willingly given. It felt different. It smelled different. He didn’t know what Derie planned to do with the stuff but he knew that anything marked with Judah’s blood was too valuable to burn or toss away.
As she worked, she said, “The courtier can’t be pregnant by Elban’s line. I don’t care which of them stuck it in her.”
“You and the Seneschal are in agreement, there.” Nate wondered if he would ever get the smell of blood out of his nose.
Her cane lay against the chair she’d been sitting in. She picked it up and used it to haul herself up. “Neither can our girl. Her babies will be too precious to waste on some stablehand. You’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
All this talk about pregnancies, those that should be and those that shouldn’t, shuffled and passed around like cards in a game, and it was one thing to have those conversations with the women themselves but this way made Nate think too much of old dead Arkady. Magus has power, he can give help or he can withhold it. He much preferred the former. “Can I give her a chance to recover from being beaten bloody before I force a miscarriage on her?” he said wearily.
“Stupid boy. Of course not. You don’t know how long that stableman’s been having at her. Soonest broken, soonest mended.”
The exasperation swelled into anger and he said, “That stableman is a person. The courtier and the young lord and Judah—they’re people. Real, actual people.”
Without warning, she switched her grip on her cane and hit him with it. Hard, on the side of his head. His glasses flew off and he collapsed to his hands and knees. “Maia and Tobin were people,” she spat, and hit him again. In the side this time. He felt one of his ribs crack. “They gave up their lives for her, and you’re going to lay on the ground like the weak-willed little worm you are and whine to me about Elban’s foul blood?” The cane came down again. He felt a blaze of pain in one of his kidneys, exactly where he’d told the guard not to hit Judah. “I grow weary of dragging you along by the ear, Nathaniel,” Derie said conversationally. “If you weren’t Jasper and Caterina’s son I’d drown you in the Brake like a runt kitten. I’d drain every thought out of your head and dance you like a puppet.” Spasms racked him as the cane came down again and again. Punctuating her words like breaths. He curled into a ball to protect himself. “You were born to do a job just as she was and you will do your job and you will see that she does hers, and you will not whimper about her being a person, and I will do my job and refrain from beating you to death, as much as you deserve it, because we have come too—”
Whack. The old woman grunted.
“—far—”
His eyes were open and through a haze of pain and nearsightedness he could see Derie’s pointed shoes in front of him.
“—to start—”
He would have sworn the shoes lifted from the floor with the force of each blow.
“—over!”
Then the beating itself was over. At least, it seemed to be. Distantly, he heard her stomp away and then stomp back and he used the time to survey his battered body, to guess which of the painful places would be enduringly painful, and which were merely bruises. “I’m sorry,” he gasped, even though apologizing never helped.
“You’re more than sorry. You’re pathetic.” Something clattered in front of him and she kicked him in the thigh. Not as hard as she might have. “You’re a disgrace to your entire line. Sit up.”
He tried. On the third attempt, he managed it. The clattering thing was his knife. “Draw your blood,” she said coldly. “Right there in the dirt on the floor, because dirt on the floor is what you are.”
He fumbled for the knife. One of the blows had landed on his wrist and his fingers were numb. Derie kicked him again and he managed to force them around the hilt. Then, awkwardly—he was afraid to put the knife down again—he unfastened his cuff, pushed up his sleeve and cut his arm, deeply and unevenly. The blood dripped onto the dusty floorboards and he watched it form drops, then bigger drops, then a puddle.
“Sigils,” she said. “All the way back.”
Shakily, he dipped his finger into the puddle. The warm, thick feel of it was familiar