as breathing. Judah leaned on the bench next to him and watched him poke at the metal thing. It was all spinning gears and colored glass bits. The glass bits seemed to wink like eyes and the whole thing made Judah think of a patiently crouched spider. But Theron gazed down it with all the fervor and devotion of a guildsman. His hands, so often fumbling and uncertain, were quick and sure as he adjusted a cog inside the body of the thing with a tool that appeared to be, and probably was, a sewing needle fixed onto the handle of a dinner knife. “What’s that?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“What’s it do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then how will you know when you’ve fixed it?”
“I won’t,” he said, “unless you shut up for five seconds.” Theron was long and thin from head to toe. There was something of a bird about him, normally; not the carrion crow that Elban made her think of, but something sparrowy and quick to flit away. Folded onto his stool as he was now, he reminded her more of a stick insect. His blue eyes were stormier than his brother’s but warmer than his father’s. Behind their long lashes they shone with intelligence and, at the moment, irritation. The workshop was the only place where Theron felt confident enough to risk being annoyed. Judah loved him this way, and so she waited.
The workshop occupied the base of one of the old-fashioned towers that nobody bothered to build anymore. The door that led up into the tower was seldom open. Most of the time it was blocked by a chest Theron had lugged there from someplace, although now the chest stood in the middle of the room and the doorway was clear. They’d tried once to climb the narrow stone staircase that spiraled up into the cobweb-draped dimness; at least, Gavin, Judah and Theron had. Elly, terrified by the height of the thing, wanted nothing to do with it. They teased her for refusing to climb trees but in the case of the tower they’d had to concede her point, because before they’d climbed two full loops around, they came to a place where the stairs had mostly fallen in. Usually, the towers held nothing but old furniture, anyway, so they’d given up. But Theron had been taken with the wide shelves and workbenches built into the curving walls of the tower’s lowest level, and had claimed it as his own. The single greasy, smeared window opened onto an empty space, open to the air but walled off on all sides; Theron called it a light well, but the light that passed through it was thin and almost useless. It was probably just an architectural oversight. There were lots of those in the House, places where old and new met and hadn’t joined seamlessly: corridors that dead-ended, rooms with uneasy corners and awkward ceilings. The bottom of the light well was thick with brambles. They’d never found a way in, but they hadn’t tried very hard.
The view, or lack thereof, didn’t matter to Theron. He rarely looked out the window. Many of the locks opened with codes, so he’d dedicated one side of the room to code breaking, and piled the benches there high with books he’d stolen from the library and messy stacks of ink-spotted paper he’d scavenged from wherever he could. On the other side, where he was working now, he kept his tools, most of which he’d built or stolen or also scavenged. Older than old, some of them, and rough with corrosion for all that he’d purloined vials of acid to eat away at the crud.
Eventually, he put down the needle tool he was using. “All right. Did you want something?”
“A few things. To make sure you survived dinner last night, for one thing.”
“I seem to have.”
“Also, Gavin says you have to start showing up for training.”
“Gavin doesn’t get to tell me what to do.” Theron returned to his table, surly. “Not yet, anyway.”
Judah lifted her hands, palms out. “I’m only the messenger. He seemed pretty determined about it, though. Might be easier to go and get him off your back.”
“Easier. To go down to the training fields and present myself as a target for the murderous lunatics Elban calls his guards? No thanks.”
“Not all of them are Elban’s.” Elban’s personal guard wore scarlet badges on their chests. The House Guard wore white. The army was made up of a mix of the