I risked one glance at Astrid and immediately had to look away or risk losing all my righteous fury. Watching this wonderful evening come crashing down around my once-beloved’s heart tore at mine. I wanted to run to her and embrace her, but instead, I revved the engine. Tilly put some extra oompf into it, which I did not appreciate.
“If you change your mind about Tilly by tomorrow night, let me know. Otherwise, don’t bother summoning me. I won’t reply.”
Without looking back, I kicked Tilly’s motor into gear. Gently, nursing her injured aerovane as I tried not to cry, I guided her into the sky.
REPARATIONS
I SPENT HOURSfixing Tilly’s aerovane. Astrid had done some serious damage, severing control linkages and power lines throughout the wing, as well as cracking her ventral repulsor plate, but with some disassembly and a few hours of careful work with an atomizing sprayer, I managed to reconstruct all the damaged parts and reassemble them correctly. The sun was rising by the time Tilly flexed her vanes and drifted into her stable bay to rest and recharge her thrust plugs. I trudged upstairs to do the same.
“Captain Boylan, so glad you could join us,” Prince Aureli said from behind his datascroll when I slouched into the dining room. “Tell me, Captain, are we to expect you to have a midnight excursion every evening of this summit?”
My upper lip twitched. “I thought I was supposed to be sleeping around for Queen and country. Isn’t that the point of the diplomatic corps?” I gestured wearily to the assembled officers and diplomats. “Are they not carrying out your orders?”
“They are trained in diplomacy and spycraft. When theyperform diplomatic reconnaissance, I can be confident they are not giving away state secrets in turn. You, on the other hand, are a soldier, a supply corps subaltern brought along to advise me on how to best seduce a female demon due to your prior experience. You are not expected to do so yourself, lest you ruin all chance the Royal Commonwealth has of negotiating a diplomatic peace with your impolitic blundering and clumsy flirting.”
“Is that so?” I asked, remembering Prince Aureli’s earlier words of desire, but too tired to remember to hold my tongue. “Or are you merely vexed that you’ve thus far failed to screw my ex-girlfriend?”
Prince Aureli opened his mouth to issue a no-doubt cutting retort, but Boleslaw forestalled him.
“Good gracious, what happened to you? What happened to your coat?”
I shrugged, too tired to think of something interesting. “I went for a midnight ride. I crashed.”
“A ride? With whom?” Boleslaw asked.
“With nobody,” I lied.
“Truly? Not with some female companion? Maybe that League princess you’ve been hanging out with?” Boleslaw asked.
“I said I was alone,” I said, frustration and bitterness creeping into my voice.
“That was incredibly rash. You could have been killed, or worse, caused a diplomatic incident. Honestly, considering the fatality rate amongst jubilee attendees already, your sneaking about alone after dark like an errant schoolboy shows a level of idiocy which borders on the imbecilic,” Prince Aureli said.
“I won’t do it again,” I said, too tired to care. The prince sounded like a general who demanded supplies I didn’t have, then got angry with me when another staff officer hadpreviously procured the desired materiel. I never had time for those nitwits, and I didn’t have time for a lecture this morning.
Especially because he was right.
I turned towards my private chamber. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to get some sleep.”
“Did you at least learn anything interesting on your midnight ride?” Boleslaw asked.
I grunted. “Yeah. Imps hate SI. Really hate them. Think they should all be exterminated. So don’t bring it up.”
Boleslaw must have caught on to the bitterness in my voice because she came after me. Outside the dining room, she asked in a low voice, “Did you crash, or did somebody make you crash?”
I gave her a level stare. “For the sake of not causing a diplomatic incident, let’s all agree I crashed without assistance.”
Boleslaw’s amber eyes were hard, but she nodded.
When I entered my room, Wiktor was waiting for me. He gave me a quick once-over. “I suppose it could be worse.” He helped me out of the grease-stained and ground-shredded mess jacket. “You managed to avoid setting it on fire.”
“So fix it,” I said. “Isn’t that your damned job?”
“Most people don’t make it quite so hard,” Wiktor admonished.
“If you found everything easy, then you’d never improve,” I shot back, struggling futilely with my boots. They fit so well that my feet, swollen from a long night of walking and working, refused to release them. Giving up, I collapsed back onto my bed, throwing one arm over my eyes to block out the sun.
Something tugged gently at my boots. I looked out from under my arm to see Wiktor, squeezing the heel of my boot with one hand and pulling the arch with the other. Gingerly, but surely, my boot came free. Wiktor set my foot down, then took up the other boot.
