because neither of them could feel each other anymore.
The next morning, Nate still sat there, motionless at the table with three bowls of clotting blood and the dead body of his oldest friend. When Bindy walked in and gasped, Nate only blinked. He felt like he’d just woken up, but knew he hadn’t slept. “Bindy,” he said calmly, “will you please go find a guard? Charles has killed himself.”
By the time the deadcart arrived—nothing so grand as a deadcoach, not for somebody like Charles—Nate had dumped the bowls of blood in the garden. Even inert blood made good fertilizer. It didn’t bother him. He’d watched the stuff drain out of Charles, but could feel nothing of his friend in it. Even the body itself felt meaningless, and it did not disturb him overmuch to watch the two workers dump it unceremoniously into the back of the cart, where several bodies already lay jumbled on top of each other. Nate stood silently with the guard as the two workers pulled a soiled piece of canvas over the bodies to cover them, and cracked the whip over the decrepit mule who began to ploddingly carry them all away.
“Where are they taking him?” Nate said.
“Pits outside the city,” the guard said. “Sorry about your friend, magus. Was he a dropper?”
“He used to be.”
“Once a dropper, always a dropper.” The guard nodded at the disappearing cart, then spat into the dust. “Two of those others were, too. Stuff turns a man into a parasite. Wish they’d all do like your friend. No disrespect meant, of course.”
“None taken,” Nate said.
* * *
As the Seneschal let him into the courtyard the next day, the gray man said, “You have one more week to convince her to come down on her own. Then I’ll bring her down, one way or another.” His voice was flat. “You might suggest to her—subtly, of course—that the broken stairs don’t protect Gavin.”
“I thought you didn’t approve of the way Elban used them against each other,” Nate said.
“I don’t. It will be clean, my way. Fair.” One gray shoulder twitched in a shrug. “I’ll only hurt him until she comes down. No tricks.”
Judah would certainly come down if Gavin were being tortured. Nate needed to finish his work soon. As he navigated the corridors to the parlor, he felt dull surprise that the end was finally so near: he had spent his entire life building a house, and now there were only the curtains to hang and the horse to hitch up. Although generally one didn’t hitch horses up to houses. His metaphors were mixing. Charles was dead. Soon Judah would be wreaking her usual careless havoc in his head. Not knowing who he was would almost be a relief.
He found Eleanor sitting on the parlor floor in a tangle of dingy gray yarn like a bird in a nest, and gave her the flour. Her thanks was halfhearted. “Put it on the table, will you? Sorry, I can’t get up. If I lose my place in this I’ll never find it again. I had it outside drying, and the wind picked up.” She shook her head once, as if she had no movements to spare. Then, looking more closely at him, her eyes narrowed. “Magus, are you feeling all right?”
“I was about to ask the same of you.”
“I’m just tired. Of this yarn, mostly. We really are grateful for the flour, magus. It means a lot. Will you bring that flask on the table up to Judah when you go? It’s squash soup.”
“She’ll like that.”
“She’ll hate it, actually,” Eleanor said, “but it’s food. There’s a letter, too.”
He took the flask. He burned the letter in the workshop, as he did all of Eleanor’s letters. They would only remind Judah of Eleanor and the outside world. They would only hurt her. And he needed her focused.
* * *
You seem sad today.
They stood on a windy mountain, thick soft cloud obscuring everything beneath them. The snow never melted there, but in Judah’s Work, it was only cold, not freezing. For her, the glittering crystals of ice in the air were beautiful, not piercing; for her, the crunch of snow underfoot did not carry a fear of crevasse, collapse, death. Around them the peaks of the Barriers reached majestically skyward, blue-gray and frosted with white. In reality, by this point, Nate had not been able to open his windburned eyes enough to see through them; Charles had lost a toe, and for all of