The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  Here with you.

  Elban grabbed Judah’s wrist and, fingers like iron, wrenched it to expose the skin on her inner arm. Her dress had half sleeves and she could see the marks from Gavin’s scratching. “Let’s speed that day along,” he said, and pressed the flat side of the poker against her skin.

  The pain was instantaneous and brilliant and the rest of the room shrank to nothing, but her training held and she did not cry out. She heard Elly’s horrified gasp and heard—smelled—the sizzle of her own skin cooking. Her vision refracted in her tear-filled eyes. Countless Elbans. Countless pokers. Countless arms, all of them burning.

  “See how easy she is to hurt, heir. See how easy you are to hurt.” All she could see clearly were Elban’s eyes, the irises so pale they were almost white. He lifted the poker—it stuck to Judah’s skin, pulling free with a disgusting tearing sound—and before Judah knew it was happening he held the other arm and the poker came down again and the searing doubled. “See how quietly you sit and watch, what a well-trained little dog you are, already. So much for love.”

  “I’ll lock her away.” Gavin’s voice sounded strangled.

  “Yes. You will. But we’re not bargaining.” He lifted the poker again and dropped Judah’s arm. She fell to her knees, staring at her branded skin. He had flipped the poker so the two burns were mirror images of each other: the point, the hook, the barb, in wet, mottled gray and red. The smell coated her throat. She very much would have liked to pass out, or throw up, and tried very hard to do neither.

  Elban bent over Judah, examining the marks. Sounding once again like the worst of their tutors, he said, “It’s a delicate balance, you know. Leave the brand too long and the nerves are destroyed, so the pain stops. But lift it too soon, and the scars don’t shine the way they should.” Satisfied, he straightened. “I think I’ve gotten these exactly right. Her scars will be pretty, even if nothing else about her is.” He stirred the fire with the poker. Judah stared, fascinated and feverish, at the logs in front of her, as they shifted and glittered. Her arms glittered, too, shining as intensely as the coals. Gavin, far away, was gray with shock and pain and misery, sweat dampening the edges of his hair.

  “Keeping in mind, of course,” Elban said, “that all of this is only happening because you love your brother too much to kill him.”

  Theron. Judah needed to take care of him. She had sworn it. She focused all of her self into her legs, and stood up.

  “Amazing.” Elban’s voice, bright and interested, was growing distant. “A normal woman would have to be carried to bed after burns like that. She’s barely human.”

  She was not human. She was pain in the shape of a human. She glittered like fire. She burned.

  * * *

  In the corridor, Gavin’s arm instantly circled her, trying to hold her up despite his own pain. “Jude, my arms—I can’t carry you—” he said, sounding desperate and scared, but then Elly had her other side. Her feet dragged as her head lolled on Gavin’s shoulder, as his voice in her ear told her he was sorry, sorry.

  Then she was lying on Elly’s big soft bed and Elly’s gentle hands were moving around her. “Get the scissors from my sewing basket,” Elly said.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “We need to cut these sleeves off. Maybe the whole dress.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Gavin. Help me.” Elly’s voice was sharp and direct enough to even break through Judah’s haze. Judah could see her hovering overhead, carved into hard white stone with the force of her anger. In a moment Gavin was there, too, equally white but sweaty and sick from his own burns; careful not to move her arm, he took Judah’s hand, then dropped his head to it. Kissed it, lay his cheek against it. The waters inside him were stormy and rough. Judah could not try to soothe them.

  Meanwhile, she could hear the low sliding snick of Elly’s sewing scissors, and then water falling into a bowl somewhere, as a cloth was wrung out. More kindly than she’d spoken to Gavin, but with just as much firmness, Elly said, “Judah, I’m going to clean your arms. It’ll hurt, love.”

  Elly was right. It did hurt, love.

  * * *

  She could not eat dinner that night but drank too much of the wine they forced on her. When she woke into a silent world, she was alone. The shutters were closed and the bedroom was dim. Somehow she dressed, sliding her coat gingerly over her bandages. The burns still seared and her arms were stiff, besides, but she managed her boots, too. The air in the bedroom felt dense, unbreathable. All of her skin hurt. She had to get outside.

  The parlor was empty. Sun streamed in through the windows and the edges of everything glittered. In Gavin’s room, Theron slept, his hands unnaturally idle on top of the blankets. Gavin, himself, was gone. Poor Gavin, out there somewhere hoisting a halberd. Swinging a sword. Bearing a bow. The pain was never quite as bad when it wasn’t truly yours, but still. Poor her, too. Creeping a corridor, lurching a lawn. It didn’t work as neatly. She needed more words. Through. Across. Words to carry her, to move her from one place to another. The crisp spring air was a cool balm on her face, but something was wrong with her mind. Was Gavin drunk again? No. There was no sober little boat bobbing on the tide. This was hers. When she passed courtiers and staff she made a special effort to stand up straight, and threw her feet out in front of her in something that maybe, perhaps, seemed like a purposeful stride. Nobody stopped her. Nobody spoke to her.

  The palm of her hand itched.

  The walled garden was empty and she spent some time resting on a bench. Then she spent some time resting on the ground next to the bench so that she could lay her cheek on its cool smooth surface. She wanted to crawl inside it, to wrap herself in the marble like a blanket. She wished she were made of marble: a cold, still, painless statue, withstanding the rain and snow, feeling only the slow scratchy embrace of ivy. The ivy was green and thick and glossy. She felt green and thick, but not particularly glossy. She wanted to be out in the open air, away from the walls and hedges, where the breeze could blow away the thickness in her head. The glitter. Because the thickness and glitter were strangling her, she was choking on them. Guttering like one of Elban’s gas lamps, right before it went out.

  Elban. Elly was going to marry Elban. Fact. True.

  Later.

  She pulled herself up, brushed halfheartedly at the dirt on her dress, and resumed walking. Boots on the hard-packed path, one, two. From somewhere far above she watched them with great interest. It was marvelous, the way boots just kept moving. How did they do that? One scuffed brown boot into the dirt, then another. Gravel scattering beneath them. The hounds howled, but the sound soon faded. She heard a human voice. The snuffle of a horse.

  The boots stopped. Something was blocking them. Other boots, like hers but larger. She heard her name. It took a moment for her to connect the word with the stifled thing inside her. A hand touched her chin, brought her head up. Darid, his brow wrinkled with worry. Somebody said, “She okay?” and at first she wondered how he’d spoken without moving his lips.

  But it must have been somebody else speaking, because Darid answered. “No.” His fingers were as cool as the marble had been. “She’s burning up. Go to the House, tell them we need the magus.”

  Magus. Arkady. Arkady had poisoned Theron. Fact. True.

  Later.

  The tiny stifled part of her forced air from her lungs into her throat, into words. “No,” she said. “No magus.”

  “Judah, you’re sick,” Darid said.

  Elban burned her. To prove he could. That nobody would stop him. Nobody had stopped him.

  I’ll lock her away.

  Fact. True.

  Later.

  “Not sick,” she said. “Hurt. No magus. Magus hates me.”

  Darid made a noise. It sounded like the noises his horses made. “At least come inside. Let me do something for the fever
.” He took her arm. She screamed. He jerked back as if she were made of fire. She felt like she was. He said something else, but she couldn’t answer, the pain had finally engulfed her, she was falling. She hoped somebody caught her.

  He did.

  Fact. True.

  * * *

  He made her drink something bitter that tasted faintly of hay. Not long afterward the glitter started to recede. It felt like she was coming out of a hole. She found herself lying on the bench in the tack room. Her coat was gone and her bandaged arms lay carefully placed on her stomach.

  Horses got sick. Horses needed to be treated. A dog could be replaced in six months; horses were expensive, horses took a long time to mature and a long time to train. Darid had a substantial collection of herbs and mixtures and potions and salves. They were meant for horses but most of the staff had never seen a magus—staff was replaceable, too—so he knew how to use them on humans.

  Wherever Gavin was, he was in agony. She could feel his pain like a gauze veil as her own receded. She was surprised that he hadn’t felt her fever. But, wait: the itch in the palm of her hand wasn’t an itch. Now that the pain from the burns had ebbed, she could feel him scratching, incessantly. When Darid stepped away, she scratched back. Just once, deliberate and slow.

  After a moment, Gavin sent it back to her. The itching eased.

  By then, Darid was back. Holding the back of her hand, he gently pushed the sleeves of her dress up over Elly’s bandages. A few snips with a pair of brutally sharp shears and the bandages were gone. The burns were both covered with sickly gray-yellow ooze, the skin around them swollen and hot. Judah preferred their looks to the one Darid wore on his face. She remembered: on the second day after the Wilmerians’ arrival, Judah had found Darid working on one of their horses. They were shorter and sturdier than House horses, made for work and not war—but the poor mare Darid had been tending wouldn’t be doing any work anytime soon. Every rib stood out, and her legs were impossibly thin. Her mane and tail hung limp and tangled and there were oozing welts on her dirty cream-colored hide where a harness had been strapped too tightly and left too long. But her hind flanks were the worst, because the horse had been whipped, and viciously. Her dingy hide was stained with an ugly brown that could only be blood.

  Normally Darid carried a lightness with him, but there had been no lightness that night. His face as he’d cleaned the little mare’s wounds, as he’d shown Judah how to coax her to eat—it was the same face she saw now. She found herself afraid. Ashamed. She didn’t want him to look at her that way.

  After what seemed like an eternity, he did exactly that. “This was not an accident.”

  Mutely, she shook her head.

  “And even if I knew who did this to you, there’s nothing I could do about it.” He seemed to be telling himself, more than her. “If it was someone on staff, I could. But it wasn’t. Was it?”

  She shook her head again.

  His eyes were fixed on her arms, but for a second his pleasant stablemaster’s mask slipped and she saw the rage beneath it. Tightly bound, deeply controlled. For her. He was angry for her—not because he felt the pain she felt, or someone had judged him responsible, but at the simple fact of her suffering. She wrapped herself in that anger the way she’d wanted to wrap herself in marble, except the anger was warm and protective instead of cold and dead. It filled her with awe.

  Darid’s chest swelled and his nostrils flared as he took a long breath in and let it out again. “I can heal this. Get rid of the infection. That, I can do.” He still held her hand in his. She thought she felt his fingers tighten, ever so slightly. Then he let go.

  Chapter Six

  In retrospect, Nate probably should have given Derie more warning. He’d been too excited, almost drunk with it, and when he saw her at the plague shrine the news exploded out of him. “I was inside,” he said, his voice high and giddy. “I saw her. She’s alive, Derie. She’s real.”

  The old woman’s knuckles went white on her cane and for a moment Nate saw two Deries: the short round woman hunched in front of him, and the bonfire of Work that raged inside her. It knocked him backward as surely as if she’d put her two hands in the middle of his chest and pushed. He barely managed to keep his feet. Derie was so very powerful, and they’d been Working together since he was a child, but she’d never lost control like that before. It felt like falling off a cliff—balance gone, arms pinwheeling, brain too full of no no no to think rationally. Icy wind whistling around you, great emptiness waiting below.

  Nate had almost fallen off a cliff once, in the Barriers.

  So, after his next trip inside, he was more careful. Before meeting Derie he cut open the heel of his thumb, letting out just enough blood to draw her sigil on his shaving mirror. He didn’t know where she was living in Highfall—or where Charles was living either—but it didn’t matter. She would feel his Work, and know he had something to tell her.

  It worked. When they met again in the midnight quiet of the plague shrine, she was able to sit patiently—as patient as Derie ever was, anyway—while he told her the story: how he’d walked into the lab, smelled the poisonous herb Arkady was distilling, and known immediately what it was and how it would be used, if not on who; how, when the phaeton came for them that afternoon, Nate had brought along one of the precious few vials of medicine he’d carried with him over the Barriers, prepared by his mother and labeled in her hand; how, after Arkady took Elban’s younger son into the bedroom, he’d passed the vial to the girl herself, and how clever and troubled her eyes had been. He did not tell Derie he’d touched her. He didn’t tell her how that had felt.

  When the story was done, she stroked the cane between her knees. There was nothing special about it. It was just a plain wooden stick, worn smooth with use. “Quick thinking, bringing the antidote,” she said finally. “You want her trusting you. You want her confiding in you.” This last she said with no small amount of distaste. As if the act of confession was inherently weak.

  “Why do you think Elban wants the young lord dead?”

  “Who’s to say it was Elban?”

  “The Seneschal came to the manor a few days before,” Nate said. “He does Elban’s bidding, doesn’t he?”

  She brushed the topic away. He could see it didn’t interest her. “More likely he’s doing some courtier’s, this time. Poison isn’t Elban’s style.”

  “Wasn’t he the one who told Arkady to poison the children in the orphanage?”

  “That was expedience.” Her cane tapped the hard-packed dirt. “No, if Elban had been behind this, he would have made more of a show. Elban likes a show. Poison’s a courtier’s game.” She smiled wickedly. “Courtiers, and us. You saw her with the boy? How did they seem?”

  When Derie said the boy, she meant Elban’s heir. They’d always spoken of him that way, and although intellectually Nate knew how old he was, he’d still been surprised by the tall, broad-shouldered man he met inside, golden and handsome. At first glance, the younger son—bony and pale—seemed to have more of Elban in him; but the more Nate had looked at the older, the more he’d seen the hard lines of the father’s face under the glowing warmth on the surface. “I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “He was concerned about his brother. They were both uneasy.”

  Dissatisfaction came off her in waves. He didn’t need any particular skill to feel it. She spat into the dust. “Bah. Give me your hand, boy. I need to know.”

  He slipped his coat off, let it fall to the bench behind him and pushed up his sleeve. “Use my arm.” Derie was not always kind with her cuts. “I need my hands.”

  “Guess you do.” Derie pulled a small folding knife from her pocket. In the wavering light from the shrine torches, the metal of the blade barely shone at all. He saw a fat crust of blood on the heel of her thumb, just where he’d cut himself to signal her earlier. She reopened the wound before he could ask about it. Knife
still wet, she carved a line in the meat of Nate’s arm, then pressed the cuts together so she could draw their two sigils in the mixed blood. Derie was powerful and she’d been doing the Work for a long time. She was confident and formidably skilled. When she reached into him, he could feel the Work behind every cut she’d ever made, for good or ill; all of those people, through all of those years, and each one rummaging in Nate’s head like a hand in a pocket. He even felt the echo of his mother’s touch, faint among all those invisible groping hands.

  It was all a little horrible. But he’d learned to push the horror aside, and focus on the wonder of it. And wonderful it was. With Derie in his head he saw the girl as if she were standing in front of him again, that moment when he’d dropped the antidote into her lap—more clearly than the first time, even, because Derie pulled his eyes to parts of her he hadn’t had time to notice. Her muddy boots, her ill-fitting dress. Her dark eyes. Her hair, wild with running her fingers through it. Not at all the color of berries—what a spurious comparison that had been—but a dark cool red, almost black in its depths. Like the last embers of a cooling fire, like the darkest wine. Her cheekbones were broad, her chin round. He couldn’t see her ears but he imagined them small, like a forest creature’s.

  Derie was already pulling the eyes of his memory away from her to the boy. Elban’s heir. Who, he saw now, would not look at Judah, who barely looked at the woman he stood next to (delicately built but steely-eyed; except for the steel and the fine clothes she seemed like a nice girl, the sort Nate might once have asked to dance a creel around a bonfire without hope of much more, just to enjoy the sight of her). Elban’s heir was not merely worried, Nate saw now. He was being eaten alive. There were shadows beneath his eyes and he could not stop clenching his fists.