Steelhands - Jaida Jones [4]
But I had to steer clear of those would’ve-beens, else it’d be another lane I was walking down.
“If I’m not wrong, we’re bound to see a bit of snow tonight,” Royston commented, slipping his hands into his pockets alongside my letter. He shivered theatrically—for my benefit, I guessed, since there wasn’t anyone else around who was looking. And also, so anybody watching—if there was even anybody who cared—wouldn’t notice that piece of paper sliding into his coat. Thremedon could be a paranoid place. And, without the war, the gossips had little else to talk about.
The winter chill had come to Thremedon about three weeks prior, though my old bones still hadn’t got properly used to the cold in the air. Roy insisted it was the source of my being “out of sorts,” as he put it, like we both didn’t know that meant real mean and even a downright whoreson sometimes on top of that. Roy’d said something about how I should consider retiring down south, not taking into account that talk of retiring was the one thing that made me madder than all this cold. I wasn’t an old man yet, thanks, despite how my bones felt, and I wasn’t about to lie down and roll belly-up just to make anyone’s life easier. Least of all my own.
“Guess Hal’s in for some shoveling,” I said, because I really couldn’t help myself when it came right down to it. Besides that, what kind of man shied away from a good joke when he had such material to work with?
“Mm,” Royston agreed, so that I wasn’t even sure he’d heard me. He was probably thinking about the contents of that letter, which was what I was meant to be doing instead of twitting Roy like usual. Maybe I thought if I just stuck to my routine, the solution to all my problems would come floating down from the sky like the golden spirit of Regina herself.
The real problem was, I didn’t want to know any of this.
I’d made an all right Chief Sergeant when there’d been a time for one, fair assessment being we’d done our jobs in the end, and that was more than you could say for most. Definitely more than you could say for whatever Ke-Han bastard had my job on the other side of the Cobalts. So I guess you could say I was fairly comfortable with a position of authority. I’d kept those boys in line, after all—a fact that seemed about equal to hog-tying an Arlemagne chevalier and getting him to see reason—and come out the other side relatively unscathed. Mental scarring aside, of course.
Which was all a very fancy way of saying that I’d kept worse than dragons at bay. Certainly—and that was a quote from the letter, too—certainly a man of my caliber would be better suited to judging the information in the letter than anyone else the writer could think of.
I was already regretting being as kind to Thom as I’d been. I should’ve thrown him to the wolves on the first day and let nature take its course; that was the way things worked in the wild.
Except, of course, we were supposed to be better than animals in the wild—civilized people—and acting that way was what’d gotten us the bad-luck charm in the first place.
If I had any kind of luck at all, or if whatever still remained from the war was holding firm, Roy would think of something. He was better suited to the ins and outs of court dealings, ironic as that was, seeing as how he’d been exiled once and I hadn’t.
The street stones were coated in a thin, near-invisible sheet of frost that melted in the shape of our boot prints as Royston and I made our way along the Stretch and toward the fountain, both of us lost in our own private imaginings—though I got the sense that mine were a lot darker than his, at the minute. Probably thinking of Hal shoveling the snow, Regina help us all.
“Whatever you—we—end up deciding,” Royston said, breath puffing up little clouds of steam in the cold air, “I feel like you ought to know that things … aren’t exactly copacetic in the Basquiat at present.”
“I’d be real interested to hear what that has to do with me,”