“Yes, Theodore,” the duke answered, sounding impatient at last. “The army is still being raised. Surely you are not that cut off in the D.E. offices. Several of your co-workers' sons were drafted, after all.”
Waving his goblet, Mr. Tobin bumbled, “Had to hear it from the mouth of the horse, as it were. No one seems to know what it's being raised for, you see.”
“I would have thought that'd be obvious. Charles Eldritch's extensive infiltration of Honora begs us to be prepared. I doubt it will be the last time aliens make a bid for our planet.”
“Is that what the creature was doing, then? Making a bid for our planet?”
“Oh, for pity's sake!” Startling them all, Abigail slapped a palm to the tabletop and glowered around at her company. “Can we speak of nothing else? I've been too busy to see daylight these past weeks because of that wretched night. Scarlet.”
Scarlet looked up expectantly, wiping her face of her look of concentration.
“How are your twin sisters? Are they liking The Academy?”
Scarlet inwardly grimaced and outwardly smiled—a skill she had honed with years of practice. “Well, they certainly like it…but I think they'd do better if there were fewer boys at The Academy to distract them.” Fewer boys meaning no boys. Kitty and Savannah could make a career out of chasing boys with no intention of chasing them back, and they'd excel at it, the silly things.
“Hmph,” Abigail snorted, clicking her fingers for a servant to clear away the empty dessert dishes. “I'll have to keep my eyes on them. If I can't marry Reece off to you, that leaves me at least two other Ashdowns to pick from.”
“Abigail,” the duke chided, chuckling with Mr. and Mrs. Tobin as Lucious frowned to himself. He had looked a little too interested in Scarlet's mention of her younger sisters' fancies; she made a mental note to keep him clear of family picnics.
“What? I'm being perfectly serious, Thaddy. If we don't marry your son off before he heads into the Streams, we'll die without any grandchildren.”
“Please forgive my wife, Mrs. Ashdown.” The duke bowed his head to Scarlet's mother, who had barely said two words since the lunch began, though hardly for lack of thought, if Scarlet knew her at all.
“Of course,” Mrs. Ashdown said lightly, smiling. “Either girl would be delighted at the thought of an arranged marriage to our young captain.”
“There, you see?” Tossing her ashy brown hair and leaning back in her seat, Abigail said to Reece, “Well? Does my hopeless son have anything to say on the matter, or can I expect our family name to stop with your Uncle Uriah? Perish the thought.”
Reece, who had been staring into his apple pie, started and lifted his head. He looked from his mother to Mrs. Ashdown, and then turned to face the duke, wearing an unfathomable expression. “I'd like to make sure the Dryad is seen to before the storm gets any worse.”
“Go,” the duke said before Abigail could put words to the anger coloring her face. “For goodness' sake, just go. Before your mother starts performing the nuptials.”
Grinning, Reece stood and backed out from the table with a sloppy bow.
“I'll come with you,” Scarlet offered, standing.
Reece raised an eyebrow at her, then jerked his chin towards the door. It was as close to a formal invitation as she could expect.
“As will I!”
“No you bleeding won't,” Mr. Tobin growled at Lucious, who deflated quite comically. “You'll stay here and help your mother out to the carriage. You know how bad her ankles are in this ice.”
Reece led Scarlet through the entrance hall, whistling, and took a short detour to fetch his black flight jacket from where he'd hung it on the antlers of the stag over the fireplace. He paused before pulling it on to straighten the silver wings on its shoulder. He'd been waiting for those wings since the day the duke had brought him home his very first model Nyad and helped him assemble it on the library floor. There'd come a point over these last few tumultuous months when he'd begun to think he'd never get them. He'd learned to live with the idea—after all, in the face of trying to overthrow a tyrant alien and save his father from assassination, they were a little thing to care about—but since he'd gotten them, they'd come to symbolize something more than just his right to captain a ship.
Scarlet watched him slide into his jacket, amused.
“Well?” he asked her, holding out his arms and turning to model.
“It looks the same as your old jacket.”
“It is the old jacket. But the wings finish it off, don't they? Kind of give it a sort of…lackadaisical sophistication?”
“Lackadaisical sophistication?” Scarlet repeated as she pulled on a pair of winter gloves. “Honestly, Reece, you should be careful. If your head grows much larger, I fear it won't fit into the cockpit.” A servant brought her a white fur coat and bonnet, and she transformed into a walking snowball, albeit a pretty one.
They walked quietly through Emathia's back halls, which were lit by sputtering photon globes in gold brackets on the walls. The light of the stained-glass windows they passed was muffled by the snow piling on the outside sills. Winter had come on fast; it slowed Reece's plans to an irritating crawl.
Of course, Scarlet had a habit of slowing Reece's plans too. The girl could dig the truth out of a pile of lies without ever getting her hands dirty, and she had a nose for smelling out cover-ups Reece thought he'd made watertight.
“Have you been enjoying your holiday?” Scarlet asked, sweeping along beside Reece as he led the way towards the motor vehicle stables behind the mansion.
“It's been busy,” Reece said honestly.
“I noticed.” Of course she did. “You and your father seem to be getting along better nowadays.”
Hesitating briefly, Reece nodded, opening a squat oak door and pattering down the set of marble stairs behind it. That was actually one of the reasons he'd been so busy. For better or for worse, since the masquerade, his father had been doggedly trying to make up for the years he'd kept himself an arm's length from Reece to protect him from Charles Eldritch and essentially, The Kreft. Knowing what he did now—that the duke's first wife had been murdered by The Kreft while her son, Liem, had been baited into joining them—Reece could understand why the duke had felt the necessity to abstain from close relationships.
Which made it so much harder not to feel guilty about the duke's latest attempts at father-son camaraderie. Reece was leaving…maybe for good, peyeingrovided his mechanic got his ship, The Aurelia, functional. The airship had been sleeping on a museum floor for the last two hundred years; he couldn't very well expect her to yawn, stretch, and start living again after a quick kip. Luckily, he had not one genius working on her, but three. Po Trimble and her brothers could refashion a muffler, a mirror, and a couple of wheels into an automobile; they could get Aurelia airborne.
“Things are never going to change between us, are they?” Scarlet suddenly asked as Reece paused to pull on a pair of leather gloves before the windowed backdoor the servants used to come and go from the mansion.
Abigail's talks of betrothal were good for a joke and all, but sometimes—now, for instance—Reece got the uncomfortable notion Scarlet was waiting for them to evolve into something more. There didn't seem to be a tactful way to inform her that was a long wait for a ship not coming, so he just kind of ducked her flirtatious smiles and tried to make himself unattractive. Which shouldn't have been that hard, but…
Hesitating with his hand on the doorknob, Reece stared out the window and into the white wasteland winter had made of the fifty foot expanse between the mansion and the stables. He felt like he was pressing his face against the glass of an enormous snow globe.
“Scarlet, the last thing I want to do is give you the wrong idea about us,” he said uncomfortably.
“I know. If one thing can be said about you, it's that you're sincere.” She looked at him, her dark green eyes searching his face. “You have a good heart, Reece.”
Reece sighed.
“But sometimes, you can be an absolute idiot.”
Scarlet paused, smiling at him, and with a grunt, Reece pulled open the door and let the snow wash in with the wicked wind. He was starting to think Scarlet just enjoyed seeing the look of surprised relief on his face. Every time he thought he had her figured, she pulled out a trump card. Her furry sleeves were absolutely full of them.
Shaking his head, he waved her through the door to begin the trudge to the stables through ankle-deep snow. The raw cold made his face prickle and his eyes sting, even screwed up against the snow and wind. Fifty feet suddenly felt uncannily like fifty yards.
A servant in a hooded trench coat opened the stable door for them, and they broke into the warmth breathlessly, wiping their eyes dry. Immediately, Reece looked around the cobble-floored stables, picked out the familiar freckled redhead dusting the shelves of spare parts against the back wall, and called to him.
“Lionel, I want the heat generators in the ceiling vents turned up to fifty-five degrees. I'm going to power up the Dryad and get her compressors hot, so it's going to get pretty steamy in here. I'll need the fans going.”
“Yes, sir,” Lionel said, saluting enthusiastically and hurrying off towards the utility stalls, feather duster still in hand.
“I haven't been in here in years,” Scarlet mused, pulling off her hat as she walked forward.
The stables opened up like an immaculate barn around them, its wooden walls steepling several stories overhead. There wasn't dust floating in the shafts of cold light as there would have been in a real stable, but there was an air of quiet mustiness, of large animals sleeping just out of sight. The window slats up near the ceiling usually supplied a good amount of daylight, but with the snow blotting out the sun, the servants had resorted to switching on the photon globes hanging on long iron chains from the ceiling. They swung in small circles, drifting like tethered birds, as the ceiling vents gasped out hot hair.
“It looks the same,” Scarlet added.
“I think they painted,” Reece said as he wandered the length of the barn. The first animal he encountered was his beloved bimotor, propped against the back wall of the barn. A servant was working on cleaning out its rear funnels, and nodded respectfully as Reece bent over to check his work before moving on.
Scarlet joined him and took his elbow smoothly. “It feels the same. But, like you said, it's not. The changes are subtle…noticeable only to someone who is as familiar with the stables as you are.”
Together they strolled past the duke's three automobiles, all of which were boxy, with long noses and overlarge tires with shiny silver hubcaps. Scarlet and Reece's reflections slithered over their shiny red, gold, and green paintjobs.
“That's what it's like with you, Reece. You look the same, you act the same, but something's changed. Most people wouldn't notice, but I know you. You're focused and distracted at the same time. You joke when I know you're really pensive. You ask favors of me,” Scarlet studied him shrewdly, “strange favors, and expect me to not ask questions.”
“You can ask questions,” Reece cut in. “You just can't be suspicious when I give you unspectacular answers. I told you what that favor's for.”
“It's not what it's for, it's the manner in which you asked. You wanting to know who bought The Aurelia's original parts isn't all that strange, but you were so intentionally casual in asking…and then followed that up by asking me every third day if I had found your answers for you.”
Reece stooped by the wheel of Abigail's blue and silver day carriage, and by pretending to retie his bootlace, hid his annoyed expression. Intentionally casual. And here he'd thought he'd acted masterfully, playing the flippant friend, asking the favor as an afterthought.
When he stood, he found Scarlet's face a mere four inches from his. He could see his cornered-rat expression reflecting in her eyes.
“Why?” she asked. “Why can't you tell me? You didn't tell me about Eldritch, you didn't tell me about the assassination—I had to figure those things out on my own. You pretend to keep things from me for my own good…but that's not it at all. Why can't I earn your trust?”
To Reece's horror, there were tears welling up in Scarlet's green eyes. As soon as he noticed, she pressed her forearm to her face and looked away. This was a conundrum nothing over these past four months could have prepared him for.
“Does it…really bother you that much?”
Scarlet laughed bitterly and dropped her hands. “I know I…I'll never be the kind of person to…”
Reece waited helplessly, the airflow from the vents rustling his hair slightly.
“Reece, you see me in my perfect world, imagine it's all tea and politics…and maybe, to some, it is a perfect world. It's orderly. I'm good at it. But I see you with your friends…and I'm jealous. You have more friends than I've had in my entire life. And you, the one friend I can trust isn't talking to me for political gain or secretly hating me…you won't even let me help you.”
It wasn't what Reece had expected, but it was a measure better than a profession of love. He relaxed and even went so far as to awkwardly pat her arm.
“Secretly hating you?” he repeated incredulously.
Scarlet laughed as she blew her nose into a handkerchief. “Yes. You know, because of my wealth, because I'm beautiful...”
“Well, I'll try not to hold that against you.”
Scarlet smiled a watery smile and drew her white coat in tightly around her. She seemed to be waiting for something, watching Reece with the stains of her tears still on her cheeks, a reminder of her sincerity.
Pushing a hand through his hair, Reece sighed. She'd been a good friend. Despite the fact she'd clearly seen through his “favor”, she'd agreed to it, and even turned out some answers for him. No matter what she thought, he did trust her.
He also trusted his father, but he hadn't told him one word of his secret. There was too much at stake. He couldn't afford to have one of them try and stop him from returning The Aurelia to where she belonged in The Ice Ring, with the people of The Heron.
“I'll tell you this much,” Reece began, and Scarlet leaned forward with interest. “The duke's right. Parliament is keeping Honora's army bolstered in case Eldritch's buddies come looking for him. The draft was Eldritch's design, but it probably seemed like a good idea to Parliament to go ahead and use what he'd already set in motion.”
With narrowed eyes, Scarlet leaned back, tapping a finger on her cheek thoughtfully. “I could have figured that much out for myself.”
“Well,” Reece squeezed by her, moving towards the Dryad, “beggars can't be choosers.”
“So parliament is anticipating an attack by aliens.”
“The Kreft.”
“What?”
“That's what Eldritch's people are called.”
If you could call them people. Reece stopped beneath a vent and let it press his hair down around his face, closing his eyes. For a second, he felt a pang in his side and an ache in his shoulder, and tasted blood as he had on the night of the masquerade, when he'd fought The Kreft that had called himself Eldritch and very nearly died.
Avoiding the stream of air he stood in—probably conscious of her manicured hairdo—Scarlet paused. “And Aurelia? What does she have to do with it?”
Reece gave her the shorthand answer. “The Kreft are interested in her.” With an air of finality, he continued walking, at last reaching the corner of the barn where the duke's Dryad rested, her sleek wings bowed around her brass hull.
After a second, Scarlet joined him beside the cockpit. “You never cease to surprise me, Reece.”
He regarded her warily, not liking her sly little grin.
“For those tears, I would have expected you to be a lot more accommodating.”
Reece simply stared as Scarlet leaned in, pecked him on the cheek, and then turned to flounce back the way she came, the tails of her fur coat blowing behind her.
Finally, Reece shook his head and looked
back at the Dryad, only a little miffed at having been played. He was more impressed than anything.
Still, he'd have to be careful. He couldn't have Scarlet looking too closely at Aurelia while he and his crew spent half their nights pent up in her cargo bay, going over their plans for departure. In fact—he checked his pocket watch—he needed to get back to Atlas. Strange though it seemed to have homework to do while there was world-saving to be done, if he didn't finish his report on fuel molecules for Tutor Agnes, there'd be bogrosh to pay. He needed to get the report done before eleven, when Fog Hour would roll over Atlas and he would join his crew aboard Aurelia.
Scarlet and her devices would just have to wait.
II
A Blue (No, Grey) Sky
As the first of eleven chimes announced the hour, Reece sprung lithely off his four poster bed in his suite at The Aurelian Academy and landed with a thud before Hayden's leather armchair. Hayden glanced up from his book, expressionless. Reece waited for his friend to show some excitement, but Hayden just slowly lowered his eyes, cleared his throat, and turned a page.
“Oh, come on, Hayden—”
“I can't keep up these nightly escapades, Reece. Not all of us are willing to make up our sleep in class.”
Reece paused. He could see the signs of that ringing true for Hayden. Hayden Rice, lean, blonde, and bespectacled, had gone from looking merely disheveled to haggard bordering on sickly. He'd lost what little weight he had to spare over these last few months—his secondhand clothes hung even baggier than usual—and his grey eyes looked bloodshot, much older than nineteen.
“So take some vitamins, get some sunshine—you'll be as spry as a schoolgirl before you know it.”
Hayden very deliberately turned another page. “That phrase is both improbable and disturbing.”
With a sigh, Reece swung around and marched to the coat tree by the door. If the care of their suite had been left up to him, the tree wouldn't have served much purpose. His jacket would have been slung sloppily over the door of his wardrobe, his bed would have been retracted, unmade, into the wall, and the floor around his desk would have been littered with crumpled pieces of parchment, like oversized snowballs. Hayden himself was untidy to look at, but he lived in a bubble of organization and order.
The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives) Page 2
