Steelhands - Jaida Jones [117]
Balfour caught my eye, and I figured he couldn’t’ve been feeling that bad if he was still up for poking a little fun at Luvander’s expense.
“I see how it is,” Luvander began, about to embark on a meandering tale of sorrow.
“Shut it,” I told him. I must’ve gotten some of my magic back, because this time, he listened right away and did as he was told without protest.
When you were dealing with someone whose natural inclination was to be quiet—like Balfour—it was necessary not to scare him away from talking. You had to make him feel comfortable, let him know it was his turn. Someone like Luvander abhorred a vacuum, and maybe he thought he was helping Balfour by filling up the silence so no one had to be uncomfortable, but in truth, he wasn’t doing the man any favors by taking control.
“I began to hear things, on the day of the meeting,” Balfour said slowly. I could almost imagine him pulling at his gloves as he worked up the courage to gain some momentum—just like the old days—except that he wasn’t wearing any. “At first I thought it was simply my mind growing bored with the proceedings and finding something else with which to occupy itself. I shouldn’t say this—I have no real cause to complain—but being a diplomat really is unbearable some days. I consider myself a rather patient person, but no one there ever wants to listen to anything but the sound of their own voices and their own solutions. It can be very disheartening, at times. Especially when, day in and day out, the same matters are addressed over and over again, and we never really get anywhere.”
“On the bright side, you do get all the best gossip first,” Luvander said, and I realized he was doing his best to be comforting.
“Either that, or you end up a part of it yourself,” Balfour agreed somewhat reluctantly.
“So you started hearing things,” I said. It wasn’t the kind of thing any man wanted to hear repeated, so I figured I’d be the one to do it and get it out of the way real fast. And we had to be sure, when it came to stuff like this.
“The way you say it, I can’t tell if I was overreacting or not,” Balfour said, looking sheepish. “Sometimes I think it was just the product of an idle brain. It’s certainly never happened before, anyway. As far as I know, there’s no history of such things in my family—not that I could write home to Mother and ask, you understand. The question would worry her.”
“No accounts of relatives going screaming out of boring parties?” Luvander asked. When Balfour shook his head, he sighed. “What a pity.”
“Don’t remember Amery ever doing it,” I said, steering us back to topic as best I could. Bastion knew Luvander was trying to be caring in his own mad way, and it was probably helping Balfour to have something to laugh at every now and again, but someone had to keep us focused.
“Perhaps my brother died before it came to that,” Balfour pointed out. It was a moment of straightforward grimness I wasn’t used to seeing him display, and he quickly looked away.
“Go on,” Luvander said softly.
Balfour chewed on a particularly dry part of his lip, hesitating before he spoke again.
“I didn’t realize what it was at first,” he said at last, in a fearful way that I could tell meant we were coming close to the heart of the matter. “It sounded like metal. Just metal working, machines going, gears grinding up against one another, that kind of thing. And it was quite loud. At first I thought they were doing some kind of repair labors in the street until I realized that no one else was reacting to the sudden noise. Then I assumed they were merely hiding their discomfort—being professional, as it were—but I asked one of my fellow diplomats and he indicated he didn’t hear anything.”
“You told someone else you were hearing things first?” I asked.
“Well, not exactly,” Balfour said, with a miserable little twist to his mouth. “I was as subtle as I could manage without betraying any of the specifics. I simply asked him if he happened to hear anything strange at all, and when he realized