and vied for customers every sunup to sundown. Foreigners coming to the city from elsewhere had a real problem with the Rue, since it was the only place where the roads ran straight instead of all crabbing crooked in the same direction. Niall, who spent more time on the ground and in the city than any self-respecting airman should, said that this year the Rue was crowded with milliners, and women in fancy wide-brimmed hats with feathers and ribbons. I tried to get him to bring me one back so we could stick it on Balfour, but he went on whining about the price until I wanted to punch him in the face; and then he said he was never going to do me any favors, ever.
Whatever. Adamo would only have torn me a new one for it, anyway.
The roads went crooked again sure as rain as soon as they bent off into Charlotte. The middle sister was where most men found their sport. Grouped together were the unmistakable red roofs and pointed, storied buildings marking the Amazement, Volstov’s entertainment district, filled with opera and theatre and a bit of whoring just to keep things interesting afterward. ’Course there were restaurants, if coffee after was more your bag, but you were like to be laughed straight back into Miranda with a priss attitude like that. Charlotte didn’t coddle, and it made no bones about someone’s ideas of segregation. If they wanted you out, they’d let you know. It was only a madman who’d want to live in Charlotte after Miranda, but you had to respect her attitude.
Through the center, just to one side of the Amazement, ran a road that was sharp and jagged as a lightning bolt. This was man-made. Wolf ’s Run, where the Provost’s men made their digs, and they didn’t have time for meandering around slow, sloping curves. The Run was located special in the center of things, so the wolves could duck into upper or lower as neat as they pleased whenever they had to keep the peace. I don’t know why they didn’t just stick the whole thing on the Mollyedge and keep the troubles out that way, but there’s no accounting for what some people think is sensible.
I didn’t have any desire to fly over Molly—Hapenny Lane, Tuesday Street, and an over-fucking-abundance of dirty, diseased urchins being its only commodities and sole export of the lowest maiden with her skirts soaking in ocean brine. No, I didn’t want to get near it, and not even to get to the ocean.
I said so sudden and firm to Havemercy as she twisted and climbed, fickle in the wind.
“Fuck that,” she said. “I wanted to see the boats.”
“No time,” I replied, though honestly I didn’t know whether it had been twenty minutes or forty
since we’d took off.
She made a wheezy sound, like a cranky bellows, and flicked her tail in a way that meant she knew I was lying.
Twenty-five, I decided impartially, and only for the harbor. We continued on.
The harbor was a deceptive place, clean and bustling as it was. Thremedon City wasn’t a port town in that we needed the trade or nothing, but boats came and left just as often as they pleased since the Ke-Han had no use for the seas. They’d been fucked over more than once trying to cross them, which was why it’d been such a big surprise when they’d snuck up and took the Kiril Islands right out from under th’Esar’s nose. Took ’em a good few years to manage that one, and not from their fighting skills or nothing—because it took them that long to get across the water without capsizing in the storms.
Thremedon’s harbor was filled with ships built by people who knew what they were doing, else I didn’t think they’d have made it to us at all. Caelian barges with their dark orange sails like buildings on fire; little merchant vessels from Arlemagne; the fishing boats of the Molly-dwellers that were almost too small and insignificant to make out, like everything else that made up part and parcel of Molly.
I only felt sorry for the poor bastards who didn’t realize where they’d landed, smack in the middle of the city’s poorest and filthiest.
I was so fucking glad to be out of there.
Havemercy was humming a tune I’d taught her myself, picked up in one of the bars and memorized ’cause I knew she’d eat it up with a spoon. The bawdy songs were her favorite, and I could tell when she was in high spirits because of when she broke out with one. Anyone who says the dragons can’t have emotions ’cause they’re made of metal’s never flown one, see, though that sort of talk never bothered me. Have and I understood each other.
“Feeling better?” I asked before she could get to the line about the earl with a girl on each knee.
“Are you?” Havemercy beat her wings extra-hard, like she was jumping in the air, and evened out again.
I thought about it. “Always better when we’re off the ground,” I answered, at length.
“Bastion’s own truth,” she said, and went back to her song.
THOM
“So,” Marius asked that evening. “How was it?”
He was being kind about everything—treating me to dinner in Reliquary’s finest—because he pitied me. And though I didn’t relish being pitied for prolonged periods of time, I knew that the more I spoke to him, the more I could postpone heading back to be given the grand tour. Anything to avoid that, I thought; and, because Marius was paying and had assured me it was all right, I ordered the duck.
“You’re asking after the grand offender himself, aren’t you,” I said, suddenly very interested in the design of my salad fork.
“Well, I was going to wait for a while to bring it up. But since you mention it . . . Indeed, I am.”
“I think he might have been raised by wolves,” I replied. “Or at least by the Ke-Han themselves.”
“Ha,” said Marius, though somewhat humorlessly. “Hilarious. That dreadful?”
“We already know he’s an abuser of women,” I said darkly. “The first exercise I had planned—”
“Introductions, yes; I thought that was very clever.”
“Thank you.” Marius always knew what to say—and, surrounded by the friendly candlelight of the Amory Rose, I felt comforted, less fatalistic. “When it was his turn, he spoke at great length about the joys of forcing his way between a lady’s legs.”
“It’s said he comes from Molly,” Marius pointed out. “So of course, he’s bound to be vulgar, isn’t he? It’s common enough. He’ll be a nuisance, but at the least you can always remind yourself how much smarter you are.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Whether or not he can write his own name seems to have very little impact on his ability to be an ass.”
“So he’s the heart of the trouble, do you think? The ringleader?”
As much as I wanted to ask Marius how he managed the most troublesome of students, I was nearly certain that much of it had to do with his age, his experience, and his own confidence. I had none of these three tools, and was rather certain of my imminent doom. “Yes.” I sighed.
“I have no advice for you, Thomas,” said Marius, though he did look rueful. Perhaps I wasn’t so averse to pity as I’d thought. “You must weather it—and you mustn’t let him win.”
I thought of the stark gray lines of the Airman, where the pilots slept close by to their dragons. It was a new building, an ugly intrusion on the landscape of Miranda. And, like its inhabitants, it was made too many allowances.
“I know,” I said, firmly. “I won’t.”
HAL
If I’d known getting myself almost drowned by the rain would help improve the Margrave’s spirits so enormously, I would have done it sooner.
Well, that mightn’t have been entirely true, and at least, if I’d been clever enough to plan it beforehand, I wouldn’t have involved poor William.
After the chatelain recovered from his short-lived period of relief, the boy was confined to the indoors for the rest of the month, and by no more than the second day of his punishment he was nearly climbing the walls with boredom. I myself was suffering from something of a cold and was also cautioned to remain inside the castle, so I tried to entertain him with a few storybooks, but soon we ran out of stories he hadn’t already heard. If we were left to our own devices much longer, I feared he might run away and really be lost to us for good.
Yet Margrave Royston was like unto a different man, and so we weren’t left to our own devices at all.
I’d given up on the storybooks entirely and thought to try a bit of the lesson plan I was forever amending to please William’s ever-changing interests. It began with an explanation of Volstov’s war with Xi’an, its history and the reasons for it—though I’d never been able to find two textbooks that agreed on the latter—but to my dismay, there wasn’t anything more recent than fifty years ago, and it had none of the detailed descriptions about famous battles that William was so enthusiastic about.
“I don’t understand,” he said, peering at the book over my shoulder as though he was angry with it.
“What don’t you understand?” I asked, in a calm voice that I’d been perfecting for just this purpose. I thought that if I at least sounded like a proper tutor, it wouldn’t matter so much that I didn’t feel like one at all.
“You keep talking about the war,” William said, “and about the mountains and those others, the Ramanthines. But I don’t understand. Who are the villains?”
“I . . . well,” I said, turning to the table of contents in the front of the book and stalling for time. “I’m not sure. It’s not exactly that simple.”
“Oh but there must be villains,” William insisted. “It isn’t a proper story without them. Papa always does the villains with a scary voice, but Mama says it hurts her throat, and she pretends like there aren’t any in the stories she reads me. Does it hurt your throat too?”
“No,” I said, reaching for another book that might have the answer I was looking for. “It’s not that. I only think that there may really not be any villains in this story in particular. It all depends on what side you’re coming from.”
“Or whose side of the table you’re sitting on,” said the Margrave Royston from where he was standing in the doorway.
“Oh,” I said, and stood, brushing dust off the backs of my trousers and fighting away the urge to rub my nose with the back of my sleeve. (Such behavior was countrified, vulgar, and unacceptable, said the Mme; only sometimes I forgot myself, and there was no kerchief handy.) “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow.”
I thought at first that the Margrave must have caught a fever from being out so long in the downpour the same way I’d caught a cold, but on that second day, as he showed no particularly feverish symptoms, I realized that what he’d actually caught was the memory of a purpose.
“He threw up?” William asked, with scandalized delight.
“Yes,” the Margrave said, looking very serious. “She thought it was an attack, poor creature, and defended herself with a knife.”
William was now looking at the Margrave Royston as if he were the last slice of chocolate cake at dinner.
He was not so absent a man that he did not notice the attention. “Have you run out of stories already, William?”
“Yes, well—” I couldn’t help speaking up, since I was feeling somewhat responsible in the first place. “You see, we’ve read most of them before.”
“Yes,” William said sullenly, “we have,” as if it were the worst fate in all the world. Part of me very much agreed with him.
“What, even the one about Slipfinger the Penniless?” the Margrave asked.
“And his fifteen different adventures,” I confirmed.
William scuffed his toe against the carpet, and added under his breath, “Which weren’t so different, not really.”
“Well, after the tenth they do tend to get a bit similar,” the Margrave agreed. He took a moment to look around the room, half of its shelves miserably empty and the dusky sunlight sinking low just outside the lone, squat window. For a moment I thought he would reject it and be lost to his fog just from the sight, but then, to my surprise, he stepped inside and clasped his hands before him. “If you’d like, William, I could always tell you about Cobalt Range.”
