Steelhands - Jaida Jones [98]
“She’s the one who ended up seeing to Balfour’s hands,” I explained, “since Ginette’s nowhere to be found.”
“Well, I suppose that makes sense,” Roy said slowly. “I don’t know her personally, but she’s one of the new Margraves—handpicked by the Esar to replace those we lost, so he can be sure that at least someone in the Basquiat puts him first. I haven’t seen her at the Basquiat since her initiation, actually. I took it as a good sign. It seemed to me that meant she wasn’t spying on us.”
“Really does like to have his finger in every pie,” I said. It was common sense, I guessed, and if I couldn’t keep track of a classroom, then I probably wouldn’t have been able to keep track of an entire country. All those lords and ladies, magicians and Margraves, diplomats and servants and citizens—the more I thought about it, the more I figured I’d’ve gone mad long ago, my brain cracked down the middle like a rotten egg.
“He is the Esar,” Royston said with a shrug. He stood, crossing to the sink and pouring the coffee out, peering after it as it gurgled down the drain. “Shall I see what I can find out about Germaine? Other than her penchant for wearing brown?”
“She’s got a skill for machinery, it seems,” I explained.
“And so you are suspicious of her sudden appointment,” Roy concluded for me. “Since she is one of the Esar’s, it would make sense that—if he did anything about this new technology—he’d probably have her working on it right this very moment.”
I polished off my sandwich, wiping the crumbs on my napkin. “That’d make sense,” I agreed. “Except why would he have her doing common physician’s appointments with ’Versity students?”
“He wouldn’t,” Roy replied.
“Well, he is,” I told him. “And you’d better watch out for your … boy, too, since apparently there’s some kind of fever going around.”
“It means so much to me when you act concerned,” Roy said.
“Doesn’t matter to me one way or the other,” I explained, “because I haven’t gotten sick in over fifteen years. But you—”
“I don’t enjoy the feeling of congestion,” Roy replied tartly. “And once, when I sneezed, I exploded the living room.”
“I wish I had you in my classroom for practical demonstrations,” I said. “If those pansy-sniffers thought they had reason to cry before, I’d like to see them after—”
“No thank you,” Roy said, though I could see he was regretful. “As much as I enjoy teaching a good lesson, I’ve been in enough trouble for one lifetime. Still, I’ll see what I can do about this Margrave Germaine. Looking after ’Versity students and Balfour’s hands, you say?”
“For whatever reason,” I replied.
“Let’s hope I have more luck with this one,” Roy said.
At that, we heard the door down the hall swing open and Hal’s voice calling for Royston to see if he was in. Something shifted on Roy’s face, a change from loneliness to contentment, and he didn’t even try to hide it.
If Hal ever did anything to hurt that, I thought, I wasn’t just sitting by on the sidelines of Roy’s ill-fated love life anymore.
“You look positively gruesome,” Roy said, snapping me out of my vengeful thoughts. “Is something else wrong?”
“It’s that coffee stink,” I told him, and went to dump the contents of my own cup down the drain.
LAURE
Toverre was supposed to meet me for supper, at which point I supposed I’d apologize to him for being sharp-tempered, but only if he’d apologize to me. Though it was hard to explain—even to myself—what I wanted him to apologize for.
But the more time I spent in the ’Versity, counting up the number of lecturers that were male versus them that were female—and the more time I spent seeing how some of the pretty students flirted with the professors to bring up their marks—the more frustrated I became. Even Toverre, with his picky little self and his barbed words, had a better chance of being who he wanted to be—whatever