Charles shook his head. “No, the committee came knocking yesterday while you were inside. Left a summons for me and my nonexistent working papers.” With a glint of humor, he added, “I’ve been ignoring it, but that strikes me as rather a short-term solution, wouldn’t you say?”
Nate’s mouth was suddenly dry, the bread turning to sand in his mouth. “We’ll get you papers. You can be my apprentice.”
“Bindy is your apprentice. Do you want to choose between us?”
There was nothing Nate could say to that. “My porter, then.”
“I think the Company of Porters would object.”
There was nothing Nate could say to that, either. “You’re my friend,” he said finally.
“You’re mine, too. And that’s why I’m telling you: I’m leaving.” He leaned forward, his face filled with an earnest intensity Nate hadn’t seen there in a long time. He felt struck nearly dumb by the force of it. And of course, this was why Charles had been chosen to come along, wasn’t it? His persuasiveness, his charm. “Come with me,” Charles said now. “Don’t stay here. It’s killing you. You know it is.”
“The world needs—”
“No.” Charles was stern now. “I don’t believe it anymore, Nate. Oh, I know, the Work seems real. But everything I felt when I was dropping seemed real, too, and it all came out of a bottle. We’ve both been told since we were children that if we cut holes in ourselves we can work wonders, but what wonders have we actually seen?”
Nate shook his head. “You haven’t been in the tower. You haven’t met—”
“The girl?” Charles’s expression twisted. “The girl is a girl and the world is the world and it’s always been like this, Nate, it’s never been any other way. There’s nothing to unbind. There are only our lives to live. Be in love with her if you want, but don’t delude yourself, don’t think of her as some sort of miracle—”
From the front of the manor came the distinct and impossible sound of the locked front door opening. Both men froze as an irregular thump-thump-tap made slow and steady progress down the hall, past the parlor and stairs. Two feet and a cane.
Charles was wide-eyed, frozen in fear. Nate imagined he looked much the same. They were both children again, waiting for Derie to come beat some brain into them, as she called it.
“Run,” Nate whispered, barely able to hear himself.
Charles shook his head with a fearsome resolution.
The kitchen door opened. Derie hobbled in. “Dinner, boys? And poor old Derie not invited.”
For a moment, neither man said anything. Then Nate pushed a third chair out with his foot. The legs screeched on the wooden floor. Derie sat down; she took up Charles’s forgotten bread and bit into it. With grudging approval, she said, “Not bad, Nathaniel. Not as good as Caterina’s. It’s the water that makes the difference, you know. Water’s dead here. Like everything else.” She tossed the bread down. Then she looked at Charles.
“Leaving, are we?” she said. “Or just talking about it endlessly, like a jay?”
Nate found his voice. “Just talking, Derie. Not endlessly.”
She barked a laugh. “Says you. This one’s been chewing on it in that parboiled mind of his for days now.” To Charles, she said, “You’ve got no defenses anymore, boy. You burned them all out with that poison you put in yourself, and now, you don’t take a shit without me knowing about it.”
Charles raised his chin. “I did my part. I got Nate inside.”
Derie made a scornful noise. “Would have been nice to have had a courtier on the inside, too, wouldn’t it? One that hadn’t stewed his own brain like tea leaves so it’d feel nicer while he wasted his seed in some third-rate courtier girl.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” Charles said, unfazed. “Shame the Work can’t show you the future, old woman. Never occurred to you that anyone else might have designs on Elban’s empire, did it?”
“This is not about his empire, you stupid boy. This is about the entire world.” Derie’s voice was a vicious hiss.
“I’m not a boy,” Charles said.
Nate felt the antagonism burning between the two of them, and fear began to burgeon into panic inside him. “Derie,” he said, and went silent. There was no balm for this wound, no salve for this betrayal. Because that was how Derie saw it, he knew: a betrayal not just of her, but of everything generations had worked for. Lives and blood, vanished like water into dry dust.