also ironic, because Nate no longer trusted himself. On the way home from the House he saw John Slonim, the man who’d driven the first Slonimi caravan, back before the Slonimi were the Slonimi, before the first Work: a rail-thin man with dark skin and a heavy beard, standing on a box doing sleight-of-hand for petty coins. He saw a tall woman with enormous horns that curled behind her head, a knitted scarf wrapped around her neck and carefully tucked under the tips of the horns. He saw a mother holding a crying baby in the crook of one arm. The mother brought a dull silver vial to the baby’s mouth. The crying stopped.
Nate looked away. It is not real, he told himself. None of it is real.
“Better work faster, boy,” Derie said at the manor. “You’re like a pot that’s more glue than clay.” Then, as Charles held Nate down, she cut his arm, and put him back together.
* * *
When Nate woke the next morning, Charles had cleaned him up and put him to bed again, but was nowhere to be seen. It took some time but eventually Nate rose, and dressed and went downstairs. The last of the bread sat, stale and hard, on the counter; when Bindy arrived, she warmed a slab of it in a pan on the stove until it was soft again and stood over him while he ate it, frowning like a concerned mother. Then she wrapped herself in her shawl and went to the Seneschal’s manor to pick up Nate’s credit vouchers for the week.
The errand would take hours. As soon as she was gone, Nate went into the garden and threw up everything he’d eaten. Then he hung a rag over the gate in the garden: not blue, but white. Or at least it had been white, once. Inside, he fetched the box he’d prepared earlier that week, and put it on the table.
A moment later, he heard a tap at the garden door, and opened it. “Firo,” he said.
The former courtier was transformed. The crinkles around his eyes were free of kohl; instead of being combed high with pomade, his hair hung long, and instead of the gems he’d once favored he wore plain steel earrings, like a dockworker. His coat was as battered and drab as any factory worker’s, but the shirt under it was spotless. Behind him in the garden, a lumpy sack thrown over one shoulder, lurked a heavily muscled young man whose good looks hadn’t yet been worn away by work and privation. Soon enough.
In the House, Firo’s predilections had been permitted but not generally spoken of, which Nate could almost bear. Now, though, Firo went about shamelessly with his new pet, as if there were nothing unnatural at all about the relationship. To the Slonimi, passing on your power was everything. For a man to waste his time in a dalliance where there was no chance of a child was seen as selfish, even traitorous. Persistence of such pursuits was one of the few crimes that merited expulsion, and the stripping of power. “You can come in. He stays out,” he said to Firo.
The young man made a face. Firo rolled his eyes and gave his companion a conspiratorial, pitying look: What can you even do with these people? It did not endear him to Nate, but the young man grinned and handed over the sack.
“Really, magus,” Firo said when the door was firmly closed, “I don’t know what isolated little backwater bred you, but it’s long since time you left it behind.”
Nate gestured to the box on the table.
Firo’s slouch vanished. The two steps it took him to reach the kitchen table were full of courtier insouciance and swagger. Opening the box, he examined the three dozen vials packed inside it. They were identical to the ones hidden beneath the plank in Leda’s stall, identical to the one Nate had hallucinated the mother holding to her baby’s mouth (it must have been a hallucination—he was more glue than clay, his brain could not be trusted). Nate had made them all, after taking a few days to figure out the formula. It had been Vertus’s idea, although the former servingman preferred to use Firo as go-between. Nate hadn’t actually spoken with him in weeks.
“What are the odds,” Nate had said to the courtier the first time, “that I’ve had dealings with both of you, and now you have dealings with each other?”