Judah felt like she’d stumbled into some deep pit of feeling in Darid, something secret and uncomfortable. He wouldn’t look at her. Awkwardly, she said, “I’m shocked to learn that there’s an animal you don’t like.”
Then he did look at her, sidelong. “Well, I didn’t much like the kennel master, either. And he didn’t like me.”
“I can’t imagine anyone not liking you,” she said without thinking, because her mind was still in the western woods. Then she realized what she’d said and blushed. He turned away to hide a grin and she knew he was trying to be kind, which just made it worse. To be standing here, chatting about animals. She couldn’t stay anymore. She left.
* * *
She had barely pushed open the parlor door before Elly snatched it away from her. Judah could smell the fumes from the rush oil clinging to her, and her blue eyes were bloodshot—after finishing the rushes, she must have spent the rest of the morning reading in the Lady’s Library. “Oh,” Elly said, disappointed. “I thought you were them. They should be back by now, shouldn’t they?”
“I don’t know.”
Elly wrapped her arms around herself. “Did you eat? There was food, but I made them take it away. The smell. I can get more.”
“I’m fine.”
“Judah.” She sounded desperate. “Something is wrong.”
Judah remembered Gavin the night before, laughing and smiling at all of them through the blackness growing inside. She forced a curious smile. “What makes you say that?”
“Oh, don’t,” Elly said, impatient. “Gavin can get away with that. You can’t. You’re bad at it. And I don’t know. Everything. Theron on the hunt. You. The courtiers I see in the hall. The way the girl who came to get the lunch tray looked at me.” Her lips pressed together. She grabbed Judah’s hands and held them tight. “I feel like there’s something everybody knows but me. Is it that stupid woman? Is she pregnant?”
“I don’t think so.” Judah had no idea.
“But there’s something,” Elly insisted.
Her eyes were intense, pleading. Judah wanted to tell her—it seemed only fair, since the rest of Elly’s life was at stake, too—but what was the point? If the hunt went the way Elban wanted it to go, if it didn’t, there was nothing either of them could do. They were powerless, Elly and Judah both. They could only wait. “Nobody tells me anything, Elly,” Judah said wearily.
Elly let go of Judah’s hands and sank down on the sofa. “Furniture,” she muttered, and Judah said, “What?”
“Furniture.” Elly’s voice was dull, frustrated. “That’s how my mother told me to think of myself when she sent me here. Furniture, to be moved from one place to another as it suited.” She picked up the deck of cards. “Come on, Jude. There’s no point in brooding. Let’s play cards.”
When the girl brought the dinner tray, Judah jumped up so quickly at the sound of the door that she was dizzy. The girl was nervous. Elly asked her if the hunt was back and she mumbled, “Don’t know, Lady,” and fled.
“Well, that was helpful,” Elly said.
“They’re back,” Judah said.
“How do you know?”
The dizziness hadn’t subsided. It was worse, even. Judah’s hand went to the chair for support. “Because Gavin’s getting drunk.”
Elly cursed. Which almost never happened. “That idiot. Sit down before you fall down.”
“No.” Judah held up her bandaged hand. “He’s not allowed to hide from us. He and I have been through this.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“No,” Judah said. “Stay here. What if Theron comes back?” And she left.
Outside, she wheeled around a corner and felt like her head was spinning on a different axis from the rest of the world. Being Gavin-drunk was different from being drunk herself: when her own body was drunk, numbness filled her like water. When Gavin was the one doing the drinking, the confusion only rose partway, and the clear, sober part of her tossed wildly like a boat on its surface. This was how she felt every night Gavin spent with the courtiers. When she knew to expect it, it could be sort of enjoyable. Tonight, it made her angry.
By the time she reached the stairs, something unfamiliar was edging out the haze of alcohol. She pushed open the door just enough to slip through. The door’s latch clicked and the noise broke in her ears. Her steps felt too big. She was suddenly unsure of the floor. Putting a hand to the wall to steady herself, the stone felt soft under her fingers, almost luxurious.
In her tiny boat on top of the maelstrom, Judah saw, in her mind’s eye, a crystal vial, passed from pale delicate hand to pale delicate hand. This was what the drops felt like, then. She marveled, dimly, that the courtiers managed to take them and do anything else.
Gavin. She was looking for Gavin.
She stumbled her way through the evening-dim corridors, the deep, lugubrious waters surging beneath her. The House wrapped around her, in all of its complicated vastness, binding her like the corsets she refused to wear. She had long ago stopped noticing the ancient paintings that hung in its halls but now the strange flat-faced people in their odd clothes seemed far more real than the living people she passed. The sober part of her knew they were nothing to be scared of, but the dull faded faces seemed filled with hate. Vicious. Worse than any courtier. The waves of Gavin-feeling were increasingly violent. Occasionally one swept over her and swamped the tiny boat that was all she had left of herself, making her clutch the walls for support.
No, she thought, furious, the third time this happened. I am not Gavin. I am not hiding in a room somewhere. I am Judah. I am me. Ferociously, she pushed the waves back. She had been pushing back his pain since she was eight years old. This was no different. Her tiny boat grew slightly larger, slightly more sure. She forced herself upright again, and kept going.
Into the solarium, gaudy with courtiers and weird purple gaslights. Too much light. Too many smells. There was music but it didn’t make any sense. She tried to feel for Gavin, but to reach out for him she had to push him back and it was too much, too strange. A hand took her arm.
“Judah,” Firo said in her ear. “What are you doing here, dear girl?”
With no little difficulty, she shook him off. “I’m not a girl. Not your dear.”
He turned her toward him. The gems in his ears glittered black as eyes. She could feel his actual eyes peering closely at her, and when he spoke again his voice was yellow with laughter. “Why, you’re drunk. At the very least. This is no place for you to be out of your head, Judah. Come along, now.”
“No.” The floor felt strange underfoot. Soft. Stretchy.
“Just for coffee.” He sounded impatient. “Something to eat.”
She should not go with him. She knew that. But he was already leading her out of the too-loud, too-bright room; down a purplish hallway to one of the retiring rooms, where food and coffee was always laid out, where the music was quieter and a conversation could be had. In the daytime they were all polished brass and white linen, but this one was firelit and choked with thick herbal smoke that burned her eyes. In a corner she thought she saw two figures twined together in a chair but in her altered state, the deep-colored drapes at the windows seemed to be twining and caressing each other, too, so she didn’t trust what she saw.
Firo deposited her in an empty corner and told her to wait. Curious eyes seemed to glint at her from the two twining figures. She thought she heard foundling. She thought she heard witchbred. Then Firo was pressing a cup of coffee into her hands, delicate white china instead of the thick ceramic they used upstairs. He sat down next to her. She thought he touched her hair, pushed some of it behind her ear. She might have imagined it. She trusted nothing.
“The hunt,” she said.
“Very disappointing. Drink your coffee.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. That’s why it was
disappointing.”
“Theron?”
His smile rang off-key and discordant in her ears. “Lord Theron lives, foundling.”
Her worry had been a knotted rope inside her and when she heard those words it snapped, it recoiled, it waved madly around inside her. “To your dismay,” she managed to say.
“To the dismay of some,” he corrected. “To the rejoicing of others.”
“Who?”
“Guess.”
Judah closed her eyes briefly. But her eyelids were lined with colorless shapes that she did not like so she opened them again, and said, “I don’t speak courtier.”
“Particularly not in your current state. Who in the world got you like this, and why didn’t they stay to finish the job? Setting you free in the solarium like that is throwing a baby bunny to the hounds.”
“Shut up. Tell me what you know.”
“Well, which, dear?” He laughed, delighted with either the question or her muddled state. When she bristled—was she sprouting actual bristles?—he held up a jeweled hand. “Easy, foundling. Don’t call any more attention to yourself than you must. It’s considered poor taste to notice other people on a night like this, but I’m not sure you count as people. Also, I know nothing. I only hear things. There’s a subtle but real difference.”
“What,” Judah said, “do you hear?”
He had full lips. It was obvious that he painted them. Now they curved faintly. “I hear that the young lord is not strong, and rather clumsy. Liable to suffer illness or accident at any moment. And I hear that the weak-minded Lord Gavin is so taken with Lady Amie of Porterfield that he’s considering renouncing Lady Eleanor, and taking Amie as Lady, instead.”
“Not true.”
“Drink your coffee.” This time there was no doubt; he pushed her unbound hair back behind her shoulder and let his fingers linger there. “I’m not concerned with what’s true. Merely what I hear.” He leaned forward and she felt those painted lips brush her ear. His consonants were sharp, almost painful. “If Lady Eleanor were renounced, of course, it would be a terrible shame for her. And I very much doubt that poor sheepish Tiernan can afford the repayment of her bride-price. Come closer, foundling. You must seem like you’re enjoying yourself.”
Firo’s body radiated heat next to hers and his perfume was velvet-heavy and dark brown. Judah felt like she was choking. “Elban wants to marry her.”
“That’s another rumor, yes.” His lips were touching the skin under her ear now, making her skin crawl, making her want to writhe. “But if such a marriage were to come to pass, my ebony-eyed darling, you would want to be very careful with yourself. You would, in fact, want to make yourself as scarce as possible. Lady Amie will not share her prize with anyone. She will want Lord Gavin utterly to herself. I risk my own future even being seen with you, which is why we’ve suddenly become so intimate. I shall tell everyone that you, poor naive thing that you are, got foolishly drunk and threw yourself at me. I’ll be disgustingly detailed and, of course, reject you brutally. The other courtiers will love it.”
The tip of his nose, cold and smooth, touched the tender skin under her ear. For a moment he was a great snake wrapped around her, the hand on her arm a coil and the arm pressing her body to his another. For a moment she was afraid.
“I have to find Gavin.” Her voice sounded too loud.
She wasn’t talking to Firo. Not really. Voices in the corridor grew louder and she sensed somebody stepping into the door. Firo’s eyes moved toward them. He grabbed the side of her head, pulled it toward his. “Vanish, little foundling. Right now.” Suddenly he stood up, unbalancing her. She slid boneless to the floor and landed on her knees. From far away, she saw her coffee cup topple onto the rug, and heard distorted laughter. “Go,” Firo said. “Get out. Thing.”
She stumbled to her feet and ran.
* * *
The hallucinations were getting worse. She couldn’t go back to Elly. Not empty-handed. Not in the state she was in. And she felt a powerful urge to actually set eyes on Theron, to prove that at least some of the words that came out of Firo’s mouth were true. So she made her way to the workshop. The floor oozed like lamp oil underfoot and made her queasy. The workshop door was closed. She pulled it open, not caring if she startled him, only caring that he was actually there.
And he was. Sitting at his workbench in his hunting clothes—although the quilted jacket lay puddled on the floor where it had been dropped—and staring blankly at the spidery device he was building, which seemed somehow more whole than the last time Judah had seen it. The relief that flooded her smelled like lemons. She could only lean against the wall and stare. He was safe. He was whole. He was safe.
But there was blood spattered on his cheek, and more on his shirt. A single drop marred one lens of his glasses; behind it, his eyes were swollen and lifeless. Doll’s eyes, made of glass. For a moment, he seemed wooden and covered in cloth, like a minstrel’s puppet. She closed her eyes and when she opened them he was real again.
“Tell me,” she said.
He didn’t answer. The silence tasted coppery, like the blood on his glasses, and it swirled, and Judah almost lost herself in it. Then he said, “They killed a deer,” and his words were made of stone, like the walls and the floor. They had solidity and weight. The room filled with them.
* * *
In stories someone killed an animal and the animal died. Then he drew his bow and did slay the beast. With his sword he struck a goodly blow and thus the beast was slain. Theron’s words were words like fix and repair and assemble and he knew the depths those words contained, how they were the stories of things: how you couldn’t fix a thing without understanding what it was for, and how it was meant to work, and the sophistication of the mind that had created it; how repairing was not a task to be checked off a list but an act of devotion, a moment of communion between one human being and the world. How assembling was a miracle as deep and beautiful as the stars. The conception of a thing that did not exist, the drawing of a path toward existence. Think of gold, mined in streams and rivers and veins beneath the earth’s surface. Think of cogs, and the perfect distance between the teeth. Think of one gem, perfectly cut. One piece of metal. One idea. One machine.
Fix. Repair. Assemble.
As he followed his father and brother through the woods, unfriendly smirking courtiers all around them, words like hunt and kill and death seemed simpler. Putting a fire out was less miraculous than starting one. Watching clockwork wind down was less incredible than winding it up. Firing an arrow was an action Theron understood; the bow was a machine like any other, one that channeled the strength of the arm, magnified by the force of the pull, into the tiny point at the head of the arrow. Everything else—the fletching, the balance of the projectile—was refinement. Making sure the arrowhead hit exactly where it would be most efficient. One of the big veins in the throat, probably. Or the heart. Or through the eye to the brain.
He thought he could fire the arrow, hit the target. When they saw the deer in the clearing, the eye was too small, so it would have to be the heart or the vein. He admired the way the deer’s legs were put together, built for fleetness and silence. He saw in an instant how the tendons and muscles were connected. He found these things beautiful, like the horses they rode, like anything that was designed to do a thing as perfectly as possible. He had time to consider that the horses were bred the way they were, but the world had created the deer on its own. He had time to marvel.
Then his father raised his bow, and his black-fletched arrow flew.
It struck far from any vital target, in the big muscle of the deer’s hind flank, and at first he thought the shot was bad. But from the smirking courtiers he heard a murmur of approval. “Excellent shot, Lord Elban,” one said, even as the deer bolted and the hunting party—horses and men and fearsome grizzled hounds that stood almost to Theron’s shoulder—took up
the chase. Theron was confused. It hadn’t been an excellent shot. It had been inefficient and wasteful.
His horse was well-bred and well-trained and needed no instruction from him. “Just hang on,” Gavin had muttered when the horses were led in front of them and Theron had gulped at the size of them, and as the horses gave chase to the wounded deer, just hang on was exactly what Theron did. He’d had daydreams—childish fantasies, he now understood—that while riding he would draw his bow and fire, but there was no question of loosing his grip on the pommel long enough to reach into the quiver that hung over his back for an arrow, let alone setting the bow and firing it, let alone in motion. Just hang on. Ahead of him, he could see that Gavin wasn’t just hanging on. Gavin rode the machine that was his horse as if he had been designed for it, as if they were two machines working toward one goal. He even had time to glance quickly back toward Theron, to make sure he was just hanging on. It had always been that way. If the human body was a machine, Theron knew his own had been poorly built from half-functional parts. Even now his lungs were tight and he had no peripheral vision, around the lenses of his glasses. Gavin was the perfected model, the very best plans and the very best parts. Theron was built from what was left over.
But his mind was quicker than Gavin’s, his fingers more nimble, and ever since realizing the difference between them—ever since realizing that he was not going to mysteriously wake up one day in a strong, capable body like his brother’s—he had done everything possible to avoid putting himself in any position where those advantages were worthless. And yet, here he was. The horse under him ran. He tried to keep from flailing and falling. It was the best he could do.
The hounds barked. The deer, limping badly, wheeled on its good leg, and just as it did another arrow flew, this one fletched in red. It landed deep in the other flank. A cheer went up. Blood drops falling from the first wound were joined by drops from the second. The hounds were deranged, slavering and snapping at the deer. Theron was baffled. What was happening, what was going on? They had come to kill the deer, and he knew there must be depths to kill that he didn’t understand, but why weren’t they even trying? Why were they doing such a bad job?
The Unwilling Page 13