“Don’t,” I said.
“Or?” he said.
It was a blatant challenge, and one I had to meet if I were to have any authority at the Hall. I subvocalised the Words and armoured up in a moment, the silver strange matter flowing over me like a second skin. I made a silver fist, and held it up before Roger’s face. And as he watched, I grew thick silver spikes out of the knuckles. Roger surged forward inhumanly quickly, his fingers like claws, his impossibly wide smile full of teeth like a shark’s. I stood my ground and punched him in the face with all my armoured strength behind it. The blow stopped him dead in his tracks, the sheer force of the impact slamming his head back so hard it would have broken an ordinary man’s neck. Roger staggered backwards, and then quickly recovered his balance. He shook his head slowly and put a hand up to his face. His nose was broken, though no blood flowed. Roger gripped the broken nose with his left hand and snapped it back into place with a painful-sounding click. I winced at the sound, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.
“Show-off,” Harry said easily to Roger. “Now behave yourself. I guaranteed your behaviour, remember? You want to make me look bad?”
“Of course. I’m sorry, Harry.” Roger smiled briefly at me. “It won’t happen again. No hard feelings, I trust?”
I armoured down and looked at him, and then at Harry. It occurred to me that the two of them might have set this up in advance, just to see what the new armour could do… Tricky, underhanded, and just a little paranoid. They were Droods, after all.
“Let’s go back to the Hall,” said the Armourer. “It’s getting cold out here.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Sons and Lovers
“It’s good to have you home again, Harry,” said the Armourer. “And your…friend. Come with me and I’ll find you someplace to stay. Don’t quite know where I’m going to put you, though. The Hall is so crowded these days you couldn’t swing a cat without taking someone’s eye out.”
“We could always put them in the dungeons,” I said.
The Armourer looked at me coldly. “You know very well we don’t have dungeons anymore, Eddie. They were converted into billiards rooms long ago.”
“You have billiards here?” said Molly, brightening up.
“Oh, yes,” I said. “They’re very popular. In fact, you have to queue to get in.”
“One more joke like that, and I’ll rack your balls,” said Molly.
“What’s wrong with putting me in my father’s old room?” said Harry. “The Matriarch hasn’t got around to reassigning it yet, has she? Thought not. Dear Grandmother always was very sentimental…where her son was concerned. And who has a better right to the Gray Fox’s room, than his only legitimate son?”
“Well, yes … I suppose so,” said the Armourer. “Yes, James would approve. Come along with me, Harry, and…Roger, and I’ll get you settled in.”
“See you later, Cousin Eddie,” said Harry.
“Yes,” I said. “You will.”
The Armourer led the two of them away across the lawns and towards the Hall. Molly and I watched them go, while the gryphons wandered back to crouch beside us, snorting and growling unhappily. I patted a few heads and tugged a few ears, and they wandered off again, happily enough. It bothered me that they hadn’t been able to predict Harry and Roger’s arrival in advance. Made me wonder what else the hellspawn might be able to hide from us.
“And this was starting out to be such a good day,” I said finally. “Now Harry’s back, just itching for a chance to stick a knife in my back, and if that weren’t enough he’s brought a half-breed demon with him. I mean, I’m not prejudiced, but…dammit, he’s a thing from Hell!” I looked at Molly. “Did you really go out with him?”
“Not one more word out of you, Eddie,” she said coldly. “Or you will never see me naked again.”
We went back to my room in the Hall. I felt an urgent need for a little down time. When I decided I was going to have to move back into the Hall, so I could keep a proper eye on things, I had to decide where I was going to stay. My old room was long gone, given over to someone else in the family when I left to be a field agent. (Crying Free! Free at last! all the way.) And it wasn’t like I had any fond measures of the pokey little garret room. Too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, and every time the wind blew in the night, I had to get out of bed and jam a handkerchief into the gap between the window and the frame to stop it from rattling. (The family has never believed in central heating; makes you soft.)
Since I was running the family now, I could have just taken any room I fancied. I could have thrown the Matriarch out of her special suite, and no one would have stopped me. But I didn’t have the heart. It would have been cruel… to Alistair. You big softy, Molly said later, when I told her, but she was only partly right. Even then, I knew I didn’t want to make an enemy of Martha Drood because I might need her help…
In the end, I just chose one of the better situated rooms in the west wing and booted out the poor beggar who was living there. He in turn picked someone lower down on the food chain and evicted them, and moved into their room. And so it went, for several days, until you couldn’t move in the corridors for people hauling their belongings from one room to another. Presumably the poor bastard at the bottom of the pile ended up moving back into the communal dormitory with the children.
(There are no guest rooms in the Hall. Only family gets to live in the Hall.)
Even so, Molly wasn’t especially impressed when she saw where she’d be staying with me. She just couldn’t get her head around the fact that members of the most powerful family in the world only got one room to live in. But that’s what happens when a family’s numbers expand faster than we can build on new wings. Another generation or two and we’ll have to find or build a new home, but no one was ready to talk about that yet.
I let us into our room, and Molly immediately ran over to the bed and threw herself onto it. She sank half out of sight into the deep goose-feather mattress and sighed blissfully.
“Still don’t care much for the room, but I do love this bed. I feel like I could sink all the way down to China.”
“What’s wrong with the room?” I said patiently.
“Far too much like a hotel room,” Molly said firmly. “All very luxurious, I’m sure, but it has no character. It’s…cold, impersonal.”
I smiled at her. “When did you ever stay in hotels, oh wicked witch of the woods?”
She wriggled cosily on the bed. “Oh, I get around. You’d be surprised, some of the places I’ve been. And it’s not like I can take my forest everywhere with me… Still, I’ll say this for hotels… I love room service. You just pick up the phone and they bring you food, every hour of the day and night. I always pig out at hotels. Particularly because I never stick around to pay the bills…”
“There’s no room service to be had here,” I said sternly. “And you’re expected to clean up your own mess. There are no servants among the Droods, or at least, not as such. We’re all encouraged from an early age to look after ourselves… Builds character and self-reliance.”
“How very worthy,” said Molly. “Let it be clearly understood between us that I do not do worthy. Was this really the best room you could have chosen, out of all those available?”
“I chose this room because it used to be my parents’,” I said. “Back when I was a child. I can just about remember visiting them here… It’s hard to be sure. Memories from that age are never reliable. My mother and father weren’t often here, you see. As field agents they lived outside the Hall.”
“And you weren’t allowed to live with them?” said Molly, sitting up and propping her back against the wooden headboard.
“No. All Drood children are raised here, in the dormitories. So they can be properly trained and indoctrinated. Loyalty is to the family, not our parents.”