Steelhands - Jaida Jones [154]
“Did they tell you what the charges were?” Luvander asked at last.
“Treason,” Margrave Royston said with a blank expression that stirred something dangerously close to fear in the deepest part of me. There was no chance he’d misspoken; I wouldn’t lie to myself and hope for something like that. “Conspiring in private with secret information to use against the Esar, more specifically. I came here to warn the rest of you—I half assumed the shop would be crawling with Wolves when I arrived—but perhaps we’re still ahead of the pack, so to speak.”
“They wouldn’t come here,” Toverre said, glancing over his shoulder in sudden suspicion, as though he was having second thoughts about having come to the shop.
Perhaps that was the smart reaction to take, but I couldn’t have moved even if I wanted to. I felt rooted in place, a curious mixture of guilt and horror doing battle in my stomach. Of all the people I knew, Adamo could take care of himself the best—that was never in question. There had always been the possibility during the war that one or more of us might be taken captive at any time; we’d always been prepared for it. Indeed, after our last flight over the Ke-Han capital, some of us had been held in their prisons. It was merely that no one had ever imagined those doing the arresting might be on our side of the Cobalt Mountains, rather than the Ke-Han. Despite that, our course of action was clear: If Adamo was in trouble for something that involved all of us, then it was up to all of us to get him out of it.
It also implicated everyone in the room, including the two young students. What a warm reception they were having in the city.
I hadn’t even been given chance enough to ask Laure everything I’d wanted to. Given the gravity of Margrave Royston’s news, it seemed unlikely we’d be able to focus on anything other than Adamo’s plight—hardly what Adamo had planned for us, I realized. Even in prison, he’d be trying to protect us all, keeping our names out of it.
Perhaps I’d been trained too well by him—I should’ve been furious, but I found myself coming down closer on the side of admiring.
“It’s my fault, isn’t it?” Laure asked, suddenly hushed. “I went to him, told him all those things about that Germaine woman. I knew not going was gonna get me in trouble. But it got him in trouble instead.”
Margrave Royston blinked. He looked completely awful—the way Thom had, sometimes, when the rest of us had been out on a raid and he’d been alone in the Airman, waiting up all night for news. He must have been with Adamo when it happened. Either that, or he’d had exceptionally fortuitous timing to enter the scene at the very last second.
“Are you referring to Margrave Germaine?” he asked Laure.
“Who else?” Laure said, throwing her hands up in the air. “She started all this, mark my words. Ain’t nothing good that’s ever come of her that I’m seeing.”
Luvander sighed, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. Without its usual lively animation, his face simply looked tired and much older than I remembered. I wondered if I shouldn’t be the one bringing him lunch every now and then, if only to keep things even between us. Just because I’d suffered the most obvious injury didn’t mean the others hadn’t. His throat had been stitched up with a needle and thread. And, as he said, he wasn’t the sort of man to be taken down by a “wee infection,” but he worked hard at his shop, from sunup to well past sunset. Not to mention all the energy he used up with his complicated monologues. It was a wonder he didn’t eat like a horse, just to keep up his strength.
“That may well be the connection, now that you mention it,” Margrave Royston said, smoothing the hair at his temple as though he needed something to do with his hands. I recognized that impulse; only a moment ago I’d been wishing for my gloves to toy with. “I am not saying it’s your fault, so please cease looking as though you’ve not made up your mind whether to strike me or not. All I mean to say is that if Owen