The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  He nodded. “And more cats.”

  She stared. “Cats?”

  “Cats,” he said, and that was the end of the conversation.

  One day when the magus came to check on Judah, Theron was with her. The magus’s glasses were still broken. Judah had stopped noticing the crack, but Theron immediately said, “Your glasses are broken.”

  Judah realized that sometime since his illness, Theron had stopped wearing his own glasses. “Yes, Lord Theron,” the magus said with a bow. He’d grown marginally less servile around Judah and Elly, but still seemed nervous around the two young lords. “I really must make time to find a spectaclist.”

  “Give them to me,” Theron said.

  The magus frowned, but said, “Of course, my lord,” and handed them over. Theron took them, then stood up and wandered to the door and through it and out.

  “What was that about?” the magus asked.

  Judah shrugged, as well as she was able: sort of a twitch of her elbows. “Theron doesn’t really do things for reasons anymore.” She turned her back to the magus and unbuttoned Gavin’s shirt, letting it fall down her back. As he began to peel away the bandages, something occurred to her. “How well do you see without those things, anyway?”

  She heard a faint exhalation that might almost have been a laugh. “Well enough, up close. You’re healing.”

  She twitched her arms again. Then there was the salve, and the bandaging. The magus was gentle but she could not help tensing as he touched her. Hands on her bare skin brought to mind either Darid or Arkady, and neither memory was welcome. Elly slept next to Judah every night—“Until you’re better and Gavin stops being a child”—but actually being touched was different. The magus seemed to sense her discomfort, and, as always, was quick.

  As she buttoned the shirt and he washed his hands, he said, “Have you been outside? Fresh air might do you good.”

  Wordless, she pointed at the open terrace doors.

  “Exercise, then,” he said. “I’ll accompany you, if you like. You could show me the House.”

  “I lost my boots.” She leaned back carefully, tucking her legs up under her skirt. “And I assume you noticed the guards at the door.”

  The magus nodded. He seemed very young without his glasses. Theron had been the same way. When you were used to seeing a face with glasses, seeing it without them was like catching a glimpse of a private room. “Are they there for you?”

  “Gavin’s angry.”

  “Because of the caning?” He began to pack his supplies into his satchel, a process she liked watching as much as she liked anything. Everything had its place. A leather case for the silver scissors. A rubber-lined pocket for the salve, another lined in silk for the bandages. The day Theron was poisoned, he’d called himself disorganized. He’d lied. “Or because you kept a secret from him?”

  “It’s complicated,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I can’t imagine what it must be like, being Lord Elban’s son.”

  “Gavin is nothing like his father,” Judah said automatically.

  “They were both born knowing they would eventually rule everything they saw.” He took the old bandages and stuffed them into a cotton bag. “My mother is a healer. I spent my whole childhood muddling grass into water, doing what I’d seen her do. Experimenting, to see what was possible.”

  “Women aren’t healers.”

  “Things were different where I grew up. Anyway, I imagine it’s strange for you, too. He feels everything you feel physically, but he’ll never see the world the way you do. His experience of life is too different from yours.”

  He seemed to expect an answer so she told him what Elly told her, every night. “He’s a child throwing a tantrum. He’ll get over it.”

  The magus lifted an eyebrow ever so slightly. Judah wasn’t even sure she wouldn’t have noticed it if he’d been wearing glasses. “On my way to Highfall, I passed a village where Lord Elban had thrown a tantrum. The ashes were still warm.”

  “Gavin is nothing like his father,” she said again.

  The door opened and Theron wandered back in, the magus’s glasses in his hand. He laid them absentmindedly on the table. They were perfectly mended. Even the crack in the glass had disappeared. Something twisted in Judah’s heart, a piercing stab that died as quickly as it was born. Theron had not fixed anything since the poisoning.

  The magus picked them up. “Thank you,” he said, surprised. But Theron had already drifted away.

  * * *

  Dinner came. Judah cut her food mechanically into pieces and ate it, though it was sand in her mouth. Gavin ignored Judah and so Elly ignored him. Judah could feel Gavin’s itchy, uncomfortable anger coming off him like an odor. All of them were eating as quickly as possible. Mealtimes were bleak, these days.

  Suddenly, Theron put down his fork. “I feel,” he said, “like there are conversations going on, and I can’t hear them.”

  There was a silence.

  “Nobody is talking, Theron,” Elly said.

  “No. Not here,” he answered. “Everywhere else.”

  There was another silence.

  Then Judah said, “Do you mean that people are talking, but they stop when they see you?” People did that to her. It could make a person feel crazy.

  “No. I feel there’s always a conversation happening.” Theron frowned. “Conversation isn’t the right word. Not talking. But...” He shook his head, mouth tightening in a rare display of frustration. “Things were easier to explain before I got sick. Maybe I knew more words, then.”

  Theron had never before mentioned the difference between what he was once and what he was now. The moment felt delicate, dangerous. Judah thought Gavin’s gaze darted to her, the way it always had when something puzzled or disturbed him. She kept her eyes on Theron.

  Very gently, Elly said, “Perhaps you should talk to the new magus, love. He’s not like Arkady. He’s a good man.”

  “He’s not a bad man,” Theron said. “But it’s worst when he’s here.” His face brightened with inspiration. “It’s like everybody is wearing clothes under their clothes. Layers and layers, all the way down. It’s always been that way, but it’s louder, now. Do you think the magus could fix my head?”

  This time, Judah couldn’t help looking at Gavin. “What does your head feel like?” he asked his brother.

  “Distant,” Theron answered, after a long time. “Like my thoughts are happening somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  Gavin was being too pushy. Too stern. Judah remembered what the magus had said, that Gavin was experimenting with ruling. He would drive Theron away; he would break the moment.

  Sure enough, Theron only shook his head, and wouldn’t or couldn’t say more.

  * * *

  “Can you help Theron?” Judah asked the magus the next time he came.

  “Lord Gavin just asked me the same thing downstairs,” he said.

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him that his brother was alive, and clever enough to fix my glasses, and I didn’t see a problem with him.”

  Judah cocked an eyebrow. “You did not, either, say that.”

  His cheeks turned pink, and he laughed; the same half-swallowed exhalation she’d heard from him before, as if he were afraid to laugh out loud in front of her. “No, I didn’t. Lord Gavin scares me.”

  Now it was Judah who half laughed. “Gavin’s not scary.”

  “Perhaps not to you.” The magus spoke very seriously. “Although I would point out that he’s had you locked in this room for nearly three weeks.”

  Being locked away didn’t frighten her, though. Being locked away felt inevitable. She didn’t say that. Instead, she said, “Theron isn’t the way he used to be.”

  “Life changes all of us.”

  The cold stove in Ju
dah flared. “Life didn’t change Theron. Arkady’s poison did.”

  “Like the Seneschal’s cane changed you?”

  The flare died. The stove went cold. “No. Theron used to be a genius. He still would be, if not for me.” She sank back in her chair and took a bitter satisfaction in the wails of pain that rose from the rent skin of her back. They were less than she deserved. (Darid dead, Theron changed. All her fault.) And they were growing quieter, day by day; soon she wouldn’t even have that. In a perverse way, she looked forward to Elban returning, and the new pain that would come with him.

  The magus cocked his head, puzzled. Then comprehension dawned. “You’re talking about the antidote.”

  “I didn’t give it to him fast enough. I was a coward.”

  The magus’s bare shock surprised her, but she didn’t trust it. “Have you been blaming yourself for Lord Theron being the way he is?”

  “You said give it to him immediately. I didn’t.”

  “And I knew what Arkady planned before we even left the manor. Blame me, if you have to blame someone.” He was sitting in the armchair and now he leaned forward, elbows on knees and fingers laced tightly together as if to control them. “How long did you actually delay, Judah? Ten seconds? Thirty? Maybe it would have made a difference, maybe not. The poison Arkady used was vicious. Even if you’d given it to him the moment we left, there was still a good chance that Theron wouldn’t be the same. He—” he hesitated “—well, where I come from, we would have said that he’d dipped a toe in the black water.”

  Judah thought of the aquifer beneath the House, the vast expanse of silent water that bloomed through the living rock below. “What does that even mean?” she said, her voice harsh.

  “It comes from old stories my family tells.” He stumbled over the word family, like it wasn’t quite what he meant.

  “Tell me?” Her interest wasn’t feigned. When she was a child, and still allowed to visit the library, her favorite books had been the oldest ones, with edges that crumbled in her fingers: old nonsense stories about talking animals and magic wells. When it was discovered that she liked them, they disappeared. What remained were mostly war histories, occasionally exciting and often bloody, but not the same. By the time Gavin had started training, even these had been forbidden her. She envied the magus his family stories. She had only the one Darid had given her about her mother, and she did not like to think of it.

  His face was fond and sad, as though he were thinking of people and places that were dear to him, and lost. “They say the world used to be different. That a great power ran through everything: the sap in the trees and the dew on the plants, and the soil and the rocks and the grass. And the water: not just actual water, but also all the blood, inside the foxes and rabbits and great cats and—and us, of course. Blood is mostly water, did you know that?”

  “So what was it, this power?”

  His mouth twisted. “It was...power. Imagine that the world we live in now is frozen over, all ice and snow, and I’m telling you about a time when the sun was warm and everything bloomed. Cold and dead versus warm and alive. In this world, the power is invisible, but in the next world—the one we go to after we die—it’s an actual river. And like any river, it flows to a sea. When we’re born, we’re made from the waters of that sea. When we die, we follow the river and make our way back.” He still wore that half fond, half sad look. “When I was a child, I used to picture it black as ink, running across a great plain where it was always midnight. No trees. Just giant rocks and scraggly weeds. We followed a river into the north for a few weeks when I was very young, up where it’s dead. I think that’s where the idea came from.”

  “Followed a river into the north?” There was nothing in the north but wasteland and ruins. “Where exactly did you grow up, magus?”

  She meant it as a gentle rib, but he jumped as if something had bitten him, and said too quickly, “Nowhere special. One of the outer provinces. Anyway, that’s what I mean when I say that Lord Theron dipped a toe into the black water. It’s an overly poetic way of saying that he came too close to dying. I don’t think you could have done anything to stop that.” Suddenly, unexpectedly, the magus reached out and laid a hand over hers. “What they did to your back was horrific. What they did to the man you loved was horrific. They wanted to make sure you never dared love anyone again, but there are different kinds of love, Judah, and there are more kinds of people in the world than you can possibly dream of. They are not all like Lord Elban.”

  She looked at the hand covering hers, and then up to his washed-out blue eyes ringed by too-dark eyelashes. “Nathaniel Magus,” she said, “are you flirting with me?”

  He jerked away. “Of course not! No, never. I apologize if it seemed that way. I just—You seem sad, and I—”

  She let him fumble, feeling only the faintest flutter of amusement: like a courtier must feel, burning people with words. Then she realized the amusement was the fond variety, and an instant after that she realized she was being cruel. She held up both hands in a placating gesture. “Peace, magus. I was joking. I’m sorry. It wasn’t funny.”

  His lips snapped shut, and he exhaled with relief. “I was afraid I’d offended you.”

  “Difficult, but not impossible,” she said. “Keep trying. Or don’t, actually. Right now I think you’re the closest thing I have to a friend.”

  “You have Lady Eleanor.” But his cheeks were pink again.

  “She feels sorry for me. You don’t, do you?”

  “No.” He couldn’t meet her eyes as she said it. She wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad one.

  * * *

  Two days later, she sat alone in the parlor. It was late afternoon, that time when the sun shone its goldest. Her back was the kind of sore that made her want to stretch, but she didn’t know what state of healing her skin was in. Nathaniel Magus would come again soon—tomorrow, possibly—and she would ask him about stretching. Meanwhile she sat on the sofa, itching a bit from the bandages, playing solitaire on the empty cushion next to her. Relishing the silence and loneliness and hating it and anticipating its end, which was an interesting, queer mix of feelings.

  Unexpectedly, the door opened and Gavin entered. He was sweating, covered with dust, and he seemed startled to see her. Which was absurd, because hadn’t he been the one to give the order that she be prohibited from leaving? Where else did he expect her to be? His eyes darted around the room for Theron or Elly. But there was nobody. Only the two of them.

  She made him nervous. He was almost as depressed as she was. She could feel it.

  Wordless, he went into his bedroom. Judah went back to her game. Through the open door, she heard him run water into the basin and splash the dust off his face. She heard the wardrobe opening and closing.

  In a few minutes he was back in clean clothes—courtier clothes, red trousers and a shirt with a ruffled collar—and wet, freshly combed hair. His boots were the high-polished ones he always wore in the House, and he carried his brown coat over one arm. He looked very handsome. Judah expected she would feel very drunk later.

  But meanwhile, she could feel his indecision, the way seeing her twisted his stomach. Then he disappeared back into the bedroom. She heard the clipped sound of his hard leather soles cross the floor and the creak of the wardrobe hinges; then the clipped footsteps came back into the parlor and stopped in front of her. She flipped over three cards.

  Something fell to the floor with a thick double thud. She lifted her head the barest fraction, to see a pair of boots, the leather smooth and new, the buckles dull steel. Too small for him. Just right for her.

  “Elly’s right,” he said. “I’m being a child.”

  She didn’t speak, but she picked up her cards so he could sit down, and felt something ease in him.

  He took the empty seat and she caught a faint hint of cologne. “I shouldn’t have let this happen.
”

  Then she did look at him. His eyes were on her, frank and direct and relieved. She wondered if he meant Darid, or everything that came after. “How could you have stopped it?”

  “I don’t know. The House Guard does what the Seneschal says. Even the ones I’m friendly with—sometimes I get this sense from them that it’s nothing personal, they like me okay, but they’d still love to take my head off if they had the chance. Today on the field they were all over me.” He sounded and felt exhausted. “I could have tried to stop it. I didn’t.”

  The caning, then. Something the magus had said came to Judah’s mind. “Were you angry because of the beating, or because I kept a secret from you?”

  “Both, probably.”

  “You keep secrets from me.” She shuffled the cards, reshuffled them, tapped them into a nice, tidy deck. “You didn’t tell me about Amie, or that Elban wanted you to kill Theron. At least, not until I dragged it out of you.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Why?”

  “It just is.”

  She bridged the cards. They came together with a swift, deadly-fast flutter. “You said that to Elly, too. What’s the difference? Why are your rules different from everybody else’s?”

  “Because I’m not everybody else,” he said curtly.

  She became aware that she was angry. It was a slow anger, all in her head where he couldn’t feel it. Its roots ran deep into the most fundamental parts of her: she was left-handed, she was blood-haired, she was angry. There was none of the surging heat she normally felt. She could sit, coolly, and consider her words. “Darid wasn’t the only secret I’ve kept from you,” she said.

  Gavin frowned. “Don’t say his name.”

  She could feel the small, shameful pain it caused him. “Why not?”

  “I just don’t want to hear it.” He shook his head with disgust. “None of this would have happened if not for him. Elban was gone. We were happy.”

  “You weren’t bothered when you thought it was Firo.”