Two weeks later, Nate stumbled into the Seneschal on the front steps. Literally. He’d been in the tower nearly every day; Judah was starving for the experiences she found in his memories, insatiable. The blood loss he could deal with, but untrained as she was, she left his head such a wreck that he could barely find his way back to the manor, where Derie waited to put him back together. “Making progress?” the Seneschal said.
Years ago, Nate had slept with a village girl named Anneka beneath a wagon, lying on soft grass sprinkled with tiny ugly flowers that released all the perfume of heaven when crushed by their bodies. Had his life not already been spoken for he might have stayed with her, married her, spent his life raising goats and chickens and lovely children with his eyes and her beautiful skin; but he belonged to the Slonimi, so he’d had only that one sublime night. Judah loved his memories of Anneka. She returned to them over and over again. Now the smell of the flowers was strong in Nate’s nostrils and he could feel the wagon above him, comforting and familiar. Both were more real than the man standing in front of him. With great effort, he said, “Enough.”
“Is she coming down?” the Seneschal persisted.
Nate’s lips were dry. He resisted the urge to lick them. “Eventually.”
“Sooner rather than later.” It was a command.
Nate flexed his wrist so his springknife leapt out of its casing and buried the blade in the man’s eye. Just like that bandit on the road, after they’d passed through the Barriers. Blood and fluid running warm over his hand.
He closed his eyes. Gathered himself. Opened them again. The real Seneschal stood in front of him, eyes intact. Nate wasn’t even wearing his springknife. He never did when he went to see Judah, because flashes like that hit him not infrequently on his way home, and he couldn’t risk trouble.
“This tower situation is very frustrating,” the Seneschal said. Nate had shown him the broken place in the stairs. None of the Seneschal’s guards, who were all great hulking men, could have navigated the narrow chunks of protruding rock without planks and ropes and a great deal of effort. The Seneschal’s proposal to Judah had been a calculated move, not a romantic one; when winter came, the man had explained to Nate, the House would grow cold, and Judah would remember that he had offered her kindness and a choice. Both false, of course—all of the Seneschal’s plans ended with Judah in a guildhall, being experimented on by the Nali chieftain—but having his men build ramps up the tower to drag Judah down by force would show the Seneschal’s cards long before the gray man intended.
They had come to the door of the Safe Passage. “I wish I understood how you make it up those stairs so easily,” the Seneschal said, pausing to take out the huge ring of keys that would unlock the Passage’s maze of doors. “You must have been raised by mountain goats.”
“I’m just careful,” Nate said.
It was a lie. Nate lied to the Seneschal a great deal—he would have said anything to get inside the Wall to Judah—but even if he was in the habit of telling the man the truth, he didn’t think he would have told this truth: that the forces bound into the tower knew him, recognized him, and let him pass; that the broken stone steps grew to meet his feet, and the spaces between them shrank to match his stride. He hadn’t known what would happen when the Seneschal insisted on seeing the broken place for himself, and watching Nate cross the gap. From Nate’s view, the stones had swelled, the spaces had shrunk. From the Seneschal’s view, apparently, everything had looked utterly normal.
“I want her out of that tower, magus,” the Seneschal said, unlocking another door, standing aside to let Nate pass, and locking it behind him. “Out of the tower and cooperative. That’s why I let you in and out, because you told me you could get her to come willingly, and do as I tell her for once in her life.”
Another of Nate’s lies. Nobody could ever make Judah do what she didn’t want to do. The oiled rushes were unpleasant under his feet and the smell made his already-queasy stomach feel even worse. “You have to give me more time,” he said. “She’s not ready yet.”
They had come to the other side of the passage. As always, the Seneschal’s guards clustered around it. The man himself turned stony eyes on Nate. “Lure her, magus,” he said, a touch of impatience coloring his voice. “You’re a traveled man. Tell her everything she’s missing. Make the world sound amazing.”
And if only the Seneschal knew the ferocity of Judah’s craving for life and experience and beauty, the depths of her talent. Nobody in the Slonimi bred for love. Every child resulted from the careful consideration of bloodlines, of similar and complementary talents. Reproduction was a responsibility, a calling. Nate himself had even been paired off, not long before he and Charles and Derie had left for Highfall, in case he died and his bloodline was lost. As was tradition, the first time, Nate had been very drunk, so he remembered the woman’s smell and her name but not her face. Derie had given him to understand that the pairing had failed, anyway.
But there was no failure in Judah. Talented parents sometimes produced a dud, but Judah fairly shimmered with power. She Worked as easily as she breathed. Not that she knew it; as far as she knew, every child with a bleeding arm could walk through defenses like they were paper and rummage through memories like a trunk of old clothes. It had taken him a year of hard training with Derie before he could hear her thoughts in his head; another two before he could send her his own. Derie’s powers dwarfed Nate’s, and Judah’s made Derie’s look like a child’s. It was all he could do when he Worked with her to keep that one door locked, so she would not know absolutely everything he knew and be frightened by it. It was all he could do to put her to sleep before he left so he could weave the threads of Work through her without her knowing, swaddling her in it like an infant. Someday she would understand, he told himself, and forgive him.
The walk to Limley Square seemed long and he remembered wistfully how quick Elban’s phaeton had been. Nate felt weak and nauseated; he slept late every day, and often came out of unconsciousness to find himself being carried around the lab between Bindy and Charles like a passed-out drunk. He had trouble focusing his eyes, and had finally traded some herbal remedies to a decent spectaclist in exchange for new lenses in his glasses. His appetite was gone, which was fortunate because his guts had crawled to a stop. His mouth was dry all the time and he had developed sores on the underside of his tongue; he drank more water and applied a very light solution of opium syrup to dull the pain.
His dreams, though, were amazing. In his dreams he made love to Anneka again; he waded through the knee-high prairie grass outside Tagusville, skin warm with sun, as fat little rodents darted and chittered unseen at his feet. He stood on the pier at Black Lake, watched the boats unload their catch into waiting wagons, smelled fish and water and tar. He dozed in an opium den in Carietta, watching half-asleep as a girl so pale she might have come from Highfall crawled on top of Charles and pulled aside his clothes. Best of all, in his dreams, he saw his mother again. He worked beside her in the caravan, stood by a makeshift stage where she sold her tonics; drove the horses as she sang for him and him alone, his hands on the reins browner, younger and less scarred than now.
In Highfall, he passed the Beggar’s Market. One of the factory gangs drilled in the space where the stalls had been. Their heavy boots all hit the floor in perfect time as they marched, pivoted, marched some more. He didn’t know which factory wore green embroidery but the marchers were uniformly young, with the rabid light of conviction in their eyes. All the older workers had already settled back into torpor as, one by one, the managers’ promises had withered and died. He’d even heard that the long shifts were beginning again. But the young ones, the ones who hadn’t been beaten down before the coup—they still believed. Belief could be dangerous. Nate altered course as if he’d never intended to go that way.
He thought he saw Anneka in the road ahead of him, then Judah, then his mother: hallucinating again. It didn’t matter. Derie would fix it.
When the old woman met him at Arkady’s door, she laughed. Her glee sounded brittle, jagged. “She’s draining you like a boil, isn’t she? Good and strong.”
“Very strong,” he said.
Derie laughed again and clapped her hands. Then she caught at his elbow, because he was falling. “I hope you’ve eaten something, boy. It’ll take a lot of blood to clean up the mess in your head. What a force she is!”
The blood was the least of Nate’s misery. Derie treated his memories like junk in a dead man’s wagon. Anneka and the dead bandit in the Barriers: thrust aside, old news. The woman Nate had been paired with, the child she probably wasn’t carrying because he was useless, lame, pathetic: nobody cared. His mother: irrelevant.
She snatched greedily at everything involving Judah, though—her face, the touch of her mind, every thought Nate had had about her, every bit of her he’d seen. Like the Seneschal, they needed her to do as she was told; unlike the Seneschal’s, their plan was righteous. Derie’s questions pried through his mind like fingers. Was she biddable enough to do what was needed? Was Nate? Was he weak enough to love her? Was he strong enough to control her?
Derie’s voice cut through the chaos like a beam of light. Quiet, stupid boy. And she twisted something inside his mind. A noise that he’d not realized he was making cut off abruptly. Inside, he still screamed.
He woke up and the light was different. Gradually, he realized this was because he lay in Arkady’s guest bed, the sheets around him clean and cool. His clothes were gone, his arms neatly bandaged. The world was blurry. He put his hand out to the small table next to the bed, found his glasses. Everything slipped into focus. Slowly, he forced himself to sit up. His stomach swung violently. A groan escaped him, and he hunched over.
The door opened and Charles entered. Drawn by the groan, Nate supposed. He carried a glass of clear, pale green liquid. “Drink,” he said, passing it to Nate. Nate drank. The draught was faintly herbal and very gingery. He had brewed it himself before going inside yesterday; he’d known he would need it. As he sipped, his nausea eased and he felt stronger.
“You know,” he said, “you don’t have to keep putting me to bed every time.”
“You piss yourself, and that’s not all. Not that Derie cares. She’d happily leave you lying in your own blood and filth all night.” Charles spoke without much expression. After weeks away from the drops, his weeping had finally dried up, which was a relief; but the way Charles was now, wan and listless, was even harder to take. “Besides, you put me to bed, didn’t you?”
Nate—who was wondering what Charles meant by that’s not all—had indeed put Charles to bed, but didn’t want to embarrass his friend by talking about it. “Is Bindy downstairs?”
Charles nodded. “She has a list of calls for you to make from yesterday.” He hesitated. “Her sister came to walk her home last night. The pretty one with the chip on her shoulder, the Paper stooge.”
“Rina.” Nora’s tenure on the committee had been brief—she was too old and worn-out, she said—but Rina had risen quickly in the ranks. She wore her Paper sash with pride and wielded it like a sword, her fervent eyes always on the watch for shirkers, hoarders, violators of any kind. People on the street ducked away when they saw her coming.
“She asked if I’d been issued working papers yet,” Charles said.
That was worrisome. People without working papers were sometimes ejected from the city. But Nate kept his voice light. “I’ll talk to the Seneschal. Tell him you’re my ailing cousin or something. He’ll call her off. The Unbinding will be done soon. You’ll feel different after. Everything won’t seem so...hopeless.”
“It’s not hope that I’m missing. I had hope. We had nothing but hope, you and I. Do you need to practice that paralyzing thing on me today?”
Charles might as well have been reciting the shopping list. “No,” Nate said. “Not today.”
One of the calls was an address in a narrow street in Brakeside where the buildings channeled the wind into a cold, gritty blade. The house was so overgrown with attaches that it seemed about to topple; climbing the rickety stairs, Nate hoped the number on his list would match one of the doors in the main part of the building, where the floors would be more stable, but no such luck.
The door was opened by a boy so thin he was almost gaunt. “No!” he cried, the moment he saw Nate. “No, I told you not to send for him!”
“Calm down, Georgy,” somebody else said. The door was opened the rest of the way by an elderly woman. Nate recognized her; she was a seamstress, arthritic in both hands, and one of Nate’s first patients in Highfall. He kept her in ointments, one with capsaicin and camphor that she could use whenever she wanted, and another with opium that she was to use sparingly. In exchange, she kept him more or less tatter free. As she let him in, she looked him over, head to toe, and said, “Give me that coat, magus. I can see the lining’s torn from here.”
Nate gave it to her. “It’s good to see you.”
Meanwhile, Georgy hovered protectively by the room’s lone bed, where a young man lay. “Not good to see you. Go away,” he said to Nate.
“Hush,” the seamstress said and nodded at the man on the bed. “See what you can do for my boy’s leg while I sew, eh?”
Georgy scuttled over to a corner, still scowling. The man’s eyes were clouded with pain, his breath short. Understandably, since his leg was broken in at least two places. As Nate measured out a dose of opium syrup—he would have to set the bone, and it would hurt—the injured man said, “Don’t mind Georgy. He’s just scared.”
“Of what?” Nate said.
The seamstress, sitting on a stool next to a table piled high with clothes, snorted. “I don’t have my independent’s license yet, that’s all. They cost the earth, those things!”
“The factory magus took away my papers when I got hurt,” the man on the bed said quietly.
Taking his papers meant the other magus thought the hurt man wouldn’t ever work again. The company stores wouldn’t sell to anyone without work papers or an independent’s license, but the seamstress was right: the licenses were exorbitantly expensive. Nate found the whole process infuriating. At least Elban’s system had left enough cracks for the people it broke to survive. Before the coup, the man’s coworkers would have taken up a collection to pay an outside magus, but all anyone had now was company credit. He wondered how the tiny family was finding the money to feed themselves. “I don’t see anything to report,” Nate said, passing the man on the bed the opium and rolling up his sleeves.
The man nodded at Nate’s springknife. “That’s a pretty thing. How’s it work?” So while they waited for the syrup to take effect, Nate showed him. The man seemed particularly fascinated by the spring. “Never seen metal like that before,” he said, and then his eyes glazed over and Nate got to work setting the bones.
He needed both the woman’s help and the boy’s, which they gave with nary a wince, even when the bones snapped back into place with a loud, uncomfortable jolt. After, as he wrapped clean bandages around the splint, the woman picked up her needle again. “When the Seneschal took over, I thought I’d be paying you in coin,” she said ruefully as they both worked, “but here I am still doing your mending, except my needle’s duller and my thread is garbage. The more things change, eh?”
The boy, who had retreated to the corner, hissed. His bitterness was startling in one so young. “Now, George,” the woman said. “Gate Magus and I are old friends. Gate Magus won’t rat on me.” Her tone was admonishing but Nate saw a flicker of fear in her eyes.
“Sure he won’t,” George said, sullen. “Cozy in the Seneschal’s pocket as he is, with his own apprentice’s sister the third-lieutenant from Paper.”
“Which only means I can help more people. You’ve nothing to fear from me.” Nate hoped he was telling the truth. He couldn’t be sure; he could never be sure. He tried to do what he could. He knew he was distracted, though. Each time he went to the House, it became harder and harder to focus, even after Derie was done fixing him. A broken leg was simple, mechanical, more a matter of brute force than reasoning or insight, but more than once he’d caught himself making a potentially dire mistake with ingredients or dosages, and he was loath to think how many he’d made and not caught. He’d started teaching Bindy some elementary herblore (she was his apprentice, after all) and she drank it in like a starving cat with a saucer of milk. She caught his mistakes now. And nagged at him all the time to take better care of himself, to eat or sleep or have some brandy. Her efforts brought tears to his eyes.
The mood swings: elation, tears. That was the Work showing itself, too.
The boy, George, skulked out of the room. “Grandson?” Nate said.
“Just a stray.”
“It’s a hard time to be taking in strays. You’re good to do it.”
She sniffed. “Wouldn’t let a dog go to one of those orphan halls. The factories will get him eventually, anyway.”
On his way home, he stopped at the Grand Bazaar. The awnings were dusty and faded, and rat droppings collected in the corners. The few merchants who still bothered to set up sold goods too frivolous to be stocked by the company stores: cheap jewelry, bolts of grubby viscose, acrid perfumes. Leda, one of Nate’s favorite herb sellers from before the coup, had moved from a large fragrant stall in the center to a chair behind a rickety table. She sat with her arms folded and groused at the guards, a few sad sprigs of spindly oregano and basil laid out before her. “Afternoon, Leda,” he said. “How’s your grandson? Headache any better?”
Leda gave him a huge, too-white smile. She’d been very grand before the coup, and still used acid to whiten her teeth even though Nate had promised her the habit would lead to her losing them. “Aren’t you kind to ask,” she said. “Seems to bother him most in the morning. Probably something to do with the damp.” Meanwhile, her foot crept out, independent from the rest of her body, and pressed down on the end of one of the wide wooden planks. The other end lifted up, revealing a cavity under the floor. Now they were carrying on two conversations: one in their normal voices, in case anyone passed by, and the other under their breath. “My sister used to be like that. Willowbark? Took funny in the damp.”
“Some people do,” Nate said. “Opium. Has she ever tried camphor tea?”
“On the left. Camphor, you say? Sounds awful.”
“It is. Tastes hideous. Looks dry. You can add honey, but I can’t decide if that makes it better or worse.”
“Fresh as it comes. Perhaps I’ll try that with the boy, then. That something you can make, the camphor tea?”
She was a strong negotiator. She was also one of the few herbmongers in New Highfall who managed to bring in opium, along with valerian, pennyroyal and basically any other herb with an actual use. Bartering care had never worked with Leda, and Nate couldn’t sew, so he ended up parting with most of his weeks’ credit vouchers. Which were valuable, because they came from the Seneschal and were good anywhere. As he slipped the small wrapped package into a hidden pocket in his satchel, she winked and said, “For all his headaches, he’s a clever little thing, my grandson. Stay and hear the clever thing he said?”
Nate wasn’t sure the grandson even existed. “I always like a clever story,” he said.
Without missing a beat the foot pressed a different board, Leda prattling all the while. Something about a puppy. Inside the revealed compartment, a handful of dull metal vials gleamed against black fabric, carefully arranged to catch the light. Not that they wouldn’t shine on their own, for anyone who really wanted them.
“Hilarious,” Nate said, when she paused, “but I have to move on.”
The foot slid away from the board. The vials disappeared. “Good day then, magus.”
“Good day, Leda,” he said.
He heard Bindy talking in the kitchen as he opened the front door of the manor. She sounded animated and cheerful in a way he hadn’t heard in weeks. A male voice answered. As he hung up his coat and hat, Nate wondered, surprised, if she was speaking to Charles, who generally avoided her like she was contagious. But the man’s voice was too deep, and the accent was wrong. Charles, like Nate, hadn’t entirely been able to shake the Slonimi lilt in his voice, and his consonants were courtier-sharp. The voice in the kitchen was pure Highfall.
No. It was pure House. Nate went tense.
In the kitchen, a fragrant pot of cinnamon tea simmered. Bindy sat at the table with a man whose face made Nate’s brain spin in alarmed circles. That broad face, those sandy curls—his first instinct was to bury the springknife in the man’s throat. Bindy leapt up.
“Magus!” Her voice was as warm as the cinnamon in the air. “Look! It’s my brother, the one from inside, that they told us was dead! But they were wrong, isn’t it amazing? I didn’t even know who he was when I found him with Ma in the house. I almost ran for the guards.” She laughed. “He was kneading the bread.”
The stableman grinned at her. The mug of tea seemed tiny in his giant hands. “Not your fault. You’d never met me in person, for all the letters you wrote.”
The fondness in his voice was unmistakable. The stableman loved Bindy and Nate still wanted to kill him. Joyously, Bindy said, “Want tea, magus? There’s lots. Darid says you two knew each other, inside.”
“We met.” Warily, Nate joined them at the table, not taking his eyes off the stableman.
“My brother and my magus, and none of us even knew! What a funny old world,” Bindy said, and went on to elucidate all of the ways in which the world was both funny and old. Darid’s eyes bored into Nate, as if trying to tell him something, but Nate couldn’t understand what it was. Nor could he explain his nearly uncontrollable desire to see the man dead. But he was sane enough to recognize the murderous thoughts as insane, so he sat with a fixed smile and let Bindy pour tea as she chattered on about (seemingly) every letter she and her brother had ever exchanged. There had to be some errand he could send her on, some way to get her out of the House so he could—
kill.
—talk to her brother. Finally, she paused for breath, and Nate said, “I’m sorry to disrupt your reunion, Bindy, but I need you to take some headache powder to the magus in Archertown. You know where he lives?”
Bindy wrinkled her nose. “Yes, but he smells funny.”
“So does the headache powder.” Nate was surprised by how easy he sounded. “He’ll give you some herbs to bring back, and some agar for clotting poultices.”
She looked from Nate to her brother, clearly reluctant to leave. “You’ll show me how to make them?”
“I will,” Nate said, and the stableman said, “Go do your work, Bin. I’ll be around. You haven’t seen the last of me.”
When she was gone—almost the moment the door closed behind her, as if the words were ready to jump off his tongue—the stableman said, “How is Judah?”
He wasn’t being polite. There was urgency in his voice, and pain. “She’s fine,” Nate said. “They’re all fine.”
Darid visibly relaxed. “I don’t care about all of them. I just care about her.” He carried a hardness that Nate didn’t remember; but then again, the only other time Nate had spent with him, he’d just been snatched from certain death. Which would leave a person somewhat less than themselves, perhaps, and why did Nate want to kill him so badly? He should excuse himself. Take off the springknife, leave it in the lab where he wouldn’t be tempted to use it.
“I thought you left the city,” he said, instead.
“I came back when I heard about the coup. Wanted to see my mother.”
The slightest flex of the wrist was all it would take. The blade would leap out like a bird startled from a bush. “You don’t look anything like Bindy.”
“Different fathers. Me and my first two sisters, Nell and Connie—our father died in the plague. Con died, too, right before I went inside. Ma’s sent a lot of people off on the deadcart.”
“What are you going to do now?” Nate asked.
With a shrug of one massive shoulder, Darid said, “Not sure. I can’t work. Don’t have papers.”
“I’m sure you could get them. Other Returned have.”
“How many of them are supposed to be dead?” Darid’s tone was cold.
“I could speak to the Seneschal for you. I don’t think he has anything against you personally. He needed to do what he did.” The words struck Nate as ridiculous even as he spoke them. The stableman’s mouth tightened and his eyes went hard and Nate wanted so very badly to kill him. Because Judah had loved him, he realized; because she’d been grievously injured, in more ways than one, and Nate had been made to be party to it, and oh, it would feel good to stab him. “He’d find you a job.”
“Thanks,” Darid said drily, “but I think I’ve had enough of being assigned work by the Seneschal.” He shook his head. “I thought things would be different now. I heard about people inside coming out. But nobody’s out, you know. They just moved the Wall. Made it invisible, so nobody would notice. Bindy told me what you did to keep her. Why? Why put yourself on the line for some Marketside factory worker’s girl?”
“I wouldn’t call it putting myself on the line,” Nate said. “I filled out a form. Anyway, Bindy’s smart and I like her. Are you going to accuse me of evil intentions? Because your mother and I already covered that.”
“Why me, then? Why’d you put yourself on the line for me?”
“To be honest, I have no idea.” Now it was Nate that was cold. “I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it. Eleanor asked me to, and it seemed like Judah would have wanted it. By the way, you haven’t asked, but I’ll tell you anyway. If she was pregnant, it was undone shortly after the caning. I saw to it myself.”
He expected the stableman to flinch; had wanted him to. But Darid only shook his head. “Then you added to her pain for nothing. We never had sex.”
It was Nate who flinched, then. The stableman leaned forward. He really didn’t look anything like Bindy; Bindy’s hair was strawberry, almost red, and her eyes a clear sky-blue. Everything about Darid was plain and drab, but his dull blue eyes were intense as he said, “Why’d the Seneschal let her live?”
Nate couldn’t speak.
“Elban’s sons, I get. The Seneschal doesn’t want to let them go rally up an army but he doesn’t want to make them martyrs, either, so he tucks them out of sight and mind, lets the hope die slowly so nobody even notices it’s gone. In the meantime, he gets to pretend he’s not as cruel as Elban. Plus, maybe sometime he’ll need somebody to blame for something, and there they’ll be.” The fate of the two men clearly didn’t bother him. “But why keep Judah? Kill her or let her go, sure. But keep her?”
With unaccountable malice, Nate said, “Maybe he’s in love with her.”
The stableman dismissed that idea quickly with a curl of the lip. The gesture spoke volumes of a life where opinions were pared down to their slimmest possible expression. “The people who’ve come out keep talking about the orchards and pastureland and fields. There’s talk of taking the House by force.”
Nate felt the color drain from his face.
“Nobody’s taking it seriously yet,” Darid went on, “but come winter, they will. And when they do—people still have warm feelings for the Children, but they’ve got warmer ones for their own. If it comes to violence there’s no way to guarantee she’d be safe.” Then, all in a burst, “She shouldn’t have to live or die with them. She’s none of Elban’s get. She deserves a life.”
“With you?”
The man withered at the contempt in Nate’s voice. “No. I can’t imagine she’d want that. I’m not sure I want it for her.” He hesitated. “Does she know I’m alive?”
“You want me to tell her?”
Darid shook his head. “Let her believe I’m dead for now. I might as well be, until I think of a way to help her.” He sucked at his lower lip. “Who’d they kill instead of me?”
“I don’t know,” Nate said. “I wasn’t involved.”
Later, when Nate told Derie about the stableman’s visit, the old woman was alarmed. “Oh, no,” she said. “No, no, no. We can’t have her losing focus now. That won’t do at all,” and made Nate let her into his head again, where she shoved the memory of Darid’s visit so far behind the locked door that when she was done, it felt like something he’d dreamed, or dreamed of dreaming, deep in a fever or on the edge of death. It made him uncomfortable, itchy. He didn’t like to think of it again.
Why can’t I do anything in the real world? Judah asked, petulant, the next time he was in the tower. They were in the Work, but she had not yet immersed herself in his memories and the tower was still visible around them, with the purple membrane strung across every surface. She had her fingers in it and was playing with it like clay. The sight made Nate shiver. All this stuff is everywhere and you say it’s powerful. Why can’t I walk on it, or build a fire with it, or use it to fly?
Because that’s not the nature of it. You might as well ask why you can’t walk on water, or build a fire with water or use water to fly.
Water can’t tell me that Gavin stubbed his toe this morning. It couldn’t tell me every time he snuck off with some staff girl.
Nate forced down his alarm. Did he do that a lot? Did any of them ever get pregnant? If there was another heir somewhere—more of Elban’s foul blood—
If they did, they ended up in the midden yard. The membrane between Judah’s fingers blazed scarlet. That’s what Darid said would happen.
Even the mention of the stableman’s name was enough to make Nate feel faintly queasy. And he didn’t like the way her hands moved to the tether in her chest, the thick rope of membrane that bound her to Gavin—the way her fingers began to tease, and dig—
No! Nate leapt for her, took her hands in his. Although they weren’t his real hands and they weren’t hers either, their real hands were in the real tower lying limp beside their real bodies. No. Not yet.
Why not?
It’s too dangerous. It might hurt you. You have to be patient.
A burst of stubbornness, like a flapping bat. Sick of being trapped, she said.
He made his thoughts gentle. Look in my memories. Can you find the Temple Argent? Can you take me there?
It’s real? she said.
Look and see, he said.
He felt her inside him. She was gentler now. Suddenly they stood together on the edge of a cliff. Hundreds of feet below, the raging ocean threw itself on the rocks, over and over. The ruined Temple was a massive tumble of stone scattered behind them. Tiny succulents crawled quietly over the surface, giving no hint of the force that had torn the citadel apart. She had seen many things through Nate’s eyes over the past weeks, mountains and plains and cities, but he had deliberately kept the ocean in reserve. He was stunned by how real the waves were, when her Work unfolded them from his mind: salt spray landed like needles of ice on their cheeks, and a cold breeze pulled at the hem of her dress. The horizon was not merely two lines meeting, but a reality that went on and on, infinitely. He would suffer for this later, he thought, feeling his own strength draining away—but he had drawn Derie’s sigil and Caterina’s before he’d even entered the tower, and he could feel them feeding him threads of their own power. These he sucked at greedily, not caring that they coursed through him and melted him the way lightning did sand. Judah’s depthless eyes were wide, transfixed. She had no idea how amazing she was, how terrifying her power. He wanted to hurl himself at her feet, to worship her; to evaporate so she could inhale him, to tear himself apart.
Good, he said. Let’s try something else.
“Make her come down,” the Seneschal said. “The managers want this land and I want my guild.” Frustration burned in the gray man’s face. He was not a man who was accustomed to being frustrated, not anymore.
Nate wobbled back and forth in reality like a loose tooth. The empty courtyard around them was simultaneously desolate and alive with carriages, and thick with the trees that had been felled to clear space for it. The rush of the Argent Sea was loud in his ears. The oil-soaked air of the Safe Passage was empty and packed with shouting bodies and on fire. It was all incredibly distracting. “I’m trying.”
“Try harder,” the Seneschal said. “And I will try not to think about how much easier it would be to throw some boards on the damn stairs and drag her out in chains.”
“Do that, and she’ll chew your throat out with her teeth if she can’t find a knife.”
“Yes, yes, it must be done willingly,” the Seneschal said. “So says the chieftain. He’s had a good bit of time to consider the problem in his prison cell. Perhaps you would find that setting equally productive.”
Prison cell. In Nate’s unreal state, thinking of the prison was as good as actually being there. He’d felt the chieftain’s power outside the man’s cell: like the old days, going village to village searching for unaware Workers, sensing power like music. The song in the prison had been playing in a key he’d never heard before. “You need me,” he said. “I’m the only one she trusts.”
Which was true and also ironic, because Nate no longer trusted himself. On the way home from the House he saw John Slonim, the man who’d driven the first Slonimi caravan, back before the Slonimi were the Slonimi, before the first Work: a rail-thin man with dark skin and a heavy beard, standing on a box doing sleight-of-hand for petty coins. He saw a tall woman with enormous horns that curled behind her head, a knitted scarf wrapped around her neck and carefully tucked under the tips of the horns. He saw a mother holding a crying baby in the crook of one arm. The mother brought a dull silver vial to the baby’s mouth. The crying stopped.
Nate looked away. It is not real, he told himself. None of it is real.
“Better work faster, boy,” Derie said at the manor. “You’re like a pot that’s more glue than clay.” Then, as Charles held Nate down, she cut his arm, and put him back together.
When Nate woke the next morning, Charles had cleaned him up and put him to bed again, but was nowhere to be seen. It took some time but eventually Nate rose, and dressed and went downstairs. The last of the bread sat, stale and hard, on the counter; when Bindy arrived, she warmed a slab of it in a pan on the stove until it was soft again and stood over him while he ate it, frowning like a concerned mother. Then she wrapped herself in her shawl and went to the Seneschal’s manor to pick up Nate’s credit vouchers for the week.
The errand would take hours. As soon as she was gone, Nate went into the garden and threw up everything he’d eaten. Then he hung a rag over the gate in the garden: not blue, but white. Or at least it had been white, once. Inside, he fetched the box he’d prepared earlier that week, and put it on the table.
A moment later, he heard a tap at the garden door, and opened it. “Firo,” he said.
The former courtier was transformed. The crinkles around his eyes were free of kohl; instead of being combed high with pomade, his hair hung long, and instead of the gems he’d once favored he wore plain steel earrings, like a dockworker. His coat was as battered and drab as any factory worker’s, but the shirt under it was spotless. Behind him in the garden, a lumpy sack thrown over one shoulder, lurked a heavily muscled young man whose good looks hadn’t yet been worn away by work and privation. Soon enough.
In the House, Firo’s predilections had been permitted but not generally spoken of, which Nate could almost bear. Now, though, Firo went about shamelessly with his new pet, as if there were nothing unnatural at all about the relationship. To the Slonimi, passing on your power was everything. For a man to waste his time in a dalliance where there was no chance of a child was seen as selfish, even traitorous. Persistence of such pursuits was one of the few crimes that merited expulsion, and the stripping of power. “You can come in. He stays out,” he said to Firo.
The young man made a face. Firo rolled his eyes and gave his companion a conspiratorial, pitying look: What can you even do with these people? It did not endear him to Nate, but the young man grinned and handed over the sack.
“Really, magus,” Firo said when the door was firmly closed, “I don’t know what isolated little backwater bred you, but it’s long since time you left it behind.”
Nate gestured to the box on the table.
Firo’s slouch vanished. The two steps it took him to reach the kitchen table were full of courtier insouciance and swagger. Opening the box, he examined the three dozen vials packed inside it. They were identical to the ones hidden beneath the plank in Leda’s stall, identical to the one Nate had hallucinated the mother holding to her baby’s mouth (it must have been a hallucination—he was more glue than clay, his brain could not be trusted). Nate had made them all, after taking a few days to figure out the formula. It had been Vertus’s idea, although the former servingman preferred to use Firo as go-between. Nate hadn’t actually spoken with him in weeks.
“What are the odds,” Nate had said to the courtier the first time, “that I’ve had dealings with both of you, and now you have dealings with each other?”
Firo had only laughed his horrible courtier’s laugh. “Fairly good, since Vertus runs three quarters of the black market in New Highfall. A better question is how a judgmental prude like you has made two such interesting friends,” and Nate had said, pointedly, that they were not friends, and never would be.
As Firo inspected the vials, Nate emptied the sack. Inside he found a supply of empty vials, as well as good, soft flour, butter, cheese, some meat that looked like goat, and a pile of decent-looking root vegetables. There were also three smaller, very well-wrapped packages: one sugar, the other two candy. Chocolate caramels and glazed cherries. Cherries were long out of season. They smelled like sunlight and open air and freedom.
Firo watched Nate’s deep inhalation with some amusement. “A funny world we live in now, magus. The confectioner’s trade is as illicit as yours. Speaking of secrets, how is our little dark horse these days?”
Nate, feeling like he’d been caught doing something salacious—Firo made him feel that way about almost everything—rewrapped the candy. “Not that it’s any of your business, but she’s fine.”
“I’ll take your word for it. At least somebody’s been eating all those lovely sweets, and it’s clearly not you.” Firo surveyed Nate critically. Nate knew he was thinner—every day his bones seemed to emerge further from his flesh—but he didn’t like being looked at by Firo, no matter the motivation. Suddenly, Firo laughed. “Dark horse! To think, all the time and lovely talk I wasted on her, and all I needed to do was offer her a sugar cube.”
Nate scowled, but said nothing. Firo shrugged. “Speaking of treats, I ought to be getting on. The longer Vertus waits, the smaller our cut gets. Poverty makes my William cranky,” he added fondly.
“So treats work on him, as well?” Nate didn’t bother to keep the nastiness from his voice.
“Loving somebody who loves you back isn’t such a terrible thing, magus. You ought to try it sometime,” Firo said, his voice full of cool pity. Then he left.
Nate tried to get Bindy to take some of the black market food. “Some candy, if nothing else. For Canty, and the other littles,” he said.
At the mention of her brother’s name, Bindy looked wistful. Canty spent his days in the factory crèche now, being cared for by women too old or pregnant to work. Nate knew she missed him. He did, too. “I ought not to,” she said. “If Rina found out, she’d turn you in. Anyway, magus, we don’t need food. We’re okay. But I’ll take some for Darid, if you don’t mind.”
As always, Nate felt an irrational stab of fury on hearing her brother’s name, but he was careful not to let it show. “What does Rina think of Darid, then?”
“He’s not staying with us. Ma says it’s best not to talk about him when she’s around. Rina’s done really well on the factory committee. She’s got a talent for it,” she added loyally. Then, “Sign my papers, magus?” The crèche wouldn’t let Bindy pick Canty up unless Nate signed her off as having worked a full day. Once, when he’d lost track of time inside and Nora had been working the long shift, Canty had spent nearly two days there. Now Nate signed a few days in advance.
After Bindy took food for her brother, and some was put aside for Judah and the others inside, there was still enough for Nate and Charles. They’d have to manage somewhat carefully, since he’d surely end up trading away the new vouchers like he had the old, but neither of them had much appetite these days. While the goat stewed, Nate made a Slonimi pan bread that baked up warm and pillowy in an iron pan on the stove. For flavor he used the last of his supply of a particular spice that he’d brought with him across the Barriers, and not seen since. The smell of it brought Charles downstairs to the table. When he tore open his share of the bread, steam rose from the soft interior. Charles inhaled deeply. But then, instead of eating, he put the two torn pieces back on his plate with exaggerated care.
“I’m leaving, Nate,” he said.
“Because I make the drops?” He knew Charles didn’t like what he did for Vertus, but he hadn’t thought it was so bad.
“No. The drops don’t bother me. I mean, I want them like I want my next breath, but I prefer to be in my right mind.” Charles shook his head. “No, the committee came knocking yesterday while you were inside. Left a summons for me and my nonexistent working papers.” With a glint of humor, he added, “I’ve been ignoring it, but that strikes me as rather a short-term solution, wouldn’t you say?”
Nate’s mouth was suddenly dry, the bread turning to sand in his mouth. “We’ll get you papers. You can be my apprentice.”
“Bindy is your apprentice. Do you want to choose between us?”
There was nothing Nate could say to that. “My porter, then.”
“I think the Company of Porters would object.”
There was nothing Nate could say to that, either. “You’re my friend,” he said finally.
“You’re mine, too. And that’s why I’m telling you: I’m leaving.” He leaned forward, his face filled with an earnest intensity Nate hadn’t seen there in a long time. He felt struck nearly dumb by the force of it. And of course, this was why Charles had been chosen to come along, wasn’t it? His persuasiveness, his charm. “Come with me,” Charles said now. “Don’t stay here. It’s killing you. You know it is.”
“The world needs—”
“No.” Charles was stern now. “I don’t believe it anymore, Nate. Oh, I know, the Work seems real. But everything I felt when I was dropping seemed real, too, and it all came out of a bottle. We’ve both been told since we were children that if we cut holes in ourselves we can work wonders, but what wonders have we actually seen?”
Nate shook his head. “You haven’t been in the tower. You haven’t met—”
“The girl?” Charles’s expression twisted. “The girl is a girl and the world is the world and it’s always been like this, Nate, it’s never been any other way. There’s nothing to unbind. There are only our lives to live. Be in love with her if you want, but don’t delude yourself, don’t think of her as some sort of miracle—”
From the front of the manor came the distinct and impossible sound of the locked front door opening. Both men froze as an irregular thump-thump-tap made slow and steady progress down the hall, past the parlor and stairs. Two feet and a cane.
Charles was wide-eyed, frozen in fear. Nate imagined he looked much the same. They were both children again, waiting for Derie to come beat some brain into them, as she called it.
“Run,” Nate whispered, barely able to hear himself.
Charles shook his head with a fearsome resolution.
The kitchen door opened. Derie hobbled in. “Dinner, boys? And poor old Derie not invited.”
For a moment, neither man said anything. Then Nate pushed a third chair out with his foot. The legs screeched on the wooden floor. Derie sat down; she took up Charles’s forgotten bread and bit into it. With grudging approval, she said, “Not bad, Nathaniel. Not as good as Caterina’s. It’s the water that makes the difference, you know. Water’s dead here. Like everything else.” She tossed the bread down. Then she looked at Charles.
“Leaving, are we?” she said. “Or just talking about it endlessly, like a jay?”
Nate found his voice. “Just talking, Derie. Not endlessly.”
She barked a laugh. “Says you. This one’s been chewing on it in that parboiled mind of his for days now.” To Charles, she said, “You’ve got no defenses anymore, boy. You burned them all out with that poison you put in yourself, and now, you don’t take a shit without me knowing about it.”
Charles raised his chin. “I did my part. I got Nate inside.”
Derie made a scornful noise. “Would have been nice to have had a courtier on the inside, too, wouldn’t it? One that hadn’t stewed his own brain like tea leaves so it’d feel nicer while he wasted his seed in some third-rate courtier girl.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” Charles said, unfazed. “Shame the Work can’t show you the future, old woman. Never occurred to you that anyone else might have designs on Elban’s empire, did it?”
“This is not about his empire, you stupid boy. This is about the entire world.” Derie’s voice was a vicious hiss.
“I’m not a boy,” Charles said.
Nate felt the antagonism burning between the two of them, and fear began to burgeon into panic inside him. “Derie,” he said, and went silent. There was no balm for this wound, no salve for this betrayal. Because that was how Derie saw it, he knew: a betrayal not just of her, but of everything generations had worked for. Lives and blood, vanished like water into dry dust.
Part of Nate agreed with her.
Suddenly Derie smiled, brilliant and hard. “Well, what to do about this? Can’t let you go feral, with all that Work in you.”
“Send him home,” Nate said.
“Where he’ll do what?” she said, as if Charles wasn’t even there. “All he’s ever been trained for is pretending to be a courtier. I can doubt he can even hitch up a horse anymore.” She picked up the bread knife. “And of course, he won’t have the Work anymore.”
Sometimes an ordinary person was born powerful. Away from the caravan, without planning, without interference. You could feel them, your first day in a new village, like a campfire in winter or water in the desert. It was easy to pick them out of a crowd, because they were the ones everyone else either gravitated toward or edged away from; they were the only ones who seemed real.
And sometimes the opposite happened. Sometimes, a person born with power grew up unworthy; wanted to leave, or was expelled. But they couldn’t take their power with them—it couldn’t be allowed to spread unchecked. So it was removed. Nate had been thinking of expulsion just that day, with Firo, but he had never actually seen one happen. When he was a child, Caterina had never let him watch, and when he grew older he didn’t want to.
Now he sat frozen as Derie sliced into her hand and drew quick sigils in the spilled blood. Nate felt the Work rasp over his mind, where it had touched Charles’s. Like an insect, Derie began to strip away Charles’s power like leaves from a tree, unweaving every bit of Work he’d ever done. It was brutal, ugly. Nate ached with empty places where Charles had been, where he was torn away. Charles himself gasped for breath, gray-skinned, lips bluing. Sweat beaded his forehead. The sounds coming from him, small and helpless, were worse than Judah’s screams during the caning. Nate knew he could do nothing to stop this.
“Stop,” he said anyway. “Stop, Derie.”
“I think not,” she said.
Charles was a dwindling flame, then a spark. Nate reached out to lend some of his own fire, and felt himself slapped back, the sting of it reverberating through his entire body.
The spark sputtered. Died. Charles’s writhing stopped. He slumped dull-eyed in his chair. “You’ve killed me.” His voice was a void.
“Not at all.” Derie stood up. “You can live like that as long as you like. Of course, most find they don’t like to for very long. But that’s not my problem.” Leaning on her cane, she stomped to the counter and picked up a basin that Bindy had left to dry on the shelf. Then she stomped back. Dropped it on the table in front of the living husk that had once been Charles. “There. So you don’t leave a mess if you do decide to do the decent thing.”
She left. Charles was uninjured physically, and looked exactly as he had before Derie had arrived, but everything was wrong. His friendly presence in Nate’s head was gone. Nate’s heart broke for him. He tried to imagine living like that, stripped of all power, all connection. Cut off from the world, from all the people he’d ever loved. The loneliness of it. The misery.
Charles closed his eyes. His head moved ever so faintly back and forth, and Nate remembered him saying, a lifetime and mere minutes ago: I prefer to be in my right mind. “Knife,” he said. His voice sounded like it was three rooms away.
Nate brought his knife. He laid the weapon down on the table in front of Charles. “You don’t have to do this,” he said. “You could—” But even as he spoke, he knew better. Nobody ever survived having their power taken away. Nobody ever wanted to.
It took Charles some time to get the knife into his hand. It took more time, and effort, to bring the knife’s edge to the vein in his arm. It was excruciating to watch but it was unthinkable to Nate to do anything other than stay, and wait, and witness as, finally, Charles mustered the strength to open the skin, as his blood started to flow into the basin. It was as dead and lifeless as the rest of him, no more alive than the sludge at the bottom of the Brake.
And although it took longer than either of them would have liked, Charles began to grow pale. “Nate,” he said eventually, and Nate said, “I’m here.” They had to speak the words aloud, because neither of them could feel each other anymore.
The next morning, Nate still sat there, motionless at the table with three bowls of clotting blood and the dead body of his oldest friend. When Bindy walked in and gasped, Nate only blinked. He felt like he’d just woken up, but knew he hadn’t slept. “Bindy,” he said calmly, “will you please go find a guard? Charles has killed himself.”
By the time the deadcart arrived—nothing so grand as a deadcoach, not for somebody like Charles—Nate had dumped the bowls of blood in the garden. Even inert blood made good fertilizer. It didn’t bother him. He’d watched the stuff drain out of Charles, but could feel nothing of his friend in it. Even the body itself felt meaningless, and it did not disturb him overmuch to watch the two workers dump it unceremoniously into the back of the cart, where several bodies already lay jumbled on top of each other. Nate stood silently with the guard as the two workers pulled a soiled piece of canvas over the bodies to cover them, and cracked the whip over the decrepit mule who began to ploddingly carry them all away.
“Where are they taking him?” Nate said.
“Pits outside the city,” the guard said. “Sorry about your friend, magus. Was he a dropper?”
“He used to be.”
“Once a dropper, always a dropper.” The guard nodded at the disappearing cart, then spat into the dust. “Two of those others were, too. Stuff turns a man into a parasite. Wish they’d all do like your friend. No disrespect meant, of course.”
“None taken,” Nate said.
As the Seneschal let him into the courtyard the next day, the gray man said, “You have one more week to convince her to come down on her own. Then I’ll bring her down, one way or another.” His voice was flat. “You might suggest to her—subtly, of course—that the broken stairs don’t protect Gavin.”
“I thought you didn’t approve of the way Elban used them against each other,” Nate said.
“I don’t. It will be clean, my way. Fair.” One gray shoulder twitched in a shrug. “I’ll only hurt him until she comes down. No tricks.”
Judah would certainly come down if Gavin were being tortured. Nate needed to finish his work soon. As he navigated the corridors to the parlor, he felt dull surprise that the end was finally so near: he had spent his entire life building a house, and now there were only the curtains to hang and the horse to hitch up. Although generally one didn’t hitch horses up to houses. His metaphors were mixing. Charles was dead. Soon Judah would be wreaking her usual careless havoc in his head. Not knowing who he was would almost be a relief.
He found Eleanor sitting on the parlor floor in a tangle of dingy gray yarn like a bird in a nest, and gave her the flour. Her thanks was halfhearted. “Put it on the table, will you? Sorry, I can’t get up. If I lose my place in this I’ll never find it again. I had it outside drying, and the wind picked up.” She shook her head once, as if she had no movements to spare. Then, looking more closely at him, her eyes narrowed. “Magus, are you feeling all right?”
“I was about to ask the same of you.”
“I’m just tired. Of this yarn, mostly. We really are grateful for the flour, magus. It means a lot. Will you bring that flask on the table up to Judah when you go? It’s squash soup.”
“She’ll like that.”
“She’ll hate it, actually,” Eleanor said, “but it’s food. There’s a letter, too.”
He took the flask. He burned the letter in the workshop, as he did all of Eleanor’s letters. They would only remind Judah of Eleanor and the outside world. They would only hurt her. And he needed her focused.
You seem sad today.
They stood on a windy mountain, thick soft cloud obscuring everything beneath them. The snow never melted there, but in Judah’s Work, it was only cold, not freezing. For her, the glittering crystals of ice in the air were beautiful, not piercing; for her, the crunch of snow underfoot did not carry a fear of crevasse, collapse, death. Around them the peaks of the Barriers reached majestically skyward, blue-gray and frosted with white. In reality, by this point, Nate had not been able to open his windburned eyes enough to see through them; Charles had lost a toe, and for all of them, remembering the sensation of being merely cold had been like remembering summer. But Nate had hidden those darker memories behind the locked door, because to explain why the three travelers were willing to suffer so would require explaining why they were here, and Judah wasn’t ready to hear that yet. To her, the Barriers were merely dark and lovely and wild.
I suppose I am, he said. A friend died.
The snow settled on her hair like diamonds and didn’t melt. I know how that feels.
You do, don’t you? Nate changed the scene: showed her the stableman as he’d seen him that first time, in Firo’s room. Wary and pale, but unafraid. Like a cow going to slaughter was unafraid. He could feel the stab of pain the dull face brought her. The empty spaces the stableman had left in her were the empty spaces Charles had left in him. It was dreadful to lose someone. He’s not dead, though.
He might as well be, she said curtly. He could feel her sadness as keenly as he felt his own.
Watch the snow, he told Judah, and set the silver crystals of snow spinning and whirling in the air. Her eyes grew wide, as he’d known they would. Snow never danced that way in reality. While she was distracted, he reached into her, felt for the jagged places the stableman’s absence had left. He pressed the broken edges together and smoothed the seam over. It was complicated Work and he was almost frightened by how quickly and easily he could do it. It was true that the more you Worked in someone’s mind, the more malleable that mind became, but this was something he’d never been able to do before. He knew he wouldn’t be able to do it now were they not in the tower.
Even so, she gasped, and pressed a hand to her chest. What did you do?
A kind of Work. The faintest smugness colored his voice. The smoothing was the sort of talent he had long envied in Caterina, who did it as a treatment for grief or anger. But now Judah’s lips were pressed tight together, her eyes flinty.
Undo it.
But I took away your pain.
It’s my pain. The ice crystals near her seemed to darken from diamond to onyx and the wind began to snatch at Nate—nowhere near as cold as reality had been, but worrisome, nonetheless. I want to feel it.
The sky was beginning to tilt sideways and slide away. He wasn’t even sure she knew she was doing it. Unsettled, he said, I’ve given you a gift. You’re better off without him.
With a sound like shattering glass, the crystals of black ice snapped together into a long, sharp wedge. For a bare instant it hovered in the air between them—then it flew straight toward his heart. He felt the merciless point tearing into his skin, splintering his ribs like kindling—
And he lay on the floor of the tower, out of the Work, gritty stone beneath his hands. He tried to take a breath, but something was wrong with his lungs. Something was wrong with all of him. His arms and legs flailed against the floor, his back straining in an agonizing arc, but his mind was clear—as clear as it ever was, anyway—watching his body twist and spasm. The pain was very real, the pain was brutal. The back of his skull rammed three times, hard, against the stone floor, and the world was full of flinty ice again and everything went gray.
When he became aware of himself once more, his body was mercifully still. The side of his face pressed against cold stone. A pebble dug into his cheek. Faintly, he heard somebody gasping. He didn’t think it was him. Carefully, he moved one arm, then another. Braced them beneath his body and pushed himself upright.
Judah sat a few feet away, her back pressed against the curved wall. She was only inches from the place the floor stopped. It terrified him to see her so close to the edge. Her arms were wrapped tight around her body. She was the one who was gasping. Her eyes were wild, like a panicked horse. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s all right. I’m all right,” he said, although something in his head was damaged. He saw everything in multiples: Judah here, Judah on the mountain, Judah a year from now. Infinite Judahs observed by infinite Nathaniels. The ends of himself flapped loose and he knew that Derie would not be able to put him back together this time. He tried to gather as much of himself as he could.
He must have done a decent job because her breathing slowed, and the terror faded from her eyes. “I saw your friend in your head,” she said. “I saw him kill himself. You just sat and watched. How could you just sit and watch?”
“Derie took his power away. He was already dead.”
He could smell her puzzlement like smoke. Then she understood, and the smoke vanished. To Nate’s great relief she came forward, onto her knees, and slid away from the terrifying drop—came close to him, and took his hand. Her hand felt dry and cold, her touch tentative. “I’m sorry I hurt you, magus. And I’m sorry for your friend. You loved him.”
“I did,” he said. Her eyes were as black as the icy dagger she’d sent into his chest, and all of the many fractured parts of him were sure that if he kissed her now she would let him, if he did anything she would let him. Some of the fragments inside his head were already kissing her, already doing much more, but the lump of his real body in the tower was sluggish and hard to control. And wouldn’t Derie be angry. Wouldn’t she use her cane on him then.
As if in answer, he heard his old teacher’s voice—real or imagined, he didn’t know, those lines were fractured, too—as cutting as the mountain wind. She’s not yours, boy.
He flinched away. Judah frowned. Before he could say anything she reached out one of her cool, dry hands and touched his cheek. He would have flinched back from that, too—but the coolness spread over him, like floating in a pond in the warm sun. It was better than a kiss. It was better than anything he’d ever felt. The pieces of him weren’t joined, but they were soothed. He was a great tree surrounded by a pond and all the fluttering leaves of him were useful, all grew from the same place. He could stay like this forever. He never wanted to move again. And she hadn’t even cut him first—even that faint delicious pain was absent—
She hadn’t even cut him first. His eyes flew open in amazement. “What are you doing? How are you—”
Judah pulled her hand back. He was still cracked and broken, but the lovely peace remained. “I do it for Gavin when he’s upset. You seemed so miserable.”
“You can just...do that,” he said.
She shrugged. “It’s not the same as what you do.”
No, it wasn’t. It was much, much stronger. This was why it had to be her, Nate realized. This was the Work the Slonimi had wrought, all of them together, over all these years. She wasn’t like him or Caterina or Derie; she wasn’t even like Maia or Tobin. She was something else entirely. He could see her slipping already back into the docility that he and the tower wove around her. Her jaw and cheekbones stood out more now. She wasn’t eating enough and she probably didn’t even know it, the Work he and the tower did on her when she was asleep kept her from feeling hungry. Or cold—he had felt her touch, he knew her body was cold. She was dying in this barren tower, isolated from everyone she knew, and it all probably felt completely normal to her. It probably seemed a perfectly reasonable way to live.
Sometimes, as the Slonimi traveled, they found a villager so powerful they could not be left behind, whether the villager would come willingly or not. It was hard. They always yelled and fought, and had to be chained until they accepted their new life. Caterina hated it. It’s for the best, she’d say, though, and she was right. Caterina’s own mother had been one of the Unwilling. Charles’s father, too. What the Seneschal had told Nate in Elban’s study was true: people didn’t always know what was good for them, and they rarely considered what was good for the world. Sometimes you had to force them. Sometimes they had to be tricked.
“You’re getting very good,” he said.
“Yes,” Judah said. Her voice sounded drowsy. She pushed his knife toward him. “If there were a contest for the person who was the very best at digging through your head, I’d win.”
No, he thought, wryly. Derie would. “You’re finding truths that I don’t even know are inside me. Soon you’ll be able to manipulate them.”
“Like you just did? With Darid?” She blinked, her face slack with the effort of thinking. “I didn’t like that.”
“But it helped you. You trust me to help you, don’t you?”
“I trust you,” she said so dreamily that his fragmented heart broke into a few more pieces, just for her.
“Good.” He took her hand in his. “Because you’ll need to trust me, if you’re going to unbind yourself from Gavin.”
Some emotion broke through her complacency like a lantern through fog: excitement and dread and fear and trepidation, all at once. “Could I do that?” she whispered finally.
“It won’t be easy,” he said. He kept his voice neutral. Just in case she had some tendrils inside him, he thought fixedly of the locked door inside his head. “You’d have to do exactly as I say. Even if it’s hard. Even if it hurts.”
With a glimmer of her old cheek, she said, “Are you seriously asking me if I’m afraid of pain?”
“I mean it,” he said. “You have to trust me.”
She rolled her eyes as if the answer was obvious. “I trust you.”
And she did. He could feel it with all of his selves. He very much doubted that she had much choice—the tower did its own kind of Work—but still. It overwhelmed him. He still held her hand; now he pressed the back of it to his lips, which was all he dared to do. Perhaps after. Perhaps there would be time.
But then he realized how limp her hand was in his, and—mouth still pressed to her cool skin—he looked up. Saw the dazed distaste in her eyes, the wariness.
Well. Maybe not.
He let her hand fall. Then he picked up his knife. It was spotted with old blood and grit from the floor, but he didn’t think it mattered, any more than her distaste mattered. After, when she was asleep, the tower would smooth everything over.