This time, Judah couldn’t help looking at Gavin. “What does your head feel like?” he asked his brother.
“Distant,” Theron answered, after a long time. “Like my thoughts are happening somewhere else.”
“Where?”
Gavin was being too pushy. Too stern. Judah remembered what the magus had said, that Gavin was experimenting with ruling. He would drive Theron away; he would break the moment.
Sure enough, Theron only shook his head, and wouldn’t or couldn’t say more.
* * *
“Can you help Theron?” Judah asked the magus the next time he came.
“Lord Gavin just asked me the same thing downstairs,” he said.
“What did you say?”
“I told him that his brother was alive, and clever enough to fix my glasses, and I didn’t see a problem with him.”
Judah cocked an eyebrow. “You did not, either, say that.”
His cheeks turned pink, and he laughed; the same half-swallowed exhalation she’d heard from him before, as if he were afraid to laugh out loud in front of her. “No, I didn’t. Lord Gavin scares me.”
Now it was Judah who half laughed. “Gavin’s not scary.”
“Perhaps not to you.” The magus spoke very seriously. “Although I would point out that he’s had you locked in this room for nearly three weeks.”
Being locked away didn’t frighten her, though. Being locked away felt inevitable. She didn’t say that. Instead, she said, “Theron isn’t the way he used to be.”
“Life changes all of us.”
The cold stove in Judah flared. “Life didn’t change Theron. Arkady’s poison did.”
“Like the Seneschal’s cane changed you?”
The flare died. The stove went cold. “No. Theron used to be a genius. He still would be, if not for me.” She sank back in her chair and took a bitter satisfaction in the wails of pain that rose from the rent skin of her back. They were less than she deserved. (Darid dead, Theron changed. All her fault.) And they were growing quieter, day by day; soon she wouldn’t even have that. In a perverse way, she looked forward to Elban returning, and the new pain that would come with him.
The magus cocked his head, puzzled. Then comprehension dawned. “You’re talking about the antidote.”
“I didn’t give it to him fast enough. I was a coward.”
The magus’s bare shock surprised her, but she didn’t trust it. “Have you been blaming yourself for Lord Theron being the way he is?”
“You said give it to him immediately. I didn’t.”
“And I knew what Arkady planned before we even left the manor. Blame me, if you have to blame someone.” He was sitting in the armchair and now he leaned forward, elbows on knees and fingers laced tightly together as if to control them. “How long did you actually delay, Judah? Ten seconds? Thirty? Maybe it would have made a difference, maybe not. The poison Arkady used was vicious. Even if you’d given it to him the moment we left, there was still a good chance that Theron wouldn’t be the same. He—” he hesitated “—well, where I come from, we would have said that he’d dipped a toe in the black water.”
Judah thought of the aquifer beneath the House, the vast expanse of silent water that bloomed through the living rock below. “What does that even mean?” she said, her voice harsh.
“It comes from old stories my family tells.” He stumbled over the word family, like it wasn’t quite what he meant.
“Tell me?” Her interest wasn’t feigned. When she was a child, and still allowed to visit the library, her favorite books had been the oldest ones, with edges that crumbled in her fingers: old nonsense stories about talking animals and magic wells. When it was discovered that she liked them, they disappeared. What remained were mostly war histories, occasionally exciting and often bloody, but not the same. By the time Gavin had started training, even these had been forbidden her. She envied the magus his family stories. She had only the one Darid had given her about her mother, and she did not like to think of it.
His face was fond and sad, as though he were thinking of people and places that were dear to him, and lost. “They say the world used to be different. That a great power ran through everything: the sap in the trees and the dew on the plants, and the soil and the rocks and the grass. And the water: not just actual water, but also all the blood, inside the foxes and rabbits and great cats and—and us, of