The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  Nearly everybody had somebody inside, a daughter or son or cousin or sibling. People spoke of them the way Nate had heard people in other places speak of loved ones who had joined guilds or armies or taken berths on sailing ships: sometimes with pride, sometimes with loss, most often with a mix of the two. Some clearly preferred not to speak of the subject at all—or perhaps they had nothing to say. Nate doubted that many Highfall residents could read or write (most of the signs in Brakeside and Marketside had no words, only pictures) so letters home seemed unlikely. But even if they had no stories to tell of their own loved ones, they had a thousand stories about the palace’s highborn residents. Funny stories, embarrassing stories, stories told with a twist of rancorous loathing. There were stories of the fearsome Lord Elban who—depending on who you talked to—may or may not have been quite so fearsome before he’d lost his poor Lady Clorin, and there were stories of Lady Clorin herself, so kind and generous and beautiful. There were even stories of the courtiers, which reminded Nate of trickster tales he’d heard all over the continent, wherein the unscrupulous either earned their comeuppance or dished it out.

  Most of the stories, though, were about the Children, as they were called, even though they were well into adulthood. Actual children sang songs about them as they played and crowded around puppeteers in the market to watch their favorites come alive on strings. In skipping chants they went up, up, up the tree and counted all the apples that fell, fell, fell. There were even dolls: Elban’s heir Gavin always in red, his sickly brother Theron in blue, and Gavin’s betrothed, Eleanor, in as much cheerful pink lace as the owner’s parents could afford. And—most popular of all, which thrilled Nate’s heart—the fourth, in drab gray with her mass of dark red ersatz hair, so striking in this land of milky blondes: Lord Gavin’s foster sister, with him since birth although she had no name and no family and a background that was a complete mystery. The love child of Clorin’s favorite maid, some said; a hostage from the Southern Kingdom, said others. Some even said she was just a common orphan from the city, brought in by a midwife. With her hair and eyes being what they were, this story was regarded as the most unlikely, but there were still those who clung to it, as proof that birth wasn’t everything, that luck could befall even the smallest and most humble child of Highfall, and that maybe Lord Elban even had a heart, somewhere inside that bloodless skin of his.

  The children loved her. The people loved her. They called her the foundling, which Nate thought too ordinary a name for her, and too small. The first time he’d seen a doll in her likeness at a toy stall he’d been so filled with something like awe and something like shame that he’d had to walk away, quickly. The second time he’d seen one—clutched in the arms of a tiny child, and obviously well-loved—he hadn’t been able to tear his eyes from it. Was it a faithful likeness, he wondered? Was the doll’s berry-colored wig determined by the real shade of the girl’s hair, or by the ready availability of berries? Was the curved pink line of her smile real? Had they given her things to smile about in the palace? Was she a happy person? Nate had heard enough children’s stories to know they came with roles to fill: in the puppet shows, Lord Gavin was noble and heroic, his brother a bumbling clown, Lady Eleanor nearly angelic. The foundling was always cast as the friendly troublemaker who came out on top. He wanted to believe the picture the puppeteers painted. He wanted it desperately.

  He dreamed of seeing her with his own eyes. He thought of her as he fell asleep at night and when he woke up in the morning and as he shaved his chin in Arkady’s dank backyard. Walking the streets of the city he practiced what he would say to her, when the time came. If he would be able to speak at all. It would be like speaking with the great John Slonim himself, the first Worker from the first caravan, like one of his childhood fantasies come to life. Years of hard work and careful planning had gone into getting Nate to Highfall, to that musty pallet in Arkady’s kitchen; years to get her here, too, to give him a reason to come. Years spent and lives spent, and it was an honor for him to be chosen, an honor to wait. So he forced himself to be patient.

  Once a week, at noon, he met Derie at the plague shrine outside the Harteswell Gate. It had been years since the last plague, but people still left offerings at the shrine for luck, cheap trinkets and stale buns. Nobody remembered which god the tokens were supposed to flatter; they left gifts because their parents had taught them to do so when they were young. And enough people still did that nobody noticed when Nate stopped and knelt next to the old woman for a minute, just long enough for her say, “News?” and him to say, “No.” Then she’d cough or spit and he’d get up and walk away. One day, though, he passed her in the street, which he’d never done before, and as he did she muttered, “Midnight.”

  So out he crept through the dark yard. In Porterfield the gas lamps burned all night, but in Brakeside people still carried torches to light their way. Only the taverns were open at that hour, and even the shadows were full of shadows: moving shadows, writhing shadows, fighting shadows. Some of the noises the shadows made were ecstatic and others were gurgling and choked. The moon’s reflection quivered in the thin stream of liquid that ran down the middle of the street, and he could hear the quiet lap of the river itself, one street over; he could smell it, ripe and unwholesome.

  He wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he’d been robbed on the way—he’d even brought a few small coins so a frustrated thief wouldn’t kill him out of spite—but the few people he saw out in the open seemed uninterested in him, and he made it to the Harteswell Gate unmolested. The guards were dozing. He didn’t see Derie anywhere; the plague shrine was deserted. Without the crowd around it, the shrine wasn’t very impressive, just a stone pillar reaching up from a dry basin. The basin was half-full of offerings, indistinguishable in the darkness. He reached into his pocket, took out a coin, and dropped it in.

  “Warding off the pox?” Derie said, almost in his ear.

  Trying to pretend she hadn’t startled him, Nate took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt. They probably needed it anyway. They usually did. “Can’t hurt, since I’m here.”

  She grunted and, leaning heavily on her cane, dragged herself over to a nearby bench. He followed. She had hobbled all the way across the Barriers on that cane. Or maybe she hadn’t needed it quite as much when they’d set out; he couldn’t remember. “Best not to mess around with other people’s gods,” she said, and dropped heavily down to sit.

  Derie had been old as long as Nate had known her. Her skin reminded Nate of the floured dumplings his mother had made to sell for extra money, except that beneath Derie’s soft whiteness was hard, unyielding bone. You could see it jutting out at her elbows and her shoulders and in her eyes. “Too slow, Nathaniel,” she said.

  He sat down next to her. “I’m doing everything I can. The old man’s stubborn. But I’m making myself useful.”

  “It’s not enough. You need to make yourself indispensable.”

  “It takes time.”

  “You’re not seeing this with big enough eyes, boy. Making yourself useful.” Her voice mocked him. She shook her cane as if to hit him with it. “This is useful—unless you can walk unassisted, yeah? Then it’s just another goddamned thing to carry around. Make him need you.”

  “He will.”

  “When?” Her eyes, fierce and frightening, burned with power. “The boy will be betrothed to that Tiernan girl by summer, and that’s as good as married to these high-bloods. They don’t wait for the vows to start working on an heir, here, and if they pass on Elban’s blood to a child, your task’s all the harder, don’t you agree? And I hear that old walking corpse is planning another trip across the strait to harass the Nali in a month or two. Good time to make our move, when he’s their problem and not ours. Things are bad in the city. The people are restless. That Seneschal’ll have his hands full, too.”

  “I can’t guarantee Arkady will bring me inside within a month or two.” />
  “Your parents were both such clever people,” she said. “I don’t understand how they spawned such a stupid boy. Maybe the bleach from your hair got to your brain. You can guarantee it. He doesn’t need you now because he’s strong. Make him weak.”

  Nate frowned. “You mean—deliberately?”

  “Why not? You know how.”

  Of course he did. There were as many herbs with negative effects as there were beneficial. Already a tiny voice was whispering their names in his head: turp root, bitterweed, milkscorn. “I didn’t think we’d have to hurt him,” he said.

  Derie laughed. “Have a soft spot for the old crank, do you? Think he’s a kind old soul, sprinkling healing fairy dust everywhere he goes?”

  “No, but—”

  “He’s a cruel man, your Arkady.” She pointed her cane toward the plague shrine. “When the pox came, he holed up inside the Wall. After it was done, he went through the orphan halls with a tonic. To make them strong, he said. Wasn’t a tonic at all, of course. The very strong ones, who hadn’t been long on the streets—they survived it. Solved old Elban’s orphan problem, certainly.”

  “Still, if we can get in without—”

  “If we can get in without.” Her bark of laughter was violent in the quiet night. “If only we could do any of this without. If only we could have just walked into Mad Martin’s throne room and said, Hello, old chum, there seems to have been an injustice here, what can we do to resolve it? How much better would that have been, eh? How many of our lives saved?” She spat into the hard-packed dirt. “You and that Charles. You bleach your hair and steal some Eastern clothes and you think you’re in the stew. I’ve spent my whole life in this, Nathaniel Clare, as did my mother before me and your mother before you. Too many good people, planning for a time they knew they’d never live to see. We watched them die. We buried them. And now you sit here and you whine and you whimper because dear, oh dear, a stone-hearted old man might have to die.”

  Under the steely force of Derie’s regard Nate felt himself shriveling, as if he were still a small boy in bare feet standing shamefaced by her campfire. That gimlet stare of hers could sweep a quarter of a century away like nothing.

  “Did we choose the wrong Worker for this job?” she said. “Because I’ll tell you, Nathaniel, there were those that had their doubts.”

  “I know, Derie.”

  “I had some doubts, myself.”

  “I know.”

  “Arkady’s vermin. Kill him. Make him sick first. A nice wasting illness. Not too long.” She put both hands on top of her cane and pushed herself up to stand. “I’m told the orphans convulsed and spewed blood before they died. Conscious every minute, too. At least plague brings delirium.”

  “See you Friday, Derie,” he said, and she said, “See you Friday, Nathaniel,” and hobbled away.

  The phaeton came for Arkady the next afternoon. When the old man read the note the messenger brought, he’d grunted. Sometimes Nate heard Arkady’s grunts in his dreams. It was the kind of sound that made a person fantasize about pushing a knife through the grunter’s throat: even if a person considered themselves a healer, even if a person had lain awake all night trying to figure out a way to avoid killing the grunter.

  “Trouble in the House?” Nate said, his shears continuing to snip at a plant as if the question didn’t particularly concern him. Nobody who actually had anything to do with the palace called it the palace; to those who spent time inside, it was always the House.

  Arkady grunted. Nate’s shears closed with particular ferocity. “The head Wilmerian has gut trouble. Stupid guildsmen,” the old man said, beginning to pack brown glass vials and bags of powder into his satchel. “They ought to stay in their guildhalls. They leave all their senses behind when they leave the world.”

  “I’ve heard the Elenesians have a lot of knowledge,” Nate said neutrally. “In the West, they’re said to have refuges in almost every city.”

  “The Elenesians?” Arkady snorted. Better than grunting. “We are but cogs in the plan of the divine—ha! You notice there’s no Elenesian refuge in Highfall. Elban’s father drove them right out. No interest in having the city swarmed with parasites. Hobbling around on crutches, begging for alms.” He snapped the satchel shut. “The Elenesians know things, all right, but they do not know when to quit, and that is the truth.”

  “Will you need help?” Nate said, as if he couldn’t care less.

  “Yes,” Arkady said, and Nate’s heart leapt. But the old man just pointed to the bench where Nate was working. “Finish those herbs and hang them to dry. When you’re done, do the same to the catchberry in the back. Tell anyone who sends for me that I’m busy in the House.”

  Nate waited until the sound of the phaeton in the street had faded, and all he heard was the regular sepulchral silence of Limley Square: no shouted greetings, no merchants crying wares, no street musicians, no laughing children. He waited some more, until he heard Vertus’s quick footsteps down the stairs and out the front door, as the servingman went wherever he went when Arkady was gone. Then he put down his scissors and went out into the yard, which wasn’t quite as dank at midday, when the sun could reach down between the spires to touch the ground. He took a blue rag out of his pocket and tossed it over the slopman’s gate. He might have been cleaning something, hung the rag up to dry and forgotten about it.

  It was a signal. Sometimes Nate put it out and nothing happened; sometimes, like now, the quiet tapping on the gate came so quickly that his patients had clearly been hiding in wait. Where they hid, he didn’t know, but he supposed that when you were from Brakeside—or even Marketside, which was slightly less dismal—you learned to disappear when necessary. A birdmonger with an infected tooth was easy to treat with a pair of pliers, and the eggs the man gave in payment were more than welcome. (Arkady didn’t like eggs. Nate did, and so did Vertus, and Nate still considered it worthwhile to try to keep on the servingman’s good side.) A pregnant woman seeking a tonic that would guarantee her a boy was a more difficult case. She was clearly within weeks of delivering; he explained several times that by now her baby was what it was, and even if such a tonic existed it would be too late to use it. She somehow took this as an admission that the tonic did exist, and he was refusing to give it to her. Nate could hear coughs and rustling in the alley and knew there were others waiting. Finally, he lost patience and told her she had to leave. He also told her she might give up hoping that the baby had inherited its father’s sex and pray, instead, that it had inherited his brain. She put her nose in the air and said, “Pray? I’m no country peasant, sir,” with such haughty conviction that he knew that was exactly what she was. After she was gone, he felt bad. She probably had her reasons for wanting a son. They might even be good ones.

  It didn’t worry him that she’d gone off in a huff. There is a magus who will treat people from Brakeside was of more interest to anyone in Highfall than And he will not give me a magic potion, and most people were smart enough to realize that a magic potion was what the woman had asked for. Most of his secret patients, in fact, were quite clever; until he’d come along, they’d had nobody to treat them at all, so they’d learned to get by on what they had, which was experience, guesswork and passed-down knowledge. More often than not they introduced themselves by telling him what they’d already done, and although he occasionally hastened to warn them never to do those things again, usually the things they’d already tried were the things he would have suggested first, anyway.

  He saw a boy who’d dislocated his shoulder working in one of the factories. Nate popped it back into place. Another man, a builder, had what was probably a concussion; Nate asked him if he could go home and rest and the man laughed, wincingly, so he gave him an elixir to ease his pain. The elixir was one Nate had made himself. He’d considered stealing such things from Arkady as needed, replacing them later, but quickly realized that his own preparations w
ere better than anything the old man made. If the hidden line of patients was close to its end, he’d have time to cook the eggs before Arkady was due back.

  The last patient he saw that day was a girl, twelve or thirteen, holding a baby in her arms. The baby was about a year old and seemed happy enough, but the girl looked worried. “His head doesn’t feel right,” she said.

  Nate felt the baby’s skull. It was soft. “Is this your brother?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Mother? Father?” Nate had learned to be brief about such questions, and accept whatever the answer was.

  He was relieved when the girl said, “Ma works in the paper factory.”

  But only for an instant. “Let me guess. She works from dawn to dusk, and brings him with her.”

  The girl nodded again. “Is he okay?” she said anxiously.

  “Sure.” Nate spoke more cheerfully than he felt. He’d smelled the air near the paper factory. He wouldn’t vouch for the health of any infant that spent its days there. “But he’s sun-starved. It softens the bones. Is there anyone else who can take him during the day?”