The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  “No. I had to go to a state dinner and sit between a courtier and a zealot. It was horrible.”

  “Duly noted. Anyway, that’s why I sent Elly after you. Not that she minded leaving—but I wasn’t just being nosy.” Leaning down, he took an apple from the bowl on the table, and kissed the top of her head. “See you later.”

  “Don’t get hit with anything,” she said.

  “Talk to Theron for me,” he said in return.

  * * *

  The House didn’t feel as empty as it had the night before. Their rooms were in one of the older, more run-down sections, but there were still guest rooms nearby, and the halls were full of kitchen staff and skittish pages rushing by with trays. Judah even passed a few courtiers, who either ignored her or sneered at her. Those who were truly talented at courtcraft managed both. Many of them believed the story about the midwife was a lie, that she was a Southern Kingdom hostage or some illicit offshoot of Elban’s, but even if there’d been no mystery about her origins, the courtiers would have sneered. They made it quite clear that the least she could do was dress decently, even if she couldn’t actually be decent.

  The courtiers could sneer all they wanted. Elban was healthy and strong, but when a man waged war the way he did it was wise to keep on the good side of his heir; Gavin wanted her left in peace and, with the exception of the occasional unpleasant incident like the one with the Wilmerian, he was mostly indulged. So was she. She wore what she wanted—the plainest dresses possible, Theron’s old boots, Gavin’s old coat—and didn’t always bother to braid her hair, even though she knew how much the color disturbed people when she let it go wild. She left state dinners early, didn’t bother with lessons, and wasn’t asked to make the traditional crafts of her home province for visiting dignitaries. What province would that be, anyway, and what arcane and frightening crafts would it produce? Nobody knew, and nobody was quite sure, and even though nobody officially believed in witchcraft anymore, nobody was willing to risk it.

  Judah made her way to the oldest section of the House, which stood at the building’s proper center, like the hub of a wheel. More than one ruling family ago, the hub had been the entire House; later Lords had built around it, wanting more spacious rooms with better views and smoother glass, until it was completely surrounded. The last Lord to actually occupy the old section had been Gavin’s several-times-great-grandfather, Mad Martin the Lockmaker: Mad, because he spent the last years of his life defending himself against imaginary assassins, and Lockmaker because in his madness, he’d covered every door and cupboard with beautiful, intricate locks that opened with spinning brass wheels or complicated patterns of glass gemstones or even musical notes. After Mad Martin died (of old age, reportedly) his heir had tried and mostly failed to open them. Then he’d tried to remove them, and when that failed, too, he’d had some of them hacked apart, leaving huge axe-shaped gashes in the doors. Eventually he’d given the job up as too much work, built the new council chamber that Elban still used, and abandoned the old section entirely. By then, most of its windows had been bricked over, anyway. The old part of the house was dark and old-fashioned, and nobody much minded losing it. With no particular ceremony—at least, none that was recorded—the wooden door that had once been the front entry was closed for the last time and sealed with a big, clumsy lock.

  Which Theron had picked, effortlessly, when he was ten. Back then, on cold or rainy days, they’d stolen food from the kitchen and spent hours wandering the abandoned halls, where nobody ever thought to look for them. But as the years passed, the empty rooms and decaying towers that had inspired such excellent imaginary adventures held less and less appeal. Theron was the only one who came here now. Theron loved puzzles and devices as much as Mad Martin had, and he soon set himself to opening all of the elaborately locked cabinets and boxes. Most held nothing but dust and dead mice, but in others he found strange clockwork devices, which he took back to the room he’d claimed as his workshop, and tried to fix. If pieces were broken, he repaired them. If pieces were missing, he experimented with shapes and materials until he found a replacement. Elly had a music box in her room that he’d actually managed to bring back to life, a lovely golden nightingale perched on a branch. When the key was twisted, the leaves on the branch waved as if in the wind, and the nightingale sang. The song was halting and in an uncomfortable key that nobody used anymore, but the music box was Theron’s greatest triumph.

  The door to his workshop was hidden behind a tapestry. Judah had never had the heart to mention the pointlessness of the gesture; the marks left by Theron’s repeated passage from the main door to the workshop were obvious, anyway, and even if they weren’t, nobody ever came to find him but the three of them. Nonetheless, Theron wanted the door hidden, and so it was. Even if most of the time, as now, the door was propped open and the tapestry tied back to let in air. Inside, Judah found Theron bent over his workbench, his glasses slipping down his nose and some complicated metal thing in front of him. His coat lay across a high stool. Each individual lump of spine was visible through his thin shirt. She coughed and scuffed her boots loudly and still, when she said, “Hi,” Theron jumped.

  “Don’t sneak,” he said crossly. “You startled me.”

  “Sorry.” Startling Theron was as easy as breathing. Judah leaned on the bench next to him and watched him poke at the metal thing. It was all spinning gears and colored glass bits. The glass bits seemed to wink like eyes and the whole thing made Judah think of a patiently crouched spider. But Theron gazed down it with all the fervor and devotion of a guildsman. His hands, so often fumbling and uncertain, were quick and sure as he adjusted a cog inside the body of the thing with a tool that appeared to be, and probably was, a sewing needle fixed onto the handle of a dinner knife. “What’s that?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “What’s it do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then how will you know when you’ve fixed it?”

  “I won’t,” he said, “unless you shut up for five seconds.” Theron was long and thin from head to toe. There was something of a bird about him, normally; not the carrion crow that Elban made her think of, but something sparrowy and quick to flit away. Folded onto his stool as he was now, he reminded her more of a stick insect. His blue eyes were stormier than his brother’s but warmer than his father’s. Behind their long lashes they shone with intelligence and, at the moment, irritation. The workshop was the only place where Theron felt confident enough to risk being annoyed. Judah loved him this way, and so she waited.

  The workshop occupied the base of one of the old-fashioned towers that nobody bothered to build anymore. The door that led up into the tower was seldom open. Most of the time it was blocked by a chest Theron had lugged there from someplace, although now the chest stood in the middle of the room and the doorway was clear. They’d tried once to climb the narrow stone staircase that spiraled up into the cobweb-draped dimness; at least, Gavin, Judah and Theron had. Elly, terrified by the height of the thing, wanted nothing to do with it. They teased her for refusing to climb trees but in the case of the tower they’d had to concede her point, because before they’d climbed two full loops around, they came to a place where the stairs had mostly fallen in. Usually, the towers held nothing but old furniture, anyway, so they’d given up. But Theron had been taken with the wide shelves and workbenches built into the curving walls of the tower’s lowest level, and had claimed it as his own. The single greasy, smeared window opened onto an empty space, open to the air but walled off on all sides; Theron called it a light well, but the light that passed through it was thin and almost useless. It was probably just an architectural oversight. There were lots of those in the House, places where old and new met and hadn’t joined seamlessly: corridors that dead-ended, rooms with uneasy corners and awkward ceilings. The bottom of the light well was thick with brambles. They’d never found a way in, but they hadn’t tried very
hard.

  The view, or lack thereof, didn’t matter to Theron. He rarely looked out the window. Many of the locks opened with codes, so he’d dedicated one side of the room to code breaking, and piled the benches there high with books he’d stolen from the library and messy stacks of ink-spotted paper he’d scavenged from wherever he could. On the other side, where he was working now, he kept his tools, most of which he’d built or stolen or also scavenged. Older than old, some of them, and rough with corrosion for all that he’d purloined vials of acid to eat away at the crud.

  Eventually, he put down the needle tool he was using. “All right. Did you want something?”

  “A few things. To make sure you survived dinner last night, for one thing.”

  “I seem to have.”

  “Also, Gavin says you have to start showing up for training.”

  “Gavin doesn’t get to tell me what to do.” Theron returned to his table, surly. “Not yet, anyway.”

  Judah lifted her hands, palms out. “I’m only the messenger. He seemed pretty determined about it, though. Might be easier to go and get him off your back.”

  “Easier. To go down to the training fields and present myself as a target for the murderous lunatics Elban calls his guards? No thanks.”

  “Not all of them are Elban’s.” Elban’s personal guard wore scarlet badges on their chests. The House Guard wore white. The army was made up of a mix of the two. In theory their loyalties were separated—they pledged different oaths—but the distinction was trivial. “Listen, I don’t blame you. But at some point, you’re going to have to deal with them.” Judah couldn’t think of anyone more poorly suited to command a fighting force than Theron. He didn’t like crowds or loud noises and when he was frightened or nervous, he stuttered. “You know Gavin won’t let anything happen to you.”

  “Oh, good. My brother is watching out for me. I’m so relieved.” Theron picked up the needle tool again and bent back over his device, but his movements had gone aimless. “Who was that courtier you left with last night?”

  Judah blew out a disgusted huff of air. “If this is what happens when I leave a room five minutes before a complete stranger, I’ll be more careful next time.”

  “Well, Gavin certainly spends enough time with them. And you two being as thick as you are—and, really, I mean that in all possible senses—it’s not unreasonable to think you’ll start, too.”

  “I loathe the courtiers.”

  “Gavin used to say the same.”

  “He has to play nice.”

  “Does he.” Theron’s tone was dry.

  She experienced a moment of dislocation: in her head, Theron would be forever fourteen and gangly. But the Theron before her, with his wary expression and patchy unshaven beard, seemed much older than the twenty he was, even. “Don’t be oblique. You’re bad at it. If you have something to say, say it.”

  “He has one courtier friend in particular. I don’t know her name.” With distaste he added, “She’s very pretty.”

  “Better the courtiers than the staff.” This distinction had been the subject of many an argument between Gavin and Judah, particularly since she’d become friendly with Darid and learned more about staff life. Lady courtiers had family, position and power to protect them; the staff girls had nobody. She was relieved, if a bit surprised, to hear that any of what she’d said had sunk in.

  But Theron’s disgust was clear. “He’s marrying Elly. He shouldn’t be spending time with other women.”

  “Maybe not, but—Theron, nobody expects that. Not even Elly. Gavin is who he is. The courtiers are who they are. They’re horrible. He’s not. It’ll all work itself out eventually.” She resisted the urge to ruffle his hair. “Gavin can be a little oblivious sometimes, but he’s not a bad person. And he really will keep an eye out for you on the training field. You know that.”

  “Give up. I’m not going down there unless he drags me.”

  “He might.”

  Theron only shrugged. “In the meantime, maybe you’ll let me get back to work.”

  So that was what she did.

  * * *

  The previous spring, she’d walked past the House stables during weaning. The cavalry stables, on the other side of the House, were all shouting and drills and massive stomping warhorses; those, she avoided. But there were foals at the House stables. She’d been unobtrusively watching them for months: their first wobbly explorations of the paddock, their games of tag and chase, the way their mothers bent soft noses down to theirs. But that day, weaning day, was different. The foals she’d grown to recognize paced nervously, squealing and bolting and tossing their heads in distress. Every time one approached the gate, the stablemen drove it away with cries and waving arms. The mothers were nowhere in sight.

  All Judah had known was that the foals were upset, that they wanted to leave the paddock and couldn’t. She’d glared at the stablemen perched on the split-rail fence, who shifted uncomfortably. A few of them did something with their hands, a sort of slashing motion. Much later, Darid told her that cityfolk used that sign to protect against the evil eye—not that they would admit to believing in it, but just to be on the safe side. He’d been the one who’d finally approached to ask what she wanted. She hadn’t known he was Darid then; he was just the head stableman, as blond-haired and blue-eyed as everyone else, dressed in dull staff brown, with massive arms that spoke of a lifetime of labor. Unsmiling but reasonably friendly, he’d explained about weaning and why it had to be done. The foals would calm down, he said, and suggested she come back in a few days to see for herself.

  Judah had been idle then, and lonely. Gavin was training and Theron was hiding and Elly had just begun to be sucked into the vortex of protocol that would prepare her for life as Lady of the City. Everybody had something to do except Judah, and she’d felt the loss of the others like she’d feel the loss of a limb, so yes: she came back to the stables a few days later, and yes, the foals were calmer. Her favorite, a pure black colt who shone like onyx in the sun, pranced around the paddock as if it belonged to him.

  “Something, that one,” Darid said when he noticed her watching the colt.

  “He’s beautiful,” she’d said.

  That time, he did smile—for all that he bit it back quickly. Then he clucked his tongue and patted the flat of his hand on the inside of the pasture fence. The colt came over to investigate. Darid handed Judah something small and wizened. It was an apple, or had been once. “Give him that, if you like. Hold your hand flat. Watch out for his teeth.”

  Now the colt was a yearling, as bold and glorious as ever, and she and Darid were friends. As much as they could be, anyway, since he was staff and she was...whatever she was. But he smiled more easily now, and if the other stablemen found other places to be when she arrived, they were polite enough about it. Darid had told her about all the different shades of black a horse could be, in the sun and out of it: rusty black, coffee-colored, even faintly blue. The colt was jet black. Elban preferred jet blacks, for the impression they made with his white hair and black armor. (The Wraith Lord in the lowlands, the Ghost King across the sea, where it was said the Nali thought he was risen from the dead and wore charms against him.) The nimble little colt would someday carry Elban into battle, and he would probably die there, and so Judah tried not to care about him.

  He made it hard. His ears pricked up at the sound of her boots crunching on the near-frozen ground and when he saw her, he trotted over to the fence, whickering. She’d brought him an apple, not one of the sad orchard rejects the stablemen were given but a firm, juicy one that she’d slipped into her coat at breakfast. “You only love me for my apples,” she told the colt, as he ate it greedily and then pushed his warm nose against her hand, hoping for more. “It’s okay. I’ll take what I can get.”

  There were a lot of stablemen around that day: mending the pasture gate, hauling hay bales up to t
he loft, mucking out the stalls vacated that morning by Wilmerian horses. One of them had probably gone to find Darid as soon as she’d rounded the bend in the path, and sure enough, it wasn’t long before he emerged from the stable and joined her at the fence. He was bareheaded but wore a heavy wool scarf against the chill. “Didn’t expect you today,” he said. “Figured you’d be sleeping in with the rest of them.”

  “Are you too busy?”

  “Not at all. You want to help me mend tack?”

  She did. She wanted to mend tack or clean out stalls or oil leather or mix feed or do anything he suggested, as long as it was real work that he would have done anyway; as long as she was useful. The tack room was warmer, if not exactly balmy, and the air was fragrant with oil and leather and horse. There were stools but she preferred to sit against the wall on the floor. She wasn’t very good at cutting leather, but she was good at stitching it—ironic, given how awful she’d always been at sewing. But this wasn’t embroidering a handkerchief or a throw pillow. This was making something.

  They worked in silence for a time. “I like your scarf,” she said eventually.

  The wool was rough-spun and undyed, but it looked warm. “My sister made it,” Darid said, an unusual note of pride in his voice. He had several sisters. He wouldn’t tell her exactly how many, or their names, or how old they were. He hadn’t seen any of them since he’d come inside the Wall when he was ten. Once you came inside, you didn’t leave. His family fascinated her. She was as persistent in asking about them as he was in refusing to answer.

  “Which sister?” she said now.

  “The one who knits.”

  “Did she send a letter with it?” Because he’d let slip that only one of his sisters could read and write well enough to send a letter.

  He shook his head, amused. Not a no, but a refusal to respond. “How was the grand dinner last night?”