Steelhands - Jaida Jones [119]
“You heard a dragon?” Luvander asked, his voice hushed.
“In your head?” I added, just to clarify.
“Well, I am reasonably certain it hadn’t landed in the square, if that’s what you’re asking,” Balfour said with the hint of a smile. “The funny thing is, I almost … I suppose if I have come this far, now I have to tell you the rest. It wasn’t just the scraping and the banging or the turning of gears; I also heard a voice, in the barest of whispers at first, and then more clearly just before I fell unconscious. Or fainted, if that’s what you wish to call it. It knew who I was; it said my name.”
Luvander drew in a sharp breath as quietly as he could manage, and I forced my mind to take stock of things one at a time, instead of shooting in a hundred directions all at once. There was a chance Balfour’d been having a real bad day. Of the survivors, he’d suffered harder than most, and that had to wear on him day in and day out. There was no reason to jump to conclusions or to be thinking about Thom’s letter, for example—the one that’d said all kinds of things about bringing a dead dragon back to life.
There was no reason to do it, and yet I was pretty damn sure Luvander and I already were.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Balfour said, before either of us could gather our wits fast enough to say something—desperate for it to be the right thing, yet without too much hope for that. “I know I have been in and out with fever ever since; I think that it’s likely what caused me to faint in the first place. But I didn’t feel at all strange when it first started happening. The voice came when I was at my most lucid—triggering the fever, perhaps. What I mean to say is, it wasn’t the product of delirium. It wasn’t a feverish hallucination. When I’m ill, I don’t hear it at all. And shouldn’t it be the other way around?”
A real unwelcome thought occurred to me, and I wrestled with it for a moment before letting it out into the open.
“Are you hearing things right now?” I asked. It made sense, and it’d explain that awful twitching, Balfour’s head jerking around from time to time like he thought someone was calling his name somewhere in the distance.
“It comes and goes,” Balfour admitted. “I haven’t been back to work simply because I’m never certain when it’s going to start up again. I even tried making a kind of chart, writing down the times of day it returned, but there’s no real pattern. I would say it’s driving me mad, but I think that’s a rather unfortunate hyperbole given the circumstances, don’t you think? Unless it turns out to be true, in which case …”
“Fevers make everyone a little funny in the head,” Luvander said slowly, looking to me for support. “I had an uncle once who marched down to the lake and threw himself in because he thought my aunt had drawn him a very large bath. It took all us cousins to haul him out again, and all the time him screaming that we should give him his privacy in the lav. The whole town came out to watch, in the end. My second cousin Levent almost drowned, actually, and it’s why I have a very personal rule never to visit my relatives in the country ever again.”
“Now, let’s nobody leap to any conclusions just yet,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as either of them. “Fever’s going around the ’Versity like wildfire right now, or so I’ve heard. Stands to reason there’d be a bit of it in the bastion, too. If that’s what’s making you hear things, then it ought to pass as soon as the bug’s out of you.”
“That is what I was hoping,” Balfour admitted, twisting his hands in his lap. They looked like little dragon claws from this distance, overhung by the shadow of the table. If he was staring at them every day, I thought, didn’t it make sense he’d be hearing dragons not only in his sleep but during waking hours, too? I closed my eyes for a moment to listen—to see if I could hear anything, or if it was some of the whirring and