The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  Her favorite, though, was Lady Margarethe, whose husband had suffered a secret apoplexy, and whose sons, upon learning of their father’s infirmity, had laid siege to the House, and their mother in it. After weeks of fighting, the Lady’s surviving second son had yielded to her rule, and the Lady herself had written what Eleanor felt was one of the least known and most important historical documents in Highfall history: Mark well, you defenseless wives, who are allowed no arms at hand; do as I suggest, and keep this in silence as you do so much else, and you will have the knowledge to make a weapon of a single candle.

  It was Lady Margarethe who had first ordered the Passage lined with oiled rushes: not because they were waterproof, but because they would burn. Even the most craven Ladies had soon realized the powerlessness of their position, and Eleanor had never read a single diary that did not contain the same suggestion. Look back to Lady Margarethe, daughters in Ladyship. She ruled well.

  She’d also been murdered by her second son less than a year after his surrender. But all of those who came after her—including Elly—pretended a horror of damp passages and a deep respect for tradition, and made sure the rushes were well-oiled.

  A weapon of a single candle. Eleanor didn’t have a candle; what she had was a single remaining match. Tomorrow she would have no matches. Today the Seneschal wanted Gavin and Judah; tomorrow he would still want them.

  Wake up each day and figure out how to survive it, she told herself.

  She wished she had a whole box of matches. She wished she had Theron. She wished she had an army.

  She grabbed her small, lonely match, and ran out of the parlor.

  * * *

  “Working in the physical world takes so much blood,” the magus said, wrapping his bleeding arm.

  “Gavin.” Judah could hear the high note of panic in her voice. “Get up.”

  He didn’t move. He didn’t even blink. The magus glanced at Gavin as if he was of very little consequence and said, “I told you, he can’t get up. I needed him quiet. He doesn’t say anything worth hearing, anyway.” Then the magus’s eyes, which had been strangely empty, landed on Judah and softened. “Oh, Judah. What have you done to yourself?”

  She knew he was talking about the stitches. “I saw you,” she said. “I saw you doing this to me.”

  “I had to.” Was that guilt in his voice?

  “To make sure I was bound to the tower more than to Gavin?”

  He nodded eagerly, relieved that she understood. “Yes. So that you can draw on its power, and so it can draw on him.” He nodded his head at Gavin, and a note of complaint crept into his voice. “I didn’t have time. There was never enough time.”

  Judah felt her head lower like an angry bull’s, her fists clench. “Why?”

  “I told you. Mad Martin bound all the power in the world, and he bound it here. Right under our feet.” He practically glowed with purpose. “I never thought it would be so easy to find, but the power drew you here. It wants so badly to be free.” He stood and moved closer. Judah saw that he had a knife in his hand: not the strange one from his cuff, but the silver one he’d always used on her for Work. “We have all worked so hard to get you here. In this place. With him.” His eyes twitched to Gavin, still motionless, and his mouth curled faintly with disgust. “He was never worthy.”

  The magus aimed a nasty kick at Gavin’s thigh. It landed with a meaty thud. Judah felt the big muscle seize painfully. Gavin didn’t move.

  * * *

  Theron wasn’t in the solarium, the chapel or the kitchen; when Elly called his name down the catacomb stairs in the pantry, there was no response. Finally, much as she hated it, she gave up. She had to get to the courtyard before the Seneschal came through the Passage. Panting, she made it there just in time to hear the guards approaching, their broad Highfall accents echoing through the winding passage.

  She gripped the match in her fingers and waited.

  Then the door opened and they were there, with the Seneschal on point, holding a lantern. She couldn’t see how many guards were behind him. He saw her, but didn’t slow or stop. Eleanor knew this trick; her brothers had pulled it on her often enough. She was supposed to quail and shrink back out of the way. Instead, she squared her shoulders, and didn’t move. If he wanted her out of his way, he could do what Gavin had said: pick her up and move her like a doll.

  He didn’t. She wasn’t surprised. With all of his men watching, he would want to move her with the sheer force of his will. To resort to physical force with a mere woman would be beneath him. “Well, Eleanor,” he said.

  “Seneschal.”

  “Have you seen the magus?” he said conversationally.

  “Up in the tower.” They might have been in the rose garden, discussing the previous night’s dinner.

  “And Gavin?”

  “With him, I assume.”

  “Excellent.” He paused. “We have business inside, Eleanor. Kindly step aside.”

  “What business is that, Seneschal?”

  “Judah needs to come down from the tower. I’ve been very patient.”

  The guards behind him were carrying some sort of bundles. Boards and rope, she suspected. “Patient?” she said. “Stuck in the tower or stuck in the parlor, she’s still behind the Wall. I don’t see how it matters.”

  “It matters,” he said, “because I can’t get to her in the tower.”

  Eleanor laughed. “You can’t get to her anyway, Seneschal. Your guards can’t make her marry you.”

  Contempt filled his face. “I don’t care if she marries me,” he said, and remembering how she’d told Judah to do exactly that, Elly felt faintly sick. “It would have made things easier, but it doesn’t—to use your word—matter. You’re all leaving here today, anyway.”

  “No,” Eleanor said.

  He blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “No. This is our House. We’re not leaving. I haven’t done the rushes in months, but the oil still smells rather strongly, don’t you think?” she said, and held up the match.

  * * *

  “Like magnets,” the magus said. “One side pulls, the other pushes. One side takes, the other gives. His side takes. His entire line takes. They have taken and taken and taken for generations. They took the world. They took the life out of it, the power.” He pointed at himself, then at her. Whenever his eyes fell on Gavin, they burned with derision, but on her, they just burned. “We’re the givers, the ones who would give everything back. Your line. Your family. And mine. His ancestors left us nothing but the thinnest trickles of power, faint shreds of what used to be—but we’ve learned to use them. Like starving peasants who’ve learned to eat grass and bark and dirt because people like him take everything else. We used them to create you, Judah. To bring you here, to put you here with him, now. You can open the world. You can fix it. You can make it live again. Only you.” Something anguished came into his voice. “We worked so long to make you. So long.”

  “To make me,” Judah said.

  He nodded wearily. “You’re the end product of five generations of the most powerful Workers we could find. Their lines end in you just as Elban’s ends in him.” He stood up. Still holding the knife, he used it to point at Gavin. “Like a crystal, focusing the light. And you’re bound to him.” He flipped the knife over and extended it toward her, hilt out. “Take it,” he said when she did nothing. “Derie and Caterina are helping me but I can’t hold him much longer.”

  She stared at the blade. “What do you expect me to do with that?” Her voice was high and nervous.

  “Let his blood,” Nate said. “You’ll need all of it.”

  Judah took a stumbling step back. She put her hands behind her, as if they might take the knife of their own volition. “You’re mad.”

  He considered. “Maybe. Probably, between you and Derie. It doesn’t matter. I’m nothing. You, Judah. You’re
everything.”

  She felt as frozen as Gavin.

  The magus swallowed hard. She could see him gathering something—strength, his thoughts—and the effort showed. “His blood. And your blood. Let them spill together, then go into the Work and use what you know to break what his ancestors did. You’ll have to open and open and open. I’ll give you the sigils. You can undo it. All that pent-up power will go back where it belongs.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  “You’ve never seen the world the way it was meant to be, Judah, and neither have I. But you’ve seen how powerful Work can be.” He held up his hand and Judah saw a row of sigils drawn on his skin. “Caterina is here, and Derie. We’ll help you. Go into the Work. Break the binding. The tower will take his energy through yours.”

  “How are you holding him? How can you do anything to him without his blood?” Judah was stalling. She knew the blood was useless, but he didn’t.

  The magus shrugged. “I used Theron’s. But it’s hard. Come on, Judah. Cut his throat. End this. We’re all suffocating. Most of us don’t even know it. Cut him and the binding will break and we can breathe again. Everyone can breathe again.”

  At some point, he had begun to weep, silently. She didn’t think he knew he was doing it. “If he dies, I die,” she said. “That’s—”

  But the magus was shaking his head. “No. The tower will save you. I’ll save you. That’s what the weaving was for.”

  Meanwhile, she moved away from him, closer to Gavin. Slowly, so the magus wouldn’t notice: thinking that if she could touch Gavin, if she could slip into the Work, she could free him. The two of them could get the knife away from the magus and then—she didn’t know what then, but they could figure it out. Even with the knife the magus was no match for both of them. She laid a hand on Gavin’s cheek.

  And was immediately overwhelmed by a familiar, sinking despair. It was the same despair that had filled him since the coup, anger rotted into hopelessness. The magus’s mind was as compartmentalized as the House itself, every memory shut away behind its own door. Gavin, who’d never needed to pretend to be anything other than what he was, still had a mind like a book, one page leading into the next. She had felt it when she’d dug for the truth of the lie about Darid. Now she was more skilled, she could turn the pages of him without leaving too much chaos in her wake, and what she read was that most of Gavin didn’t want to live. The world was new and alien and his place in it wasn’t what he’d always assumed. He was scared of dying, but he was terrified of being ordinary. He hated his father but his father had been powerful. In Gavin’s mind, she read what Gavin himself had read in his father’s diaries about the bare stone cell off Elban’s parlor, and the people who had been taken there to suffer for Elban’s amusement. Men and women, staff and courtier. It couldn’t have been a secret: someone cleaned the blood, someone took the bodies to the midden yard. Judah herself had watched the Seneschal move among the crowd at state dinners and balls, seeking out a particular body to be brought to the dais. Judah couldn’t remember faces but Elban had written about them and now the words burned in her brain as they did Gavin’s. He’d been drawn to people who laughed. Strong or delicate, servile or arrogant, it didn’t matter. They all stopped laughing in the end.

  Gavin hated his father. He was worried he’d become him. He was ashamed of what Elban had done, but envied him the power to do it, and he was ashamed of that, too.

  Judah saw it written, as clear as ink on paper: If he can save you, do it. Let it end.

  * * *

  “What are you going to do, Eleanor?” the Seneschal said. “Stand against all my guards, all by yourself?”

  Eleanor felt ludicrous, her one tiny body blocking the door and all the giant men crowded into the passageway beyond. But she said, “Four hundred years ago, Lady Margarethe held off both of her sons and an army at this door.”

  “With her guard, who had swords. You have a single match and some greasy floor mats.” The Seneschal shook his head with exasperated pity. “Step aside. None of this concerns you.”

  She held steady. “If it concerns Gavin and Judah, it concerns me.”

  Behind the Seneschal, one of the guards muttered something Eleanor couldn’t hear. “I think I can talk sense into one girl,” the Seneschal said over his shoulder. Then, to Eleanor, he said, “What’s stopping you from going back to Tiernan? Is it your brothers? I can arrange to have them killed, if you like. You have good reason to want them dead.”

  Something lurched in her stomach. The Seneschal smiled. “Yes, I know about your brothers. Your mother actually prostrated herself before me, begging me to take you away. Her one lovely little daughter, among all those brutish stupid sons and her brutish stupid father. We had other candidates for Gavin, you know. Prettier ones from better families. But I took pity on you. I wanted to help you. And now I want to help you again. Go back to Tiernan. When your brothers are dead, it’ll be entirely yours, even if you are a woman. I won’t interfere at all.”

  “I don’t want Tiernan,” she said.

  “You can’t have Highfall,” he said.

  She was glad to see the match didn’t quiver. “I don’t want that, either. I just want to be left in peace. I want all of us left in peace.”

  His jaw hardened. Quickly, she struck the match on the rough stone wall. It flared to life with a sound like ripping paper. She could feel the heat of it on her fingers.

  “That,” the Seneschal said, “you can’t have.” Then he leaned forward and blew out the match.

  * * *

  The magus had begun to shake. The hilt of the knife oscillated wildly in the air and he was nearly sobbing. He seemed about to collapse. Judah was still half in Gavin’s mind, but she discovered she could be both places, in the Work and the tower. “We tricked them,” the magus said. “We tricked them, to keep you safe. You don’t love him. You only think you love him because you feel what he feels. It’s not the same thing. He thinks he loves you and that’s not real, either. He can’t love. It’s been bred out of him just as your power has been bred into you.” He laughed through his tears. “Do you know how many people the men of his line have killed? Do you know how many more have died from cold, or starvation, or a simple lack of the will to live? I’ve seen it happen. It’s hard to live with no hope, Judah.” He tossed his head, tore at the hair that fell loose from its queue. “Judah, Judah! That horrible name. When this is over I’ll give you a new one. You’ll be free. We both will.”

  “Gavin won’t,” she said.

  “His death will save thousands,” the magus said. “And he’s a monster. If there’s a shred of human feeling in him he stole it from you.”

  That’s probably true, Gavin said in her head.

  Shut up. She was replaying everything the magus had said. There must be a way out of this. There must be a way to free Gavin, and—

  Suddenly she felt as if she were covered in biting insects. Fighting nausea, she stared at the magus. “Theron’s blood?” she said. “Is that what you said?”

  * * *

  Time shrank into the wisp of smoke rising from the extinguished match. The Seneschal smiled slowly behind it, waiting to see what she would do. “Should we move her, sir?” the impatient guard behind him said, and the Seneschal answered, “Give her one more minute to move herself.”

  The smoke swirled. Dwindled. Died.

  “Elly.”

  She hazarded a glance to the side. Theron stood next to the open door, against the Wall and out of the Seneschal’s line of sight. His expression was more animated than it had been in months, almost like his old self. He smiled and lifted something in his hand to show her.

  It was the device he’d been working on in the workshop, the device Judah and Gavin had brought down to entice him after his illness. All the bits of spring and wheel that had spent the last few months spread out on the table in Gavin’s bedroo
m, gathering dust: she recognized the pointed key, the green gems. Nested in the middle of the clockwork was a familiar white vial: her last, hoarded vial of gas for the Wilmerian quickstove. She couldn’t think when Theron had found time to assemble the thing; she couldn’t think why he had chosen now to show it to her.

  He wound the key, quickly. It made a comfortable clicking noise. Then he pressed one of the gems, and the big wheel on top began to spin, and the device sparked; caught and burned with a steady purple flame that rose from a tiny post at the top. It was beautiful.

  The Seneschal, increasingly amused, waited in the door. He couldn’t see Theron, or the clockwork device. Eleanor held out her hand. Theron placed the thing in her palm. It was heavy, but not too heavy; it ticked, but not loudly. It was still burning. She held it at arm’s length, where the Seneschal couldn’t see it.

  “Come on, now, Eleanor,” the Seneschal said. “Step aside.”

  “I told you,” she said, “this is our House,” and threw the device down onto the oil-soaked mats. The flames leapt up like a crowd to its feet. The Seneschal’s eyes went wide with alarm and one of his guards cried out.

  Theron slammed the door shut with surprising strength. With glittering merriment in his eyes, he grinned. “Run.”

  Inside, the men were screaming. Elly laughed, high and horrified, and ran. Theron laughed behind her. She didn’t look back.

  * * *

  “Elban’s heir had to be the last of his line,” the magus said. “I’m sorry. We’ve all done things we’re sorry for. When this is over, we’ll grieve his brother together.”