Steelhands - Jaida Jones [1]
I know that the Esar is a secretive man, one who guards his possessions jealously. In light of that, I considered the possibility that he might never share this story with you and thus felt duty-bound to impart it myself. The dragons belonged to more than just one man, however powerful that man might be.
I have no counsel for what you might do with this information, my own strengths lying largely in the theoretical and analytical fields. I merely felt that it was the right thing to pass it along and hope that you do not find yourself too at odds with my assumption.
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