The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  “Don’t ever make me ask you anything twice,” she said.

  “Yes, Derie,” he said, and ran.

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Judah didn’t like the Wilmerian guildsman.

  She, better than anybody, knew that it wasn’t a person’s fault what they looked like, so she wasn’t bothered by the sweat that coated his bald head and dripped from his nose in the hot, crowded hall. His rough-spun robes smelled like a freshly dug grave but she could overlook that, too. Guildsmen lived by strange rules. Maybe the Wilmerian Guild had prohibitions against bathing, even before state dinners; their guildhall and gas mines were in the high plains to the north, and for all Judah knew, water was scarce there.

  The Wilmerians had made clayware, long before mining gas, and the guildsman had introduced himself as Single-Handled Ewer. He turned his sweating nose up at the dazzling array of food on the table, the cheeses and roasts and candied fruits and Judah’s favorite sticky spiced duck; he produced a crumbly gray-brown shard of what appeared to be clay from the depths of the grave-dirt robe, put it between his teeth and actually began to nibble; and even all of this, Judah could overlook. Although he made it hard, the way he closed his eyes in apparent ecstasy and, too loud, proclaimed that the Wilmerians would not touch any food of the world until they had ingested their sacred portion of earth. Most people had reasons for what they did, even if those reasons were bizarre. And Judah herself had been thought bizarre often enough to judge strangeness gently, too.

  But once the guildsman had downed a few glasses of wine—nothing in his guild vows about that, apparently—he’d started to stare at her hair, and that, Judah couldn’t forgive. In this land of monotonous corn silk, the dark, almost-purple mass always drew stares, but Judah didn’t have to put up with it from somebody with clay in his teeth.

  Do I have something in my hair? she’d asked coolly, and he’d said, I apologize. It’s just so...odd.

  The courtier sitting on her other side wasn’t much more appealing. Like all courtiers, he was greased and polished, his hair heavy with pomade and kohl thick around his eyes. At least the Wilmerian mostly kept his smell to himself; the courtier’s perfume made her eyes water. The best she could say for him was that he didn’t seem to be overindulging in the drops that were the courtiers’ drug of choice these days; it amused her to watch the ornate jeweled vials pass from hand to hand with what she assumed was supposed to be subtlety, but she was less amused by the prospect of having one of the blurry-eyed droppers sitting right next to her.

  For weeks, the Wilmerians had been crawling over the newest part of the House like cassocked beetles, installing the gas lamps. By the lavender light of the new sconces, the guildsmen and courtiers assembled in the hall appeared faintly cadaverous. In the front of the hall, on the dais, where Gavin looked bored and Theron looked scared and only Elly was able to fake the proper level of interest, the Guildmaster was talking. “Such a privilege it has been,” he said, with enthusiasm as genuine as Elly’s interest, “to visit the very heart of the Highfall, the hidden treasure that is the great House of Lord Elban. We are honored to add our tiny light to its legendary brilliance.”

  Speaking of brilliance, the diamonds in the courtier’s ears were too large. She wondered if wearing diamonds that ostentatious meant the courtier could actually afford them, or if he just wanted the other courtiers to think he could.

  “It is with humility that we work with the things of the earth, and with humility that we offer our small wares to those who will use them to bring light to the still-dark corners of our world.” The Guildmaster, short, square and robustly corpulent despite the Wilmerians’ ostensible asceticism, beamed at Gavin’s father. “And who fits that description better than Lord Elban?”

  Cheers and applause rose at this, as they were supposed to. The great Lord Elban, in his gilded chair at the center of the dais, merely nodded. He was tall and lean, with white hair that flowed down over his shoulders and skin that wasn’t much darker. Even his blue eyes were so pale as to be nearly white. He wore nothing but black, which heightened the effect. Those he skirmished with on the southern border called him the Wraith Lord. Judah couldn’t remember where she’d heard that. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing she was supposed to know. On balance, she would rather be down here on the floor, squeezed in between the courtier and the guildsman, than up on the dais, anywhere near him. He made her think of a bird rather than a wraith: something cruel that waited. Like a carrion crow. Maybe the effect was different when he was charging toward you on a warhorse.

  The Guildmaster’s speech went on and on. He must not have been paid for the lamps yet. Judah’s dress fit her badly. As always, it was one of Elly’s, made over. She was hot and uncomfortable, and she wanted to leave. She’d been late getting dressed and there hadn’t been time to braid back her hair and the Wilmerian wasn’t the only one staring at it. At her.

  “I don’t know why the Seneschal is making me go,” she’d complained to Gavin the night before. “Nobody cares if I’m there. Nobody will even talk to me. I’m just Judah, the witchbred foundling.”

  She didn’t exactly mean it as a negative. She was mostly amused by the way the staff wouldn’t quite look at her and the courtiers couldn’t quite look away. Still, Gavin had scowled. “Tell me who calls you witchbred. I’ll have them executed.”

  “Kill the whole House, then,” she’d said, “and most of the courtiers.”

  “Could you do that?” Theron had asked, curiously.

  Gavin ignored his brother. “You’re no foundling. You’re my foster sister. And the courtiers had better get used to seeing you, because someday, when I’m Lord of the City, I’m going to make you—I don’t know, Lead Chancellor in Charge of Keeping Me Sane, or something.”

  “I thought that was the Lady of the City’s job,” she’d said, and Elly, playing solitaire by the window, said, “Leave me out of this.”

  It wasn’t Gavin’s fault that she was eating in such odious company. The Seneschal, dressed in his usual gray, stood behind Elban, but she could still feel his eye on her. Anything inappropriate that she did would earn her a lecture, and twenty-two years of the Seneschal’s lectures had bored her into a reluctant obedience, or at least a moment’s consideration as to whether her intended bad behavior was worth the tedium of another one. Escaping this room was certainly worth it. She intended to do so at the first possible opportunity.

  More applause. The Guildmaster had finally shut up. Now Elban rose, and a thick and instantaneous blanket of silence fell over the hall. Elban’s face—otherwise as handsome as Gavin’s—bore a crosshatch of old battle scars, earned honorably or otherwise, that left it craggy and granitic. “The Guildmaster has spoken well,” he said. “This House is the jewel of Highfall, and Highfall is the jewel of the empire I have spent my entire life building. Every province, guild and noble family stands united under my banner, from the Barriers in the east to the sea in the west, from the border of the Southern Kingdom to the dead lands of the north. We are powerful. We are prosperous.”

  Another cheer from the courtiers. And it did sound nice when he said it that way, using words like united and prosperous. Darid, the House stablemaster, had told her that Elban’s cavalry horses came back covered in blood, when they came back at all.

  “But we must be vigilant,” Elban continued, and the cheers died. “There are evil forces at work in our city, seditionists who would eat away at us from the inside like woodworm. Who would work against Highfall’s best interests by disrupting our factories and starving our workers; who would even sink so low as to sabotage the very Wilmerian envoy we celebrate tonight, claiming their gas lines carry poison. Even worse, they spread lies about our soldiers. Calling the expedition across the Nali Strait a rout, saying they stumbled home in defeat. Yes, stumbled!”

  Elban called anyone who disagreed with him a seditionist. The word had long since lost a
ny meaning, but derisive jeers filled the air. Not that the courtiers cared about the soldiers; they just liked to jeer.

  “The Nali expedition was designed to draw out the Nali, to test their capabilities. It was a resounding success.” Elban’s icy eyes swept the room. “Were lives lost? Yes. Such is the nature of war. Those lives were freely given. We learned much at the Battle of the Nali Strait. We learned that the Nali are unnatural, inhuman. More like insects than men. Like insects, they would invade, and they would devour, even swarming over Highfall itself if they thought they could.”

  More jeers. Elban held up a finger; the jeers stopped. “In two months, I will cross the Nali Strait again. With the knowledge gained from the last campaign, and the marvelous ever-burning fire of the Wilmerian Guild, we will do more than defeat the Nali on their own shores. We will sweep them from the world like the infestation they are. We will annihilate them.”

  He spoke without emotion, but the crowd leapt to their feet with a deafening cheer. The Wilmerian to Judah’s right did so a bit drunkenly, the courtier to her left with courtier-like reserve and panache. None wanted to be caught lagging. None wanted to be seen cheering less exuberantly than the rest. Judah stood, too, but she didn’t bother to clap or cheer. A door opened; the musicians came in. With the musicians came drummers and with the drummers came fire-dancers, spinning pots of flame on cords around their bodies. Another wave of cheering broke over the hall and the horrible new gaslights were extinguished. The orange light of the flamepots shifted and swung crazily in the darkness.

  It was the distraction Judah was waiting for. When the lights came back up, she was gone.

  * * *

  Despite the gas lamps, deep shadows nestled between the pillars lining the gallery outside the hall. Judah shivered; the wide neckline of her poorly cut dress left most of her shoulders exposed. She could hear the quiet slip of her pinching, uncomfortable court shoes on the flagstones. Outside, the rosebushes stretched thorny fingers against the window and the spitting snow glinted in the purple light.

  Another cheer erupted from the hall.

  She wandered through the liminal quiet, considering. She could go to the stables, where Darid might let her muck out stalls or oil tack or do some other small, useful thing; but her court shoes would dissolve within minutes in the snow and mud, and her boots were a long walk away, back in her room. Besides, the stablemen might be having their own celebration. Guildspeople, with their odd clothes, assumed names and forced piety, were never much liked by outsiders, and the Wilmerians were cruel to their horses. Darid had lost more than one night of sleep trying to keep their starved, overworked beasts alive—because he loved horses and didn’t want them to suffer, but also because a dead horse would mean a dead stableman, another head on the spikes in the kitchen yard. Once the Wilmerians left, their horses would suffer again, but Darid’s stablemen wouldn’t. That was worth celebrating. Darid was kind to her, but she knew she made the stablemen nervous, and didn’t want to intrude.

  Meanwhile, most of the rooms in the huge, sprawling House would be empty. As long as she avoided the kitchens, which would still be frenzied from the feast, she could do anything, go anywhere: the library, the catacombs, the portrait hall. She could go to the council chamber and dance on the massive wooden table; she could sit in Elban’s throne and issue imaginary proclamations. The wearing of perfume by courtiers is now forbidden. Chocolate caramels will be served with all meals. Everyone caught wearing heels of three inches or higher will be summarily beheaded.

  Then she heard a noise. She was never sure afterward exactly what kind of noise it was: the swish of heavy fabric, a rough drunken breath. Maybe it wasn’t a noise at all, but the faint smell of dirt. Whatever it was, something inside her sent up a warning. She tensed, and turned.

  It was the Wilmerian. He’d followed her out of the hall. The hood of his cassock was down. His eyes were watery and unfocused and his jaw hung slack. She probably wouldn’t have heard anything if he’d been sober. An alarming thought.

  “Bertram.” His voice sounded breathless, with none of the aloof piety it had held earlier.

  “I’m sorry?” she said, carefully.

  “Bertram. Before I took my vows. My name was Bertram.”

  The back of her neck prickled. “All right.”

  “You have to give up everything when you join a Guild. Even your name. I—” He hesitated, and took a step closer. The words tumbled out of him all in a rush. “I want to touch your hair.”

  “No,” she said.

  Bertram’s thin lips were dry and as she watched, he licked them. His hands reached out like talons, those bleary eyes glued to her hair. “They say you’re witchborn. That you stole Lady Clorin’s soul. Killed her.”

  Judah hadn’t heard exactly that variation before. She didn’t believe in witches and she didn’t believe in souls, but this didn’t seem like the time to mention it. He stood between her and the open end of the gallery; the only door behind her led to the chapel, and was no doubt locked. She’d been stupid. She should have circled around him as he spoke so he couldn’t trap her. Even if she did manage to bolt past him, her shoes weren’t made for running any more than they were made for snow. Drunk he may have been, but he could still probably catch her, and if he caught her she would be well and truly caught. The Wilmerians were all broad-shouldered. Judah was sturdy but small. The gaslight above her burned steady with its creepy purple glow. Six months ago, it would have been an oil lamp, or a torch, and she could have thrown it at him. Now she had nothing.

  “Hair like blood,” he said. “It looks soft. Is it soft?”

  She imagined Bertram’s fingers sliding into her hair—questing, invading, clenching, pulling—and decided that her head would be on a spike before she let him touch her. He came closer.

  Suddenly, she heard boot heels. Not Gavin’s or Theron’s formal leather boots, but hard wooden soles, with the staccato clip of high heels. The pomaded courtier who’d sat on Judah’s other side appeared over Bertram’s shoulder: neither young nor old, earrings sparkling in the gas lamps and visage unsullied by anything so common as emotion. Only the wryest lift of an eyebrow suggested that there was anything odd about the scene before him.

  Bertram hadn’t seen him yet. His fingertips brushed against Judah’s hair just as the courtier, sounding bored, said, “Guildsman. Lady Judah,” and then the guildsman’s whole body flinched, as if he’d been doused in cold water.

  He snatched back his hand and his face filled with horror and shame. Staggering backward, he said, “Forgive me.”

  “Forgive you?” the courtier said with benign interest. “Whatever for?” But Bertram was already stumbling away down the gallery, a tangle of coarse robes and fumy sweat. The courtier watched him go, then turned back to Judah, one eyebrow lifted in what looked like curiosity. Contemplating the poisonous hay he could make of what he’d seen, probably. It was what courtiers did.

  Quickly, Judah circled him, putting the length of the gallery at her back. Normally, no courtier would acknowledge her existence, let alone chase her. But for all she knew, this particular courtier was as drunk as Bertram. Surely there was an aphorism in that. From the grasp of the guildsman to the grip of the courtier.

  “You should be more careful. It’s a strange night.” Mocking, but they all sounded like that, so it was impossible to tell if the mockery were directed at her. His kohl-lined eyes drifted up to the gas lamp overhead. “And oddly lit.”

  “The House is full of drunk courtiers,” she said, bolder with an escape route at her back. “Nothing strange about that.”

  The corner of his mouth moved. “Nothing particularly safe about it, either. You might find yourself running into unsavory characters. You might find yourself owing them favors.” Courtiers trafficked in favors, and reputation, and fear.

  “A favor? In exchange for walking down the hall? Seems like a low threshold.”
r />   “Oh,” the courtier said, “but think of the rumors.”

  “I try not to. Good night, lord courtier.” Giving him a wide berth, Judah walked past him and away, acutely conscious of his gaze on her back.

  “Good night, foundling,” she heard him say, as she left the gallery by the first flight of stairs she came to. As she climbed them, she felt something scratch the inside of her wrist, like a fingernail drawn across the skin. She ignored it. For now.

  * * *

  Up a broad marble staircase, down a twisting narrow one: nothing in the House was straightforward. Generations of City Lords had lived there, and it had been built and rebuilt and demolished and built again. The floors were flagstone or cool ceramic or, in one room, copper, although nobody remembered why. She passed gas lamps and oil lamps, dark corridors where you were meant to light a torch or carry a lantern and even darker ones where nobody respectable had passed in years. She navigated by feel and memory and, when there were windows, starlight. Eventually she made it back to the rooms where she and Gavin and Theron had lived since birth and Elly had lived since she was eight. The suite was modest enough, just two bedrooms with a shabby parlor between them. It was tradition that the Lord’s heir stayed in his childhood rooms until he married or took power, but normally those childhood rooms were lovingly tended by loving nurses who’d been lovingly chosen by loving mothers. Gavin and Theron’s mother, Clorin, was dead, and in the absence of the loving mother the system had fallen apart. The sofa was losing stuffing and the curtains were riddled with moth holes; the silk on the walls was threadbare and the furniture still bore every scratch and dent from their childhood. Nobody, including them, had ever thought to replace any of it.

  Tucked away in each bedroom was a tiny alcove, meant for a nurse or a handservant and big enough for a narrow bed and not much else. As the irrelevant second son, Theron slept in one alcove, and as the mostly unwanted witchbred foundling, Judah slept in the other. (Or was supposed to; half the time she slept with Elly, who didn’t mind sharing.) Now all three rooms were empty, because everyone else was still stuck down in the hall being official. Unwanted foundling status had its advantages. The ashes in the fireplace were cold. Nobody had laid a new fire. Judah did, and lit it; then she kicked off her useless court shoes, slid into the pair of Theron’s old boots she’d claimed as her own, put on her coat and went out onto the terrace while the room warmed.