Steelhands - Jaida Jones [227]
I’d get over it, sure, but I didn’t want Toverre to be lonely. Then again, I was doing this for his sake as much as for mine. He had Gaeth, to scare off or—this being the more frightening prospect—to latch onto in his own prickly way. I’d have to come up to the city proper to let ’em both know what’d happen if they messed things up. If Gaeth was worth it, he’d stay the course. But something told me he wasn’t the type to spook easy.
“Thank you,” Toverre said finally, breaking the silence. “Mother will be so sad, though.”
“Da’s going to be scandalized.” I sighed. “It just doesn’t seem fair to anyone else—if there ever is anyone else, I mean, so don’t get that look, ’cause so far there isn’t—to make ’em live with me having a fiancé when we both know that doesn’t mean anything to either of us.”
“It did mean something,” Toverre corrected me, a stickler for details, no matter how sensitive the topic. “Just not what anyone else would assume a betrothal meant. I will say that if I had to be engaged to anyone, I count myself incredibly lucky that it was you.”
“Well, same to you,” I said; I couldn’t keep from grinning like a puffed-up pigeon. It wasn’t every day Toverre handed out compliments, and he gave them to me least of all on account of how I was the one who knew him best and he didn’t have to charm me. “Just imagine if you’d been engaged to some skinny little wisp. Who’d’ve killed all the spiders in your dorm room for you?”
“Please,” Toverre said, holding up his hand with a brief, violent shudder. “I’ve only finished eating. Don’t speak of it.”
We were gonna be just fine, Toverre and me. Now that we weren’t engaged anymore, we could focus on being friends, which’d always been the best part of the arrangement—at least, that’s how it was for me, anyway. I figured it’d do him some good to come visit me and Gaeth at the estate, too; he’d already proven he could get down and dirty the same as the rest of us if he really needed to, and a little dirt hadn’t killed him. Knowing that’d made me real happy—I could believe there was hope for us yet if even Toverre was capable of getting over himself.
Judging by the way he acted around Gaeth, he’d gotten over more than just his quirk about keeping everything shipshape. All them dragons and missing students seemed almost to have knocked the notion of falling in love with someone new right out of his head. Even if that’d been all we got out of coming to the city, it would’ve lived up to Toverre’s high expectations.
And even if neither of us had expected things to shake down the way they did, I figured we’d handled ourselves okay for two hayseeds from the country who nearly got robbed our very first day in Thremedon.
“If that’s all, I suppose I’d better go and help Gaeth pack,” Toverre said, folding his napkin and stacking the plates up neatly, cutlery sorted by order and balanced on the very top plate. “Otherwise he really will be a mess when the two of you get up there. I should think you’d be more concerned about your corps looking dignified.”
“It’s not my anything,” I pointed out quickly. “And don’t call us that. We don’t have a name.”
“Speaking of names,” Toverre began shrewdly, “have you named your dragon yet?”
I sighed, casting a glance toward Toverre’s gleaming window, the only one in the first-year dorms that you could actually see through when it was closed. Maybe I’d been overthinking the whole name thing, but once I named this dragon, she was gonna be the one to live with it. I didn’t want to pick something like Troius had, just because it sounded strong, and it didn’t seem like proper tribute to name her after my ma, even if she would’ve liked it.
There was a third option that’d been swirling around in my head for a while now—since I’d first clapped eyes on her, in fact—and Toverre wasn’t gonna accept an “I don’t know” for an answer. All the dragons I’d ever been mad for had been given real specific names, and even