“She doesn’t even know what’s happening,” he said angrily.
“She will soon enough,” the Seneschal said.
Another guard entered with the cane itself, dripping with moisture—it had been soaked, to keep it from splintering. The Tiernan followed him. Her eyes were red but she wasn’t crying. “I’m staying,” she said.
“I would rather you didn’t, Lady Eleanor,” the Seneschal said, as if discouraging her from attending a particularly dull party.
Lady Eleanor’s chin went up. “You have no say in it. If Gavin won’t go through this alone, neither will Jude. I’ll be here, and I’ll be where she can see me.”
She and the Seneschal locked eyes, a contest of wills so fierce that Nate could almost feel it, for all that there was no Work involved: the solid gray man on one side, the fair willowy girl on the other. But the fair willowy girl’s feet were planted, her mouth a thin line. The Seneschal would order the guards to remove her; they would handle her as easily as they’d handled Judah. The memory twisted his gut, made the sick pang already lurking there worse, and for a moment he thought he might throw up.
But the Seneschal didn’t order her moved. He merely nodded. “As you like.”
“Stay away from her lower back,” Nate said to the guard holding the cane. “If you break her spine or rupture her kidneys, she’ll die, and there’ll be nothing I can do.” The guard nodded. His bluish eyes kept going to Judah, hanging limply between the bedposts.
In the other bedroom, the young lord lay bound facedown on his bed. When he heard the door open, he twisted to see who’d entered the room; his bonds were tight and he couldn’t turn very far, but when he saw Nate, he cursed him, called him things that would get all his teeth knocked out in the caravans. Nate didn’t react. He stripped the boy to the waist, as Judah would be in the other room. The well-muscled arms and shoulders already bore a few scars, but not from caning. Training scars, probably. And the weird curlicues. Which Nate suddenly recognized: a fireplace poker, like the one the Seneschal had picked up in Elban’s study.
When the highborn finally quit cursing him long enough for Nate to get a word in, he said—laying out what he’d need, the threaded needles and salve and opium syrup—“You’ll be able to hear her scream. Do you want me to stop your ears?” He spoke with no great sympathy. Elban’s son, he thought, staring at the boy’s skin, touched with gold from hours training in the sun. Elban’s blood. His legacy.
The boy made a frustrated, inarticulate sound. “She won’t scream.” His torso rose and fell, rose and fell. He was breathing quickly, his arms and legs flexing against the ropes that held them, testing their strength. A high thin tremor of panic and fear colored his voice. “They trained us not to scream.”
Nate would have liked to hear more about that. “I have a salve that will numb the pain. Yours and hers.”
Through clenched teeth, the young lord said, “Do you have one that’ll make it worse?”
“Why?”
“Because the more she screams, the faster it will be over.”
Nate shook his head. “There’s no need to be selfless.”
“I’m not.” His lips curled like an angry animal’s. “I am being absolutely fucking selfish. Make it worse.”
Nate sometimes used lemon juice in poultices and he had a bottle in his satchel. He soaked a cloth with it. The smell was as pleasant and normal as a summer’s day and as the room filled with it, strange laughter began to bubble up from the young man on the bed. Also in Nate’s satchel was a padded leather strap; he used it to gag the boy, fitting it between his teeth and over his tongue. It would keep him from breaking the former or biting through the latter, but it didn’t stop the thin sound of his laughter. A few layers of bandage bound over it did, mostly.
He knew how the bond worked, probably better than anyone else in Highfall except Derie. Even so, he was shocked when the first wound appeared out of nowhere on the smooth sun-kissed skin, a heavy violet streak like a swipe from a paintbrush. That one didn’t break the skin but the second one did. As each bloody welt appeared, the skin splitting apart like smiling mouths where no mouths should be, Nate pressed the lemon-soaked rag against them. He was impressed that his hands