Darid?” She blinked, her face slack with the effort of thinking. “I didn’t like that.”
“But it helped you. You trust me to help you, don’t you?”
“I trust you,” she said so dreamily that his fragmented heart broke into a few more pieces, just for her.
“Good.” He took her hand in his. “Because you’ll need to trust me, if you’re going to unbind yourself from Gavin.”
Some emotion broke through her complacency like a lantern through fog: excitement and dread and fear and trepidation, all at once. “Could I do that?” she whispered finally.
“It won’t be easy,” he said. He kept his voice neutral. Just in case she had some tendrils inside him, he thought fixedly of the locked door inside his head. “You’d have to do exactly as I say. Even if it’s hard. Even if it hurts.”
With a glimmer of her old cheek, she said, “Are you seriously asking me if I’m afraid of pain?”
“I mean it,” he said. “You have to trust me.”
She rolled her eyes as if the answer was obvious. “I trust you.”
And she did. He could feel it with all of his selves. He very much doubted that she had much choice—the tower did its own kind of Work—but still. It overwhelmed him. He still held her hand; now he pressed the back of it to his lips, which was all he dared to do. Perhaps after. Perhaps there would be time.
But then he realized how limp her hand was in his, and—mouth still pressed to her cool skin—he looked up. Saw the dazed distaste in her eyes, the wariness.
Well. Maybe not.
He let her hand fall. Then he picked up his knife. It was spotted with old blood and grit from the floor, but he didn’t think it mattered, any more than her distaste mattered. After, when she was asleep, the tower would smooth everything over.
Chapter Nineteen
Something was wrong. Like a word on the tip of Judah’s tongue, or a dream—she knew the wrongness was there, but when she tried to grab for it, it slipped away.
It wasn’t the Work; she loved the Work. The Work was alive. The blood, which she’d initially found gory, hardly bothered her anymore. The purplish membrane didn’t particularly interest her, but the world Nate showed her inside his head was dazzling. There was so much of it. Forests of vine-shrouded trees with tops that pierced the clouds; giant rust-colored rocks littered across a plain like discarded toys; wide meadows greener and more fragrant than anything she’d ever seen or smelled. The Work was all that was real; the tower was the dream. She watched the magus’s fine, pale hands cleaning crusted blood away from her cuts and remembered Darid’s hands, big and callused, dabbing salve over her burns; those big hands had seemed the only solid thing in a world that slipped and slid with fever, but now the memory seemed empty, meaningless.
In another language, another world, around a corner, under a bed, some hidden part of her knew: something was wrong. Something was missing. No matter how she searched, she couldn’t find it.
She thought she had searched.
She was sure she had.
* * *
A thin crust of snow appeared in a perfect semicircle near the broken edge of the tower. Elly sent up a blanket, but Judah wasn’t cold. The magus’s visits were brilliantly clear, but she had no idea how she passed her time in between. She devoured the food he brought, but was never aware of being hungry. She had nothing to do, but was never bored; she must have slept, but remembered neither falling asleep nor waking, and was never drowsy. Through the purple membrane she could feel Theron drifting around the house, but he meant nothing to her. Scratches from Gavin marred her skin, around the old curlicue scars and the tidy cuts the magus made, but they didn’t seem important.
In the Work she felt everything. Every touch of breeze, every flake of snow. Her body felt hyper-alive and the world felt hyper-real even though she knew it wasn’t real at all. Her memories of the places the magus took her weren’t even really hers. They were secondhand, with the shape of his identity still in them. But they felt like hers.
Why does the inside of your head look like the old part of the House? she asked once. Because when they weren’t working with specific memories, he let her explore, opening closed door after closed door. And it did look like the old wing. You