Then there was less pain. She drifted up through the soft sea of white into consciousness, and she still could not move her arms or legs. She waited to drift away again but the current seemed to have stopped. All she could do was lie—yes, her cheek lay against something, that was the softness—and wait. Each rise and fall of her body was searing agony so she breathed shallowly. She blinked, and realized she could blink, that there was a difference between closed eyes and open ones, and also that blinking helped the blur around her coalesce and separate into specific forms. A bright blur became a window full of light. A brown blur became a wooden table, holding small blurs that sharpened into bottles and a large blur that was a pitcher and a pile of white blurs—bandages? Maybe.
She was in Elly’s room, facedown on the bed. Some of her hair was in her eyes, blood-colored streaks across her vision like bars, and when she tried to lift a hand to brush it back her hand wouldn’t come. She could lift her head, though, and did. Pain rippled down her back like burning water but she saw soft strips of cloth tied around her wrists, holding her down.
So she was tied facedown on Elly’s bed.
She took further inventory. She was naked, but covered up to her waist by a thin sheet. Her scalp itched and she could feel a thick layer of grease on her skin although the sheets she lay on were clean. There was a stale smell in the room. Her hands were sticky with old sweat. The pain in her back was constant, blazing. Her head hurt. The muscles in her neck ached. Her mouth was dry. She wished that somebody would bring her water.
Her back hurt like the burns on her arms had hurt, but worse. Had she fallen into a fire?
She had been with Darid, in the far pasture. He had pulled her boots off and she had laughed, and then he’d run his hand up the outside of her leg, fingertips barely touching the bare skin above her legging. She had teased him: Am I a horse you’re thinking of buying?
Then nothing.
Then Elly, tearstained.
Then the magus. I warned you. He had never warned her of anything. He wasn’t talking to her.
A fluttering, sick panic surged in her and she realized that she was scared. She squeezed her eyes shut and willed herself to drift away. Willed it and willed it and willed it, but when she opened her eyes there were the bottles, there was the pitcher, there were the bandages.
Her back hurt so much.
There was a new sound. The door opening; whispering footsteps coming toward her, she could not bend her head enough to see their owner. She could only lie there and wait for them to enter her field of vision.
Dark trousers, a white shirt. With a flood of relief she recognized Gavin, his shirt loose and unbuttoned, his jaw bristling with golden stubble. “You’re awake.”
Something was wrong with his voice, or possibly her ears. She licked her lips as well as she could. “What happened?”
His unshaven face twisted into a smile. There was something wrong with that, too. “Where would you like me to start?”
“I don’t remember,” she said.
An empty armchair waited next to the bed; somebody had been sitting with her. He lowered himself into it. The way he moved wasn’t right, either. He was stiff. Slow. “I was on the training field, wrestling. I got thrown; hit my head on a rock and knocked myself unconscious. You, too, apparently.”
His voice was cold. That was what was wrong with it. He sounded like Elban.
“The head stableman ran into the House carrying you in his arms. Right through the garden into the great hall, with your hair down and your feet bare.” He smiled that ghastly smile again. “We still haven’t found your boots.”
Carried her. Into the House. The panic came back, stronger than ever. “Darid.”
“Was that his name?” Icy. Freezing.
Was. “Where is he?”
“I haven’t gotten to that part yet.” Oh, he did sound like Elban, he sounded exactly like Elban. Mocking and heartless and poisonously friendly. “Don’t you want to know why your back hurts?”
Elly’s face. “No.”
“You were caned,” Gavin said. “Right here, tied to the bedposts. Half-naked, with guards watching.”
Ripping fabric. The top of her dress torn to her waist. A sea of helmets. The Seneschal, flat-eyed. Elly, crying. She did not know what she really remembered and what she could only imagine.
Gavin’s glare was hard. “I wasn’t there, of course. I was tied to the bed in the other room, much like you are now. Would you like me to take off my shirt and show you what your back looks like?”
She remembered that cold hard look. From when they were children, in the study. When they would not stop hurting her because she would not stop screaming and his face had hurt her, too: long past love, wanting only for her to shut up because he, too, was hurting. Blaming her, hating her. As he hated her now.
But they were both still here and they were both still alive and once Elban returned, Gavin would have hated her anyway, she remembered.
Was that his name?
Was. “Darid,” she said again.
“Was not very smart. If he’d had the sense to send a stable boy with a message, instead of making a spectacle of himself, you and I wouldn’t have spent the last week drowning in opium syrup. By the way, if you were pregnant, you aren’t now. The magus saw to that.”
“Gavin,” she said, helpless, desperate.
“Were you pregnant?”
“My back hurts,” she said.
He leaned forward. She sensed his scathing fury and for a moment was afraid he was going to hurt her. Then he spoke, and his voice was so frostbitten, so black and blistered with barely-controlled violence, that she almost wished he had. “So does mine.”
Her eyes filled with tears. She didn’t want them to spill over onto her cheeks, but they did. Gavin leaned back again, his anger touched with satisfaction, now.
“Tell me what happened to Darid,” she said. Pleading.
“I’m very sorry, Judah.” He didn’t sound sorry at all. “I’m sorry your life is the way it is. I’m sorry you won’t get to see everything you want to see and do everything you want to do, get married and have a sweet little cottage somewhere and lots of purple-haired babies. But it’s not my fault any more than it is yours. Fucking a courtier would have been bad enough, but at least a courtier would have been smart enough not to get caught. But staff, Jude?” A bitter laugh escaped him. “How many lectures did you give me on that very topic? Don’t fuck the serving girls, Gavin. They have too much to lose, Gavin. You’re being selfish, Gavin. Selfish!” He pointed at her. “You never get to call me selfish again. Ever.”
She couldn’t even wipe the tears away. They ran unchecked.
Ticking off each point on his fingers, he continued. “Elly’s upset. I’ve spent the last week in agony for something I didn’t even do—and in case you’re too selfish for that to bother you, did you miss the part where they stripped you half-naked in front of a room full of guards?”
“Why are you being so mean?” The question came out sounding so childlike, so powerless, that it only made her weep harder.
“Because I have spent the last twenty-two years defending you,” Gavin said, “and this is how you repay me.”
She was stunned into silence. Even her crying stopped. She had thought of Gavin in many ways over the years: as brother and playmate, as a cad and a spoiled child and a silly boy playing soldier. Her confidant, her conspirator; a glorious hope made flesh, because someday when he was Lord of the City her life would be better and so would everyone else’s. Her love. Her burden. Her responsibility. Her friend. Never had she thought of him in terms of debt, or repayment, or owing. “You sound like Elban,” she said.
She meant it to sting, but he didn’t even flinch. Not even inside. “Maybe he’s right. Maybe I do need to lock you up, if you’re going to keep doing such stupid things.” But then, maybe, the barb went home, because suddenly he looked exhausted. “Why did you do it, Jude? Were you that lonely? I do everything I can for you, you know that. Why?”
Now he was the one who sounded like a child. Dry-eyed, she said, “Tell me what happened to Darid. Did they let the hounds have him?”
She felt a sick burst of something from him. She didn’t know what it was. The sadness vanished and he went cold again. “First they castrated him. Then they cut him open. Then they cut his throat. When they were done, they threw him on the trash heap. Whatever the crows haven’t eaten is probably still there.”
She couldn’t talk. He stood and walked to the door. Then he stopped.
“They didn’t spike his head,” he said. “I did that much for you.”
She didn’t know how long she lay there after that. Darid was dead and it was her fault and Gavin hadn’t even untied her hands. When she heard the door open again she didn’t bother to lift her head. These footsteps were heavier, and the chair creaked as someone sat down. She counted her heartbeats in silence. Ten. Twenty.
“Well,” the Seneschal said finally, “I did warn you.”
Had it been him, and not the magus, who she’d heard speaking those words through a cloud of opium? Either way, she saw no reason to respond.
“I hope you realize how lucky you are that this didn’t happen when Lord Elban was here. Your little arrangement with him would actually have made this worse, you know. You’re not just the disobedient foundling anymore. You’re his property, just like his horse or his soldiers or his sword. He might still have something to say about it, when he comes back.”
No point responding to that, either. When the Seneschal spoke again, he sounded weary. “You must begin to think before you act, Judah. Elban might not be willing to kill you, but surely you realize now that killing is not the worst he can do. What happened here was the bare minimum that I could order, and still have a chance of satisfying him. I’m doing everything that I can to help you, but I can’t promise that it will be enough.”
She opened her eyes. “This is helping me?”
“Right now, this is the best help I can give you.”
No point. She let her eyes close again.
She heard the Seneschal stand. “Nathaniel Magus is here to see to your wounds. If he thinks it’s safe, he’ll untie you. The restraints aren’t a punishment. You were delirious, and we didn’t want to risk you rolling onto your back.” Apparently, she was supposed to say something to that because he paused, and after the pause he sounded stern and disappointed. “The magus has made sure you aren’t pregnant, but he’ll need to examine you again to make sure the bleeding has stopped. Do what he tells you. We won’t speak of the stableman again. Maybe the House will forget and Elban will never hear of it.”
Footsteps. Receding.
Darid was dead and it was her fault.
As the magus untied her, he said, “I’m very sorry for everything that’s happened to you. I did what I could to help.”
He had to help her move her arms down to her side. It hurt, a stabbing pain through the joints of her shoulders. Unlike the fire in her back it was a good pain, or would be, but she almost cried out. The shock of it opened her eyes; the magus crouched next to the bed, where he could meet her gaze with his own, which was concerned and genuinely sad. His glasses had been broken, she noticed; a thin crack marred the lens, and the frames were clumsily mended with a piece of wire.
“Everyone keeps telling me how much they’ve done for me.” She relished the bitterness in her own voice. “And yet somehow I don’t feel helped.”
“I don’t blame you. I need to see your back. I’m sorry, I can’t give you any more opium syrup. But I’ll be as gentle as I can.” She closed her eyes. A stretchy pain was added to the burning one. “The bandages stick a little. I have a salve that will help, but in a few days, it would be good if we left the bandages off and let the wounds air. There are some stitches here that have to come out. It might pinch.” Whatever the magus was doing now hurt, but not unbearably. He took a bandage from the table. “You’ll have some scars, but I’ve seen worse. And you have some scars already, I see.”
“They told you about Gavin and me.”
“They did. It’s very interesting. Lord Gavin really has healed quite a bit faster than you have. He woke up earlier, too, by several hours.” There was an audible snip, and a tiny, almost insulting pinch. “What caused the scars on your feet?”
“Different things. Nobody ever sees feet.” Darid had seen her feet. The last day had not been the first time. He had never said a word about her scars.
Pinch. “Lord Gavin said you were taught not to scream.”
Darid was dead and it was her fault. Through gritted teeth: “Couldn’t have me saying ouch when he stubbed his royal toe.”
The magus’s scissors snipped, snipped. “Whatever the source of the bond between you, I don’t think it was intended to be used that way. To hurt you.”
She opened her eyes. “Oh? Then how do you think it was intended to be used?”
Either missing her sarcasm or ignoring it, he said, “Maybe someone was trying to protect you.” He put the scissors on the table next to the bed, and then laid something across her back, something cool and damp that quenched the fire.
“Then someone underestimated Lord Elban,” she said. “Someone underestimated this whole horrible place.”
“Perhaps they had a reason.”
“Perhaps they had a sick sense of humor.”
The cool damp thing came away. “Have you ever been out in the city?”
“No.”
“Lord Elban is not beloved there,” he said. “You are.”
“Until they come inside, and everyone tells them I’m a witch.”
“Well,” he said, and then again. “Well. You’re not like them. They sense that. This is just salve. It shouldn’t hurt.” His fingers moved across her back in long straight lines. The touch only stung a little. “The Seneschal said I don’t need to explain this, but I’m going to anyway. While you were unconscious, I gave you an elixir that would end a pregnancy, if one existed. It...did what it was supposed to do.”
Darid was dead. It was her fault.
“If you were pregnant, it was too early to tell. But you bled more than I liked, and you had a seizure. Only a small one.” As if that helped. “I’m sorry. I wanted to wait, and see if it was even necessary, but the Seneschal—wouldn’t wait.” He sounded pained, almost embarrassed. “You can still have children. I’m as sure as I can be about that.”
“I don’t want children.”
“You might change your mind.”
“No. I was born, once, and look how I ended up. Look how—” Her mouth snapped shut. She had been about to say, Look how my mother ended up, and it was the first time she’d thought of her mother since awakening, and the anger and grief slid back onto her with the weight of the entire House.
“I think the bleeding has stopped,” he said very gently. “But I need to check again.”
Again. He had done this before, while she was unconscious. The idea disturbed her, but what was the point of arguing? What was the point of anything?
“Roll onto your side, please,” he said. “I will be as quick as I can.”
He was true to his word. Where Arkady had been crude and gleeful, this magus was quiet and efficient. She even thought his hands might be shaking, but she felt so thoroughly dulled that she trusted nothing her body told her except the pain in her back. When he was done he said everything seemed fine and he would check on her back again soon. Then he left. As soon as he opened the door Elly burst through it, hurried to Judah’s side and kissed her forehead.
“I wanted to come in with the magus, but the Seneschal wouldn’t let me. I thought it would be okay, anyway. He’s not like Arkady.” Her voice was low, but her words tumbled all over each other on their way out of her mouth. Her blue eyes were wide and anxious. “It was okay, wasn’t it?”
Judah wanted to reassure her, but she could not seem to do it. “I’m not pregnant.”
“I know. Thank the gods, neither am I.” Elly stood up and began poking through the wardrobe. Finally, she held up a white cotton nightgown. “This is loose. It shouldn’t hurt you. Lords, Jude, what did I say?” Because Judah’s eyes were filling with tears again. Judah could see Elly, eyes wide and startled, running through the past few seconds in her mind. Then her face crumpled. “Oh, no. I’m so stupid. I’m sorry. They’ve just been—well, never mind. I’m sorry, that’s all. Please forgive me.”
Judah nodded. She swiped angrily at the tears, tried to sit up and failed. The motion made her sick to her stomach and her back howled.
“Let me help you,” Elly said, and she did. Neither of them spoke. The dressing process drained what little energy Judah had and her back protested every movement, no matter how small. When she finally lay down on her stomach again, queasy and damp with sweat, Elly crawled into bed next to her and took her hand.
“Jude.” Her voice was gentle, almost a whisper. “Did Gavin tell you about—the person we’re not supposed to mention?”
Judah nodded. Relief filled Elly’s face, but only for an instant, because Judah was crying again. She didn’t seem to be able to control it.
“Oh,” Elly said. “Judah, my love, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for all of this.”
“You were there,” Judah said. “You were with me.”
“I will always be there.” Elly was crying, too. Her words were choked but fierce. “I will always be with you.”
After another day in bed Judah was able to stand up and hobble around the room; the day after that she made it out into the parlor, and sat gingerly in her chair. By the time she could twist her head enough to see her back in the mirror, the shallowest welts were well on their way to healing. There were four wounds that would scar: three across her upper back, in an X with one double bar, and one lower down. She did not spend long looking at them.
Gavin was still furious with her. When she entered the parlor, he left it. His healing was further along than hers, and he was back to training; she even saw the sweat marks on his shirt that meant he’d been able to wear his cuirass. Judah wore one of his other shirts—Elly brought it to her—that flowed loose over her back, and her lightest skirt. The others, in their boots and tunics and summer coats, came in like creatures from a different world, smelling of other rooms, of outside. Guards stood watch over the parlor door in the corridor. They allowed Gavin and Elly and Theron to pass, but Judah knew they wouldn’t do the same for her. Not by the Seneschal’s orders; by Gavin’s.
“I obviously can’t trust you,” he said in the only conversation they’d had since she left her bed.
Elly, scarlet, with clenched fists, told him, “You’re being a petulant child.”
“You’re not the one who suffers for what she does,” he said, stern. This new Gavin, the one who made firm decisions about everyone else’s lives, seemed to have replaced the old one entirely. Maybe the cane had stripped away the last of the person, and left only the lord.
Elly wasn’t cowed. “She didn’t do anything you haven’t done a dozen times over. And don’t even try to tell me that’s not true.”
“It’s different and you know it,” Gavin argued.
Elly drew herself up and seemed about to say something else, but Judah said, “Let it go, Elly. It doesn’t matter. I don’t mind.”
She didn’t. She had nowhere to go anyway, and no boots to wear there. The dull feeling that had come over her when she’d heard Darid was dead had not left her. She suffered physical pain and the occasional burst of weeping, but both felt disconnected from the core of her. Everything important inside her was dead. She was like an unlit stove, except that she wasn’t even engaged enough to be cold. She was just—there. Inert.
Theron sat with her sometimes. Which she knew would have warmed her, if she’d been able to feel warmth: the new Theron came and went like weather, with little notice of those around him. But when he came into the parlor and found Judah sitting alone, he would stop and sit, too. He still didn’t speak much. But he only sat in the parlor when she was there. Something in him seemed to think she needed company. She didn’t think she did.
Once she asked him how things were in the House. He pondered for several seconds before answering: “There are more guards than usual. The ones with white badges.”
“Really,” Judah said, unsurprised. The Lord’s Guard, with their red badges, had all marched with Elban.
He nodded. “And more cats.”
She stared. “Cats?”
“Cats,” he said, and that was the end of the conversation.
One day when the magus came to check on Judah, Theron was with her. The magus’s glasses were still broken. Judah had stopped noticing the crack, but Theron immediately said, “Your glasses are broken.”
Judah realized that sometime since his illness, Theron had stopped wearing his own glasses. “Yes, Lord Theron,” the magus said with a bow. He’d grown marginally less servile around Judah and Elly, but still seemed nervous around the two young lords. “I really must make time to find a spectaclist.”
“Give them to me,” Theron said.
The magus frowned, but said, “Of course, my lord,” and handed them over. Theron took them, then stood up and wandered to the door and through it and out.
“What was that about?” the magus asked.
Judah shrugged, as well as she was able: sort of a twitch of her elbows. “Theron doesn’t really do things for reasons anymore.” She turned her back to the magus and unbuttoned Gavin’s shirt, letting it fall down her back. As he began to peel away the bandages, something occurred to her. “How well do you see without those things, anyway?”
She heard a faint exhalation that might almost have been a laugh. “Well enough, up close. You’re healing.”
She twitched her arms again. Then there was the salve, and the bandaging. The magus was gentle but she could not help tensing as he touched her. Hands on her bare skin brought to mind either Darid or Arkady, and neither memory was welcome. Elly slept next to Judah every night—“Until you’re better and Gavin stops being a child”—but actually being touched was different. The magus seemed to sense her discomfort, and, as always, was quick.
As she buttoned the shirt and he washed his hands, he said, “Have you been outside? Fresh air might do you good.”
Wordless, she pointed at the open terrace doors.
“Exercise, then,” he said. “I’ll accompany you, if you like. You could show me the House.”
“I lost my boots.” She leaned back carefully, tucking her legs up under her skirt. “And I assume you noticed the guards at the door.”
The magus nodded. He seemed very young without his glasses. Theron had been the same way. When you were used to seeing a face with glasses, seeing it without them was like catching a glimpse of a private room. “Are they there for you?”
“Gavin’s angry.”
“Because of the caning?” He began to pack his supplies into his satchel, a process she liked watching as much as she liked anything. Everything had its place. A leather case for the silver scissors. A rubber-lined pocket for the salve, another lined in silk for the bandages. The day Theron was poisoned, he’d called himself disorganized. He’d lied. “Or because you kept a secret from him?”
“It’s complicated,” she said.
He shook his head. “I can’t imagine what it must be like, being Lord Elban’s son.”
“Gavin is nothing like his father,” Judah said automatically.
“They were both born knowing they would eventually rule everything they saw.” He took the old bandages and stuffed them into a cotton bag. “My mother is a healer. I spent my whole childhood muddling grass into water, doing what I’d seen her do. Experimenting, to see what was possible.”
“Women aren’t healers.”
“Things were different where I grew up. Anyway, I imagine it’s strange for you, too. He feels everything you feel physically, but he’ll never see the world the way you do. His experience of life is too different from yours.”
He seemed to expect an answer so she told him what Elly told her, every night. “He’s a child throwing a tantrum. He’ll get over it.”
The magus lifted an eyebrow ever so slightly. Judah wasn’t even sure she wouldn’t have noticed it if he’d been wearing glasses. “On my way to Highfall, I passed a village where Lord Elban had thrown a tantrum. The ashes were still warm.”
“Gavin is nothing like his father,” she said again.
The door opened and Theron wandered back in, the magus’s glasses in his hand. He laid them absentmindedly on the table. They were perfectly mended. Even the crack in the glass had disappeared. Something twisted in Judah’s heart, a piercing stab that died as quickly as it was born. Theron had not fixed anything since the poisoning.
The magus picked them up. “Thank you,” he said, surprised. But Theron had already drifted away.
Dinner came. Judah cut her food mechanically into pieces and ate it, though it was sand in her mouth. Gavin ignored Judah and so Elly ignored him. Judah could feel Gavin’s itchy, uncomfortable anger coming off him like an odor. All of them were eating as quickly as possible. Mealtimes were bleak, these days.
Suddenly, Theron put down his fork. “I feel,” he said, “like there are conversations going on, and I can’t hear them.”
There was a silence.
“Nobody is talking, Theron,” Elly said.
“No. Not here,” he answered. “Everywhere else.”
There was another silence.
Then Judah said, “Do you mean that people are talking, but they stop when they see you?” People did that to her. It could make a person feel crazy.
“No. I feel there’s always a conversation happening.” Theron frowned. “Conversation isn’t the right word. Not talking. But...” He shook his head, mouth tightening in a rare display of frustration. “Things were easier to explain before I got sick. Maybe I knew more words, then.”
Theron had never before mentioned the difference between what he was once and what he was now. The moment felt delicate, dangerous. Judah thought Gavin’s gaze darted to her, the way it always had when something puzzled or disturbed him. She kept her eyes on Theron.
Very gently, Elly said, “Perhaps you should talk to the new magus, love. He’s not like Arkady. He’s a good man.”
“He’s not a bad man,” Theron said. “But it’s worst when he’s here.” His face brightened with inspiration. “It’s like everybody is wearing clothes under their clothes. Layers and layers, all the way down. It’s always been that way, but it’s louder, now. Do you think the magus could fix my head?”
This time, Judah couldn’t help looking at Gavin. “What does your head feel like?” he asked his brother.
“Distant,” Theron answered, after a long time. “Like my thoughts are happening somewhere else.”
“Where?”
Gavin was being too pushy. Too stern. Judah remembered what the magus had said, that Gavin was experimenting with ruling. He would drive Theron away; he would break the moment.
Sure enough, Theron only shook his head, and wouldn’t or couldn’t say more.
“Can you help Theron?” Judah asked the magus the next time he came.
“Lord Gavin just asked me the same thing downstairs,” he said.
“What did you say?”
“I told him that his brother was alive, and clever enough to fix my glasses, and I didn’t see a problem with him.”
Judah cocked an eyebrow. “You did not, either, say that.”
His cheeks turned pink, and he laughed; the same half-swallowed exhalation she’d heard from him before, as if he were afraid to laugh out loud in front of her. “No, I didn’t. Lord Gavin scares me.”
Now it was Judah who half laughed. “Gavin’s not scary.”
“Perhaps not to you.” The magus spoke very seriously. “Although I would point out that he’s had you locked in this room for nearly three weeks.”
Being locked away didn’t frighten her, though. Being locked away felt inevitable. She didn’t say that. Instead, she said, “Theron isn’t the way he used to be.”
“Life changes all of us.”
The cold stove in Judah flared. “Life didn’t change Theron. Arkady’s poison did.”
“Like the Seneschal’s cane changed you?”
The flare died. The stove went cold. “No. Theron used to be a genius. He still would be, if not for me.” She sank back in her chair and took a bitter satisfaction in the wails of pain that rose from the rent skin of her back. They were less than she deserved. (Darid dead, Theron changed. All her fault.) And they were growing quieter, day by day; soon she wouldn’t even have that. In a perverse way, she looked forward to Elban returning, and the new pain that would come with him.
The magus cocked his head, puzzled. Then comprehension dawned. “You’re talking about the antidote.”
“I didn’t give it to him fast enough. I was a coward.”
The magus’s bare shock surprised her, but she didn’t trust it. “Have you been blaming yourself for Lord Theron being the way he is?”
“You said give it to him immediately. I didn’t.”
“And I knew what Arkady planned before we even left the manor. Blame me, if you have to blame someone.” He was sitting in the armchair and now he leaned forward, elbows on knees and fingers laced tightly together as if to control them. “How long did you actually delay, Judah? Ten seconds? Thirty? Maybe it would have made a difference, maybe not. The poison Arkady used was vicious. Even if you’d given it to him the moment we left, there was still a good chance that Theron wouldn’t be the same. He—” he hesitated “—well, where I come from, we would have said that he’d dipped a toe in the black water.”
Judah thought of the aquifer beneath the House, the vast expanse of silent water that bloomed through the living rock below. “What does that even mean?” she said, her voice harsh.
“It comes from old stories my family tells.” He stumbled over the word family, like it wasn’t quite what he meant.
“Tell me?” Her interest wasn’t feigned. When she was a child, and still allowed to visit the library, her favorite books had been the oldest ones, with edges that crumbled in her fingers: old nonsense stories about talking animals and magic wells. When it was discovered that she liked them, they disappeared. What remained were mostly war histories, occasionally exciting and often bloody, but not the same. By the time Gavin had started training, even these had been forbidden her. She envied the magus his family stories. She had only the one Darid had given her about her mother, and she did not like to think of it.
His face was fond and sad, as though he were thinking of people and places that were dear to him, and lost. “They say the world used to be different. That a great power ran through everything: the sap in the trees and the dew on the plants, and the soil and the rocks and the grass. And the water: not just actual water, but also all the blood, inside the foxes and rabbits and great cats and—and us, of course. Blood is mostly water, did you know that?”
“So what was it, this power?”
His mouth twisted. “It was...power. Imagine that the world we live in now is frozen over, all ice and snow, and I’m telling you about a time when the sun was warm and everything bloomed. Cold and dead versus warm and alive. In this world, the power is invisible, but in the next world—the one we go to after we die—it’s an actual river. And like any river, it flows to a sea. When we’re born, we’re made from the waters of that sea. When we die, we follow the river and make our way back.” He still wore that half fond, half sad look. “When I was a child, I used to picture it black as ink, running across a great plain where it was always midnight. No trees. Just giant rocks and scraggly weeds. We followed a river into the north for a few weeks when I was very young, up where it’s dead. I think that’s where the idea came from.”
“Followed a river into the north?” There was nothing in the north but wasteland and ruins. “Where exactly did you grow up, magus?”
She meant it as a gentle rib, but he jumped as if something had bitten him, and said too quickly, “Nowhere special. One of the outer provinces. Anyway, that’s what I mean when I say that Lord Theron dipped a toe into the black water. It’s an overly poetic way of saying that he came too close to dying. I don’t think you could have done anything to stop that.” Suddenly, unexpectedly, the magus reached out and laid a hand over hers. “What they did to your back was horrific. What they did to the man you loved was horrific. They wanted to make sure you never dared love anyone again, but there are different kinds of love, Judah, and there are more kinds of people in the world than you can possibly dream of. They are not all like Lord Elban.”
She looked at the hand covering hers, and then up to his washed-out blue eyes ringed by too-dark eyelashes. “Nathaniel Magus,” she said, “are you flirting with me?”
He jerked away. “Of course not! No, never. I apologize if it seemed that way. I just—You seem sad, and I—”
She let him fumble, feeling only the faintest flutter of amusement: like a courtier must feel, burning people with words. Then she realized the amusement was the fond variety, and an instant after that she realized she was being cruel. She held up both hands in a placating gesture. “Peace, magus. I was joking. I’m sorry. It wasn’t funny.”
His lips snapped shut, and he exhaled with relief. “I was afraid I’d offended you.”
“Difficult, but not impossible,” she said. “Keep trying. Or don’t, actually. Right now I think you’re the closest thing I have to a friend.”
“You have Lady Eleanor.” But his cheeks were pink again.
“She feels sorry for me. You don’t, do you?”
“No.” He couldn’t meet her eyes as she said it. She wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad one.
Two days later, she sat alone in the parlor. It was late afternoon, that time when the sun shone its goldest. Her back was the kind of sore that made her want to stretch, but she didn’t know what state of healing her skin was in. Nathaniel Magus would come again soon—tomorrow, possibly—and she would ask him about stretching. Meanwhile she sat on the sofa, itching a bit from the bandages, playing solitaire on the empty cushion next to her. Relishing the silence and loneliness and hating it and anticipating its end, which was an interesting, queer mix of feelings.
Unexpectedly, the door opened and Gavin entered. He was sweating, covered with dust, and he seemed startled to see her. Which was absurd, because hadn’t he been the one to give the order that she be prohibited from leaving? Where else did he expect her to be? His eyes darted around the room for Theron or Elly. But there was nobody. Only the two of them.
She made him nervous. He was almost as depressed as she was. She could feel it.
Wordless, he went into his bedroom. Judah went back to her game. Through the open door, she heard him run water into the basin and splash the dust off his face. She heard the wardrobe opening and closing.
In a few minutes he was back in clean clothes—courtier clothes, red trousers and a shirt with a ruffled collar—and wet, freshly combed hair. His boots were the high-polished ones he always wore in the House, and he carried his brown coat over one arm. He looked very handsome. Judah expected she would feel very drunk later.
But meanwhile, she could feel his indecision, the way seeing her twisted his stomach. Then he disappeared back into the bedroom. She heard the clipped sound of his hard leather soles cross the floor and the creak of the wardrobe hinges; then the clipped footsteps came back into the parlor and stopped in front of her. She flipped over three cards.
Something fell to the floor with a thick double thud. She lifted her head the barest fraction, to see a pair of boots, the leather smooth and new, the buckles dull steel. Too small for him. Just right for her.
“Elly’s right,” he said. “I’m being a child.”
She didn’t speak, but she picked up her cards so he could sit down, and felt something ease in him.
He took the empty seat and she caught a faint hint of cologne. “I shouldn’t have let this happen.”
Then she did look at him. His eyes were on her, frank and direct and relieved. She wondered if he meant Darid, or everything that came after. “How could you have stopped it?”
“I don’t know. The House Guard does what the Seneschal says. Even the ones I’m friendly with—sometimes I get this sense from them that it’s nothing personal, they like me okay, but they’d still love to take my head off if they had the chance. Today on the field they were all over me.” He sounded and felt exhausted. “I could have tried to stop it. I didn’t.”
The caning, then. Something the magus had said came to Judah’s mind. “Were you angry because of the beating, or because I kept a secret from you?”
“Both, probably.”
“You keep secrets from me.” She shuffled the cards, reshuffled them, tapped them into a nice, tidy deck. “You didn’t tell me about Amie, or that Elban wanted you to kill Theron. At least, not until I dragged it out of you.”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“It just is.”
She bridged the cards. They came together with a swift, deadly-fast flutter. “You said that to Elly, too. What’s the difference? Why are your rules different from everybody else’s?”
“Because I’m not everybody else,” he said curtly.
She became aware that she was angry. It was a slow anger, all in her head where he couldn’t feel it. Its roots ran deep into the most fundamental parts of her: she was left-handed, she was blood-haired, she was angry. There was none of the surging heat she normally felt. She could sit, coolly, and consider her words. “Darid wasn’t the only secret I’ve kept from you,” she said.
Gavin frowned. “Don’t say his name.”
She could feel the small, shameful pain it caused him. “Why not?”
“I just don’t want to hear it.” He shook his head with disgust. “None of this would have happened if not for him. Elban was gone. We were happy.”
“You weren’t bothered when you thought it was Firo.”
“Because Firo made sense,” he said. Snapped, almost. “Courtiers talk and wheedle and convince. How a stableman could convince you to—”
She made another bridge. This one broke. “There was no convincing.” He didn’t respond, but she could see that he didn’t believe her, which only fueled her anger. “I’m not a stupid little sheep to be herded this way and that. I have my own mind.”
“I never said you didn’t.” He took a deep breath, trying to regain control. “When Elban said that eventually I’d see things his way and lock you up, it’s not true. This—” he gestured to the door, and presumably to the guards beyond “—was a weakness. A temper tantrum. It won’t happen again, I promise.” He reached out and touched her shoulder. “It wasn’t about me. It was about you. When you’re here, in this room—I know exactly where you are, Jude. I know you’re safe.”
She did not remind him that he had agreed to lock her up the night Elban had burned her. Instead she said, “When I’m safe, you’re safe.”
He winced, then scowled. “Maybe. Gods, I don’t know. It makes my head hurt, this thing between us. Part of me hates it. The rest of me can’t imagine how other people don’t all kill themselves from sheer loneliness.” He took her hand, and suddenly she was inside him: a dozen small hurts from the training field, the still-tender skin of his back. A sick nausea unfolded into limp relief as he laced his fingers between hers. He was glad they were talking. He did love her. He was sorry for everything. He was also angry, and resentful and confused. She could even feel the sharper pain of her own back through him. The bits of herself scattered through her sense of him were like flat notes in an orchestra, and she realized that the dullness she’d been laboring under was actually a loneliness so keen it would have brought tears to her eyes, if she’d let it.
Gavin’s hand tightened on hers. “Your back still hurts,” he said. She was baffled—was that really all he’d felt in her?—but before she could say anything, he smiled. “Guess what I’m going to do tonight, as soon as Elly’s done with the rushes?”
She managed one of her truncated shrugs.
“Have dinner with Firo.” He laughed. “Elly insists. He wants me to talk Elban into keeping a garrison in Cerrington, and I guess I don’t have a reason to be suspicious of him anymore. Do you want to come? We’re having that duck you like.”
She shook her head. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
“This other secret of yours,” he said. “Am I going to find out eventually?”
She nodded.
“Well, then, I won’t bother you about it.” He pulled on her hand and slid his other arm around her shoulder, pulled her over to him and kissed her forehead. “I’ll never let anybody hurt you again, Judah. I promise.” Then he let her go. Standing up, he put on his coat, winked at her and left the room. The confidence was back in his walk, and his steps were light and comfortable again.
“I traded us to Elban,” she said to the empty room. “So he’d let Elly go. He’s going to use us to send messages. He’s going to cut us to pieces.”