It was surprisingly easy. And the easiest path of all was the one that led out of the middle of her chest, straight to Gavin. He was in the kitchen yard: overgrown, now, with their chickens pecking in the tall grass. In front of her was the stump of a tree, its surface scarred with countless axe cuts, where a block of wood stood on end. As she watched, a pitted axe blade swooped down from somewhere over her right shoulder and she thought, Right through your neck, Seneschal, you scheming bastard.
Or rather, Gavin did. Then he sensed her and the blade went wild, knocking an awkward splinter off the top of the wood and sending the rest flying. The world tilted wildly as he jumped out of the way of his own axe and Judah slid quickly sideways, so that she was beside him instead of in him. When he saw her, his eyes widened. He dropped the axe with a clatter. Not on his foot, luckily.
She looked down. Her body seemed solid; her feet rested on the ground, the wind moved in her hair. She cast no shadow, but neither did Gavin. The sky was gray.
“Jude.” Gavin’s face—thinner now—bloomed with joy and relief. “You’re back.”
I did it, she said, amazed.
But the words came out of her head, the way they did in the Work. Gavin’s relief died. “You’re not back. You’re a hallucination. I’m finally going insane.”
You’re not going insane.
“Obviously, the hallucination would say that. It’s okay. It’s sort of a relief, actually.”
Gavin, she said, exasperated, and threw her arms around him. She was delighted to find that she could feel him. He wore a thick sweater she’d never seen before, sort of a dull gray, a bit misshapen. When she pressed against it, the wool felt scratchy on her cheek.
Slowly, his arms circled her—tentatively at first, as if she might evaporate; then, as he became convinced of her solidity, almost painfully tight. But when he pulled back, he was frowning. “Strange. I can touch you, but—”
You can’t feel me in your head. I know. I can’t feel you, either. Instead of sensations from his body, it was her own body she felt, back in the tower. Which, she became aware, was pulling at her. I think it’s because I’m already in your head. I came through your head to get here.
“So you are a hallucination.”
Sort of. Not really. It’s complicated.
“Of course it is,” he said with faint, deadened amusement. “It’s you. It’s us. We’re always complicated.” He began to walk away. She found herself pulled along.
Where are we going?
“Anywhere Elly isn’t going to catch me talking to myself like a courtier with a vial problem,” he said. They passed the stands of hops, dry and dead, and the empty but still fragrant piggery, and then came to the pasture. Judah had never come this way before. She’d always come around by the stables, even before Darid. Kitchen staff swatted and shooed; stablemen and dairymaids didn’t care.
Gavin stopped. “All right, hallucination or no: I’m sorry about the stableman, Judah. And everything else. I should have told you the truth. I don’t blame you for being angry with me.”
Gavin—
He held up a hand. “But it’s not fair to Elly, the way you’ve been ignoring her notes. Without you, all she has is me and Theron, and neither of us is much use.”
What notes? She hasn’t sent any notes.
“She gives them to the magus for you.”
And oh, gods, her memory was such garbage, she didn’t know. If she’d been given notes from Elly, would she have bothered to read them or cared what they said? Was there a pile of them sitting in the tower somewhere, ignored, buried in the leaves?
She tried to picture the magus handing her a slip of paper. The image didn’t feel true at all. The anger she felt: now, that felt true.
He hasn’t been giving them to me, she said.
Gavin frowned. “Jude, what’s going on?” He pushed up one sleeve of the rough sweater and held out his arm. “Does it have anything to do with this?”
The inside of his arm was covered—as hers was, in the tower—with the magus’s tidy, careful cuts. They were more healed than hers; his were a healthy pink. Judah felt even worse. Of course her cuts made him bleed, too. It hadn’t occurred to her. Yes, she said.
Gavin put a hand on her arm, his jaw set with worry. “Come down. We’ll figure it out.”
Tears pricked at Judah’s eyes. I want to.
“So do it.”
I want to right now. I think in a minute, I won’t want to anymore. The tower—makes me not care about things. She was sure now. Out of the tower, all of the dead places were alive again. Not getting the notes Elly had sent her made her angry. Seeing Gavin made her want to slap him, or hug him, or both. Darid was still gone, though. Where the bitter ache of his absence should have been, she felt nothing. Meanwhile, her body—or the tower? Or her body in the tower—pulled even harder at her. The world was becoming shimmery and unreal, and the place in her chest where the rope connected felt tense and stretched.
Gavin, oblivious, was shaking his head. “I’ll come get you.”
The stairs—
“I’ll be careful. If that lying sneak of a magus can make it—”
I think the tower helps him. I think it helped me.
“Do you want me to try or not?” Now it was Gavin who sounded angry.
She hesitated. The magus had told her he could teach her how to unbind herself from Gavin; she remembered that very clearly. He’d seemed certain. He’d felt certain. She had been inside his head; she’d seen his most dearly-held and shameful memories. Anneka. Caterina. The blond man dying at the table. She didn’t think he could lie to her.
But he hadn’t delivered Elly’s notes. He kept a locked place in his head. With everything she’d seen, what could possibly be left to hide? The only answer: something he didn’t want her to see. Specifically. She remembered him kissing her hand, how wrong that had felt. She would have to trust him, he’d said. She didn’t. It hurt her to realize, but she didn’t.
She took Gavin’s hands. They already felt less real in hers and she knew she didn’t have much time. Try. I’ll try, too.
Frustrated, confused, he said, “You’ll try what? Judah, what’s going on?”
I love you, she said, and slipped away again.
Back to the tower, and into the Work. The blood was stupid. The blood was a crutch, a silly, disgusting tradition passed down through generations of people too timid to use what they knew. Caterina had said Judah was special—amazing—but if she was, it was only because she was unhampered by all the magus’s years of lessons and training and worship at the altar of the Work. It was there, like water; no point in singing to it when you could dive in and swim. But what if she wasn’t swimming? What if she was only splashing around in the shallows? Everything she saw around her in the tower was exactly what she’d expected—luminous purple lace draping everything, each strand coursing with life and power—but that didn’t mean it was all there was. Like standing at the edge of the aquifer and sensing the vast caverns in front of her, she stood in the Work and sensed that there was more to see.
So she opened her eyes.
This, she was surprised to find, wasn’t easy. There was a general feel of reluctance around her. Like Theron as a child, watching cautiously from the ground as she climbed up to the thinnest branches in the apple trees, saying, Ugh, Judah, please don’t, you’re going to fall. A soft voice whispering, Unsafe, unsafe. She ignored the voice. She was determined. There was an ineffable tearing sensation around her eyes—
And suddenly the room was clogged with Work, choked with it. The membranous purple filled the very air; it drifted like smoke, and she realized with horror that she had been breathing it in all this time. She looked down at herself.
The great rope wound out of her chest; that was familiar. But peeking out of her collar, just at the edge of her vision, she saw something else:
a thread, a taut bit of Work. She pulled the collar down and saw that her body—what she could see of it—was nearly covered in purple stuff, threads of it disappearing into her and emerging in the perfect precise stitches of an expert seamstress.
Or a magus.
It was so easy, now that she knew how. She only had to look inside one of the stitches, and there it was. There he was; there they both were. Her own self, asleep—looking not at all the way she did in her head, her face smudged and too thin, her fingernails dirty and broken, her dress spotted with blood. Half of her hair had come free of her braids and stood out around her head like a greasy, tangled crown. But her eyes were closed and her face looked somehow mindless, like Gavin when he’d passed out drunk, or Theron anytime.
The magus was bent over her, bandaging her arm with unsteady hands. He kept squeezing his eyes shut behind his dirty spectacles, as if trying to clear them. He didn’t look much better than she did. Cleaner, maybe; his hair was neatly tied back, but she didn’t see how he could have done it the way his hands shook. Did he live with someone who loved him enough to tie back his hair for him? Was there a lover in his Highfall life, some latter-day Anneka who trembled at his touch? She could hardly imagine. The kiss he’d pressed on her hand had been familiar and intimate—and why shouldn’t it be, since she’d lived through most of his memories?—but the moment his lips touched her skin she had known with crystalline clarity that she would never want him to kiss any other part of her.
And that had been when she’d still trusted him. She felt sorry for him, and she felt sorry for the loss of him, but the faint sway of his shoulders made her uneasy. He was singing some simple up-and-down-again tune, like something one of the dairymen would whistle. She moved so she could see his face and he was further gone than Theron, with slack mouth and half-lidded eyes. He managed to finish bandaging her arm, to put the unused bandages, scissors and salve back into his satchel. Then he took out a needle. It was long and curved.
Still singing, he plucked a strand of membrane out of the air. She had asked him once why she couldn’t use the Work in reality, and he’d said it simply wasn’t that kind of thing—and yet here he was, threading the membrane through the eye of the needle like purple silk. It went agreeably, stretching and thinning to slip easily in. As he bent over her sleeping body, the needle fell from his fingers. He didn’t seem to notice it was gone. His thumb and first finger were still pinched together as though he held it, and she understood that the needle was like the blood: a crutch. A way in. A method of activating the Work so he could do what he was doing now, as Judah watched with growing horror: humming his stupid song and sewing the membrane into Judah’s body like he was embroidering a pillowcase. Sometimes he pushed the thread all the way through her, catching it on the other side and sending it back. Sometimes he actually reached into her to retrieve it. Her unconscious self didn’t wake but moaned and writhed. He made small soothing noises, but almost to himself; stroked her filthy hair, but didn’t stop. Everything about him said that he felt he had every right to do what he was doing. The drifting gaze he cast down at her was affectionate, almost loving. The body on the floor was only a memory; but watching the magus Work made her arms twitch to cover herself. She was revolted, but she had to see what had happened to her. She had to know.
As she watched, the pitch and volume of his humming increased. His breath grew ragged and his pale cheeks flushed. Still his hands moved, weaving the stuff of the tower in and out of her, and if they had seemed unsteady before, they were smooth and confident now. His eyes closed. His hand sewed.
Then, all at once, his shoulders hunched and he let out a cry, small and shuddering. His hands slowed and stopped. He was still.
If Judah had been repulsed before, now she felt sick and furious. She wanted to reach into him and tear him apart. She couldn’t do that; he wasn’t actually there. This wasn’t her memory or his, but the memory of the tower itself. The Work, the tra la la song, his shabby climax—all were in the past. All she could do was observe as he put her dirty blanket over her, as he wrapped up the food he’d brought so it would stay fresh. He made no effort to clean himself. As he moved around the tower, he mindlessly picked up the fallen needle, and when he stood again Judah caught a glimpse of his eyes and they, too, unfolded, just like the stitch had.
And then she was inside the magus, and she didn’t know if she had slipped into the real magus, as she had the real Caterina, or if this was some half-formed tower-memory, so she was cautious. He had no idea what had happened. He knew about the weaving, but he didn’t know he’d dropped the needle before he’d started and he didn’t know he’d come as he’d finished. She wondered what he’d thought when he’d undressed at home, what story he told himself to explain the mess.
Very carefully, she found the locked door and discovered that it stood open. Not all the way open; not enough for her to step through, but enough for her to peek through the crack.
A terrifying-looking old woman with white hair and cruel eyes. His teacher. The one who wouldn’t tell him his mother loved him.
The tower must have more of a hold on her than the boy does when the Unbinding comes.
I think the weaving hurts her, the magus-memory said, and a white flash of pain filled his eyes. The old woman cackled.
Did that hurt you, Nathaniel? Don’t be pathetic. It doesn’t matter if it hurts her.
That was it. That was all she could see. She slammed the whole scene shut like a book. With a flash of anger she made her dress go away—she would have torn it off, but in the Work she had only to will it gone—and looked down at her own body as if she’d never seen it before. Which she supposed she hadn’t. She had certainly never seen the purple seams that traversed it, so much uglier than the scars that marred her real body. When she ran her hands over her stomach she felt the ripple of the stitches beneath them. The sheer number of them took her breath away. He must have been doing this since the first day. All this time, the Work had seemed miraculous, and all this time it had been...infecting her.
The boy. The boy must be Gavin, but somehow she doubted that the Unbinding was the unbinding the magus had promised her. They had another plan, the magus and his nasty old teacher, and she didn’t know what it was, but she knew it involved her and Gavin.
Her pain didn’t matter, did it? Well, that was familiar.
She found a stitch just above her left breast that was nearly an inch long. Slid a finger under the purple thread. Ripped it out.
She screamed. The world went black.
She came to on her knees, sobbing. It was the worst pain she’d ever known. Worse than the poker, worse than the caning, worse than thinking Darid was dead. But she was still in the Work, and the stitch had vanished.
She found another stitch and tried again.
The world went black again.
Hundreds of purple stitches marred her body. She pulled out four of them before the pain kicked her out of the Work entirely and she found herself lying on the cold stone floor of the tower. Night had fallen. She crawled to the sheared-away edge and was sick over the edge of it. Her whole body hurt. She told herself that she would rest for just a minute. Maybe two. The floor was so nice and cool on her aching body and the fresh air felt good.
When she woke, she was shivering. Her arm dangled over the edge. Lifting her head, the first thing she saw was the drop. All at once fully awake, heart pounding and breath short, she crawled away, not trusting her legs to carry her. Only after she was safe did she realize: something was different.
She was hungry. She was cold. She was lonely.
And she was furious.
Chapter Twenty
Nate didn’t dare treat patients anymore. He was afraid he’d kill someone. Word had gotten around Marketside and Brakeside that his friend had died and people seemed content to leave him in what they judged to be grief. On the street, he was the recipient of many a pitying
smile and kind pat on the shoulder. Waiting at Leda’s, he lost track of the world and when he found it again, he was holding a wizened sprig of mint. Based on Leda’s expression, he guessed he’d been standing there quite a while. “You’ll find someone else, magus,” she said. “No heart dies forever.” Confused, Nate only nodded. It wasn’t until later that he realized that Leda had assumed Charles was his lover. Once, that would have humiliated and infuriated him, but it no longer seemed to matter.
Bindy took care of him in a quiet way that he found almost intolerable. He suspected that she was filling and delivering simple orders so she didn’t have to bother him with them, but her apprenticeship had withered and died on the vine. When she decided he needed something—food, water, a shave—she put bread or a cup or his razor in front of him, so unobtrusively that they might always have been there. When she started to bring soup again he knew she was truly worried for him. He wasn’t hungry, but he ate to please her. The soup tasted different. He doubted the broth lady could get her hands on chicken anymore. He didn’t like to think what she’d found to use instead.
A week passed like this. It was the week the Seneschal had given Nate to get Judah down from the tower. On what he knew would be his last morning in the manor, he woke to find Derie sitting in the kitchen. “Locked the door in case your little wenchlet shows up early,” she said, and nodded at a cup on the table. “Might as well drink that.”
It was broth, but cold. He drank it anyway.
Derie watched. “Today, then.”
“Today.” He frowned into the broth. “Derie, if we ever go home, I want to bring Bindy. If she wants to come.”
“Her?” Derie’s voice dripped with contempt. “She’s got nothing in her at all.”
“Still. I’d like to ask her,” Nate said, dogged.
Derie huffed. “I’ll consider it. But I’m not making you any sort of deathbed promise about it, boy.”
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