Steelhands - Jaida Jones [91]
“It’s a letter home,” Laure said quietly. “What you might expect, really. It says he’s been feeling a bit poorly lately, but his mam’s not to worry because he’s weathered worse winters than what the city has to throw at him.”
I took the letter from her to see it for myself. He’d spelled city with an “s” and two “t”s—sitty—and I felt a kind of affection stir within me; immediately, I sought to overpower it with a more logical sentiment: irritation at the sight of such ghastly penmanship, not to mention his spelling. If I’d known he’d been having such difficulties, I might have offered to write his letters for him in thanks for the loan of those gloves. Then we would have been even. But there was nothing that I could do to help him now that he’d up and disappeared on us.
“I don’t like this,” Laure said, looking around the room as though she were mad at it. I could tell when she wanted to hit something—I only had to hope that I wasn’t nearby when she finally decided to release some of her frustration. “Something’s happened to him; it’s obvious. People don’t just drop off the face of the map like this, Toverre.”
“Now, don’t jump to any conclusions,” I told her, looking over the letter as carefully as I could. Try as I might, I couldn’t divine any hidden patterns or code in the writing—there were too many dreadful misspellings for that. “We’ve barely started looking, and we might yet find some further clue to his whereabouts in all this.”
Whatever had happened to Gaeth, I couldn’t imagine he’d seen it coming. Otherwise, it was more likely that he’d have tried to tell us about it rather than cramming his worries into a badly spelled letter home about his health and the weather.
“I just feel guilty, that’s all,” Laure admitted, going over to examine the fire. “Like I should’ve paid more attention when he was sick, tried to talk to him more. Should’ve come by with some of that soup you got for me, or something.”
“You couldn’t have known,” I told her, placing the letter back where she’d found it. “A person’s illness is normally a cause to speak with them less, not more—at least until it goes away.”
Laure tested the window, but the lock was still firmly in place, and there were no broken pieces anywhere to be found.
“Well, he must’ve gone out the front door,” she said, looking sheepish when she saw the look on my face. “I was only checking—it’s possible someone could’ve climbed up here and snatched him. The door still would’ve been locked, and no one outside would’ve known a thing. You don’t know what happened. Anyway, it’s not a completely unreasonable assumption.”
“No, I suppose not,” I agreed, moving the inkwell from Gaeth’s book so that I could flip through it. Gaeth, it seemed, was in the habit of making notes with his pen in the margin—a tactic Laure found useful as well though I personally found it abhorrent. So messy, and it made the pages of the book stick together, smearing the ink all over and ruining the neat pages.
There was another piece of parchment, folded up into a square and wedged between the pages like a bookmark. I plucked it out carefully, smoothing the creases and holding it up to the light of the window. It appeared to be another letter, though this one shorter, more disjointed than the first. It was evident to me that he’d never intended to send the thing in the first place, so I had even less compunction about reading it than I had for the first. Of course, I would never have wanted someone going through my private documents and diaries this way—but that was why I kept them so well hidden.
The letter began with the same pleasantries as the first letter had, well-wishes to the family—famly—and assurances that he was doing fine here in the big city.
After that, it turned rather strange.
Bin having stranj dreems of late, and heering stranj sounds as well. Sumtimes wen I wake I heer noyses like I am in sum jiant macheen. They sound like hissing and metal, like the inside of a blaksmithy. The room advizers