The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  “Then go somewhere else. I swear, whatever she saw in you, it eludes me.” Firo shook his head. When he spoke again, his words came slowly and with precise enunciation, as if he really did think the stableman was stupid. “Here is the situation. Lady Eleanor wants you rescued, so rescued you will be. You have no choice in the matter. After you’re outside the Wall, I don’t care what happens to you. But I would not advise getting caught.”

  Showing a spark of nerve, the stableman said, “If I am, they’ll find out who helped me.”

  “They will,” Firo said. “But it’ll take time. I can make that time very unpleasant for you. And for your mother and sisters, too, I suppose.” He frowned at the stableman with genuine confusion. “Is there anyone else I should be threatening to convince you to let us save your life? A beloved cousin, perhaps?”

  The stableman’s muddy blue eyes went to Nate, who gave him nothing. Then, slowly, he began to put the cuirass on.

  * * *

  In cuirass, helmet and greaves, the stableman made a reasonably believable guard, but it soon became clear that he was utterly lost in the House. Fortunately, Nate was able to find the courtyard where the phaeton waited, even if he made a few mistakes on the way; even more fortunately, nobody they passed seemed to notice that both he and the guard accompanying him were out of place and lost. Before he climbed into the two-person carriage, Nate muttered, “Stand on the side rail,” to the stableman, so he’d know what to do. Nate didn’t usually have a guard, but it wasn’t unheard of, and the phaeton driver glanced at the helmeted stableman pulling himself up onto the rail without much interest. Then his eyes widened. Despite his instinctive dislike of the man responsible for Judah’s situation, Nate felt a surge of panic. If they were caught, it wouldn’t be good for him, either.

  “Onward,” he barked at the driver. “Hurry.”

  The driver looked from Nate to the stableman and back. Then, eyes still wide, he said, “Sir,” a new note in his voice—was it respect?—and cracked the reins.

  It took scarcely ten minutes to travel back to the manor. As befitted a guard, the stableman hopped down first. He accompanied Nate up the front walk. “Come in, I guess,” Nate said. This was not his plan and nobody had told him what happened next. Inside, he called, “Hello?” and was relieved when Bindy didn’t answer. She’d gone out on an errand that morning and must not be back yet. He went to his lab and began gathering supplies: surgical thread for stitching tattered skin; the opium syrup he’d been preparing for numbing away agony; a few other, less potent things to ease pain and encourage healing. When he came back into the kitchen, the stableman had peeled off the armor. He was holding it awkwardly, and didn’t seem to know what to do with it.

  “Just put it on the table,” Nate said. He would find Charles later, and see if the armor could be sold. “What you’re wearing will work in most of the city.”

  The stableman placed the armor in a neat pile, clearly used to keeping things tidy. “Is Judah really all right?”

  “She will be. Eventually.” He considered asking the man outright if Judah could be pregnant, but decided it was a stupid question. Of course she could be; the question was whether or not she was. “There’s a gate in the garden. You can leave that way.”

  “She just collapsed.” The stableman didn’t move. “I’ve never been so—What will they do to her?”

  “She’ll be caned.” Nate found callous gratification in the way the massive man’s giant body crumpled into itself. Let him be hurt. Judah would be.

  But then the stableman said, “People die from caning,” and the pain in his voice was so bare that Nate’s pleasure evaporated. His fists hurt, he realized. He’d been clenching them ever since he left the courtier’s room. This man, this stupid man, who’d meddled with things so far above him, who’d risked everything Nate had ever held important—and for what? For a few moments spent rutting in the stable.

  But that was unfair, and Nate knew it. It was unfair because she was guilty, too, and because this man had run with her to the House when she collapsed, knowing that it meant his death. He forced his fists to relax. “She won’t die. The Seneschal doesn’t want her dead, and neither do I.”

  A spark of hope lit the stableman’s face. “Can you keep her alive?”

  “I can. She’ll be all right in the end.” And she would be, if Nate had to burn out his own mind as fuel to make it so. “Where will you go?”

  The stableman shook his head, as lost as he had been inside the House. “I haven’t been outside since I was ten years old. Brakeside, I guess. Find a barge to take me out of the city.” He looked at Nate. “Can I give you a letter for my sister?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “No. I guess not.” He sighed. “I’m so stupid to have got us in this mess.”

  With an attempt at levity, Nate said, “You’re not the first man brought low by a beautiful woman.”

  The stableman shook his head fondly. “Beautiful, she’s not. But she is...” His voice trailed off.

  “Yes,” Nate said. “She is that.”

  * * *

  When Nate emerged back into Limley Square, satchel over his shoulder, the phaeton driver was waiting. He greeted Nate with a bow so low that his forehead nearly touched his knees. “What’s that for?” Nate said, surprised, but the driver didn’t answer.

  Back in the House, he was taken to the parlor, where the Seneschal waited with the Tiernan and the younger boy. The Tiernan didn’t look at Nate and so he avoided looking at her. “They’re stirring,” the Seneschal said. “Do you have what you need?”

  Nate nodded. “I still advise against this.”

  “Will it kill her?” the Seneschal asked seriously.

  The Tiernan made a strangled noise.

  “You’re piling two serious injuries on top of each other,” Nate said.

  The Seneschal dismissed that. “The caning won’t be that serious. It will be unpleasant and humiliating, and it will leave her with a few scars and a renewed sense of obedience.”

  “Ordinarily, maybe. But with the head injury—”

  “Perhaps you didn’t understand me earlier.” The Seneschal’s gaze was as hard and cold as the stone floor they stood upon. “If she dies, Lord Gavin dies.”

  “Then don’t cane her. Let her heal.”

  “For how long?”

  On the sofa, the Tiernan stared up at Nate as if he were the hero in a campfire story, desperate and fragile with hope. “A few weeks,” he said.

  The Seneschal shook his head. “Lord Elban might return within a few weeks. So she will be caned now, with whatever mercy she can have, and she will not die. The first is my responsibility, Nathaniel Magus. The second is yours. Now, you and I must tend to Lord Gavin.”

  Elban’s son was barely conscious. With a clever knot the Seneschal knew, Nate and the Seneschal looped the ropes loosely around the bedposts and then his wrists and ankles, leaving one end long. Then, one on either side of the bed, they each took up the two long ends nearest them and pulled all the knots tight at once. The moment the ropes touched his skin, the boy burst to life, and fought savagely, spitting curses as coarse as Nate had heard in any Barrier tavern. But the knots were very clever indeed, and the young lord’s struggles only tightened them. When he finally gave up, and lay panting and heaving with rage, the Seneschal said, “She risked your life, Lord Gavin. I am sorry for the pain you must suffer, but it’s on her shoulders.” He turned to Nate. “Gag him before it begins.”

  In the other room, Judah was awake, but only just. Gavin’s struggles had agitated her and the guards had to pin her so that Nate could examine her again. Then, sick to his stomach, he stood back and let the guards hoist her to standing, pained to see the limp way she dangled between them. They tied one of each of her arms to the tall bedposts of the Tiernan’s bed, holding her upright. “She doesn’t even know wh
at’s happening,” he said angrily.

  “She will soon enough,” the Seneschal said.

  Another guard entered with the cane itself, dripping with moisture—it had been soaked, to keep it from splintering. The Tiernan followed him. Her eyes were red but she wasn’t crying. “I’m staying,” she said.

  “I would rather you didn’t, Lady Eleanor,” the Seneschal said, as if discouraging her from attending a particularly dull party.

  Lady Eleanor’s chin went up. “You have no say in it. If Gavin won’t go through this alone, neither will Jude. I’ll be here, and I’ll be where she can see me.”

  She and the Seneschal locked eyes, a contest of wills so fierce that Nate could almost feel it, for all that there was no Work involved: the solid gray man on one side, the fair willowy girl on the other. But the fair willowy girl’s feet were planted, her mouth a thin line. The Seneschal would order the guards to remove her; they would handle her as easily as they’d handled Judah. The memory twisted his gut, made the sick pang already lurking there worse, and for a moment he thought he might throw up.

  But the Seneschal didn’t order her moved. He merely nodded. “As you like.”

  “Stay away from her lower back,” Nate said to the guard holding the cane. “If you break her spine or rupture her kidneys, she’ll die, and there’ll be nothing I can do.” The guard nodded. His bluish eyes kept going to Judah, hanging limply between the bedposts.

  In the other bedroom, the young lord lay bound facedown on his bed. When he heard the door open, he twisted to see who’d entered the room; his bonds were tight and he couldn’t turn very far, but when he saw Nate, he cursed him, called him things that would get all his teeth knocked out in the caravans. Nate didn’t react. He stripped the boy to the waist, as Judah would be in the other room. The well-muscled arms and shoulders already bore a few scars, but not from caning. Training scars, probably. And the weird curlicues. Which Nate suddenly recognized: a fireplace poker, like the one the Seneschal had picked up in Elban’s study.

  When the highborn finally quit cursing him long enough for Nate to get a word in, he said—laying out what he’d need, the threaded needles and salve and opium syrup—“You’ll be able to hear her scream. Do you want me to stop your ears?” He spoke with no great sympathy. Elban’s son, he thought, staring at the boy’s skin, touched with gold from hours training in the sun. Elban’s blood. His legacy.

  The boy made a frustrated, inarticulate sound. “She won’t scream.” His torso rose and fell, rose and fell. He was breathing quickly, his arms and legs flexing against the ropes that held them, testing their strength. A high thin tremor of panic and fear colored his voice. “They trained us not to scream.”

  Nate would have liked to hear more about that. “I have a salve that will numb the pain. Yours and hers.”

  Through clenched teeth, the young lord said, “Do you have one that’ll make it worse?”

  “Why?”

  “Because the more she screams, the faster it will be over.”

  Nate shook his head. “There’s no need to be selfless.”

  “I’m not.” His lips curled like an angry animal’s. “I am being absolutely fucking selfish. Make it worse.”

  Nate sometimes used lemon juice in poultices and he had a bottle in his satchel. He soaked a cloth with it. The smell was as pleasant and normal as a summer’s day and as the room filled with it, strange laughter began to bubble up from the young man on the bed. Also in Nate’s satchel was a padded leather strap; he used it to gag the boy, fitting it between his teeth and over his tongue. It would keep him from breaking the former or biting through the latter, but it didn’t stop the thin sound of his laughter. A few layers of bandage bound over it did, mostly.

  He knew how the bond worked, probably better than anyone else in Highfall except Derie. Even so, he was shocked when the first wound appeared out of nowhere on the smooth sun-kissed skin, a heavy violet streak like a swipe from a paintbrush. That one didn’t break the skin but the second one did. As each bloody welt appeared, the skin splitting apart like smiling mouths where no mouths should be, Nate pressed the lemon-soaked rag against them. He was impressed that his hands did not shake. The ropes that held Elban’s son to the bed were soon as bloody as the rag. The muffled screams that escaped the gag were harrowing.

  Judah’s, from the other room, were worse.

  * * *

  By the time Nate made his way back across the parlor to Judah, she lay as if lifeless across the Tiernan’s bed. She wasn’t lifeless; she’d passed out. Nate had seen to that. The boy in the other room was in the same condition. She had bled more, though. Someone had thrown a towel across her to absorb the blood.

  Lady Eleanor sat next to the bed, her face greenish but her eyes dry. “I told them to leave her here, on my bed,” she said. “She’s actually been sleeping in Theron’s room since the betrothal, but—”

  The Seneschal, standing over the unconscious girl, said, “Have you tended Lord Gavin?”

  Nate peeled the towel away. It was ruined, sodden with blood. “He’s fine,” he said. Seeing her blood spilled like this gave him a pang. The only consolation was that none of the idiots in this city were smart enough to know what they were wasting. He looked for somewhere to put the towel.

  Two pale white hands took it from him. He looked up at Lady Eleanor. “Leave it by the door. I’ll take care of it,” he said.

  She nodded. On her way into the parlor, she glared at the Seneschal. “You’ve had your show,” she said. There was nothing quiet about her now. “Let him tend to the wounds you caused.”

  “Lady,” the Seneschal said.

  “Without you here,” she snapped.

  He inclined his head and left.

  The marks on Judah’s back were gruesomely familiar. After watching them drawn in blood on Elban’s son, they were like a map he could almost read. The Seneschal was right; there would be scars. But at least Nate already knew which wounds needed stitching. By the time he had the needle threaded, Lady Eleanor was back.

  “I checked on Gavin. He’s asleep, too. I assume—his back—” All the fierceness was drained from her voice.

  “Like hers,” Nate said, indicating Judah’s mangled back. Then he remembered that this girl would be married to the young lord eventually. “There’ll be scarring, but it shouldn’t be too horrible.”

  “Oh, I’m not concerned about that.” She managed a thin smile. “Don’t think I’m callous. I assume they told you about the two of them. You saw the scars on his arms?” She was holding Judah’s hand, although the girl couldn’t have felt it, and when Nate nodded, she gently turned the limp arm over. Judah’s wrists were bloody from her bindings, too, but beneath the bracelets of blood were the same fireplace-poker curlicues he’d seen on the highborn. His had seemed years old; hers were mere weeks healed, still a livid pink. “The one who’s not actually hurt scars the least. Judah has all the best scars, of course.” Her voice almost broke, but she held it back, and her face grew hard. She nodded toward Judah’s bare feet.

  Nate looked, then looked away. Oh, how he hated these people, he thought, as he sewed the bloody mouths on Judah’s back shut. He hated all of them. All of them that had ever lived. He would hate them even if their ancestor hadn’t strangled the world, all those generations ago. He hated them for this girl, whose soles were crosshatched with scars and whose back would be, too, now. When the whole point had been to keep her alive, to keep her from being hurt. They found reasons to hurt her anyway. Because they could.

  “You’re taking all of this very much in stride,” Lady Eleanor said, wiping a wet cloth across Judah’s forehead.

  “So are you,” he said.

  “My father liked public canings,” she said curtly. She dipped the rag in water again, wrung it out and began dabbing the blood away from Judah’s wrists. He would have to bandage those, too. “But I meant—the t
hing between them. Elban says it’s unnatural. Most people are afraid of unnatural things.”

  Nate tied off the last stitch on the worst split, then began on the next one. “The natural world is very big.”

  “You’re kind. I suppose it’s awful to say this, but I’m glad Arkady is dead.” She picked up the girl’s hand again. “Poor Judah. Her one happiness. Did he make it out?”

  “He did,” Nate said, and Lady Eleanor said, “Good.”

  * * *

  The Seneschal was waiting for Nate outside the parlor door. Standing straight upright, not even leaning against the wall. “We can have a room made ready for you, if you’d like to stay the night,” he said. “Dinner will be served in an hour.”

  Nate stared at him, dumbfounded. Sewing together tattered flesh wasn’t the sort of thing that built up an appetite. Then he remembered that this had been Arkady’s habit: to treat his patients, and then spend as much time as possible living like a courtier. “No, thank you. I have matters to attend to in the city. But I’ll be back tomorrow to check their wounds, if you’ll send the phaeton first thing.”

  “I will. Is Judah pregnant?”

  “I didn’t check.” He’d been too busy keeping her from bleeding to death. “If she is, it’ll keep a few days.”

  “Are you familiar with Lady Amie of Porterfield?” the Seneschal said.

  “I think I treated her mother for a headache.” The headache had been caused by the violent green dye the woman favored, for dresses and everything else. Nate had warned her against it but she’d scoffed and dismissed him.

  “Please arrange to see her. There’s a chance that she’s pregnant, too. I need you to make sure that she isn’t.”

  “Even if she is, you mean?”

  “You can do it, I assume.”

  “Of course I can do it. But why does it matter if a courtier is pregnant or not?” He heard the rudeness in his voice and was distantly surprised by it. Apparently his patience stores were drained for the day.