Derie smiled, brilliant and hard. “Well, what to do about this? Can’t let you go feral, with all that Work in you.”
“Send him home,” Nate said.
“Where he’ll do what?” she said, as if Charles wasn’t even there. “All he’s ever been trained for is pretending to be a courtier. I can doubt he can even hitch up a horse anymore.” She picked up the bread knife. “And of course, he won’t have the Work anymore.”
Sometimes an ordinary person was born powerful. Away from the caravan, without planning, without interference. You could feel them, your first day in a new village, like a campfire in winter or water in the desert. It was easy to pick them out of a crowd, because they were the ones everyone else either gravitated toward or edged away from; they were the only ones who seemed real.
And sometimes the opposite happened. Sometimes, a person born with power grew up unworthy; wanted to leave, or was expelled. But they couldn’t take their power with them—it couldn’t be allowed to spread unchecked. So it was removed. Nate had been thinking of expulsion just that day, with Firo, but he had never actually seen one happen. When he was a child, Caterina had never let him watch, and when he grew older he didn’t want to.
Now he sat frozen as Derie sliced into her hand and drew quick sigils in the spilled blood. Nate felt the Work rasp over his mind, where it had touched Charles’s. Like an insect, Derie began to strip away Charles’s power like leaves from a tree, unweaving every bit of Work he’d ever done. It was brutal, ugly. Nate ached with empty places where Charles had been, where he was torn away. Charles himself gasped for breath, gray-skinned, lips bluing. Sweat beaded his forehead. The sounds coming from him, small and helpless, were worse than Judah’s screams during the caning. Nate knew he could do nothing to stop this.
“Stop,” he said anyway. “Stop, Derie.”
“I think not,” she said.
Charles was a dwindling flame, then a spark. Nate reached out to lend some of his own fire, and felt himself slapped back, the sting of it reverberating through his entire body.
The spark sputtered. Died. Charles’s writhing stopped. He slumped dull-eyed in his chair. “You’ve killed me.” His voice was a void.
“Not at all.” Derie stood up. “You can live like that as long as you like. Of course, most find they don’t like to for very long. But that’s not my problem.” Leaning on her cane, she stomped to the counter and picked up a basin that Bindy had left to dry on the shelf. Then she stomped back. Dropped it on the table in front of the living husk that had once been Charles. “There. So you don’t leave a mess if you do decide to do the decent thing.”
She left. Charles was uninjured physically, and looked exactly as he had before Derie had arrived, but everything was wrong. His friendly presence in Nate’s head was gone. Nate’s heart broke for him. He tried to imagine living like that, stripped of all power, all connection. Cut off from the world, from all the people he’d ever loved. The loneliness of it. The misery.
Charles closed his eyes. His head moved ever so faintly back and forth, and Nate remembered him saying, a lifetime and mere minutes ago: I prefer to be in my right mind. “Knife,” he said. His voice sounded like it was three rooms away.
Nate brought his knife. He laid the weapon down on the table in front of Charles. “You don’t have to do this,” he said. “You could—” But even as he spoke, he knew better. Nobody ever survived having their power taken away. Nobody ever wanted to.
It took Charles some time to get the knife into his hand. It took more time, and effort, to bring the knife’s edge to the vein in his arm. It was excruciating to watch but it was unthinkable to Nate to do anything other than stay, and wait, and witness as, finally, Charles mustered the strength to open the skin, as his blood started to flow into the basin. It was as dead and lifeless as the rest of him, no more alive than the sludge at the bottom of the Brake.
And although it took longer than either of them would have liked, Charles began to grow pale. “Nate,” he said eventually, and Nate said, “I’m here.” They had to speak the words aloud,