Tethered by Meljean Brook Read Free Book Online Page A

hers. “I always had a smashing time.”
    Relishing every hardship, no doubt. What had driven Bilson to go along with him? “With such adventures in the New World, Mr. Bilson, I imagine that you haven’t missed salvaging?”
    “And the zombies?” He laughed. “Not at all.”
    Archimedes would have missed them—or rather, the dangerand the excitement they offered him. Apparently, Bilson hadn’t experienced the same thrill.
    “I do wish I’d seen that da Vinci sketch he’d found, though.” Bilson exhaled on a low whistle, as if in astonishment that Archimedes had ever come across such an artifact. “I’m not sure what’s more impressive—what that sketch is or what it was worth.”
    “What it is,” Archimedes answered.
    His response drew a chuckle from Bilson, and he looked to Yasmeen again. “That’s why I don’t miss it much. Salvaging was always a puzzle to him: finding a clue in some old letter, searching through journals, trying to figure out where everyone left their valuables. Not that I didn’t feel that same thrill when we found something—and not that I didn’t appreciate the money. But I’d have been just as happy getting in and out, and calling the job done.”
    “That’s also why he’s never been popular with the ladies,” Archimedes said.
    Yasmeen grinned. Bilson laughed and turned to her, as if looking for an ally now that Archimedes had begun firing. She would be glad to act as one, as long as his return fire told her more about Archimedes.
    To her pleasure, Bilson’s first volley did. “Ladies? Let me tell you this. The first year at university, there wasn’t a man less likely to speak to a woman than him. Always dressed in black and buckled up to his chin, and he never took a step out of line. You couldn’t get more than a word or two out of him—and that only if he ever glanced up from a book long enough to look at you.”
    Though Yasmeen hadn’t expected that, she also wasn’t surprised. Archimedes had been known as Wolfram Gunther-Baptiste then—and Yasmeen had known another Gunther-Baptiste, once.
    She held Archimedes’ gaze. There wasn’t as much amusement there now, but an emotion flat and hard. “That’s how your father expected you to behave?”
    When he nodded, Bilson grimaced. “I forgot you know about that bastard well enough, Captain.”
    Yasmeen did; she’d killed Emmerich Gunther-Baptisteafter he’d tried to roast her alive. Years later, Archimedes and his sister had thanked her for it.
    “We assumed he was one of those Separatist revivalists that were cropping up in the northern principalities,” Bilson said. “And though all of the first-year students were quartered together in the same hall, we paid him no mind. A handful of us would often gather in the great room and confer upon ways of getting into trouble—but not him. He was always in the corner, studying the lives of dead men.”
    “The dead were more interesting than anything you were up to.” Archimedes turned to Yasmeen. “It was all bluster. They’d formed a brotherhood—”
    “
La Confrérie de la Vérité
,” Bilson supplied, saluting Yasmeen with his wineglass and a wink.
    “And it was even more ridiculous than it sounds. They hoped to impress everyone in Johannesland with their anonymous ramblings printed on handbills, but they only impressed themselves.”
    “We were quite the radicals.”
    “You were all balloons filled with hot air, with no course in mind and no rudder. You weren’t even half the radical that Yasmeen is, and she doesn’t put any effort into it.” At her narrowed look, he lifted her hand, kissed her fingers. “You’re a complete anarchist, my captain. Admit it.”
    “I won’t, because it’s not true.”
    “Ah, yes—that one exception.” He widened his eyes a bit, laughing at her. “Anarchy has no place aboard your lady.”
    “Or any airship,” she agreed. “On the ground, however, it seems a better option than the governments and corruption