to see. Specifically. She remembered him kissing her hand, how wrong that had felt. She would have to trust him, he’d said. She didn’t. It hurt her to realize, but she didn’t.
She took Gavin’s hands. They already felt less real in hers and she knew she didn’t have much time. Try. I’ll try, too.
Back to the tower, and into the Work. The blood was stupid. The blood was a crutch, a silly, disgusting tradition passed down through generations of people too timid to use what they knew. Caterina had said Judah was special—amazing—but if she was, it was only because she was unhampered by all the magus’s years of lessons and training and worship at the altar of the Work. It was there, like water; no point in singing to it when you could dive in and swim. But what if she wasn’t swimming? What if she was only splashing around in the shallows? Everything she saw around her in the tower was exactly what she’d expected—luminous purple lace draping everything, each strand coursing with life and power—but that didn’t mean it was all there was. Like standing at the edge of the aquifer and sensing the vast caverns in front of her, she stood in the Work and sensed that there was more to see.
So she opened her eyes.
This, she was surprised to find, wasn’t easy. There was a general feel of reluctance around her. Like Theron as a child, watching cautiously from the ground as she climbed up to the thinnest branches in the apple trees, saying, Ugh, Judah, please don’t, you’re going to fall. A soft voice whispering, Unsafe, unsafe. She ignored the voice. She was determined. There was an ineffable tearing sensation around her eyes—
And suddenly the room was clogged with Work, choked with it. The membranous purple filled the very air; it drifted like smoke, and she realized with horror that she had been breathing it in all this time. She looked down at herself.
The great rope wound out of her chest; that was familiar. But peeking out of her collar, just at the edge of her vision, she saw something else: a thread, a taut bit of Work. She pulled the collar down and saw that her body—what she could see of it—was nearly covered in purple stuff, threads of it disappearing into her and emerging in the perfect precise stitches of an expert seamstress.
Or a magus.
It was so easy, now that she knew how. She only had to look inside one of the stitches, and there it was. There he was; there they both were. Her own self, asleep—looking not at all the way she did in her head, her face smudged and too thin, her fingernails dirty and broken, her dress spotted with blood. Half of her hair had come free of her braids and stood out around her head like a greasy, tangled crown. But her eyes were closed and her face looked somehow mindless, like Gavin when he’d passed out drunk, or Theron anytime.
The magus was bent over her, bandaging her arm with unsteady hands. He kept squeezing his eyes shut behind his dirty spectacles, as if trying to clear them. He didn’t look much better than she did. Cleaner, maybe; his hair was neatly tied back, but she didn’t see how he could have done it the way his hands shook. Did he live with someone who loved him enough to tie back his hair for him? Was there a lover in his Highfall life, some latter-day Anneka who trembled at his touch? She could hardly imagine. The kiss he’d pressed on her hand had been familiar and intimate—and why shouldn’t it be, since she’d lived through most of his memories?—but the moment his lips touched her skin she had known with crystalline clarity that she would never want him to kiss any other part of her.
And that had been when she’d still trusted him. She felt sorry for him, and she felt sorry for the loss of him, but the faint sway of his shoulders made her uneasy. He was singing some simple up-and-down-again tune, like something one of the dairymen would whistle. She moved so she could see his face and he was further gone than Theron, with slack mouth and half-lidded eyes. He managed to finish bandaging her arm, to put the unused bandages, scissors and salve back