He considered. “Maybe. Probably, between you and Derie. It doesn’t matter. I’m nothing. You, Judah. You’re everything.”
She felt as frozen as Gavin.
The magus swallowed hard. She could see him gathering something—strength, his thoughts—and the effort showed. “His blood. And your blood. Let them spill together, then go into the Work and use what you know to break what his ancestors did. You’ll have to open and open and open. I’ll give you the sigils. You can undo it. All that pent-up power will go back where it belongs.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“You’ve never seen the world the way it was meant to be, Judah, and neither have I. But you’ve seen how powerful Work can be.” He held up his hand and Judah saw a row of sigils drawn on his skin. “Caterina is here, and Derie. We’ll help you. Go into the Work. Break the binding. The tower will take his energy through yours.”
“How are you holding him? How can you do anything to him without his blood?” Judah was stalling. She knew the blood was useless, but he didn’t.
The magus shrugged. “I used Theron’s. But it’s hard. Come on, Judah. Cut his throat. End this. We’re all suffocating. Most of us don’t even know it. Cut him and the binding will break and we can breathe again. Everyone can breathe again.”
At some point, he had begun to weep, silently. She didn’t think he knew he was doing it. “If he dies, I die,” she said. “That’s—”
But the magus was shaking his head. “No. The tower will save you. I’ll save you. That’s what the weaving was for.”
Meanwhile, she moved away from him, closer to Gavin. Slowly, so the magus wouldn’t notice: thinking that if she could touch Gavin, if she could slip into the Work, she could free him. The two of them could get the knife away from the magus and then—she didn’t know what then, but they could figure it out. Even with the knife the magus was no match for both of them. She laid a hand on Gavin’s cheek.
And was immediately overwhelmed by a familiar, sinking despair. It was the same despair that had filled him since the coup, anger rotted into hopelessness. The magus’s mind was as compartmentalized as the House itself, every memory shut away behind its own door. Gavin, who’d never needed to pretend to be anything other than what he was, still had a mind like a book, one page leading into the next. She had felt it when she’d dug for the truth of the lie about Darid. Now she was more skilled, she could turn the pages of him without leaving too much chaos in her wake, and what she read was that most of Gavin didn’t want to live. The world was new and alien and his place in it wasn’t what he’d always assumed. He was scared of dying, but he was terrified of being ordinary. He hated his father but his father had been powerful. In Gavin’s mind, she read what Gavin himself had read in his father’s diaries about the bare stone cell off Elban’s parlor, and the people who had been taken there to suffer for Elban’s amusement. Men and women, staff and courtier. It couldn’t have been a secret: someone cleaned the blood, someone took the bodies to the midden yard. Judah herself had watched the Seneschal move among the crowd at state dinners and balls, seeking out a particular body to be brought to the dais. Judah couldn’t remember faces but Elban had written about them and now the words burned in her brain as they did Gavin’s. He’d been drawn to people who laughed. Strong or delicate, servile or arrogant, it didn’t matter. They all stopped laughing in the end.
Gavin hated his father. He was worried he’d become him. He was ashamed of what Elban had done, but envied him the power to do it, and he was ashamed of that, too.
Judah saw it written, as clear as ink on paper: If he can save you, do it. Let it end.
* * *
“What are you going to do, Eleanor?” the Seneschal said. “Stand against all my guards, all by yourself?”
Eleanor felt ludicrous, her one tiny body blocking the door and all the giant men crowded into the passageway beyond. But she said, “Four hundred years ago, Lady Margarethe held off both of her sons and an army at this door.”