The Dragonbone Petticoat

Chapter 13

While Roric was lazy, he was professionally lazy, and while he waited until twenty minutes before his appointment, when he at last deigned to awaken, his eyes snapped open with an abruptness and intensity not unlike a parody of military discipline, and, in no more than one and a half motions, rolled out of his bed and into his boots.

Boots, he reminded himself with a smile. This was going to be a wonderfuld day.

Donning his overcoat with a flourish that twirled his arms through both sleeves and ended with a snap of his fingers—worthy of this contortionist-turned-street magician that failed up into a student, then peace officer—Roric used the remainder of his wayward momentum to snap his belt, crack his fingers, and slip on his tie.

Like sprung clockwork, this gangly ambidexterity--uneven to the point of asymmetry, but seeming all the more balanced for all that—ticked to a halt as he faced the mirror, painstakingly fixed his tie, combed his hair, smoothed the folds of the cape still attached to his overcoat, then took a small scissors to the edges of his moustache and the corners of his eyebrows.

Two minutes after lurching from bed, Roric ambled down Evenlam Avenue. While the peeking sunrise was turning Old Ardem a cool, crisp blue, the gaslamps still glowed a sullen orange, and the foot traffic was that curious mixture of dissheveled workers and well-dressed drunks. Coaches and wagons clopped and rattled down the throughfare, their beasts moseying with heads down, as if they stumbled half-asleep, relying on the reins.

Having stopped in Corner Cafe—which, eight years ago, was on the corner of Everlam and Reyus, before Old Ardem's expanding commercial sprawl sandwiched it between Keener, a sharpening business, and Vulgus's shoe importing shop, so that the Corner Cafe was now two hundred feet from its namesake intersection--Roric sat at the shabby, cutlery-scarred counter, quaffed three coffees as quickly as if he had gills and a second set of lungs with the express design of engulfing coffee, then downed an even shabbier sandwich ringed with tatters of crisp lettuce, tangy bacon, and wet tomato on buttered toast that had been cracked and nearly blackened by the toasting jet, per Roric's order. While the sandwich crumbled and crackled as he devoured it, he was so intent on what he had planned that he was pinching the last corner of toast between forefinger and thumb before he realized that he had forgotten to savor his breakfast in his rush to relish the day.

After a fourth coffee to wash it down, this one with an extra teaspoon of sugar and a sprinkling of cinnamon, he left a larger tip than normal—large for the frugal Roric, if still modest by the spendthrift standards set by the lordlings, heirs and merchant princes that had the run of Ardem—then left Corner Cafe, having not once returned the admiring looks of the owner's daughter, the three freshmen in a booth, nor the voguish young woman who had sidled next to him, layered in so much lacy swank that he had guessed her for either a prostitute or a rebel on her father's coin, and, in either case, none of his business. While an attentive eye might have gathered from Roric's inattention to his surroundings and admirers that he was, like a crab, both introverted and insensitive to his charms, a keener observer would see that it was indifference, for Roric knew himself to be much too conceited to care for anything but his own interests. As there was no shortage of beautiful people in Ardem, Roric found them a crashing yawn unless they piqued his interests. Unfortunately, as the young officer became more and more jaded in his university career, his standards rose and his interests dwindled, until they could be numbered on one hand most days, while on a bad day, he might have only one rude finger to spare the world. But yesterday was a good day, Roric thought, smiling to himself. Not only was the Grand Exhibition shaping up to be a good one, but he had Elessa Whatshername, a self-absorbed Vanoori liar, and Dranwen Jugus, the moneyed and mad-eyed heiress inventor, to call on.

While intrigued about the ugly little heiress, Roric lied to himself about what drew him down Reyus Street, but being a born sophisticate who knew when he lied to himself, this only whetted his anticipation. Although willfully immature and a boy by design, Roric was not so naive to feel himself a boy at heart—at least until his long-corrupted and utterly annihilated boyish nature was resuscitated by an idea so daring he dared not think of it directly, and instead shaded in its probable outctomes, as if capturing the bold silhouette of an eclipse on paper. As he walked, he contented himself by thinking what lay beyond the immense risk: a green land, a bold, cloudless sunshine, and, perhaps, the hospitality of a notorious alumnus.