Steelhands - Jaida Jones [16]
Toverre made a face of real horror. “Don’t try to distract me from my point,” he said. It was obviously pretty hard for him to breathe, but he’d always been too easy a mark for any real teasing. “Please, Laurence, do put that somewhere … away.”
There was a wastebasket in the corner of the room, which already had a few balls of dust and other strange remnants of the room’s previous dirty, scummy student. I tossed it in there, grimy with dust and dirt and some unknown black substance, then moved to the fireplace with my newfound poker. Flimsy piece of work, probably made light so none of the fools living here was ever tempted to clobber themselves—or a student rival—with it in the dead of night. But there was something warped and metallic stuck in the chimney shaft, and I was getting it out. If not just to make the room more hospitable, then certainly to see what it was. Aside from all the scorch marks on it, it was shiny.
“You know it’s not polite to look through a woman’s personal effects,” I told Toverre. “So what’d you find, anyway? There’s nothing embarrassing in there.”
“You brought trousers with you,” Toverre murmured, sniffing unhappily. “And a man’s riding boots and shirt.”
I stabbed at the bit of metal a tad too viciously and it clanged, but the distraction bought me a little bit of time. Being born a man—peculiar as he was—Toverre would never be able to understand what it meant to be a woman in Volstov, no matter how many times I’d tried to explain it to him. And as much as Toverre’s father wanted him to be someone else, mine was wishing right along with him. He might even have accepted Toverre, though he couldn’t ride half as well as I could and was terrified of barnyard animals, besides. The only weapon he’d ever managed to wield successfully was a butter knife—although he knew pretty well which piece of silverware came first and second and so on during a fancy dinner service—but, bastion help him, he did have the necessary parts to make a son, which I didn’t.
It was pretty simple, really. Da just wanted a boy. Why else would he name his sweet little daughter after his favorite uncle?
“Don’t worry,” I told Toverre. “Breathe normal. It’s not like I’m planning on wearing them all over the place and all of the time. I thought I could wear the trousers underneath my skirts when it got really cold, and the shirt to bed at night. Besides, it’s not like I have so many dresses.”
“You thought you’d wear these trousers under your skirts,” Toverre repeated. Like I was the one most likely to go mad.
“No one’s going to know,” I said. Another clang, and a little shifting of embers and stone, and I knew I was close to shaking the thing free. Now I just had to hope it was something put in there by some troublemaker, and not an actual part of the fireplace that was necessary for making it work.
“My dear Laure,” Toverre said, “this simply will not do. Here we are, in Thremedon at last. It is time to remake ourselves.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “Into what?”
He might’ve answered, except I managed to shake the metal free at last. It fell down into the still-hot embers of the fire I’d lit—before I knew the room had been booby-trapped, that is—and I poked it quickly out onto the carpet, while Toverre watched me, covering his mouth with his kerchief. So as not to breathe in any unseemly fireplace poison, I assumed.
“Well,” I said, a little disappointed. “It’s just a plate. Wonder how that got up in there. Don’t you?”
“It’s ghastly,” Toverre said, his voice slightly muffled because of the cloth. “What if it has the remains of someone’s meal on it? You ought to put it back immediately.”
“It’s made for eating off, not for being stuck in the flue,” I told him. I bent down so as to be able to wrap my skirts around it before picking it up. It had been in the fire, and nothing held heat like metal did.
I’d often wondered how the men in the corps didn’t burn their breeches off, riding the dragons the way they did and them being all fire and metal, but when I’d asked my da he’d just said I had too practical a mind for my own