Free Havemercy by Danielle Jaida & Bennett Jones Page A

show it, and was failing miserably.
    “Marius,” I’d said, familiarity and exhaustion both creeping up to make me rather more impertinent than usual. “Leave. It’s late, and I still cherish the idea that I may yet get some sleep.”
    “Yes,” he’d said, but still had made no effort to get up, so that in the end I’d had to be quite firm with him, fairly ejecting him from the ’Versity at an hour that most decent people were abed anyway, so that the pair of us might get some rest.
    It was a left, then a right, or a right, then a left. I breathed deeply to calm myself, feeling nerves disappear in a quick rush of annoyance. It wouldn’t do to begin my day by cursing the architect of the palace, but I quite felt like it by the time I’d passed that same statue of the current Esar for the sixth time, bronzed and brave and quite twenty years younger than he was now.
    “Bastion,” I said heatedly, coming upon his courageous brow once more.
    “Oh,” said a voice from behind me. “Are you lost?”
    I turned and was surprised to see someone of about my own age. He had the dark hair and pale complexion of a nobleman and was fiddling absently with a pair of gloves. He was also, I realized a moment later, wearing a coat with large brass buttons and a high Cheongju collar, and I recognized the colors immediately. He was a member of the Dragon Corps.
    I made to bow, before it occurred to me that teachers did not bow to their students—that bowing might be considered a sign of weakness—and then I didn’t know what to do, so I held out my hand.
    He took it with a bemused smile, and shook it. He was most genteel.
    “I’m Balfour,” he added helpfully, after a spell.
    The newest member, my brain provided from the notes I’d made and committed to memory. Also, it pointed out, I’d not introduced myself yet.
    I cleared my throat loudly, to cover up for the rather obvious breach in etiquette I’d just made, and hoped this wouldn’t make it back to the Chief Sergeant before I’d even had the chance to meet him. “Thomas,” I said. “From the ’Versity. I believe I’m supposed to be meeting your . . . the rest of the corps in the atrium, only I can’t seem to . . . that is . . .” I looked to th’Esar, large and bronzed, as though this were all his fault. And in a way it was—his and the airman Rook’s, and I blamed them both equally.
    “Oh,” said Balfour, with a rush of gladness that threw me off. “I thought I was late! Merritt stole my alarm clock, see, to fish the bells out of it. Come along, then. It’s this way.”
    He set off ahead of me, chattering still, so that I could only assume I was meant to keep up.
    The atrium had walls of glass and a black-and-white-tiled floor that resembled a giant game board. I felt like an expendable and very small plebe piece in a round of Knights and Margraves, but it did me no good to indulge in thoughts like that.
    It would be very warm in the atrium in the full flush of summer, I thought, but today was suitably overcast so as not to turn the room into a giant greenhouse. The sound of raucous laughter echoed from just around the corner.
    I held my nerves in check as firmly as a horse’s reins and stepped after Balfour to meet the Dragon Corps.
    Right away, I could see being outnumbered fourteen to one would make this no simple task. Once Balfour joined them in the row of graceful, gold-backed chairs, I found myself alone on a dais. Fourteen pairs of eyes pinned me. My throat was very dry.
    “Well if it isn’t himself,” said one all the way on the end, whose coat was unbuttoned and whose boots were tall but slouched. He had the lazy, self-satisfied grace of a cat, and I was certain—though I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge—that this was Rook in all his infamy. The smug expression he wore, remorseless and amused, lit his cold blue eyes as if they were trapped behind stained glass. His mouth was unrepentant, almost cruel, his blond hair in knotted