Steelhands - Jaida Jones [226]
“You mind excusing us for a bit, Gaeth?” I asked.
Despite being a little slow sometimes, like a horse that was bred for racing but turned out placid, Gaeth always picked up on things when you least expected him to, and he never made things uncomfortable by asking too many questions.
“I’ve been needing to pack, anyway,” he said. He folded his napkin—a habit he’d picked up from Toverre—and excused himself from the table.
“But I was going to help him,” Toverre protested, already getting twitchy. Now, he was someone who could read all the books in all the libraries in all of Volstov but never know how to read a room. “Otherwise he’ll mix all his socks together.”
“It’ll be okay,” Gaeth assured him. “I’ll just be taking them out again, anyway.”
“But you’ll be taking them out in the wrong order,” Toverre said.
“I’ll see you both later,” Gaeth said with a half-salute and slipped out of the room.
“Well, I hope you’re happy,” Toverre told me peevishly. “Now he’ll be wearing mismatched socks for the rest of his life.”
“You won’t even be with us at Antoinette’s place most of the time,” I pointed out. “You’ll be here, studying, terrifying professors with your handwriting.”
“But I’ll know,” Toverre explained. “And what about when I come out to visit?”
I was surprised he even wanted to—I could tell the dragons made him uncomfortable, though thank bastion he hadn’t given me tips yet on how to polish one. I couldn’t really blame him since to anyone on the outside, it was impossible to tell what they were thinking because no one else but us connected ones could hear ’em talking. And after the big display in the tunnels, we knew how dangerous they could be. Ironjaw was still recovering, so my girl told me, and being tetchy about it to boot. But she didn’t have the same constitution my girl had; Troius was probably going crazy from listening to all her complaints.
Still, it was good to know there’d be something familiar amidst everything new, a face I recognized that’d remind me of who I used to be, not who I was changing into. Toverre was my best friend, and I wanted things to stay that way.
One thing, however, had to change.
“Hey,” I said, never one to put off what needed to be said, “don’t you think maybe we shouldn’t get married?”
“Oh,” Toverre said, wilting but also looking very relieved. “Yes, I rather think that’s an excellent idea.”
“All right, then,” I replied. “So it’s off. That’s a relief.”
“You could have been a little more delicate about it,” Toverre added, reaching across the table to pile the crumbs from Gaeth’s dinner together, swiftly sweeping up the pile with his napkin. “Because I would have been a very good husband.”
“I wouldn’t have been clean enough for you,” I replied.
“I would have been clean enough for both of us,” Toverre said, but he was smiling wistfully. “This means I will never be married, you know.”
“Me neither,” I told him, bristling. “I mean …”
“You never know what could happen,” Toverre cautioned. “You’ll have thousands of offers—but it will take only one.”
“It’s not something I wanna think about yet, anyway,” I said, wishing this conversation was over with already. Talking about suitors was making me uncomfortable, all the more so because the idea wasn’t so fuzzy as it used to be. Had a face attached to it, so to speak, which made it all the more terrifying. “I’m eighteen, and I’ve got things I want to take care of. I don’t wanna be anybody’s fiancée. No offense. Though it was funny since everybody always looked shocked to hear it.”
“Much to my embarrassment,” Toverre said.
We sat in silence for a little while, and I thought about how free I felt but also how sad. It’d just been a fact of life for so long that being without it made me feel like I was adrift at sea. It was important though, mostly because I was positive now that neither of us thought about the other in that way—not even a little—and it didn’t seem