Steelhands - Jaida Jones [175]
BALFOUR
One of the first things I’d been taught as a child was not to stare at anyone. It caused others to feel self-conscious, and it was rude, no matter what your intentions were. Curiosity was a feeling best indulged in private, when no one else would take notice, and I knew that I had finally reached adulthood when I was able to keep myself from staring, no matter how much I might have wished to.
Still, I’d have defied any of the others to be sitting on a couch next to Raphael and not look at him, just a little, for some evidence that he was actually there.
I wasn’t afraid of being teased since I’d weathered all that and more in the past, and there were more important things for everyone to be thinking about than mocking me. What I was frightened of was that this would all turn out to be some cruel dream. That in reality, I’d fallen asleep on Luvander’s couch while waiting for news, and any second now someone was going to shake me awake and tell me that Margrave Royston had arrived, and also, that I’d missed supper while sleeping like a little lamb.
It was the most wonderful surprise I could ever have asked for, but it hurt, too. Knowing Raphael had been alive this whole time but unable to make some contact with the rest of us, with his home, made me feel guilty, as though I ought to have sensed him. His dragon would have been able to if she were still in one piece.
But the worst part about Raphael’s resurrection, despite my gratitude, was that it sparked new hope in me. It inspired the foolish—and highly unlikely—possibility that there might be others out there, still alive and not lost forever at all, just living out the past half a year in some other remote fishing village.
It had taken me a long time after the war to convince myself that my fellow airmen were really and truly gone. I would never see them in the streets again or hear them laughing raucously at a stupid joke at someone else’s expense. They’d never fill my boots with piss or my gloves with other, less savory liquids. They were dead, and no amount of magic could bring them back.
Except that Ghislain had brought Raphael back without using any magic at all.
This was a dilemma, one that I’d be agonizing over for years to come. The possibility might have been slight, the chances incredibly slim, but now that I had new hope in the form of Raphael, alive, I would never be able to stop wondering, What if?
If Adamo had been with us, he would’ve told me—told us all—that there was no point in focusing on the dirty end of the stick when you’d finally turned up some good fortune at last. It was morbid and unnecessary and a waste of time. Whether or not Adamo himself believed that, he would’ve been able to make us believe it. That was something he was uncannily good at.
Still, I wished Adamo was here to see this. Despite knowing very little about the man in question’s more personal feelings, I did know how much it had bothered him to have so few of us left. Privately, I almost worried he felt responsible, but I’d never been able to broach the topic. Not even with all my shrewd diplomatic training could I find a humane way.
And so, as with most topics, we had all avoided talking about it.
Ghislain, however, hadn’t been afraid to look the matter squarely in the eye. He’d chased a rumor of the seas and found one of our fellows, presumed dead—and still looking as though he might keel over at any moment though he was putting on a brave face for the rest of us.
Maybe it was just the rough journey back that made Raphael look so shaky. But the white in his hair made him look like the Esar in the old tale—the one who’d lost his three sons to fever and gone mad the following year.
The noise from downstairs had at least given me an excuse to stop thinking about the whole mess and an excuse to stop staring at poor Raphael as well. He looked as though he needed a full week’s sleep, and there we were hauling him along on another calamitous adventure.
He wouldn’t have had it any other way, of course, but it hardly seemed decent.
Laure