In retrospect, Nate probably should have given Derie more warning. He’d been too excited, almost drunk with it, and when he saw her at the plague shrine the news exploded out of him. “I was inside,” he said, his voice high and giddy. “I saw her. She’s alive, Derie. She’s real.”
The old woman’s knuckles went white on her cane and for a moment Nate saw two Deries: the short round woman hunched in front of him, and the bonfire of Work that raged inside her. It knocked him backward as surely as if she’d put her two hands in the middle of his chest and pushed. He barely managed to keep his feet. Derie was so very powerful, and they’d been Working together since he was a child, but she’d never lost control like that before. It felt like falling off a cliff—balance gone, arms pinwheeling, brain too full of no no no to think rationally. Icy wind whistling around you, great emptiness waiting below.
Nate had almost fallen off a cliff once, in the Barriers.
So, after his next trip inside, he was more careful. Before meeting Derie he cut open the heel of his thumb, letting out just enough blood to draw her sigil on his shaving mirror. He didn’t know where she was living in Highfall—or where Charles was living either—but it didn’t matter. She would feel his Work, and know he had something to tell her.
It worked. When they met again in the midnight quiet of the plague shrine, she was able to sit patiently—as patient as Derie ever was, anyway—while he told her the story: how he’d walked into the lab, smelled the poisonous herb Arkady was distilling, and known immediately what it was and how it would be used, if not on who; how, when the phaeton came for them that afternoon, Nate had brought along one of the precious few vials of medicine he’d carried with him over the Barriers, prepared by his mother and labeled in her hand; how, after Arkady took Elban’s younger son into the bedroom, he’d passed the vial to the girl herself, and how clever and troubled her eyes had been. He did not tell Derie he’d touched her. He didn’t tell her how that had felt.
When the story was done, she stroked the cane between her knees. There was nothing special about it. It was just a plain wooden stick, worn smooth with use. “Quick thinking, bringing the antidote,” she said finally. “You want her trusting you. You want her confiding in you.” This last she said with no small amount of distaste. As if the act of confession was inherently weak.
“Why do you think Elban wants the young lord dead?”
“Who’s to say it was Elban?”
“The Seneschal came to the manor a few days before,” Nate said. “He does Elban’s bidding, doesn’t he?”
She brushed the topic away. He could see it didn’t interest her. “More likely he’s doing some courtier’s, this time. Poison isn’t Elban’s style.”
“Wasn’t he the one who told Arkady to poison the children in the orphanage?”
“That was expedience.” Her cane tapped the hard-packed dirt. “No, if Elban had been behind this, he would have made more of a show. Elban likes a show. Poison’s a courtier’s game.” She smiled wickedly. “Courtiers, and us. You saw her with the boy? How did they seem?”
When Derie said the boy, she meant Elban’s heir. They’d always spoken of him that way, and although intellectually Nate knew how old he was, he’d still been surprised by the tall, broad-shouldered man he met inside, golden and handsome. At first glance, the younger son—bony and pale—seemed to have more of Elban in him; but the more Nate had looked at the older, the more he’d seen the hard lines of the father’s face under the glowing warmth on the surface. “I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “He was concerned about his brother. They were both uneasy.”
Dissatisfaction came off her in waves. He didn’t need any particular skill to feel it. She spat into the dust. “Bah. Give me your hand, boy. I need to know.”
He slipped his coat off, let it fall to the bench behind him and pushed up his sleeve. “Use my arm.” Derie was not always kind with her cuts. “I need my hands.”
“Guess you do.” Derie pulled a small folding knife from her pocket. In the wavering light from the shrine torches, the metal of the blade barely shone at all. He saw a fat crust of blood on the heel of her thumb, just where he’d cut himself to signal her earlier. She reopened the wound before he could ask about it. Knife still wet, she carved a line in the meat of Nate’s arm, then pressed the cuts together so she could draw their two sigils in the mixed blood. Derie was powerful and she’d been doing the Work for a long time. She was confident and formidably skilled. When she reached into him, he could feel the Work behind every cut she’d ever made, for good or ill; all of those people, through all of those years, and each one rummaging in Nate’s head like a hand in a pocket. He even felt the echo of his mother’s touch, faint among all those invisible groping hands.
It was all a little horrible. But he’d learned to push the horror aside, and focus on the wonder of it. And wonderful it was. With Derie in his head he saw the girl as if she were standing in front of him again, that moment when he’d dropped the antidote into her lap—more clearly than the first time, even, because Derie pulled his eyes to parts of her he hadn’t had time to notice. Her muddy boots, her ill-fitting dress. Her dark eyes. Her hair, wild with running her fingers through it. Not at all the color of berries—what a spurious comparison that had been—but a dark cool red, almost black in its depths. Like the last embers of a cooling fire, like the darkest wine. Her cheekbones were broad, her chin round. He couldn’t see her ears but he imagined them small, like a forest creature’s.
Derie was already pulling the eyes of his memory away from her to the boy. Elban’s heir. Who, he saw now, would not look at Judah, who barely looked at the woman he stood next to (delicately built but steely-eyed; except for the steel and the fine clothes she seemed like a nice girl, the sort Nate might once have asked to dance a creel around a bonfire without hope of much more, just to enjoy the sight of her). Elban’s heir was not merely worried, Nate saw now. He was being eaten alive. There were shadows beneath his eyes and he could not stop clenching his fists.
Distantly, Nate was aware of an increase in the warm flow of blood on his arm. At the plague shrine, Derie grunted; back in his mind’s eye, she unfolded the picture before them. Like a napkin wrapped around a morsel of food, like a rose with a bee at its heart. Like nothing Nate had ever seen before. He’d once seen a human arm dissected, skin sliced open, muscles and tendons and ligaments all on display, and it was a little like that, but it was also completely different. It was nothing he could have drawn in ink, not if his life depended on it.
In the center of everything, exactly where it was but also everywhere else, like wind or smoke or music, he saw the Work, like a thick purple rope that led from the young lord’s chest to the girl’s. But the words thick purple rope were too small, too limited. He had never seen the Work before, and like the spots that danced on the inside of his eyelids, he could not quite manage to focus on it. He knew that thick purple rope was the only way his mind could process the strength of it, because it was immense. It was everything. The people in the room were half-real by comparison. Nate himself barely existed.
Then Derie dropped his arm and, like that, it was over. The memory, the power, the invading hands: all gone. Nate found himself blinking into the darkness, feeling empty and disarrayed. Real again. Real enough that he was nearly sick. Hard Working did that to the inexperienced—while Derie was training him, their Workings had often left him puking and reeling in the dirt—but it had not happened to him for a long time.
Derie merely said, “More Maia’s side than Tobin’s. Comely enough. Wish I could see if she has enough power to break the binding, but—she must, with that blood in her. And the boy’s well bound to her, at least.” She took a scrap of cloth from her pocket, wrapped it around her hand and used her cane to hoist herself to standing. Only then did she squint down at Nate. “Pull yourself together, boy.” She sounded faintly disgusted.
He did so, as well as he could. Although he couldn’t stop the great whoops of air forcing their way into and out of his lungs, and couldn’t stop the way the world lurched around him. He didn’t have anything to wrap his bleeding arm with so he would just have to hope it wasn’t noticed. He wasn’t the only one to ever walk around Brakeside bloody. “This isn’t your first Work today,” he said, making his voice as neutral as he could.
“Caterina sends vague feelings of pride,” Derie said. “Try to earn them.”
As he made his way back to Arkady’s manor he had a headache, and the smell of the Brake seemed worse than usual. The Work Derie had done on Nate shouldn’t have left him feeling so bad; it was small, specific, and over no great distance. But the Work Derie had done inside the Work—exposing the bond between the heir and the girl—was a feat on another order. It was as if, having been assured all his life that his body contained a heart and lungs and a liver and two kidneys, someone had actually unzipped his skin and taken them out, one by one. It was unnerving and fearsome and magnificent, so bright he could barely think of it. Also bright was the memory itself. Which happened: when someone fooled around in your head, the things they touched never quite went back to the way they’d been. Sometimes the memories were left detached, almost faded, like they’d happened to somebody else. Sometimes only the shape of them remained, like a glass empty of water. In very rare cases, this was done deliberately, as a punishment or a healing; an unskilled or malicious Worker could leave them burning more fiercely than ever. Spreading them out like sketches on a table, and not bothering to put them away.
This was what Derie had done to Nate—not out of any deliberate choice, but because she simply hadn’t cared enough to undo what she’d done. It wasn’t the first time she’d left him this way. When he and Charles were together they could fix each other, but Nate hadn’t seen Charles in weeks, and when he reached for the sense of his friend in his head, the other man was there, but also...distant. Like there was smoke between them.
So as he stumbled home through Brakeside, as he stopped twice to retch in the dirt, his head was full of the girl, clear as crystal. He had the time and luxury now to notice her without the press of the other people in the room, without Derie dragging his gaze around. The girl’s hands were strong; their movements were quick and determined, not languid and ornamental like those of the courtiers. They were hands that wanted to grab, to hold tight. Her mouth seemed full of words bitten back. She was a torch waiting to burn; she was a Working, the moment before it ripped the world open.
Ever since he was nine years old, the idea of the girl had been the center of his existence, his reason for training and learning and being. Comely, not comely—who cared? She was real. He had heard tales of her his entire life, for half a decade before she was even born, and she was real. He had seen her, spoken to her, touched her. He soaked himself in her Work-brightened image like a drunk in a keg of whiskey. Nate had lusted; he’d loved, even. This was neither. This was—bigger. This was like the first Working he’d ever done as a child, the quick painful flick of Derie’s knife opening a world that was so much deeper, so much more possible than he’d ever considered. He’d been frightened beforehand, but never again. That vast stretching possibility that he only ever felt under the knife was worth any pain. It had changed him. It had changed everything. And now, he found everything changed again. The girl was real. The bond between the girl and the heir was real. Once he’d helped her untie old Mad Martin’s knot, he could have that sense of possibility anytime he wanted, no knife, no bloodshed. Anybody could.
She could. He’d never seen her when she wasn’t hurt or worried; the Work would make her happy. To be the one to make her happy, to be the one she confided in: yes, that would be nice, to have those dark liquid eyes trusting him to listen, to help. He sometimes indulged in ridiculous private fantasies wherein he entered the shabby parlor and her face lit up because now, finally, here was somebody who truly understood her. In his smaller moments, he indulged in even more ridiculous fantasies in which he came upon her being mistreated somehow, at the mercy of those poisonous lady courtiers who peopled the House like beribboned vipers or—and these fantasies were very secret—at the mercy of one of the men. Sometimes the imaginary man he rescued her from was the heir himself. Even in his fantasies he knew better than to think he could physically best the tall, strong young lord, who’d been training in combat since he was half-grown, so in these fantasies Nate’s tongue became as acerbic as Derie’s, his wit as quick as Charles’s, his sense of justice as stalwart as Caterina’s. It was one of these fantasies into which he slipped, with the preternatural clarity of his Worked memory, as he crossed the deserted cobbles of Limley Square. His imaginings carried him up the steps of Arkady’s manor and through the front door—he no longer bothered to sneak out of the gate—and only when he met Vertus in the hall, and the servingman scowled and said, “What’s got you so bloody happy?” did Nate realize he was smiling.
“Nothing.” Quickly, he wiped the smile away, and nodded at the covered chamber pot Vertus carried. “How is he tonight?”
“Leaking blood from every hole.” Vertus lifted the lid and showed him.
Nate waved the pot away, recoiling a bit from the smell. “I’ll give him something to put him to sleep.”
“Please. Just our luck the old lizard didn’t get one of the wasting-quietly-away diseases, huh? Something that takes the lungs out first?”
“Healthy people shouldn’t complain about their luck.”
“Whatever he’s got, it’s not wasting any time. Ever seen a cure for someone as far gone as he is?”
Nate shook his head.
“I have,” Vertus said. “It’s called death.”
He took the pot out into the back to empty. Nate followed him as far as the lab, where he mixed a sleeping draught. It was one of the first things Caterina had taught him to make as a child. He made this one strong, and added a few extra things. They were the same extra things he added to almost everything Arkady ate or drank now. After smelling what was in the tonic the old man had fed the heir’s unsuspecting brother the previous week, Nate had found his own qualms about poison significantly eased.
Upstairs, in the front bedroom, a fire blazed on the hearth and the room was prickly with heat. Arkady lay on top of the bedclothes, wearing only a thin nightgown, his limbs covered in slack flesh and the sheet beneath him brown with sweat. His eyes rolled toward Nate when he heard the door open. “Freezing to death,” he said, his voice dry and cracked. “More wood.”
“No more wood. You can have a blanket.” Nate crossed to the table and checked the pitcher. There was just enough water in it to dilute the draught.
Arkady called him a foul name. Nate took a dirty glass from the table, poured the rest of the water into it, and added the draught. Arkady eyed it suspiciously. “What is that?” His voice was thin and querulous.
“Valerian, mostly. A lot of it. So you’ll sleep.”
Arkady snatched at the glass with a palsied hand. “Paltry kindness.”
“It’s self-serving. If you sleep, we sleep.” Nate watched as the old man greedily sucked down the draught. Then he picked up Arkady’s wrist and felt for a pulse.
“More water,” Arkady said, but he didn’t show any actual signs of dehydration, so Nate shook his head.
“In the morning. Unless you want to wake up in your own piss again.” He went to the chest at the foot of the bed and took out a blanket. “I’ll leave this here for when the fire burns down. But I’d put it on now, if I were you. That draught will work quickly.”
Arkady pulled the blanket over himself. Nate helped him, pulling it down to cover the knobbed, yellowing toes. The old man complained, said it was too heavy and too rough, but left it where it was. “You’re a shitty nurse, boy,” he said, “but you make good sleeping draughts.” His words were slurred and his eyes unfocused. Nate wondered how much he could still see.
“Glad you approve,” Nate said coldly.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Arkady sounded as if his failing health were an intellectual puzzle that only vaguely interested him. “My mind feels wet. Like paper. Falling apart in my fingers.” The old head rolled toward Nate like a fruit about to fall. “You’re good, boy. You figure it out.”
But Nate didn’t have to figure it out. Nate knew. There were rotting black holes burning their way through Arkady: his stomach, his bowels, his lungs, his brain. His blood was separating inside his veins and his heart was struggling to pump the resulting sludge. He would not last much longer. Nate no longer felt even remotely bad about it. “I’ll bring water in the morning,” he said.
He didn’t exactly forget the water, but neither did he go out of his way to remember. When Arkady’s cracked shouts began to drift downstairs, Vertus knocked at the open door of the lab. “Should I bring him water?” he said.
Nate glanced at him. There had been a subtle change between them since Arkady had grown ill; they had gone from being equals to being—something else. Arkady’s courtier clients still came to the manor for medicine and Vertus couldn’t provide it, so Nate did. Slowly, without fanfare, he had moved more fully into the manor. He still slept on his pallet in the kitchen, and Arkady’s chair in the parlor was always left respectfully empty, but it was a token gesture. Nate had taken over the lab, the parlor and the garden as if they were his by right. When there were decisions to be made, Nate made them. Vertus, for the most part, appeared to accept the change in their relationship with equanimity, but Nate felt something unsaid between them, and suspected that when it emerged it would be nothing pleasant. Even as Vertus asked advice about Arkady—should I bring him water, should I open the window, should I give him brandy—Nate could feel the servingman watching, calculating. Vertus was not stupid. Nate suspected that he knew more about Arkady’s illness than he let on. Sewn into the lining of Nate’s battered satchel was a cloth pocket that held, among other things Nate would rather keep secret, a leather wrist cuff with a tension-released blade attached: his springknife. Nate hadn’t worn it since arriving in Highfall, but he often found himself thinking of the knife when he was alone with Vertus, thinking he might feel better with it strapped inside his sleeve. Vertus was a big, solid man, and wiry was the kindest word ever used to describe Nate. He wasn’t sure wiry would be enough, if it came to a fight. He wasn’t sure the springknife would be, either.
So he stepped lightly around Vertus, even as he rearranged the contents of Arkady’s lab and replaced the sorrier plants in the garden with more useful ones. Arkady’s courtier patients mostly wanted headache powders and contraceptive sachets, which took barely any effort. It wasn’t hard for Nate to keep up his Gate Magus work, which he considered more important. His secret patients still came to the back gate, but without the need to hide from Arkady, anyone who needed help could come right through the garden and knock at the kitchen door. No messenger had come from the palace since Lord Theron had been poisoned (which was troubling, because no news of the boy’s death had come; either the antidote had worked, or the boy was dying as slowly as Arkady) but Nate hoped to take over those duties, too, tending to courtiers inside with brains stirred by drops or stomachs burned with alcohol.
In short: Nate was busy. He no longer had time to run this way and that, from the Beggar’s Market to the Grand Bazaar, seeking ingredients and information. He missed being out in the city, seeing the people who had become friendly and familiar, but there simply weren’t enough hours in the day. He needed to be available when people needed him, particularly courtiers and most particularly the riders from the House, should one come. He dared not ask Vertus to run errands for him, but he needed help. When he’d chanced upon the messenger girl in the Market again a few weeks before, still wearing her brother on her back, Nate had felt the baby’s head, pronounced it a bit firmer, and asked her if she wanted to work for him. “Regular work,” he said. “Every day. As much as you want.”
Her eyes had lit up. “Can I bring Canty?”
He’d said she could; of course he had. Bindy—that was what she called herself, although he doubted it was her given name—was irrepressibly cheerful, quick and smart and ready to laugh. While she waited for him to finish a preparation, she would play with Cantor on the floor of the lab. Highfall babies, he noticed, enjoyed the same games Slonimi babies did—peekaboo, where’s your nose, look what’s on my head, look what’s on your head—and a giggling Highfall baby was as irresistible as any other. Nate liked having them around.
After a few days, when they were comfortable with each other, Bindy asked him shyly to tell her what it was like inside the House. At first, remembering that she had a brother inside, he told her reassuring stories about the plentiful food and beautiful gardens. But she’d heard all that before. “Tell me about the Children,” she said, her voice eager. “Especially the foundling.”
He hesitated. He didn’t know if he could speak casually about the girl she called the foundling. “What do you want to know?” he finally said.
She laughed. “I don’t know. Everything. She’s always been my favorite. Is she nice? Does she seem like she’d be good to be friends with?”
He remembered of the girl inside, the wary reserve with which she carried herself, her obvious anger. Arkady had told him he always tried to separate the four to treat them: The Seneschal made a mistake. Let them be raised in a pack like dogs. Best not to get yourself surrounded.
“Yes, she does,” he said.
Bindy was thrilled. “I knew it! I could tell.”
When he sent her off to Brakeside or Marketside or even to the Bazaar, she’d strap Canty onto her back, grin cheerfully, and come back the same way. The first time he sent her to one of the manors in Porterfield, though, she came back with hard eyes, and her smile seemed forced. The third time this happened, Vertus confronted him. “You can’t do that,” he said. “Send her around town, saying she’s from the House Magus. Dressed the way she is, with that baby on her back.”
“Are you volunteering for errand duty? Because somebody has to do it until Arkady Magus gets well.”
“She’s a street rat. Any respectable courtier would drive her off with a stick, rather than be seen with her at their door.”
“She’s been doing fine.”
Vertus made a contemptuous noise. “She’s been giving your packages to the bloody kitchen maids, and probably getting quite a lording-over as she does it, too. Get rid of her.”
Nate let his voice go cool. “Bindy stays.”
“Then find another way,” Vertus said. “This one’s bad all around.”
Vertus was right. Nate couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to him before. Bindy was Marketside born and raised; which wasn’t as rough as Brakeside, maybe, but her experience with courtiers probably started and stopped at jumping out of the way of their carriages. She was always clean, her hair neatly braided; but her dress was obviously—if skillfully—mended, many times over, and her boots had been worn by many other feet before hers. The day Derie had wrenched his memory at the plague shrine, he’d given the girl a few coins from Arkady’s chest upstairs, and told her to buy herself new clothes. Dress, boots, leggings and coat. Very plain, he was careful to say, not because he was afraid that she would come back with something gaudy, but because he wanted her to know this was a work uniform, not charity. “Picture an old lady you don’t like, and buy something she’d wear,” he’d said, and Bindy had laughed and said she knew just the one.
But whoever Bindy had in mind, it wasn’t the woman who rapped at the kitchen door the day after Nate saw Derie. This woman’s eyes were dark-ringed with fatigue, her forehead creased with worry lines, but she wasn’t old and she didn’t seem unlikeable. He could smell the paper factory fumes that clung to her clothes: this was Bindy’s mother.
Nate still felt a bit weak, but he invited her inside. She would not sit down. Unbending and severe, she held out her hand. In her outstretched palm he saw too-smooth skin left by a nasty burn, or many nasty burns. On top of it rested the coins he’d given Bindy. “Take them back,” she said without preamble. “You’ll not buy clothes for my child, magus or no.”
“I’m just an apprentice,” Nate said automatically. He made no move to take the coins.
“I know what you are.” Her tone was bristling and rigid. “Everyone says you’re a good man. They say, oh, Nora, Gate Magus wouldn’t do anything bad. Gate Magus goes all the way down. But I know people like you. I know how the world is. I do honest work. My two oldest girls do honest work and my son does, too inside. We don’t do it so Belinda can be bought dresses by the likes of you.”
Nate realized what she thought. He took a step back, lifting his hands up as if to show that there were no weapons in them; but he wasn’t being accused of hurting Bindy with a weapon. “You’ve got me wrong. She’s running errands for me, that’s all. Making deliveries. If she’s better dressed—”
“She’s dressed just fine for Marketside.” The woman—Nora—dropped the coins on the table. “Anywhere wants her dressed better is somewhere she doesn’t need to be.” She turned to leave.
“Then take her to work at the factory with you,” he said.
She stopped. All Nate could see of her was her back. The thin fabric of her dress was worn gray over her shoulder blades. One shoulder in particular; she probably wore something slung over it while she worked. A tool belt or a bag of supplies. He’d seen factory workers who walked with a permanent list from years spent that way. “You won’t,” he said, talking fast. “You wouldn’t. You sent your son inside, where you’ll never see him again, to keep him out of that factory. I’ve heard what they’re like. Working through the night, grabbing a few hours’ sleep before the foreman wakes you up—no breaks, no food, no clean water. You didn’t want that life for him.”
She didn’t answer.
“Is he smart, too?” Nate said. “Because Bindy is. And you know it.”
Then, finally, she swiveled. Her face was proud. “All of my children are smart.”
“Smart enough to know where they’re safe and where they’re not?”
“Smart enough to know who decides when they’re safe,” she snapped back.
“And who will that be, when she’s back and forth across Brakeside, running messages for anyone with a coin?” he said. “When I send her out on an errand, she’s under my protection. Which may not be much, but it’s better than nothing.”
Teeth clenched, she said, “And who protects her from you?”
“She doesn’t need protection from me,” he said. “I would never harm her.”
“You say that now. Then later it’ll be, ‘Well, now, that wasn’t harm, exactly.’ But it’s my Belinda who has to live with what you don’t call harm.” She spoke flatly, but with absolute conviction, and Nate knew that as far as she was concerned, every word she spoke was the unconditional truth. But it was not his truth, and in that moment, he determined that it would not be Bindy’s, either.
“I swear to you,” he said, “I intend her no harm and no ill, by anyone’s definition. Not yours and not my own.”
Nora’s eyes narrowed. “Swear it on your blood, magus. And I warn you, I may be poor, but I am not friendless.”
He understood the threat in the words. In all of the cities and towns and villages he’d visited, those who had no recourse to official justice made their own. “On my blood,” he said, which was a direr oath for him than it was for her, because blood was everything to the Slonimi, and they did not waste it.
Nora watched him, considering. “She comes home every night,” she said finally. “Even when I’m working, there’s those who’ll watch for her, and I’ll know.”
“Of course.”
“And you don’t feed her. She eats at home. Not here.” She looked pointedly at the shelves visible through the open lab door, with their jars of herbs and powders. Nate nodded. She said, “Where’s the old one, whose manor this is?”
“Upstairs. He’s ill.”
“That one wouldn’t notice Bindy long enough to kick her out of his way. What happens when he gets better?”
He won’t. But the words that came out of his mouth were Caterina’s. “Wood’ll burn when the match strikes.”
Her chest twitched in a silent laugh. “You’re no courtier, magus or no. Why waste your time here, with them?”
“It’s not the courtiers I care about,” he said truthfully.
“So I hear.” She gave him a long, measuring look. “You keep your word to me, Gate Magus. I lost one child to those people. I won’t lose another.”
The next day Bindy was back, in a dour black dress and a pair of reassuringly solid-looking boots. She also wore a happy grin, though, and for a moment he imagined Bindy as she might have been in the caravans, where life wasn’t perfect but at least there was sunshine most of the time. “Magus, you’re magic,” she said, and grinned with delight. “Magic Magus. That’s what we’ll call you from now on, won’t we, Canty?” She bounced her brother on her hip.
“What have I done that’s so magical?” he said.
She widened her eyes at him in mock awe. “Only crossed swords with Ma and won, that’s all. Ask around about Nora Dovetail, and see how many people can say the same!”
“She was just worried about her daughter,” Nate said. “I pointed out that the daughter in question was sharp as a tack and plenty smart enough to take care of herself.” Not that the conversation had been about Bindy’s intelligence, which would not necessarily have protected her from the harm Nora feared—but close enough.
“The daughter in question.” Bindy laughed. “Well, the daughter in question would like to know if the Magic Magus likes her dress?” She made a passable curtsy.
“Not especially. I think the courtiers will, though.”
“Only because it makes me look like I don’t ever have any fun at all, and they don’t think poor people have a right to any fun.” But the somber fabric was thick and well-woven, and Bindy’s eyes shone with satisfaction. “Won’t give them a thing to sneer at, though.”
“I’m sorry if people have been sneering at you,” Nate said softly. “I didn’t think.”
“They’re courtiers. Sneering is what they do. I’d rather they sneer than—anyway, I wouldn’t be one if I could, would you? Not for all their pretty clothes.”
“Not if you paid me. Bindy, how many brothers and sisters do you have?”
“Four sisters, two brothers. Counting the one inside. I never met him, but he sends letters.”
“How many are—” He tried to think of a gentle way to say it, but then decided that kind of gentleness probably wasn’t needed, with Bindy. “How many are alive?”
“Those are the ones who are alive,” she said cheerfully. “All the others were just wee little babies. So where am I off to today, Magic Magus?”
Arkady was ill enough to die. One last, slightly larger dose of poison would push him over the edge. Nate even had the large dose prepared, in a vial in the lab, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to administer it. Which was illogical; it wasn’t any less murder if he drew it out. But somehow there was a difference between giving the old man small doses of poison that would kill him eventually and one large dose of poison that would kill him in an hour. Also, the dose was too large to hide in a cup of tea—there wouldn’t be enough volume to mask the taste—so it would have to go in the soup, and Bindy brought the soup. She bought it from a woman by Harteswell Gate who boiled it down thick. Nate paid for it (well, Arkady did) but it had been Bindy’s idea; the brothmaker was apparently legendary in Marketside, and Bindy’s faith in the restorative powers of the golden liquid was obvious. She was proud that she’d thought to suggest the soup, and even prouder that Nate had taken her advice.
Nate couldn’t bring himself to use Bindy’s soup to kill Arkady. He also hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. The old man was fading fast. Each day, he spoke less and less. On a night when he was feeling talkative, he said, “I hear you downstairs. Treating rabble. And that girl. Courtiers are where the money is. Don’t neglect them. They need to be fussed over. Call on them, if they don’t call on you.” Then, plaintively, “Surely they ask after me.”
“Not really.” Nate shoved a spoonful of broth into Arkady’s mouth. “The old men, sometimes, but the young ones, almost never. And none of the women.” Another spoonful. “The women really seem to hate you.”
The old man made an unpleasant noise. Maybe it was supposed to be a laugh. “They need me. They know it. They resent it. Magus has power, boy. He can give help, or he can withhold it.”
Nate put the spoon down. “What do you mean, withhold help?”
“Little minxes want to play.” Arkady’s eyes glittered. “Don’t necessarily want the get that comes of it, though. So they come to me. Some, I help. Others, maybe not. Maybe it’s the Seneschal’s say-so. Make their life not so easy for a while. Stop a marriage, push a divorce. Or maybe he wants me to give them something different, so they’ll never catch—a family getting a little too powerful, say. Or maybe they’re just brats who deserve to be dropped down a peg.” Arkady drew in a long, wheezing breath. “They get desperate, you know. Desperate can be very interesting in a lady courtier. So they hate me. So what. Doesn’t stop them begging when they need my help. Good for them to beg. Keeps them in their places.”
Nate picked up the spoon again. “You’re a terrible person,” he said, and slid more broth into the old man’s mouth.
Arkady swallowed most of it. A dribble ran down his chin. “Disapprove all you like, but when the Seneschal comes, you do as he says. Lord Elban might choose the road, but it’s the Seneschal at the reins. When I’m up and well again—”
“You’re not going to be up and well again,” Nate said. “You’re dying.”
“Bah.”
Nate stood up. The bowl was still half-full but he was suddenly sick of the room, of the smells of medicine and piss and the labored sound of the old man’s breathing. “I don’t think the world will find it much of a loss.”
Downstairs, Vertus sat at the kitchen table. “How is he?” he said.
“Dying.”
Vertus didn’t say anything. Nate washed the bowl and spoon in the basin, conscious of the servingman’s eyes following him and hoping he wouldn’t notice the careful way Nate used his right hand, to keep the springknife dry. The room was filled with the kind of silence where every breath and movement felt magnified, momentous. He felt like he was onstage. It was always that way before trouble, in a field or a tavern or a kitchen off Limley Square. Caterina said it was a gift passed down from generations long dead, from ancestors who’d survived nights full of teeth.
He dried the bowl and put it back on the shelf. Not to let himself be knocked down: that was important. He put his back to the counter, bracing himself against it. He waited.
Finally, Vertus said, “How long?”
“A day or two. Maybe more. It’s hard to know.”
“Easier some times than others, I’d guess.”
“Well, yes,” Nate said dryly. Considering what Vertus might know. “I could predict his time of death with amazing accuracy if he had a knife in his throat.”
Vertus smiled. “Doesn’t he?”
“Not last time I saw him, no.”
Vertus stared at Nate, and Nate pretended not to be unnerved. “I just think it’s strange,” Vertus said. “He’s old as rocks, but he’s always been healthy, as long as I’ve known him. Until you show up. Then suddenly, he’s dying.”
“Old men die.”
“Guess so. Guess nobody’s safe. Not even the most successful magus in the city, with a manor in Porterfield and the trust of the Seneschal himself. Not even Elban’s House Magus, huh?”
“You die in the skin you wear when you’re born,” Nate said, shrugging.
Vertus nodded. “Must be tough, being a young magus just in from the provinces. Hard to make a name for yourself. You might have to treat street people, in secret, just to get your name out. And getting in with the courtiers—that’d be damn near impossible.” The teeth were showing, now. Vertus leaned forward, his huge bulk shifting toward Nate. “Guess that’s why you apprentice yourself out. Find an old man with a solid name. Let him introduce you to the courtiers, get you inside the Wall. Then—” he spread out his hands, either of which could cover Nate’s entire face with room left over “—who knows? Maybe he’ll get sick. Maybe he’ll die. Maybe you can step into his place. The courtiers, the Seneschal, the nice manor.”
Too late, Nate tried to remember when he’d last oiled the catch on his springknife. There’d been that blizzard in Butantown; they’d been trapped in the tavern for a week with nothing to do but go over and over their plan, over and over their supplies. Charles had oiled his knife then. Nate couldn’t remember if he’d done the same, or just watched.
Vertus stood up. “Think I’ll go check on him,” he said, and began to climb the stairs.
Nate flexed his wrist. The steel blade popped out smoothly, with a faint click. He slid it back into place and followed after Vertus.
Upstairs, in the sickroom, Arkady was as Nate had left him: motionless, breathing loudly. When the two men entered the room, he barely moved. In a thin, creaky voice, he said, “What?”
Vertus stood by the bed. Nate tried to read his face but there was nothing there. “You’re dying.”
Arkady’s lip curled. He said something obscene.
“I don’t believe in ghosts and such,” Vertus said. “I think dead’s dead. But you never know, do you?” He jerked his head toward Nate. “This one’s poisoning you. I fed some of your tea to a stray dog and, well, there you go.”
Arkady’s eyes went wide. He began struggling, futilely, to sit up.
Vertus picked up a pillow. “Never liked poison much myself. Cowardly. But I thought you should know, just in case dead’s not dead. He’s the murderer, not me. I’m the one doing you a kindness.” Then he pressed the pillow down over Arkady’s face.
Arkady kicked desperately at the bed, fighting for leverage. The old hands clawed at his wrist; the thin body bucked. But even healthy, Arkady could not have fought back against a man Vertus’s size. Vertus, holding him down, wasn’t even breathing hard. The air in Nate’s own lungs was suddenly as useless as if it were his face the pillow covered. Fists jammed tightly in the pockets of his coat, he stood and watched Vertus kill the old man, and was he glad? Was he relieved not to have the death completely on his own conscience? Was he, as Vertus had suggested, a coward?
He made himself watch every moment, every kick and every flail, until they slowed, and finally stopped.
Vertus stayed where he was, bent over the bed, his full weight on the pillow.
Nate leaned against the wall, his knees weak. “Is he gone?”
“Not yet. It takes longer than you’d think.”
They waited. This silence, too, was all-consuming; but it was companionable, shared between them.
Finally, Vertus stood up and tossed the pillow aside. “He’ll have fouled himself. They always do,” he said. Then he went downstairs. Arkady’s open eyes were fixed on the ceiling. His face was slack, as if he were asleep, except that he was very clearly dead. Nate drew down the eyelids and pushed the old man’s jaw up to close his mouth; it instantly fell open again. A moment later Vertus returned with a small prybar. Nate watched as the servingman—former servingman, he corrected—broke open the chest in the corner. Inside were half a dozen or so small bags, sewn out of thick dun-colored cloth. Nate knew each one was full of gold. They vanished into Vertus’s pockets, one by one. The last one wouldn’t fit so Vertus tied it onto his belt.
“Would you have done it anyway?” Nate said.
Vertus shrugged. “I’m not a murderer, but I’m not a fool, either. I know an opportunity when it comes knocking. This way, I get my share.”
“I didn’t do it for the money.”
Vertus took Arkady’s watch from the nightstand and slipped it into his pocket. “Not my business what you did it for. I’m glad to have known you these past few months, magus.” There was an unpleasant stress on the title that Nate didn’t like. “Seems to me we’ll keep friendly in the future. A thing like this—it binds men together, doesn’t it?” He glanced at the dead man on the bed and left.
So that would be the way of it. Well, it couldn’t be helped. Nate left the dead man gaping at the ceiling and went downstairs to the parlor. Vertus had taken Arkady’s brandy, but left the goblets and the silver tray that sat underneath—valuable, doubtless, but also bulky. Nate brought the tray and his satchel out into the garden. He took a small knife out of the satchel; the springknife was for stabbing and slashing, not the delicate cuts of the Work. The night was clear and moonless. In the spectral light from the stars he could barely see the knife’s edge. He reopened the wound Derie had left on his arm by feel and collected the blood in a black pool on the tray. He didn’t need much, just enough to spread into a thin layer with the heel of his good hand. Quickly, before it got sticky, he drew Derie’s sigil; hesitated a moment, then added Charles’s.
The Work would have been easier in moonlight. Something about the moon and blood and the ocean: if a full moon shone on the blood, the Work was clearer, just as the rest of the world was. Everybody Nate had ever known described the Work in a different way—although these were uncomfortable conversations, never easy, like talking about sex; despite its communal nature the Work felt very private—and to Nate it felt like moving stacks of books to find the one he wanted. He even got a dull ache at the base of his spine sometimes, the way he had when he’d helped Caterina empty out their wagon for cleaning. He found Derie instantly; Charles came more slowly, as if he’d been asleep. Derie was rustling around in his head, as crude as Vertus in Arkady’s wardrobe. Bringing out Arkady’s graying face, his blueish lips.
Then the blood was dry, and they were gone. Nate was alone in the garden. In the manor. He was alone.
Derie came so quickly that at first Nate thought the slow, steady drag of her cane on the Porterfield cobbles was just an afterimage of the Work. Then she rapped on the back gate. He let her in, leaving the gate unbolted for Charles. He’d been sitting in Arkady’s chair in the parlor (nobody’s chair, now), feeling increasingly clammy despite the roaring fire, and with some reluctance asked her if she wanted to go upstairs.
“Not these old bones,” she said. “I can feel he’s dead from here.”
She probably could, too, for all that Arkady had never seemed to have the dimmest glimmer of power about him. The Work gave you a feel for life, for the ebb and flow of blood and tides. They had to wait a long time for Charles. The log in the fire had almost burned down and Nate had started to worry that his old friend had left Highfall, or been taken by the guards, when there came a low knock at the back door. Nate let him in and nearly gasped. Charles had been well-muscled when they’d arrived in Highfall, even after the long trip across the Barriers. Now he was skeletally thin. His skin was patchy, his eyes bloodshot and deep-ringed with purple. The hair that Nate had last seen perfectly combed into golden curls hung ratty and limp. His dark roots weren’t showing, so at least he’d managed to keep up with the bleach, but the luxurious courtier’s clothes they’d worked so hard to steal were rumpled and soiled, the boots scuffed.
“You look awful,” Nate said. “Are you all right?”
“Fine. Let’s get this over with.” His words sounded dull around the edges. His Highfall accent slipped and slid; behind it, Nate could hear the broad vowels of the Slonimi.
In the parlor, Derie, sitting by the fire with her hands propped on top of her cane, stared at Charles with hard, suspicious eyes. “Charles Whelan, is your head clear?”
“Yes.” Charles’s voice was curt. Without another word, he began to climb the stairs.
Nate followed. They wrapped Arkady’s body in the soiled sheets and blankets from his bed and used three of the old man’s plainest belts to bind it. As they carried him downstairs, Nate told himself that it was a bundle of wood they carried, that the thin bones of Arkady’s ankles weren’t bones at all, but twigs in cloth. Derie had them bring down the dirty featherbed next, so she could remake it. Then they dragged Arkady out into the garden, where Charles had brought a wheelbarrow.
“Fold him,” Charles said. But Arkady was beginning to stiffen and bending him to fit in the barrow took much massaging and coaxing of the dead muscles. When he was finally inside, and Charles moved to pick up the barrow handles, Nate stopped him.
“I’ll do it. I’m dressed more like a laborer than you are.” He paused, and then added, “If we get stopped, you should run. I hear things about the guards.”
“We both look disreputable enough,” Charles said. “And the guards won’t stop us if we keep to the alleys.”
They did just that, pushing Arkady all the way through Porterfield and Marketside to Brakeside. The manors gave way to row houses and attaches; the row houses and attaches gave way to warehouses, with taverns and rooming houses and eel shops squeezed between them. Their first night in Highfall, before they’d separated, Nate, Charles and Derie had stayed in just such a rooming house, in a clammy basement common room, sleeping draped over their packs to keep away thieves. It was almost midnight now but barges were still unloading on the Brake by lantern light, the shouts and directions of the stevedores drifting disembodied through the darkness. Nate and Charles carried their dead cargo long past the barges to a disused landing near the charred rubble of a burned-out warehouse. The embankment wall had crumbled low there. They weighed Arkady down with rocks and slipped him into the water that lapped gently at the broken stone; watched, together, as the pale color of the once-rich bedding they’d used as a shroud disappeared.
Nate looked at ragged, bony Charles, staring down after the corpse, and was filled with a sudden certainty that his friend would try to follow it. He found the thought alarming. The Work forged connections between its users—everyone you touched, everyone they touched—and the connection between Nate and Charles was old and clear and strong. But before Nate could speak, Charles pivoted away from the water on one scuffed heel and said, “Let’s go.”
They didn’t speak on their way back to the manor, where they found that Derie had finished sewing the new featherbed. The parlor reeked of burned feathers; she had ripped open a pillow to replace the fetid ones she’d destroyed. “Going to report this to the Seneschal? What are you going to say happened?” she said to Nate.
“In the morning,” Nate said.
“What do these people do for their dead?”
“Not a lot. Crematories outside of the city, if you can afford them. Lime pits if you can’t.”
“Some of the courtiers keep private crypts in the provinces,” Charles said.
“I’ll say I sent him to family,” Nate said. “I’ll say they came and got him.”
“He has family?” Derie said.
“A brother.” This was true. It was also true that Arkady had told Nate the two hadn’t spoken in decades.
“Will there be trouble about the manor? Worth a lot, in this neighborhood.”
“I have no idea.”
Derie nodded. “I’ll hire a deadcoach, and livery for you, Charles. You’ll come for him tomorrow. Put on a show.” Too late, it occurred to Nate that it would have been both easier and safer to actually send Arkady out in the hired deadcoach. He felt a bubble of frustration but before he could say anything, Derie said, “Better he’s in the Brake, Nathaniel. A real deadcoach would keep records, and the Brake has more dead bodies than fish in it. Nobody’ll think twice if he washes up.”
Nate nodded. He’d grown used to the way Derie pulled thoughts out of his brain, but he still didn’t like it.
“Give me the money. I’ll take care of the deadcoach myself,” Charles sounded a little too eager.
“I think not,” Derie said and left.
Charles called her a few choice names. She was no longer there to hear, but Nate still flinched; Charles saw, and laughed bitterly. “We’re not children anymore, Nate, for all she treats us like we are. Did the old man have a wine cellar?”
He did. Vertus had taken the best bottles, but there were still several bottles of ordinary wine and one bottle of brandy. Charles chose the wine. They drank it in the parlor. Charles raised a glass.
“To Nathaniel Magus,” he said. “The master of the manor.”
His voice was faintly mocking. Nate ignored it. “Where have you been living?”
“Around.”
“You could stay here now, you know. There’s a guest bedroom upstairs. Three of them.”
“I’d be a terrible servingman.”
Nate was appalled. “You wouldn’t have to serve.”
“Oh, but we all serve.” The mockery was out in the open now. It twisted Charles’s mouth; it stained the air. “What purpose do we have, save slavish devotion to unbinding old Mad Martin’s evil work?”
“None,” Nate said.
Silence fell. Charles drank freely and blinked at the fire; Nate sipped his first glass and watched as Charles’s spine sank lower and lower into the chair. It was the same chair he’d occupied that first night, as the foppish Lord Bothel. He’d chosen the alias because it sounded like bother, as they sat around a campfire on a hill overlooking the city. They’d seen all of Highfall stretched below, that night: the white stone of the Wall slicing the city as surely as the Brake did, the palace hunkered beyond.
As if he could read Nate’s thoughts as well as Derie did, Charles said, “What’s it like inside?”
Nate chose his words carefully. “Elaborate. Why have a plain, functional doorknob when you can cover it in gilt filigree? But also run-down, in places courtiers don’t go.”
“Sounds fitting.”
“Is that where you’ve been? With the courtiers?”
“I was supposed to maintain my identity, remember? In case we needed it again.” Charles gestured wryly to himself. “I don’t think Derie likes the way I did it, though.”
“What way was that?”
Charles reached into his pocket and pulled out a battered metal vial. He tossed it to Nate. The surface was badly scratched and there was a dent in one side, as if it had been stepped on. Nate opened it carefully and found a thin rod attached to the inside of the cap, just big enough to extract one drop of the fluid inside. It was clear, but smelled odd, acrid and medicinal. Slippery; almost familiar. He thought he could figure out what was in it, given enough time, but he still asked, “What is it?”
“I have no idea,” Charles said, “but it feels amazing. Like someone wrapping half your brain in the softest blanket imaginable. I get it from Lady Maryle’s youngest, plainest daughter, Gainell. We drop together and fuck like cats, it’s delightful.”
Lady Maryle was a minor courtier; so minor, in fact, that Arkady had put her treatment off to a lesser magus. Her manor was near, but not technically in, Fountain Hill. Nate couldn’t remember the family industry, but it had something to do with manufacturing. “She buys drops for you, looking the way you do?”
Charles smiled a slow, sleepy smile and said, in Lord Bothel’s bored, condescending drawl, “These days, all the best courtiers are hopeless addicts, Nathaniel.” Then, in his own voice, he added, “Not that Gainell’s family are the best courtiers. I picked the wrong family. They’re barely courtiers at all. Anyway, when I met her, I was prettier. I don’t think she’s noticed the change. She drops more than I do, which is saying something.”
Nate recapped the vial and tossed it back to Charles. “I think you should stop taking them.”
“I think you’re right, but I like them too much.” Charles twisted the vial in his fingers. The firelight played on the dull surface. “You’ve seen her. The girl.”
Not Gainell. “Yes.”
“And do her feet float half an inch above the ground? Does a faint aura of unearthly light surround her wherever she goes?”
Nate felt oddly hurt. “Of course not. She’s a person. Like you and me.”
Charles shook his head. “No. Not like you and me.” Then he seemed to reconsider. “Although all three of us had our lives mapped out long before we were born, so there’s that. I hear she’s strange.”
“So would you be, in her circumstances.”
“So I am. So are you, for that matter. At least in Highfall, we are.” Still fingering the vial, Charles said, “It’s funny, you know. Gainell’s mother can’t pay her own daughter’s way inside, let alone mine, but even if she could—I don’t think I’d want to see the girl. I thought I would, after everything. But I think I’m afraid to.” He opened the vial and shook a drop from the thin rod onto his tongue. The motion had such ease, such practice, that he might as well have been taking a sip of wine. “To be honest, I don’t even like being in the same city as her.”
Nate wondered how long the drops took to kick in. “What are you afraid of? She’s a girl.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. That she’s a girl. An ordinary girl. Ten fingers, ten toes. Feet on the ground. No faint aura of unearthly light.” His eyes began to drift, as if he were having trouble focusing them. “I’m afraid that she’ll be nothing. That we’ll all be nothing. That it will be a waste.” Charles saw Nate’s face, then, and laughed. It was a high-pitched, giddy laugh. Lord Bothel’s laugh. “Oh, come on. It must have occurred to you, too.”
Hot with indignation, Nate said, “How can you say that? How can you even think it?”
“You said it yourself.” Charles’s words were slurred and thick. “She’s a girl.”
“She’s not just a girl,” Nate said. “She’s everything.”
But Charles’s head was sagging. His eyelids drooped and his mouth hung as slack as Arkady’s had. As Nate watched, breathing deeply to quell the anger inside himself, a thin rivulet of drool dropped from Charles’s lower lip. If his friend hadn’t blinked, just then—slowly, with great effort—Nate would have thought he was dead.