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“We could try and build some extra chutes into the hull, but I don’t know how that’s going to affect the balance of the ship.”
Wylan nods, pinching the bridge of his nose. It’s normally a nervous habit, but he does it consciously now, more to keep himself awake than anything else.
The king of Ravka stopped being intimidating by virtue of his title roughly five minutes after their introductions, when he ducked an apple out of the Sun Summoner’s hand only to split it in two and give one half back to her, a smile that could outblind her namesake on his face. He then proceeded to stop being intimidating by virtue of being a complete stranger as well by responding to Wylan’s off-the-cuff remark about the Hummingbird’s firing power by digging out the chemical formula of the gunpowder they’d used.
“Nevermind the balance of the ship – it’ll be sailing so far up that we don’t know that the Squallers will be able to direct it while concentrating on keeping the vehicle floating in the air,” Wylan says, squinting at the papers on the other side of the table. “You’d probably need more people doing just that, and even then there’s the risk of some of the jurda being pushed back by strong enough wind if someone doesn’t manage to gather all the particles. Honestly, I think we should probably go with the canon plan.”
Nikolai looks up from the ship's schema and smiles at him. “You came up with an idea on how to make canons?”
“I talked with Jesper and a bunch of other Fabrikators and we figure there’s a few things we could try.”
“Look at you, working side-by-side with the Grisha,” Nikolai says, putting his hand over his chest. “You represent us otkazat’sya well.”
Wylan shakes his head, but he can feel the edges of his mouth tugging upwards. “Oh, I’m way behind most Alkemi. They’ve studied for far longer than I have.”
“Really, I never would have guessed. Genuinely,” he adds, not that Wylan thinks for a moment he meant anything else by it. He’s distracted by the thought, of how easy Nikolai is to talk to despite his upbeat act, straightforward in a way that even Jesper isn’t, and so he says–
“My father never really allowed for chemistry to take up too much of my time. I had other things to–” catch up on, “–focus on.”
Nikolai, to his eternal gratitude, only shrugs.
“Well, more bully for you learning now from the corporalki, then,” he winks, and Wylan feels his face redden. “My father never paid much mind to what I was doing so long as it wasn’t making the evening gossip, which at the time I was fairly incensed about, but maybe I was wrong to be so.”
“Maybe,” Wylan says. He looks up towards the window; it’s still light out, birds flying towards the encroaching sunset.
They’ve been holed in the palace basement, where the workshop is, since lunch. Wylan can’t remember when he’s last drank water; he’d never had to fetch it for himself before he left the mansion, and getting into the habit of regular hydration was difficult, even without the water in the Barrel being largely unsanitary.
“You sound like you’re holding back on me.”
He looks back towards Nikolai, who’s cocked his head at a different angle now. Nikolai’s always cocking his head some way or the other, always looking for a challenge; in this moment, he reminds Wylan of Kaz. Where Kaz looks at you from under his nose, daring you to try and get one over him, Nikolai cocks his head and waits to see how you’ll surprise him.
“My father didn’t really care what I did too much so long as I wasn’t bothering him, either,” he finds himself saying. “The thing is, my entire existence did, so he also made sure I didn’t have an easy time of staying out of his way, either.”
Nikolai is silent for a moment. The smile has slipped off of his face for the first time this entire day that hasn’t been when he’s thought that nobody was looking. Wylan has been looking, though, because Wylan knows a facade when he sees one, even if Nikolai and Kaz and, hell, Jesper think they’re smarter than him like that.
It’s an unconscious tic, looking for the mask. Wylan is always careful about lifting it, though; always careful not to try and feel out a person enough so that they know he can see the contours of it, so he lets Nikolai stay silent as he notes down a couple of other calculations relevant to the mass of the hypothetical jurda canon balls. He tries to sketch one out, putting his notes down next to the composition.
Finally, Nikolai adds, “I suppose that makes me the lucky one of us.”
“Maybe,” Wylan says, again, not looking up from his notes. He remembers, all of a sudden, some whispers he’d heard pass between Zoya and Genya, and adds, “though at least I don’t have to contend with his legacy as well as the consequences of his bad humour.”
When he looks up, Nikolai’s mouth’s quirked up again.
“Wouldn’t want the lack of chemistry knowledge to be supplemented by any type of inheritance.”
Wylan pulls the corners of his mouth up as well. “No, we wouldn’t, now, would we?”