“Because Firo made sense,” he said. Snapped, almost. “Courtiers talk and wheedle and convince. How a stableman could convince you to—”
She made another bridge. This one broke. “There was no convincing.” He didn’t respond, but she could see that he didn’t believe her, which only fueled her anger. “I’m not a stupid little sheep to be herded this way and that. I have my own mind.”
“I never said you didn’t.” He took a deep breath, trying to regain control. “When Elban said that eventually I’d see things his way and lock you up, it’s not true. This—” he gestured to the door, and presumably to the guards beyond “—was a weakness. A temper tantrum. It won’t happen again, I promise.” He reached out and touched her shoulder. “It wasn’t about me. It was about you. When you’re here, in this room—I know exactly where you are, Jude. I know you’re safe.”
She did not remind him that he had agreed to lock her up the night Elban had burned her. Instead she said, “When I’m safe, you’re safe.”
He winced, then scowled. “Maybe. Gods, I don’t know. It makes my head hurt, this thing between us. Part of me hates it. The rest of me can’t imagine how other people don’t all kill themselves from sheer loneliness.” He took her hand, and suddenly she was inside him: a dozen small hurts from the training field, the still-tender skin of his back. A sick nausea unfolded into limp relief as he laced his fingers between hers. He was glad they were talking. He did love her. He was sorry for everything. He was also angry, and resentful and confused. She could even feel the sharper pain of her own back through him. The bits of herself scattered through her sense of him were like flat notes in an orchestra, and she realized that the dullness she’d been laboring under was actually a loneliness so keen it would have brought tears to her eyes, if she’d let it.
Gavin’s hand tightened on hers. “Your back still hurts,” he said. She was baffled—was that really all he’d felt in her?—but before she could say anything, he smiled. “Guess what I’m going to do tonight, as soon as Elly’s done with the rushes?”
She managed one of her truncated shrugs.
“Have dinner with Firo.” He laughed. “Elly insists. He wants me to talk Elban into keeping a garrison in Cerrington, and I guess I don’t have a reason to be suspicious of him anymore. Do you want to come? We’re having that duck you like.”
She shook her head. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
“This other secret of yours,” he said. “Am I going to find out eventually?”
She nodded.
“Well, then, I won’t bother you about it.” He pulled on her hand and slid his other arm around her shoulder, pulled her over to him and kissed her forehead. “I’ll never let anybody hurt you again, Judah. I promise.” Then he let her go. Standing up, he put on his coat, winked at her and left the room. The confidence was back in his walk, and his steps were light and comfortable again.
“I traded us to Elban,” she said to the empty room. “So he’d let Elly go. He’s going to use us to send messages. He’s going to cut us to pieces.”
Chapter Twelve
Seven days later, the four of them stood together on the balcony over the Lord’s Square, even though the summer solstice was still weeks away. The Seneschal stood with them, a row of guards stony behind him. A sizeable crowd had gathered among the linden trees in the Square. Someone had taken the time to set up the courtiers’ dais in front, where they were protected by more guards and soft scarlet ropes; many of them were already there, glittering and resplendent. Behind them stood the higher-class commoners—wealthy but landless merchants, well-regarded clothiers, factory managers—and there were a great many of them, too. Around the edges were the true commoners. The markets had been closed but the factory fires still burned, so there weren’t as many commoners as usual. Most were still working.
No banners flew. People wore what they’d had on when they’d heard the drums. Judah had never seen the city in its normal dress before. The white-badged guards were a heavy presence in the Square. On her first tentative forays out of the parlor Judah had seen that Theron was right: there were more guards than usual in the House. Now, though, her eyes slid over the guards, barely noticing them. She realized that she no longer wondered about her mother when she looked out over the city; she knew where her mother was. But she couldn’t help thinking of Darid’s mother and his sisters: the one who could knit, the one who wrote letters.
The Seneschal had come shortly after dawn. His face had been somber but Judah had seen—or imagined—a faint glimmer of mania in his eyes. “A messenger arrived this morning,” he’d said. “Lord Gavin, your father has been injured.”
Nobody reacted. “How?” Gavin finally said.
The Seneschal shook his head. “It’s war, Lord Gavin. This is what happens in a war. People are injured. Even City Lords.” He told them that the army was marching back now. It would reach the barracks outside the city within the hour; an hour after that, Elban’s own guard would enter the city itself, bringing the Lord with them. They should wait on the Lord’s Square balcony, he said. It was only proper.
So they waited. The drums grew louder. Gavin stood in front, noble and somber despite the queasy excitement Judah could feel coursing through him, elated one minute and nervous the next. Elly was next to him, equally composed despite the fact that—as always—she’d had to be dragged up the stairs and onto the balcony, and now clung tightly to Judah’s hand. They’d found Theron and put him in some clean clothes. Most of his attention seemed to be on a flock of birds that soared and swooped over the manors on the Square.
Judah felt like a bird herself, straining at the end of a tether. If Elban was injured—if he was seriously injured...oh, if he died—there would be no next campaign. There would be no life on the end of Elban’s chain, no blood spilled for the sake of a troop movement. Gavin would be Lord of the City. Elly would be Lady. Judah didn’t know what her own future held, but with Elban dead, it would have to be better than anything she’d expected.
And on top of it all: to see Elban die. To stand over his corpse. That would be sweet. Perhaps she would steal the corpse from his crypt and throw it to the hounds.
The drums were very loud. The day promised to be clear and lovely. Ten minutes after Judah caught the glint of sun on armor down the broad avenue at the end of the Square, she caught the flutter of Elban’s banner, and ten minutes after that she could discern upon it the red-and-gold dagger that was his emblem. Below the balcony, Judah heard the grinding of the winches as the gates in the Wall began to roll open.
The officers marching at the front of the column weren’t as battered as Judah had expected. Those who were courtiers—and only those from very poor or very large families joined the army—wore armor enameled with the colors of their individual lineages, and their horses’ skirts and head plumes were still clean and fluffy. Here and there, she spotted a bandaged arm in a sling. Only a handful of horses rode empty, and most of those were clearly nothing Darid had bred. On the battlefield, the living horses of dead officers were usually appropriated by the living officers of dead horses, but because it was tradition to lead a fallen officer’s horse riderless back into the city, the army would pick up any horse they could on their way home to make up the difference: buying them, trading them, or—more often—just taking them in Elban’s name. The new horses would be dressed in the colors of the fallen and led as if they belonged. If they were worth breeding, Darid had always kept them. If not, he was supposed to kill them, but he’d confessed to Judah that he usually put them to work, or quietly let them out to pasture until they died on their own.
Thinking of him hurt. She didn’t know who ran the stables now, or what they would do with the outside horses.
After the officers, half of the Lord’s Guard marched on foot: first the spearmen, then the archers. Here, too, it was traditional to leave a space empty for a fallen comrade. A few gaps showed
in the ranks like missing teeth but, again, not as many as Judah would have expected. It seemed to her that the ranks seemed smaller overall, but she’d never paid much attention.
“There should be more of them,” she heard Gavin mutter on the other side of Elly. She could feel his dismay. Something was off, besides the numbers. Her brain sensed it, but she couldn’t pin it down.
Next came the prisoners. There was only one this time. Instead of being marched in chains ahead of Elban himself, he stood in a barred iron cage on wheels, pulled by two outside horses. His arms were bound over his head to the top of the cage; he winced with every cobble, and Judah’s own shoulders ached in sympathy, remembering full well how much being bound that way hurt. She had expected some sort of elaborate costume but his clothes were ordinary, brown trousers and a sleeveless tunic and boots. He could have been any man from Highfall, except for his coloring: his short-cropped hair was as black as Darid’s colt’s, his bruised, dirty skin white as skimmed milk. At least, she thought it was. His arms were covered in tattoos. Nobody in Highfall wore tattoos. Fashions changed too quickly and tattoos couldn’t be undone.
After the prisoner and the guards surrounding him came Elban’s riderless horse. A glorious black, huge and proud and so very clearly Darid’s work—so like the colt she’d loved—that Judah’s heart ached. The horse didn’t seem to mind that his saddle was empty. His steps were proud and his coat gleamed. Even the silverwork on his saddle seemed recently polished.
Behind him, surrounded by a phalanx of guards, was the palanquin.
Where had they found these things, Judah wondered—the palanquin, the cage? Did armies ride out with such things as a matter of course? She hadn’t noticed them when the troops had marched. They seemed too sturdy to have been put together on the road. The palanquin was hung with thick curtains and carried by eight guardsmen, stepping carefully to avoid jostling the injured man inside. Past them Judah could see the rest of the guards, more archers, more spearmen (although too few of those, again), with the supply carts and drummers bringing up the rear. Her eye kept returning to the palanquin. Something was wrong there, too. It nagged at her. She could feel it nagging at Gavin, as well.
The crowds in the Square were already thinning as the Seneschal ushered the four of them back into the small antechamber. In the rush-lined passage, the lamps were lit, the air thick with the smell of oil. A larger-than-usual group of guards escorted them through the passage, out the courtyard door and into chaos. As the great doors slowly creaked shut behind the procession, the new-returned guards split off into groups, calling orders, arranging for the disposition of the horses and goods and the prisoner and the fallen Lord, but the guards surrounding their own small group hustled them across the cobbles and into the House. As the door closed, Judah thought she heard a cry—of celebration or pain, she couldn’t tell.
They were escorted all the way up to their own rooms, where the Seneschal was waiting. Once they were inside, he bowed and said only, “I will send for you when he’s settled.” The words hardly seemed worth climbing the stairs for. The door closed. Judah listened as his footsteps moved away, and then realized that his were the only ones that had.
“He left the guards,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Just security,” Gavin said, but he was chewing his lip.
Elly, meanwhile, had sunk down on the sofa, her hands in her lap. Her voice was tuneless. “I feel like I should be relieved, but I’m not.”
“Colors,” Theron said.
They all looked at him. He was so quiet these days that they often forgot he was there. “What?” Gavin said impatiently.
“The colors were wrong.”
“Nothing is wrong.” Gavin’s tone was almost belligerent. Judah knew he was reassuring himself as much as the rest of them. “Everything will be fine.”
“You sound certain,” Elly said.
“I guess the old monster could pull through,” Gavin said.
They waited. A page brought food: soft cheese covered in pepper and sliced meat that none of them could eat. When they let the page in, Judah saw all eight guards still standing in the corridor. An hour later, another guard came; simply but politely, he said the Seneschal had sent him to fetch them, so they left the food uneaten and went.
The door guards came with them, four before and four behind in a disconcertingly formal procession through the House. They saw nobody else: no pages, no stewards, no staff of any kind. Not a single courtier. From a distance Judah heard another cry, like the one she’d heard in the courtyard. The procession ended in Elban’s parlor. Judah had never been there before. It was surprisingly austere, with only a simple wooden desk and chair, and one sofa which was well-brushed and not at all worn. There was a door in one wall, and another in the wall facing it.
With a bow, the guard who’d come to fetch them left. The other eight remained.
“He doesn’t use this room much.” Gavin spoke nervously, to fill the silence. “Just the bedroom, and—” His voice trailed off, and he nodded at one of the doors.
“And what?” Judah said.
Gavin glared at her. “And the other bedroom.”
In a moment, the door opposite the other bedroom opened, and the Seneschal emerged. “A head wound,” he said. “Serious, I’m afraid.”
“What happened?” Gavin said, although Judah didn’t see why it mattered. “Who’s the prisoner? Is he the one who dealt the blow?”
The Seneschal shook his head. “He’s a Nali chieftain. Apparently after our army captured him, his people tried to take him back. That was when Lord Elban was injured. Come in; I think you should all see.”
The bedroom was large and grandly appointed. All of the fabrics were new, rich and saturated with color, and every surface that could be gilded had been. Elban lay on the bed in a plain white nightgown, a stark contrast to the rest of the room. The side of his head was completely caved in. Nathaniel Magus, who sat at his side, had covered the wound in bandages and padding, but the dressing didn’t disguise the concave shape of Elban’s skull. The magus looked up at Judah. His expression was grave, but—as with the Seneschal—she saw a faint excitement there, buried deep. The same excitement lurked on the guards’ faces. For all she knew, it showed in hers, too.
Her voice soft with horror, Elly said, “Can you help him, magus?”
“Do you want him to?” Judah said without any horror at all.
“Treason, Judah,” the Seneschal said, but without much conviction.
The magus shook his head. “No, I can’t help him. His skull is shattered. But I’ve made him comfortable.”
And Elban did seem comfortable. The rise and fall of his chest was slow but steady, and what was visible of his face was calm. He looked more like Gavin than ever. “If it’s not treason to ask,” Judah said, “what do we do now?”
“There’s nothing to do but wait.” Reluctantly, the magus added, “I can hurry things along a little.”
“No.” The Seneschal was firm. “Let death come when it will.”
So they waited. Food was brought into the parlor: more cheese and meat, but also sweet pastries, fruit and soft bread. Gavin felt that someone should stay in the bedroom with Elban, but clearly neither Judah nor Theron was suited to the task, so it fell to Elly and Gavin. They took turns: one would sit and watch while the other sat and ate. The Seneschal came and went; he didn’t eat or drink, and it occurred to Judah that he never had, in her sight. When he was in the parlor, he received a steady stream of messages delivered not by pages but by guards, who whispered them in his ear or passed them to him on slips of paper. He didn’t share their contents.
Judah gorged herself on the pastries, which were fresher than she was used to. Then she grew bored with eating, and bored in general. The second door was locked; a moment after Judah tried it, Theron did. Five minutes later, he tried again. And five minutes after that. She expect
ed him to try to pick the lock and was disappointed when he didn’t.
So they passed the day, Theron alternating between the window and the locked door and Judah restless, pacing or sitting or making strained conversation with whoever wasn’t with Elban. “You’d almost think we loved the old monster,” she said at one point to Elly.
“He can’t hurt us anymore,” Elly said grimly. “And death is death. It deserves respect.”
The longer Judah sat, the more surreal the situation seemed. All of the evil Elban had wrought in their lives over the last few months was simply...ending. Drifting down the black river to the sea, as the magus would say. She felt strangely cheated. When the magus went away to rest and the Seneschal was drawn out of the room by one of his many messages, Judah drifted into the death room. Elban would not want her, so she took a petty pleasure in being there.
Gavin sat next to the bed. The bandages covering the Lord’s skull showed faint blooms of blood, but he remained quiescent, his long snowy hair lying gracefully on the pillow. From a certain angle, Elban might open his eyes at any moment and smile his cruel smile. As Judah watched, one of the long pale hands on the quilt twitched, as if it wanted to hit her.
“He was a monster and I hated him,” Gavin said, “and now he’s dying.”
“Not very satisfying.”
Gavin’s head fell, limp, against the thickly upholstered chair. “He’s my father, Jude.”
Technically true. But all she felt was a wish that the body on the bed was not so quiet, that it was racked with pain. He should suffer more. He deserved to suffer more. But there was no point in saying any of that to Gavin, who already either knew it or wouldn’t want to hear it. So instead, she said, “You’re going to be Lord of the City.”
Gavin took a deep breath and looked at her. “Yes, I am. Do you think I’ll be good at it?”
She didn’t know what to say to that. Once she would have said yes, unequivocally, but she was no longer sure. “If you do what Elly tells you.”
The Unwilling Page 35
