The next morning, Nate still sat there, motionless at the table with three bowls of clotting blood and the dead body of his oldest friend. When Bindy walked in and gasped, Nate only blinked. He felt like he’d just woken up, but knew he hadn’t slept. “Bindy,” he said calmly, “will you please go find a guard? Charles has killed himself.”
By the time the deadcart arrived—nothing so grand as a deadcoach, not for somebody like Charles—Nate had dumped the bowls of blood in the garden. Even inert blood made good fertilizer. It didn’t bother him. He’d watched the stuff drain out of Charles, but could feel nothing of his friend in it. Even the body itself felt meaningless, and it did not disturb him overmuch to watch the two workers dump it unceremoniously into the back of the cart, where several bodies already lay jumbled on top of each other. Nate stood silently with the guard as the two workers pulled a soiled piece of canvas over the bodies to cover them, and cracked the whip over the decrepit mule who began to ploddingly carry them all away.
“Where are they taking him?” Nate said.
“Pits outside the city,” the guard said. “Sorry about your friend, magus. Was he a dropper?”
“He used to be.”
“Once a dropper, always a dropper.” The guard nodded at the disappearing cart, then spat into the dust. “Two of those others were, too. Stuff turns a man into a parasite. Wish they’d all do like your friend. No disrespect meant, of course.”
“None taken,” Nate said.
* * *
As the Seneschal let him into the courtyard the next day, the gray man said, “You have one more week to convince her to come down on her own. Then I’ll bring her down, one way or another.” His voice was flat. “You might suggest to her—subtly, of course—that the broken stairs don’t protect Gavin.”
“I thought you didn’t approve of the way Elban used them against each other,” Nate said.
“I don’t. It will be clean, my way. Fair.” One gray shoulder twitched in a shrug. “I’ll only hurt him until she comes down. No tricks.”
Judah would certainly come down if Gavin were being tortured. Nate needed to finish his work soon. As he navigated the corridors to the parlor, he felt dull surprise that the end was finally so near: he had spent his entire life building a house, and now there were only the curtains to hang and the horse to hitch up. Although generally one didn’t hitch horses up to houses. His metaphors were mixing. Charles was dead. Soon Judah would be wreaking her usual careless havoc in his head. Not knowing who he was would almost be a relief.
He found Eleanor sitting on the parlor floor in a tangle of dingy gray yarn like a bird in a nest, and gave her the flour. Her thanks was halfhearted. “Put it on the table, will you? Sorry, I can’t get up. If I lose my place in this I’ll never find it again. I had it outside drying, and the wind picked up.” She shook her head once, as if she had no movements to spare. Then, looking more closely at him, her eyes narrowed. “Magus, are you feeling all right?”
“I was about to ask the same of you.”
“I’m just tired. Of this yarn, mostly. We really are grateful for the flour, magus. It means a lot. Will you bring that flask on the table up to Judah when you go? It’s squash soup.”
“She’ll like that.”
“She’ll hate it, actually,” Eleanor said, “but it’s food. There’s a letter, too.”
He took the flask. He burned the letter in the workshop, as he did all of Eleanor’s letters. They would only remind Judah of Eleanor and the outside world. They would only hurt her. And he needed her focused.
* * *
You seem sad today.
They stood on a windy mountain, thick soft cloud obscuring everything beneath them. The snow never melted there, but in Judah’s Work, it was only cold, not freezing. For her, the glittering crystals of ice in the air were beautiful, not piercing; for her, the crunch of snow underfoot did not carry a fear of crevasse, collapse, death. Around them the peaks of the Barriers reached majestically skyward, blue-gray and frosted with white. In reality, by this point, Nate had not been able to open his windburned eyes enough to see through them; Charles had lost a toe, and for all of them, remembering the sensation of being merely cold had been like remembering summer. But Nate had hidden those darker memories behind the locked door, because to explain why the three travelers were willing to suffer so would require explaining why they were here, and Judah wasn’t ready to hear that yet. To her, the Barriers were merely dark and lovely and wild.
I suppose I am, he said. A friend died.
The snow settled on her hair like diamonds and didn’t melt. I know how that feels.
You do, don’t you? Nate changed the scene: showed her the stableman as he’d seen him that first time, in Firo’s room. Wary and pale, but unafraid. Like a cow going to slaughter was unafraid. He could feel the stab of pain the dull face brought her. The empty spaces the stableman had left in her were the empty spaces Charles had left in him. It was dreadful to lose someone. He’s not dead, though.
He might as well be, she said curtly. He could feel her sadness as keenly as he felt his own.
Watch the snow, he told Judah, and set the silver crystals of snow spinning and whirling in the air. Her eyes grew wide, as he’d known they would. Snow never danced that way in reality. While she was distracted, he reached into her, felt for the jagged places the stableman’s absence had left. He pressed the broken edges together and smoothed the seam over. It was complicated Work and he was almost frightened by how quickly and easily he could do it. It was true that the more you Worked in someone’s mind, the more malleable that mind became, but this was something he’d never been able to do before. He knew he wouldn’t be able to do it now were they not in the tower.
Even so, she gasped, and pressed a hand to her chest. What did you do?
A kind of Work. The faintest smugness colored his voice. The smoothing was the sort of talent he had long envied in Caterina, who did it as a treatment for grief or anger. But now Judah’s lips were pressed tight together, her eyes flinty.
Undo it.
But I took away your pain.
It’s my pain. The ice crystals near her seemed to darken from diamond to onyx and the wind began to snatch at Nate—nowhere near as cold as reality had been, but worrisome, nonetheless. I want to feel it.
The sky was beginning to tilt sideways and slide away. He wasn’t even sure she knew she was doing it. Unsettled, he said, I’ve given you a gift. You’re better off without him.
With a sound like shattering glass, the crystals of black ice snapped together into a long, sharp wedge. For a bare instant it hovered in the air between them—then it flew straight toward his heart. He felt the merciless point tearing into his skin, splintering his ribs like kindling—
And he lay on the floor of the tower, out of the Work, gritty stone beneath his hands. He tried to take a breath, but something was wrong with his lungs. Something was wrong with all of him. His arms and legs flailed against the floor, his back straining in an agonizing arc, but his mind was clear—as clear as it ever was, anyway—watching his body twist and spasm. The pain was very real, the pain was brutal. The back of his skull rammed three times, hard, against the stone floor, and the world was full of flinty ice again and everything went gray.
When he became aware of himself once more, his body was mercifully still. The side of his face pressed against cold stone. A pebble dug into his cheek. Faintly, he heard somebody gasping. He didn’t think it was him. Carefully, he moved one arm, then another. Braced them beneath his body and pushed himself upright.
Judah sat a few feet away, her back pressed against the curved wall. She was only inches from the place the floor stopped. It terrified him to see her so close to the edge. Her arms were wrapped tight around her body. She was the one who was gasping. Her eyes were wild, like a panicked horse. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s all
right. I’m all right,” he said, although something in his head was damaged. He saw everything in multiples: Judah here, Judah on the mountain, Judah a year from now. Infinite Judahs observed by infinite Nathaniels. The ends of himself flapped loose and he knew that Derie would not be able to put him back together this time. He tried to gather as much of himself as he could.
He must have done a decent job because her breathing slowed, and the terror faded from her eyes. “I saw your friend in your head,” she said. “I saw him kill himself. You just sat and watched. How could you just sit and watch?”
“Derie took his power away. He was already dead.”
He could smell her puzzlement like smoke. Then she understood, and the smoke vanished. To Nate’s great relief she came forward, onto her knees, and slid away from the terrifying drop—came close to him, and took his hand. Her hand felt dry and cold, her touch tentative. “I’m sorry I hurt you, magus. And I’m sorry for your friend. You loved him.”
“I did,” he said. Her eyes were as black as the icy dagger she’d sent into his chest, and all of the many fractured parts of him were sure that if he kissed her now she would let him, if he did anything she would let him. Some of the fragments inside his head were already kissing her, already doing much more, but the lump of his real body in the tower was sluggish and hard to control. And wouldn’t Derie be angry. Wouldn’t she use her cane on him then.
As if in answer, he heard his old teacher’s voice—real or imagined, he didn’t know, those lines were fractured, too—as cutting as the mountain wind. She’s not yours, boy.
He flinched away. Judah frowned. Before he could say anything she reached out one of her cool, dry hands and touched his cheek. He would have flinched back from that, too—but the coolness spread over him, like floating in a pond in the warm sun. It was better than a kiss. It was better than anything he’d ever felt. The pieces of him weren’t joined, but they were soothed. He was a great tree surrounded by a pond and all the fluttering leaves of him were useful, all grew from the same place. He could stay like this forever. He never wanted to move again. And she hadn’t even cut him first—even that faint delicious pain was absent—
She hadn’t even cut him first. His eyes flew open in amazement. “What are you doing? How are you—”
Judah pulled her hand back. He was still cracked and broken, but the lovely peace remained. “I do it for Gavin when he’s upset. You seemed so miserable.”
“You can just...do that,” he said.
She shrugged. “It’s not the same as what you do.”
No, it wasn’t. It was much, much stronger. This was why it had to be her, Nate realized. This was the Work the Slonimi had wrought, all of them together, over all these years. She wasn’t like him or Caterina or Derie; she wasn’t even like Maia or Tobin. She was something else entirely. He could see her slipping already back into the docility that he and the tower wove around her. Her jaw and cheekbones stood out more now. She wasn’t eating enough and she probably didn’t even know it, the Work he and the tower did on her when she was asleep kept her from feeling hungry. Or cold—he had felt her touch, he knew her body was cold. She was dying in this barren tower, isolated from everyone she knew, and it all probably felt completely normal to her. It probably seemed a perfectly reasonable way to live.
Sometimes, as the Slonimi traveled, they found a villager so powerful they could not be left behind, whether the villager would come willingly or not. It was hard. They always yelled and fought, and had to be chained until they accepted their new life. Caterina hated it. It’s for the best, she’d say, though, and she was right. Caterina’s own mother had been one of the Unwilling. Charles’s father, too. What the Seneschal had told Nate in Elban’s study was true: people didn’t always know what was good for them, and they rarely considered what was good for the world. Sometimes you had to force them. Sometimes they had to be tricked.
“You’re getting very good,” he said.
“Yes,” Judah said. Her voice sounded drowsy. She pushed his knife toward him. “If there were a contest for the person who was the very best at digging through your head, I’d win.”
No, he thought, wryly. Derie would. “You’re finding truths that I don’t even know are inside me. Soon you’ll be able to manipulate them.”
“Like you just did? With Darid?” She blinked, her face slack with the effort of thinking. “I didn’t like that.”
“But it helped you. You trust me to help you, don’t you?”
“I trust you,” she said so dreamily that his fragmented heart broke into a few more pieces, just for her.
“Good.” He took her hand in his. “Because you’ll need to trust me, if you’re going to unbind yourself from Gavin.”
Some emotion broke through her complacency like a lantern through fog: excitement and dread and fear and trepidation, all at once. “Could I do that?” she whispered finally.
“It won’t be easy,” he said. He kept his voice neutral. Just in case she had some tendrils inside him, he thought fixedly of the locked door inside his head. “You’d have to do exactly as I say. Even if it’s hard. Even if it hurts.”
With a glimmer of her old cheek, she said, “Are you seriously asking me if I’m afraid of pain?”
“I mean it,” he said. “You have to trust me.”
She rolled her eyes as if the answer was obvious. “I trust you.”
And she did. He could feel it with all of his selves. He very much doubted that she had much choice—the tower did its own kind of Work—but still. It overwhelmed him. He still held her hand; now he pressed the back of it to his lips, which was all he dared to do. Perhaps after. Perhaps there would be time.
But then he realized how limp her hand was in his, and—mouth still pressed to her cool skin—he looked up. Saw the dazed distaste in her eyes, the wariness.
Well. Maybe not.
He let her hand fall. Then he picked up his knife. It was spotted with old blood and grit from the floor, but he didn’t think it mattered, any more than her distaste mattered. After, when she was asleep, the tower would smooth everything over.
Chapter Nineteen
Something was wrong. Like a word on the tip of Judah’s tongue, or a dream—she knew the wrongness was there, but when she tried to grab for it, it slipped away.
It wasn’t the Work; she loved the Work. The Work was alive. The blood, which she’d initially found gory, hardly bothered her anymore. The purplish membrane didn’t particularly interest her, but the world Nate showed her inside his head was dazzling. There was so much of it. Forests of vine-shrouded trees with tops that pierced the clouds; giant rust-colored rocks littered across a plain like discarded toys; wide meadows greener and more fragrant than anything she’d ever seen or smelled. The Work was all that was real; the tower was the dream. She watched the magus’s fine, pale hands cleaning crusted blood away from her cuts and remembered Darid’s hands, big and callused, dabbing salve over her burns; those big hands had seemed the only solid thing in a world that slipped and slid with fever, but now the memory seemed empty, meaningless.
In another language, another world, around a corner, under a bed, some hidden part of her knew: something was wrong. Something was missing. No matter how she searched, she couldn’t find it.
She thought she had searched.
She was sure she had.
* * *
A thin crust of snow appeared in a perfect semicircle near the broken edge of the tower. Elly sent up a blanket, but Judah wasn’t cold. The magus’s visits were brilliantly clear, but she had no idea how she passed her time in between. She devoured the food he brought, but was never aware of being hungry. She had nothing to do, but was never bored; she must have slept, but remembered neither falling asleep nor waking, and was never drowsy. Through the purple membrane she could feel Theron drifting around the house, but he meant nothing to her. Scratches from Gavin marre
d her skin, around the old curlicue scars and the tidy cuts the magus made, but they didn’t seem important.
In the Work she felt everything. Every touch of breeze, every flake of snow. Her body felt hyper-alive and the world felt hyper-real even though she knew it wasn’t real at all. Her memories of the places the magus took her weren’t even really hers. They were secondhand, with the shape of his identity still in them. But they felt like hers.
Why does the inside of your head look like the old part of the House? she asked once. Because when they weren’t working with specific memories, he let her explore, opening closed door after closed door. And it did look like the old wing. You had never been here before I brought you.
You had, he said. A bit wry, even in the Work. Having her wandering the halls of his brain was uncomfortable for him but he let her do it anyway. He said it was fine, that what mattered was that she was learning—and she was. She could open his memories, unfold them to see things in them that he’d never noticed and couldn’t consciously remember. She could even change them, if she wanted. There was a girl he’d been with, Anneka, his memory of her strong because—Judah thought—she had been his first and they had been young and it had happened during the time the magus thought of as Before, When Things Were Easy. The memory was easy to manipulate. Her changes were subtle at first, the weather or the smells or the feel of the ground under Nate’s hands. Then she changed the color of Anneka’s dress, made her older, gave her a scar. The young magus still kissed her throat and told her she was beautiful. The memory seemed to rest not just in the girl, but in his younger self with the girl: Did his feelings for Anneka stay the same no matter what Judah changed, or was he simply unable to remember himself acting any way other than he actually had?
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