chance that all of her would fall like a dead thing, so perhaps it was good he kept her hand in his until they reached the parlor door. When he did let go—reluctantly? Was it her imagination? He gave her a wry, almost secretive smile, and kissed her forehead again. She accepted the kiss as she would a passing moth. Then he pushed the door open.
The parlor smelled blandly of whatever was in the porridge Elly had simmering on the stove. Theron was already eating, bent low over a bowl. Whatever state he’d been in down in the catacombs, he was back now; when Judah and Gavin entered he frowned, but kept eating. Judah was too tired to worry much about the frown.
On the settee, Elly focused on her own bowl of sludge as if she could will it into being something more palatable. She looked up, saw Judah and Gavin, and said, “Hello,” with only the vaguest interest.
Gavin held out the bag the magus had brought; Judah herself had almost forgotten it. “Look what we have,” he said, and dropped the bag into Elly’s lap. Then he leaned down and kissed her lightly on the cheek, which made her jaw drop; took a bowl, filled it, and began to eat.
Chapter Fifteen
After that, wherever Judah was, Gavin was never far. At night she went to tend the sheep—Elly was trying to make bread, some process involving a frothy bowl of flour and water that smelled musty and alcoholic—and Gavin came along. Walking to the stable with him, working together to separate the lamb from the ewe and filling the mangers with whatever fodder they had to offer, Judah found herself reminded of all the reasons she loved Gavin. His sense of humor bit and surprised, and it was fun to bat words back and forth with him. What she didn’t like was what inevitably came after the night’s chores, when the bucket of milk was secured in the wagon Theron had built and Gavin reached expectantly for her hands. He made her feel emptied out, like a discarded wine bottle. And she couldn’t say exactly what he took from her, but she knew what she got in return: anger, depression, hurt. When Gavin was in her head, Judah herself seemed trivial and unimportant, nothing worth bothering with. She tried to hold on as long as she could, but there always came a moment when she could feel nothing that wasn’t him and think nothing that wasn’t him and know nothing that wasn’t him. A part of her liked the oblivion, even craved it: the absence of that tangled snarly thing she felt herself to be, neither here nor there, neither this nor that. Her Judah-ness was sand in the water that was Gavin, ashes swirling in his wind. Every time, it was easier to disappear into him. Every time, it was harder to find herself again.
One morning, when she met the magus in the courtyard, she was feeling particularly lethargic, particularly not-herself. As she took the bag from him, she said, “I don’t suppose you brought any coffee, did you?”
He shook his head. “There’s no coffee to bring. Coffee comes from the Southern Kingdom, along with green dye, oranges and about half a dozen herbs I’d love to get my hands on before people start dying this winter. Even the black market hasn’t been able to get coffee through yet.”
“There’s a black market?”
“Of course. You don’t expect the factory managers to live on the same overpriced trash they sell to the rest of the city, do you?” His tone was caustic, needle-sharp. Then he smiled a tense, weary smile. “I’m sorry. Things are difficult in the city right now. Yes, there’s a black market. The courtiers who stayed—all they have to sell are their contacts.”
She thought again of Firo, and that horrible girl who’d had her hooks in Gavin—funny, Judah had hated her so much, but now she couldn’t remember her name. “Gavin says the Seneschal will kill him eventually. That he can’t let Elban’s heirs run around with a claim to the throne, because the courtiers might try to put him back on it.”
“I suppose they could,” the magus said, as if it didn’t matter. “Can we see the old wing today?”
So she led him through the dusty corridors to Theron’s workshop. His tools were still in the parlor where Judah and Gavin had left them, so the workbench was bare, but other than that the place was unchanged: