keep on the good side of his heir; Gavin wanted her left in peace and, with the exception of the occasional unpleasant incident like the one with the Wilmerian, he was mostly indulged. So was she. She wore what she wanted—the plainest dresses possible, Theron’s old boots, Gavin’s old coat—and didn’t always bother to braid her hair, even though she knew how much the color disturbed people when she let it go wild. She left state dinners early, didn’t bother with lessons, and wasn’t asked to make the traditional crafts of her home province for visiting dignitaries. What province would that be, anyway, and what arcane and frightening crafts would it produce? Nobody knew, and nobody was quite sure, and even though nobody officially believed in witchcraft anymore, nobody was willing to risk it.
Judah made her way to the oldest section of the House, which stood at the building’s proper center, like the hub of a wheel. More than one ruling family ago, the hub had been the entire House; later Lords had built around it, wanting more spacious rooms with better views and smoother glass, until it was completely surrounded. The last Lord to actually occupy the old section had been Gavin’s several-times-great-grandfather, Mad Martin the Lockmaker: Mad, because he spent the last years of his life defending himself against imaginary assassins, and Lockmaker because in his madness, he’d covered every door and cupboard with beautiful, intricate locks that opened with spinning brass wheels or complicated patterns of glass gemstones or even musical notes. After Mad Martin died (of old age, reportedly) his heir had tried and mostly failed to open them. Then he’d tried to remove them, and when that failed, too, he’d had some of them hacked apart, leaving huge axe-shaped gashes in the doors. Eventually he’d given the job up as too much work, built the new council chamber that Elban still used, and abandoned the old section entirely. By then, most of its windows had been bricked over, anyway. The old part of the house was dark and old-fashioned, and nobody much minded losing it. With no particular ceremony—at least, none that was recorded—the wooden door that had once been the front entry was closed for the last time and sealed with a big, clumsy lock.
Which Theron had picked, effortlessly, when he was ten. Back then, on cold or rainy days, they’d stolen food from the kitchen and spent hours wandering the abandoned halls, where nobody ever thought to look for them. But as the years passed, the empty rooms and decaying towers that had inspired such excellent imaginary adventures held less and less appeal. Theron was the only one who came here now. Theron loved puzzles and devices as much as Mad Martin had, and he soon set himself to opening all of the elaborately locked cabinets and boxes. Most held nothing but dust and dead mice, but in others he found strange clockwork devices, which he took back to the room he’d claimed as his workshop, and tried to fix. If pieces were broken, he repaired them. If pieces were missing, he experimented with shapes and materials until he found a replacement. Elly had a music box in her room that he’d actually managed to bring back to life, a lovely golden nightingale perched on a branch. When the key was twisted, the leaves on the branch waved as if in the wind, and the nightingale sang. The song was halting and in an uncomfortable key that nobody used anymore, but the music box was Theron’s greatest triumph.
The door to his workshop was hidden behind a tapestry. Judah had never had the heart to mention the pointlessness of the gesture; the marks left by Theron’s repeated passage from the main door to the workshop were obvious, anyway, and even if they weren’t, nobody ever came to find him but the three of them. Nonetheless, Theron wanted the door hidden, and so it was. Even if most of the time, as now, the door was propped open and the tapestry tied back to let in air. Inside, Judah found Theron bent over his workbench, his glasses slipping down his nose and some complicated metal thing in front of him. His coat lay across a high stool. Each individual lump of spine was visible through his thin shirt. She coughed and scuffed her boots loudly and still, when she said, “Hi,” Theron jumped.
“Don’t sneak,” he said crossly. “You startled me.”