She opened it: good bread, some fruit, a tiny pot of something. Candy, he always brought candy. Gavin was definitely right; the magus had a soft spot for Judah. The things he brought were chosen with her in mind.
Which gave her an idea. She passed the bag back to him. “Take it to Judah for me, will you? She’s in the tower above Theron’s workshop. Do you know the way?”
He seemed disproportionately startled. “I can find it. But why—”
“She and Gavin had an argument.”
The magus had gone very still, but his eyes were wild. “What about?”
“Remember the stableman? The one we helped, when she—” She stopped, not wanting to say it. “Gavin said he told her we got him out. But he lied—he told her nothing of the kind. She’s been thinking he was dead, and assuming it was her fault. Just like she thinks Theron is her fault, as if she could have done anything to stop Elban poisoning him. Anyway, the truth came out, and she and Gavin had words about it.” She chose not to mention the scratches. “Now she’s in the tower. Why the tower, I don’t know. The stairs are treacherous, but Theron said he could climb them, and you’re not that much bigger than he is. No offense,” she added hastily.
“None taken. Brawn isn’t much of an asset in my line of work.”
“I can’t go, I don’t like high places,” she said, knowing her worry and frustration were showing. “Will you go? Try, at least? Take her that—” she indicated his bag “—and some things from me?”
He nodded. She added the food from her bag to his, gave him the note she’d written, and he left. But the worry and frustration stayed with her and she knew that dull, repetitive work like unraveling yarn or picking squash seeds out of pulp would be maddening. Hard labor was what she needed, something physical and distracting. So she took the waterskins down to the aquifer to fill them. It was strange, the things that bothered people: Judah didn’t like the aquifer. The water was too big and too dark, she said. Elly had no problem with that, but she didn’t relish the idea of the House above her, crouched like an animal waiting to drop.
That had been another favorite trick of Angen’s, to drop out of trees and scare her.
She met Gavin on her return trip. His scratches were healing, but only at normal speed. They’d been his to begin with, then. In the tower, she knew, Judah’s would already be pink with new skin. Wordlessly, he took the waterskins from her, and they made their silent way to the parlor. As she transferred the water into the ewer—it went stale faster in the skins—he finally said, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” Elly said. “I’m not the one you hurt.”
“Well, I’d apologize to Judah, but you told me to stay away from her.” He’d grown leaner since the coup, like the rest of them. His face was more angular, more like Elban’s—but he could never truly look like his father. He had too much of his mother in him, and too much humanity. “And for the record, I didn’t hurt her. I would never hurt her.”
“Does lying about the stableman not count as hurting?” He said nothing. Elly went on: “Anyway, you’ve done something to her. You’ve been doing it for weeks.”
Something in his eyes flickered. Not quite guilt but...awareness. She wasn’t wrong, she saw. There had been something, all these weeks. At first she’d suspected it was sex, because the wariness in Judah’s eyes had reminded her of her mother, or the way Eleanor herself had felt around Angen. But there was a difference: Judah had seemed wary, but not afraid. Not trampled. “I wouldn’t hurt her,” he said.
“You would not deliberately hurt her,” she said quietly. “And you would be very sorry afterward. Just like now.”
Silence dropped, heavy and thick, and Elly let it lie where it fell.
* * *
So many hours passed before she saw the magus again that she decided he’d left without stopping back in to see her. It surprised her when he appeared in the open parlor door, still holding the bag. He was pale and the skin under his eyes was an alarming grayish-purple. She put down the spoon she’d been holding and went to him. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he said with a weak smile, and held out the bag to her.