“Everyone lived except the deer.”
“Was it bad?”
Stealthily, Judah scratched come here now on the inside of her wrist. Jagged and angular, which was its own message. There was no answer. “Yes. It was. But it’s over. And he’s not hurt. Just—”
“Humiliated.”
Feeling unclean, Judah nodded.
“And Gavin?”
Judah lifted her shoulders. Let them drop.
Elly’s hair was braided down her back. She reached up with both hands and yanked it ferociously, like a bell that wouldn’t ring. “Of course,” she said. “Because coming back here and actually dealing with us would be difficult, and Gavin doesn’t like difficult. Gavin likes fighting and wine and pretty little courtier girls who follow him around like geese. Oh, how strong you are, Lord Gavin. How handsome and manly.”
“To be fair,” Judah said, “Theron’s not here, either.”
“Theron has reason not to be,” Elly snapped, and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. When she dropped them again the anger was gone. “Tell me about the hunt, Jude.”
So Judah did. A version of the hunt, anyway, in which there was a bit more mockery of Theron’s stutter and a lot less of Gavin nearly killing him. Nothing she said was technically untrue, but it was all a lie, nevertheless. “Anyway, he survived,” she finished. “And it wasn’t easy for Gavin, either, so stable your warhorse, all right?”
“Gavin.” Elly’s lips pressed together. “Gavin will wake up with a headache and be just fine.” She sat down and began putting on her shoes. “I’m going to try to talk Theron into coming down. He can’t stay up there, his lungs will rot. If anyone asks for me, tell them to go jump in a well. And if you see Gavin, tell him to jump in a well, too,” she added, head held high.
As soon as she left—as if he’d been waiting and watching around a corner somewhere—the door opened again, and Gavin came in: pale and unsteady, hair disheveled and coat missing. His shirt was only half-buttoned, and incorrectly, with some brownish stain down the front that could have been wine or blood or either or both. His eyes were red and bleary. “I didn’t do it,” he said.
“I know,” Judah said.
Theron had said that when Gavin remounted his horse he had looked as though his bones were slumped and soft. She saw now what he meant. Gavin dropped onto the sofa, just where Elly had been sitting, and everything about him seemed defeated. “He doesn’t want her,” he said. He had a headache, a blurry throb over his eyes that Judah hadn’t noticed until they were in the same room. “He’ll take her to make me miserable. He wants Theron dead, so he has one less heir to worry about, and he wants to know I’ll jump when he pulls my string.”
It felt like Judah had been angry with him for days. She was tired of being angry with him. It was too hard. She sat down next to him. “We’ll figure it out,” she said, and took his hand. He let her. The headache flared; her queasiness and his folded together, doubled, redoubled, until she couldn’t tell where she stopped and he began.
She pulled herself together and focused. Water. Ripples in the sun. Slowing; quieting; still.
Chapter Five
Gavin decided that the most logical course of action was to kill his father with a knife to the throat in the most public place possible. Judah thought this was absurd. Gavin informed her that patricide was practically a family tradition. “He’ll be disappointed in me if I don’t at least try,” he said, flipping the dagger he’d taken to carrying. It was overly jeweled and too well polished, but the long blade was nasty. “All I need is a chance.”
Forgetting, apparently, his earlier certainty that Elban would never give him one. “Are you liable to catch him here in the staff corridors?” Judah said. Because that was where they were, even though she was going to the stables and he was going to the training field, where he’d spent nearly every waking hour of the last forty-eight practicing with the dagger, and there were faster ways to get both places if you didn’t care about being noticed. Judah used the staff routes fairly often, but Gavin almost never did. “Or are you just avoiding Amie and her friends?”
He slid the dagger back into its sheath. “She was incredibly attractive before I thought I might have to marry her.”
“Has she been disfigured somehow?” Judah said, and he said, “Let’s just say I see her differently.”
They came to the intersection where he needed to go one way and Judah the other. Before he could walk away, Judah grabbed his arm. “Before you murder your father,” she said, “you need to tell Elly what’s going on.” Because he hadn’t; neither had Judah. Being kept in the dark made Elly extremely angry and being angry made her extremely polite, and when Elly was extremely polite, she was formidable. Every icy please and thank you stabbed at Judah, and she felt an uncertain lurch in Gavin’s stomach, too, the moment she spoke Elly’s name.
But all he said was, “Speaking of telling, Cerrington’s telling all sorts of stories about you from the night of the hunt. Which makes you the first woman he’s touched in decades. Congratulations.”
“Tell Elly,” Judah said doggedly, “or I will.”
In the stables, Darid sat in the doorway, braiding rope. He greeted her as normal, but when she picked up the pitchfork and began mucking out the nearest stall, she became aware that he would not look directly at her. “Am I doing something wrong?” she said.
“No wrong way to muck out a stall.” His attention remained fixed on his rope, but something in the tone of his voice told her the sentence wasn’t over. She waited for the rest and finally it came. “Not sure you should be doing it at all, though.”
The words weren’t a surprise. She’d known he’d say them someday. But she hadn’t expected them to come now, when the rest of her life was falling down around her ears. She stuck the tines of the fork in the old wood of the floor. Harder than she needed to; the sound of metal stabbing into the wood was louder than she’d intended. “I’ve been mucking out your stalls for almost a year. You’ve never said anything like that to me.”
“Thought it.”
“Sure. But you never said it. So what’s changed?” Then the connection snapped together in her head, as unnatural as the gaslights. “You heard something about me, didn’t you? What was it? That I was chasing some courtier?”
The strands of hemp wound in and out around his fingers, the long tail of completed rope coiled next to him on the ground. Darid’s fingers could weave rope on their own while his brain did three other things but suddenly the process seemed to require all of his attention.
“More than that?”
His eyes flicked up to her. She had blushed when Gavin mentioned Firo, but she didn’t now. She could feel him searching for either confirmation or denial. She didn’t know how to give him either, but one of her eyebrows wanted to lift so she let it, and a slow smile touched Darid’s face.
“As long as no lord from the provinces is going to show up here with a horsewhip,” he said, and then, “Don’t look at me like that. People do odd things.”
“I do odd things all the time,” she said, “but not that.”
She went back to her muck. He went back to his rope. After a few minutes, he said, “I have people to protect. My men. My family.”
She kept her eyes on her work. “Yes,” she said. “I know.”
Before she left, Darid said that he would show her the next time she came how to weave rope herself; he had tried to teach her before, but she’d been hopeless at it. Darid didn’t have time to waste on hopeless tasks so she took the offer as the apology she suspected it was meant to be, and said she would be happy to learn. Then she went down to the baths. This early in the day, they were deserted. No noises came from behind any of the closed doors, and not a single page waited outside the bathing rooms for a courtier. Judah had no page, and clean clothes would have required a trip back upstairs, so she had none
of those, either. The steam was scented so strongly with eucalyptus and lavender that her eyes stung. After, she put her dusty dress back on and it smelled like horse and hay, and as she tied the laces she thought, Elly is going to marry Elban.
It hit her like a slap. She felt like one of Theron’s clockwork things, wound to its limit every morning so it would go through the motions all day, spinning and ticking away. Meanwhile, the world burned, and for the thousandth time, she pondered how strange life was, how easy it could be to let your feet carry you through the hours despite the fire.
On her way back upstairs, she met the Seneschal. He was talking to one of the kitchen stewards about wheat: how much the fields inside the Wall could be expected to yield, how much would be consumed, how much would have to be purchased or traded from the provinces, how much all of it would cost. When he saw Judah he did not pause, but held up one finger. She considered ignoring it, but knew she wouldn’t be able to avoid him for long. So she stood, impatiently, until the conversation was over. As the steward slipped past her on his way out, he slashed at the air. Protecting against the evil eye—her eye. Judah slashed back.
The Seneschal appeared not to notice. “This way,” he said, and led her two hallways over to an empty guest room. It was shabby enough that it was probably meant for tradesmen or visiting servants; the cot was narrow, there was no sink or running water and the washstand was chipped. The only window opened onto one of the light shafts. This far down, the light had a long way to travel, and what made it through the window was weak and halfhearted.
“If you’re going to yell at me about Firo,” she said, “don’t bother. Nothing you’ve heard is true.”
He shook his head. “Firo likes beautiful men. Neither word applies to you. While I’m curious about the conversations he’s obviously covering for, I doubt very much that they contain anything I don’t already know. And Firo might be useful to us down the road.”
“I thought I was supposed to stay away from the courtiers.”
“Circumstances have changed. If Lord Gavin marries Lady Amie, she’ll want you dead,” the Seneschal said matter-of-factly. “Marrying you to Firo and sequestering you in Cerrington might not be the worst thing. He’d follow instructions if he were paid well enough, and there’d be little risk of pregnancy.”
Judah recoiled. “There will be no risk of pregnancy. I won’t marry Firo.”
“Perhaps you’d rather be walled into one of the unused towers for the rest of your life, or beheaded.” His consonants were crisp, bitten-off. “Lady Amie doesn’t know about your bond with Lord Gavin, and she can’t find out. Unlike Lady Eleanor, she would have no qualms about using the information to her advantage.” Judah could practically feel the man thinking. It was like standing next to a hot fire. “It would take a lot of money to buy Firo, though. He’s well-connected in his own right, and he wouldn’t go against Elban unless there was quite a lot in it for him. We might be able to blackmail him; they don’t think very well of men with his preferences in the outer provinces. Why is Lord Gavin spending so much time on the training field?”
“He likes hitting things,” Judah said.
The Seneschal slapped her, hard, and the world flashed white. It was more startling than anything. Then came the heat, and only after that the pain, like something rising out of the deep. She put a hand to her cheek. She couldn’t feel the touch of her fingers at all. “Like that?” he said calmly.
Whenever she or Gavin broke a rule as children, Judah had taken the blows for both of them, although they’d shared the pain. But there had been warning then. There had been reasons given. She had never bothered arguing because she was a child (and not an important one, as she was constantly reminded). She wasn’t a child now, and she was filled with a prickling sense of anger and affront so huge that she could make no sound big enough to express it.
“I suspect that Gavin is planning an attempt on his father’s life,” the Seneschal said. “If he asks you about the blow I just gave you, tell him that an axe through the neck hurts a great deal more. I cannot protect him from a charge of treason.”
Only when he was gone did words come to her. “How dare you,” Judah said, but she was alone in the room, and speaking to nobody.
* * *
“He hit you because he didn’t dare come after me,” was all Gavin said when he saw Judah’s bruise that night. “I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t worry you that he knows?”
He shrugged. “What can he do about it?”
“Behead you?” she said. “Us?”
They were on the terrace, leaning on the balustrade. Elly had gone to see Theron, who still said—as he’d told Judah, when she visited him earlier that day—that he was not ready to come back down. Gavin had not been to see his brother at all since the hunt. Now he surveyed the greenhouses and oat fields and sucked his teeth. “I think we can call that bluff, for now.”
“If it’s not a bluff, I’ll resent you as long as I live,” Judah said with more bravado than she felt.
She didn’t go to the stables the next day. She didn’t want to explain the bruise to Darid. Instead, she went walking through the fallow fields where the sheep grazed on wild grasses. After spending so much time with the quick, strong horses, the sheep seemed placid and dull. The ewes hadn’t been sheared for lambing yet and they barely moved; it was hard to believe they could, under the weight of all that wool. A few herding dogs loitered around the edges of the flock, long-nosed and intelligent. They watched Judah curiously but without malice. She wondered if the hounds had ever been dogs like these, or if they had started as some other animal entirely—something imported from the Southern Kingdom or Duviel, made of heat and jungle.
When she returned to the parlor, the door stood ajar, and she paused outside it. She could hear strange voices within. Through the opening she saw a pair of boots, well-made but plain. If she tilted her head she could see the back of a thin, shabbily-coated person, blond hair tied back in a leather thong at the nape of his neck.
She pushed the door open. The boots were the Seneschal’s, extended before him where he sat in Judah’s chair. The man in the shabby coat was Arkady’s assistant, whatever his name was, the one who never spoke. And on the sofa, hunkered like a bird, limbs hanging limp around him as if he lacked the strength to compose them, sat Arkady himself. “What are you doing here?” she said to the three men, reserving her harshest glare for the Seneschal. “Get out. You’re not wanted.”
“You’d know what that feels like,” Arkady said.
The Seneschal stood, one hand upraised. “We’re not here for you, Judah. Come back in an hour, and we’ll all be gone.”
“I’m not leaving. I live here.” She stepped inside. “Why are you here?”
Arkady eyed her dress and boots, mud-spattered from her walk. “Foul girl. Have you been rolling in dirt?” The apprentice merely stared, eyes wide behind his glasses. He always stared. Judah paid no attention to either of them.
“There are rumors in the city about Lord Theron’s health,” the Seneschal said. “Arkady needs to examine him so we can issue a statement and dispel those rumors. People are putting in orders for mourning,” he added as an afterthought.
Rumors. Firo had mentioned rumors. He wants Theron dead, Gavin had said. Elban always got what he wanted. Judah’s fingernails were already at the soft skin of her wrist. Come, come home, emergency. “Theron’s not here,” she said, managing to sound normal.
“We know. Lady Eleanor has gone to fetch him,” the Seneschal said. “She was very reasonable about it, once I explained the situation.”
Elly was very reasonable about the situation because nobody had told her about the situation. Hurry. Hurry. Now. They should have told Elly what was happening. Judah should have. She hadn’t. “I won’t allow this without Gavin here,” Judah said fiercely. Hoping fierceness was enough, because if they wanted to take Theron
into the bedroom sooner than that, she had no idea how she would stop them. Hurry. Come now.
“It’s not for you to allow,” the Seneschal said.
“What’s that, girl, a rash on your arm?” Arkady said.
Judah felt like she was screaming, but the scream had nowhere to go so it reverberated inside her.
Gavin burst into the room, red-faced and hollow-eyed. He’d been on the field again and hadn’t stopped to take off any of his armor when he’d come running. His helmet was in his hand and his hair, soaked through with sweat, stuck up at odd angles from his head. His gaze swept over the two men in the room before landing on Judah. “What’s wrong?” he said, breathless. “Why are they here? Who’s hurt?”
“Nobody’s hurt,” the Seneschal said. “Everything is fine.” Gavin gave him a hard look at that, but the Seneschal seemed not to notice. “We’re just here so Arkady Magus can examine Lord Theron and issue a statement saying that the rumors of his illness are unfounded. Your people are concerned, Lord Gavin. Lady Eleanor has been kind enough to go fetch your brother for us.”
At rumors Gavin’s eyes had widened. Now he took a step toward the Seneschal, his shoulders down and his jaw clenched. “Lady—” By habit, Judah put out a hand to stop him, although she wouldn’t have minded in the least seeing the Seneschal go down under Gavin’s fists. But then Elly and Theron entered through the open door, arms linked. Elly took in the scene before her and looked, questioning, at Judah.
But Judah was staring at Theron. In the thin grayish light of his workshop, she hadn’t noticed how thin and grayish he’d become since the hunt. He was unshaven, his beard coming through in sparse patches, and he’d obviously been wearing the same clothes for days. She should have taken better care of him. Made sure he stopped working occasionally, and ate and rested.
“What’s wrong?” Elly said.
Our fault, Judah thought. Elly didn’t know. She didn’t know because we didn’t tell her. Theron’s expression was grim, but not grim enough. He squared his narrow shoulders. “Let’s get this over with, if we’re going to do it,” he said to Arkady, who nodded and—with some difficulty—stood up. His apprentice moved quickly to help him.
The Unwilling Page 15
