The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  Rina gave him an arch look. “A lot of outsiders have been sent back where they came from, you know, magus. But you needn’t worry. Seneschal has you on his list of indispensables.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, too.”

  “Yes,” Rina said. “You should be.”

  Three days after his visit to the Seneschal, Derie came. As he let her in the garden gate, he said, “Where have you been?” and the question was part anger, part curiosity. He didn’t know where she was living or how she was surviving, but she seemed no worse for the wear.

  “None of your business,” she said harshly, “and don’t grouse at me, boy. I couldn’t answer, and that’s all you need to know. Get inside.”

  “Charles is here,” he said as he closed the kitchen door.

  “I know. I don’t care.” She reached into her skirt pocket, took out a knife. “Now shut up and sit still. Let’s see what’s going on.”

  So he had to endure it again: having her inside his head, tossing his memories the way Rina’s crew had tossed the manor. It was worse this time, and he hadn’t thought that was possible. When it was over he lay on the floor and discovered that his words were gone. He wanted to communicate, and knew that he’d once known a way to do it, but the means simply weren’t there anymore. He couldn’t think of her name. He couldn’t think of his own, either. She seemed very tall, perched above him on a sort of frame that he’d once known the name of, made of something he could no longer identify. A long piece of the same stuff was in the nameless one’s hand. It made small noises on the floor. He’d once known the name for those, too. The sounds. The long thing.

  “Nasty piece of work, that Seneschal,” the nameless one said. “Well, we’ll just have to be nastier, that’s all. No more dancing around.” There were brown things at the end of her body nearest to him. One of them moved and he felt a pain. “No more wasting time, you, boy.”

  You, boy. Was that him? It felt familiar. The nameless one made a sort of grunt that he knew meant she wasn’t happy with him. He curled around himself in case she hurt him again. She took a soft, floppy thing from the flat thing next to her and tossed it toward him. It hit the part of him that saw and breathed. He flinched.

  The nameless one cackled. “Sick on yourself. Oh, a mess, you are. Well, we’ll put you back together again.” He did not want that. He did not want her touching him. He tried to push her hands away. “Fine, we’ll do this the hard way,” she said, and did something, and he found himself frozen. Her Work wrapped around him, tied him down, held him. He could barely breathe.

  It was not pleasant this time, either, but when she was done, he had snapped back into himself like a dislocated shoulder going back into joint. The hand holding him vanished. All the elusive words came back in a rush. Derie, table, chair, towel, cane. Boot. He picked up his glasses where they’d fallen to the floor—not broken this time—and slipped them on. The world around him came into crystalline focus and his brain was crystalline, too. He saw more clearly than he had in days: what was coming, what he would have to do, how best to do it.

  Derie watched him. “Better?”

  “Yes, thank you,” he said.

  “I suppose I could have been a bit more careful. But I put things back neater than I found them.”

  “I guess you did.” There was vomit on the floor. On his shirt, too. He stood up—only a bit unsteadily—and went to the lab, where his things were; leaving the door open, he stripped off the filthy shirt and put a clean one in its place. At the washstand, he splashed his face and cleaned his glasses. He could hear Derie stomping around the kitchen. Making tea, probably.

  Sure enough, two steaming cups waited on the table when he returned. He wiped up the vomit on the floor, then took his cup and settled himself into the chair across from her. That nudge in the ribs she’d given him with her boot had been within a hairbreadth of a kick. He could still feel it.

  “What was that you did to me?” he said eventually.

  “Needed you still, so I made you still,” she said. “I’ll show you how later. You can try it out on that wastrel Charles, he might as well serve some purpose. You’re infatuated, you know.”

  He stifled the urge to flinch again. The new clarity she’d left in his brain didn’t let him lie, not even to himself. “With Judah? A little, I suppose. Can you neaten that up, too?”

  “I could. I left it be for now. Might work in our favor.” She put a soft, cold hand over his. “You’re a good boy, Nathaniel. You know what you need to do, and you’ll do it.” Kind touches from Derie had always been rare, even when he was a child. She patted his hand and stood up. “We can always fix you up afterward. Whatever needs to be done.”

  “Of course you can,” he said, and there was no doubt in him whatsoever. She could, and would. Whatever needed to be done.

  * * *

  The crystalline clarity lasted through that day and into the next. Late that afternoon, Nate heard the rattle of the phaeton outside his door. His whole body came alive, like a wild creature sensing prey. He met the guard at the door, already holding his satchel. “Am I needed inside?” he said.

  “No, it’s the prison,” the guard said. “Seneschal said you could be trusted, if a magus was needed,” and, still sharp-edged and hard with the force of his new clarity, Nate answered, “Yes. I can.”

  The phaeton had been denuded of all Elban’s insignia. Only ghosts remained: bare silhouettes, cleaner than the rest of the phaeton’s surface but marred by careless prybar work and empty bolt holes. The bell was still there, and the driver rang it aggressively as he drove through the city, yanking hard on the chain so the bell clanged harsh and tuneless, a vicious pleasure visible in his face as people scattered before the phaeton like dried leaves. The guard hanging on the foot rail said nothing. Empty storefronts with broken windows gaped like missing teeth in each street. Some of them had been burned. There were blackened places on the cobblestones, too, and at the bases of some of the lampposts: bonfires, or worse. Whatever had been burned had already been cleared away. He saw lots of white sashes, embroidered with different symbols and different colors, but he also saw a number of matching white caps. He asked the guard what they were.

  “Work enforcement. Making sure everyone who can work, does. No work, no scrip.”

  “Scrip?”

  “Companies keep their own stores now. Scrip’s what they take. Stops the price gouging at the markets.”

  It made perfect sense. But Nate found himself asking, “What about the old and the sick?”

  “Most people can do something, if they try hard enough,” the guard said.

  Highfall Prison was a crumbling brick tower crammed onto a lump of land in the Brake that could barely be called an island. It wasn’t a large building; Elban hadn’t favored lengthy prison sentences. The same guard who’d hung off the phaeton rowed Nate over in a tiny boat, greasy green water splitting sluggishly around the prow. At the best of times, a person didn’t want to look too closely at things floating in the Brake. These were not the best of times. Nate kept his eyes straight ahead.

  The guard led Nate into a dingy hallway. Through open doors on either side, he could see two reception rooms, one fairly nice and the other less so; they were meant for important visitors, which Nate wasn’t. He was taken instead to a dank staircase at the end of the hall. The walls of the staircase wept and the stone steps were slick with dampness. At the bottom was a similarly damp corridor, or rather, a wet corridor. As they walked, the guard directed Nate around puddles of standing water that had seeped up through the floor. Occasionally, these were deep enough to warrant planks of moldy wood lying across them as bridges.

  The cell doors were solid, with hinged slots permitting the passage of food. There was no way to tell if a cell was inhabited or not, but as Nate passed one cell in particular, the back of his neck broke out in prickles. Power, but an unfamiliar sort. He paused by
the door. The guard stopped, too.

  “Hear something? That’s where they keep that Nali they brought back.” A smile crept over the guard’s face. “Doesn’t say much. He cries a lot, though.”

  Reflection, the Seneschal had called it. Nate nodded, and resumed walking.

  Eventually they came to a room that was more or less dry, which held a table, a chair and a small, hard cot. Yet another door in the far wall bristled with locks, to which the guard applied keys from a large ring until it swung open. The room beyond stank of many unpleasant things—all the fluids that could be taken or expelled from the human body, as well as char and meat—but they all added up to suffering. Iron-barred cells lined both sides, and the large space in the middle was full of devices that Nate chose not to consider. A man greeted them, clothed in a heavy apron of stained leather. Nate chose not to consider the stains, either.

  “Here’s the magus, Interrogator,” the guard said.

  “Pleased to meet you, magus. This way.” The Interrogator spoke pleasantly enough, but Nate could feel invisible blades of malevolence radiating from him. He couldn’t tell if the blades or the job had come first, but he supposed it didn’t matter. The aproned man led Nate to one of the cells. The door was open and unlocked; inside, Nate understood why. The man who lay on the floor had two brutally broken legs. His toes, knees and hips all pointed in contrary directions. He was extremely unlikely to stand up and walk away.

  Nate knelt next to the prisoner and saw that his hands were mutilated, too. The man’s breathing was loud and ragged. Both of his ears had been cut off, the wounds crudely cauterized to black char. Nate found a bit of uninjured skin on the man’s throat. It felt cold and clammy, the pulse erratic.

  Nate stood up, grateful for whatever it was that Derie had numbed in his brain. “Where would you like me to start?”

  The Interrogator seemed vaguely embarrassed. “Well, magus, I’m not exactly used to this sort of thing.”

  “It looks like you’re used to it.”

  “Trying to get information, I mean. Under Lord—under Elban, rather—we just killed ’em, however slow he wanted. But this one, he’s got a mouth on him. Said the crudest things. Not the things we wanted him to say, of course. Courtiers have filthy minds, the lot of them. And this morning—well, I’d just had enough.” He wore a look of mixed distaste and affront. The man he’d been torturing had offended him, Nate realized, and in his new icy state almost wanted to laugh. “It’s not as if I didn’t warn him. I told him a dozen times, he’d better watch that tongue if he didn’t want to lose it. He wouldn’t listen, so out it came.”

  Forgetting that without a tongue or a hand that worked, the smashed heap of human being on the floor would find it difficult to share any information at all. “I can’t sew his tongue back in, you know.”

  The interrogator chuckled. “Not after I threw it on the fire, you can’t.” Then, more anxiously: “I was thinking about his hands, maybe.”

  Nate bent back down. He didn’t recognize the courtier, but he wasn’t sure he would have, anyway. Most of the bones in the man’s face had been broken, including his jaw—probably when he lost his tongue. He put a hand on the courtier’s shoulder. The man cringed and shuddered.

  “Which hand do you write with?” Nate asked him.

  After a moment the right elbow twitched. Nate examined that hand. Evidently, the Interrogator had started by pulling out the fingernails and then worked his way up, smashing each bone individually.

  “He’s got jewels hidden in his manor,” the Interrogator said over Nate’s shoulder. “He was famous for them, wasn’t he? But those jewels belong to the city, now, and this selfish pig won’t tell us where they are.” His voice grew strident. “The managers could trade those jewels to the provinces for food to feed the city this winter. But that ain’t good enough reason for him. He’s holding out. Don’t know why. After we’re done with him, it’ll take more than jewels to make him pretty.”

  For money. They had done this for money, and on the strength of hearsay. Nate laid the man’s hand down gently. “This man is in shock. He might be dead by morning no matter what I do. But I can fix his hand well enough for him to write, eventually, if you’ll leave it alone to heal.”

  The Interrogator nodded eagerly. Nate opened his satchel. He preferred to lay out what he needed before he began to work, but he didn’t want any of his supplies to touch the mucky floor of the cell, so he worked directly out of the bag. He had a salve that would help the man’s bloody lips, which were as dry as paper (and of course he couldn’t lick them). But before Nate did anything else, the man needed opium syrup. Nate took out the bottle; then stopped and considered.

  The courtier was perched on the very edge of death, his bloodshot eyeballs staring right into the depths of the black river—but he might survive. It wasn’t likely, but it was possible. The injuries to the man’s face would not heal cleanly, though. Even with the best of care, any life Nate could help him back to would be misshapen and colored with agony. Nate’s thumb traced the edge of the cork in the syrup bottle. It would be a simple thing to empty it between the man’s cracked lips. He would be unconscious in minutes and dead in hours. Caterina would have considered it a kindness. But Caterina would also have checked the man’s lineage, to make sure his line would survive him, and conferred with the rest of the caravan. She might even have reached inside the man’s mind to ask his own opinion. Nate could do none of those things; he had nobody to confer with, and he wasn’t talented enough to read the man’s thoughts. But he could end his pain.

  Behind him, the Interrogator laughed at something the guard said. Nate glanced toward them, to make sure they weren’t watching—and as he did, he heard again the words of the guard: Seneschal said you could be trusted.

  With his new hardness, Nate knew he needed that trust. He had no choice but to leave the courtier here to suffer and—with any luck—die on his own. This hideous room with its hideous smells must be part of his life, now. He would set bones so they could be smashed again, stitch wounds so they could be opened anew. He would pump water from the lungs of the half-drowned while the bucket waited, amputate one charred limb while the fire was stoked for the other. He would loathe every second and he would loathe himself, but that didn’t matter. He had to stay in the Seneschal’s good graces. He had to have access to Judah.

  One of the man’s eyes opened as much as it could. All Nate could see was a tiny slit of blue and black and bloodred. The man must have been in incredible pain. Nate didn’t even know if he understood what was going on. Reflexively, he gave the man a reassuring smile. The opium bottle was still cool in his hand.

  He turned back to the Interrogator. “Can I give him anything for the pain?”

  “Not much point,” the Interrogator said.

  Nate nodded, and put the syrup away. He carefully cleaned and bound the oozing sores where the man’s fingernails had once been. The bones in the hand were not broken so much as obliterated. Judging by the bruising, the damage was several days old. He splinted and bandaged the fingers as well as he could. The courtier moaned at first, low and ragged, but soon the moans stopped and Nate knew he’d passed out.

  Finished, he closed his satchel and went back to the Interrogator. “Leave that hand alone from now on. And let him rest until morning.”

  The Interrogator eyed the courtier with distaste. “Will he live that long?”

  “I think so. But call me earlier next time.”

  “Thanks, magus,” the Interrogator said, clearly relieved. “Without your help, might be me in his place next.”

  And then it would be the Interrogator that Nate put back together. He didn’t think that would bother him; but he said he was happy to help, and followed the guard out.

  At the manor, all was quiet. Charles, thankfully, was asleep in Arkady’s room. Bindy had left Nate a piece of roasted meat, which he ate between two piece
s of bread. He drank a beer that might as well have been water. He washed and shaved, and took the dirty water out into the garden to dump it.

  Night had fallen. The moon was full and the garden was silvery and unreal. Carefully, he poured the water at the roots of some ferns that needed it. The air was warm and soft and damp, and it made Nate think of planting, and burial and renewal. It made him think of his mother.

  Suddenly the ice inside him broke, and all the walled-away horror of the prison flooded through him. He smelled again the fetid cell and the courtier’s wounds and saw every single torture device in bitter, detailed clarity; and he was appalled. Who am I, he thought numbly. What have I done; what will I do? The memory of the courtier suffering in the Interrogator’s cell hurt him, ached in him like a bad tooth; like the worst tooth, like a tooth you would knock out with a rock rather than suffer with it for one second more. The Work Derie had done on him had not lasted. It happened sometimes. Things reordered themselves. He could go to her and tell her; he could ask her to redo it.

  But he remembered, with a shudder, the feel of that unconquerable paralysis she’d put him under, his complete powerlessness in her grip, and something in him rebelled. He would go to the prison when summoned, and he would do the Seneschal’s disgusting bidding, because that was what he needed to do. Derie would do what she wanted to him, whenever she wanted, because that was what she’d always done. And he would let her, because that was what he’d always done—just as Charles let Nate practice the paralyzing Work on him, because Derie had ordered it—but he would not invite her attention, and he would not beg for it.

  Still, without the numbness she’d Worked on him to shield him from what he’d done, sleep would be impossible. He went into the lab and mixed a strong draught: valerian, opium, anything that might wall the dying courtier away for a few hours. It tasted like acid and burned going down. By the time he made it to his pallet he was already stumbling, but it took several minutes of lying there, clenching and unclenching his fists, for oblivion to come.