Steelhands - Jaida Jones [74]
At least this false start made me laugh. It even brought a few tears to my eyes.
If my current accommodations had come with a fireplace, it would have been getting an awful lot of fuel tonight. My mind was just too distracted to compose a letter though I knew the reasons for that well enough. My thoughts were currently in a turmoil I couldn’t conceive of putting into a letter, even if it was Thom who’d written about the matter first, to Adamo. He, at least, had the excuse of being far away from home, adventuring through the desert with only Rook’s moods to worry about. I didn’t blame him for being rash. He’d probably thought that the information was important enough to risk everyone’s getting into a little trouble, and in strictest truth there was nothing illegal about what he’d sent.
By the way Adamo told it, Thom’s story had been a recounting of a very sad and disturbing experience that had begun and ended in the desert. But it did make me wonder how Rook had been able to deal with everything—he’d been there, right in the thick of it, seeing a resurrection none of us had thought possible. While I knew I would never be able to extract anything from him that resembled the truth of his feelings on the matter, I felt like I surely had some idea—the hope and longing, and eventual despair, he’d felt.
Like it or not, we’d all been tarred with the same brush, and now we were connected in ways I didn’t think any of us had ever considered before.
Privately, it made me wonder what I might’ve done had I been in Rook’s place at the time. Certainly I felt the twinge—the same as any man might have—at the promise of being given back someone I’d thought lost forever. But, just like Rook, neither did I believe in that kind of easy solution.
The Esar was a different matter. He’d never been close to the dragons, as we were. They’d been weapons to him, and nothing more.
Adamo and Luvander had both seemed willing to bet that the Esar wouldn’t experience my misgivings, and however much I tried to look at it in a different way, I was beginning to share their opinion. My meeting at the palace seemed all too suspicious in the light of Thom’s information—though what it meant for Margrave Ginette and the fate of my hands, I’d been too stubborn to bring up at the meeting. There was more to be discussed than my problems, which affected no one other than me.
I was suffering for it, though, my hands too stiff to write another letter even if I’d wanted to. I could still move them enough to accomplish all my daily tasks, but the result was stiffness quite similar to that suffered by my extremely arthritic grandfather, and it made me self-conscious to be seen in public.
The clumsiness, too, might have had some part in my frustration. I could no longer write quickly enough to keep up with my thoughts, and the cramps in my wrists shot all the way up my arms to the elbows.
Even though I’d stopped writing, my hand was still firmly wrapped around the pen, and I knew that I’d have to use the other to pry it off. It was becoming inconvenient, not to mention painful, and I had to check the date again just to make sure I hadn’t gotten it wrong.
Some help was coming, at long last.
With timing that could only be called ironic—or impeccable—it had been only after my meeting with the remnants of the Dragon Corps that the Esar had finally contacted me. His letter—to which I hadn’t even been able to reply—informed me that he’d set up an appointment for me with one of the finest magicians for technical work, his own personal recommendation, and I must accept his apologies for not arranging something sooner but he’d been quite busy with this and that.
I’d been relieved just to realize that his letter had nothing at all to do with my shadowy meeting of peers. That was an act the Esar was bound to find suspicious if his present state of mind was as bad as some seemed to believe.
All this living while constantly looking over my shoulder did remind me,