Steelhands - Jaida Jones [172]
“You want her for yourself,” Luvander huffed. “I’ll have you know that she’s spoken for. Not to mention that if you continue talking about her in this way, I’m quite certain she’ll attack us both with a fire poker.”
“It’s true,” I said, twirling it in my hand to show I hadn’t forgotten. I appreciated Luvander speaking up for me, though, so some people didn’t think I was an object instead of a person.
“New recruits?” Ghislain asked, and Toverre jumped a little, almost like he’d forgotten he was there. Even though Ghislain was three times Luvander’s size, he was three hundred times quieter. “One of them’s scrawny. Jumps a lot. Like a field mouse.”
“We’re here because Adamo’s been arrested,” I said, letting the reminder of what was actually going on sink in for myself as much as everyone else. I didn’t blame them for getting caught up in the moment, but just because there was another airman walking around now didn’t mean we could afford to forget about the other one, who’d been alive all this time but might not be alive for much longer.
“Really? Thought he was teaching,” Ghislain said.
“He was,” I said, while Luvander and Balfour returned their pokers to the fireplace. I held on to mine for a while longer. It was calming me down some to have it in my hand. “That’s how I met him.”
“Oh, I see,” Raphael said, settling himself on Luvander’s couch. He made a big show of it, but I could tell he was tired and grateful not to be on his feet anymore. “Well, it’s a minor infraction at best, and they can’t necessarily prove the two of you did anything untoward unless you testify against him.”
“Beg pardon?” I asked. I was starting to wish Raphael had come in through the door first, so I could’ve clonked him one instead. Might’ve finished him off, though, the way he was looking.
“It’s not exactly like that,” Balfour said, sitting down next to Raphael. He couldn’t keep his eyes off him—like he thought if he blinked, the man was gonna disappear. “We can explain it all later, but the Esar seems to have taken exception to some of Adamo’s actions. He thinks Adamo was plotting against him.”
“Seems like I picked a perfect time to drop anchor,” Ghislain said. “Could’ve sailed all the way up to the Kirils and back first, make myself a nest egg, but Raphael here was feeling homesick.”
“You’d be feeling homesick, too, if you’d spent every day between the end of the war and now in a fisherman’s village,” Raphael pointed out. “I’ll be smelling tuna in my dreams for the rest of my life.”
“Just pretend it’s mermaids,” Ghislain suggested, lowering himself into one of Luvander’s chairs, which creaked ominously under his weight.
“That would ruin all my other dreams,” Raphael replied dryly. “The good ones.”
“Are you going to tell us where you found him?” Luvander asked, setting an enormous pot on the stove and bringing a few fat, shiny eggplants out of a drawer above the counter. How on earth he could be thinking about dinner at a time like this was beyond me, but I guess that was the difference between me and a trained airman. They knew to eat when the eating was good and probably didn’t lose their dinners in the air if the flying got too rough.
Probably. I’d have to ask Adamo about that, too, someday.
“Not to mention how you even …” Balfour began, then trailed off as his voice cracked. “I mean, none of us even knew that you were alive.”
“Neither did I, for about two weeks after the war ended,” Raphael admitted, rubbing at a scar I hadn’t noticed before—it curved down from the corner of his mouth, twisting his mouth into a jester’s grimace when he wasn’t talking. I had to wonder if he’d gotten it during the real fighting, or sometime after, by offending someone in his fishing village. “I got thrown well clear of Natalia in the final battle, which is what might’ve saved me, come to think of it—especially considering what happened to her when she … exploded. I was taken in by a young woman fleeing the capital—returning home to her village by the sea, more accurately, wanting to get out of that mess. And who can really blame her? I