enough to see her back in the mirror, the shallowest welts were well on their way to healing. There were four wounds that would scar: three across her upper back, in an X with one double bar, and one lower down. She did not spend long looking at them.
Gavin was still furious with her. When she entered the parlor, he left it. His healing was further along than hers, and he was back to training; she even saw the sweat marks on his shirt that meant he’d been able to wear his cuirass. Judah wore one of his other shirts—Elly brought it to her—that flowed loose over her back, and her lightest skirt. The others, in their boots and tunics and summer coats, came in like creatures from a different world, smelling of other rooms, of outside. Guards stood watch over the parlor door in the corridor. They allowed Gavin and Elly and Theron to pass, but Judah knew they wouldn’t do the same for her. Not by the Seneschal’s orders; by Gavin’s.
“I obviously can’t trust you,” he said in the only conversation they’d had since she left her bed.
Elly, scarlet, with clenched fists, told him, “You’re being a petulant child.”
“You’re not the one who suffers for what she does,” he said, stern. This new Gavin, the one who made firm decisions about everyone else’s lives, seemed to have replaced the old one entirely. Maybe the cane had stripped away the last of the person, and left only the lord.
Elly wasn’t cowed. “She didn’t do anything you haven’t done a dozen times over. And don’t even try to tell me that’s not true.”
“It’s different and you know it,” Gavin argued.
Elly drew herself up and seemed about to say something else, but Judah said, “Let it go, Elly. It doesn’t matter. I don’t mind.”
She didn’t. She had nowhere to go anyway, and no boots to wear there. The dull feeling that had come over her when she’d heard Darid was dead had not left her. She suffered physical pain and the occasional burst of weeping, but both felt disconnected from the core of her. Everything important inside her was dead. She was like an unlit stove, except that she wasn’t even engaged enough to be cold. She was just—there. Inert.
Theron sat with her sometimes. Which she knew would have warmed her, if she’d been able to feel warmth: the new Theron came and went like weather, with little notice of those around him. But when he came into the parlor and found Judah sitting alone, he would stop and sit, too. He still didn’t speak much. But he only sat in the parlor when she was there. Something in him seemed to think she needed company. She didn’t think she did.
Once she asked him how things were in the House. He pondered for several seconds before answering: “There are more guards than usual. The ones with white badges.”
“Really,” Judah said, unsurprised. The Lord’s Guard, with their red badges, had all marched with Elban.
He nodded. “And more cats.”
She stared. “Cats?”
“Cats,” he said, and that was the end of the conversation.
One day when the magus came to check on Judah, Theron was with her. The magus’s glasses were still broken. Judah had stopped noticing the crack, but Theron immediately said, “Your glasses are broken.”
Judah realized that sometime since his illness, Theron had stopped wearing his own glasses. “Yes, Lord Theron,” the magus said with a bow. He’d grown marginally less servile around Judah and Elly, but still seemed nervous around the two young lords. “I really must make time to find a spectaclist.”
“Give them to me,” Theron said.
The magus frowned, but said, “Of course, my lord,” and handed them over. Theron took them, then stood up and wandered to the door and through it and out.
“What was that about?” the magus asked.
Judah shrugged, as well as she was able: sort of a twitch of her elbows. “Theron doesn’t really do things for reasons anymore.” She turned her back to the magus and unbuttoned Gavin’s shirt, letting it fall down her back. As he began to peel away the bandages, something occurred to her. “How well do you see without those things, anyway?”
She heard a faint exhalation that might almost have been a laugh. “Well enough, up close. You’re healing.”
She twitched her arms again. Then there was the salve, and the bandaging. The magus was gentle but she could not help tensing as he touched her. Hands on her bare skin brought to mind