notebooks piled on the shelves, the cloth over the window. The smell was the same, smoke and lamp oil and metal. She felt a pang of sadness, of longing for the days when Theron could be found hiding away here, too busy tinkering to talk.
A moment passed before she noticed the magus standing stock-still in the doorway. As she watched, he moved like a sleepwalker to the tapestry that covered the stairs; pushed it aside, and peered up into the gloom.
“It’s a tower,” she said, “but the stairs are broken.”
“Impassable?”
“Unless you can fly.” She understood the tower’s appeal. The last time she’d been here, it had called to her, as well: the idea of getting away, rising above the toil and the grimness.
The magus gave her a quick, fierce look—it reminded her of the way Theron had looked, when most of his mind was engaged in a problem and he wanted to be left alone to figure it out—and then stepped through the door. By the time Judah followed him he was already climbing the winding stone stairs. He wouldn’t get far; she remembered the collapsed place, the steps nothing but broken teeth jutting out of the wall. She remembered watching Gavin test one with a foot, and hearing the short, startled scream from Elly, waiting below, as the tooth broke and fell clattering to the ground. They’d been twelve then, and in her memory Gavin’s body was still child-slight, all long limbs and narrow shoulders. Remembered him calling down to Elly, teasing: You sure you won’t come see, El? They’d teased her mercilessly about her fear of heights. At the time it had felt harmless, but now it seemed cruel. They’d all been so young.
Above her, she heard the soft shuffle of the magus’s boots slow, stop, and—after a moment—descend. When he reached the bottom, he said, “There are gaps, but they’d be passable if a person was really determined.”
“Nobody is.”
“Aren’t you curious? Don’t you wonder what happened here?”
“I don’t have the energy for curiosity anymore.”
They were back out in the workshop now. “You do look tired.”
“Oh, I’m fine,” Judah said with a breeziness she didn’t feel. “If you’re going to be concerned about someone, be concerned about Theron. He’s still seeing imaginary cats.”
She meant to distract him, but he surprised her. “Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there. Some people would call the link between you and Gavin imaginary.”
“That’s different. That’s real. We were born with it.”
“I doubt that. You aren’t related. You weren’t born in the same room. How would you be linked from birth? The real question, though, is not when, but why you were linked.”
“I’ve always assumed it was a bad joke.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Your mother was torn apart by dogs getting you in here. Seems like a lot of trouble for a bad joke.” She didn’t respond. Patiently, he said, “Think about it. If your health wasn’t linked to Elban’s heir’s, they probably still would have let Lady Clorin keep you—for a while. But as soon as you could be taken away and put to work, you would have been. Somebody didn’t want that for you. Somebody wanted you to live, and they wanted you to live here. As close to Elban’s blood as you could possibly get.”
Nobody had ever said things like this to Judah. All at once she was filled with a cold, prickling suspicion of this man, with his spectacles and odd coloring. Who she didn’t know, really, any more than she’d known Arkady. She felt her eyes narrow. “Why does the Seneschal send you to spy on us?”
Evenly, and without hesitation, he said, “He wants to know if you’re getting desperate. And spy is a harsh word. It’s not as if you don’t know he’s sending me.”
The prickling suspicion faded into a faint unease. “Is he paying you?”
“I get to keep my manor and my apprentice. I don’t care about the manor, but my apprentice is special.” He hesitated. “So are you.”
She ignored that, although his murky blue eyes were sincere enough behind his glasses. “What happens when we get desperate?”
“Gavin abdicates. The empire falls. For what it’s worth, I don’t think the Seneschal has any intention of killing you.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” she said, and he said, “Nothing here makes sense.”
* * *
In the parlor, Elly was scrubbing midden dirt off a squash; when she saw the bag from the magus, she said, “Theron, love, come do this for me, please,” and took it