The Broken Tower--A Novel, page 5
The edges of Judah’s vision began to go white. That word. Slonimi. The magus had said he was Slonimi. He’d said she was, too. She could remember him as clearly as if he stood in front of her, a gaunt man with blond hair falling out of his queue. Weeping. Holding a knife out to her. His blood. Your blood. Break what his ancestors did. He and his great Unbinding, the thing that he was convinced she had to kill Gavin to accomplish. But he was also convinced that the purple web of Work in the tower wouldn’t let her die and so she’d chosen to take her chances with jumping, instead. The white band around her vision was growing wider. She felt sick.
“No,” Sevedra said. “The Slonimi keep tight rein on their people. They would never have let you fall in with the Morgeni or that talks-too-much Northerner.” He moved his hand to the back of her head, gripping her by the short curls there. “Tell me where you’re from.”
Unbidden, the city spread out before her mind’s eye, spires and smokestacks and banners and drums. The word forced its way out of her. “Highfall,” she said.
“Nonsense. Highfall is in the east, all the way on the other side of the Barriers. And you’re no Highfaller. Not with this hair.” His grip on her hair tightened, and he shook her head slightly. “How did you get here?”
“Fell,” she said. Because fallen, she had. When she jumped from the tower. She was west of the Barriers, now? Really? Everything she knew was to the east. The tower hadn’t let her die, but why had it sent her so far away?
“Yes, Highfall. I heard you the first time,” he said, a bit impatiently. “Give me your hand.” Of its own accord, her hand floated up to his waiting one. He let go of her hair to take it, but she still couldn’t move. He took a knife out of his belt. It looked like the same one he’d used to cut the bread earlier. “Now, be quiet. Let’s see what you’ve brought me.”
He cut a line down the length of her forearm with the knife, right across her perfect, unscarred arm. She wanted to scream but he’d said quiet. It was a shallow cut, he hadn’t hit anything important, but the white began to creep back into her vision. The blood welled up from the cut and dripped down onto the earth; he squeezed her arm to make it flow faster and she felt as if somebody kicked the inside of her brain and then the white was everywhere. She was everywhere. She was standing in the broken tower with the magus and she was drinking Sevedran wine in the catacombs with Gavin and she was helping Darid mend tack and she was in the Ghostwood and she was in the underground vineyard, all at once. She was herself. She was the dead boy whose clothes she wore, grappling with somebody as a strong arm slid around her throat and a sweet herbal smell filled her nose. She was a dozen other people, voices and minds she didn’t know. She was dying, not dying, dead, not dead. She was.
Then the white flared to purple, the same sickly, familiar purple of the Work that flowed through the tower. All of her selves collided with a jolt. Now she stood in a room, at a window, staring out onto a bleak, yellowed moor pocked with jagged rust-red rocks. The glass of the window was warped, hazy. Her hands felt strange and when she looked down she realized they were wrapped in thick bandages and then she realized they were not hers. She was in Gavin’s body, the thick purple rope that bound them still protruding from his chest. It looked sickly. Not quite there.
Behind her, a woman said, Gavin, I brought food, and Judah’s heart leapt because the woman was Elly. They were alive. They were alive.
They were alive.
But everything was alive. The purple was alive. She could feel it turning its attention toward her, seeking, pulling—a multitude—
She yanked herself away, back to the vineyard. She’d fallen forward, her hands sinking into the soft soil, and the soil was filled with multitudes, too. All the people the winemaker had killed, right here, so their blood could flow into his special, special vines. She could feel their lives in the vines, in the grapes themselves. She looked up at the winemaker. His hands were covered in blood.
“Bright gods,” he said, the words hollow with shock. “Bright gods, what are you? You’re like—you’re like what the Slonimi wish they were, you’re—” He seemed to lose the words. Then he grabbed her cut arm again. The blood was clotting but he shook it over the soil. “Give it to the grapes. Give it all to the grapes,” he said, panting, almost moaning. The moan turned into a laugh that was half sob. “My precious darling, I’ll keep you forever, what a vintage—what a vintage this will be—”
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a figure slammed into him from the side, a tangle of limbs and long ropes of hair. Down the winemaker went, landing with a grunt in the soft ground next to Judah. Lukash grabbed the old man’s long hair in one hand, and grabbed for the bloody bread knife with the other. The old man howled and held it out of reach. “No!” he cried. “She’s mine! She’s mine!”
No. She wasn’t.
Judah pivoted on one knee, spun around, and grabbed the old man’s knife-holding fist. The drug he’d given her was screaming and protesting in her head but it couldn’t hold her anymore. He wailed protest and insult as the three of them grappled in the near dark and the rich damp loam and the musty smell of ripening wine and the metallic smell of blood. Then the old man went down under her, and he still held the knife in his fist but Judah held the fist. She pushed the knife into his throat. His blood pulsed out, disappearing into the soil with hers, and the last clinging tendrils of the drug disintegrated.
Everything was quiet. Her chest heaved, her breath burning. Slowly, she stood up.
Lukash stared at the corpse on the ground, the knife protruding from its throat. “He drugged us. Are you all right?”
She nodded.
“You’re from Highfall. I heard you say it.”
She nodded again.
“I don’t know where that is,” he said, and she said, “Neither do I.”
* * *
Upstairs, they shook Cleric awake. The healer managed to collect enough of his wits to boil them a batch of some foul stuff that cleared the last of the mist from their brains. He sniffed at the bottle of special restorative wine, and visibly shuddered.
“What is it?” Judah said, and he said, “It’s evil, is what it is. Almost as bad as the godswill.”
“And if you can find any more of it, you’ll be bringing it with you,” Lukash said.
“Oh, very much yes,” Cleric said with a grin. Then the grin faded. “I should have known when I saw the herb garden. Some of those plants—” He shook his head. “People don’t just grow those.”
In one of the rooms in the basement, they found clothes and packs and staffs, knives and boots and bedrolls. All, they assumed, had belonged to the travelers the winemaker had killed. Lukash took gems and small coins—easy to carry, easy to spend. Cleric found the old man’s apothecary chest and ransacked it, transferring everything he wanted into sacks and vials from the winemaker’s own supply. Judah—who was distracted by a sore lip; she must have taken a blow from the winemaker without realizing it—found a satchel very like the one Cleric carried, a better bedroll, a few coins. She considered switching the dead boy’s clothes for others, but something felt wrong about leaving him alone here.
When they had combed the house from top to bottom, and taken everything they could carry that could possibly be of use, they made a pile of old cloth and kindling from the woodpile and doused the whole thing with tallow. Lukash set the fire with his tinderbox, and they left. The smell of smoke followed them into the trees.
“That wine,” Cleric mourned. “That sublime, sublime wine.”
Judah said nothing. In her head, she remembered standing at the strange window, in that awkward comfortable place where Gavin had always been, all her life; standing at the window, and looking out over a bleak, dead moor. Hearing Elly’s voice. Gavin, I brought food. Over and over she heard her, and her heart hurt, and there was nothing to do about it. The Slonimi wanted her, and they wanted Gavin dead. She had felt them, in the purple. Watching. Waiting. Looking for her, looking for both of them. If she reached out to Gavin again, they would find her.
Gavin and Elly were alive. Judah was alone.
THREE
Eleanor—formerly Eleanor of Tiernan, once the almost-Lady of Highfall, and now merely herself—had been brought to the guildhall from Highfall with Gavin in a closed carriage. The trip had taken three days. She had no idea where they were; she knew it was a bleak place, with great red boulders jutting from a sea of tall winter-faded grass, and she suspected there had been murders there before she and Gavin had arrived. A long pile of soil outside had the look of a poorly dug mass grave and there were pools of dried blood in some of the empty rooms. Whatever vocation the guild members had followed, their hall was thoroughly ransacked. Like the House had been, after the Seneschal’s coup—but the House had been home, especially after the coup, and the guildhall was a prison.
After the long, hardscrabble months alone in the House, they now had a staff of six, which should have seemed luxurious. But four of those six were the same members of the Seneschal’s guard who had spirited them out of Highfall in the dead of night. The other two were a kitchen boy who stole food from their very plates, and a skittering, hooting old woman, her tongue long since cut out, who watched them constantly with glittering eyes to make sure Gavin’s perfect, uninjured hands stayed bandaged.
All of Gavin was perfect and uninjured. The Seneschal had ordered Gavin’s hands bound before they left Highfall so that he couldn’t scratch Judah a message in his own flesh, knowing that wherever she was, she would feel the pain and see the marks of it. For the same reason, he was allowed to experience no discomfort whatsoever. The room where they slept was kept neither warm nor cold but exactly comfortable. They were fed often and copiously, if not luxuriously. Gavin was permitted to walk in the halls, the tongueless old woman like a shadow behind them, but not to train, or run. All of these conditions were enforced by the guards. Early on, Gavin had refused food and the nearest guard had immediately turned and punched Elly in the jaw. She’d lost a few seconds and been bruised for two weeks. Gavin had never defied the guards again.
Wake up each day and figure out how to survive. That was her grandmother’s maxim, and Elly felt like she’d been living by it her entire life. She had been sent to Highfall and betrothed to Gavin when she was only eight years old; Elban and the Seneschal had wanted a biddable girl with few political ties, Elly’s father had wanted her bride price, and her mother had wanted to see her safe away from her brothers. He’d never touched her but old Elban was as bad in his way as her brothers Angen or Eduard had been, and still she had survived. She had agreed to marry Elban instead of Gavin when it meant saving Theron’s life. She had arranged for Darid, the head stableman, to flee the House when it meant saving Judah’s heart. She had kept them all alive after the coup, digging through the midden heap for squash sprouted from discarded seeds and convincing the Seneschal to give them oats. She had set the Safe Passage on fire when the Seneschal and his men were coming through it, knowing full well they would burn alive. (One of the burned guards was at the guildhall now, his scars pink and new. She’d expected him to be nasty to her, but he acknowledged her existence little more than he would have a chicken he’d been charged with keeping.)
All of these things, she had done. All of these things, she would do again. But she hated the guildhall. She hated the life they lived. She hated the bandages on Gavin’s hands and she hated the way the old woman cackled when the bandages were removed so Gavin could wash. She hated cutting his food for him and she hated buttoning his shirts and she hated the way he let her. Proud Gavin, vain Gavin. Who didn’t care, anymore, if tea spilled on his sleeve because his bandaged grip was unsteady, if his hair fell in his eyes because he couldn’t push it back. She had tried braiding it in a queue once but had taken it out almost immediately. Better for it to fall than for her to look at him and be reminded of the House Magus, Nathaniel, the lying traitor who’d been their friend until he hadn’t been. The last time she’d seen him, he was being dragged out of the House ahead of them. She wondered, sometimes, where he was now. She hoped it was somewhere unpleasant.
More often, she wondered where Judah was. Gavin said Theron was dead, that the magus claimed to have killed him, but if that was true then how had Theron found her at the Safe Passage to give her the fire-making device, and how had he helped her up the tower stairs afterward? No, the lying traitor had lied again. Theron wasn’t dead. Theron was extremely clever, knew the abandoned halls of the old wing better than anyone living, and had managed to secret himself away where the Seneschal couldn’t find him. Judah, though—Gavin said Judah had jumped from the broken place in the room on top of the tower. The Seneschal’s men had searched the overgrown light well beneath the tower, but they hadn’t found her body. So perhaps the magus had drugged Gavin, to make him think Judah had jumped. Perhaps she had friends Elly didn’t know about who’d helped her. Elly hadn’t known about the stableman, after all, and everything she thought she’d known about Judah’s relationship with the courtier Firo had turned out to be wrong. All she knew for sure was Judah could never have survived that fall. And therefore she could never have jumped.
(Tell Elly I’m sorry. That was what Gavin told her Judah had said, before she’d jumped. Elly didn’t know what Judah was sorry for, and the idea that Judah had sent her, specifically, a message, and she hadn’t understood it, haunted her.)
On top of everything else, Gavin was still alive, wasn’t he? He wouldn’t be, if Judah was dead. Any injury Judah suffered, Gavin suffered, and vice versa. Nobody could explain it, but it had been that way all their lives. They shared hunger, cold, thirst, pain—even pleasure, when they got older. (Which had made Elly uncomfortable, during the weeks when she and Gavin had shared a bed in the more traditional sense than they did currently, and was that what Judah had been sorry for?) The bond was why cruel Elban allowed Judah to live with them, all these years—why he’d let Judah live at all, if Elly was honest with herself—and now it was the reason behind their infuriatingly comfortable living circumstances. Because the Seneschal didn’t think Judah was dead, either. He thought that if Judah stopped feeling anything from Gavin she would be driven out into the open to find him. Elly didn’t think the plan would work; Judah was pretty damned determined when she wanted to be.
But it was certainly having an effect on Gavin. There was a dead look in Gavin’s eyes, now, as if part of him had been severed. Elly could sympathize with that. She felt as if the most interesting parts of herself had been snatched away, too. She didn’t have Theron’s quiet genius and she didn’t have Judah’s acerbic perception and she didn’t have Gavin’s charm (neither did he, at this point). She missed them. She missed everything about them. Was that what Judah was sorry for, for leaving Elly on her own? Was it for fleeing to the tower in the first place? Or was it a general I’m sorry, an acknowledgment that nothing was currently good, and nothing had been good for a long time, and probably nothing would ever be good again?
It didn’t matter. But Elly still wondered.
All of the windows in the guildhall were glass, and none of them opened. Elly wasn’t allowed outside—she hadn’t felt fresh air in months—but she was allowed to go down to the empty, dirty kitchen to fetch their food. She didn’t know who cooked the food but sometimes it was better than others. Today it was soup, with the bones of the fowl they’d had a few days before floating in it. Tomorrow the soup would be gone and they would probably have nothing but bread and waxy, tasteless cheese. When they’d been under house arrest in Highfall, they’d lived on boiled oats and midden heap squashes, so almost anything else was an improvement. One of the guards had left with a cart for supplies two days before; there would be new meat when he returned. Elly found a wooden tray and filled it with rough-milled dry bread, a pitcher of water, and two bowls of soup. She eyed the door to the kitchen garden, as she always did, but didn’t try it. Not yet.
Back in their room, Gavin was staring out the window where she’d left him. There was little else for him to do. There were no books in the guildhall, and with his bandaged hands, he couldn’t hold a pen to draw or write. Not that Gavin had been much interested in books, or drawing, or writing. Elly was the one who’d drawn, and Judah the one who’d read, and Theron the one who’d written: pages and pages of notes in his tidy, precise hand, documenting all of his devices and experiments and notions. Gavin had trained with the army. Gavin had caroused with the courtiers. Now Gavin did nothing. “Gavin,” Elly said. “I brought food.”
As always, the old woman glared at them from her seat in the corner, flint-eyed and sour, as Elly carefully unwrapped the bandage that held Gavin’s thumb to the rest of his hand. This one concession they had negotiated, as long as the old woman was there to watch. The thumb was still bandaged, the hand was still bandaged, there was no way for him to scratch a symbol into his skin with a thumbnail the way he and Judah had used to do, to send messages to each other. But he could at least hold a spoon and feed himself. “Thanks, El,” he said, sliding a clumsy spoonful into his mouth. “Tasteless as usual, Betsy.”
He’d named the tongueless old woman Betsy after the last nursemaid they’d had back in Highfall, who had also been tongueless and scowled at them from corners. Gavin had grown tired of her and put her outside in the corridor when they were sixteen. He couldn’t do that with this one. Elly wondered, again, why the old woman had lost her tongue. When Elban had ordered somebody muted, it had usually been more for security reasons than punitive ones. She was sure he’d had the original Betsy’s tongue removed so that she couldn’t tell anybody of the bond between Gavin and Judah. But who had ordered this Betsy’s tongue destroyed, and why, and what would become of her when there were no more secrets to keep?
