sent him to the aquifer for water (the pipes had been ripped from the walls for their metal) he returned faster than anyone else, because he knew the quickest route, and the best way to distribute the weight of the waterskins on his body. After watching Elly try and fail to cook oatmeal first on the big stove in the kitchen and then in their small ornamental fireplace—she still had the little Wilmerian quickstove and one precious canister of gas for it, but she wanted to save that for an emergency—he had somehow found the scraps necessary to build an inelegant but efficient cookstove in the parlor, complete with ductwork to carry the smoke to the chimney. When Elly mentioned that the berries growing on the edges of the orchard would go bad quickly once picked (they had no sugar for jam), he’d appeared two hours later with a shiny square contraption that, when placed in the sun, dried the fruit in days. He built a winch to replace the one taken from the well in the stableyard, which made watering the sheep infinitely easier, and when Judah said, “How about a new pump for the water trough?” he didn’t even seem to consider that she might be joking.
“The gasket would be the hard part,” he’d said, and wandered off. He hadn’t reappeared with a pump, not then or in the weeks since. But Judah had no doubt that one day he would.
As for Gavin—Gavin had always been vaguely selfish, and now he’d done away with the vaguely. He showed up for meals because he had no other source of food, and would grudgingly do something specific if Judah or Elly told him he had to. They left the brute-strength tasks to him: because brute strength was what he brought to the table, but also because Elly was clever enough to see that chopping firewood was not unlike hacking at a practice dummy. It was difficult, and physical, and took just enough exactitude to distract him from his moods. But as soon as the firebox was full, he’d disappear again. Sometimes, in the evenings, the ground felt unsteady under Judah’s feet. Trust Gavin to find a secret stash of alcohol somewhere in the House. He didn’t invite her to drink with him, and she didn’t invite herself. He’d lost his father, his kingdom and, effectively, his wife. She supposed he was entitled to his grief—for a while, anyway.
And Judah? She scavenged, she mended, she stirred a pot when Elly asked her. She scratched for Gavin when they needed him, and tried to cajole him into working a bit more than he wanted, but half the time when she set out to convince him to do something helpful he ended up convincing her to do nothing instead. “One hand of cards, Jude,” he’d say—luckily, the deck of cards they’d had in their room when the coup came was complete—and the one hand would become ten and she’d end up slinking back shamefaced from Elban’s study or the armory or the chapel (the plundered House suffered from a dramatic lack of seating), helpful task undone. She would vow to be more responsible next time. And then next time would come, and she wouldn’t be any more responsible at all.
She could feel enough of what was inside him to know she didn’t want any more of it, and avoided touching him. Her own feelings were bad enough; as busy as she was, she felt dazed, detached, always faintly angry. She missed food with flavor and she missed fires laid by unseen hands; she missed not ever having to consider that the food and firewood had been prepared and lugged and arranged by people whose childhoods had ended at ten so that people like her wouldn’t get splinters. She resented having to work so hard, and felt guilty about resenting it, and resented the guilt. Judah had never felt like a courtier but their system had benefited her, as well, and her new firsthand knowledge of how hard staff jobs must actually have been waged constant war against her memories of pain and powerlessness. When she drew water for the sheep from the well by the stable she knew that lugging a few buckets of water was nothing compared to the work Darid had done every day; how unknowing she’d been, back then, and how kind he’d been about it. Then again, Darid had had underlings and a trough with a working pump—but how