The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  “You’re a good boy,” she said to Darid. “You did well.”

  He felt himself blush. “What about—” he said, and couldn’t finish. He nodded toward the mother’s body.

  “She’s gone. You can put her back where you found her. She won’t mind now.” With that, she started back toward the courtyard. Darid stood where he was and watched until the white glow of her hair disappeared, feeling a confusing combination of joy and loss. Then he looked down at the body.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, although she wasn’t there to hear him. But it made him feel better as he dragged the body back into the kennel and kicked dirt over the place where she’d been, obscuring the puddle of blood.

  By morning the hounds had stripped most of the bones clean. In a few days, when they’d lost interest altogether, Darid and Jon carried what was left to the midden yard behind the kitchen. During the day Darid continued to endure Barr’s kicks and cruelty, and at night he endured Jon’s feeble—but increasingly insistent—attentions. He had one free hour a day, one hour that was his own; in the past, he’d used it to crawl off into a corner and sleep, but now he found himself wandering the grounds. Watching the orchardmen, the dairymen, the shepherds. Eventually he discovered the horses. They drew him back day after day. The head stableman let him get close to them. When, eventually, he let Darid touch them, Darid felt it again: that same joy he’d felt on the night of the baby. He didn’t know the word serenity, but he knew serenity itself. He found that he could reach for it when he needed it; he found that it never entirely left him.

  * * *

  Darid finally stopped speaking. Judah felt fevered and sick. Weak, somehow, all the strong and hard inside her dissolved by the story. The pasture looked different. Darid looked different. The House spreading out in the distance looked different. The Wall looked the same.

  “When word got around that Lady Clorin had adopted a little girl, I knew it was you. I always listened when people spoke of you, no matter what they said. When you came, that day we were weaning the colts, I was glad to see you. But I wasn’t surprised. Not that I ever expected this.” He gestured at her, at himself, at their proximity. Somewhere she heard a night bird chirping out its incessant, repetitive song: I am here, I am here. “I’ve never been the wander-and-wonder type. I have a job and I do the job and I’m good at the job. But everything about you makes me feel like—always, even that night, when you were just a tiny baby in a towel—like there’s something I’ve forgotten. Something as basic as my own name, something I should know and don’t. Like one of those dreams where you can’t find your own house, when you walk and walk and walk down the street and it’s not where it should be.” He shook his head. “I’m not making sense. None of it makes sense.”

  No. It didn’t make sense. “I suppose I should thank you.” Her voice sounded flat and lifeless.

  Puzzled, Darid said, “Why?”

  For finding someone to cut her free of her dying mother. For carrying that mother’s bones to the midden yard when they were picked clean. The two thoughts existed on top of each other, like layers of silk over the world. He had held her when she was a baby. He had seen her mother. He had seen her born.

  Instead, she stood up, a little unsteadily. Her legs didn’t seem entirely connected to her body. “I have to go.”

  “Should I not have told you?” The wondrous look was gone now. He looked sad. “I just wanted—It was amazing, don’t you see? That I was there, and the midwife—just at the right time—and the courtyard is never deserted, there’s always someone around—”

  “Yes,” she said, hearing the chill in her voice. “I’m a miracle, aren’t I?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. But being there that night was the best thing I’ve ever done. It was the best thing I imagine I’ll ever do. It led to you, being here. And so I know I can do good things. I know the good things I do make a difference. Maybe that’s just the world. But—it’s a better world than it could be. Isn’t it?”

  “I have to go,” she said again.

  Outside she stumbled up the path that led from the pasture to the House. By the time she reached the stables, she felt like she might be walking instead of stumbling. She had been cut free of her dying mother. The hounds ate her mother alive and the kennel boys threw her bones in the midden yard. The boy who threw them (the boy who had saved both of them, the boy who had no choice, the boy who sold his choices long ago) became the man who kissed Judah. Who chose to kiss Judah. Who would choose to, still.

  She’d had a mother.

  She found herself at the kennel. It was inevitable. There was nowhere else she could have gone but here, to stand on this patch of dust, a few feet from the gate. Was this the spot? Ten-year-old Darid, dragging her mother’s body (her mother’s body, she’d had a mother, her mother was dead, Elban had ordered her killed)—had he made it this far? If she dug down far enough, would she find traces of the blood he’d kicked dirt over?

  Her mother’s blood. Her mother had stood here, died here.

  She’d had a mother.

  Then, another thought: this is where she’d been born. All those years of staring off at the lights of the city, and it was here. There was no family waiting outside, no home to find. Nobody like her.

  In the kennel, the hounds bayed and howled at her presence, as they always did. Did they know? Did they smell her mother’s blood in her? (She’d had a mother, her mother was dead, she stood in the place where her mother had died as she was born.) She stepped up to the fence. There were gaps between the wide wooden slats. She hooked her fingers into one of them, and on the other side a hound rammed against it, slavering. Its single visible eye was enraged, as cold and yellow as Darid had described.

  How long do you live? she thought coldly at the beast. Did your mother eat my mother? Did you?

  She’d had a mother. This is where her mother died.

  Two people had climbed the Wall. Man and woman. Who was the man? Was it her father? Had both of her parents died here in this terrible place?

  The kennel door slammed open. It had to be the kennelmaster; nobody else would have the nerve to approach her so directly. People feared her.

  “I’d step back if I were you, girl. Anything you stick through that fence you’re likely to lose.” His voice was nasty. Of course it was. Nastiness would be a requirement for the job. She didn’t know why the Seneschal had ever thought Darid suited for it. Then, if possible, the kennelmaster’s voice got even nastier. “Now, if you want to pet a puppy, come on inside. We got lots of puppies for you to pet.”

  The hounds howled. Judah wasn’t afraid. She turned toward the man.

  He was older than Darid: solid and balding, an oozing pustule on his chin. Whatever he saw in her made him go pale. He stepped backward, slashing at the air frantically, almost compulsively. “Witch, slut witch,” he said, stumbling in his haste to get back inside. Behind him, she caught a glimpse of a thin, dirty body with a thin, dirty face, one cheek badly bruised. The current kennel boy: wary, fearful. Warmth surged in her for the boy, as brief and searing as Elban’s poker. She found that she forgave the boy (who darted away almost as soon as she saw him). She found that she loved the boy. It was a strange love but she was strange, she had been born in the dust of a kennel doorstep, cut from the body of her dying mother by a midwife who should not have been there to help.

  She realized: the first kindness she had ever known had been Darid.

  The fence shook again. She gripped the slat harder and felt the scar on her arm tug and pull.

  He will chain you like a dog.

  Maybe that’s just the world.

  From inside the kennel, she heard a thud and a muffled cry; then another thud, and the soft sound of a child weeping.

  Chapter Nine

  There were more guards on the streets of Highfall than Nate had ever seen before. Bindy said they were just City Gu
ards, not the Lord’s Guard; the Lord’s Guard, she said, would have marched with the army. Nate asked what the difference was. “The City Guards have a white thing on their uniform. The Lord’s Guard has red,” she said, so he knew that what she called the City Guard was what he thought of as the House Guard. “None of them are what you’d want to meet on a dark street, but the Lord’s Guard is the worst.”

  “Why?”

  “City Guards take people all the time. Beat them up a bit, throw them in the cells for a while, then let them go. The Lord’s Guard hardly ever takes people, but when they do, nobody ever sees them again. It’s bad luck to talk about them,” she said with an air of finality. “Where am I off to today?”

  Nate sent her to Lady Maryle’s with a health tonic and his compliments—exactly the sort of thing Arkady had encouraged him to do, before the old man died. It was one of the few situations when Nate had come to agree with Arkady; the deliveries kept him on the courtiers’ minds, and the bit of opium syrup Nate slipped into his tonics ensured that at least some of them would seek him out again. They paid him in coins, which were nice to have, and—unknowingly—in gossip, which he filed away carefully in his memory. Sometimes he thought he was stepping into Arkady’s shoes in more ways than one. Sometimes it worried him.

  But the tonic for Lady Maryle was less about money and more about finding out if Charles was still at her manor, glomming onto her youngest daughter and taking those vile drops. He sent Bindy over once a week or so to check. Lady Maryle, whose fortune was waning, was flattered by the attention, and Bindy—as always—managed to come home with exactly the information Nate needed. In her new clothes, with her hair neatly braided and a little coaching from Nate to smooth out the Marketside edges in her speech, she’d become a bit of a pet to some of the courtiers. More of a pet than she liked, sometimes, and he quickly learned to tell from her bearing which courtiers he should keep her away from.

  The tonic for Lady Maryle had used the last of his opium syrup, so he was in the lab preparing more when someone pounded on the front door. It was the House messenger. His face was grim. “Nathaniel Magus,” he said. “You’re needed. The phaeton is coming.”

  And come it did, bare seconds after Nate had managed to grab his coat and satchel. The usual driver was at the reins, but his forehead was damp with sweat and he, too, looked unhappy. “What’s happened?” Nate said, climbing in.

  “Lord Gavin is unconscious,” the driver said, and then they were rattling over the cobbles and it was too loud to speak.

  Inside, the Seneschal awaited him in the young people’s parlor. Lord Theron stood by the window, and Lady Eleanor—pale and beautiful, wearing an unreadable mask of cordiality, as always—stood with him. Both bedroom doors were closed and a guard stood by each. Their badges were white. City guards, then. He had never seen guards in the parlor before.

  Elban and the Seneschal had kept the bond a secret, Derie had told him, so he wasn’t supposed to know—but if the boy was unconscious, so was the girl. He wanted to see her, but knew he couldn’t ask, so he said, “Where is he?” If a note of impatience colored his voice, he assumed the Seneschal would ascribe it to the emergency, and nothing else.

  “In the bedroom.” The Seneschal opened the door himself. Nate followed him inside, where the young lord lay still and pale on the bed.

  “What happened?” he said as he peeled back the boy’s eyelids.

  “A training accident. His head hit a rock,” the Seneschal said.

  Nate didn’t care. He cared about the girl. He choked back his impatience and felt for Elban’s son’s pulse, checked his reflexes, listened to his breathing. He was not examining the boy; he was examining her, through the boy. No broken ribs. A nasty contusion on the back of the head. He noticed a bizarre scar on the inside of each of the boy’s arms: delicate, almost graceful curlicues, perfectly matched mirror images of each other in smooth raised flesh. They looked like very old burns, on their way to vanishing. Probably some ridiculous House fashion. He disliked touching the boy. Elban’s flesh, Elban’s blood. In the caravans, Nate would have done a quick Work to make sure the boy’s mind was intact, but he was revolted at the very idea. There was no way the boy was anything other than corrupt inside.

  Finally, he sat back. “He’s lucky. His skull isn’t broken. If he’d hit it a few inches lower, his neck would be. If he doesn’t awaken within the day, I’ll give him a stimulant, but I don’t think it’ll be a problem.”

  The Seneschal nodded, but didn’t move. “I hear you’re doing well in the city. The courtiers speak highly of you.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “We need to speak frankly,” the Seneschal said.

  If Elban’s son was fine, the girl would be. The Seneschal must know that, after all these years, so this was something else. Internally, Nate was jumping with nerves. Calmly, he snapped his satchel closed. “About what?”

  If Nate thought himself cool, the Seneschal was a block of ice. “The House Magus is an honored and illustrious position. In Elban’s father’s day, the holder of that title spent his entire life inside the Wall. Arkady was the first to live in the city.”

  “Why the change?”

  “By the time he was called to the post, he had a wife and child. Lord Elban found them annoying.”

  Nate felt a bit queasy. “Arkady never mentioned a family.”

  “They died,” the Seneschal said dismissively. “My point is this: it is time for me to officially offer you the position of House Magus, and for you to officially accept it. You have served us well, but we would not usually have appointed someone so young and of such unknown origins to the post.”

  “Lord Tensevery—”

  “Has never heard of you.”

  Nate’s chest seized up. The Seneschal continued. “You chose your cover story well. It took me weeks to get word to him in Duviel, and weeks more to get an answer. I assume you got your hands on one of the directories of courtiers, and picked the most remote one.” He waved a hand. “Oh, I don’t care. You’re a better magus than Arkady was. And our system is too tightly controlled, sometimes. I’m glad to have a fresh perspective.”

  Nate swallowed hard. He couldn’t speak. All he could do was nod.

  “If you accept the position, you may continue to live in the manor on Limley Square, which is owned by the House. You will have reasonable lines of credit at the better merchants in town; other funds are available to you on request. If you desire rooms in the House, you will be given them. Although I would encourage you not to abuse that particular privilege.”

  Nate recovered his voice. “As Arkady did, you mean.”

  “Yes,” the Seneschal said bluntly. “The post is a prestigious one. It is also complicated, and involves a great deal of discretion and unquestioning obedience. There will be times when you will be told to do things you do not like. You must do them anyway. To do otherwise would be treason, and the penalties for treason are severe.”

  “Death?”

  “If you’re lucky. Understand, magus: I am offering you the post, but I am also offering you a chance to leave. Say the word and the phaeton will take you back to Limley Square. You may pack your things and leave the manor. But you will never come back inside the Wall, or speak of anything that happened here.”

  “I accept the position,” Nate said. Four words, so simple; and yet, they were the most important words he’d ever spoken. It was odd that such a momentous occasion took place in a dingy room with unswept corners, the only witness an unconscious boy full of Elban’s foul, poisonous blood.

  “Are you sure? It is a lifetime appointment, one way or another. If you do not leave now, I will have to tell you things that are...irrevocable. Once you hear them, you will belong to the House. You will not leave Highfall. You will not marry. If you have children, you will neither acknowledge them nor pay for their rearing. When Lord Elban returns,
he might revoke the edict allowing you to live outside. He might also disapprove of my choice, and have you put to death. Do you understand?”

  Nate nodded.

  “Do you still accept the position?” The Seneschal’s voice was always formal, but now it was somehow more so.

  “I do,” Nate said, just as solemnly.

  The corner of the Seneschal’s mouth curled with something like relief. Nate realized this was the answer the man had hoped for. “Good. I’m glad to have someone with experience of the world beyond Highfall. Of course, I’m the only one who knows you’ve deceived us. Should anyone else find out, things will go badly for you.”

  A threat. No; a leash. But if Nate accomplished what he’d come here to do, and unbound the power beneath the House, things would go badly for Elban and anyone associated with him. So the Seneschal’s words didn’t matter. “I understand.”

  The Seneschal nodded. “Then we must speak even more frankly,” he said, “but not here.”

  Outside, Lady Eleanor waited expectantly. The Seneschal said, “Lord Gavin will be fine. Nathaniel Magus believes he will awaken within the day. I have offered him the position of House Magus, and he has accepted. Now, he and I have some business to attend to.”

  Lady Eleanor’s mouth fell open and her face came alive with indignation and anger. “Seneschal—” she said, and Nate was glad that fierce, implacable tone wasn’t addressed to him.

  The Seneschal barely appeared to notice. In fact, he cut her off. “Later, Lady Eleanor. We will be back shortly.”

  He bowed politely—Nate following his lead—and then walked out. Nate followed him there, too. As the door closed behind them, he heard a strangled female cry of indignation.

  “She is emotional,” the Seneschal said. “It has been a difficult day.”