* * *
He woke early. His brain felt a little tender, as if it had stumbled into a tavern brawl the night before, but the sky was clear, one of Highfall’s rare cloudless days. As Nate made tea, he knew he could go on.
Charles still slept, so Nate took his tea out onto the front step to wait for Bindy to save her knocking on the door. Normally if he wanted fresh air, he took it in the garden—which was considerably less dank and a healthier place in general since Nate had taken over—but today he wanted to see the trees in the Square, to feel a bit of space around him. The morning was brilliant with color: the gold-green of the light filtering through the leaves, the glimmers of blue from the sky above, the gray shadows on the white stone. The spires reaching up in the distance, which could seem cruel under overcast skies, seemed almost elegant. The sun warmed his feet in his boots, and he heard the tiny chip chip of the sparrows pecking the ground for crumbs. The air smelled of smoke and the faint stale must of the Brake.
He heard footsteps. They slowed, and stopped. Nate looked up.
Vertus stood at the end of the walk. His clothes were nicer than they’d been when Nate had known him; not the violent colors the courtiers had favored, but not drab servingman’s gray, either. The rich fabrics hung well on him. His eyes were as intent as ever.
“Good morning, magus,” he said in a knowing, amused tone. Like he saw a joke that Nate wasn’t quite clever enough to get. “Made it through the coup, I see.”
His Highfall accent was broader than it had been. “As did you,” Nate said.
“Indeed.” Vertus put his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “Indeed, I did.”
There was a long, evaluating silence. Nate was thinking about that last grim night with Arkady, aware that Vertus knew everything Nate had done. He was also considering the Seneschal, if his belief in Nate’s utility would outweigh his years’ acquaintance with Arkady. He was wondering, in short, how much damage Vertus could do. He would have been willing to bet that the former servingman’s thinking ran along the same lines.
“Well,” Vertus said finally, “just thought I’d see how you were getting on.”
“Good to see you.” It hadn’t been, but it was what one said.
“Don’t worry, magus,” Vertus said. “You’ll see me again soon.”
Chapter Fourteen
Judah was walking back from the orchard when she came upon the Seneschal in the courtyard. Summer was ending and she wore one of Gavin’s old coats against the chill in the air. Until she met the Seneschal, she’d been feeling lucky, because she’d found six unripe apples in an out-of-the-way corner of the orchard. An unexpected bounty, since the Seneschal’s plunderers had stripped the grounds pretty thoroughly. She’d left three apples to ripen and marked the tree with a piece of cording that had once held back the drapes in Elly’s bedroom. The plunderers had taken all the rope, too.
When they were first let out of their rooms—a month after the coup, that was, and a month ago, now—she would have run back to the House instead of walk. During those bizarre early days she’d found a destructive glory in hurtling through spaces that had once belonged to the courtiers: to hell with them, to hell with anything they’d ever thought or said about her. The Seneschal’s men had taken everything of use or value during their month-long imprisonment, and as far as Judah was concerned, the rest belonged to the four of them. If she wanted to scuff the floors and spatter the marble with mud, she would, and she felt no remorse. The garden paths made for delicate silk shoes were already furred with moss, the carefully groomed galleries on the Promenade blurry with overgrowth. There were broken windows in the solarium and carpenter bees had eaten perfect round holes in the armory. In another year, the Discreet Walk would be impassable, the wisteria thick and tangled after the wet summer. Anything destructive Judah did was merely helping along the entropy of neglect.
Today, she felt too dull to run. She hadn’t eaten anything since morning, and not much then. When she saw the Seneschal standing on the wide marble step that led to the grand foyer her feet grew even heavier, but she thrust her chin out at an angle she hoped read as arrogant, and said, “Come to visit?”
The Seneschal lifted a heavy-looking burlap bag. “I brought food. I took it up to the parlor, but nobody was there.”
She gave the bag a critical glare. Her mouth was already watering, though. The food in the Seneschal’s bags was never luxurious, but it wasn’t boiled oats with winter squash, which was most of what they ate now. The oatmeal came from a huge bag the Seneschal had brought; the squash grew from seeds thrown in the midden yard. “Gavin’s in Elban’s study. Gavin’s always in Elban’s study. You know that.”
“Yes. But Gavin wants to kill me.”
With an affectionate smile, Judah said, “He really does. You should probably bring a guard with you when you come.”
“I don’t want to bring a guard. I’m not his enemy.”
“He disagrees.”
“The four of you are as much Elban’s victims as anyone in Highfall.” The Seneschal’s gray eyes had new lines around them. “Surely, after everything that’s happened, none of you can disagree with that.”
“Elban didn’t have me caned. Elban didn’t kill my friend.”
“Neither of which I would have had to do if you’d taken my advice.”
“Advice? Are you referring to when you told me I wasn’t allowed to take—what was your word—lovers? Because that felt more like an order.”
“And is it so hard for you to believe that occasionally, my orders were in your best interest, and not merely designed to make your life horrible?” The Seneschal sounded as tired as Judah felt.
She didn’t care. “Are you going give me the food or not?” He handed her the bag. She peeked inside: bread, a small bottle of what was probably oil, a bundle of greasy paper that held either meat or cheese. Not quite enough to get them through the week to his next visit.
Reading her expression, he said, “Things are still unsettled in the city. Goods are scarce.”
Judah closed the bag. “That’s disgraceful. You should find whoever’s in charge and complain.”
His lips twitched. “It’ll get better.”
“Doubtless,” she said and walked away.
* * *
He didn’t want to kill them. That was what he’d told them a week after the coup: I watched you all grow up from children. I don’t want to see any of you dead. But he’d also told them that Highfall—or rather, New Highfall—was his top priority. He had other things on his mind than them at the moment; they would be allowed to stay in the House through the winter, and beyond that, they would see.
“He can’t leave me alive,” Gavin said as soon as he left. “Or Theron. We’d be rallying points for Elban’s loyalists. And he can’t leave the House just standing here empty.”
But the Seneschal had done exactly that, and none of them knew if Elban even had any loyalists. For four sleepless weeks, they’d listened through the locked door as the House was torn to pieces around them. They hadn’t been given enough water to wash with, and soon their rooms reeked with stale linen and bodies and stress. Judah had started a mental list of tips for being put under house arrest: at the first sign of trouble, make sure you have clean clothes and clean linen. Lay in stocks of water, firewood, nicely perfumed soap, tooth powder; gather foods high in fat and sugar, alcohol and coffee. You will have trouble sleeping and you will have trouble staying awake. Find a deck of cards. Make sure none are missing. You will be bored; you will be very, very bored.
By the time they were released, Judah would have willingly walked to her own execution, as long as she could do it through fresh air, alone. They were on each other’s nerves, all of them. Gavin had lost his father and his empire and had become fixated on Elly, on whether or not the Seneschal would still allow them to marry; she tolerated it as well as she could, but
by the time it occurred to him to ask her opinion, her patience was gone. She’d told him that she really didn’t see the point; he had looked stunned, then angry, and snapped that perhaps the point was that they loved each other.
Elly—who, with little else to do, had been drawing as Gavin talked—had put down her pen. “Gavin.” Her blue eyes were hard and the word sounded less like an address than a call to attention. “Your father bought me for you when I was eight years old, just like he’d buy you a pony or a fancy new sword. My father wanted the money, and my mother wanted me away from my brothers, so they sold me like a useless plot of land, and ever since then you’ve worked your way through staff girls and courtiers and anyone else who’d have you. Love was never what our marriage was going to be about and it’s childish and stupid of you to suddenly want me to pretend that it is.”
Gavin’s skin seemed to shrink on his body. Judah felt it. Elly shook her head. “I know you feel like everything’s been taken from you, and I’m sorry. Truly, I am. But I’m not the last coin in your treasury and I’m not the last piece of your great lost empire. I’m a human being.”
They hadn’t spoken since. That afternoon, the Seneschal had unlocked the door, and Gavin more or less disappeared.
The rest of them went to work. The guards had taken their belt knives, but Elly had begged to keep hers, on the grounds that it was the smallest and least lethal and they needed some sort of blade to prepare food. They didn’t bother looking for a way out; the Safe Passage was locked, as always, and the gate winches took six large men to work. They were one smallish, addled man and two women, and they had enough to do. A handful of chickens had managed to evade the plunderers. Judah, out foraging, found a wily ewe that had absconded into the thick hedges at the foot of the Wall, spring lamb in tow. The stables were closer to the House than the sheepfold, so Elly had tied a drapery cord around the ewe’s neck and led her there. (Judah had wanted to name the two sheep Current Mutton and Future Mutton, but Elly had preferred Cheese and Warm Socks, and since she was the only one who knew how to milk a sheep, she won.) On top of that, the plunderers, who were guards and not farmers, had missed a good bit of actual food in the kitchen garden, so they’d had greens and would eventually have tubers to eat. Some of the dustier shelves of preserved goods in the pantry had escaped notice, too.
But the tubers still weren’t ready and the spinach was long gone. Elly was saving the jars of jam and pickled peaches to eat when the snow came, when there would be nothing fresh at all. The squash from the midden yard seemed a boon at first (Judah forced herself not to think about Darid, or her mother, or any of the other bodies buried there) but they’d long since grown sick of it. Past the kitchen garden were fields of rye, oats and wheat—which were how the sheep had survived—and at first the Seneschal had suggested they make use of those for food. But Elly remembered the scything-threshing-winnowing process from her childhood in Tiernan, and had resisted this, on the grounds that it was impossible. Two women, one smallish addled man.
“And what do you think small families do in the countryside?” the Seneschal had said.
“They don’t grow oats as their primary food crop, and when they do grow oats, at harvest time they either hire help or trade for it,” Elly said. “Are you offering me a field full of farmhands?”
“What would you pay them?”
“How about quarried stone? This whole place is built of it. They can take it away rock by rock for all I care.”
The Seneschal had brought the twenty-pound sack of oats the next day, and after that Elly was in charge. She was the only one of the four of them who had ever seen bread baked or wheat ground, and it quickly became apparent that she was the only one of them who knew anything useful. In addition to milking the sheep, she could tell which of the plants in the ruined garden were weeds and which were beets and potatoes. She’d dispatched Judah and Theron to search the pillaged storerooms and pantries and guest rooms for anything forgotten, and she’d brought a pile of ancient, moldering herbals and cookery books from the Lady’s Library. In addition to the oats, the Seneschal provided them with paltry amounts of oil, stringy meat, a wizened vegetable or two (never soap, coffee, butter or wine), and Elly was the only one who could make the packages into actual food.
The coup had made all of them more of whatever they’d been before. Elly had always been pragmatic and difficult to ruffle, and now she kept them all alive. Theron had been half-insane, and now he muttered to himself about cats nobody else could see and twitched at imagined noises; but he had also always been an ingenious problem-solver. When Elly sent him to the aquifer for water (the pipes had been ripped from the walls for their metal) he returned faster than anyone else, because he knew the quickest route, and the best way to distribute the weight of the waterskins on his body. After watching Elly try and fail to cook oatmeal first on the big stove in the kitchen and then in their small ornamental fireplace—she still had the little Wilmerian quickstove and one precious canister of gas for it, but she wanted to save that for an emergency—he had somehow found the scraps necessary to build an inelegant but efficient cookstove in the parlor, complete with ductwork to carry the smoke to the chimney. When Elly mentioned that the berries growing on the edges of the orchard would go bad quickly once picked (they had no sugar for jam), he’d appeared two hours later with a shiny square contraption that, when placed in the sun, dried the fruit in days. He built a winch to replace the one taken from the well in the stableyard, which made watering the sheep infinitely easier, and when Judah said, “How about a new pump for the water trough?” he didn’t even seem to consider that she might be joking.
“The gasket would be the hard part,” he’d said, and wandered off. He hadn’t reappeared with a pump, not then or in the weeks since. But Judah had no doubt that one day he would.
As for Gavin—Gavin had always been vaguely selfish, and now he’d done away with the vaguely. He showed up for meals because he had no other source of food, and would grudgingly do something specific if Judah or Elly told him he had to. They left the brute-strength tasks to him: because brute strength was what he brought to the table, but also because Elly was clever enough to see that chopping firewood was not unlike hacking at a practice dummy. It was difficult, and physical, and took just enough exactitude to distract him from his moods. But as soon as the firebox was full, he’d disappear again. Sometimes, in the evenings, the ground felt unsteady under Judah’s feet. Trust Gavin to find a secret stash of alcohol somewhere in the House. He didn’t invite her to drink with him, and she didn’t invite herself. He’d lost his father, his kingdom and, effectively, his wife. She supposed he was entitled to his grief—for a while, anyway.
And Judah? She scavenged, she mended, she stirred a pot when Elly asked her. She scratched for Gavin when they needed him, and tried to cajole him into working a bit more than he wanted, but half the time when she set out to convince him to do something helpful he ended up convincing her to do nothing instead. “One hand of cards, Jude,” he’d say—luckily, the deck of cards they’d had in their room when the coup came was complete—and the one hand would become ten and she’d end up slinking back shamefaced from Elban’s study or the armory or the chapel (the plundered House suffered from a dramatic lack of seating), helpful task undone. She would vow to be more responsible next time. And then next time would come, and she wouldn’t be any more responsible at all.
She could feel enough of what was inside him to know she didn’t want any more of it, and avoided touching him. Her own feelings were bad enough; as busy as she was, she felt dazed, detached, always faintly angry. She missed food with flavor and she missed fires laid by unseen hands; she missed not ever having to consider that the food and firewood had been prepared and lugged and arranged by people whose childhoods had ended at ten so that people like her wouldn’t get splinters. She resented having to work so hard, and felt guilty about resenting it, and resented the guilt. Judah had never f
elt like a courtier but their system had benefited her, as well, and her new firsthand knowledge of how hard staff jobs must actually have been waged constant war against her memories of pain and powerlessness. When she drew water for the sheep from the well by the stable she knew that lugging a few buckets of water was nothing compared to the work Darid had done every day; how unknowing she’d been, back then, and how kind he’d been about it. Then again, Darid had had underlings and a trough with a working pump—but how dare she think of Darid as lucky and herself as unlucky? Darid, who was buried somewhere in the very midden yard where their squash grew, who had died suffering, and done it for her. Her mother was buried there, too, somewhere deep in the layers of vegetable peelings and fireplace ashes—but she had seen Darid, held his hand, known his smell. If he could see her now, he would laugh at her, at the slipshod, half-capable way she did her chores.
No. Darid wouldn’t laugh at her. He would be proud of her.
They didn’t spike his head. I did that much for you.
It had seemed a hollow gesture at the time. But three spiked skulls still stared over the kitchen yard, and every morning, while Judah gathered eggs under their empty eyes, she was resentfully grateful that none of them were Darid’s.
As she moved from chore to chore she often found herself in places that had once been enemy territory. The grand foyer, the council chamber, the solarium: all empty and echoing, the life that had been lived there as faraway as an old story. Sometimes she dreamed that she was a ghost, that she’d slipped an hour ahead or an hour behind the rest of the world: she could feel the life that had been, hemming her in on all sides, but she couldn’t see it or catch up or get further away and she didn’t know which she’d choose, if she’d been able. Worse still were the bleak moments when she found herself at some mundane task that she’d done in exactly the same way the day before and would do in exactly the same way the next day—filling waterskin after waterskin at the edge of the aquifer, for instance, cold hands in the dark water and only the light of her lantern in all of the huge damp blackness yawning around her, knowing with all her being that she couldn’t, she simply could not, load those skins onto her back and make the long, brutal trek upstairs under the weight of them. It was impossible. She would scream. She would lose her mind. She would do it anyway. Moments like that came a dozen times a day, moments when she considered whatever she had to do, thought, I can’t, and then did. Instead of making her feel triumphant it made her exhausted and angry and frustrated.
The Unwilling Page 40