The Unwilling

by KELLY BRAFFET

  Impossible. Salt; a handful of wild onion. She wished she had pepper. There’d been a cheese she’d used to like, its thick rind studded with whole peppercorns. The pepper permeated the creamy inside, giving each bite had a satisfying sting. She missed that cheese.

  Wait.

  Theron was already wandering away, his flitting moth of a mind having found another light. She grabbed his arm. “Tell me again, Theron.”

  “Judah went up to the tower above the workshop.”

  Creeping doubt began to fill her. “But the stairs are broken.”

  “Not for me.” His cloudy blue eyes slid away from her. “And not for Judah. I’m not sure about you or Gavin.”

  What did you do now, Gavin? she thought wearily. She had so much to do. She always had so much to do.

  * * *

  Gavin was in Elban’s study with a bottle of wine. He sprang up when the door opened, his face earnest and exposed in a way it rarely was; but, seeing her, his mask slammed down. The Grand High Lord, thwarted by his stubborn Lady-that-should-have-been, proudly hurt by her lack of consideration for his feelings. “What do you want?” he said curtly. Four long scratches marred his cheek, one crusted with blood.

  “If Judah did that to your face,” Elly said, “you deserved it.”

  “Did I?” he said.

  “You lied to her about the stableman. All this time she’s been thinking she killed him, and now Theron says she’s gone to the tower above the workshop, so what happened?”

  For a moment, guilt drew his mouth tight, but when he spoke his voice was petulant and cross. “That’s nonsense. There’s nothing in the tower above the workshop.”

  “According to Theron, Judah is, and I trust him more than I trust you,” she said.

  His brow furrowed. “She’s really up there?”

  “Yes. Why did you lie to her about the stableman?”

  “I was angry,” he said, his voice colored with a mix of contrition and frustration. Yet another thing gone wrong for him, another obstacle in the way of the young lord’s happiness. “What does it matter? I’ll go up and bring her down. That’s what you came here to tell me to do, isn’t it?”

  It was. It had been. But then he’d said, What does it matter, and it did matter. It mattered very much. If he couldn’t see that, she couldn’t blame Judah for leaving. “Wrong,” she said. “I came here to find out what you’d done. And to tell you to leave her alone.” Then she walked out of the room and left him there. She hated that room, anyway. It smelled like Elban and misery.

  * * *

  Theron helped her with the sheep. They ate porridge in silence and Elly wound the newly-dried yarn. When the fire burned low she banked the coals, so she wouldn’t have to use one of her few precious matches to relight it the next morning, and retired to her bedroom. It would have been warmer to sleep in the parlor with Theron. But she liked to have two doors between her room and Gavin’s, these days. In her big, cold, stale-smelling bed, she worried about Judah, and missed her warmth and company, and it took her a long time to sleep.

  When she opened her eyes in the morning, the bed was warm and for one delicious minute the chill on the tip of her nose was less a hardship than a pleasant reminder of how warm the rest of her was. Then it all came crashing back down again: the fire to be stirred to life, some sort of food put in their stomachs. Judah in the tower. They’d tried to climb it once, when they were twelve. Judah and Gavin had gone ahead. Elly, frozen with fear, had managed only the first step when a crumbled piece of stone crashed down past her. Above, Judah and Gavin had laughed, but the pieces of the cracked stone were still there and Elly would have still been there, too, if the others hadn’t come to unfreeze her. She’d been unable to make her legs move, unable to keep from feeling like she was balanced on the branch of a tree. Angen’s voice echoing in her head: silly little kitten, stuck up a tree. However will the kitten get down? What if the wind starts to blow, and the tree begins to shake? Like this—

  Quickly, she climbed out of bed and pulled on her clothes. The cold drove away the comfortable warmth and most of the uncomfortable memories. In the parlor, the fire had already been stoked, the pot of oatmeal from last night set to warm over it. Theron huddled next to the stove, a bird in a rainstorm. “You did the fire,” she said.

  “No. Gavin.”

  He must have felt guilty. Good; he should feel guilty. “Theron, can you get up the tower steps?” He nodded. “Will you take Judah some food today?”

  He shuddered. She didn’t think it was from the chill. “I don’t like the way it feels up there.”

  “She took you food,” Elly said. “She took you food all the time.”

  The shudder stilled. His eyes were blank. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it.”

  She wrapped up the last of the bread and cheese from the Seneschal’s visit. The bread was tasteless and gritty, the cheese greasy and dried-out. She wished she had something comforting and loving and good to add, but there was nothing but medium-cold oatmeal and boiled squash. So she wrote a note instead, on the crumbling flyleaf of a cookery book.

  Judah: I love you and I miss you. Come down.

  The ink in the bottle—her last—had been watered down nearly as much as it would stand. She regarded the note for a moment, then put her pen over the period at the end of the sentence, so the mark would disappear into the ink, and added: when you are ready.

  By then, Theron had disappeared. Oh, well; the package would keep an hour or two. The parlor door opened, and she looked up quickly, hoping it was Judah—but it was the magus, his battered leather satchel slung over one shoulder and the burlap bag over the other. Heavy laden as he was, and with the ineffable alien air that always clung to him, he reminded her of one of the peddlers that sometimes knocked at her father’s door. “Eleanor,” he said, no small amount of alarm in his voice. “Is Judah ill? I waited in the courtyard but she didn’t come.”

  Eleanor hesitated, and then said, “She’s fine. She’s just busy.” He was disappointed, she could tell. Maybe Gavin was right, and the magus had feelings for Judah. Marrying him might hold more appeal for Judah than marrying the Seneschal had, she thought, and then remembered Judah in the stables, saying, Do we exist to be married?

  I do, she’d answered, just as she’d realized it was no longer true.

  “The Seneschal told me about your father,” the magus said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not. My father was a terrible person who sold me to the highest bidder, and the world is better off without him.”

  She expected the words to shock him, but he only nodded. “My mother used to say that my father had one service to do the world, and it was over and done with nine months before I was born.”

  Elly smiled. “I like your mother.”

  “I like her, too.” His voice was wistful, which Elly found fascinating. She didn’t know anyone who was wistful about their parents. “Although I think she didn’t give my father enough credit. I met him once or twice. He seemed decent enough.” He handed her the bag. “Here. I wish it were fuller.”

  She opened it: good bread, some fruit, a tiny pot of something. Candy, he always brought candy. Gavin was definitely right; the magus had a soft spot for Judah. The things he brought were chosen with her in mind.

  Which gave her an idea. She passed the bag back to him. “Take it to Judah for me, will you? She’s in the tower above Theron’s workshop. Do you know the way?”

  He seemed disproportionately startled. “I can find it. But why—”

  “She and Gavin had an argument.”

  The magus had gone very still, but his eyes were wild. “What about?”

  “Remember the stableman? The one we helped, when she—” She stopped, not wanting to say it. “Gavin said he told her we got him out. But he lied—he told her nothing of the kind. She’s been thinking he was dead, and assuming it was her
fault. Just like she thinks Theron is her fault, as if she could have done anything to stop Elban poisoning him. Anyway, the truth came out, and she and Gavin had words about it.” She chose not to mention the scratches. “Now she’s in the tower. Why the tower, I don’t know. The stairs are treacherous, but Theron said he could climb them, and you’re not that much bigger than he is. No offense,” she added hastily.

  “None taken. Brawn isn’t much of an asset in my line of work.”

  “I can’t go, I don’t like high places,” she said, knowing her worry and frustration were showing. “Will you go? Try, at least? Take her that—” she indicated his bag “—and some things from me?”

  He nodded. She added the food from her bag to his, gave him the note she’d written, and he left. But the worry and frustration stayed with her and she knew that dull, repetitive work like unraveling yarn or picking squash seeds out of pulp would be maddening. Hard labor was what she needed, something physical and distracting. So she took the waterskins down to the aquifer to fill them. It was strange, the things that bothered people: Judah didn’t like the aquifer. The water was too big and too dark, she said. Elly had no problem with that, but she didn’t relish the idea of the House above her, crouched like an animal waiting to drop.

  That had been another favorite trick of Angen’s, to drop out of trees and scare her.

  She met Gavin on her return trip. His scratches were healing, but only at normal speed. They’d been his to begin with, then. In the tower, she knew, Judah’s would already be pink with new skin. Wordlessly, he took the waterskins from her, and they made their silent way to the parlor. As she transferred the water into the ewer—it went stale faster in the skins—he finally said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize to me,” Elly said. “I’m not the one you hurt.”

  “Well, I’d apologize to Judah, but you told me to stay away from her.” He’d grown leaner since the coup, like the rest of them. His face was more angular, more like Elban’s—but he could never truly look like his father. He had too much of his mother in him, and too much humanity. “And for the record, I didn’t hurt her. I would never hurt her.”

  “Does lying about the stableman not count as hurting?” He said nothing. Elly went on: “Anyway, you’ve done something to her. You’ve been doing it for weeks.”

  Something in his eyes flickered. Not quite guilt but...awareness. She wasn’t wrong, she saw. There had been something, all these weeks. At first she’d suspected it was sex, because the wariness in Judah’s eyes had reminded her of her mother, or the way Eleanor herself had felt around Angen. But there was a difference: Judah had seemed wary, but not afraid. Not trampled. “I wouldn’t hurt her,” he said.

  “You would not deliberately hurt her,” she said quietly. “And you would be very sorry afterward. Just like now.”

  Silence dropped, heavy and thick, and Elly let it lie where it fell.

  * * *

  So many hours passed before she saw the magus again that she decided he’d left without stopping back in to see her. It surprised her when he appeared in the open parlor door, still holding the bag. He was pale and the skin under his eyes was an alarming grayish-purple. She put down the spoon she’d been holding and went to him. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” he said with a weak smile, and held out the bag to her.

  It felt too heavy in her hands. “I hope she kept some of this.”

  “She did. But I bring it for all of you.” One of his hands drifted toward the doorjamb for support.

  “Please, magus. Sit down.”

  He sank gratefully into the nearest chair. “I’m sorry. It’s the stairs, that’s all.”

  “You made it up?”

  “Oh,” he said, and his eyes slid away. “No, that part’s fine. It’s just a lot of climbing. I shouldn’t get winded, walking around the city as much as I do.”

  “Maybe you’re coming down with something.”

  “Maybe I am.” His gaze drifted in a way that tugged at her memory, but before she could follow the thread to its source, he said, “I’ll go home to bed. But I wanted to bring you the food. I told her I’d be back tomorrow, but I’m not sure I can get you more supplies by then.”

  “Tomorrow?” She blinked, surprised. “Oh, of course not. We appreciate everything you do for us. Judah’s all right?”

  “Fine.” He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. “Eleanor, there was something I wanted to say earlier, and didn’t. I’m here on sufferance, because the Seneschal allows it, and it’s a bit—sticky. Sometimes I have to think carefully before I speak. But I’m on your side, as much as I can be.”

  “We know you are.”

  “I don’t think Elban poisoned Theron. I think it was the Seneschal. He came to Arkady’s manor a week or so before. It was the only time I ever knew him to do that. I can’t imagine Arkady taking any action the Seneschal didn’t approve. He always said the Seneschal held the reins.” The magus had a bandage wrapped around one arm. She hadn’t noticed it before. His hand went to it now. “Don’t trust him.”

  The Seneschal had known Theron since he was a baby. Eleanor stood frozen in her own empty shell; as sweat beaded on the magus’s forehead, and he paled even more; as he said, “I must go,” and did. Still she stood, the bag limp in her hands. The sun began to sink behind the Wall and the parlor grew cold, and she did not stoke the fire and she did not put anything on for dinner.

  The light in the room faded from gold to gray.

  Wake up. Find a way to survive.

  * * *

  She hadn’t been to the workshop since she’d brought Theron food after the hunt, and not for years before that. She and Gavin had been so busy training with their respective weapons, axes for him and protocol for her, and what good was any of it now, Eleanor thought, as she made her way through the old wing in her patched, dingy dress. She didn’t care that the dress was patched and dingy. The dress had come by its wear honestly. She liked her own competence, she liked finding solutions to problems, she liked building their paltry winter store. She had deluded herself, perhaps, into thinking that she was happier now, that she had more freedom. But they lived at the Seneschal’s mercy, all of them, and he’d tried to kill Theron and marry Judah and he wanted to send her away, back to Tiernan and Angen. She could do nothing about any of it. Judah could do nothing about any of it. But they could do nothing together. They could...not be alone.

  In the base of the tower, the staircase wound up and up. The magus had been right. There were a lot of stairs. Carefully, she stepped onto the first one. Instantly, she became aware of the empty space next to her. Instantly, the solid stone under her foot felt like slender wood and bark. Her head began to spin and her skin broke out in cold sweat and she heard Angen’s voice calling up from the bottom of the tree, sweet and musical and cruel.

  What will you do for me if I let you down, little kitten?

  Angen was far, far away. Angen could not hurt her. It didn’t matter.

  Will you play nicely, and not whine like last time?

  She pushed his voice away and called up into the growing gloom, “Judah? Can you hear me?”

  The words echoed and died, and there was only silence.

  The last time she’d stood here, she’d worn lovely embroidered slippers with ice-slick soles, just the thing for careful gliding steps over flat marble floors. Now she wore Theron’s old boots, like Judah always had. They were sturdy and strong and she could climb anything in them. She forced herself to put one of them on the next step. One step at a time, just like storing food: one dried fruit, one bag of oats, one bundle of dried onions. Don’t think about the long cold winter ahead, and how full the shelves will need to be before it begins, and how empty your stomach will be before it ends. Wake up each day and figure out how to survive it. One fruit. One bag. One bundle.

  One step. Then one mor
e. She would climb a thousand staircases, each only one step high. At the top of the last one, she would find Judah. One step, over and over. She would do it. She was doing it. She had found the strength to feed them and keep them alive and she would find the strength to do this, too. She didn’t dare turn to see how far she’d come, but soon it seemed she had climbed a hundred steps, two hundred, and her heart began to flutter with victory.

  Then she made a mistake. She looked up.

  There it was, mere feet ahead of her: the broken place. The one that had kept the others from climbing to the top, all those years ago—but Judah had done it the day before, and the magus had done it today. Broken steps jutted out from the wall, crumbling and rotten. Like a game of checkers, she could see how she would have to move from one to the next, but she could also see the places where she would have to stretch and leap, and she knew there was no hope. She couldn’t breathe water and she couldn’t drink fire and she couldn’t climb those stairs, and if she had hated Angen (and Edouard and Grey, but Angen was the worst) before, she hated them doubly and triply now. She had not thought of them for years, she had decided they no longer mattered. But they had broken something in her, all those years ago, and now Judah needed her and she needed Judah and she still couldn’t go. The steps were broken. She was broken. She couldn’t even move.

  Stop crying. Bad kittens who cry get punished.

  Angen had only yelled at her for crying because he liked yelling at her. He liked it when she cried. Just like Elban would have liked it when she cried, and oh, dear gods, she had almost married him. Most of the time she could keep the long view, most of the time she could be strong inside. But right now the panic was so close to the surface that all its sources blended together and she felt sick.

  “Judah!” she called again, desperate.

  This time, there was an answer. Her own name: but from below, not above, and it wasn’t Judah’s voice but a man’s. Gavin’s. She was envious of the quick thud of his boots on the steps, and then his body was between her own and the edge, and his arm was around her shoulder, and she was grateful for him. She hated that she was grateful for him.