on the rug where she stood, buried her face in her hands and wept.
Gavin and Judah both still found the sound of crying actively painful, so it was Theron, finally, who went to her, and slid a thin arm around her shoulders.
“He doesn’t like me,” she said, her teary blue eyes enormous. “He has to like me. If he doesn’t like me he’ll send me home and my father will have to give back the money and my brothers will be so angry, I don’t even know what they’ll do. He doesn’t like me. But he’s so scary. I’m so scared.”
She was talking about Elban. The tiny perfect dolly was weeping with fear and terror of Elban. And yet she’d sat so sweetly on his knee and answered his questions so perfectly. Judah, who had recently learned a great deal about how difficult it was to feel one thing inside and another outside, found herself reluctantly impressed. That was her first glimpse of the steel in Elly. There would be more.
And then Judah thought again about the way Elban had watched her across the room as Elly sat on his lap: the frigid gleam of satisfaction in his eyes, the cruelest hint of a smile. It was the same expression he wore at solstice parties when two courtiers held one of their subtle, sniping arguments, competing for his favor. Although Judah was young, some prescient part of her realized that she was supposed to hate this girl. They had been set against each other like rats in a cage. The sense of rebellion she’d thought dead in the study flared back to life. Who, in this entire palace, should be more her friend than this girl, who no more belonged here than Judah did, for all her quaint braids and pretty manners?
She knelt down—stiffly—in front of the girl. “He doesn’t like anybody. He hates me. He’d kill me, if he could. Oh, please stop crying.” The girl’s sobs were stabbing blades in Judah’s skull, they made the cut on her thigh sting and burn. Judah reached out and touched Elly’s hand. Theron laid his head on the pale girl’s shoulder.
Elly peered up at her. Something about the angle of her head made Judah realize that her eyes looked so big because her face was too thin. “You’re Lady Clorin’s foundling.”
“Judah,” Judah said, and then—unexpectedly—felt Gavin’s hand on her shoulder.
“My foster sister,” he said.
Elly gazed up at him, her face tearstained and frightened. “I don’t want to go back. They can’t send me back.”
“They won’t,” Gavin said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I won’t let them,” he said. For the first time ever, he sounded like his father. Judah remembered stifling a shudder, and being surprised, because it was harder than stifling a scream.
* * *
Arkady was a revolting person, but he was a good magus. His poultice worked well, and the person who wasn’t actually hurt healed faster, and the next morning the egg on Judah’s leg was barely a pebble. A summons from the Seneschal arrived for her with breakfast. Putting him off was pointless; he would send page after page, and eventually come to find her himself. So she made her way to his tiny office. It was poorly ventilated and his door was propped open with a brick to let in the fresher air from the corridor. Inside, he sat at his desk with his collar unbuttoned. The Seneschal’s job—one of them—was to maintain protocol, but he only did so when it mattered. It was among his few redeeming qualities.
She tapped on the open door. He glanced up and beckoned her toward the only chair, which was straight-backed and hard. He was a solid man and in the tiny room he seemed like an extra wall behind his desk, unsmiling in his gray uniform, his hair cut so short that it was as colorless as the rest of him. “I’m surprised,” he said. “I thought I’d have to send at least three messages before I saw you.”
“Well, you didn’t,” she said. “What do you want?”
“One moment.” He bent back over the ledger in front of him.
The desk was covered in clutter. From where Judah sat she could see three inkwells, two broken pens, countless piles of books and scrolls and papers; through the open window she could see the massive gate in the Wall, closed and barred today. The gate was opened one day a week, six men working each enormous winch, to let in the supplies that the