Steelhands (2011) (22 page)

Her face was flushed, her eyes bright. She looked for all the world as though she’d caught whatever fever Gaeth had been suffering from when last we’d met him. Which, bastion help us all, meant I was bound to catch it next.

I pressed the back of my hand against her brow the way my mother had when I was sick—and I’d been a sickly child, suffering every winter for months without fail. If I was to become ill with this disease, then I’d likely caught it already, and there was no further use in being careful. Besides which, Laure’s health was currently more important. She was the one who was suffering.

“You most certainly
do
have a fever,” I told her. I managed to gentle myself, as I knew—sometimes—my attitude was what some might
consider abrasive. “Is there anything I can get for you? A glass of water, perhaps?”

“Sure,” Laure said. “But get that bucket of my stink out of here first. I know you’re dying to.”

“Dying” being the operative word
, I thought but didn’t say, as that would have been cruel. Laure was rarely ever sick—I could only remember her having a fever
once
, and we’d known each other practically since birth. It must have been very awful indeed if it managed to catch
her
unawares.

“I’ll be right back,” I told her, patting her on the shoulder. I cleverly fashioned a mask for myself out of one of her scarves; I also took her gloves, so that I could permit myself to touch the handle of the bucket.

It swayed sickeningly when I picked it up, and I kept my eyes fixed resolutely ahead of me, so that I would not be drawn in by morbid fascination and accidentally look down. This was the stuff of which nightmares were made. I had no desire to torture myself further than I was already being tortured.

To my great relief, the hall in the first-year dormitory was blessedly empty of my raucous peers, each under the impression that his or her importance lay in direct correlation with how much noise they were able to make. While I was attempting to study, or while I was attempting to
sleep
, no one else’s comfort seemed to matter much to my fellow dorm mates. Not when they could organize a rousing indoor ball game, with the corridors as grounds, and kicking the ball up the staircases the ultimate goal. Laure thought it good fun, but the first time I’d opened my door to see what all the commotion was, I’d been hit in the head with the puffed-up leather balloon, which was generally how these games always ended—or apparently began—for someone like me.

When all their fun was brought to an end by the inevitable broken neck, I could only hope that the ’Versity authorities would see an opportunity to take the matter in hand. Until then, I would have to suffer bravely through the noise of a leather ball smacking against the walls and sometimes even my door at all hours of the day
and
night.

The temptation to find the bastion-blasted thing and puncture it with a knife was beginning to overwhelm me. I made it down the stairs and to the disposal unit around back without becoming ill, though I tossed the bucket into the garbage whole, choosing to forgo the more thrifty approach of dumping the contents out and keeping the apparatus
itself for further use. There was another bucket in my room, which I used to store my cleaning supplies, and if Laure found herself in dire need, I would simply have to sacrifice it to the greater good.

One could always buy another bucket.

On my way to her room, I found myself walking by Gaeth’s door—he was two rooms away from mine, the one just above Laure’s. I moved past it, then stopped and retraced my steps, staring at the number by the knob.

In addition to his curious elusiveness within the dormitory halls, I hadn’t seen him attending lectures alongside the rest of the crowd in at least two days. It was possible that, in certain lectures, my ill-advised infatuation with Hal had given me a kind of tunnel vision, blocking out all distractions for the purpose of my private study, but Gaeth wasn’t the easiest person to miss. In fact, he rather stuck out from the crowd though not always for reasons that were particularly flattering. As much as I’d tried to stop myself from noticing him, I’d found it to be a nearly insurmountable task. Since I’d never had such trouble with my focus before, I was forced to assume that it had something to do with
him
. Some stubborn flaw in his nature that was affecting me poorly, like a winter’s wind stripping the paint from a house.

He’d
had this fever—though mercifully, he’d never vomited in my presence—and as such, he might have some helpful information, perhaps as to what balms would soothe Laure’s symptoms and whether there was any medicine I needed to purchase for her at the apothecary to bring the fever down. I’d even have settled for a rough estimation of how
much
vomiting I could expect, if only because I was going to run out of buckets very shortly and would have to purchase more before the shops all closed for the night.

If only another trash pail had been what was jammed into my chimney flue, I thought. It would have made life seem considerably less cruel and random, if only for a moment.

Despite the rising sense of futility I was beginning to associate with dormitory life, I tugged Laure’s scarf down from my face and knocked sharply on Gaeth’s door. For added effect, I imagined I was rapping on his head. For all his good manners, he didn’t seem to understand how rude it was to make someone worry after you this way.

Nothing but silence greeted me.

I even leaned in, as close as I could manage without actually allowing
the old door with its gray, flaking paint to touch my cheek. Something creaked, but it was only the stairwell behind me moaning from all its regular abuse. After I’d counted to ten—forward
and
backward—I decided I’d been quite generous enough with my time.

“Ho, Laure’s friend,” someone called from behind me.

It was a girl, coming up the stairs, and a boy behind her, both of them dark-haired and dressed for walking in the cold. They were carrying shopping bags and had—for reasons that I couldn’t possibly fathom—chosen to engage me instead of passing me by to reach their respective lodgings.

“Are you looking for Gaeth?” the girl asked. It was she who’d called out to me, which was odd, since I hadn’t been aware Laure had been cultivating any female friendships. She usually had difficulties with that; they were so often jealous of her attributes.

“Just thought I’d see if he was in,” I explained, experiencing a slight moment of panic. I had to fetch Laure’s water and give it to her, then head to the apothecary and write to Mother—and what was more, I was certain that I had nothing at all to say to these people, who clearly didn’t even know me by name. Idle conversation would be a waste of time, and an awkward one.

“He hasn’t been in for
days,
” the boy said, scratching his head underneath the wool cap he wore. His hair poked out from under the brim in stiff peaks. “Been looking for him to get a bit of a ball game going, but I haven’t been able to find him. Not in the morning
or
at night, which just seems rude, don’t it?”

“Maybe he has a girlfriend in the city,” the girl said, tugging at the boy’s scarf. It seemed a very stupid suggestion to me, but I thought of Laure and their friendship and managed to keep my mouth firmly shut.

“Not likely,” the boy snorted. He looked past me toward Gaeth’s door and shrugged. “Bet he went home or something. Couldn’t take the city. All those fevers, all the time. You wouldn’t
think
a guy with that many physicians’ appointments would end up sick, but there ya go. Thought he’d last a little longer, but I guess I was wrong.”

“Oh,
don’t
talk about it. I’ve got mine next week,” the girl said, shivering dramatically for her companion’s sake. He stepped closer to her. If he hadn’t been carrying so many bags, I would have wagered he’d have put an arm around her, as well.

“It’s just a little needle,” the boy said, shaking his head.

“It is really very large,” I blurted out, because it seemed like the proper time for a contribution to the conversation.

“It’s not that bad,” the boy said.

“He says that, but he fainted
clean away
once he got back to the dorms,” the girl confided in me, lowering her voice, even though it was impossible to imagine he wouldn’t overhear her. “I couldn’t wake him up at all until dinner.”

“Did he vomit?” I asked.

The girl shook her head. “But he looked like he was going to.”

“That’s enough outta you,” the boy said, scowling and starting off down the hall once again, dragging his friend along with him. “Lemme know if you see Gaeth, though. Tell him the sides are all uneven without him and Thib’s looking for him. Okay?”

“I shall certainly do so,” I assured him, offering a small wave.

Under different circumstances, I’d have returned to Laure
immediately
to tell her of my adventure in the hall, but with matters currently as they were, I first retreated to the kitchens to pour her a cold glass of water.

My conversation with the couple in the hall had left me feeling uneasy, for reasons I couldn’t quite place. My worry for Laure—not to mention cleaning up her mess—had jolted my mood off center, but I found myself thinking of other things, ones that had nothing at all to do with Laure: Gaeth’s vague, preoccupied air when we’d met him in the Amazement; his apparent return home to the country; and the girl’s tale of not being able to rouse her friend once he’d arrived back at the dormitory from his own appointment.

That line of thinking did lead back to Laure, since her sudden illness coincided with her return from the physician. I knew a great deal about fevers simply from having suffered through more than my share, and it seemed impossible to me that Laure’s physicians wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary with her during either of her visits.

Perhaps the city physicians were—as my father had put it before we left—incompetent jackasses, like every other jacked-up charlatan living in the city, but I was unwilling to subscribe to my father’s beliefs just yet. Not even my doctors in the countryside had ever done so
much harm, and they still subscribed to the outdated belief that leeches could actually cure a man of his
cough
.

My room was cold when I returned, but at least the smell seemed to have dissipated somewhat. I could see a cloud of red hair above the blankets that indicated Laure hadn’t moved at all since I’d left her. I set her water down on the bedside table and moved quickly to close the window, since despite how she might have felt about it, bracing herself in winter air was
not
what her constitution required.

The window made rather a loud noise when I closed it, and I heard the rustle of the covers as she began to stir beneath them.

“Toverre?” she rasped, sounding a great deal like my great-aunt Bernadette, who’d smoked clove cigarettes for much of her youth.

“I am here at last,” I told her, turning the lock on the window and making sure it caught before I returned to her side. “And I’ve brought water, just like I promised.”

“M’mouth tastes like pig slop,” Laure said, and she pulled the covers down enough for me to see her bright red face. “I probably
look
like pig slop, too. Don’t even look at me. Don’t tell me if I do.”

“You have never looked like pig slop,” I said, holding out the water and helping her to sit up. “Not even when you were actually covered in it.”

Laure leaned on me instead of the headboard as I held the cup to her lips. Some of it spilled onto my blankets, but at least it was only water. If she was sick in my bed, now that would be a different matter.

“ ’M sorry about making you clean all that up,” Laure mumbled, after she’d had something to drink. “Thought for sure you weren’t coming back. You’d gone off to scrub yourself clean, or something, then ask for a change of rooms because this one’s no good anymore.”

“I’ll do all that later,” I assured her. “I’ll get clean eventually. With a steel brush and everything.”

“I
hate
being sick,” Laure said, leaning her head on my shoulder.

“I’m sure it will pass quite soon,” I told her, stroking her hair with my free hand. “And at your next physician’s appointment—to which I will accompany you—you will beat the attending severely around the head for allowing you to leave in this state.”

Laure chuckled, then let out a small sigh. “You know,” she said, “they didn’t even give me my blood back. I
wanted
it, too, because it doesn’t
do to have it running around out there without me.
They
said they were sorry, but that wasn’t possible. Well ’s my blood, isn’t it? That’s like stealing.”

“You’re delirious,” I told her, gently patting her head. “Get some sleep, and we’ll talk about everything in the morning.”

“Can’t sleep
here,
” Laure said. She hid an overly scandalized gasp behind a clumped-up handful of coverlet. “What will everyone say? What will they
think
?”

“Now,” I said, trying to be reasonable, though I did realize it would injure both our prospects if people were to think we were engaged in
that
kind of behavior together. “I’ll tell everyone you were sick, and there’s no need to worry—no one would believe someone like you would ever spend that … kind of night with someone like
me
, anyway.”

“But we’re going to be married,” Laure said. “We’re going to have to spend that kind of a night together someday.”

Laure had a fever, I told myself, and could not possibly know she was bringing up such a delicate subject. If I was lucky, she wouldn’t remember having asked it at all, and I could also put the difficulty right out of my mind.

Truth be told, I had worried about the same matter myself enough times in the past. Our families would be expecting additions to the fold, little boys and girls they could train better than they’d trained me, and I shuddered at the idea.

“You’re grimacing,” Laure said. “I’m talking about sleeping with you, and you’re grimacing. Makes a girl feel … Makes a girl feel …”