The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  The guard who’d spoken followed Nate’s gaze to the fallen man. “Don’t worry about that. Someone will be along to get that eventually.”

  “Is he dead?” Nate said.

  The guard laughed. “Oh, yes.” Then, reassuringly, “You just go back inside, magus. Seneschal sent us to stand guard. You’ll be safe enough.”

  “What’s happening inside the Wall?” he said.

  “Nothing for you to be concerned about,” the guard said.

  If the courtier was dead, there was nothing for him to do. If Judah was—

  Nate went back inside.

  Around three, he heard a faint but insistent tapping on the back door, and opened it to find Bindy, wearing Canty on her back and surrounded by three other girls who looked very like her: one a few years older, and the other two considerably younger. Their eyes were all wide and exhausted. He hustled them into the kitchen. “Oh, magus, the city’s gone mad!” Bindy burst out before he could even say hello. “Things are burning and people are killing courtiers, and—”

  “They deserve it,” the older girl said with bitter satisfaction.

  Bindy ignored her. “We stayed in the house but none of us could sleep. And there’s a moneylender near us, they hung him. Right from a lamppost. And he wasn’t a courtier at all, he just did business with some, and Rina and me started to think that people might—because I run errands to courtiers—” She glanced at the little one holding her hand, and clearly amended what she had been about to say. “Well, anyway, Ma’s at work. And I figured you’d be safe. So we came here.”

  “I’m glad you did.” Nate discovered that he meant it. His throat felt tight and his eyes burned. “Is your mother working the long shift?”

  “She’s all right. I ran to check,” said the older one, who Nate guessed was Rina. Her face was rounder than Bindy’s, her eyes wider, and her hair fiercely curly. Different father, probably. “They’re taking the factories back from the courtiers. The managers are going to run them now. The managers are going to run everything. And they’re appointing workers’ committees and they asked Ma to be on one and I want to be on one, too. Isn’t it exciting?”

  The young girl clinging to Bindy’s hand started to cry. “It will be, maybe,” Nate said. Then he crouched down to the crying girl. She didn’t seem to be hurt. In her arms she clutched a grubby doll with a matted thatch of badly-dyed red hair. Nate’s heart hurt to see it. “What about you?” he asked the girl as gently as he could. “Are you all right?”

  “She’s fine,” Rina said, but Bindy gave the girl an encouraging nudge and said, “Say hi to the magus, Kate.”

  “Your name is Kate?” Nate said to the little girl, who nodded. “Well, Kate, I’m Nate. Our names sound the same, isn’t that funny?” He pulled his face into an exaggerated beam of surprise and delight. “Nate and Kate! We’ll have to be friends, with names like that.”

  Some of the fear melted out of Kate. She smiled. Then she yawned.

  “Are you sleepy, Kate?” he said, and she nodded.

  With Bindy’s help, he got them all settled in the three guest bedrooms upstairs. Rina caught sight of the dead man in the Square and kept going back to the window with a regretful expression, as if she were sorry she’d missed the murder itself. “Ignore her,” Bindy said quietly when Nate frowned. “She worked for a courtier for a while. He was nasty to her. She’s a good person inside.” Then, fatigued as she was, her face broke into a grin and she covered her mouth to hide a giggle.

  “What’s funny?” he said.

  “Nate,” she said. “I knew you had another name besides Gate Magus, but—Nate.” She giggled again. “Sounds like a little boy with a slingshot.”

  “Once upon a time, I was a little boy with a slingshot.” He bowed low, like he’d seen the courtiers do. “Nathaniel Clare, at your service.”

  “Belinda Dovetail, at yours,” she said with a small, merry curtsy, “but I’m still going to call you magus.”

  When she and the others were all breathing quietly in their beds, Nate still didn’t go to his. The manor full of sleeping children was soothing and daunting all at once; he no longer felt quite so lonely, but the weight of responsibility was heavy. At least it weighed down the sick feeling inside him, and stifled some of his fear. He wondered where Derie and Charles were, how they were faring in the pandemonium. This was not a part of the plan. He did not know what to do next.

  The Wall was very high. Anything could be happening beyond it. Anything.

  * * *

  The children stayed through the next day. Taking turns with Canty, the older girls each marshaled one of the younger ones and began cleaning the manor from top to bottom. Nate told them, repeatedly, that they didn’t have to do it—in fact, it made him uncomfortable, having them poking innocently into the corners of Arkady’s decadent old life—but Bindy ignored his protests. “Gives the littles something to do,” she said. “Better than having them sit around fretting.” In truth, he was glad of the distraction. Retying aprons and cutting slices of bread and butter kept him busy, too. The idea that Judah might be dead, and he wouldn’t know, was nearly driving him mad.

  Charles arrived just after nightfall on the second night, barefoot and bedraggled. The guards were still on duty in front so he came to the back door, like Bindy’s family had. Nate hadn’t seen him in weeks. He was shocked at the change in his old friend: the hollow cheeks, the sunken eyes. Charles’s chin was covered with a bronze haze of stubble and there was a sizeable bruise under his left eye. He carried nothing with him, not even the satchel he’d brought over the Barriers. “Lady Maryle’s dead,” he said.

  Rina, who had been spooning potato soup into Canty’s mouth, froze when she heard this, her face bright and vengeful. “Wait, Charles,” Nate said, and pulled him into the parlor.

  Charles barely seemed to notice the interruption. “Set fire to the manor, with everyone in it. Said she couldn’t bear to lose a single thing more, not one thread of tapestry. Gainell and her sister and I made it out. But they couldn’t get the old woman to move.” Charles’s eyes were haunted. “I couldn’t help her. Her own daughters couldn’t help her. She was too big for us to carry out. We barely made it ourselves. There was a crowd outside and I ran. We all did.”

  “Maybe you should have run faster,” Nate said, nodding toward the bruise on Charles’s face.

  Charles blinked without comprehension. Then, remembering, he touched the bruise. “Oh. That. I cut through the Bazaar. Stupid. Of course they were looting it. Fortunately for me, a better courtier came along. Not fortunate for him, poor bastard. Although if he were poor, and a bastard, he might have had better luck.” A high, nervous giggle escaped him. “The Seneschal’s arrested the heads of all the best families, you know. It’s the ones in the middle they’re stringing up. Figures, doesn’t it? We worked for five generations to bring Elban down, and practically the moment we get here, he’s deposed.”

  “The power is still bound,” Nate said. “We’re not done yet.”

  “You might not be, but I am,” Charles said. He pulled a vial out of his pocket and disappeared into Arkady’s bedroom. Nate bit back his anger—Charles had abandoned his satchel and Lady Maryle, but saved his drug—and let him go.

  The rest of that night was no quieter than the one before. The dead courtier still lay where he’d fallen across the Square. The weather was warm. Nate knew the body would soon start to rot.

  On the third day, Nora came to get her children, walking confidently past the guards to the front door as if she’d done so a thousand times before. She wore a white sash across her chest, bound in brown embroidery that looked hastily done. Nate made tea.

  “I thank you for taking in my children, but they’ll be safe enough now,” she said, and pointed to her sash. “I’m on the worker’s committee for Paper. Nobody will bother us.”

  “Rina mentioned the committee,” N
ate said. “What does it do?”

  “Everything. Factories always ran this city, you know. Only difference will be that now the money’s actually going to the people who work in them, instead of some courtier’s pocket. Managers know the running of the factories better than the courtiers ever did, anyway.” She called out to the children, and the manor was suddenly full of the sounds of running feet as the littles blasted through the kitchen door to leap on her. Bindy and Rina followed at a slower pace, with Canty on Bindy’s hip. Something in Nora’s eyes released when she saw them, and her voice was brighter than Nate had ever heard it when she said, “Hello, my lovelies! You’ve not been making trouble for the magus, I hope?”

  “They’ve been a huge help,” Nate said.

  “They always are.” Nora took Canty from Bindy; delighted, he wove his little fists into her hair, and she kissed his soft cheek. “And I’ll tell you all, the first thing the committee’s changing is the schedule. No more long shifts. No more days spent at one task, never seeing sunlight, no time to rest or breathe or have your own thoughts, begging for privy breaks and eating while you work.”

  “It’s a new world,” Rina said, her eyes glowing, and Nora said, “We’ll see.”

  “Have you heard anything about what’s to happen to Lord Gavin and the other Children?” Nate said.

  “No lord anyone, anymore, magus,” Rina said.

  “They haven’t been children for years, now,” Nora said. “Seneschal put Elban’s corpse in the Lord’s Square so we could all see it and know the old bastard was dead. But he hasn’t announced what’s to become of Elban’s House, or his family.” She shrugged, resigned. “Not their fault where they were born, I suppose. But neither was it my Darid’s, nor any of the other children who’ve disappeared inside the Wall over the years.”

  “Magus knows the Children, Ma,” Bindy said. “He goes inside, remember?”

  “So he does.” Nora gave Nate a measuring look. “What do you say of them, then, magus? Since you know them so well. Should they live?”

  His mouth dry, Nate said, “I would hate to see anyone die who didn’t deserve it.”

  “Deserve it?” Nora’s eyebrows went fierce. “I watched them grow up same as anyone. Made my own children dolls of them, took them to see the puppet shows. But don’t you talk to me about deserving. Did my Darid deserve to be sold like a side of beef into that House, to be mistreated however they like and hung when they felt like it? All the House staff are out now, you know. The stories I’m hearing would curl your hair. Told us they’d be well fed and well cared for, they did, but they cut my Darid into pieces and threw him on the trash heap. Deserve it, indeed.” Bindy put a hand on Nora’s shoulder. Nora leaned her head against it and then gathered the littles closer around her, reaching out for Rina’s arm; holding everything she had left in a death grip to make up for her vanished son.

  Her son wasn’t gone, not the way she thought. The sadness in her eyes made Nate’s heart ache, but if word got back to the Seneschal that the head stableman hadn’t been executed after all, he was going to want to know how Darid had escaped. Nate couldn’t risk that. He wondered who was making sure the four young people had food and wood for their fire, if the staff was gone; he wondered if Judah was hungry and cold in this amazing new world where the managers ran the factories and corpses rotted in the streets. He wondered if she was already dead.

  And then he felt bad, because of course Nora was right. He wouldn’t be here if Highfall had ever been fair, and when there was unfairness on the table, the weakest were always served the biggest helping. Which made him think again of Judah, and the cane-marks on her back, and he was sick and conflicted and wished the Seneschal would send word. He wished he knew something. Anything. He had been so close. She almost trusted him.

  When all of the children were gone, the manor seemed painfully quiet and painfully empty. The next morning, the courtier’s body had vanished.

  * * *

  Worry chewed on the edges of Nate like a dog with a shoe. He signaled Derie, but received no answer. To make up for the food they were eating, Bindy and her sisters had made loaf after loaf of bread. Nate didn’t have much appetite and Charles barely ate—as the drops wore off, he began to weep, constantly and uncontrollably—but by the fifth day after the coup, even the most misshapen and oddly-textured loaves were gone. Finally, Nate ventured outside.

  The streets were quiet. People walked quickly, heads down to avoid seeing anything around them. Guards watched from the corners of every square, every major thoroughfare; on the lesser streets, Nate noticed more than one person wearing a white sash like Nora’s. The colors of the embroidery varied. Different factory committees, Nate guessed. They held themselves with an air of grim importance, and Nate found himself walking quickly, too. He found that he didn’t want these people to look at him for long.

  The Grand Bazaar was closed, the stalls inside shuttered tight. Some of the locks had been broken. Ruined goods were scattered over the wooden floor. The air in the empty aisles smelled the same as it always had, like nutmeg and wine. A poster had been tacked up next to the entrance: a map of the city, divided into uneven slices like a badly cut cake. Nate stopped: the old neighborhood names were gone. Each wedge was labeled with the name of a factory. Paper. Textiles. Steel.

  The managers are going to run everything.

  The slices were uneven because sometimes there were two factories close together, and of course none of them were anywhere near the better parts of the city. It was clear that a lot of deal-making had taken place as the map was drawn. Limley Square was probably closer, as the crow flew, to Textiles, but for some reason it was included in a lump growing off the eastern edge of Paper. The map had been made on a press, quickly and not very neatly. The letters across the bottom—Know your factory district! Please cooperate with resource inventories! Your New Life in New Highfall!—were blurred.

  Your New Life in New Highfall. As revolutionary slogans went, Nate found it a bit vague. It didn’t even have a verb. He didn’t know what the resource inventory was, but assumed he would find out.

  He skirted the Lord’s Square, not knowing if Elban’s body was still on display there and not caring to see it if it was. Not far away, a crowd gathered in what had once been a lovely garden. A decorative statue—something graceful and lithe—had toppled off its plinth; it lay in pieces in the mud, and a man with wild eyes stood in its place. “They cut out their tongues!” he cried. “They cut off their fingers! When a courtier was barren and needed an heir, they chose one of your daughters or sons, anyone they liked the looks of—and why not, since it was what they did anyway, aye? But woe betide the girl who came down with a child unwanted. Did your daughters not come home? Like as not, they lie in the great trash heap, holding the tiny bones of a courtier’s lust!”

  Nate kept walking.

  The Beggar’s Market had fared better than the Bazaar. It still seemed mostly the same, although the piles of food were a bit smaller, the carrots a bit spindlier. But there was still milk, and butter and lamb; Nate bought some of each, and a bit of cheese. He wanted coffee, too, but the prices were ridiculous. Everything was more expensive than it had been. The vendors all told him that his House account was no longer good. They were polite about it; he knew them all, and they seemed happy to see him. But something was missing, something was off. It took him a moment to realize what it was. The traders, the ones from outside Highfall or across the Barriers: they were gone. All the people he saw were pale and golden-haired, with round blue eyes.

  “Where are all the traders?” Nate asked the dried fruit man.

  “Gone.” The man threw a few more apricots on Nate’s pile.

  “With the courtiers?”

  He shook his head. “On their own. By sundown the day Elban died, wasn’t a single foreign trader left in the city. I had friends among them. Folk I’ve known for years.”

  Nate wa
sn’t surprised. No matter how big the city or small the village, when trouble came and people were scared, their eyes fell on the outsiders. No better way to learn that lesson than to grow up in a caravan. Nate, Caterina and the others had been run out of more places than he could even count. The makeshift market by Harteswell Gate might never have existed; the plague shrine was still there, but the offerings—like everything else in the city—seemed a bit paltry. Nate waited there for an hour, long enough for the guard keeping watch over the shrine to begin eyeing him curiously, but Derie didn’t show up.

  When he came back to the manor, Charles—wiping the still-uncontrollable tears from his cheeks—met him at the door with a summons from the Seneschal.

  * * *

  The Seneschal’s new headquarters were in one of the big manors on the Lord’s Square. The courtiers who had surely lived there before were gone now, either fled or ejected. A guard at the door directed Nate to a dim hall full of closed doors and a sense of harried activity. A low hum of indistinct voices underlay all of the normal noises, as if every room held a busy meeting, and a constant stream of guards flowed through the front door, up the polished wooden staircase and back down. People wearing white sashes bustled from room to room. They carried water jugs or stacks of paper or baskets full of food; they opened doors and slipped through on waves of animated conversation that cut off as soon as the doors shut. For all he knew, Nora was behind one of the doors, but he didn’t see her. Finally, one of the sashed people—a woman around Caterina’s age—asked him what he wanted. When he showed her the summons from the Seneschal she led him upstairs, down a bare corridor to a door flanked by white-badged guards. Neither of them spoke or moved to stop her as she knocked; a voice called, “Come in,” and she gestured to Nate, so he did exactly that.