Steelhands - Jaida Jones [192]
“Let’s hope,” I muttered. If they were anywhere else, chances were they wouldn’t be doing so well. It seemed to me that being where I was was actually being lucky, ’cause at least it meant nobody was dead. Then again, being dead didn’t seem to carry the same finality it used to. What was the world coming to?
“I’ll find them,” Ghislain said, ducking under the low door of my cell and heading back out into the hall.
With him gone, there wasn’t anything standing between me and Raphael anymore. I stared at him, and he stared at me. If we stood around in the cell any longer, I really was gonna start spewing all sorts of horseshit—and maybe give him an earful about idiots whose brains went lame in the war and didn’t have enough sense in their heads to come home after it’d ended, like everybody else.
“Good to see you,” I said finally.
“It’s good to be seen,” Raphael said. “I’ll go into detail later, but suffice it to say that I was living on the Seon border, being worshipped as a good-luck charm because of the size of my—”
Am I to assume this very large and handsome man is part of your rescue party? Antoinette asked me suddenly.
Yeah, I told her. That’d be Ghislain.
It seems my luck has turned around, Antoinette said. He looks quite … useful. I see that he has Ginette and Wildgrave Ozanne with him.
Already? I asked.
He moves quickly, and so should you, Chief Sergeant, Antoinette said. I don’t know what sort of distraction Royston cooked up, but I imagine time is not necessarily on our side. Let us value his assistance.
Got it, I said, drawing myself up to my full height. With Ghislain out of the picture, it’d actually seem impressive.
Luvander and Balfour were both staring at me like they were afraid the sudden shock of seeing Raphael again might’ve harmed my brain. They were used to me operating faster than this, but I had to take stock of my resources before I could decide where to begin.
In the corner of my cell, Gaeth and that skinny cricket were having a whispered conversation that seemed placid on one side—that was Gaeth—and all kinds of frenzied on the other. I heard the cricket demand, in a stage whisper, where in Regina’s name Gaeth had been all this time and something about mother’s gloves—probably just some of today’s slang I wasn’t up on—as Gaeth tried to explain he’d been here the whole time. Meanwhile, the cricket was trying to clean something off his shoulder, using a glove as a kerchief.
Then there was Laure, who didn’t look worried, just mad and red in the face, like she was aching to get started. I knew what she was thinking—she didn’t know why we were waiting around in a prison for our captors to come back, making rounding us up again real easy—and I wished I had an answer for her, to put her worries to rest.
There were a few magicians I didn’t know, though I’d heard gossip about them from Royston, even if I couldn’t keep all that horseshit straight in my head for more than two minutes. Antoinette would be a powerful enough ally, and I’d take her word on the rest of the troops.
And then there were my boys. Ghislain would be good for anything; Balfour looked shell-shocked; Luvander could talk any enemy to death; and Raphael looked like you could bowl him over if you tapped him with a stick.
These were the soldiers I had to work with—three of them too young, and totally untrained, to boot. They were students, and even if one of them had a dragon, I knew better than anyone that having a dragon didn’t all of a sudden transform you into a seasoned warrior. I couldn’t compare them to the boys I’d had before—wouldn’t be fair to anyone since there was no replacing that crowd—but maybe the idea of something new wasn’t completely off base. The way th’Esar’d gone about assembling it was all cockeyed, and if I was the first one to see him, Antoinette was gonna have to fight me for the honor of breaking his nose.
I was just gonna have to hope that I could still lead—that after