curls—his first instinct was to bury the springknife in the man’s throat. Bindy leapt up.
“Magus!” Her voice was as warm as the cinnamon in the air. “Look! It’s my brother, the one from inside, that they told us was dead! But they were wrong, isn’t it amazing? I didn’t even know who he was when I found him with Ma in the house. I almost ran for the guards.” She laughed. “He was kneading the bread.”
The stableman grinned at her. The mug of tea seemed tiny in his giant hands. “Not your fault. You’d never met me in person, for all the letters you wrote.”
The fondness in his voice was unmistakable. The stableman loved Bindy and Nate still wanted to kill him. Joyously, Bindy said, “Want tea, magus? There’s lots. Darid says you two knew each other, inside.”
“We met.” Warily, Nate joined them at the table, not taking his eyes off the stableman.
“My brother and my magus, and none of us even knew! What a funny old world,” Bindy said, and went on to elucidate all of the ways in which the world was both funny and old. Darid’s eyes bored into Nate, as if trying to tell him something, but Nate couldn’t understand what it was. Nor could he explain his nearly uncontrollable desire to see the man dead. But he was sane enough to recognize the murderous thoughts as insane, so he sat with a fixed smile and let Bindy pour tea as she chattered on about (seemingly) every letter she and her brother had ever exchanged. There had to be some errand he could send her on, some way to get her out of the House so he could—
kill.
—talk to her brother. Finally, she paused for breath, and Nate said, “I’m sorry to disrupt your reunion, Bindy, but I need you to take some headache powder to the magus in Archertown. You know where he lives?”
Bindy wrinkled her nose. “Yes, but he smells funny.”
“So does the headache powder.” Nate was surprised by how easy he sounded. “He’ll give you some herbs to bring back, and some agar for clotting poultices.”
She looked from Nate to her brother, clearly reluctant to leave. “You’ll show me how to make them?”
“I will,” Nate said, and the stableman said, “Go do your work, Bin. I’ll be around. You haven’t seen the last of me.”
When she was gone—almost the moment the door closed behind her, as if the words were ready to jump off his tongue—the stableman said, “How is Judah?”
He wasn’t being polite. There was urgency in his voice, and pain. “She’s fine,” Nate said. “They’re all fine.”
Darid visibly relaxed. “I don’t care about all of them. I just care about her.” He carried a hardness that Nate didn’t remember; but then again, the only other time Nate had spent with him, he’d just been snatched from certain death. Which would leave a person somewhat less than themselves, perhaps, and why did Nate want to kill him so badly? He should excuse himself. Take off the springknife, leave it in the lab where he wouldn’t be tempted to use it.
“I thought you left the city,” he said, instead.
“I came back when I heard about the coup. Wanted to see my mother.”
The slightest flex of the wrist was all it would take. The blade would leap out like a bird startled from a bush. “You don’t look anything like Bindy.”
“Different fathers. Me and my first two sisters, Nell and Connie—our father died in the plague. Con died, too, right before I went inside. Ma’s sent a lot of people off on the deadcart.”
“What are you going to do now?” Nate asked.
With a shrug of one massive shoulder, Darid said, “Not sure. I can’t work. Don’t have papers.”
“I’m sure you could get them. Other Returned have.”
“How many of them are supposed to be dead?” Darid’s tone was cold.
“I could speak to the Seneschal for you. I don’t think he has anything against you personally. He needed to do what he did.” The words struck Nate as ridiculous even as he spoke them. The stableman’s mouth tightened and his eyes went hard and Nate wanted so very badly to kill him. Because Judah had loved him, he realized; because she’d been grievously injured, in more ways than one, and Nate had been made to be party to it, and oh, it would feel good to stab him. “He’d find you a job.”
“Thanks,” Darid said drily, “but I think I’ve had enough of being assigned work