No. The person responsible for the salamander was not on board this ship, and it wasn’t right for Gavin to take his anger out on any of them. He thought a long moment with the ship hovering high over foreign farmland. Despite his decision, it was hard to make the words come-the anger was still there.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” he said at last, with Phipps translating. The words were clipped and forced.
“Thank you?” said Li.
“For delivering the salamander. To me.” The men. The innocent families. He had to think of the families. Abruptly, and to Li’s surprise, Gavin switched to Chinese.
“I am glad you were able to properly give me my salamander. As I requested. Because I know you would never touch a Dragon Man without his express request. And I clearly requested it.” Gavin ground his teeth. “Because, as we all saw, I wanted the salamander, and I needed your expertise for its insertion. I. . thank you, Lieutenant.”
Li dropped to the deck and kowtowed again. “My gratitude, great lord.”
Gavin couldn’t bring himself to respond. Instead, he strode to the gunwale and stared at nothing for a long time. Eventually, Li and the soldiers rose and silently stole away, as if they were afraid Gavin was a bomb that might go off at any second.
Alice slipped up beside him without speaking for some time. Then she said, “That was a good thing you did. Phipps tells me that as long as you keep the salamander in, the men’s lives may be spared.”
“May be?”
“Nothing’s certain. Phipps says this is a strange area for Chinese law. But you’ve helped, and I know it hurt you a lot.” She stroked his arm. “You’re the bravest man I know, Gavin Ennock.”
“There’s other difficult news, I think,” he said to change the subject, and he repeated the conversation between Li and Phipps to her, the one about the emperor’s planned invasion of Europe to take place once he was sure the clockworkers were gone and Alice’s cure was neutralized.
“You’re right,” she said. “That is bad news. The question is, how do we stop it?”
“I don’t know.” He glanced at the spider on her arm. “You can start the cure spreading through China, if you get the chance.”
Alice’s face was tight. “If they don’t kill me.”
“You only have to scratch one person to spread it.”
“It’s not that simple, and you know it. Any number of factors could slow or even halt the cure entirely. The person I give it to might die or stay home or simply not transmit it to anyone who can carry it. A mountain range can block its passage for years, as could a desert. Or it could simply fade away like some illnesses do. That’s what seems to have happened in Europe, anyway. No one truly understands how diseases spread, and my cure spreads like a disease. I need to ‘infect’ as many people as possible, and even then, there’s no guarantee it’ll reach the entire world.” She sighed sadly. “Sometimes I think the plague will be with us forever.”
He didn’t know what to say just then, so he kept silent, though he tightened his grip on her hand. Phipps had taken the helm and was piloting.
“And now it occurs to me to ask,” she continued, “how you learned Chinese so quickly.”
“The plague is accelerating. A bad sign.”
“But you haven’t had a fugue in days, darling,” she said. “That must be a good sign. I think it’s those clockworker fugues that are bad for you. They burn out your mind faster, like a candle or even a firework. The more you give in to the plague, the more it takes from you. Perhaps,” she continued hopefully, “you’re going into remission or even getting better.”
“Don’t do that.” Gavin rapped the wooden helm with his knuckles, then stamped his foot and whistled two notes. “It’s bad luck on an airship to say what you think will happen. It means the opposite will come true.”
“Is that what that little dance was about?”
He looked sheepish. “You have to distract the sprites so they don’t remember what you just said.”
“It certainly distracted me. I thought it was boyishly handsome.”
Without thinking, he said, “Am I that?”
She blinked. “Are you what?”
“A boy. To you?” He hadn’t realized the idea had been bothering him until he said it aloud. Now he held his breath, feeling tense again. Of course she would say he wasn’t. Of course he would pretend to accept what she said at face value. But no matter what she might say, he wasn’t the traditional sort of man, and even though she had left England behind, Alice had brought a great deal of its traditional mind-set with her. She still refused to do more than kiss him until they were married, even though his body ached for her, and he knew she wanted him. Just standing next to her aroused desire in him, even with the soldiers looking on. They hadn’t begun a physical relationship largely because Alice didn’t want to risk getting pregnant, not when Gavin was living under a death sentence. Gavin himself didn’t want to create a child who would grow up without a father as he had done. But he also suspected that Alice was holding back a little. The acceptance of his marriage proposal on the Caspian Sea had been tentative, hesitant. Was her love the same way?
“Listen to me, Gavin Ennock.” Alice placed her hand atop his on the rail. “When I look at you, I don’t see an airman. I don’t see a fiddler or a singer. I don’t see a nineteen-year-old. The one thing I see is the man I love.”
Gavin stared ahead into empty sky, not convinced.
“And not only that, darling.” Alice leaned closer to his ear. “I destroyed one empire for you, and now I’m going to destroy another. How can you doubt anything after you hear that?”
Something broke inside, and he had to laugh. “All right,” he snorted. “You win.”
“That’s not a joke, darling.” Her eyes were smoke. “When your strong arm pushed me behind you, I never wanted you more.”
Desire for her made his skin hot, and he lowered his voice. “Really?”
“Oh yes.”
“Now I really wish those soldiers weren’t aboard.”
She sighed. “As do I, darling. As do I.”
Lieutenant Li, who was at the front of the ship standing lookout, shouted, “Peking!” just as the explosion knocked Gavin to the deck.
Chapter Ten
A hatchet was splitting Alice’s head in two. A dull hatchet. With chips in the blade. She groaned and tried to open her eyes, but they were gummy and stuck shut. Her mouth tasted like dry paper.
A gentle grip closed her hand around a cup and pushed it toward her mouth. Alice resisted at first, but her body was tired and heavy and great clods of pain kept thudding about her skull, and she finally drank. The warm liquid was overly sweet and tasted of licorice. Absinthe. Alice grimaced, but after a few swallows, her headache receded and the heaviness left her. The gentle hands helped her sit up, and a damp cloth washed her eyes open. Alice blinked uncertainly. She was sitting on a bed in a smallish room crammed with furniture, most of it red, all of it Chinese. What looked like plain white sheets had been hung over other wall hangings for reasons she couldn’t fathom. A small barred window let in a bit of breeze. The person helping her up was a maid in Chinese dress, though her clothes were white. Her upper lip had been split all the way up to her nose, giving her something of a canine appearance.
In another bed sat Susan Phipps, her uniform rumpled, her hair down and tangled in her monocle. Alice automatically put her hand up to her own head and found herself in a similar state. The corks on her fingertips caught in her hair. She cast about, befuddled. The last thing she remembered was talking to Gavin aboard the Lady.