Steelhands - Jaida Jones [124]
Instead of squabbling pointlessly, I reached over to pick up my note cards, not sure of how to proceed. If she truly wished to get this physician’s appointment over with, and deal with it in her usual, indomitable fashion, then I supposed there wasn’t much I could do to stop her. I certainly wasn’t capable of physically restraining her—not with the disparate nature of our strengths—and she was bullheaded enough that sometimes even the best-reasoned argument might as well have fallen on deaf ears. I found myself wishing irrationally for a third party—even simple Gaeth would’ve done—to help me reason with her. I was only one person, after all, and as a result it seemed my opinion tended to matter very little.
“I want you to think very carefully before you do make a decision, one way or the other,” I said, running the pads of my thumbs over the smooth surface of the note cards. The clean simplicity of their crisp edges and neat handwriting soothed me. A terrible thought occurred to me, and I hesitated before bringing it up. “But, Laure, you’re not planning to tell them you’ve been hearing voices … Are you?”
Laure sat down on the end of her bed with a flounce, skirts bunching up underneath her. I could see she was wearing the green stockings I’d bought her; they didn’t match at all with the dress she was wearing, but I kept that small detail to myself, touched that she’d made the attempt in the first place.
“I don’t want to get bundled off to some women’s hospital for raving idiots, if that’s what you’re asking,” Laure said, rubbing the back of her neck again. “But I don’t like feeling out of sorts and lying to a doctor when she asks me how I’m doing, either. I just want someone to fix all this—and isn’t that what a physician’s job is? Make me one of them nasty-smelling herbal teas, crush up some dried rats’ bones. I’ll take whatever she’s willing to give me, so long as it works.”
“I wouldn’t ask for the rats’ bones up front,” I suggested. “Just a thought.”
At least I managed to make her laugh, and her concentration was better that night than I’d been expecting, given her disposition when I’d first arrived. But there was nothing more I could do for her mood than distract her, and my ability to do that was only going to last for so long.
And so it was just when I was beginning to give up hope—and assume the gloves had been lost by an errant postman—that I went to check for new deliveries the next morning and found the flag in my postbox up. There was a letter waiting for me in the box, the corner smudged with what appeared to be a thumbprint of mud. I wrapped it with a kerchief and slid it into my pocket. And because of the time, I was forced to read it in the lecture hall, just before Ducante began our first lecture that day. It burned against my side the entire walk along ’Versity Stretch. By the time I arrived at Cathery, the excitement and impatience had nearly given me apoplexy.
As the poor professor surveyed the small number of attendees in his room with a look of offended displeasure, I neatly slipped one of my pens underneath the blobby wax seal to break it. My name had been spelled wrong on the front—Tovere, with only one “r”—but the address itself was correct, and I supposed that was all that mattered for those in charge of ’Versity post.
“What’s that you’ve got there?” Laure hissed, peering curiously over my shoulder. “Something wrong at home?”
“Does this look like my father’s handwriting to you?” I asked, briefly showing her the letter before I hid it once again from any prying eyes that might have been lurking about. “I believe this was written by the only soul in Borland able to write—if one considers this ‘able.’ ”
“Borland?” Laure snorted. “What’re you corresponding with that place for?”
“Be quiet for a moment, and let me read it,” I told her. I felt her breath on my ear, which meant she was reading along with me.
Sir Tovere, it read, and I felt a pang of tenderness and pity, Thank ya for yer writing.