The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  “Water,” he croaked, and she scrabbled across the floor for the skin he’d brought. She had to hold it for him at first, watching anxiously as he drank. Eventually his ragged breathing slowed and he managed, slowly, to push himself up.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “So am I.” His voice was rough. “I should have told you to be careful. But you shouldn’t have been able to go that deep inside my head, not on your first—” He seemed to be having trouble finding his words. Pulling his satchel close, he took out bandages and a pot of salve. “Let me dress your arm,” he said, and reached for her.

  But she recoiled, holding the arm stiff against her body where he couldn’t reach it. The pain wasn’t bad—she’d suffered far worse—and she felt like she deserved it. Even now he was too pale. His lip was still oozing blood and every time he sucked it clean she felt worse.

  Gently, he said, “It’s all right. You didn’t know.” She let him take her arm. Moistening a cloth, he dabbed at the crusted blood. “You’re...very talented.”

  A blush heated her cheeks. But even through the blush, even through her guilt over what she’d done to him, she couldn’t help asking, “Could we undo what’s between Gavin and me? By moving that purple stuff?”

  The salve was clear and smelled faintly of lavender. “Look at me,” he said. She did; he looked fragile, as if he’d just recovered from a long illness. “You didn’t even try to change anything, and I can barely stand up. Meddling inside other people’s heads is dangerous. I’m not strong enough to do that kind of Work and you haven’t been trained for it. You could end up with your brains addled worse than Theron’s.”

  She knew it was true. Her hands still shook; she felt blistered inside and out by what she’d seen, what she could do. Even so, she said, “But it must be possible. What about the Nali chieftain?”

  The magus shook his head. “What the Nali do is very different. And the chieftain isn’t in the city; he’s in prison. He’s been there for months. I suspect he’s been tortured. If he didn’t deliberately scramble your brain for revenge, he might be so weak and out of practice that he’d do it accidentally.” He finished bandaging her arm, and then patted the bandage lightly. There was something insensate about the way his hand moved, like it wasn’t entirely under his control. “I’ll come back tomorrow. We’ll keep practicing. Get to where you don’t feel like a volcano erupting inside my head. Then we’ll talk again, I promise. Is it so awful, the bond between you?” he added wistfully. “Do you want so badly to end it?”

  Was it? Did she? Sometimes she had pitied other people who were alone in their heads. But she had seen that kind of life from the inside, now: the magus’s life, the good and the bad of it. And she supposed that, with what he could do, his head was different than Elly’s or Darid’s would be, but still. There had been so much magus in it. So much space for him to fill, with thoughts and feelings and sensations that were his and his alone, love and hate and pain and sadness. And no uncertainty if a feeling was really his own, no trying to ignore the nagging pressure of someone else’s desires, motivations, rages. “It’s not awful,” she said finally. “But I’m not free.”

  The magus wrapped the bloody mirror carefully in the cloth. She wondered that he didn’t clean it, but assumed he knew what he was doing. “None of us are free,” he said.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Two weeks later, Nate stumbled into the Seneschal on the front steps. Literally. He’d been in the tower nearly every day; Judah was starving for the experiences she found in his memories, insatiable. The blood loss he could deal with, but untrained as she was, she left his head such a wreck that he could barely find his way back to the manor, where Derie waited to put him back together. “Making progress?” the Seneschal said.

  Years ago, Nate had slept with a village girl named Anneka beneath a wagon, lying on soft grass sprinkled with tiny ugly flowers that released all the perfume of heaven when crushed by their bodies. Had his life not already been spoken for he might have stayed with her, married her, spent his life raising goats and chickens and lovely children with his eyes and her beautiful skin; but he belonged to the Slonimi, so he’d had only that one sublime night. Judah loved his memories of Anneka. She returned to them over and over again. Now the smell of the flowers was strong in Nate’s nostrils and he could feel the wagon above him, comforting and familiar. Both were more real than the man standing in front of him. With great effort, he said, “Enough.”

  “Is she coming down?” the Seneschal persisted.

  Nate’s lips were dry. He resisted the urge to lick them. “Eventually.”

  “Sooner rather than later.” It was a command.

  Nate flexed his wrist so his springknife leapt out of its casing and buried the blade in the man’s eye. Just like that bandit on the road, after they’d passed through the Barriers. Blood and fluid running warm over his hand.

  He closed his eyes. Gathered himself. Opened them again. The real Seneschal stood in front of him, eyes intact. Nate wasn’t even wearing his springknife. He never did when he went to see Judah, because flashes like that hit him not infrequently on his way home, and he couldn’t risk trouble.

  “This tower situation is very frustrating,” the Seneschal said. Nate had shown him the broken place in the stairs. None of the Seneschal’s guards, who were all great hulking men, could have navigated the narrow chunks of protruding rock without planks and ropes and a great deal of effort. The Seneschal’s proposal to Judah had been a calculated move, not a romantic one; when winter came, the man had explained to Nate, the House would grow cold, and Judah would remember that he had offered her kindness and a choice. Both false, of course—all of the Seneschal’s plans ended with Judah in a guildhall, being experimented on by the Nali chieftain—but having his men build ramps up the tower to drag Judah down by force would show the Seneschal’s cards long before the gray man intended.

  They had come to the door of the Safe Passage. “I wish I understood how you make it up those stairs so easily,” the Seneschal said, pausing to take out the huge ring of keys that would unlock the Passage’s maze of doors. “You must have been raised by mountain goats.”

  “I’m just careful,” Nate said.

  It was a lie. Nate lied to the Seneschal a great deal—he would have said anything to get inside the Wall to Judah—but even if he was in the habit of telling the man the truth, he didn’t think he would have told this truth: that the forces bound into the tower knew him, recognized him, and let him pass; that the broken stone steps grew to meet his feet, and the spaces between them shrank to match his stride. He hadn’t known what would happen when the Seneschal insisted on seeing the broken place for himself, and watching Nate cross the gap. From Nate’s view, the stones had swelled, the spaces had shrunk. From the Seneschal’s view, apparently, everything had looked utterly normal.

  “I want her out of that tower, magus,” the Seneschal said, unlocking another door, standing aside to let Nate pass, and locking it behind him. “Out of the tower and cooperative. That’s why I let you in and out, because you told me you could get her to come willingly, and do as I tell her for once in her life.”

  Another of Nate’s lies. Nobody could ever make Judah do what she didn’t want to do. The oiled rushes were unpleasant under his feet and the smell made his already-queasy stomach feel even worse. “You have to give me more time,” he said. “She’s not ready yet.”

  They had come to the other side of the passage. As always, the Seneschal’s guards clustered around it. The man himself turned stony eyes on Nate. “Lure her, magus,” he said, a touch of impatience coloring his voice. “You’re a traveled man. Tell her everything she’s missing. Make the world sound amazing.”

  And if only the Seneschal knew the ferocity of Judah’s craving for life and experience and beauty, the depths of her talent. Nobody in the Slonimi bred for love. Every child resulted from the careful considera
tion of bloodlines, of similar and complementary talents. Reproduction was a responsibility, a calling. Nate himself had even been paired off, not long before he and Charles and Derie had left for Highfall, in case he died and his bloodline was lost. As was tradition, the first time, Nate had been very drunk, so he remembered the woman’s smell and her name but not her face. Derie had given him to understand that the pairing had failed, anyway.

  But there was no failure in Judah. Talented parents sometimes produced a dud, but Judah fairly shimmered with power. She Worked as easily as she breathed. Not that she knew it; as far as she knew, every child with a bleeding arm could walk through defenses like they were paper and rummage through memories like a trunk of old clothes. It had taken him a year of hard training with Derie before he could hear her thoughts in his head; another two before he could send her his own. Derie’s powers dwarfed Nate’s, and Judah’s made Derie’s look like a child’s. It was all he could do when he Worked with her to keep that one door locked, so she would not know absolutely everything he knew and be frightened by it. It was all he could do to put her to sleep before he left so he could weave the threads of Work through her without her knowing, swaddling her in it like an infant. Someday she would understand, he told himself, and forgive him.

  The walk to Limley Square seemed long and he remembered wistfully how quick Elban’s phaeton had been. Nate felt weak and nauseated; he slept late every day, and often came out of unconsciousness to find himself being carried around the lab between Bindy and Charles like a passed-out drunk. He had trouble focusing his eyes, and had finally traded some herbal remedies to a decent spectaclist in exchange for new lenses in his glasses. His appetite was gone, which was fortunate because his guts had crawled to a stop. His mouth was dry all the time and he had developed sores on the underside of his tongue; he drank more water and applied a very light solution of opium syrup to dull the pain.

  His dreams, though, were amazing. In his dreams he made love to Anneka again; he waded through the knee-high prairie grass outside Tagusville, skin warm with sun, as fat little rodents darted and chittered unseen at his feet. He stood on the pier at Black Lake, watched the boats unload their catch into waiting wagons, smelled fish and water and tar. He dozed in an opium den in Carietta, watching half-asleep as a girl so pale she might have come from Highfall crawled on top of Charles and pulled aside his clothes. Best of all, in his dreams, he saw his mother again. He worked beside her in the caravan, stood by a makeshift stage where she sold her tonics; drove the horses as she sang for him and him alone, his hands on the reins browner, younger and less scarred than now.

  In Highfall, he passed the Beggar’s Market. One of the factory gangs drilled in the space where the stalls had been. Their heavy boots all hit the floor in perfect time as they marched, pivoted, marched some more. He didn’t know which factory wore green embroidery but the marchers were uniformly young, with the rabid light of conviction in their eyes. All the older workers had already settled back into torpor as, one by one, the managers’ promises had withered and died. He’d even heard that the long shifts were beginning again. But the young ones, the ones who hadn’t been beaten down before the coup—they still believed. Belief could be dangerous. Nate altered course as if he’d never intended to go that way.

  He thought he saw Anneka in the road ahead of him, then Judah, then his mother: hallucinating again. It didn’t matter. Derie would fix it.

  When the old woman met him at Arkady’s door, she laughed. Her glee sounded brittle, jagged. “She’s draining you like a boil, isn’t she? Good and strong.”

  “Very strong,” he said.

  Derie laughed again and clapped her hands. Then she caught at his elbow, because he was falling. “I hope you’ve eaten something, boy. It’ll take a lot of blood to clean up the mess in your head. What a force she is!”

  The blood was the least of Nate’s misery. Derie treated his memories like junk in a dead man’s wagon. Anneka and the dead bandit in the Barriers: thrust aside, old news. The woman Nate had been paired with, the child she probably wasn’t carrying because he was useless, lame, pathetic: nobody cared. His mother: irrelevant.

  She snatched greedily at everything involving Judah, though—her face, the touch of her mind, every thought Nate had had about her, every bit of her he’d seen. Like the Seneschal, they needed her to do as she was told; unlike the Seneschal’s, their plan was righteous. Derie’s questions pried through his mind like fingers. Was she biddable enough to do what was needed? Was Nate? Was he weak enough to love her? Was he strong enough to control her?

  Derie’s voice cut through the chaos like a beam of light. Quiet, stupid boy. And she twisted something inside his mind. A noise that he’d not realized he was making cut off abruptly. Inside, he still screamed.

  * * *

  He woke up and the light was different. Gradually, he realized this was because he lay in Arkady’s guest bed, the sheets around him clean and cool. His clothes were gone, his arms neatly bandaged. The world was blurry. He put his hand out to the small table next to the bed, found his glasses. Everything slipped into focus. Slowly, he forced himself to sit up. His stomach swung violently. A groan escaped him, and he hunched over.

  The door opened and Charles entered. Drawn by the groan, Nate supposed. He carried a glass of clear, pale green liquid. “Drink,” he said, passing it to Nate. Nate drank. The draught was faintly herbal and very gingery. He had brewed it himself before going inside yesterday; he’d known he would need it. As he sipped, his nausea eased and he felt stronger.

  “You know,” he said, “you don’t have to keep putting me to bed every time.”

  “You piss yourself, and that’s not all. Not that Derie cares. She’d happily leave you lying in your own blood and filth all night.” Charles spoke without much expression. After weeks away from the drops, his weeping had finally dried up, which was a relief; but the way Charles was now, wan and listless, was even harder to take. “Besides, you put me to bed, didn’t you?”

  Nate—who was wondering what Charles meant by that’s not all—had indeed put Charles to bed, but didn’t want to embarrass his friend by talking about it. “Is Bindy downstairs?”

  Charles nodded. “She has a list of calls for you to make from yesterday.” He hesitated. “Her sister came to walk her home last night. The pretty one with the chip on her shoulder, the Paper stooge.”

  “Rina.” Nora’s tenure on the committee had been brief—she was too old and worn-out, she said—but Rina had risen quickly in the ranks. She wore her Paper sash with pride and wielded it like a sword, her fervent eyes always on the watch for shirkers, hoarders, violators of any kind. People on the street ducked away when they saw her coming.

  “She asked if I’d been issued working papers yet,” Charles said.

  That was worrisome. People without working papers were sometimes ejected from the city. But Nate kept his voice light. “I’ll talk to the Seneschal. Tell him you’re my ailing cousin or something. He’ll call her off. The Unbinding will be done soon. You’ll feel different after. Everything won’t seem so...hopeless.”

  “It’s not hope that I’m missing. I had hope. We had nothing but hope, you and I. Do you need to practice that paralyzing thing on me today?”

  Charles might as well have been reciting the shopping list. “No,” Nate said. “Not today.”

  * * *

  One of the calls was an address in a narrow street in Brakeside where the buildings channeled the wind into a cold, gritty blade. The house was so overgrown with attaches that it seemed about to topple; climbing the rickety stairs, Nate hoped the number on his list would match one of the doors in the main part of the building, where the floors would be more stable, but no such luck.

  The door was opened by a boy so thin he was almost gaunt. “No!” he cried, the moment he saw Nate. “No, I told you not to send for him!”

  “Calm down, Georgy,” somebody els
e said. The door was opened the rest of the way by an elderly woman. Nate recognized her; she was a seamstress, arthritic in both hands, and one of Nate’s first patients in Highfall. He kept her in ointments, one with capsaicin and camphor that she could use whenever she wanted, and another with opium that she was to use sparingly. In exchange, she kept him more or less tatter free. As she let him in, she looked him over, head to toe, and said, “Give me that coat, magus. I can see the lining’s torn from here.”

  Nate gave it to her. “It’s good to see you.”

  Meanwhile, Georgy hovered protectively by the room’s lone bed, where a young man lay. “Not good to see you. Go away,” he said to Nate.

  “Hush,” the seamstress said and nodded at the man on the bed. “See what you can do for my boy’s leg while I sew, eh?”

  Georgy scuttled over to a corner, still scowling. The man’s eyes were clouded with pain, his breath short. Understandably, since his leg was broken in at least two places. As Nate measured out a dose of opium syrup—he would have to set the bone, and it would hurt—the injured man said, “Don’t mind Georgy. He’s just scared.”

  “Of what?” Nate said.

  The seamstress, sitting on a stool next to a table piled high with clothes, snorted. “I don’t have my independent’s license yet, that’s all. They cost the earth, those things!”

  “The factory magus took away my papers when I got hurt,” the man on the bed said quietly.

  Taking his papers meant the other magus thought the hurt man wouldn’t ever work again. The company stores wouldn’t sell to anyone without work papers or an independent’s license, but the seamstress was right: the licenses were exorbitantly expensive. Nate found the whole process infuriating. At least Elban’s system had left enough cracks for the people it broke to survive. Before the coup, the man’s coworkers would have taken up a collection to pay an outside magus, but all anyone had now was company credit. He wondered how the tiny family was finding the money to feed themselves. “I don’t see anything to report,” Nate said, passing the man on the bed the opium and rolling up his sleeves.