Steelhands - Jaida Jones [17]
“You’re not planning on … eating from it,” Toverre said, not even as a question because he couldn’t possibly imagine the answer would be yes.
It really was too easy to get a rise out of him. Maybe I should’ve gone a little softer on him, like I would’ve had we been sparring for real, but if he didn’t toughen up now—in the middle of all his planned personal renovations, bastion help us—then there really was no hope for him.
“You never know when it might come in handy, having a spare plate in the room,” I told him. “What if I’m entertaining company? Or if I want a midnight snack for when I’m studying?”
Toverre finally deigned to seat his bony behind on the very end of my bed, folding one leg up to his chest and resting his chin against his knee. He looked like a finely dressed bundle of twigs—perhaps a scarecrow dressed in a noble’s clothing or a portrait from a book about the first magicians, none of whom had ever looked quite human to me. Hard to convey what a man with no heart looked like on the outside, probably, even for the best artists. The girls in the country had all found him handsome enough, I expected, in that beautiful, ghostly way of his. Everyone did, right up until he opened his mouth and all the crazy came pouring out.
All the long eyelashes and dark curls in the world couldn’t make up for someone who’d only take the road to the nearest marketplace on even days, not odd. And if he so much as breathed in trail dust, he’d be coughing for a week. People didn’t like being told they had dirt under their fingernails, and his behavior only got worse when he was talking to somebody he actually liked.
He could be a pain in the ass, but he didn’t try to grab my breasts or look up my skirts, and he didn’t make any stupid comments about how grown-up I looked in my mother’s dresses, either. We’d known each other since both of us were learning to walk, and I liked him all right.
Someone had to, after all.
“I can’t even begin to tell you how wrong it would be to try and entertain guests in this room,” Toverre said, lowering his kerchief at last. I was surprised he hadn’t spread it out over the bed like a protective doily or something, but then, maybe the thought just hadn’t occurred to him.
Or, miracle of miracles, he was actually loosening up a hair. That, however, seemed less likely than me securing an invitation to dinner with th’Esar himself. Even if our reasons for coming to the city had been directly thanks to His Highness, I didn’t cherish any illusions about him wanting to meet us or anything like that.
Apparently, after the war and once all the dust had settled, th’Esar had realized that there were all sorts of people in Volstov—outside of Thremedon—with good heads on their shoulders and no means of expanding their minds. I guess it had something to do with the fact that the man who’d figured out how to stop the magicians’ plague had hailed from somewhere around Nevers originally. All the best minds in Thremedon hadn’t been able to accomplish what he did, and th’Esar probably didn’t want to get caught with his trousers down like that again.
Of course, that wasn’t how it’d been put in the letter Da got, but it was the general thrust of things. It was a postwar scholarship program, and Toverre and I’d been lucky enough to qualify because of our location. Besides which, Toverre was the only young man of age to be found for miles in either direction.
We’d accepted because you didn’t say no to th’Esar. Though, to be honest, Toverre’s father was happy enough to be rid of him, and my da would do all right so long as the stableboy didn’t leave his employment seeking other work. Toverre was delighted, but I was reserving judgment—at least until I saw what Thremedon was really like.
The letter came in early fall, just after the war ended. Winter term started up, like you’d guess, at the beginning of winter. That didn’t give us much time for getting