The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  He found the magus’s house easily. The door was painted blue, with an ostentatious brass knocker shaped like a hawk’s head. Nate lifted the heavy ring and dropped it, three times. Belatedly it occurred to him that he had no idea if handshaking was the custom in Highfall or not. His fingers were wet from the fog that had condensed on the metal, and he wiped them on his coat, which wasn’t much drier.

  The door opened. The man behind it was dressed in neat but plain gray—servant’s clothes—but the look he gave Nate seemed reserved for things just dredged up from the bottom of the Brake. “Magus doesn’t see people off the street,” he said, and started to close the door.

  Quickly, Nate stuck his boot in it. “I’ve got a letter.”

  The servingman eyed him. “Let’s have it.”

  So Nate reached into his coat and found the packet, which he’d been smart enough to wrap in waxed paper so it was more or less dry. He handed it over, then pulled back his foot. The servingman closed the door and that was that. Nate would either get in, and his mission could continue, or he wouldn’t, and everything would be lost. While he waited to see which it would be, he stood on the step, in the fog. His wet hair made the back of his neck itch under his collar.

  Just when he was becoming convinced that the door would never open again, it did. The servingman stepped back. “Come in,” he said.

  The dim hallway smelled like wood smoke and dried herbs. The floor was dark and glossy, but Nate couldn’t tell by the light of the servingman’s single candle if it was wood or stone. Before Nate set foot on it the servingman handed him a towel and told him to dry the soles of his boots. Nate had cleaned them as best he could before he came, but they were still coated in layers of dirt from the Barriers and beyond. Some of the dirt he wiped off in the hall had probably traveled all the way from the other side of the mountains with him. He dropped the filthy rag into a bowl held waiting by the servingman, who gave it the same dead-rat look he’d given Nate and whisked it away. In a moment he was back to lead Nate down the hall and through a set of double doors into a room warm with oil lamps, where the magus sat in one overstuffed armchair and another man, so lushly dressed he could only be a courtier, sat in another. There were plenty of other places to sit; the room was crammed with far too much furniture, all of it too opulent for the space. Nate remained standing.

  The magus was aged and balding, the ponytail that marked his trade long and braided more intricately than was technically necessary. The packet of waxed paper lay open in his lap, the letter of introduction in his hand. “Nathaniel Clare,” he said.

  No handshake, then. Nate bowed instead. “Magus.”

  The courtier, whose curled hair gleamed like spun gold in the firelight, examined his painted fingernails, his legs in their violently-colored trousers stretched languidly out in front of him. The magus shook the letter. “I’ve never heard of any of these people, Nathaniel Clare.”

  “Pardon, magus. They’ve heard of you.”

  “So has the slopman who comes twice a week for the garbage. Shall I take him as an apprentice, too?” the old man said, one eye on the courtier for approval.

  The courtier obliged him with a high, mannered titter, which the magus lapped up like a cat with a saucer of cream. “Now, Arkady. Don’t torment the poor boy.” The courtier’s voice was deeper than the titter would have led Nate to believe. His thick-kohled eyes landed on Nate with only the most distant interest. “The magus doesn’t know Lord Tensevery, but I do. And he, apparently, knows you.”

  “I grew up on his estate, in Duviel,” Nate said.

  The magus peered at the letter. “This says you saved his daughter’s life.”

  Nate bowed again. “A fever. It might have broken anyway.”

  “The Tenseverys are in forestry,” the courtier said, stroking the wood armrest of his overstuffed chair. “This very mahogany might have come from their mills.” His eyelashes fluttered. “You know their son, Landon, boy?”

  “I know of him, lord courtier. He’s well known, and well liked.”

  The magus sat back. “What did you give the girl for her fever?”

  “Willowbark.”

  “For rheumatism?”

  A test, then. “The same.”

  “Convulsions?”

  “Valerian.”

  “Pox?”

  “Depends on the pox,” Nate said. “For small blisters, a redfern poultice, but for flat pox, I’d use chokeweed.”

  The magus grunted. The courtier yawned. The fire crackled.

  Nate waited.

  Eventually the magus leaned back in his chair. “You’re fortunate that Lord Bothel happened to be here when you arrived, and that he knows the Tensevery family well enough to vouch for them.” His eyes on Nate were cold. “I’ve never taken an apprentice before. I don’t know how I’ll like it.”

  “What’s not to like?” Lord Bothel said with a languid wave of his hand. “The magus at my father’s estate is never without one. Sorry wretches, most of them. But it’s free labor. And good to have somebody to do the tedious tasks.”

  The magus grunted again. “Indeed.” He considered a moment. Then he threw Nate’s letter into the fire, where it instantly began to smolder around the edges. Nate’s hopes flared with it. Ordinarily, the gesture would have been a threat and a demonstration: without a letter, he wouldn’t be able to get an apprentice position with any other magus in the city, so he’d be stuck with Arkady. But Nate’s circumstances weren’t ordinary. No other magus in Highfall was of any use to him. It was Arkady or nobody.

  “I won’t pay you, but I’ll feed you,” the old man said. “You’ll sleep in the kitchen. Vertus will show you the way.”

  Nate bowed one last time, low and grateful and completely sincere. “Thank you, magus. You won’t be sorry.”

  “The more you speak, the sorrier I’ll be,” Arkady said, and Nate felt the servingman, who must be Vertus, at his side. Quickly, before the magus could change his mind, he bowed again and backed out of the room.

  “The more fool you,” Vertus said when they were well down the hallway and away from the parlor. “That man’s so mean he shits stone.”

  “You’d know,” Nate said.

  Vertus grinned. “You’ll eat well, so there’s that. I’ll bring blankets. You can make a pallet here by the stove.”

  The place Vertus pointed out was thick with coal dust. “And the laboratory?”

  “Through there.” Vertus nodded at a closed door. “It’ll be locked now. He’ll show you in the morning. Yard’s through the other door, if you want a smoke or a piss. Just be sure to draw the bolt on your way back in.”

  When the pallet was made up and Vertus had gone upstairs to his own bed, Nate listened. No more voices could be heard in the parlor. The courtier must have left. Carefully, quietly, he slipped out into the yard. He couldn’t see much in the darkness: some vague shapes that were probably bushes and other vague shapes that were probably trees, and in the back, a coffin-like shape that was probably the privy. The air smelled like mud and urine and, faintly, something spicy and herbal.

  Mostly, though, it smelled like garbage. The bin in the back corner was overflowing. Nate picked his way through the garden to it; nearby, as he’d expected, a gate had been built into the high wood fence, so the slopman could grab the bin without bothering the household. The latch was simple and in a moment he was outside in the alley. It was barely wide enough for a single person, and Nate’s fingers found waist-high scores in the wooden walls from the slopman shoving his cart through. He followed the scores to another alley, and another. Porterfield’s broad squares and paved streets gave the impression that the neighborhood had been planned but the alleys told another story. It would be easy to get lost here, but Nate had been raised in the wilderness: he had a good sense of direction, and he knew that eventually the slopman’s marks would lead him to the avenue. S
oon, he found himself on the street, around the corner from Limley Square.

  Ahead, he could see Lord Bothel, standing on the corner and peering anxiously in the other direction. The streetlamps hid the lurid colors of his clothes and his curls were wilting slightly in the fog. Nate tapped him on the shoulder. Bothel—whose real name was Charles, and who wasn’t a courtier any more than Nate was Lord Tensevery’s former apprentice—started, and frowned. “I thought you’d come from that way.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You can almost see the old pig’s yard from here, that’s why.” Charles lit a pipe and his wilted curls shone in the brief flare of brimstone. “All well?”

  “All well. You’ll tell Derie for me?”

  “When I see her. Good luck to you. That old man is a nightmare.”

  “Thanks,” Nate said. “Nice clothes, by the way.”

  Charles scowled, kohl wrinkling around his eyes. “Blow it out your ear,” he said. Then he walked away, the quick clip of his heels on the whitestone pavement echoing through the empty square. They had been friends for nearly their entire lives. When they were ten years old they’d had a fight under one of the wagons, and Charles had broken Nate’s nose. Nate watched him disappear into the fog. He had not asked where Charles would go; they were all safer if he didn’t know. But he suspected that it was the last he would see of his friend for a long time.

  * * *

  For the first weeks, Arkady wouldn’t let Nate do anything but wash herbs. He wouldn’t even let him pick them from the garden. Which was ludicrous, because the herbs in Arkady’s garden were spindly and sad, none of them truly useful. The old man wasn’t quite what Nate thought of as a nightmare, but he was certainly unpleasant. He wasn’t the worst healer Nate had ever seen—that honor went to a man on the other side of the Barriers, who rinsed out the nasal cavities of his patients with a mixture of powdered mouse bones and turpentine—but neither was he the best. Still, he never hit Nate, and Vertus had been right: they ate well, although not abundantly. Sharp cheese, well-cured meat, plenty of wine. And if there was sawdust in the bread, Nate couldn’t taste it.

  His tiny pallet in the kitchen was hard and the blankets smelled as if they’d been rained on and not allowed to dry properly. If the house had been his, he would have put the lab in what was now the front parlor, the room where he’d first met Arkady with Charles; it had the best light and the best ventilation. But the dim, stuffy lab was still the best equipped that Nate had ever seen. There was glassware beyond his wildest imaginings and cabinets upon cabinets upon drawers upon shelves of neatly labeled supplies. Even if the herbs were substandard, most healers Nate had known worked out of battered trunks or—more often—satchels. Arkady’s counter space alone dazzled him.

  It was a pleasure to work there, even at menial tasks. A month passed before Arkady permitted Nate to polish glass in the lab while Arkady himself mixed tonics and prepared salves; more weeks passed after that before Nate was allowed to actually watch. Nate kept quiet and tried to make himself indispensable. It wasn’t hard for him to anticipate a few steps ahead as Arkady worked, so that he could be standing silently by with the necessary tool or herb or oil the moment Arkady realized he wanted it. The first few times this happened, the old man grunted with a grudging surprise, but after a while it just became the way of things, and Arkady would reach out his hand wordlessly and expect Nate to fill it with whatever was needed.

  Mostly Nate was ignored, except for the dullest, nastiest tasks and the most tedious errands. That was fine. He was used to pleasing difficult, thankless people and it was what he’d expected. Vertus was mercurial, treating Nate like a brother on some days and his worst enemy on others. A friend would have been nice, but wasn’t required; and Nate soon noticed that whenever Arkady left the house Vertus soon followed, on business of his own, and decided that it was better to keep his distance from the servingman. Eventually Arkady let him grind herbs and hang them to dry. Nate had forgotten more herblore than Arkady had ever known, but he did as he was told without complaint even when he knew there were better ways. So far, he hadn’t seen Arkady do anything that would kill anyone. He was grateful for that. Storing herbs badly was one thing; Nate wasn’t sure he could stand by while Arkady gave his patients poison.

  Most of those patients were courtiers with petty, cosmetic complaints. Their water was clean, their manors weren’t flea-infested, and they ate and slept too well to develop any real sickness. On occasion a rider would come from the palace, ringing a hand bell as he rode to warn pedestrians to clear the way; soon after, a phaeton would arrive, and Arkady would climb into it and disappear behind the Wall. In a day or two he’d be back, wine-stained and happy, with his pockets full of coins. Vertus said that when Arkady was done treating his highborn patients, he made off for the parlors and retiring rooms, and lived like a courtier until the Seneschal suggested he leave.

  Whenever the phaeton came, Nate found somewhere else to be. He was afraid his eagerness shone like a beacon out of his eyes. He wanted to be in that phaeton like he wanted his next breath. More. He wanted it so much that the wanting was like a tumor in his chest. It took up space; it grew; it lived. It was of him and not of him.

  All in good time, he told himself. Meanwhile, he learned about the city, which he’d arrived in for the first time less than forty-eight hours before presenting himself on Arkady’s doorstep. Nate had grown up surrounded by quiet forests and verdant plains. He’d been in cities before, but he’d never spent so long in one. The gracious avenues of Porterfield, the desperation of Brakeside, all the gradations of grandeur and misery in between; Beggar’s Market, where literal scraps of food sold for pennies, and the Grand Bazaar, where luxurious patrons browsed luxurious goods. A few foreign traders moved among the locals, with rich warm skin and varied features that made Nate think of his people in the caravans, who came from everywhere, but with eyes that carried the natural wariness of those far from home. But the people he saw in the streets here had been born and raised here. Nate hadn’t, and he could not help but feel the unsteadiness and rot in Highfall’s streets. The city was like a spoiled egg, a thin shell of respectability barely containing the foulness inside. He didn’t like it, but it soon stopped feeling overwhelming and chaotic. (Except on feast days, when the gaiety quickly slipped into an almost deliberate danger, when brawls spilled out into the streets and you had to be careful where you stepped, or you’d be ankle-deep in blood.)

  Arkady sent him on errands to the Grand Bazaar, because he wanted his apprentice to be seen buying goods there, but Nate found that most of the herb sellers at the Bazaar waterlogged or oiled their wares, to make them seem heavier or healthier. In the Beggar’s Market the same herbs would be wizened and bruised but sometimes more potent, and the small market by the Harteswell Gate—just a few stalls—often had unusual things, because the foreign merchants on their way out unloaded unsold goods for cheap to stallkeepers who had no idea what they were buying. One day, near the Beggar’s Market, he stopped a man with a rash on his cheek. “I can treat that,” he said when the man glared at him. And he could. It was simple enough, and he’d just bought the very herb he needed: a pathetic specimen, but once it was simmered in oil and the oil cooled to a solid, it would soothe away the rash in a matter of days. He told the man to come to Arkady’s manor, to the back gate by the slop bin. Nate didn’t expect that he would, but he made the salve anyway. He was pleased when the man showed up.

  “Why do you do this?” the man said, still suspicious, as he took the salve.

  Nate shrugged. “Because I can.”

  Word got around. People started to stop him on the street—the shabbier streets, anyway—to pull him aside. “You the magus?” they said, and he was always quick to say no, he was just an apprentice, but they called him magus all the same. (He would rather have been called healer or apothecary or even herbalist, but on this side of the Barriers it was always magus.) Sometimes he co
uld help on the spot, telling the women to feed their babies goat’s milk instead of cow’s, or suggesting the men alternate their bundles between their left and right shoulders. Others, he told to come to the gate. They began to call him the Gate Magus. They paid in small goods, eggs from backyard chickens or bags of brown flour, or in services. One seamstress sat down cross-legged right in the alley to sew a button onto his coat. Another time, a shoemaker brought his tools and fixed the worn heel of Nate’s boot.

  More importantly, they paid him in goodwill. “You’re a good man, magus,” the weaver’s husband told him once, when he gave the man a syrup for his son’s colic. “You go all the way down.” In Brakeside and Marketside, the original cottages that lined the narrow streets had been built up and out, with rooms propped unsteadily over the streets themselves. Collapses weren’t uncommon. Nate had talked a young boy through a breathing spasm in one of these attaches, as they were called, barely able to breathe himself for fear while the floors bent and creaked perilously beneath him. Back on the hard cobbles, he finally understood what the weaver’s husband had meant. All the way down, indeed.

  Merchants in the Beggar’s Market showed him better goods. Pickpockets left him alone. If the guards were raiding a specific street, a wink and a shake of the head would tell him to take another route. The fruitmonger would pass him an extra date. All of this was nice, and gave Nate some small sense of belonging to this strange place where pale people lived on top of each other. He had tried to be friendly to the foreign traders, but had soon discovered that they didn’t trust him any more than they did any other Highfall citizen. Their reticence made him lonely but he could understand it. He supposed, even, that it was for the best.

  Because what he valued more than anything else were the stories the locals told: of their lives, of Highfall, and (best of all) of the palace. No matter where he was or what he was doing—clipping herbs in the dim miasma of Arkady’s yard, making his way through the Market with a loaf of bread under each arm—he could feel the palace, with her in it, pulsing quietly under his days like his own heartbeat. He had seen the whole thing once, from the crest of a hill outside the city. The land enclosed by the Wall was almost as big as the city outside it, the palace itself a patchwork tangle of colored roof tiles and mismatched towers, crenellated, peaked, brick or stone. The people he spoke to in the streets knew it only through stories. Inside were trees that grew any kind of fruit you could dream of; inside were herds of fat cows that gave milk all year round, and goats and lambs and pigs. Inside were medicinal gardens of strange herbs and aromatic plants from faraway lands, vegetable gardens that grew produce three times the size of anything in a city market (this, Nate could believe), and formal gardens full of rosebushes the size of carriages and plants that bloomed even in the dead of winter. Inside was a spring that never ran dry, and great kitchens where the fires never went out, and glass windows in every color a person could imagine. The tables were spread with delicacies from morning until night and if you were hungry you just ate, whatever and whenever you liked.