Steelhands - Jaida Jones [79]
“Don’t worry; I think I’ll be giving her an earful myself, next time I go,” I said, stretching out my arms before I plodded over to the door. I needed to get back to my own room, change these fever-stinking clothes, and maybe comb my hair a little bit, so I looked slightly less deranged. Maybe I didn’t care about my appearances as much as Toverre thought I should, but I had to draw a line somewhere.
Toverre paused only to fold up the blankets I’d knocked onto the floor, then followed after me.
My room was stuffy and hot, and I immediately opened a window to let some fresh, cold air in.
“Your friend Thib lost consciousness after his appointment,” Toverre informed me, as I dug into my dresser for a fresh change of clothes I could take to the ladies’ while I bathed. “His lady friend told me, though she hadn’t yet had her appointment, so she was just fit as a fiddle. And we both saw what Gaeth looked like after he came back from his. You don’t think it’s another plague, do you? Something to do with the magicians? It’s possible they didn’t cure it—Oh bastion, Laure, why have we come here?”
“Stop that,” I told him. “I don’t think that’s it at all.” I had one black sock in my hand, but I couldn’t for the life of me dig up the other. Being turned away also meant that Toverre couldn’t see how worried he was making me with all this fearful talk, which normally I didn’t fall for, but he’d finally gotten to me.
One of us had to be the calm one, and it wasn’t ever going to be Toverre.
Privately, I didn’t like the sound of it: people fainting dead away in the physic’s chair and coming back with all these fevers. I’d just assumed I’d caught it from Gaeth, but Toverre’d seen him more times than I had and he had the constitution of a newborn baby in wintertime. It didn’t make much sense for me to get sick ahead of him. There was also a chance I’d caught it from Thib. But if by “lady friend” Toverre meant Eveline, and she was still in fine health, then once again it didn’t make sense for me to be the one who got stuck under the weather. I knew how much Eveline liked Thib, and how much Thib liked Eveline, and how unlikely me catching Thib’s fever before Eveline was.
As much as Toverre liked his crazy theories, I was starting to think he wasn’t so off base with this one. Not that it was a theory so much as it was a group of nasty suspicions. But once we had the chance to talk to Gaeth, I told myself, there was bound to be some simple explanation. Then I could have a good hearty chuckle at myself, and save the mystery solving to the pay-by-hour detectives.
“Here,” Toverre said finally, elbowing me out of the way with his pointy little limbs. “I can’t bear to watch this miserable attempt a minute longer.”
Quick as you please, and without throwing anything on the floor the way I usually did, he put together an outfit that passed both his approval and mine, though it involved stockings instead of socks, and one of my newer dresses instead of the plain cotton shift I’d been holding.
“The green will give you some color,” he explained, all but pushing me out the door, “and it’ll make your eyes stand out wonderfully; you’ll see. And even if you don’t,” he added, with what appeared to me to be just a slight hint of jealousy, “everyone else will.”
“We’re just going to lecture,” I protested.
“You’ve been sick,” Toverre said, as if that explained itself. “If you don’t put your best foot forward and make an effort not to look like a pickled herring, I guarantee you Professor Adamo will write you off as weak stock and that will be the end for us. Of course, if what you desire is to cultivate the impression that you’re about to drop dead at the foot of his desk, then by all means, the outfit you’d picked out was a marvelous choice.”
Somehow, he managed to compliment a girl and gravely insult her at the same time. He was lucky he was attached to me because nobody else in all of Volstov would ever have put up with it.
I stopped him just short of entering the ladies’ with me, though for a moment there