ADAMO

The way I saw it—and probably would ’til the day I died—was that both times the rug was pulled out from underneath my boots, it was somehow because of that whelp. Not even the whoreson who usually gave me all my trouble. It was the brother of the whoreson who usually gave me all my trouble.

I’d never asked to be anybody’s pen pal, since I’d never been much for writing letters in the first place and all the people I’d ever cared to know lived in the same city as I did. The end of the war had fractured some things though, sent little pieces skittering all over, and one of those pieces just happened to have a brother with a real sick sense of humor, at least by my understanding.

Dear Adamo, the letter began—no Chief Sergeant or nothing, which was technically correct, but seemed oddly personal to me.

That was it—the vital parts anyway. I’d squeezed out a lot of the hand-wringing that came afterward and there were three more long paragraphs all about how Rook had taken to the desert like a camel and nearly became prince of the nomads, but that wasn’t the shit that was going to get me arrested.

He’d wrapped up the whole thing with Best wishes. After crafting a letter that read like Thom was putting every ounce of that enormous brain into getting me arrested, he ended it with “best wishes.”

I’d met some cracked little teacups in my time, but he had to be the absolute worst.

“So the thrust of the matter,” I concluded, myself, “is he says you need a living, breathing human being to bind their soul to, and he thinks the ethical implications of something like that would be devastating. Not just for Volstov, but for everywhere else.” I reached for the letter to get the proper phrase, the one he’d used that’d made me laugh out my breakfast, although it wasn’t for pure humor. “Oh, yeah. ‘Just devastating.’ He feels compelled, because of our time together, y’see, and because of his brother being ‘one of us,’ to make sure I’m aware of a situation that, as far as I’m concerned, could probably take my head off my body a damned sight easier than flying.”

And that, as anybody knew, was dangerous enough. Commanding the members of the Dragon Corps from Proudmouth’s back wasn’t exactly the job a sane soldier volunteered for, was it? Even if the truth was I’d never really volunteered for it in the first place—I was just a whole lot better than most people at holding back all the shit I wanted to say when somebody more important was doling out the steaming heaps.

Bitter, my good friend Royston might’ve called it, but it wasn’t really that. It was just practical thinking. My theory was, the less you got involved, the less chance there was of someone important taking exception to your head and the way it sat on your shoulders.

Which was why I didn’t appreciate getting this crazy letter from a man I already knew thought more of the ethical implications of something than he did of the personal ones. In other words, me holding this letter, getting it over breakfast and breaking the seal and reading it with my buttered rolls, would’ve had more implications in th’Esar’s eyes than just ethical ones.

Sometimes, a man just didn’t want to know.

And that was kind of the tactic I was taking right now. Because in that letter, the words that loudmouthed, proud-arsed, crazy-eyed ex-airman Rook’s damn strange little brother had used—such as “resurrection” and “soul”—sounded a lot to me like playing at things I wasn’t meant to play at. More often than not, I gave my hand away at cards.

“So, I burn it,” I said, with only a hint of uncertainty. I didn’t want to be the man who went to his friends asking for advice with his mind already made up. No man was ever more of a burr in the arse than that one, and I wasn’t going to be him. Not even in my old age.

Across from me, Royston took a neat little sip of his coffee. Then he reached up to smooth the two, maybe three, gray hairs growing at his left temple—the ones no one would notice if he wasn’t so damn self-conscious about them. After all, he was considerably less advanced into his forties than myself. In fact, I thought it was downright rude of him to remind me.

“Well, it is a conundrum,” he said finally.

He was doing it to needle me, I told myself, but years of getting used to the behavior never quite meant you became master at dealing with it. I snorted, just giving him the rise he wanted, not to mention buying him extra time to think up a more clever response, then handed it over.

“Well,” I said, filling up the air. I hated to watch people read things, and Roy knew it.

“Reading,” Roy replied quietly, with that distant air he only got when he was putting his mind to something complicated or talking about his boy.

Now that was a mess of worms, I told myself—a can of them that’d already been opened—and to avoid hurting certain feelings I had to throw myself into the task of teasing Roy every chance I got, just so he’d know how I felt about the matter. But it’d probably take a few years before I’d be comfortable sitting in the same room with the two of them. Pointing out that a man was still a baby was no fun when that man was in the room, if only because teasing babies just wasn’t right no matter who you were doing it for.

Those thoughts seemed to occupy enough time that Roy finally cleared his throat, tossing the letter down between our coffee cups. I eyed it unhappily, this simple-enough-looking thing that I knew wasn’t going to prove simple for me—at least not now that I knew about it.

I wasn’t the sort of man who could just sit on information. I’d been bred to act, and all this sitting around and hemming and hawing was starting to chafe at my very last nerve. Wouldn’t’ve expected it to be the quiet that got me in the end either, but the world was a strange place.

“I’ll look into it,” Roy said.

“Somehow, I knew that’d be your answer.” I sighed. “But with a nose that large, I suppose you can’t help poking it into things.”

“Dark-mooded as you are, it isn’t anything yet,” Roy continued, too distracted by his thoughts to let the teasing get to him. This wasn’t a normal coffee we were having, and for whatever reasons, that made me even more clench-jawed. There was no way I wasn’t going to tear into some poor, hopeful tactician in my afternoon lecture that day and be hearing about it from the wealthy parents a few days afterward. Couldn’t I please be easier on their precious offspring? The lecture room wasn’t part of the Airman, as far as they could tell.

And, the worst one: This isn’t wartime anymore, you know.

Not that I was against the war being over—not even when it was all I’d ever known, which meant I knew a whole lot more about it than the sap-eyed creatures who shuffled into the room and daydreamed about their ponies back in the country while I tried to impress upon them the importance of strategy, or coax some milk of inspiration out of them in return for all the milk they’d sucked from the world, probably right up until the moment they were sent away to ’Versity. Maybe they missed it now. Maybe if I bottled some and gave them all nap times and dollies, they’d be more inclined to think about what the differences would be between an airstrike and a land strike.

And Brothers and Sisters of Regina help them if one of them ever questioned the real importance of discussing airstrikes again, since wasn’t that a moot point these days anyway?

Nothing in war or the possibility of war—and definitely not during the preparation for war—was a moot point. I’d drum it into their skulls yet, and if not me, then some future generation of real war drums. Not exactly comforting, but it was a salary and I hadn’t been fired yet—no matter how much some parents objected to the shouting.

“Oh, it’s something,” I muttered. “You mind hanging on to it?”

“You’re acting uncharacteristically suspicious,” Roy told me, which was true.

“Boy who wrote that’s the opposite of any good-luck charm I’ve ever had,” I explained, backward country as it sounded. “Some men carry around a rabbit’s foot or a lock of their true love’s hair or what have yous. Well, the way I figure it is, I’m not carrying around anything he touched.”

“You know what this means?” Roy said.

I shrugged.

“It means if I’m caught with this information on me before I—before we—decide what to do with it, the Esar will be very, very displeased.” This was just one more reason that sending all these words in a letter was more than just bad luck; it was suicidal stupidity. “He already doesn’t like me, though I’m sure his feelings about you are much more complicated. I might even be exiled again. Once is painful enough; twice just seems excessive, don’t you agree?”

“Well, look on the bright side, anyway,” I replied. “Maybe you’ll find yourself another …”

“One of these days, Owen,” Roy told me, in a tone I really didn’t like, “you’re going to find yourself falling in love. And I can only hope it will be the most outlandish—the most wildly inappropriate—coupling that Thremedon has ever seen.”

“Considering that rumor with Margrave Holt and his greyhounds—” I began.

“I think you need a good walk to clear your head,” Royston suggested. “And, for that matter, so do I.”

I wasn’t inclined to take Roy’s advice any more often than I had to. Listening to a man like him when he told you what was best for you would only give him the hot air he required to fill his own head. And as much as I teased him about his nose—great honking detail that it was—the size of his head as it was remained quite tolerable. For the time being, in any case.

But he was right about the walk, as he was right about so many other things that he had no business knowing, let alone sharing.

That was the problem with old friends—and magicians, to boot. Putting both attributes in the same man was like committing yourself to a life sentence, though I’d never actually give him the satisfaction of acknowledging that.

The point was, I did need a good walk to clear my head. And I intended to take it, but I needed some time on my own—if Roy would allow it. Which he usually didn’t.

“Along the ’Versity Stretch perhaps?” Royston suggested, already out of his chair and straightening his waistcoat—some gold and black brocade fashion that looked like it cost about as much as the entire coffee shop. I’d seen everyone wearing the sort recently; leave it to Royston to lead the trend. “You might become inspired for your next lecture.”

“Head’s not gonna get much clearer if you come along,” I pointed out, dropping a few coins on the table for politeness’s sake. “When you talk, I can’t hear myself think.”

“Who said I expected you to be able to?” Royston asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, putting on my coat. “Little someone by the name of Mistress Common Courtesy?”

“I can assure you that were I ever to take a mistress, it would not be her,” Royston said, tying his scarf in a fussy kind of knot before heading for the door.

Wind hit us both square in the face, cold as frozen steel and just about as sharp when we stepped out into the street. Just like always, my muscles tensed all over—though not from the cold, because who would I be if I couldn’t handle a little of that? No, it was more like the memory of what wind on my face had meant once and how hard it was to teach your brain something once the rest of you’d gone and figured it out already. All I had was my two boots firmly on the ground, and they weren’t going anywhere but down the road. Maybe toward the Rue around where they’d erected those fool statues of me and the boys.

Small miracle no one’d knocked a piece off or written anything vulgar on ’em yet, but that’d come with time. Hell, if some of the boys had been boys still and not just statues, they’d probably have done it themselves—or at least the ones that could write, with messages to each other about the night before, what kinds of women they’d been with and fancied themselves to have pleasured, sharing it so all Thremedon could know just the sort of men they were looking up to.

But I had to steer clear of those would’ve-beens, else it’d be another lane I was walking down.

“If I’m not wrong, we’re bound to see a bit of snow tonight,” Royston commented, slipping his hands into his pockets alongside my letter. He shivered theatrically—for my benefit, I guessed, since there wasn’t anyone else around who was looking. And also, so anybody watching—if there was even anybody who cared—wouldn’t notice that piece of paper sliding into his coat. Thremedon could be a paranoid place. And, without the war, the gossips had little else to talk about.

The winter chill had come to Thremedon about three weeks prior, though my old bones still hadn’t got properly used to the cold in the air. Roy insisted it was the source of my being “out of sorts,” as he put it, like we both didn’t know that meant real mean and even a downright whoreson sometimes on top of that. Roy’d said something about how I should consider retiring down south, not taking into account that talk of retiring was the one thing that made me madder than all this cold. I wasn’t an old man yet, thanks, despite how my bones felt, and I wasn’t about to lie down and roll belly-up just to make anyone’s life easier. Least of all my own.

“Guess Hal’s in for some shoveling,” I said, because I really couldn’t help myself when it came right down to it. Besides that, what kind of man shied away from a good joke when he had such material to work with?

“Mm,” Royston agreed, so that I wasn’t even sure he’d heard me. He was probably thinking about the contents of that letter, which was what I was meant to be doing instead of twitting Roy like usual. Maybe I thought if I just stuck to my routine, the solution to all my problems would come floating down from the sky like the golden spirit of Regina herself.

The real problem was, I didn’t want to know any of this.

I’d made an all right Chief Sergeant when there’d been a time for one, fair assessment being we’d done our jobs in the end, and that was more than you could say for most. Definitely more than you could say for whatever Ke-Han bastard had my job on the other side of the Cobalts. So I guess you could say I was fairly comfortable with a position of authority. I’d kept those boys in line, after all—a fact that seemed about equal to hog-tying an Arlemagne chevalier and getting him to see reason—and come out the other side relatively unscathed. Mental scarring aside, of course.

Which was all a very fancy way of saying that I’d kept worse than dragons at bay. Certainly—and that was a quote from the letter, too—certainly a man of my caliber would be better suited to judging the information in the letter than anyone else the writer could think of.

I was already regretting being as kind to Thom as I’d been. I should’ve thrown him to the wolves on the first day and let nature take its course; that was the way things worked in the wild.

Except, of course, we were supposed to be better than animals in the wild—civilized people—and acting that way was what’d gotten us the bad-luck charm in the first place.

If I had any kind of luck at all, or if whatever still remained from the war was holding firm, Roy would think of something. He was better suited to the ins and outs of court dealings, ironic as that was, seeing as how he’d been exiled once and I hadn’t.

The street stones were coated in a thin, near-invisible sheet of frost that melted in the shape of our boot prints as Royston and I made our way along the Stretch and toward the fountain, both of us lost in our own private imaginings—though I got the sense that mine were a lot darker than his, at the minute. Probably thinking of Hal shoveling the snow, Regina help us all.

“Whatever you—we—end up deciding,” Royston said, breath puffing up little clouds of steam in the cold air, “I feel like you ought to know that things … aren’t exactly copacetic in the Basquiat at present.”

“I’d be real interested to hear what that has to do with me,” I admitted. The streets were less crowded than usual—probably because of the cold—and I could already see the distant, misty gray outlines of a few statue heads and shoulders rising above the buildings. Mine being the biggest one, despite us all knowing that Compagnon’d been proud owner of the largest skull in all the Dragon Corps.

“Well …” Royston began, like now that I’d actually agreed he didn’t have any idea of where to begin. “My sources inform me that relations with the Esar are not exactly what they used to be, and you of all people know what they used to be was hardly that sturdy to begin with. Anyway, it’s as bad as it’s ever been, and that might not put him in the most forgiving of moods at present. A war always does make the enemy seem clear. But once that clear enemy is gone, and one is so used to having one …”

“Thanks for the theorizing,” I said, because if you let Roy talk too much, you’d never come to the point of anything, “but if you do have a plan of action, do you think you might let me in on it? It’s damned cold out.”

“I intend to talk to my sources,” Roy repeated, blinking once. “Do keep up, old friend.”

“So by your sources, you mean a certain lady of the tower,” I said, just for confirmation. Funny thing about running in the same circles as Roy, you met all sorts of people you’d never have cause to know about otherwise. Lady Antoinette definitely seemed like the type who’d prefer you not to know about her. At least, not until it was too late.

“She’s as acceptable a source as any when it comes to his moods,” Royston said. “And this letter has the sort of information she should know.”

“It doesn’t seem anyone should know about it, to me,” I said. Damn me if I was going to have to talk to th’Esar about anything, least of all what rights I had when it came to the girls. I’d been taken off my post, considering it didn’t exist anymore. I wasn’t anyone except Professor Adamo, teaching two classes to ’Versity brats just because there was a statue of me in the middle of the Rue, and that made people assume I knew things. Made people whisper about me, too, and maybe pity me a little. “So I guess that just means I’m waiting.”

“I’m afraid it’s the only thing you can do, at the moment,” Roy murmured, voice far off. His mind had moved on to whispers and secrets, concerns of the Basquiat that apparently—thanks to Rook’s fucking brother—had somehow become my fucking problem. “This is hardly like planning an assault on the other side of the Cobalts, is it?”

“Nothing really is, anymore,” I said. Not like I missed it.

“You don’t have to look so dark,” Royston assured me. “At least, not yet. I’ll let you know when you do. You know how the Esar gets into these moods of his; I’m sure it’ll all pass over like so many storm clouds in the end. I just thought it best to forewarn you, lest you make an uninformed decision and run off to the Esar without me.”

“Sounds to me like I’d do better without you if he’s not feeling too warmly about the Basquiat,” I said.

“I suppose that will be for you to decide,” Royston said with a shrug. We rounded the corner that led to the mouth of the Rue d’St. Difference, filled with all sorts of fancy hat shops—Luvander’s included—which just went to show how a woman was judging her fashions these days. To our right was the open courtyard that held our statues, mine in the middle and the boys lined up on either side of me, in proper formation like we’d never quite managed with the living examples. They sure brought the customers in for Luvander. “Bastion,” Royston added, “what on earth is that …?”

There was a shabby little crowd gathered around them, which wasn’t so unusual except that the group had suitcases with them, and their clothes were—as Roy might’ve said—decidedly countrified. Even for someone like me who didn’t much care one way or the other, it was easy to pick ’em out. Despite how it was only a carriage ride away, there was never too much mixing between the outer country folk and those who were born and bred in Thremedon. For good reason, according to people like Roy—which I couldn’t help but feel made him a snob, since without the proper shepherding, the former were liable to be swallowed up in the shuffle. Not to mention having to keep up with the changing fashions. Some of us city folk couldn’t even manage that.

“Looks like hayseeds to me,” I said, eyeing them. Young people mostly, at least a dozen or more. They seemed cold—just as dramatically cold as Royston had been himself a few moments ago. They probably couldn’t take the difference between Thremedon and the countryside—always warmer out there, or so I was told—and one of them had taken the liberty of sitting on his suitcase, which made him look both unimpressed and damn tired, too. “Why? Are you interested? I know you’ve a fondness for country folk.”

“You know,” Royston said, “the more often you say a thing, the less funny it becomes.”