then Judah, then his mother: hallucinating again. It didn’t matter. Derie would fix it.
When the old woman met him at Arkady’s door, she laughed. Her glee sounded brittle, jagged. “She’s draining you like a boil, isn’t she? Good and strong.”
“Very strong,” he said.
Derie laughed again and clapped her hands. Then she caught at his elbow, because he was falling. “I hope you’ve eaten something, boy. It’ll take a lot of blood to clean up the mess in your head. What a force she is!”
The blood was the least of Nate’s misery. Derie treated his memories like junk in a dead man’s wagon. Anneka and the dead bandit in the Barriers: thrust aside, old news. The woman Nate had been paired with, the child she probably wasn’t carrying because he was useless, lame, pathetic: nobody cared. His mother: irrelevant.
She snatched greedily at everything involving Judah, though—her face, the touch of her mind, every thought Nate had had about her, every bit of her he’d seen. Like the Seneschal, they needed her to do as she was told; unlike the Seneschal’s, their plan was righteous. Derie’s questions pried through his mind like fingers. Was she biddable enough to do what was needed? Was Nate? Was he weak enough to love her? Was he strong enough to control her?
Derie’s voice cut through the chaos like a beam of light. Quiet, stupid boy. And she twisted something inside his mind. A noise that he’d not realized he was making cut off abruptly. Inside, he still screamed.
* * *
He woke up and the light was different. Gradually, he realized this was because he lay in Arkady’s guest bed, the sheets around him clean and cool. His clothes were gone, his arms neatly bandaged. The world was blurry. He put his hand out to the small table next to the bed, found his glasses. Everything slipped into focus. Slowly, he forced himself to sit up. His stomach swung violently. A groan escaped him, and he hunched over.
The door opened and Charles entered. Drawn by the groan, Nate supposed. He carried a glass of clear, pale green liquid. “Drink,” he said, passing it to Nate. Nate drank. The draught was faintly herbal and very gingery. He had brewed it himself before going inside yesterday; he’d known he would need it. As he sipped, his nausea eased and he felt stronger.
“You know,” he said, “you don’t have to keep putting me to bed every time.”
“You piss yourself, and that’s not all. Not that Derie cares. She’d happily leave you lying in your own blood and filth all night.” Charles spoke without much expression. After weeks away from the drops, his weeping had finally dried up, which was a relief; but the way Charles was now, wan and listless, was even harder to take. “Besides, you put me to bed, didn’t you?”
Nate—who was wondering what Charles meant by that’s not all—had indeed put Charles to bed, but didn’t want to embarrass his friend by talking about it. “Is Bindy downstairs?”
Charles nodded. “She has a list of calls for you to make from yesterday.” He hesitated. “Her sister came to walk her home last night. The pretty one with the chip on her shoulder, the Paper stooge.”
“Rina.” Nora’s tenure on the committee had been brief—she was too old and worn-out, she said—but Rina had risen quickly in the ranks. She wore her Paper sash with pride and wielded it like a sword, her fervent eyes always on the watch for shirkers, hoarders, violators of any kind. People on the street ducked away when they saw her coming.
“She asked if I’d been issued working papers yet,” Charles said.
That was worrisome. People without working papers were sometimes ejected from the city. But Nate kept his voice light. “I’ll talk to the Seneschal. Tell him you’re my ailing cousin or something. He’ll call her off. The Unbinding will be done soon. You’ll feel different after. Everything won’t seem so...hopeless.”
“It’s not hope that I’m missing. I had hope. We had nothing but hope, you and I. Do you need to practice that paralyzing thing on me today?”
Charles might as well have been reciting the shopping list. “No,” Nate said. “Not today.”
* * *
One of the calls was an address in a narrow street in Brakeside where the buildings channeled the wind into a cold, gritty blade. The house was so overgrown with attaches that it seemed about to topple; climbing the rickety stairs, Nate hoped the number on his list would match one of