Charles still slept, so Nate took his tea out onto the front step to wait for Bindy to save her knocking on the door. Normally if he wanted fresh air, he took it in the garden—which was considerably less dank and a healthier place in general since Nate had taken over—but today he wanted to see the trees in the Square, to feel a bit of space around him. The morning was brilliant with color: the gold-green of the light filtering through the leaves, the glimmers of blue from the sky above, the gray shadows on the white stone. The spires reaching up in the distance, which could seem cruel under overcast skies, seemed almost elegant. The sun warmed his feet in his boots, and he heard the tiny chip chip of the sparrows pecking the ground for crumbs. The air smelled of smoke and the faint stale must of the Brake.
He heard footsteps. They slowed, and stopped. Nate looked up.
Vertus stood at the end of the walk. His clothes were nicer than they’d been when Nate had known him; not the violent colors the courtiers had favored, but not drab servingman’s gray, either. The rich fabrics hung well on him. His eyes were as intent as ever.
“Good morning, magus,” he said in a knowing, amused tone. Like he saw a joke that Nate wasn’t quite clever enough to get. “Made it through the coup, I see.”
His Highfall accent was broader than it had been. “As did you,” Nate said.
“Indeed.” Vertus put his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “Indeed, I did.”
There was a long, evaluating silence. Nate was thinking about that last grim night with Arkady, aware that Vertus knew everything Nate had done. He was also considering the Seneschal, if his belief in Nate’s utility would outweigh his years’ acquaintance with Arkady. He was wondering, in short, how much damage Vertus could do. He would have been willing to bet that the former servingman’s thinking ran along the same lines.
“Well,” Vertus said finally, “just thought I’d see how you were getting on.”
“Good to see you.” It hadn’t been, but it was what one said.
“Don’t worry, magus,” Vertus said. “You’ll see me again soon.”
Chapter Fourteen
Judah was walking back from the orchard when she came upon the Seneschal in the courtyard. Summer was ending and she wore one of Gavin’s old coats against the chill in the air. Until she met the Seneschal, she’d been feeling lucky, because she’d found six unripe apples in an out-of-the-way corner of the orchard. An unexpected bounty, since the Seneschal’s plunderers had stripped the grounds pretty thoroughly. She’d left three apples to ripen and marked the tree with a piece of cording that had once held back the drapes in Elly’s bedroom. The plunderers had taken all the rope, too.
When they were first let out of their rooms—a month after the coup, that was, and a month ago, now—she would have run back to the House instead of walk. During those bizarre early days she’d found a destructive glory in hurtling through spaces that had once belonged to the courtiers: to hell with them, to hell with anything they’d ever thought or said about her. The Seneschal’s men had taken everything of use or value during their month-long imprisonment, and as far as Judah was concerned, the rest belonged to the four of them. If she wanted to scuff the floors and spatter the marble with mud, she would, and she felt no remorse. The garden paths made for delicate silk shoes were already furred with moss, the carefully groomed galleries on the Promenade blurry with overgrowth. There were broken windows in the solarium and carpenter bees had eaten perfect round holes in the armory. In another year, the Discreet Walk would be impassable, the wisteria thick and tangled after the wet summer. Anything destructive Judah did was merely helping along the entropy of neglect.
Today, she felt too dull to run. She hadn’t eaten anything since morning, and not much then. When she saw the Seneschal standing on the wide marble step that led to the grand foyer her feet grew even heavier, but she thrust her chin out at an angle she hoped read as arrogant, and said, “Come to visit?”
The Seneschal lifted a heavy-looking burlap bag. “I brought food. I took it up to the parlor, but nobody was there.”
She gave the bag a critical glare. Her mouth was already watering, though. The