Steelhands - Jaida Jones [197]
I was probably imagining it. Deep dungeons could do something like that to a soldier, and with all we’d been through, I supposed I wasn’t as immune to flights of fancy as I’d always thought. It wasn’t as loud as it’d been during the fever, and like I’d said, that workroom had been fucking eerie. Not to mention we were traveling with a velikaia now. I’d never met one before, but I knew they got right into your head and stirred everything around like it was a pot of mashed potatoes. It was possible that had something to do with it. I sure didn’t know how it worked—I just knew enough not to trust that kind of magic for a second.
No one was saying anything, which made matters worse. Even Toverre had fallen silent, giving up on telling Gaeth off to trudge beside him in the dark, casting glances toward him every so often just like I’d been doing with Adamo. Gaeth’d been gone a long time; Toverre could’ve been worried about his health or whether or not he’d been bathing properly. Either was likely, the latter even more than the former. But then there was something else I recognized, part of the same concern I felt for Adamo that I’d never felt for Gaeth, though I had been worried about him.
I didn’t want to think about the meaning of that too closely, and since there were more important things going on, I could afford not to. We were all on edge, tense as nervous cats, and while I’d assumed earlier that the corps’s babbling was their way of bleeding off extra energy, apparently they had another stage that came right after that, when a situation got about as serious as it could.
As much as I’d wanted it before, I found I really didn’t care for the silence.
“Ah,” Gaeth said, the single syllable bouncing off the passage walls and echoing back at him. He looked nervous when everyone halted and rounded on him—we’d all been thinking we were under attack—but he held his ground all right. “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt our progress none, I just realized that I’ve been this way before.”
“And?” Antoinette asked, keeping a rein on her impatience but only just. She was someone I would’ve liked to get to know a little better—the kind of person who seemed like she could teach me more than I’d ever learned at the ’Versity if she didn’t decide one day that she didn’t like me and scrambled my brains like eggs at breakfast. But now wasn’t the time to think about that.
Toverre was scowling at her, but only because she’d snapped at Gaeth, and I knew her magic had to make him fighting-anxious.
“There’s another tunnel,” Gaeth explained, cutting through the group to stand at the front, with Toverre scurrying in his wake like he wasn’t about to let him out of his sight for an instant. I didn’t blame him. Gaeth was good at disappearing. “Should be right around here. They took me up it once with Cornflower, when I was supposed to meet th’Esar. We came out right in one of his audience chambers—huge room, that was. Big hole in the ceiling made of glass. I’d never seen anything like it, and Cornflower neither.”
“Cornflower,” Luvander repeated, shaking his head faintly. It seemed like he felt the need to remark on the name every time it was brought up. I didn’t see what was so wrong with it. No need being stuck-up. “I’m sorry, I merely can’t reconcile the name with the image in my head. If I get the chance to meet her, I think I’ll be expecting a cow.”
“I rather like it,” Raphael murmured. At least he was making an effort to keep his voice down. “I mean, just think—if we’d been allowed to name our own dragons, there could be worse decisions than a simple flower theme.”
“I can’t even imagine what some of them might’ve come up with,” Luvander admitted with a sad nod. “ ‘Titsmercy’ would only have been the beginning.”
“Would you boys have some fucking sense?” Adamo demanded. He turned to me and cleared