The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  “Run!” Elban cried, and bellowed something at the hounds, and the hunters roared. Up ahead, Gavin bent down low over his horse. Theron’s own mount seemed to lift under him; suddenly the world flew past. The motion was smooth and terribly fast and he could see nothing, not even with his glasses.

  He heard Elban’s voice again, cold and severe: “Hold!” The horses in front of Theron reared and stopped and Theron’s did, too, nearly throwing him in the process. Just hang on. He found himself next to Gavin, Elban on his brother’s other side. Again, Gavin risked a quick glance in Theron’s direction, the same old question in his eyes: Okay? Theron found himself in a tangle of reins and straps; they had seemed orderly enough in the beginning, but now they’d all come loose, and Theron felt like a fool, trying to assemble himself into the easy effortlessness his brother managed by nature. But he nodded. He was okay.

  In front of them, the hounds had circled the deer, growling. The deer’s injured back half trembled on legs oddly splayed. Theron saw that it was holding itself up on its bones because the muscles weren’t working. It was a doe, or at least antlerless; her wide eyes were terror-stricken, her mouth open and panting.

  The hounds would take it now. They would leap for the throat. It would be bloody. He must not flinch.

  “Take it,” Elban said.

  The biggest hound leapt—but not for the throat. Instead, the sleek gray beast went for the deer’s midsection, tearing loose a flap of skin. The deer squealed. Another hound went for one of the delicate forelimbs, and with a twist of the great head and an appalling snap, the deer went down to one knee. The courtiers cheered again.

  “Mark the time, Seneschal,” Elban said, a muted delight in his voice. The Seneschal took out a pocket watch and flipped it open. “Gentlemen, give your bets.”

  “Three minutes, Lord,” a courtier called out.

  “Five!” said another, and then all the men on horseback were shouting out numbers. Two. Three and a half. Seven. A dozen or so courtiers rode with them; every face matched Elban’s, in excitement and pleasure. Only one courtier was silent, a tall man with glittering onyx earrings who kept to the back, and he seemed to be watching his fellow hunters rather than the deer.

  “Heir,” Elban said. Heir meant Gavin. Theron had no idea what word Elban would use to address him. “What’s your bet?”

  Staring at the deer—who still struggled to stand, on two wounded legs and one broken one—Gavin was made of stone. “Eight minutes,” he said.

  Theron, with revulsion, realized they were betting on how long the deer would live. “Fifteen minutes,” Elban pronounced.

  Minute after minute passed: hard, gory minutes; minutes loud with horrendous animal screeching. Great spurts of blood shot toward the courtiers, making them crow with delight, as the hounds tore the deer apart, bit by bit. They ripped her legs out from under her and tore them off when she fell; they chewed off her ears and her tail, and Theron didn’t understand why the deer didn’t die of fear and pain, why no part of the deer’s brain called the battle for the hounds and let her suffering end. He didn’t understand how the courtiers could stand and laugh as the deer tried to put her least broken leg under her. His own mouth was dry, his skin cold. Gavin remained stony.

  “Why—d-doesn’t it die—” he finally muttered, drawing his horse close to his brother’s.

  “Because it wants to live,” Gavin said, his voice dull. “Everything wants to live.”

  On the other side of Gavin, Elban pulled at his reins. His horse stomped. “Does the Commander of the Army find the blood distasteful?”

  It was more words altogether than Theron’s father had ever said to him at once. “No, Lord,” Theron said. “I mean, I’m f-fine, Lord.” Cursed stutter.

  Elban’s ice-blue eyes fixed on him. “Time, Seneschal?”

  “Fourteen minutes,” the gray man said.

  “In one minute, Commander of the Army, I will have won the game. Do you think the beast can last one more minute?”

  The deer had given up standing. Her head lay in the dried needles and leaves on the forest floor. The hounds were disemboweling her with excruciating slowness. As Theron watched, horrified, she blinked. He could feel his tongue wanting to stutter. “Yes, Lord,” was all he dared say. Elban said nothing in response, and neither did anyone else. In a panic to fill the silence, Theron said, “What’s the p-prize, Lord?”

  “The p-prize?” Elban smiled. “Tell your brother what the p-prize is, heir.”

  “Anything he wants,” Gavin said.

  Theron felt sick.

  “Anything I want. That’s the p-prize. Anything, or anyone.” The courtiers laughed, hooting lewdly. “So. Just another day, I suppose.” He pulled his reins again. This time his animal backed up, took a few steps to the side. Now he was next to Theron. He wore black, as always. A silver dagger hung at his belt. He pulled it out and pointed it at Theron. “I’ll tell you what, Commander of the Army. When I have won my p-prize, you, too, may have what you want.” He flipped the dagger in his hand, extending it hilt-first. “You may kill the deer. End the p-poor thing’s suffering.”

  The last words dripped with sarcasm. The courtiers laughed again.

  Behind Elban, Gavin did not look up. Theron took the dagger.

  “Time, Lord,” the Seneschal said.

  Elban’s eyes glinted. Theron knew eyes didn’t really do that but some motion in the muscles around them made him understand how that expression came to be. “Well, then. Commander?”

  Still no help from Gavin. Slowly, Theron slid off his horse. His legs hurt and he paused for a moment with both boots on the ground, so he wouldn’t stumble. Elban made a noise in his throat that drew all of the hounds back from what was left of the deer, and Theron made himself watch to see if her chest still rose and fell. It did. The hounds had blank, all-black eyes. There were as many of them as there were men behind him and he felt the weight of all their gazes equally. Blood spattered their gray hides, dripped from their jaws as they panted; curious about this new thing on the ground, sensing that he was somehow neither master nor exactly prey.

  They had torn the deer’s chest open, exposing her ribs. I’ll just put the dagger through her heart, Theron thought. She won’t feel anything. She’ll just die. Then we can go back to the House. This will be over.

  The trees in the western woods were smooth-barked and still leafless, reaching skeletally up into the sky. Dead leaves crunched under Theron’s boots. He was acutely aware of the hunting horses behind him, all strong and quick and tall, the men on them strong and quick and tall, as well. He was the smallest, weakest thing in this clearing, with the possible—and only the possible—exception of the deer.

  He took another step. The deer’s eye—brown, not black—rolled toward him in the socket, to see what new torture he brought. He could not believe he had ever looked forward to this. He did not ever want to do it again.

  “Commander of the Army,” he heard his father sneer, behind him, and it made him angry. Who else was he supposed to be, other than who he was? How was he supposed to have grown into this person his father wanted, when his father refused to even acknowledge his existence? He gripped the dagger tightly, and made himself take the three steps to the deer.

  Oh, gods. The smell.

  He heard a noise behind him and turned.

  Gavin was off his horse. The noise he’d heard had been his brother’s boots hitting the ground. He had a dagger at his belt, too, except it wasn’t at his belt anymore. It was in his hand.

  He’s going to do it for me, Theron thought with a mixture of anger and relief. He doesn’t think I can do it. He thinks I’m a coward. He thinks I’m useless. He’s right. I am a coward. I am useless. Then Theron corrected himself, as he always did. No. I’m just useless at this. But I can help the deer. I will.

  Gavin’s lips were pressed tightly together, his face white.
He was holding himself strangely. Everything about him seemed strange. The dagger in his hand, poised to strike, his eyes fixed—

  On Theron.

  Behind him, Elban watched. There was no sound. Even the panting of the dogs had stopped.

  Gavin took two steps toward him.

  “No.” Theron didn’t mean to speak. Even as the word escaped his lips—without even a hitch, and ns were hard—he was thinking: this is not happening. This would not happen. The machine doesn’t work this way; this is not the plan; Gavin would not do this.

  Just hang on.

  Then Gavin moved. He had not seen his brother on the training field in so long. He had no idea how fast Gavin could be, and even now the part of his brain that appreciated a well-made machine was admiring the way all the parts of Gavin’s body worked with all the other parts, the fluidity of his movement, the sureness of his steps and the practiced line of his arm as he drew back the dagger; the way his brother’s torso and hips swiveled to deliver the maximum possible energy through the arm and wrist and hand to the weapon, focusing all of the strength and beauty that was the human body at its finest and best-trained into the fine-honed tip of the blade, sharpened beyond what the eye could see.

  Theron closed his eyes.

  A breeze. The warmth of his brother’s body passing within a hairbreadth of his own. A grunt, a thud.

  He opened his eyes. Gavin’s dagger was buried at the base of the deer’s skull. He had severed her spinal column. She was dead.

  All pleasure and excitement vanished from Elban’s face, replaced by anger and distrust. Gavin pulled his dagger from the deer’s body and wiped it on his trousers. With an illogical sidestep he swiveled, put himself between Theron and Elban. He still held the dagger point down but there was something dangerous in the set of his shoulders, the stance of his legs. It was a fighter’s stance. Gavin was waiting for an attack.

  Elban made a noise. The hounds all stood as one and took a step closer. The courtiers were silent. In front of Theron, Gavin’s shoulders flexed.

  Their father was going to kill them both. He would have them torn apart. “Gavin,” Theron said, low—meaning what? That he did not know what was going on, but he knew they were in danger. That he did not want to be torn apart by hounds.

  “Quiet.” Theron could barely hear him.

  The moment lasted only a few seconds but it also lasted longer than the fifteen minutes it had taken the deer to die. The moment lasted forever. “Well, then,” Elban said finally, as if they’d just finished a negotiation, although nobody else had spoken. He spun his horse and rode away. The courtiers followed. Gavin’s and Theron’s own horses, confused, stamped impatiently at the ground.

  “Gavin,” Theron said again.

  Gavin didn’t look at him. With the courtiers moving away, his whole body slumped, as if all of his bones had gone soft at once. Hoisting himself up onto his horse looked as if it took immense effort, and his posture in the saddle was grim. If posture could be grim. The human body was an amazing machine, not just effective but flexible and expressive. Even in defeat, Gavin was beautiful.

  “Come on,” he said over his shoulder. Theron came.

  * * *

  In the workshop, for the first time, Theron seemed to notice the spatter of dried blood on his glasses. Deer’s blood. He chipped at it with a broken fingernail. Judah found it too fascinating, the slow erosion of the perfect circle of blood.

  “He was supposed to kill me, wasn’t he?” Theron said.

  “He didn’t kill you,” Judah said. Her hallucinations were intense and the words came out a sideways purple color. She was glad Gavin had not killed Theron. She was glad of the fact of Theron, perched on his stool, warm and alive. But there was a reason she could not be happy. Something she was forgetting; something that was drowning with Gavin’s mind in whatever chemicals he’d found.

  Theron laughed. It was an ugly laugh. It huddled in a corner and brayed at them. “He thought about it, though. He seriously considered it.” He turned away from her, back to his machine. Like a door shutting. “Never mind, Jude. I’m okay.”

  “You’re not.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Judah’s chest opened like a box and something vicious and scarlet escaped it. She watched it swoop around the room, hot and unsteady like a bird with a broken flight feather. Then it vanished through the tapestry that led to the broken staircase.

  Her legs melted underneath her, and a soft gray nothing descended.

  * * *

  When she came to, she was sneezing. Gradually she realized she had been sneezing for some time. Apparently some part of her brain had been counting; she was at seven. By the time her eyes were fully open she was at fifteen. The light from the workshop’s one window seemed overly thick, a glowing fog that permeated the room, and her first dismayed thought was that the drops hadn’t worn off. But the fog was just sun hitting dust motes in the air. The edges of the room stayed where they were; the floor was solid. The world seemed to be behaving itself again.

  Theron had stretched out on his code-breaking table to sleep, but now he was sitting up, rubbing his eyes. His legs dangled over the edge like a child’s. Judah herself was still on the floor. Theron’s hunting jacket lay rumpled around her waist, having evidently been draped over her at one point. A pile of books sat where her head would have rested. She guessed that Theron was responsible for both things, and was touched: he had propped her head up with the books in case she vomited in her sleep, and covered her with his jacket in case she got cold. The books were dusty. That explained the sneezing. “What time is it?” she said.

  “Early,” Theron said.

  A bit unsteadily, she climbed to her feet. Every muscle in her back protested. As soon as she was upright, all of the previous forty-eight hours slid back down onto her, a curious mix of relief and horror. Gavin had not killed Theron: that was the relief, both the relief of Theron remaining alive and the joy of Gavin remaining the person she thought he was. The horror was that Elly would marry Elban now. Theron didn’t know that, she realized, and on the heels of that realization came another. Theron must not know, not for the longest possible time. It could not be helped now. It would only cause him pain.

  She made herself smile. It wasn’t too difficult. She would have Theron to smile at for years to come. “Let’s go find some coffee.”

  “No,” Theron said.

  “You’ll feel better when you’ve eaten.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “You can’t just stay up here.”

  “I’m not going to stay up here. I’m just not ready to come down yet.” He picked up his glasses from the bench and rubbed them on his shirt. “What am I going to say to him? Hey, older brother, thanks so much for not killing me?”

  “He would never have killed you.” Judah could say that, now that Gavin hadn’t.

  “I don’t even understand why. I don’t want to be Commander of the Army. I’d be terrible at it. They don’t have to kill me to keep me from doing it.” His voice was rich with anger and bitterness, which Judah’s brain processed properly, without adding taste or color. “Gavin knows I don’t want to do it. He told me I don’t have to.”

  Judah tried another smile. It was harder this time. “You don’t. But you do have to come downstairs eventually. Elly will worry.”

  “I’ll be down in a while,” he said. “Once I figure out what to say. I don’t want to tell her the truth. It will upset her.”

  It was too early for staff girls carrying breakfast trays, but late enough that a different, younger set of girls crouched next to piles of dirty shoes in the corridors outside the guest rooms, furiously brushing and polishing. None of the girls looked up when Judah passed. If anything, they tried to make themselves smaller. And shoes were one of the first tasks House staff were given when they came inside, so the
girls were pretty small already. The courtiers’ shoes, some high heeled and gaudy with embroidery and gems and some—Judah could not help but notice—tall mud-splattered hunting boots, seemed giant in their hands. In her younger years, when she’d come upon the newest staff members, Judah had been known to make her hair extra-wild and growl as she passed, to see them jump. Now she knew they’d been fed a steady diet of stories about the witchbred foundling from the moment they arrived, and felt sick at what she’d done.

  Or maybe she just felt sick.

  In the parlor she found Elly asleep on the sofa, sitting upright in the same dress she’d worn the day before, chin on her chest. Her sketchbook lay half off her lap, where it had slid when she’d drifted off, and a charcoal pencil had fallen to the floor by her bare feet. The sketchbook lay next to her where it had fallen, page filled with one of Elly’s forests: she would spend hours on the trees, making sure every branch and leaf was perfect, and then she would fill in the spaces between with half-glimpsed beasts and fierce eyes. There was no sign of Gavin. No boots, no coat, no dirty gauntlets thrown onto the table or dropped on the floor. Judah picked up the sketchbook, closed it and put it back in Elly’s lap.

  Elly’s head jerked. She winced, put a hand to her neck. Then she saw Judah. “Are you just coming home? Where have you been?”

  “In Theron’s workshop.” Judah sat down in the armchair. “Gavin was out of his head. By the time I got up there, I couldn’t make it back down again. I passed out on the floor.”

  Elly stared at her; deciding if she was lying, Judah knew. It was painful to see. Finally she said, “That explains the dust. What about the hunt?”