The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  But Darid was shaking his head vehemently. “Maybe most of us are tools in a box—for sure, I am—but not you.”

  She tried not to roll her eyes. “Why, because you like me?”

  “No.” He dropped her hands, afraid he’d said something he shouldn’t have. A pained expression came over him.

  She was suddenly angry. “Fine.” She stood up.

  “I was there when you were born,” he said.

  “When I was brought in, you mean,” she said. “I wasn’t born here.”

  His eyes closed, and then opened again. Still scared, but there was something determined in the set of his jaw now. “Yes, you were. I was there. I saw it happen.”

  Judah’s lips and her chest and her fingers all went numb. Suddenly, she felt afraid, too. “You saw my mother,” she said.

  “I was there,” he said again.

  * * *

  He told her.

  He’d been new, and barely ten. The Seneschal—younger himself, then, but not new; he’d risen early on talent and ambition—had looked him over, deemed him too rough for the House and sent him to the outbuildings, where he’d been assigned to the kennels. He’d been relieved at first, because he liked dogs, but then he met the hounds and they weren’t dogs. They were enormous slavering beasts, coats as thick and coarse as the wolf pelt he’d once seen a trader wearing in the Beggar’s Market. Cold eyes, flat faces. Flapless ears to provide small targets, not much more than bare holes in their skulls. Standing, the biggest of the hounds could look him in the eye. One glimpse of those dead yellow eyes, and Darid knew he was less than nothing to an animal like that.

  Barr, the kennelmaster, spoke to them in grunts and growls that were almost barks, themselves. He carried a knobbed length of wood as big around as Darid’s arm and used it to beat the hounds when they didn’t obey immediately; he beat Darid with it, too, and for the same reason. Once he’d beaten Darid so badly that the boy thought his ribs would never stop hurting. (One of them never did; even when he was an adult, he could still feel the place where the stick had landed.) Another time, Barr had beaten one of the hounds to death, right there in the kennel. A young male, an upstart. It had snapped at Barr’s leg. Ten minutes later it was dead. The other hounds lolled, and panted and watched.

  “Why don’t they attack him?” Darid asked the older kennel boy, Jon, afterward.

  “Because Barr runs the pack,” Jon had said.

  Barr left the dead hound in the kennel yard for the others to eat. When the meat was gone, he told Darid to throw the bones in the midden yard, but leave the skull. There were two ways to be with the hounds, Jon had told him: you could take Barr’s route, and try to brutalize them into obedience, or you could cower, let them tackle you and bite at your neck and go limp, to show submission, and hope that would be enough. When he went in for the bones, Darid took the latter route, and Barr and the others laughed heartily, seeing him down on his back like a puppy. As they’d laughed, the three biggest males sniffed and nipped at Darid, their muzzles still spotted with their pack mate’s blood. One put its jaws around his neck and shook its head—lightly, almost experimentally, but it was enough to make Darid’s heart pound in his sore chest. With one grunt from Barr, he knew, the jaws would clamp down, the nips and buffets turn brutal. In a few days, another kennel boy would creep in to get his bones.

  One night, Darid, asleep in the corner under a blanket, heard voices out in the kennel yard. The noise in itself wasn’t enough to wake him; Lady Clorin’s birthing time had come, and the House and grounds were full of strange people come inside to see if she’d finally have a baby that lived. People he’d never seen the likes of, even in Highfall: people who teetered on high wooden heels carved like flowers and whose arms were so thickly hung with gold bracelets that it was a wonder they could move their arms. And some of these people came to peek at the hounds through the fence, to squeal and laugh and exclaim about the stink. They often came late at night, when they were drunk. Over the last few weeks of Lady Clorin’s lying-in, Darid had grown used to ignoring them.

  These voices were different. There was laughter, but there was also crying and pleading. That combination didn’t mean anything good. Sometimes Barr and his men would catch an unlucky staff girl, a dairymaid or even a House girl running an errand, and tease and threaten her with the hounds until she promised to do whatever they wanted. Sometimes it was a boy they caught, which made Darid very grateful—and very ashamed at being grateful—for his broad, plain face that nobody seemed to think much of. The older kennel boy, Jon, was pretty. Darid knew he had it worse.

  Darid closed his eyes tight, trying to will himself back to sleep. But he couldn’t close his ears. The hounds snarled. He could hear excitement in their voices, and in the voices of the kennelmen, too. When the screams started he gave up pretending to be asleep and tried, instead, to pretend he was in his mother’s kitchen with his sisters. It was the baby who was screaming, he told himself, with hunger or tiredness or who even knew with babies, and anyway the baby would not be hungry now because he was here, and a messenger would bring his mother a shiny coin every month. He did not want to but he could pick out two screaming voices, one female and one male. That was Nell, then; Frederick from next door had taken her doll again, her one and only doll, her most special special. Darid had trounced Fred for that, the last time he’d done it, and then he’d shown Nellie how to do a little trouncing of her own. That was all he was hearing. Nell and Fred.

  But the screams rose. They were beyond pain now. They were beyond anything Darid had ever heard. His imagination snapped and broke on that terrifying animal noise. He could only clutch his hands over his ears and wait for it to be over. Eventually it was. The screams trailed away, became whimpers. Then they stopped.

  Jon came in and dropped down next to Darid, breathing hard and ragged.

  “What’s happening?” Darid said.

  “Two people snuck in past the Wall. Man and a woman. Lord Elban said to feed them to the hounds. So we did. Awful. Awful.” Darid felt Jon move up close against him. The other boy’s skin was clammy and he, too, was shaking. Jon’s thin arms slid around Darid’s middle and his nose pressed to the back of Darid’s neck. “Awful.”

  Darid stayed quiet and still. Some people adapted to life inside better than others, an undercook had told him. Jon—who, to tell the truth, had probably always been a bit simple—had not adjusted well, for all that he’d been here three years longer than Darid. Living at the mercy of Barr and the others probably hadn’t helped. During the day Jon was all bluster but at night, sometimes, he was like this: clingy, needy. His hands wandered. Out in Marketside, where survival in pairs was easier, Darid had known men who lived with men and women who lived with women. But what Jon wanted was different. After three years under Barr and the rest, the line inside him that should have divided what was okay to do from what wasn’t had started to blur. Darid was learning how to handle him, to put him off gently enough that the older boy still thought they were friends. But Jon was getting bigger and officially he was in charge of Darid, and Darid knew there would be a time when Darid would say no, and Jon would simply ignore it.

  But the night of the screams wasn’t that night. Jon tried to bring Darid’s hand to his crotch, but when Darid feigned a yawn and pulled his hand away, Jon let go and rolled away to take care of his own business. In a few minutes there came a soft grunt, and then Jon rolled back, pulled Darid close again, and went to sleep. As Darid lay in the dark and the filth, Jon’s body twined over his like the ivy that climbed the Wall, the other boy’s soft breath in his ear didn’t drive out the memory of the screaming, not at all. The knowledge that this was now Darid’s life made him so weary he could barely gather the strength to breathe himself.

  He still heard voices outside the kennel but soon they, too, were gone. Barr would be too keyed up after the slaughter; he and the others would want to find other staff, share
the story. Darid waited for silence to descend over the kennel.

  But it didn’t. There was a noise. An unsteady, gurgling noise. He closed his eyes and pretended it wasn’t there. Then he told himself it was none of his business, and there was nothing he could do, and it was better not to see, anyway.

  None of this worked.

  Finally, carefully, he extricated himself from Jon’s grasp and crept out of the kennel. Inside the yard itself, several lumpy piles of various sizes were discernable in the moonlight. Most of the hounds had retreated to the corners, chewing objects that Darid didn’t like to think about, but one still hunched in the middle worrying at the largest of the piles. Darid had good ears that hadn’t been boxed too many times and he knew, as much as he didn’t want to, that the large pile was the source of the gurgling; the pile was a person, and the person was still alive.

  Barr had his own special beating stick, but for lesser members of the kennel staff, there was a communal bucket of similar weapons just inside the door. For the first time ever, Darid picked one up. Slowly, he unchained the gate and slipped through. Avoiding the piles, and ignoring the new gruesome smells that threaded their way through the ordinary ones, he walked to the hound in the middle. It paid him no mind. He wasn’t a threat. He was barely even worth noticing.

  As quietly as he could, Darid made a noise in his throat that he hoped sounded like Barr’s leave-it noise.

  The hound growled faintly.

  Darid lifted the stick, not sure if he could use it. He had never hit an animal before and his hands shook. But then the person took in a deep, rattling breath, and twitched all over, and Darid brought the stick down as hard as he could, right between the hound’s eyes. It yelped, startled and jumped back. The growl deepened.

  “Back,” Darid said under his breath, and hit it again. The feeling of the stick hitting living flesh was extremely unpleasant.

  The hound shook off the blow, confused. It made a motion toward the dying person in front of it again, and Darid hit it one more time. “No.” His voice sounded stronger this time. “Mine.”

  The hound glared at him. Then it picked something up—unfortunately, Darid got a good enough look to identify it as a hand, with a decent bit of arm attached—and wandered off, as if that had been its intention all along. Quickly, before it could change its mind, Darid dropped the stick and hooked his hands beneath the shoulders of the mauled body in front of him. He dragged it out of the kennel yard, locked the gate behind him, and then crouched down next to the body, feeling sick. The head had been partially scalped, but the hair that was left was dark, possibly with blood, and tightly braided. A woman. She was still breathing, but not for long. He glanced around quickly; if Barr caught him, he would be in serious trouble. A tiny voice inside asked him why he’d even bothered risking it.

  Because he couldn’t let the woman be eaten alive like her companion had been, that was why. There wasn’t much left of her face and nothing left of her ears. He doubted she could even still hear him. Both hands were gone. She should not have still been alive. He put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay,” he said, although it wasn’t.

  Out of the corner of his eye: motion. Then again.

  The hounds had torn open her abdomen. He didn’t want to see it. But there was the movement again—was it her breathing? No, he could hear that. The movement didn’t match. He steeled himself, and looked closer.

  Then he stifled a cry and scuttled back from the woman. He didn’t want to believe what he’d seen. It was unbelievable. It was unthinkable. But then the movement came again and suddenly he was running. Toward the House, toward people. He was new enough, inside, that the only thought in his head was to find his mother, that she would know what to do. Because he didn’t. He didn’t know. He couldn’t even think straight.

  He found himself in the courtyard. Bizarrely, it was empty—the courtyard was never empty—except for a single woman. A city woman, by her clothes, about the same age as his mother. Her blond hair was luminous in the moonlight, her head cocked as if she were listening for something. He didn’t know why she was standing there doing nothing. He didn’t know why there was nobody else around.

  Then, as if she’d known he would be there, she turned toward him. “Help,” he said, panting. She was not his mother but she would do. “I need help.” He grabbed her hand.

  And found himself lying on the cobbles. He hadn’t seen her push him down but she must have. Or had he fallen? A big satchel hung across her body, the biggest he’d ever seen. She towered over him, pale and fierce, and for a moment he thought she was going to kick him. Instead, she said, “Sorry. I’m edgy. Show me where.”

  When it was over he would marvel that she’d managed to keep up with him with such a big satchel, because he had run as fast as he could. The gardens would have been quicker but staff weren’t allowed there unless they were working, so he led her down the rough service path by the Wall. Miraculously, he didn’t trip and neither did she. The trip back to the kennel seemed to take only a fraction of the time it had taken him to run to the courtyard, but trips back always felt shorter. It seemed only moments before the blonde woman knelt next to the mauled body outside the kennels. There was still nobody else around. Incredibly, the thing was still breathing.

  Not thing. Woman.

  He expected the blonde woman to react to the wreck of flesh before her, but she only made a small pitying noise. She laid a hand on the woman’s bloodied breastbone—her fingers twitched over it for a second first—and closed her eyes, as if praying.

  Darid had not brought her here to pray. “But—she’s—”

  “I know,” the strange woman said, eyes still closed. Then, to Darid’s relief, she opened them; nodded briskly, opened the enormous satchel, and began digging through it. A moment later, her hand emerged with a short, fat knife. Like her hair, it seemed to glow.

  Unceremoniously, she bent over the dying woman’s abdomen, and cut. The sound was like fabric tearing. Darid squeezed his eyes shut and oh, lords, he would rather be anywhere else than here right now, he would rather be back in the kennel with Jon or fighting the hounds or being kicked to death by Barr.

  “There,” the woman with the knife said. Gently, almost crooning. “There, brave girl. Almost done.” In a normal voice: “There’s a towel in my satchel. Get it for me.”

  Still managing not to look, he opened his eyes a slit. Just enough to see the bag. Inside, he did, indeed, see towels, and soft blankets, and a metal tool he remembered from the night his second sister was born. Forceps.

  “You’re a midwife,” he said, startled. “How are you a midwife?” The coincidence—the impossibility—of having stumbled upon exactly the person he needed, in exactly the place he needed her, with no impediments and no difficulties, was so huge and overwhelming that he forgot to be scared, forgot to keep his eyes closed. So he was watching the midwife, stunned, as she reached inside the body of the dying woman, and brought out an impossibly small baby, long cord still attached.

  It would be dead, he thought fuzzily. Surely it would be dead. But then one miniature fist moved, and the head, and he heard a thin, weak wail.

  “Towel, please,” the midwife said.

  He had been unable to look. Now he was unable to look away. He fumbled blindly in the satchel for a towel and thrust it toward the midwife with both hands, like a shield. He could not have been more shocked when, rather than take it, the midwife put the new creature down on top of it. In his hands. It was a girl. That was unsurprising. In Darid’s experience, all babies were girls.

  The midwife was rooting through the satchel again, this time for a ball of twine. She tied off the baby’s cord and then cut it with another flick of the knife (as black as night now). Instinctively, Darid wrapped the towel around the baby and clutched her gently to his body. She had an alarming shock of dark hair, he noticed. Like her mother, maybe. He found himself filled with
a deep, gentle joy. He hadn’t felt anything like this in months, not since he’d come inside, and maybe he hadn’t felt it ever. That something so new, so full of potential, could escape unscathed from the horror that the hounds had left—that life could persist through such depravity—it was as if he had a hearth full of embers inside him, and as the tiny face frowned and yawned a gentle breeze caressed them, and they came to life.

  Then he saw the midwife, sitting back on her heels, watching him with a faint, sad smile. “Was going to tell you how to hold her,” she said, “but you’re doing fine, aren’t you?” Then she turned back to the ruined body of the baby’s mother, who no longer seemed quite so horrifying to Darid. She put a hand back on the woman’s breastbone—which, Darid saw now, was nearly the only unscathed part of her—and, as if in answer, the dying woman let out one last rattle and was still.

  “Well, that’s that.” Slowly, the midwife climbed to her feet. She shook the dust off her skirts and held out her arms. Darid found that he didn’t want to give the baby up, which made no sense. “Give her to me,” she said impatiently. “I’ve got a good hold around us but it won’t last forever.” And that didn’t make any sense, either, but the authority in her voice was undeniable. He let her take the baby, then stood and watched as she unwrapped the tiny body, rewrapped it in an expert swaddle, and then placed her carefully in the big satchel. Making sure, he saw, that the forceps and other sharp cold things were well buried, and that the bundle of blankets and toweling was tucked firmly down so it wouldn’t cover the baby’s face. Then she brought the opening of the satchel together, leaving a space of an inch or so.