The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  The girl was still for a moment. Then her small chin jutted out. “I can.”

  Nate wondered what she was giving up. “All right. Try to keep him out in the sun as much as possible. And feed him pork and eggs. Can you get pork and eggs?”

  “There’s a pigmonger down the street from us.” She sounded uncertain.

  Nate took a measured breath in, let a measured breath out, and gave her his eggs. Her eyes grew wide at the unexpected bounty and Nate was ashamed of his own pangs of loss. “You know how to cook those?” he said.

  “Sure,” she said happily. Then a shadow fell across her face. “You have anything needs cleaning? Or errands? I’m a fast runner. And I can write. For messages.”

  That last was said with no small amount of pride. “Owe me one,” Nate said. The girl nodded; then she, the baby and the eggs all disappeared through the slop gate. It was his least satisfying interaction of the day. Pull a tooth, pop a shoulder back into place: those were easy. With a good diet, and a mother who didn’t spend all of her daylight hours in a paper factory, both of the children would be fine. They didn’t have either of those things. There was nothing he could do about it.

  Nobody else came through the gate. He waited a few minutes, just to be sure. Then he took the rag down off the fence and went back inside.

  * * *

  “Guildsmen are savages,” Arkady said when he returned a few hours later. He was drunk. When he was drunk, he liked to sit in the parlor and feed the fire obscene amounts of wood until it roared; then he liked to sit by the obscene roaring fire and expound on the state of the world, and he liked for someone to sit and listen. Before Nate had come along, Vertus had served as audience, but now Vertus was free to do as he wished as long as he kept bringing wine.

  “The crazy guilds—the ones that spend their lives dancing in circles and singing—” the old man said now, “you expect them to be idiots. The craft guilds, though. You’d think, they can make a thing. They have a skill. But these Wilmerians. It’s like they can’t think about anything that’s not a bloody pot or a bloody tank of gas. Even the Guildmaster. Man gets milk-sick and even as he cries and moans and shits himself half to death, there’s a plate of cheese on the table.”

  “The Temple Argent used to deliberately leave their wounds untreated,” Nate said. “They thought it was a sign of faith.”

  “The Temple Argent never bloody existed.”

  They had. Nate had been to the ruins of the great stronghold, perched on the cliff above the cold, raging sea. But he didn’t see the point of saying so. “The stories exist.”

  Arkady grinned. “Ah, the tales of heroism. When the warrior priestesses of the Temple Argent battled the sorcerers of Pala to the end of the earth, and scorched the north with ice and fire. As if a bunch of women could form an army worth anything. Had an uncle who used to tell such stories when I was a child. A drunken idiot like the one I wasted my time on this afternoon. Of course, the wine wasn’t a waste. I’ve been drinking Sevedran all afternoon. Makes this taste like cat piss. You ever had Sevedran?”

  “It comes from the other side of the Barriers, doesn’t it?”

  “That it does.” Arkady made a satisfied noise and settled deeper into his chair. “Even the courtiers hardly ever see it, but today this cunning young courtier creature convinced the wine steward to break a few bottles free. Twinkled her pretty blue eyes and purred at him that she loved it most specially and even that stingy old bastard couldn’t tell her no.” He shook his head. “Probably doesn’t hurt that she’s got young Lord Gavin in her pocket, if what I hear is true.”

  Nate felt a faint flare of alarm. The fewer pockets Elban’s heir spent time in, the easier his task would be. “Is that an accomplishment?”

  “Meh. He’ll go after anything that sparkles at him. Lord Elban, too—although they never seem to like his attention much, once they’ve got it.” Arkady’s smile was unpleasant. “But this one’s smart. Porterfield girl. They’re all crafty.”

  “Her family is from this neighborhood?”

  Arkady laughed. “They own this neighborhood, boy. It’s bloody named for them. Quick as thieves, the lot of them. I remember this one’s father, in the old days. Vicious. Wouldn’t cross him.” There was admiration in the old man’s voice. “And his sister! Oh, the lady courtiers, boy. Particularly those with the coin to afford rooms inside. Nothing like what you see out here. Not that I could ever get under one of the Porterfield girls’ skirts, but there were others. Less proud. There used to be this drug from over the Barriers. Nowadays, they use those drops, and they get hooked if they use enough, but I think half of them are just in it to show off their vials. That drug, though—oh, they would just tremble for it, those courtiers. An excellent cure for pride, that was.”

  “What was the drug?”

  “Who knows? I had a man who brought it into the city for me, special. Lord Elban held most of it, but I always managed to keep a bit on me to grease the wheels. Then one day, my man was supposed to show up and didn’t. Supply dried up. Had a lot of sick courtiers for a while. Sick and desperate. Couldn’t be convinced that I didn’t have any, some of them. Willing to do anything for it. An interesting time. That was back before Lady Clorin died, of course.”

  “You knew Lady Clorin?”

  “That one.” Arkady rolled his eyes. “Always crying, always sick.” Then he seemed to realize what he was saying and hastily added, “Poor thing, with all her dead babies. Sad.”

  “Two of them lived, though. And the foundling.”

  A hard glint came into Arkady’s eyes. “Indeed.”

  “Indeed?” Nate kept his voice neutral.

  “That foundling doesn’t belong inside. A place for everything and everything in its place.” Arkady leaned forward. The smell of wine on his breath nearly made Nate’s eyes water. “I’ll tell you something. Give you a piece of professional advice. You know why magi in Highfall only treat courtiers and merchants?”

  “Because they can pay.”

  “Well, yes. That. But not just that.” Arkady jerked his head toward the window. “All those people out there, the scrabblers and thieves and laborers. They’re necessary. They’re the bones that keep Highfall standing. But they’re no use to us weak.”

  Nate blinked in surprise. “Yes. I’ve been thinking that. I see children in the streets with sun-starvation—it’s easy to treat. There’s an oil made of junk fish—”

  But Arkady was shaking his head. “No, no, no. See here, boy. There’s two things we, as magi, can do for the scrabblers. We can treat each and every one of them, like the Elenesians do, at our own expense, and keep them healthy and strong. We’d never do anything else, of course, and the healthier they are, the more they breed. Inside two generations we’d have more workforce than we have jobs. We’d also have more bodies than we have houses and more mouths than we have food.”

  “We could build more,” Nate said. “Grow more.”

  “Not if the courtiers have any say in it, thank you. They’ve got the place divided up just the way they want it. All the right people are powerful and all the wrong ones aren’t. No, better to let nature take care of the scrabblers. Let the weak ones die. Not all the children you see in the streets are sun-starved, are they?”

  A chill came over Nate, despite the roaring fire. “No.”

  “There you go. The healthy ones, those are our factory workers, right there.”

  “The sun-starved ones can contribute, too.”

  “Maybe. If they live long enough. Better they don’t, though. Otherwise they’ll just spawn a bunch of children prone to sun-starvation, and everything starts all over again. We need the courtiers healthy. We need them smart, to run their provinces and factories, to manage trade. But the scrabblers are a crop that never stops growing.”

  “I see,” Nate said.

  “Just think of the plagues,” Arkady said. “
There’s always those that survive a plague. Maybe a few men are left with seed that won’t take, but for the most part, the strong ones live and the weak ones die. If you’ve ever been here after a plague—once it’s run its course, I mean—what a sight, young Nathaniel. What a sight. The streets are so clean.”

  Except for the dead bodies, dying orphans and ashes from the pyres. “So you think the foundling should have been left to die? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I think raising a rat in the stables doesn’t make it a horse,” Arkady said.

  * * *

  In the caravans, there were a thousand ways to make a living and none to make a fortune, but it was enough. Nate’s mother had said that. The wisdom of Caterina Clare: you’re born with your blood, but you earn the dust on your shoes. Judge a lie by the fruit it bears, but don’t judge a man in a box for not noticing the stars. Rain falls where it will; keeping out of it is up to you. Have patience with drunks and little children, for we’ve all been one and we could easily end up the other.

  He did not sleep well the night after Arkady’s trip to the palace. Trying to figure out if there was a way to have patience with Arkady, to believe that the things he’d said were just drunkenness and spite. He didn’t know where Arkady had been born, how he’d lived. Maybe he’d spent his entire life in Highfall. Maybe that life had been too easy, or not easy enough. Maybe he was the man in the box who never noticed the stars.

  Or maybe he was a mean old shit who didn’t care what happened to the world as long as he got his.

  Nate racked his brain, trying to think of some herb he could give Arkady that would incapacitate him just enough to render him needy but not dead. And he came up with a few, but they were slow. Too slow. He did not have years to make Arkady clumsy and weak, not when Elban’s heir was nearly betrothed, attractive courtiers were complicating matters, and Arkady thought of the foundling as a rat in the stable. If the young lord was careless with his seed, Nate needed to know that, and sooner rather than later. If she was in danger, he needed to know that, too. (The very idea made him feel half-suffocated.) He had months, and not many of them.

  Books were rare in the caravans—they were heavy and took up space—so they kept only those with value. And the most precious of all were Caterina’s journals. She hadn’t written them all, but they were hers now, and if Nate ever made it back, someday they would be his. They held the life knowledge of a half-dozen traveling herbalists, going back five generations to the days of John Slonim himself: every scrap of knowledge, every theory or rumor or vision. He would have cut off his left arm for an hour with those books now.

  In the morning, a sour, hungover Arkady sent him out for willowbark. Once Nate had it in his pocket, he wandered first the Grand Bazaar and then the Beggar’s Market, searching for an answer to his other, greater problem. When he didn’t find one, he tried a few of the smaller markets. There were no answers there, either. He was about to give up when he heard someone calling him.

  It was the girl from the day before and her brother, who seemed absurdly huge, tied precariously as he was on her back. The girl’s eyes were alert and interested and her forehead was beaded with sweat. “Gate Magus!” she said. “I was going to come see you later.”

  “How’s your brother?” Nate said, although it was too early for the eggs to have done any good.

  She cast a glance over her shoulder at the baby. “Oh, he’s fine. Although he weighs a bloody ton.”

  “I can show you a way to tie him on that’ll be easier on your back.”

  As he unwrapped the length of cloth she’d tied the boy with and then retied it—the baby gurgled delightedly, as if being juggled from one arm to another was a hilarious game—the girl said, “Ma gave me money to give you, for yesterday. You wouldn’t have had to wait except she was working the long shift and she just came home. Oh, that is better!” She eyed him skeptically. “How do you know about babies? You have a little one somewhere?”

  Nate blinked, and felt himself blush. He’d been matched, not long before he left—but he’d had no news of a child, although he wasn’t sure Derie would tell him if there was one. “Where I grew up, there were always babies around.”

  But she wasn’t listening. Digging in her pocket, she pulled out three copper coins, and held them out. “Will this do? For the eggs, too?”

  “More than enough.” He took it. “Thanks. I can’t remember the last time somebody paid me in actual money. How long is the long shift?”

  “Four days. It’s why I had Cantor with me to start with. Good thing, though. Ma said she hadn’t noticed about his head.”

  “You’re a good sister,” Nate said.

  “Yep,” she said proudly. “Anyway, now he can keep me company while I work, can’t you, Canty?”

  “What kind of work are you doing?”

  “Running messages.” She reached into her pocket again, this time producing a filthy piece of paper and a stub of pencil. “See? People tell me their messages and I write them down, then I read them back so they know I have it right. Then I take them to wherever and read them out again. Ma got me the paper from the factory.”

  Nate nodded. “That’s right. You told me yesterday you could write.”

  “I can do more than that. I can read, write, do numbers, everything. My brother’s inside. He paid for me to go to school.” He caught a flicker of something sad and stoic in her then; at first Nate thought it was the brother, gone forever inside the Wall—there was no coming out to visit once you went in—but then the girl said, “I’d learned it all, anyway, by now,” and Nate knew it was school she missed, and school she’d given up to take care of the baby. There was nothing he could do about that, but he felt her sadness like it was his own.

  Then her head went up and she put the sadness away. Nate could see her do it, could feel her pulling good cheer out of the heart of her like a carrot out of hard, frozen ground. “Well, customers waiting. I should fly.”

  You should, Nate thought. You won’t. Not in Highfall. Not in Brakeside. The sadness was crushing him. “Bring the baby back in a few weeks,” he said. “We’ll take a look at that head.”

  But she was already gone, calling her thanks over her shoulder.

  * * *

  On his way home he stopped at a tavern and bought a bottle of brandy with the coins the girl had given him. Sitting in the kitchen after Arkady had retired, he shared the bottle with Vertus, and if Vertus noticed that the sharing mostly consisted of Nate picking up the bottle and putting it down again without drinking, he didn’t say anything. Soon enough the servingman, too, stumbled off to bed. His bedroom was directly above the lab. Ordinarily, he was a light sleeper. He wouldn’t be that night.

  Nate waited a reasonable amount of time, though his own eyes were scratchy and sore with exhaustion. Then he took down the box where Arkady kept his tea. Barefoot, he carried it into the lab, careful to step on only the most solid floorboards; he’d been taking note of those that creaked for weeks, now.

  It didn’t take him long to find what he needed. The calculations took longer: the weight of the tea, the potency of the dose. Nate kept a tiny journal of his own tucked away in a pocket—nothing incriminating, out of context, and easily burned. If he made it home, he would transpose it into a real journal and add it to Caterina’s collection. For now, the scratch of his pen seemed very loud to him, and almost soothing. It made him think of being a child, lying in his bunk while his mother worked at her desk. The herb-and-resin smell of Arkady’s lab wasn’t entirely removed from the fragrant wood-and-incense smell of Caterina’s wagon. He could remember quite clearly what it had been like to be that little boy, lying under a quilt, knowing only the dusty ease of playing outdoors, the familiar excitement of setting up stage and footlights in a new town, the smoky campfire warmth of being loved by everyone around him. He’d had no notion, then, that he would ever cross the Barriers to the blue and gra
y spires of this strange, sad city, or that he would grow into a man who sat alone in a gloomy lab after midnight, figuring out how much poison per smallweight of tea. Not to kill; not right away; but to bring on a slow decline, a suffering shamble toward death. No long life lived on sun-starved bones. No convulsions. No spewing blood.

  Well, maybe at the end there would be.

  When he finished, he crept back to his pallet. He hoped he’d fall asleep immediately—he was exhausted—but instead he lay awake until morning, staring up at the ceiling he couldn’t see. Slowly, the light grew hazy around him. Then the sun rose, and he rose, too, and another day began.

  Chapter Four

  Judah found Gavin in the solarium. In a month’s time, the entire House would attend his betrothal ball there. Now, the room under the vaulted glass ceiling was like the Promenade brought indoors. Careful arrangements of sofas, ferns and potted trees carved temporary rooms out of the marble-tiled space, and every one of them was full. Any courtier who could afford to keep rooms inside hadn’t bothered going home for the few weeks until the ball. Even if Judah hadn’t spotted Gavin by the fountain, she would have known where he was by the way the courtiers subtly gravitated toward him, like flowers following the sun.

  But they wanted nothing at all do with Judah, and scattered before her like pigeons. Gavin stood with a tiny woman wearing a shade of fuchsia that barely escaped vulgar. She was young and her makeup was too heavy, but her hairstyle was relatively restrained and not too crowded with decorations. The lady courtiers were all draping themselves in stuffed birds and enameled insects this season, but this one wore only a single iridescent beetle over her right ear, where its blue-green shell brought out the strawberry in her hair. Her dress was trimmed in white fur and she’d brushed opal powder on her cheeks to make them sparkle. She reminded Judah of an iced cake, the kind that looked better than it tasted. Her blue eyes were round as sugar rosettes and about as lively. Or maybe Judah just disliked her on sight because she was a courtier, and seeing her laughing so easily with Gavin brought back all of the things she could do and Judah could not.