Steelhands - Jaida Jones [59]
Luvander had always said, to anyone who’d listen to him and even to those who weren’t listening at all, that when he made it out of this war he was going to open up a hat shop on the Rue d’St. Difference, and no amount of the boys’ jeering was ever going to stop him.
With the money he’d received as a stipend for being a Volstovic hero, he proved he wasn’t a liar, although in my opinion it was easier for him with most of the boys not being around to make good on their promises of jeering.
If there’d been any of them left—besides me and Balfour, who was too quiet for it, and Ghislain and Rook, who were smart enough to get their clever asses out of Thremedon because she held too many memories for them—they would’ve been lined up in front of the store howling and hooting and jeering at all hours of the day and night. They’d’ve been proud of him, too, of course, but they’d’ve scared so many customers away he wouldn’t’ve lasted too long. And the last thing I needed to see in this lifetime was Compagnon putting on one of those big velvet hats and parading around to impress all the others, and whatever poor lady shoppers were caught up in the chaos along with them.
Those were my boys, all right.
As it was, the location of the shop was pretty much ideal for those who wanted to say they’d bought their hats from the milliner airman. Him deciding to call it Yesfir after his girl was another stroke of genius, and, I guessed, also a tribute in its own way. Most importantly, Luvander liked to shoot the shit, which was part of the reason, in my personal opinion, he’d wanted to be a shopkeeper in the first place. He loved all that gossip—not the sort that was passed along by the lower maidens about guttings and knife fights, but the high-end crap, like which Margrave was having an affair with which member of the Arlemagne court, and who’d been found having a little ménage à trois with the Wildgrave Gaspardienne?
It was exactly the kind of ambiance I wasn’t suited for, which was why I didn’t spend too much time scaring away his customers and looking out of place, like a sword-and-leatherware mannequin that’d been delivered to the wrong store.
I had been there once, back when it opened, a small place selling outrageously priced hats and some gloves, too. In honor of Balfour, Luvander added to me, privately. But also, apparently, because gloves were all the rage these days.
They probably weren’t anymore, knowing how quick Thremedon fashions could change. One day, all the men and women were dressing like the airmen, and the kids were charging around in the streets pretending they were flying. The next, you saw the ladies wearing silks from the Ke-Han, and everybody was gossiping about what’d happened on the other side of the mountains.
I wasn’t too insulted by it. They were fickle and it was nice not to be the center of attention for a change. Now, if they started building statues in the middle of the Rue of Ke-Han emperors and warlords and shit, then I’d’ve felt slighted, but I didn’t think th’Esar’d be stooping to that level anytime soon. And as for the rest of it, people could wear what they liked.
In the end, I wasn’t too surprised to see that all the hats in Yesfir’s window were shades of blue and green now rather than the patriotic red and gold of a few months before. With all the feathers, it looked like a slaughtering house for peacocks.
A little bell jingled over my head when I opened the door.
“I am so sorry to tell you we don’t serve men here,” Luvander said from behind the counter, just wrapping something up in a box with pretty white paper. The boys would’ve loved to see this, and maybe he knew it. Maybe that was why he was doing it, carrying on the joke for them that couldn’t laugh about it anymore. “Unless you’re buying something for a sweetheart—but I doubt it; what mad wench would settle for you? Or you fell off Proudmouth one time too many in your day—in which case I feel it’s my duty to tell you none of these styles suit you, except maybe the purple one with the white veil.”
“Just browsing,” I told him, glancing