worse. “You have to give me more time,” he said. “She’s not ready yet.”
They had come to the other side of the passage. As always, the Seneschal’s guards clustered around it. The man himself turned stony eyes on Nate. “Lure her, magus,” he said, a touch of impatience coloring his voice. “You’re a traveled man. Tell her everything she’s missing. Make the world sound amazing.”
And if only the Seneschal knew the ferocity of Judah’s craving for life and experience and beauty, the depths of her talent. Nobody in the Slonimi bred for love. Every child resulted from the careful consideration of bloodlines, of similar and complementary talents. Reproduction was a responsibility, a calling. Nate himself had even been paired off, not long before he and Charles and Derie had left for Highfall, in case he died and his bloodline was lost. As was tradition, the first time, Nate had been very drunk, so he remembered the woman’s smell and her name but not her face. Derie had given him to understand that the pairing had failed, anyway.
But there was no failure in Judah. Talented parents sometimes produced a dud, but Judah fairly shimmered with power. She Worked as easily as she breathed. Not that she knew it; as far as she knew, every child with a bleeding arm could walk through defenses like they were paper and rummage through memories like a trunk of old clothes. It had taken him a year of hard training with Derie before he could hear her thoughts in his head; another two before he could send her his own. Derie’s powers dwarfed Nate’s, and Judah’s made Derie’s look like a child’s. It was all he could do when he Worked with her to keep that one door locked, so she would not know absolutely everything he knew and be frightened by it. It was all he could do to put her to sleep before he left so he could weave the threads of Work through her without her knowing, swaddling her in it like an infant. Someday she would understand, he told himself, and forgive him.
The walk to Limley Square seemed long and he remembered wistfully how quick Elban’s phaeton had been. Nate felt weak and nauseated; he slept late every day, and often came out of unconsciousness to find himself being carried around the lab between Bindy and Charles like a passed-out drunk. He had trouble focusing his eyes, and had finally traded some herbal remedies to a decent spectaclist in exchange for new lenses in his glasses. His appetite was gone, which was fortunate because his guts had crawled to a stop. His mouth was dry all the time and he had developed sores on the underside of his tongue; he drank more water and applied a very light solution of opium syrup to dull the pain.
His dreams, though, were amazing. In his dreams he made love to Anneka again; he waded through the knee-high prairie grass outside Tagusville, skin warm with sun, as fat little rodents darted and chittered unseen at his feet. He stood on the pier at Black Lake, watched the boats unload their catch into waiting wagons, smelled fish and water and tar. He dozed in an opium den in Carietta, watching half-asleep as a girl so pale she might have come from Highfall crawled on top of Charles and pulled aside his clothes. Best of all, in his dreams, he saw his mother again. He worked beside her in the caravan, stood by a makeshift stage where she sold her tonics; drove the horses as she sang for him and him alone, his hands on the reins browner, younger and less scarred than now.
In Highfall, he passed the Beggar’s Market. One of the factory gangs drilled in the space where the stalls had been. Their heavy boots all hit the floor in perfect time as they marched, pivoted, marched some more. He didn’t know which factory wore green embroidery but the marchers were uniformly young, with the rabid light of conviction in their eyes. All the older workers had already settled back into torpor as, one by one, the managers’ promises had withered and died. He’d even heard that the long shifts were beginning again. But the young ones, the ones who hadn’t been beaten down before the coup—they still believed. Belief could be dangerous. Nate altered course as if he’d never intended to go that way.
He thought he saw Anneka in the road ahead of him,