the great hall and the kitchens. She’d shown him the retiring rooms and described to him the vanished tables of pastries and cheeses, the silver samovars of coffee and tea and drinking chocolate, the plush chairs and polished tables. She’d even shown him the tailor’s suite and the cold, moldering baths. Soon she looked forward to his visits. She knew he was spying for the Seneschal to some end she would probably regret, but the food was precious and he wanted so little in return. He asked her to call him Nate, but that—oddly—she found that she couldn’t do, so she called him nothing at all and he didn’t seem bothered.
He was the one person she knew who didn’t seem at all changed by the coup. When she met him in the courtyard the day after she found the apples, his clothes were neat and plain, his hair in its tidy queue. The glasses Theron had mended still sat on his nose. The eyes behind those glasses lit up when they saw her, as they always did, with an intensity that she didn’t take personally.
He held out a small white paper bag. “Toffee almonds. How are the others?”
Chocolate-covered toffee almonds, actually. They were sweet and salty and rich and perfect. She ate three immediately and slipped the rest of the bag into the inside pocket of her coat so she wouldn’t be tempted to eat the rest. “They’re fine. Thanks for the candy. What shall we see today?”
One of the buttons on his shirt didn’t match the others, and the thread wasn’t exactly the right shade, either. Like the rest of him. She’d never been able to put her finger on the off thing, but it didn’t bother her. “How about the outbuildings?” he said. “The stables, maybe?”
Fine. The shortest way to the stables was through the walled garden. During the wet summer it had sprouted a truly impressive crop of ferns that bent and swayed over the path; these and the other plants drew the magus’s interest and she waited while he wandered around, peeking at mosses and, once, pulling up a root, which he brushed clean and pocketed. The toffee almonds called to her: the smooth chocolate coating, the crisp toffee jacket beneath it, the meaty almonds themselves. She tried not to think about them.
“Find something useful?” she said when he returned, and was surprised when he blushed.
“I think it’s a sort of wild turnip. Good for lightening black moods.”
“Do you suffer from black moods?”
He laughed. “I suffer the aftereffects of being raised by Caterina Clare. My mother can no more pass by a useful plant than she can fly.”
“I forget that there are female magi where you come from.” She didn’t know where that was, but she knew it was far away.
“There are no magi at all where I come from. We call ourselves healers or herbalists. My mother prefers herbalist. I prefer healer. If she’d called herself a healer, I’d probably want to be an herbalist.” He grinned. “I guess it’s always that way with mothers.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
His expression softened. “Surely someone was there for you.”
“Elban was all the father a girl could want,” she said with a flat smile.
“Oh, well, fathers,” he said dismissively, and then laughed. “Sorry. It’s not an important relationship where I’m from. I always found it bizarre how obsessed with paternity the courtiers were here.”
Judah thought of Firo, with his showy makeup, his embroidered coats, his absent son’s dead mother. “What happened to the courtiers?”
He blinked, surprised by the change of subject. “Most of them left, at least the ones who had somewhere to go outside the city, and a way to get there. The heads of the richest families were...encouraged, I guess you’d say, to sign new trade agreements with the Seneschal, and then they left, too.”
That wouldn’t have been Firo. She remembered him telling her how poor Cerrington was. “What about the ones who weren’t rich?”
Reluctantly, he said, “Not all of them made it. There was a lot of anger.”
“They were killed?” Even as she said the words, Judah didn’t know how they made her feel.
“Not necessarily. I know one woman who burned herself alive rather than give up her manor, since they aren’t allowed to own property anymore. Some people would rather die than change.” His jaw went tight. “Others went underground. Occasionally the guards catch one of them and make a big show of sending them to prison for hoarding. What’s this?”