Steelhands - Jaida Jones [158]
“Something else you want to say?” Laure asked, even though Toverre tried to hush her seconds later. “I don’t mean it like an insult. You’ve just got a look like you’re not quite telling us everything. One of my cousins used to get it when he was sick—that was how you knew to clear the room before he spewed.”
“Delightful,” Royston said, though he did look a little as though he was going to be ill.
I wished Luvander was with us, so that he might conduct the conversation better than I was currently handling it. But I wouldn’t get very far on simple hopes, or so the proverb about wishing in one hand and shitting in the other went. It was actually a phrase Rook had told me—see which hand fills up first, he’d said—and, like all things Rook had passed on, it had stuck, in its own way.
“There is more,” Royston said, after he’d taken a moment to catch his breath. “It’s part of the reason for my delay, actually, and I do ask your forgiveness. It seems you’ve all been very patient in my absence. It’s merely that the route to your apartment took me directly past the Basquiat, and there was a dreadful commotion out front. Wolves, carriages parked all around, and Margraves shouting in the streets. Lady Antoinette was there—it was she who caught my attention, though I’m not certain if she meant to. When a velikaia is in great distress, she is able to project her thoughts without intending to, and anyone with a Talent will pick up on it. Her voice—her Talent—is particularly distinctive. It has a signature, if you will.”
“This a story or a history lesson?” Laure interjected.
“Laure,” Toverre hissed, looking scandalized.
“No, she’s quite right; I talk too much when under stress,” Royston said, taking a moment to collect himself. “I have a habit of getting caught up in my own words; feeble as far as excuses go, but if you’ll forgive me once more—it’s been an extremely trying day. Shall I get straight to the point?”
“That’d be nice,” Laure said. She’d taken the reins of the conversation in exactly the same way Adamo would’ve done, if he’d been there with us. “Who’s Lady Antoinette?”
“Are you serious?” Royston asked.
“She’s one of the Esar’s closest confidantes in the Basquiat,” I explained, to make the potentially long story short. “Until very recently, their friendship was what allowed him to work closely with the magicians at all.”
“And yet since the end of the war, we’ve been on thinner and thinner ice,” Royston concluded grimly. “What I managed to glean from Antoinette, once I’d calmed her down enough that I could be assured she wasn’t going to injure any of the guards in the middle of the street, was that our Owen wasn’t the only man arrested today.”
Abruptly, I felt my heart begin to pound in my chest. Whatever was happening in Thremedon was a threat I’d never been trained to combat. I’d been raised among the country nobility, and though there had certainly been intrigue and politics enough there, the consequences had never been so dire. You’d lose an extra guest at dinner parties—and that was the extent of your punishment for a bit of gossip that reached the wrong ears. I felt as though I’d been dropped into a game where I knew only half the rules and understood none of the consequences of losing.
In the corps, it had always been my duty to scout ahead, so that I could recommend the best angle for my comrades to attack. For the first time in a long time, one of my friends was in hot water, and I hadn’t the faintest idea about how to approach it. I hadn’t even been able to warn him a storm was coming.
“They were arresting Margraves?” I asked finally.
“Two Margraves and a Wildgrave,” Royston confirmed. “Normally I’d make a joke about Margrave Holt being taken in for his unconventional style of dog-breeding, but this hardly seems the time and place. Josette—Margrave Josette; you’d know her as one of the diplomats who got caught up in that mess in Xi’an—told me the Esar’s men have been questioning Lord Temur all morning. They haven’t arrested him yet, but I suppose the Esar remembered he was