the Wilmerian from her mind. “Your people.” The words had to be forced out, they didn’t want to come. “Your people are my people.”
“The Slonimi,” he said, and a brilliant, beatific smile spread across his face. “Yes. You’re Slonimi, like me. Oh, how I’ve wanted to tell you, Judah. But I couldn’t. Not until we were here. Not until I could show you.”
“I have people,” she said. Then, “We look nothing alike.”
He laughed. “None of the Slonimi look anything alike. We come from all over.” He took her wrist carefully, as if it were blown glass, and poised the knife over her skin. “It’s polite to ask permission before I do this. Do I have your permission?”
She stared down at the arm he held, which was scratched and raw from Gavin’s incessant attempts to lure her downstairs. The curlicue scar was just visible at the edge of her sleeve, raised and pink and smooth. Probably she was insane. Probably this was all as imaginary as Theron’s cats.
Maia. Tobin.
Why not? she thought, almost belligerently. At least he’d asked first, which was more than Gavin or his father had ever done. “Go ahead,” she said.
He was quick, the knife was sharp, and there was hardly any pain. Then her blood joined his on the mirror, thinner and brighter. It ran into the marks he’d made—the sigils—filling them in. Below them, like lines of words on a page, he drew two more. “Mine and yours,” he said. The mark he called hers was graceful and strong. It didn’t feel like something that would come from her.
“How do you know my...sigil?” Now there was pain, a slow warm burn.
His own cut was still oozing blood and all it took was a flex of his wrist to reopen it fully. “Because it shines out of you like a bonfire. This will be strange,” he said, and pressed her cut to his.
The world opened. Split like an overripe fruit, the rind falling away. It hurt, but it was a relieved kind of hurt: lancing an abscess, pulling a splinter. The room—which she could still see faintly—was full of purple membrane, impossibly knotted and nearly the same color as her hair. She could feel it as much as she could see it, growing through the House like ivy, tree-trunk-sized ropes of it winding up staircases and tendrils working their way into the tiniest of cracks. But the tower was the root of the Work, the source.
The sigils on the mirror glowed now, and she could feel the people who belonged to them: nothing as unimportant as their faces, but their very essences. The person the magus had called his teacher was ferociously smart, determined, cruel. The long years she’d lived piled inside her like bricks. His mother was just as smart and determined, with fewer years stacked up behind her—but oh, the love between her and the magus made Judah’s heart ache, and the ache was so sharp that she reflexively pushed away.
Downstairs, in the catacombs—the walls of the House were irrelevant, her body was irrelevant, distance was irrelevant; wherever the Work was, she could be, and the Work was everywhere—she could feel Theron, but wispy, only half-there. Scattered, somehow, like a page torn free of its book. Other, smaller wisps floated through the House, pieces of the purple membranous stuff that split off and fused again, or drifted across the floor like leaves. Theron’s cats. He had figured it exactly right: his brain was turning the wisps into something it could understand. Her brain, she suspected, was doing the same thing; Theron saw cats that nobody else could see, and she saw purple rope. What would an observer standing in the tower see now, she wondered? Just her body and the magus’s, lying among the leaves on the dirty floor, blood trickling down their arms?
She looked down and was unsurprised, in this strange lifted world, to see a thick purple rope sprouting from the middle of her chest and disappearing through the floor. Judah could feel it reaching through layers of rock and plaster and wood like she could feel her arm inside her sleeve, down through the House to Gavin. Who stood in Elban’s parlor, at the open door of the room where they’d met with the chieftain. The pulsing tether that sprouted from her chest ended in his. But while the rest of the membrane felt organic, like cobwebs or moss, the rope between her chest and Gavin’s appeared almost woven, like the ropes