One step at a time, just like storing food: one dried fruit, one bag of oats, one bundle of dried onions. Don’t think about the long cold winter ahead, and how full the shelves will need to be before it begins, and how empty your stomach will be before it ends. Wake up each day and figure out how to survive it. One fruit. One bag. One bundle.
One step. Then one more. She would climb a thousand staircases, each only one step high. At the top of the last one, she would find Judah. One step, over and over. She would do it. She was doing it. She had found the strength to feed them and keep them alive and she would find the strength to do this, too. She didn’t dare turn to see how far she’d come, but soon it seemed she had climbed a hundred steps, two hundred, and her heart began to flutter with victory.
Then she made a mistake. She looked up.
There it was, mere feet ahead of her: the broken place. The one that had kept the others from climbing to the top, all those years ago—but Judah had done it the day before, and the magus had done it today. Broken steps jutted out from the wall, crumbling and rotten. Like a game of checkers, she could see how she would have to move from one to the next, but she could also see the places where she would have to stretch and leap, and she knew there was no hope. She couldn’t breathe water and she couldn’t drink fire and she couldn’t climb those stairs, and if she had hated Angen (and Edouard and Grey, but Angen was the worst) before, she hated them doubly and triply now. She had not thought of them for years, she had decided they no longer mattered. But they had broken something in her, all those years ago, and now Judah needed her and she needed Judah and she still couldn’t go. The steps were broken. She was broken. She couldn’t even move.
Stop crying. Bad kittens who cry get punished.
Angen had only yelled at her for crying because he liked yelling at her. He liked it when she cried. Just like Elban would have liked it when she cried, and oh, dear gods, she had almost married him. Most of the time she could keep the long view, most of the time she could be strong inside. But right now the panic was so close to the surface that all its sources blended together and she felt sick.
“Judah!” she called again, desperate.
This time, there was an answer. Her own name: but from below, not above, and it wasn’t Judah’s voice but a man’s. Gavin’s. She was envious of the quick thud of his boots on the steps, and then his body was between her own and the edge, and his arm was around her shoulder, and she was grateful for him. She hated that she was grateful for him.
“You made it a long way,” he said, his voice kind. Not at all mocking. Last time he’d mocked. Last time he’d been twelve. “You did really well.”
“It isn’t fair,” she said. “None of it is fair. I want to go see her and I can’t.”
She expected him to say something bland and reassuring. It’s all right. It will all be fine. But instead, he surveyed the staircase winding above them, eyeing the gap. His legs were longer, but he was heavier. “Shall we try it together? If I go with you?”
“No,” she said, and she hated—again—that there was not even a second when it seemed possible. “Not now.”
“She’ll come down when she’s ready,” he said gently. Then he helped her turn around, and she counted the steps that she’d climbed and saw that there were only eight of them, and almost wept.
* * *
She met the Seneschal in the courtyard, because Judah wasn’t there to do it. Surprise painted plain on his face, he said, “Is Judah ill?”
“No,” Eleanor said, although it had been four days and she had no way of knowing, truly. The magus came every day, went all the way up to the tower. He assured them all that Judah was fine, warm, eating. As Elly took the bag from the Seneschal, it felt lighter than it should have, and she glanced inside: a bottle of oil, a bag of oats, some dried meat of uncertain origin. All things that would make their life possible