The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  And into the midst of this pain and confusion came Eleanor of Tiernan, wearing her nicest clothes (which still seemed old-fashioned and dowdy), her long hair braided into loops. Her thick-lashed eyes looked too big for her face and everyone who saw her was charmed by the quaint little thing from the provinces. Arkady examined the future Lady of the City and pronounced her healthy (and did not burn or cut or hit her, Judah could not help but notice); Elban came, too, his first visit to their rooms since Theron’s birth and the last he would ever make. As he sat on the late Lady Clorin’s pale rose-colored sofa, he’d taken the unprecedented step of bringing the new little girl onto his knee for a few minutes, asking questions in his cool, cultured voice. How had her trip been? (Very lovely, thank you, Lord Elban, and the carriage you sent was extremely fine.) Did she miss her mother and father, and all of her brothers? (Only a very little bit, Lord Elban, because who could ever be sad in a place as grand as this?) Would she behave herself, and work hard, and do everything she was told, so that one day she might be worthy of the honor of being Gavin’s Lady? (I could never be worthy, Lord Elban, but I will work very hard.)

  As they spoke, his icy eyes had moved from his oldest son, sitting impassive and stiff—there were bandages under Gavin’s clothes, too—to Judah, skulking across the room. Judah felt the hate in those eyes, the contempt. Her life until the nights in the study had been relatively pleasant, but now she knew it didn’t have to be. He wouldn’t kill her, not until they were able to dissolve whatever it was that bound Gavin’s health to hers, but he could hurt her, and he would. The lovely little country doll on his knee was acceptable; Judah herself, with her savage-colored hair and her awkward bandages and her offensive black irises, was not. The doll would be lauded—in fact, as Judah watched, Elban slid a ring with a pale pink stone onto Eleanor’s finger—and Judah would be tolerated. Barely.

  Judah didn’t care about rings and she didn’t want to sit on Elban’s lap. She would rather have been touched by the burning brand Arkady had used on her than by those thin white fingers. But she clearly read Gavin’s relief and greed as he watched his future bride, and it made her feel sick and unsteady. She realized later that this had all been deliberate. The men in the study hadn’t broken the unnatural bond, but they’d torn Judah and Gavin apart just the same. They had made it hard for him to meet her eye and then given him someone else to look at: someone uncomplicated and beautiful; someone entirely his, who he was allowed to love, and who nobody would ever try to take away from him.

  They’d given Judah nothing.

  It would have made all the sense in the world for Judah to hate Eleanor. For a few minutes, she did. But then the adults left, and the four of them were alone: Gavin and Judah, injured and traumatized; Theron, perpetually a bit baffled but especially then (left alone for all those nights with only the silent nurse for company, and then Gavin and Judah came back sick and odd and none of them slept in the same room anymore, and now apparently this complete stranger lived with them); and the new girl herself, Eleanor of Tiernan. Elly, although she wasn’t quite Elly to them yet. Who looked from one of them to the other. Smiled tentatively. Then dropped down on the rug where she stood, buried her face in her hands and wept.

  Gavin and Judah both still found the sound of crying actively painful, so it was Theron, finally, who went to her, and slid a thin arm around her shoulders.

  “He doesn’t like me,” she said, her teary blue eyes enormous. “He has to like me. If he doesn’t like me he’ll send me home and my father will have to give back the money and my brothers will be so angry, I don’t even know what they’ll do. He doesn’t like me. But he’s so scary. I’m so scared.”

  She was talking about Elban. The tiny perfect dolly was weeping with fear and terror of Elban. And yet she’d sat so sweetly on his knee and answered his questions so perfectly. Judah, who had recently learned a great deal about how difficult it was to feel one thing inside and another outside, found herself reluctantly impressed. That was her first glimpse of the steel in Elly. There would be more.

  And then Judah thought again about the way Elban had watched her across the room as Elly sat on his lap: the frigid gleam of satisfaction in his eyes, the cruelest hint of a smile. It was the same expression he wore at solstice parties when two courtiers held one of their subtle, sniping arguments, competing for his favor. Although Judah was young, some prescient part of her realized that she was supposed to hate this girl. They had been set against each other like rats in a cage. The sense of rebellion she’d thought dead in the study flared back to life. Who, in this entire palace, should be more her friend than this girl, who no more belonged here than Judah did, for all her quaint braids and pretty manners?

  She knelt down—stiffly—in front of the girl. “He doesn’t like anybody. He hates me. He’d kill me, if he could. Oh, please stop crying.” The girl’s sobs were stabbing blades in Judah’s skull, they made the cut on her thigh sting and burn. Judah reached out and touched Elly’s hand. Theron laid his head on the pale girl’s shoulder.

  Elly peered up at her. Something about the angle of her head made Judah realize that her eyes looked so big because her face was too thin. “You’re Lady Clorin’s foundling.”

  “Judah,” Judah said, and then—unexpectedly—felt Gavin’s hand on her shoulder.

  “My foster sister,” he said.

  Elly gazed up at him, her face tearstained and frightened. “I don’t want to go back. They can’t send me back.”

  “They won’t,” Gavin said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I won’t let them,” he said. For the first time ever, he sounded like his father. Judah remembered stifling a shudder, and being surprised, because it was harder than stifling a scream.

  * * *

  Arkady was a revolting person, but he was a good magus. His poultice worked well, and the person who wasn’t actually hurt healed faster, and the next morning the egg on Judah’s leg was barely a pebble. A summons from the Seneschal arrived for her with breakfast. Putting him off was pointless; he would send page after page, and eventually come to find her himself. So she made her way to his tiny office. It was poorly ventilated and his door was propped open with a brick to let in the fresher air from the corridor. Inside, he sat at his desk with his collar unbuttoned. The Seneschal’s job—one of them—was to maintain protocol, but he only did so when it mattered. It was among his few redeeming qualities.

  She tapped on the open door. He glanced up and beckoned her toward the only chair, which was straight-backed and hard. He was a solid man and in the tiny room he seemed like an extra wall behind his desk, unsmiling in his gray uniform, his hair cut so short that it was as colorless as the rest of him. “I’m surprised,” he said. “I thought I’d have to send at least three messages before I saw you.”

  “Well, you didn’t,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “One moment.” He bent back over the ledger in front of him.

  The desk was covered in clutter. From where Judah sat she could see three inkwells, two broken pens, countless piles of books and scrolls and papers; through the open window she could see the massive gate in the Wall, closed and barred today. The gate was opened one day a week, six men working each enormous winch, to let in the supplies that the House couldn’t produce itself, and once a year for new staff. She and Gavin had stolen a glimpse of Staff Day once, the lines of ten-year-olds in worn city clothes trying not to be frightened. Darid had been one of those children once. She wondered if the Seneschal had.

  There was only one other way through the Wall to the city: the Safe Passage, a twisting maze of switchbacks and locked doors, deliberately built to be confusing if you didn’t know the way. Twice a year, when the Seneschal led the four of them, flanked fore and aft by House Guards, to the Lord’s Balcony for Elban’s speech, they had to pause every few yards so the Seneschal could unlock and relock the doors. The floor was cove
red in woven mats of oiled rushes to waterproof them, and their stench permeated the air. Every month, as Lady-to-be of the City, Elly had to oversee the replacement and oiling of the rushes while the Seneschal stood, keys in hand, and watched, wordless as stone.

  He seemed just as stony now as Judah waited. She had spent too much of her life sitting in this chair; too many long, agonizing minutes staring out this window and biting back her words. Just being here made her tongue ache. Usually his summonses heralded some unpleasant new change in her life, like being banned from the library or expected to attend state dinners. She wondered what it would be today. His pen scratched. The window did not close tightly enough to block out the creak of cart wheels, the shuffle of feet on cobblestone, the muffled voices of the courtyard staff. Life being lived. She sat. She waited.

  Finally, he closed the ledger, put down his pen and looked at her. “Are you well?”

  Judah shrugged.

  He waited a moment, and when she still said nothing, leaned back in his chair. “So much for the pleasantries. We’ll get to it, shall we? I was reminded this morning of a conversation I’ve been meaning to have with you. I’ve been putting it off, because it’s not a particularly pleasant conversation.”

  In the study, when Judah was eight, the Seneschal had held a hot coal to her foot, over and over again, until Gavin could bite back the pain, and not cry. “I didn’t know you had a preference for pleasant conversations,” Judah said.

  “I don’t have a preference for unpleasant ones. At the Wilmerian dinner, you were seated next to a courtier. Firo of Cerrington.”

  “I sat where I was put.”

  “You were not put there with the expectation that you would be seen leaving the hall with him.”

  “I didn’t leave the hall with him. Find one person who saw me leave the hall with him.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said patiently. “It is believed that you were seen leaving the hall with him. That’s enough. Did he speak to you?”

  “He may have complimented my dress.” Even if it is Lady Eleanor’s winter solstice gown from two years past, it’s been remade well, he’d said. It wasn’t true. The dress had been remade terribly. They always were.

  “Your position here is—strange,” the Seneschal said. “You have privileges, but no rank; a soft life, but no status. Your only purpose is to stay alive and healthy so that Lord Gavin stays alive and healthy.”

  “You say all of this like it’s new to me.”

  He nodded. “We haven’t given up, you know. We’re still hunting for the midwife who brought you here. And one of the reasons Lord Elban is so interested in the Nali is that there are aspects of their culture that we would consider unnatural.”

  “Unnatural, like me?” Judah said.

  “Well, you’re not Nali, if that’s what you’re thinking. But the bond that keeps you here is unnatural, yes. The hope is that we can use Nali knowledge to understand how to break that bond.”

  “I’m not sure that would be to my benefit.”

  “Your concern isn’t entirely unfounded. But Lord Gavin is very attached to you, as is Lady Eleanor. The closer they come to power, the more that matters.”

  “Elly gets power? She’ll be delighted to hear it. We were all under the impression that she had nothing to do but oil the rushes and breed.”

  The Seneschal’s eyebrows lifted, which was as close as he ever came to emotion. “And here we are. Arrived at the point.”

  “Which is?”

  “No lovers,” he said. “Not for you. Not ever.”

  Unexpectedly, she found herself wanting to laugh. “What?”

  “Women die in childbirth, and in pregnancy, and trying to end pregnancy. Lovers driven mad by jealousy lash out in violent ways. We can’t risk any of that.”

  Then she actually did laugh. “And where are they,” she said, when she could speak again, “these lovers who’ll be driven mad with jealousy over me? They sound unbalanced. I’d like to think I’d have better taste.”

  “Judah,” he said.

  “Maybe you should post a guard at my door.”

  “Hopefully it won’t come to that.”

  Her laughter died. “There’s a thing called a joke.”

  “I wasn’t making one.” He sighed. “We were hoping to find a solution before now. We should have done things differently, kept you hidden. But we didn’t, and now, like it or not, people expect to see you. Like at the state dinner for the Wilmerians, or the betrothal ball next month. They’re interested in you. Too interested, honestly. If they didn’t see you, they’d talk. Ask questions. As it is, they spin all sorts of nonsensical tales about you and Lady Eleanor and the young lord. Particularly after Lord Gavin kicked out the last nurse.”

  The nurses had all been old, tongueless women who sat in the parlor between their bedrooms all night to prevent what the Seneschal called impropriety. When they were seventeen, Gavin had picked the last one up physically, put her in the hallway, and refused to allow another one back in.

  “They are nonsense, I hope,” the Seneschal continued.

  For a moment Judah thought he meant the nurses. Then she caught up. “They must be, because I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “People think your relationship with Lord Gavin has—transgressed. Inappropriately.”

  She blinked. “What, they think we’re in love?”

  “Something like that. I’ve never believed it, or we’d have had this conversation years ago.”

  “That’s absurd. Gavin is—” She fumbled for the words. “We’re not like that. He’s not. I’m not.”

  The Seneschal picked up a stack of paper and moved it a few inches to the left. It occurred to Judah that the man was embarrassed. “I’m glad to hear it. Lord Gavin mostly favors his mother, you know, in both appearance and manner, which is to his benefit. But there does seem to be one way in which he favors his father. So it’s natural, when his appetite for women is well known, that the women close to him would be scrutinized. After the wedding, most of the talk should die down.”

  Appetite for women. Judah didn’t like that phrase, as if the women Gavin pursued were so many plates of food placed in front of him.

  The Seneschal was still talking. “When we no longer need to have you and Lady Eleanor publicly not hating each other—”

  “Elly and I don’t hate each other.”

  “—then we’ll arrange for you to miss one court event, and eventually another. In time—”

  “I’ll be in complete seclusion,” Judah said grimly. “So why worry about my thousands of lovers?”

  “You should be grateful. You could have been in complete seclusion all along. Anyway, don’t be so pessimistic. Maybe we’ll be able to arrange for you to be pledged to a celibate guild, eventually. One of the bookish ones; that would seem to suit you.” He folded his hands on the desk, his eyes hard and cold. “In the meantime, we cannot risk even the suggestion of disloyalty. Therefore, you cannot mix with the courtiers. At all. They have spent their entire lives training in manipulation and intrigue and they will eat you alive.”

  Judah was picturing herself in some cold guildhall on a hill, all rocks and sackcloth and arcane rituals with no actual purpose. “You’re the one who put me next to him at the damn table.”

  “I am deathly serious, Judah. You have a reputation for doing whatever you want, regardless of what’s right or proper, and we have indulged Lord Gavin by indulging you. Frankly, what you do or don’t do has never mattered, as long as you weren’t physically hurt. But the time for indulgence is past, and now, in this matter, you will obey. I am deathly serious,” he said again.

  “How deathly serious can you be?” Judah said. “It’s not like you can kill me.”

  “No. We can’t kill you.” Now, for the first time, he smiled: a sad smile, and weary. “How young you are. How l
ittle you know.”

  * * *

  Exiting the Seneschal’s office into a swirl of rushing pages and staff, Judah churned with fury. So she wasn’t supposed to talk to the courtiers; who wanted to? But Gavin, Elly and Theron were too busy to talk much these days. Darid wasn’t supposed to talk to her at all. One day he’d get tired of risking his head and very gently ask her not to come back. The life she saw stretching in front of her may have been soft and privileged, as the Seneschal had said, but it was also bleak and lonely. By the time they shipped her off to a guild, she might not mind leaving.

  Meanwhile, she wasn’t interested in lovers or courtiers, so she’d lost nothing. She didn’t know why she was so angry. Her boots were on her feet and her work gloves were stuffed in her pocket; she would go to the stables while she still could.

  The most direct route was the Promenade, a paved path that wound through the most charming parts of the garden. Normally Judah avoided it but today she resented having to go out of her way. The day was sunny and not too cold, and courtiers were gathered into stinging nosegays at every fountain and bench. They knew how to angle their bodies in morning light and afternoon, where to stand to ensure the vistas behind them made the loveliest backdrops; they knew, to a one, which plants and shrubs would complement the colors they wore. For the courtiers, self-awareness was an art. If one watched—if, say, one was forced to attend a state dinner—one could observe each courtier cycling through the poses and angles they believed most flattering. A tilted head here, a bent shoulder there. Over and over.

  Now, like paintings, the courtiers stood frozen and silent in each gallery she passed. Unlike paintings, they erupted into bursts of laughter and chatter as soon as she was out of sight, which only stoked the fire inside her. She knew the picture she made in Gavin’s old coat and Theron’s old boots and Elly’s old dress with the worn lines where the seams had been let out. Let them recoil. She was no business of theirs and they were no business of hers and it wouldn’t hurt their pretty little eyes to see something ugly now and again. She held her head up. She took her time.