The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  The snow had stopped. They were on the quiet side of the House, high above the ground. The pasture stretched below her, weird and blue with light reflecting off the snow. To the far left, she could just see the inky black puddle of the orchard and the western woods beyond it; across the pasture, just barely, she could make out the haze of brush and ivy that marked the edge of the Wall. The Wall was flawless white stone, impossibly high, eternal and unyielding. The ground rose slightly on this side of the House, so from their terrace the Wall loomed almost as high as the House itself. On the other side, the Wall was just as high, but the ground there sloped downward. From a certain height the smokestacks and spires of the city could be seen bristling above the Wall like a poorly hidden beast. The city had a name—Highfall—but Judah rarely thought of it as anything other than the city or outside. People lived there, down among the steeples and high gabled roofs, under the dim glow of the underlit clouds. They tended the ceaseless fires that kept the factories running; they bought and sold, worked and rested, lived and died. A sluggish river called the Brake wound through the city, full of water from other places: places like Tiernan, where Eleanor was born, and the provinces where the courtiers were from, and all of the lands that Elban had invaded or annexed or simply strode into and claimed with his army at his back. All of the place-names she’d seen on maps, all of the lakes and mountains and peninsulas and oceans.

  And somewhere out there, among the dark and the fires, was the place where she’d been born—or so she’d been told. Somewhere lived people with the blood-colored hair and black eyes she could not disguise; people who were solid and round instead of lithe and delicate, whose noses were strong and sharp instead of buttonish like Elly’s or straight like Gavin’s. She didn’t even know which direction to look. She had no sense of the city; she had no memory of being there. Twice a year, on each solstice, the four of them were taken to the small antechamber built into the Wall, where a balcony cityside overlooked the Lord’s Square. When she thought of the city, it was the Square she pictured: grand manors, graceful linden trees waving like the fans the lady courtiers carried these days, the same sea of pale golden-haired people dressed in their best and most vivid colors surging below. Never among them did she see hair or eyes like hers; always, Elban’s red-and-gold banner hung from every window ledge and lamppost. The air felt thicker in the Square, and smelled faintly of burning from the factories.

  Elban’s solstice speeches tended to follow the pattern of the one he’d just given the Wilmerians: so much conquest already, more to come, steadfast in the face of evil, glory and glory and riches and glory. When the speech was done, the four of them were herded out onto the balcony. If she listened closely to the cheers from the gathered masses, she could pick out voices calling Gavin’s name, and Elly’s. Sometimes, for reasons she didn’t understand, she might even catch her own. Rarely poor Theron’s, but she didn’t think he’d ever noticed. The crowds and the noise made him feel sick and it was all he could do to stay on his feet. The height did the same to Elly and Judah had her hands full, keeping the two of them upright. Gavin claimed to hate solstices, too—although he always seemed to stand a bit straighter when the crowd chanted his name—but even so, they all had to appear. Protocol, the Seneschal said. Gavin said it was to prove they were still alive.

  There were no crowds beneath her now, and the air that blew in from over the Wall, wherever it blew from, was crisp and alive. From here she couldn’t hear the calls of the coachmen who waited in the courtyard to carry the city-dwelling courtiers back to their manors, or the rattle of their wheels on the cobbles. After the crowds and heat of the hall the cool silence was a relief. She felt the scratch on her wrist and ignored it again.

  In time, the terrace door creaked open behind her, and she heard the faint hush of silk. “How did you manage to get away so quickly?” Elly said.

  “Misdirection.” Judah leaned against the railing. “Ducked out when the dancers came in. How’d you escape?”

  The blonde girl, whose dress fit perfectly and whose hair was dressed with rubies, didn’t step through the door. The railing was high and solid and the terrace itself much wider than the balcony over the Square, but Elly still preferred to stay inside. “Gavin told the Seneschal I was sick from the wine, and he let me go. He said I have to work on building up my tolerance, though.”

  “He didn’t give you a bottle to get started on that, did he?”

  “He did not.”

  “You should have taken one anyway. You were drinking Sevedran up there. Down in the pit, we were practically drinking vinegar.”

  “It all tastes like vinegar to me.” Elly yawned. “Gavin said to stop ignoring him.”

  “Being ignored is good for him.”

  “I’ve always thought so. You’re lucky you got out when you did. I had to dance with the Guildmaster. He smells like a sick sheep.”

  “How do you know what a sick sheep smells like?”

  “I grew up in Tiernan. I’ve forgotten more about sheep than you’ll ever know. Anyway, you’re the one he should have danced with. He was full of questions about you.”

  “Did he ask you if I stole Lady Clorin’s soul?” Judah said.

  “Not in so many words.” Elly arched her back in a stretch, or as much of one as her dress would allow, and groaned. “Gods, I’m so glad they’re leaving. My mother would be horrified to learn that she sent me five hundred miles away from Tiernan and I still ended up doing blackwork until my hands ached. I’ve never been so glad to see the back of anything as I was that altar cloth.”

  “I suggest being talentless. The Seneschal never asks me to make state gifts.”

  “Only because people think they’ll end up cursed. By the way, there’s some cake inside for you. It’s good, it has that cream in the middle.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Also by the way,” Elly said, and her voice sounded so casual that Judah knew that whatever she was about to say had been on her mind for the entire conversation, “who was the courtier sitting next to you tonight?”

  Oh, but think of the rumors. Judah remembered the nastiness in the corridor and suppressed a shudder. “No idea. Why?”

  “He was watching you,” Elly said merrily. “And he left at the same time you did. I think that’s why Gavin was so desperate to know where you were. He thought you had a new friend.”

  Judah grimaced. “Blech.”

  “It’s nice to have friends.” Elly’s voice was gently mocking, but Judah couldn’t tell if she was making fun of Gavin, or the courtier, or Judah herself. Pulling her shawl more tightly around her, Elly said, “Well, my face hurts from smiling. I’m going to bed.”

  “I’ll stay out a while longer.”

  “Don’t bother waiting up for Gavin. When I left he was surrounded by courtiers.” Elly lifted a hand in a wave, then went inside.

  The scratch came again. More insistently this time. Down in the great hall, Gavin was drawing a fingernail against the blue-veined skin on the inside of his wrist, a complicated swirl that meant, simultaneously, Where did you go? and Are you okay? and Can I stop worrying about you?

  Judah sighed, pulled up her own sleeve, and scratched. Fine. Home. Bored.

  The response came almost immediately. Good. Stuck here. See you later.

  Once, she would have waited for him. Once, he could have been counted on to come back before dawn. The terrace was quiet and peaceful, and she couldn’t quite shake the memory of the Wilmerian’s voice.

  They say you’re witchborn. They say you stole Lady Clorin’s soul.

  * * *

  She’d been carried into the House in a midwife’s basket. Lady Clorin had been laboring with Gavin for three days, and the midwife was supposed to be the best. The maid who recommended her said she brought special skills, unsurpassed. And Clorin had survived, so maybe the midwife did bring special skills, but she’d also brought the newbo
rn Judah, wrapped in an old piece of toweling and still wet with blood. Lady Clorin had lost five babies by the time she’d had Gavin—two dead in their cradles, one born dead, and two more not even making it that far—and she was softhearted. She’d asked the midwife what would become of the tiny baby girl.

  The midwife shrugged. “Nobody wants girls. Might be able to find a brothel to take her in. Otherwise, the Brake.”

  Clorin told the old woman to leave the baby with her instead. The Seneschal saw no harm in it. Elban didn’t care, so the Lady of the City was allowed to keep the new baby as if it were a kitten. Judah and Gavin slept in the same crib, fed from the same nurses, played with the same toys. Even when Judah’s hair turned its disturbing garnet color and her infant-blue eyes deepened to black, Clorin delighted in her two babies. Judah couldn’t remember who’d told her that, but she had the distinct impression that it was true.

  When Judah and Gavin were barely two, Theron had been born, and Clorin had died of it. This, nobody had ever talked to her about, but Judah suspected that probably, by the time Theron came along, Elban and the Seneschal had realized they’d made a mistake. She suspected that was probably why Theron had come along, when by all reports Clorin was frail even before Gavin, and never fully recovered from his birth. Nobody would have considered it strange that two infants who slept in the same crib would share the same illnesses, but the books Judah had read on the subject suggested that well before two, babies could walk, and fall down, and bump into things. Well before two, then, someone would have noticed that when Judah fell down, Gavin’s knee bruised, too. She wondered, sometimes, how they must have confirmed it: had they snatched her from Clorin’s arms and put her in a snowbank to see if Gavin shivered? Had Clorin watched as they cut Judah’s tiny heel to see if Gavin bled? She wondered also about the nurse who’d been keen enough to notice (because it would have had to be a nurse; nobody else would have spent enough time with them): who she was, how long she’d been allowed to live. If they’d killed her quickly, or if she was among those silent members of the House staff who’d had their tongues cut out for convenience’s sake, creeping about doing tasks that didn’t require speech.

  She rarely indulged in such thoughts. There was no point. Years had passed before she realized that the bond was unique to the two of them. Years more passed before she understood that the bond was why she was allowed to live in the House as she did, why she was allowed to live at all; why the fiction was maintained, at solstices, that she was a treasured member of the family and Elban’s dead Lady’s pet, when in fact he could hardly look at her without sneering. When she was eight there had been long, awful days in Elban’s study when the limits of the bond had been tested. Those were days she tried not to think of at all. The scars, she told herself, were like the bond. They had always been there. They always would be. There was no point thinking about them.

  She preferred to think of days spent playing on the parlor carpet in the sun, back when its colors had been bright and alive. Toy soldier campaigns under the table. Dirt-smeared, feral afternoons in the orchards and pastures, Theron frowning along behind and sneezing from the dust. They explored the old wing, uninhabited for generations save for spiders and sparrows and mice, and prowled the catacombs, tiptoeing with delicious dread past the crypts that held Gavin and Theron’s dead ancestors as marble busts of their occupants watched with stone eyes. Carrying flickering lanterns, they’d found the aquifer deep in the living rock that supplied the House with fresh water, and fled from the vast lightless stillness of it, giggling to hide their nervousness. Judah was never afraid in the dark because she could always feel Gavin somewhere in it. Over time the scratch code evolved and then each knew exactly where the other was, and what they were doing, and what they might do later. When they had a tutor, they used the scratches to snicker over his bad teeth or hairy ears (their tutors were never women) but most of the time, they had no tutor. Most of the time, they were ignored, and they were happy.

  Now, none of them were ignored. Now, Gavin trained with the House Guards every day; at night, if there was no state event like the Wilmerian dinner, he either went to Elban’s study to listen to the old man talk about his campaigns, or did who knew what with the courtiers. Theron was supposed to train, too, but his poor eyesight and complete lack of killer instinct led him instead to spend most of his time hiding in the secret workshop he’d set up in the old wing. Eleanor, who would eventually be Lady of the City and Gavin’s wife, sat in the Lady’s Library for hours, reading protocol manuals and etiquette guides and the social diaries of Ladies long dead. Judah spent her days avoiding the Seneschal, who apparently spent his hunting for her so he could tell her about new things she wasn’t allowed to do: read freely in the main library, nose about freely in the map room, make a spectacle of herself in front of the courtiers.

  But she was still allowed to sleep, and sleep she did, in her tiny alcove off Elly’s room. When she woke the morning after the Wilmerian dinner, Elly and Theron were already gone. Gavin sat on the threadbare sofa in the parlor, gray patches shadowing his eyes; but he smiled when he saw her. “Very sneaky last night. What makes you think you get to be free when none of the rest of us do?”

  “Not my fault if I’m clever enough to escape.” She dropped into the sprung, leaking armchair that she liked best. “Pour me some coffee, Lordling?”

  “I’m too important to pour coffee.”

  “Too hungover, you mean. Elly said the courtiers got hold of you last night.”

  “They did indeed. Stumbling all over themselves to ingratiate themselves with the future Lord of the City. Stumbling, period, if they’d had enough drops.”

  “Sounds awful,” she said.

  He grinned and leaned forward to pour her coffee. Let the courtiers high-comb their hair, decorate themselves with gems and kohl and scent: Gavin was twice as handsome with none of the effort. Judah knew him too well to be impressed by his future on the throne, but even she had to admit that he’d practically been made to order for the role, except for the awkward matter of her. “All joking aside,” he said, handing her the chipped cup she always used, “what happened to you last night? You didn’t answer when I scratched.”

  Pain transmitted best between them but strong emotion would, too, particularly if it generated a physical response. Thinking of the Wilmerian filled her with something slithering and uncomfortable, and without bothering to examine her reasons, she knew she didn’t want Gavin to know what happened. “Nothing. I came back here and enjoyed the quiet.”

  “Really.”

  “Really.” She picked up a bun from the tray on the low table between them.

  He let a breath’s worth of silence pass. “Did your new courtier friend enjoy the quiet with you?”

  She threw the bun at him. It had been stale, anyway. “Go hang.”

  “It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for you, you know,” he said with a laugh. “The rest of us are busy all the time now. It’d give you something to do.”

  “I have plenty to do. How late did Theron stay last night?”

  “Not much longer than you. He said the smoke from the fire dancers made his chest feel tight. Funny how that never seems to happen with the torches and acids in his workshop.”

  “Maybe it does. Maybe he just thinks that’s worth it.”

  Gavin’s annoyance would have been obvious even without the scowl. “He snuck out early this morning. If he put half the effort into actually training that he puts into avoiding it, he’d be commander of the army already.”

  It wasn’t annoyance he was feeling, after all, Judah realized; it was anger. In a few years, Theron would be commander of the army anyway, no matter how ill-suited he was for the job. That was what the second son did. Gavin had always been frustrated by his brother’s refusal to prepare for the role, but somehow this felt different. She narrowed her eyes. “Why are you so angry at him?”

 
Gavin chewed his lip for a moment. “He needs to start showing up to training. He needs to at least try.”

  “It doesn’t matter how hard he tries. He still won’t be able to see past the end of his arm.”

  “All the same.” His usually-easy grin seemed forced. “I didn’t know I was angry enough for you to feel it. Sorry. When he’s not there, I feel like I have to try twice as hard. And I already try pretty hard. So.”

  That didn’t feel entirely true but Judah decided not to press it. “You could try a little harder not to get hit. If I’m going to end up with all the bruises anyway, they might as well put me down there with a sword.”

  Gavin’s smile caught and spread to his eyes. “You’d be terrifying in battle. If you came at me with a weapon, I’d give you whatever you wanted. The whole country. Anything.”

  “Make it so, Lordling. You were just saying that I needed something to do.”

  “And you were telling me to go hang.” He yawned. “Speaking of training, I should get down to the field. My hangover pass won’t last past noon.”

  “So go.”

  “I am. I’m going.” He stood up. Then he stopped. “Jude—last night, after you left...you felt sort of strange.”

  She put on a puzzled expression. “Strange, how?”

  “Your heart was beating fast.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. Strange. You’re sure everything was okay?”