The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  The man nodded at Nate’s springknife. “That’s a pretty thing. How’s it work?” So while they waited for the syrup to take effect, Nate showed him. The man seemed particularly fascinated by the spring. “Never seen metal like that before,” he said, and then his eyes glazed over and Nate got to work setting the bones.

  He needed both the woman’s help and the boy’s, which they gave with nary a wince, even when the bones snapped back into place with a loud, uncomfortable jolt. After, as he wrapped clean bandages around the splint, the woman picked up her needle again. “When the Seneschal took over, I thought I’d be paying you in coin,” she said ruefully as they both worked, “but here I am still doing your mending, except my needle’s duller and my thread is garbage. The more things change, eh?”

  The boy, who had retreated to the corner, hissed. His bitterness was startling in one so young. “Now, George,” the woman said. “Gate Magus and I are old friends. Gate Magus won’t rat on me.” Her tone was admonishing but Nate saw a flicker of fear in her eyes.

  “Sure he won’t,” George said, sullen. “Cozy in the Seneschal’s pocket as he is, with his own apprentice’s sister the third-lieutenant from Paper.”

  “Which only means I can help more people. You’ve nothing to fear from me.” Nate hoped he was telling the truth. He couldn’t be sure; he could never be sure. He tried to do what he could. He knew he was distracted, though. Each time he went to the House, it became harder and harder to focus, even after Derie was done fixing him. A broken leg was simple, mechanical, more a matter of brute force than reasoning or insight, but more than once he’d caught himself making a potentially dire mistake with ingredients or dosages, and he was loath to think how many he’d made and not caught. He’d started teaching Bindy some elementary herblore (she was his apprentice, after all) and she drank it in like a starving cat with a saucer of milk. She caught his mistakes now. And nagged at him all the time to take better care of himself, to eat or sleep or have some brandy. Her efforts brought tears to his eyes.

  The mood swings: elation, tears. That was the Work showing itself, too.

  The boy, George, skulked out of the room. “Grandson?” Nate said.

  “Just a stray.”

  “It’s a hard time to be taking in strays. You’re good to do it.”

  She sniffed. “Wouldn’t let a dog go to one of those orphan halls. The factories will get him eventually, anyway.”

  On his way home, he stopped at the Grand Bazaar. The awnings were dusty and faded, and rat droppings collected in the corners. The few merchants who still bothered to set up sold goods too frivolous to be stocked by the company stores: cheap jewelry, bolts of grubby viscose, acrid perfumes. Leda, one of Nate’s favorite herb sellers from before the coup, had moved from a large fragrant stall in the center to a chair behind a rickety table. She sat with her arms folded and groused at the guards, a few sad sprigs of spindly oregano and basil laid out before her. “Afternoon, Leda,” he said. “How’s your grandson? Headache any better?”

  Leda gave him a huge, too-white smile. She’d been very grand before the coup, and still used acid to whiten her teeth even though Nate had promised her the habit would lead to her losing them. “Aren’t you kind to ask,” she said. “Seems to bother him most in the morning. Probably something to do with the damp.” Meanwhile, her foot crept out, independent from the rest of her body, and pressed down on the end of one of the wide wooden planks. The other end lifted up, revealing a cavity under the floor. Now they were carrying on two conversations: one in their normal voices, in case anyone passed by, and the other under their breath. “My sister used to be like that. Willowbark? Took funny in the damp.”

  “Some people do,” Nate said. “Opium. Has she ever tried camphor tea?”

  “On the left. Camphor, you say? Sounds awful.”

  “It is. Tastes hideous. Looks dry. You can add honey, but I can’t decide if that makes it better or worse.”

  “Fresh as it comes. Perhaps I’ll try that with the boy, then. That something you can make, the camphor tea?”

  She was a strong negotiator. She was also one of the few herbmongers in New Highfall who managed to bring in opium, along with valerian, pennyroyal and basically any other herb with an actual use. Bartering care had never worked with Leda, and Nate couldn’t sew, so he ended up parting with most of his weeks’ credit vouchers. Which were valuable, because they came from the Seneschal and were good anywhere. As he slipped the small wrapped package into a hidden pocket in his satchel, she winked and said, “For all his headaches, he’s a clever little thing, my grandson. Stay and hear the clever thing he said?”

  Nate wasn’t sure the grandson even existed. “I always like a clever story,” he said.

  Without missing a beat the foot pressed a different board, Leda prattling all the while. Something about a puppy. Inside the revealed compartment, a handful of dull metal vials gleamed against black fabric, carefully arranged to catch the light. Not that they wouldn’t shine on their own, for anyone who really wanted them.

  “Hilarious,” Nate said, when she paused, “but I have to move on.”

  The foot slid away from the board. The vials disappeared. “Good day then, magus.”

  “Good day, Leda,” he said.

  * * *

  He heard Bindy talking in the kitchen as he opened the front door of the manor. She sounded animated and cheerful in a way he hadn’t heard in weeks. A male voice answered. As he hung up his coat and hat, Nate wondered, surprised, if she was speaking to Charles, who generally avoided her like she was contagious. But the man’s voice was too deep, and the accent was wrong. Charles, like Nate, hadn’t entirely been able to shake the Slonimi lilt in his voice, and his consonants were courtier-sharp. The voice in the kitchen was pure Highfall.

  No. It was pure House. Nate went tense.

  In the kitchen, a fragrant pot of cinnamon tea simmered. Bindy sat at the table with a man whose face made Nate’s brain spin in alarmed circles. That broad face, those sandy curls—his first instinct was to bury the springknife in the man’s throat. Bindy leapt up.

  “Magus!” Her voice was as warm as the cinnamon in the air. “Look! It’s my brother, the one from inside, that they told us was dead! But they were wrong, isn’t it amazing? I didn’t even know who he was when I found him with Ma in the house. I almost ran for the guards.” She laughed. “He was kneading the bread.”

  The stableman grinned at her. The mug of tea seemed tiny in his giant hands. “Not your fault. You’d never met me in person, for all the letters you wrote.”

  The fondness in his voice was unmistakable. The stableman loved Bindy and Nate still wanted to kill him. Joyously, Bindy said, “Want tea, magus? There’s lots. Darid says you two knew each other, inside.”

  “We met.” Warily, Nate joined them at the table, not taking his eyes off the stableman.

  “My brother and my magus, and none of us even knew! What a funny old world,” Bindy said, and went on to elucidate all of the ways in which the world was both funny and old. Darid’s eyes bored into Nate, as if trying to tell him something, but Nate couldn’t understand what it was. Nor could he explain his nearly uncontrollable desire to see the man dead. But he was sane enough to recognize the murderous thoughts as insane, so he sat with a fixed smile and let Bindy pour tea as she chattered on about (seemingly) every letter she and her brother had ever exchanged. There had to be some errand he could send her on, some way to get her out of the House so he could—

  kill.

  —talk to her brother. Finally, she paused for breath, and Nate said, “I’m sorry to disrupt your reunion, Bindy, but I need you to take some headache powder to the magus in Archertown. You know where he lives?”

  Bindy wrinkled her nose. “Yes, but he smells funny.”

  “So does the headache powder.” Nate was surprised by how easy he sounded. “He’ll give you some herbs to bring
back, and some agar for clotting poultices.”

  She looked from Nate to her brother, clearly reluctant to leave. “You’ll show me how to make them?”

  “I will,” Nate said, and the stableman said, “Go do your work, Bin. I’ll be around. You haven’t seen the last of me.”

  When she was gone—almost the moment the door closed behind her, as if the words were ready to jump off his tongue—the stableman said, “How is Judah?”

  He wasn’t being polite. There was urgency in his voice, and pain. “She’s fine,” Nate said. “They’re all fine.”

  Darid visibly relaxed. “I don’t care about all of them. I just care about her.” He carried a hardness that Nate didn’t remember; but then again, the only other time Nate had spent with him, he’d just been snatched from certain death. Which would leave a person somewhat less than themselves, perhaps, and why did Nate want to kill him so badly? He should excuse himself. Take off the springknife, leave it in the lab where he wouldn’t be tempted to use it.

  “I thought you left the city,” he said, instead.

  “I came back when I heard about the coup. Wanted to see my mother.”

  The slightest flex of the wrist was all it would take. The blade would leap out like a bird startled from a bush. “You don’t look anything like Bindy.”

  “Different fathers. Me and my first two sisters, Nell and Connie—our father died in the plague. Con died, too, right before I went inside. Ma’s sent a lot of people off on the deadcart.”

  “What are you going to do now?” Nate asked.

  With a shrug of one massive shoulder, Darid said, “Not sure. I can’t work. Don’t have papers.”

  “I’m sure you could get them. Other Returned have.”

  “How many of them are supposed to be dead?” Darid’s tone was cold.

  “I could speak to the Seneschal for you. I don’t think he has anything against you personally. He needed to do what he did.” The words struck Nate as ridiculous even as he spoke them. The stableman’s mouth tightened and his eyes went hard and Nate wanted so very badly to kill him. Because Judah had loved him, he realized; because she’d been grievously injured, in more ways than one, and Nate had been made to be party to it, and oh, it would feel good to stab him. “He’d find you a job.”

  “Thanks,” Darid said drily, “but I think I’ve had enough of being assigned work by the Seneschal.” He shook his head. “I thought things would be different now. I heard about people inside coming out. But nobody’s out, you know. They just moved the Wall. Made it invisible, so nobody would notice. Bindy told me what you did to keep her. Why? Why put yourself on the line for some Marketside factory worker’s girl?”

  “I wouldn’t call it putting myself on the line,” Nate said. “I filled out a form. Anyway, Bindy’s smart and I like her. Are you going to accuse me of evil intentions? Because your mother and I already covered that.”

  “Why me, then? Why’d you put yourself on the line for me?”

  “To be honest, I have no idea.” Now it was Nate that was cold. “I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it. Eleanor asked me to, and it seemed like Judah would have wanted it. By the way, you haven’t asked, but I’ll tell you anyway. If she was pregnant, it was undone shortly after the caning. I saw to it myself.”

  He expected the stableman to flinch; had wanted him to. But Darid only shook his head. “Then you added to her pain for nothing. We never had sex.”

  It was Nate who flinched, then. The stableman leaned forward. He really didn’t look anything like Bindy; Bindy’s hair was strawberry, almost red, and her eyes a clear sky-blue. Everything about Darid was plain and drab, but his dull blue eyes were intense as he said, “Why’d the Seneschal let her live?”

  Nate couldn’t speak.

  “Elban’s sons, I get. The Seneschal doesn’t want to let them go rally up an army but he doesn’t want to make them martyrs, either, so he tucks them out of sight and mind, lets the hope die slowly so nobody even notices it’s gone. In the meantime, he gets to pretend he’s not as cruel as Elban. Plus, maybe sometime he’ll need somebody to blame for something, and there they’ll be.” The fate of the two men clearly didn’t bother him. “But why keep Judah? Kill her or let her go, sure. But keep her?”

  With unaccountable malice, Nate said, “Maybe he’s in love with her.”

  The stableman dismissed that idea quickly with a curl of the lip. The gesture spoke volumes of a life where opinions were pared down to their slimmest possible expression. “The people who’ve come out keep talking about the orchards and pastureland and fields. There’s talk of taking the House by force.”

  Nate felt the color drain from his face.

  “Nobody’s taking it seriously yet,” Darid went on, “but come winter, they will. And when they do—people still have warm feelings for the Children, but they’ve got warmer ones for their own. If it comes to violence there’s no way to guarantee she’d be safe.” Then, all in a burst, “She shouldn’t have to live or die with them. She’s none of Elban’s get. She deserves a life.”

  “With you?”

  The man withered at the contempt in Nate’s voice. “No. I can’t imagine she’d want that. I’m not sure I want it for her.” He hesitated. “Does she know I’m alive?”

  “You want me to tell her?”

  Darid shook his head. “Let her believe I’m dead for now. I might as well be, until I think of a way to help her.” He sucked at his lower lip. “Who’d they kill instead of me?”

  “I don’t know,” Nate said. “I wasn’t involved.”

  Later, when Nate told Derie about the stableman’s visit, the old woman was alarmed. “Oh, no,” she said. “No, no, no. We can’t have her losing focus now. That won’t do at all,” and made Nate let her into his head again, where she shoved the memory of Darid’s visit so far behind the locked door that when she was done, it felt like something he’d dreamed, or dreamed of dreaming, deep in a fever or on the edge of death. It made him uncomfortable, itchy. He didn’t like to think of it again.

  * * *

  Why can’t I do anything in the real world? Judah asked, petulant, the next time he was in the tower. They were in the Work, but she had not yet immersed herself in his memories and the tower was still visible around them, with the purple membrane strung across every surface. She had her fingers in it and was playing with it like clay. The sight made Nate shiver. All this stuff is everywhere and you say it’s powerful. Why can’t I walk on it, or build a fire with it, or use it to fly?

  Because that’s not the nature of it. You might as well ask why you can’t walk on water, or build a fire with water or use water to fly.

  Water can’t tell me that Gavin stubbed his toe this morning. It couldn’t tell me every time he snuck off with some staff girl.

  Nate forced down his alarm. Did he do that a lot? Did any of them ever get pregnant? If there was another heir somewhere—more of Elban’s foul blood—

  If they did, they ended up in the midden yard. The membrane between Judah’s fingers blazed scarlet. That’s what Darid said would happen.

  Even the mention of the stableman’s name was enough to make Nate feel faintly queasy. And he didn’t like the way her hands moved to the tether in her chest, the thick rope of membrane that bound her to Gavin—the way her fingers began to tease, and dig—

  No! Nate leapt for her, took her hands in his. Although they weren’t his real hands and they weren’t hers either, their real hands were in the real tower lying limp beside their real bodies. No. Not yet.

  Why not?

  It’s too dangerous. It might hurt you. You have to be patient.

  A burst of stubbornness, like a flapping bat. Sick of being trapped, she said.

  He made his thoughts gentle. Look in my memories. Can you find the Temple Argent? Can you take me there?

  It’s real? she said.
/>   Look and see, he said.

  He felt her inside him. She was gentler now. Suddenly they stood together on the edge of a cliff. Hundreds of feet below, the raging ocean threw itself on the rocks, over and over. The ruined Temple was a massive tumble of stone scattered behind them. Tiny succulents crawled quietly over the surface, giving no hint of the force that had torn the citadel apart. She had seen many things through Nate’s eyes over the past weeks, mountains and plains and cities, but he had deliberately kept the ocean in reserve. He was stunned by how real the waves were, when her Work unfolded them from his mind: salt spray landed like needles of ice on their cheeks, and a cold breeze pulled at the hem of her dress. The horizon was not merely two lines meeting, but a reality that went on and on, infinitely. He would suffer for this later, he thought, feeling his own strength draining away—but he had drawn Derie’s sigil and Caterina’s before he’d even entered the tower, and he could feel them feeding him threads of their own power. These he sucked at greedily, not caring that they coursed through him and melted him the way lightning did sand. Judah’s depthless eyes were wide, transfixed. She had no idea how amazing she was, how terrifying her power. He wanted to hurl himself at her feet, to worship her; to evaporate so she could inhale him, to tear himself apart.

  Good, he said. Let’s try something else.

  * * *

  “Make her come down,” the Seneschal said. “The managers want this land and I want my guild.” Frustration burned in the gray man’s face. He was not a man who was accustomed to being frustrated, not anymore.

  Nate wobbled back and forth in reality like a loose tooth. The empty courtyard around them was simultaneously desolate and alive with carriages, and thick with the trees that had been felled to clear space for it. The rush of the Argent Sea was loud in his ears. The oil-soaked air of the Safe Passage was empty and packed with shouting bodies and on fire. It was all incredibly distracting. “I’m trying.”