Then the blood was dry, and they were gone. Nate was alone in the garden. In the manor. He was alone.
* * *
Derie came so quickly that at first Nate thought the slow, steady drag of her cane on the Porterfield cobbles was just an afterimage of the Work. Then she rapped on the back gate. He let her in, leaving the gate unbolted for Charles. He’d been sitting in Arkady’s chair in the parlor (nobody’s chair, now), feeling increasingly clammy despite the roaring fire, and with some reluctance asked her if she wanted to go upstairs.
“Not these old bones,” she said. “I can feel he’s dead from here.”
She probably could, too, for all that Arkady had never seemed to have the dimmest glimmer of power about him. The Work gave you a feel for life, for the ebb and flow of blood and tides. They had to wait a long time for Charles. The log in the fire had almost burned down and Nate had started to worry that his old friend had left Highfall, or been taken by the guards, when there came a low knock at the back door. Nate let him in and nearly gasped. Charles had been well-muscled when they’d arrived in Highfall, even after the long trip across the Barriers. Now he was skeletally thin. His skin was patchy, his eyes bloodshot and deep-ringed with purple. The hair that Nate had last seen perfectly combed into golden curls hung ratty and limp. His dark roots weren’t showing, so at least he’d managed to keep up with the bleach, but the luxurious courtier’s clothes they’d worked so hard to steal were rumpled and soiled, the boots scuffed.
“You look awful,” Nate said. “Are you all right?”
“Fine. Let’s get this over with.” His words sounded dull around the edges. His Highfall accent slipped and slid; behind it, Nate could hear the broad vowels of the Slonimi.
In the parlor, Derie, sitting by the fire with her hands propped on top of her cane, stared at Charles with hard, suspicious eyes. “Charles Whelan, is your head clear?”
“Yes.” Charles’s voice was curt. Without another word, he began to climb the stairs.
Nate followed. They wrapped Arkady’s body in the soiled sheets and blankets from his bed and used three of the old man’s plainest belts to bind it. As they carried him downstairs, Nate told himself that it was a bundle of wood they carried, that the thin bones of Arkady’s ankles weren’t bones at all, but twigs in cloth. Derie had them bring down the dirty featherbed next, so she could remake it. Then they dragged Arkady out into the garden, where Charles had brought a wheelbarrow.
“Fold him,” Charles said. But Arkady was beginning to stiffen and bending him to fit in the barrow took much massaging and coaxing of the dead muscles. When he was finally inside, and Charles moved to pick up the barrow handles, Nate stopped him.
“I’ll do it. I’m dressed more like a laborer than you are.” He paused, and then added, “If we get stopped, you should run. I hear things about the guards.”
“We both look disreputable enough,” Charles said. “And the guards won’t stop us if we keep to the alleys.”
They did just that, pushing Arkady all the way through Porterfield and Marketside to Brakeside. The manors gave way to row houses and attaches; the row houses and attaches gave way to warehouses, with taverns and rooming houses and eel shops squeezed between them. Their first night in Highfall, before they’d separated, Nate, Charles and Derie had stayed in just such a rooming house, in a clammy basement common room, sleeping draped over their packs to keep away thieves. It was almost midnight now but barges were still unloading on the Brake by lantern light, the shouts and directions of the stevedores drifting disembodied through the darkness. Nate and Charles carried their dead cargo long past the barges to a disused landing near the charred rubble of a burned-out warehouse. The embankment wall had crumbled low there. They weighed Arkady down with rocks and slipped him into the water that lapped gently at the broken stone; watched, together, as the pale color of the once-rich bedding they’d used as a shroud disappeared.
Nate looked at ragged, bony Charles, staring down after the corpse, and was filled with a sudden certainty that his friend would try to follow it. He found the thought alarming. The Work forged connections between its users—everyone you touched, everyone they touched—and the connection between Nate and Charles was old and clear and strong. But before Nate could speak, Charles pivoted away from the water on one scuffed heel and said, “Let’s go.”
They didn’t speak on their way back to the manor, where they found that Derie had finished sewing the new featherbed. The parlor reeked of burned feathers; she had ripped open a pillow to replace the fetid ones she’d destroyed. “Going to report this to the Seneschal? What are you going to say happened?” she said to Nate.
“In the morning,” Nate said.
“What do these people do for their dead?”
“Not a lot. Crematories outside of the city, if you can afford them. Lime pits if you can’t.”
“Some of the courtiers keep private crypts in the provinces,” Charles said.
“I’ll say I sent him to family,” Nate said. “I’ll say they came and got him.”
“He has family?” Derie said.
“A brother.” This was true. It was also true that Arkady had told Nate the two hadn’t spoken in decades.
“Will there be trouble about the manor? Worth a lot, in this neighborhood.”
“I have no idea.”
Derie nodded. “I’ll hire a deadcoach, and livery for you, Charles. You’ll come for him tomorrow. Put on a show.” Too late, it occurred to Nate that it would have been both easier and safer to actually send Arkady out in the hired deadcoach. He felt a bubble of frustration but before he could say anything, Derie said, “Better he’s in the Brake, Nathaniel. A real deadcoach would keep records, and the Brake has more dead bodies than fish in it. Nobody’ll think twice if he washes up.”
Nate nodded. He’d grown used to the way Derie pulled thoughts out of his brain, but he still didn’t like it.
“Give me the money. I’ll take care of the deadcoach myself,” Charles sounded a little too eager.
“I think not,” Derie said and left.
Charles called her a few choice names. She was no longer there to hear, but Nate still flinched; Charles saw, and laughed bitterly. “We’re not children anymore, Nate, for all she treats us like we are. Did the old man have a wine cellar?”
He did. Vertus had taken the best bottles, but there were still several bottles of ordinary wine and one bottle of brandy. Charles chose the wine. They drank it in the parlor. Charles raised a glass.
“To Nathaniel Magus,” he said. “The master of the manor.”
His voice was faintly mocking. Nate ignored it. “Where have you been living?”
“Around.”
“You could stay here now, you know. There’s a guest bedroom upstairs. Three of them.”
“I’d be a terrible servingman.”
Nate was appalled. “You wouldn’t have to serve.”
“Oh, but we all serve.” The mockery was out in the open now. It twisted Charles’s mouth; it stained the air. “What purpose do we have, save slavish devotion to unbinding old Mad Martin’s evil work?”
“None,” Nate said.
Silence fell. Charles drank freely and blinked at the fire; Nate sipped his first glass and watched as Charles’s spine sank lower and lower into the chair. It was the same chair he’d occupied that first night, as the foppish Lord Bothel. He’d chosen the alias because it sounded like bother, as they sat around a campfire on a hill overlooking the city. They’d seen all of Highfall stretched below, that night: the white stone of the Wall slicing the city as surely as the Brake did, the palace hunkered beyond.
As if he could read Nate’s thoughts as well as Derie did, Charles said, “What’s it like inside?”
Nate chose his words carefully. “Elaborate. Why have a plain, functional doorknob when you can cover it in gilt filigree? But also run-down,
in places courtiers don’t go.”
“Sounds fitting.”
“Is that where you’ve been? With the courtiers?”
“I was supposed to maintain my identity, remember? In case we needed it again.” Charles gestured wryly to himself. “I don’t think Derie likes the way I did it, though.”
“What way was that?”
Charles reached into his pocket and pulled out a battered metal vial. He tossed it to Nate. The surface was badly scratched and there was a dent in one side, as if it had been stepped on. Nate opened it carefully and found a thin rod attached to the inside of the cap, just big enough to extract one drop of the fluid inside. It was clear, but smelled odd, acrid and medicinal. Slippery; almost familiar. He thought he could figure out what was in it, given enough time, but he still asked, “What is it?”
“I have no idea,” Charles said, “but it feels amazing. Like someone wrapping half your brain in the softest blanket imaginable. I get it from Lady Maryle’s youngest, plainest daughter, Gainell. We drop together and fuck like cats, it’s delightful.”
Lady Maryle was a minor courtier; so minor, in fact, that Arkady had put her treatment off to a lesser magus. Her manor was near, but not technically in, Fountain Hill. Nate couldn’t remember the family industry, but it had something to do with manufacturing. “She buys drops for you, looking the way you do?”
Charles smiled a slow, sleepy smile and said, in Lord Bothel’s bored, condescending drawl, “These days, all the best courtiers are hopeless addicts, Nathaniel.” Then, in his own voice, he added, “Not that Gainell’s family are the best courtiers. I picked the wrong family. They’re barely courtiers at all. Anyway, when I met her, I was prettier. I don’t think she’s noticed the change. She drops more than I do, which is saying something.”
Nate recapped the vial and tossed it back to Charles. “I think you should stop taking them.”
“I think you’re right, but I like them too much.” Charles twisted the vial in his fingers. The firelight played on the dull surface. “You’ve seen her. The girl.”
Not Gainell. “Yes.”
“And do her feet float half an inch above the ground? Does a faint aura of unearthly light surround her wherever she goes?”
Nate felt oddly hurt. “Of course not. She’s a person. Like you and me.”
Charles shook his head. “No. Not like you and me.” Then he seemed to reconsider. “Although all three of us had our lives mapped out long before we were born, so there’s that. I hear she’s strange.”
“So would you be, in her circumstances.”
“So I am. So are you, for that matter. At least in Highfall, we are.” Still fingering the vial, Charles said, “It’s funny, you know. Gainell’s mother can’t pay her own daughter’s way inside, let alone mine, but even if she could—I don’t think I’d want to see the girl. I thought I would, after everything. But I think I’m afraid to.” He opened the vial and shook a drop from the thin rod onto his tongue. The motion had such ease, such practice, that he might as well have been taking a sip of wine. “To be honest, I don’t even like being in the same city as her.”
Nate wondered how long the drops took to kick in. “What are you afraid of? She’s a girl.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. That she’s a girl. An ordinary girl. Ten fingers, ten toes. Feet on the ground. No faint aura of unearthly light.” His eyes began to drift, as if he were having trouble focusing them. “I’m afraid that she’ll be nothing. That we’ll all be nothing. That it will be a waste.” Charles saw Nate’s face, then, and laughed. It was a high-pitched, giddy laugh. Lord Bothel’s laugh. “Oh, come on. It must have occurred to you, too.”
Hot with indignation, Nate said, “How can you say that? How can you even think it?”
“You said it yourself.” Charles’s words were slurred and thick. “She’s a girl.”
“She’s not just a girl,” Nate said. “She’s everything.”
But Charles’s head was sagging. His eyelids drooped and his mouth hung as slack as Arkady’s had. As Nate watched, breathing deeply to quell the anger inside himself, a thin rivulet of drool dropped from Charles’s lower lip. If his friend hadn’t blinked, just then—slowly, with great effort—Nate would have thought he was dead.
Chapter Seven
A shattered cup could be glued back together, but it would never hold liquid again; its shape might remain but its essence was gone, its purpose annihilated. That was how the four of them felt to Judah now: broken into shards. They hardly talked. There was nothing to say. Sometimes she saw Gavin watching Theron with shielded eyes and guessed that he was thinking about killing his brother—his odd, half-present brother, who seemed so much less than he used to be. But she knew, and Gavin knew, that killing Theron would not fix what was broken. It would not rescue any of them; it would merely lock them in a different kind of prison. Later, she’d see how gentle Gavin could be with Theron, helping him shave or cutting his food for him, and she knew that the murder was idle daydreaming. The gentleness was real.
It didn’t matter. Nothing changed.
Every afternoon, the gates creaked open to let in a long train of supply carts and carriages and entertainers for the betrothal ball: acrobats and jugglers and musicians, arriving sometimes on foot and sometimes in gaudy wagons with their names and talents painted on the side. Some were from Highfall, some from elsewhere, and they had skin and hair and eyes in every color Judah could imagine. It wasn’t Staff Day but by special dispensation, two dozen new children were brought in to serve as pages. They wandered the halls, wide-eyed and afraid; usually lost, often weeping, and trying to hide both. A person couldn’t pass the kitchen or the laundry or the tailor’s suite without hearing one of them being berated.
The three dresses Elly would wear for the actual wedding, on the summer solstice, were still in pieces in the tailoring suite. Her betrothal gown, though, already hung on Elly’s bedroom wall, the scarlet and gold wrapped in fine gauze to keep off the dust. Elly had endured the fittings stoically. She’d seemed much more interested in the green gown being made for Judah, and the ferocity she devoted to that one was almost frightening. Elly had insisted for months that this once, at least, Judah would have her own dress, made just for her. Since Judah had been burned, Elly had put all of her energy into making sure that dress was perfect, with the result that the gown hanging in Judah’s little alcove actually fit her. It was even flattering, and—Judah grudgingly admitted—quite beautiful, with an embroidered silver vine crawling up from the hem and down from the neckline. The dress had long sleeves to hide her burns, which were crusted but healing (thanks, in large part, to Darid’s skill in tending them). Elly even had something planned for Judah’s hair. She refused to say what it was, but hinting about it was the only thing that made Elly smile.
Judah didn’t see why her appearance mattered, but would not deny Elly any pleasure she could find these days. Everything was suspended: there was no studying, no training. Only the oiling of the rushes happened on schedule, and that probably would have been put off too had Elly not been grimly determined that it should happen. Too often an assertive tap at the door brought a summons from the Seneschal, ordering Elly and Gavin to meet with some important courtier—people familiar to Gavin, though Elly knew them only by name. Inevitably they came back drained, as if smiling their way through the formalities of introduction had taken all they had. And why wouldn’t it? Judah had to assume that, at this point, all the courtiers knew Gavin and Elly’s betrothal would never happen. At the ball, Elban would make the announcement: Amie of Porterfield would step into Elly’s place, and everyone would pretend to be surprised—or not—but in the meantime, the fiction had to be maintained. The courtiers were probably enjoying it immensely.
In private, Elly ignored Gavin. Gavin knew better than to try to mend the breach. He spent hours on the terrace, attacking the target Theron had set up before the hunt.
He shot arrows. He threw knives. From the way his heart beat, Judah guessed that he was imagining them landing in vital parts of his father’s body. Sometimes Judah watched, sometimes she didn’t. She tried to spend time away from the House, in the stables or the pastures or even the orchard. Every time she saw a guard wearing Elban’s scarlet badge, she wondered if she were looking at the guard who’d been assigned to murder her, or Elly or Theron.
Theron, as it turned out, was the only one of the four of them who remained untroubled. He had reclaimed the music box he’d fixed for Elly, and he spent hours sitting in Gavin’s room listening to the uncomfortable little tune. If he was asked to get up or move or eat or wash, he did so, occasionally with help, but a part of him seemed never to have woken up. When he was spoken to, he answered, and when she could think of enough questions to ask in a row it was almost like talking to the old Theron. He still gave off a faint sense that he was waiting for you to finish talking instead of actually listening, but where the old Theron’s waiting had been colored with impatience, in the new Theron there was just...nothing. It was as if he were waiting for a clock to finish chiming. As soon as she ran out of questions, he would go back to the music box. Once, when Judah brought him coffee, she found that he’d opened the side of the box, and felt a thrill of hope. But he watched the gears spinning inside with the same vague interest he applied to the shadows moving across the wall, or the coffee she brought him.
She hated Gavin’s hurt; she hated Elly’s self-isolation. But it was Theron who filled Judah with hopelessness. Sometimes she thought she would welcome the walled tower, when it came, if it meant she didn’t have to see those distant eyes anymore, and know they were her fault.
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