Steelhands - Jaida Jones [214]
There’d been some question—from Professor Adamo in particular—about whether or not Troius should be brought along at all, but Antoinette and the Esarina both felt that it was necessary to include him because of his connection to the dragon. He certainly hadn’t seemed to appreciate his place in the proceedings, but then he was tied to a chair, with Ghislain standing watch over him. I would have questioned my place if I were in his boots. There’d been dried blood all down his face, staining the front of his uniform, which was also caked in tunnel dirt. The sight of him made me ill; it was a sentiment that seemed to be shared by and large with everyone else in the room, however, though perhaps their reasoning was slightly different from mine.
Ghislain, for example, had looked as though he was just waiting for Troius to make his first escape attempt, so that Ghislain could break his nose all over again.
The Esarina—cleaner than Gaeth, I realized quickly, but I couldn’t very well presume to stand by her—had appeared distracted, declining the seat offered to her in favor of pacing the room like a lonely ghost. No doubt she’d been concerned about her husband’s condition; Antoinette had arranged for a few trusted healers to see to him in secret but I could tell from the way everyone had been acting that no one expected him to live, nor did they know what to do with him given either possible outcome.
There was something disturbingly poetic about the Esar having been done in by his own obsession, the very pride of his life that he’d sought to re-create—but I’d done my best to keep that thought private. While everyone else talked business, I’d done my best not to feel as though there were maggots and beetles and worms crawling all over me.
It proved very distracting—making it even more difficult for me to plead my case.
For, given the gravity of the situation, it seemed that the finest minds in the room had all come to the same conclusion. While the rest of us had still been scrabbling at straws, doing our best to make sense of what had already happened, they’d been looking to the future—trying to sort out what step to take next. Immediately it had become very clear to me that no one planned to let the secret of the dragons leave Antoinette’s private room.
That realization had made me very uncomfortable indeed. How, I’d wondered, did they intend to swear us all to secrecy?
“We destroy the dragons and bury the evidence,” Antoinette had suggested firmly. I appreciated that she wished to take charge and had been more than willing to go along with whatever she suggested.
Until, of course, Troius spoke up, giving us all a very grave piece of information. “I’ll go mad if you do that,” he said. From everyone’s reaction, it was clear not too many people cared, and he quickly did his best to clarify his point. “Gaeth as well,” he said. “It’s possible that the others—Laure, was it? And Balfour—will suffer the same fate. Our blood has been mixed with the dragonsouls. If you break them, our minds will be broken.”
I felt a slim shiver of outrage, at which point Luvander gently cleared his throat.
“I don’t believe we should destroy them even if such difficulties hadn’t presented themselves,” he said. “It would be akin to murdering all the witnesses. Unless that is what you intend, in which case, let me inform you, it is a difficult task to slit my throat.”
“The Ke-Han can’t learn of them,” Antoinette countered. “Nor any other country, for that matter. They would all take arms against us—the Ke-Han for violating the terms of the treaty, and Arlemagne in particular would assume we intend expansion. We’d make enemies of them, not allies. Do you really want more war?”
“But you can’t very well just do that to Gaeth,” I said hotly.
Troius cleared his throat. “Nor to the other one, I suppose. And to take that