"What was it like?" I ask, when it's over. "Having Elias Charbon 'take care' of you. What happened?"
I'm at the desk; Aimée's home for one of her rare stretches, sitting on the couch in a crater scooped out of the mat of toys, Sim asleep on her lap. "It was just life," she says. "What should it have been?"
"You don't think much of him now," I say carefully; the look she gives me shows she understands my understatement is intentional. "Was that always true?"
"I didn't always have a little boy to protect."
I make myself say it. "But you were little yourself."
She twines a strand of Sim's golden hair around her finger, making sure not to pull it taut at the base. "I don't remember him well from when I was very little. He came around a lot. He and my mother had a lot of arguments. He was very sweet to me, or tried to be—he had an idea of how girls liked to be talked to, his voice would go high and he'd say how pretty I was, or my clothes were. Ask about boys and school. I didn't like those visits. I liked it better when he'd bring his friends to meet and talk, even if they would drink. You can get away from a drunk—he can't catch you, and he won't hate you for it in the morning."
"Sounds like you had a read on him all along."
She shakes her head. "Those were bad years. He borrowed from us; stole too, I think. Though he would bring food and clothes at least some of the times we needed them, and that was often. Shabby stuff, but still a shield against death.
"Then he gave my mére a bag of shekels.
"And it wasn't the last. He'd still have the men from the 7th over, but they'd drink good spirits, now, and touch glasses and cheer.
"There were a few good years of that. He stopped paying attention to me, mostly. I don't mean he pretended I didn't exist—he just stopped pretending we were friends. And then we got to be friends, a bit. He talked about the Hoofstone mission." She shudders. "Can you imagine? The Dandelion Knight inside the sixth's strongest fortress, like maggots in bread. Papa and Elias and Jesson shooting literally at shadows, by bioluminescence that could fail any minute, moving forward inches an hour for two whole days. They were poisoned, you know. The whole unit was. That's why they were discharged. Mama told me someone from the government came by to monitor him every month until he left."
"That sounds familiar," I said, and Sim pipes up from Aimée's lap to say "What would you know about it?"
He takes a few minutes of merry shit for eavesdropping and Aimée sends him off to bed. When he's quiet, she picks up the story again.
"Nothing lasts forever, I guess," she says. "Eventually the bags of shekels stopped coming. Food and clothes, as needed, they kept coming, but the same ratty shit that he gave us when he was poor. And, do you know, it took me maybe a year to realize he really was—that this wasn't simply holding out because he didn't like us any more, that wherever the money had come from, it was gone.
"By that time I was almost through at the lycée, and people started noticing." She looks to the side and presses her lips together. "Look, even when we were flush, you'd have called us poor. That's all right; everyone on the peripheral sixth is poor, no matter how much cash they have. But there's poor, and then there's hard up. And when I was just poor, I wasn't as kind to the hard-up souls at the lycée as I might have been. And when people noticed that I was hard up again..."
Aimée lets the sentence trail off. "Just because your allies desert you," I say, "doesn't mean your enemies flock to your banner, does it?"
She gives a little, bitter smile. "It does not, in my experience," she says.
I run the numbers in my head. "That takes you through the lycée," I say. "And you're what, now, twenty-eight?"
"Twenty-four," she says. Don't forget, she looks a hard-lived forty. "There's one kind of person who does flock to your banner when no one else will, of course."
"Your loyal friends?"
She looks at me as though I'm joking. I ask myself whether I had been, and don't quite know the answer. "The person who wants the very last of you," she says. "The person who'll take the scraps that even the carrion crows left behind."
I look through the door that opens on the hallway, down toward Sim's bedroom.
Aimée follows my gaze and says "Not the father." The small smile's now no longer bitter, just a little rueful. "Oh, he wanted what he wanted, but I wanted the same, and we left each other no poorer for the taking." I wait for her to say richer, even, or words to that effect—but she doesn't, and I find myself condemning her for it, as though she were not entitled to some ambivalence at being forced to raise a child alone. "You know the sort I'm talking about. They give you something; then, when you want more, they set a price because they know you'll pay. He scared them off me for a bit." She gives a hollow chuckle here, like dropping a plass cup on a tile floor. "I thought I was done then. But they reassigned him to a patrol on the fourth and fourth. Folio and Binlang, you know the area?" I nod, naturellement. "And it was free again, one time only, and it was like those weeks with him had never been.
"He scared Elias off too." The smile again, the bitterness returned. "And when he was gone, Elias came back. See the similarities, there? I didn't. Elias never cared that I was using. But as soon as he learned that I was pregnant, he got me clean. And I was so grateful for it that I didn't think twice when Sim was born, and once I was recovered enough to walk around again, he offered me a little something to celebrate. He wanted me clean, to keep Sim healthy—"
"—and then he wanted you preoccupied."
Aimée looks at me, her eyes huge and bright and miserable, not even a semblance of humor on her face. "Preoccupied," she says. "That's the word I'll use for it from now on."
I don't dare press her. I want to say something comforting, but what is there? "Sim's a strong boy," I manage at last. "He'll grow up well, I think."
"Maybe," she says. "As long as I'm not too 'preoccupied' to protect him." She shakes her head slowly. "Elias took such good care of him when he was tiny. I don't know when it started. Have you noticed I don't let him play with dolls?"
I look around the toys that carpet the room like varicolored mold or lichen. There are autokinetons, ornithopters, buildings and building blocks, animals fantastic and mundane; costumes, armor, wands and weapons; books, balls, a kitchen in miniature with plass food, cookware, and utensils. Nothing with a human shape.
"That was how I found out," she says, her voice rough and cracked as bare earth in summer. "Even a preoccupied mother notices that kind of play."
"Not always," I say, as though I know anything about it. "And not everyone who does, will do what needs doing."
"Who says I did what needed doing?"
"Imen's horn, Aimée, it seems to have gotten done, does it not?"
We wait for a long time in silence, but when I move to leave she says "Please don't go," so I sit.
At last she says what I'd been dreading to hear. "My mother died not long after Sim was conceived." She casts her eye over to the box of documents. "We took that heliotype, and a couple of weeks later she was gone. She would have protected Sim. I think Elias knew that."
Do you really think he's that dangerous? I want to ask, but she does, and she'd know better than I would, so I don't ask. Instead I go for platitudes. "The griffons crack everybody's bones in the end," I say, "but today Sim is safe in his house with all the toys he could think to ask for. Don't take credit for it if you don't care to. Just believe that things are better."
"For now," she says.
"That's what I'm saying," I say.
"What if I put out a dandelion?" she asks, leaning her head back to stare at the ceiling. "What if the Dandelion Knight gave me a wish? I'd publish anything they want if they'd get Elias out of my way."
"You think that's true, then?" I ask. "What Gauthier wrote?"
"What do you think?"
"I think it's his last letter, Mlle Leblanc," I say. (Remember that, for all our revealing boudoir conversations, I am still, at this point, her employee.) "I think perhaps he knew what he risked when he went to visit Jesson Desrosiers. I think perhaps he was writing something romantic for a little girl who was going to lose her father very soon—