found time to assemble the thing; she couldn’t think why he had chosen now to show it to her.
He wound the key, quickly. It made a comfortable clicking noise. Then he pressed one of the gems, and the big wheel on top began to spin, and the device sparked; caught and burned with a steady purple flame that rose from a tiny post at the top. It was beautiful.
The Seneschal, increasingly amused, waited in the door. He couldn’t see Theron, or the clockwork device. Eleanor held out her hand. Theron placed the thing in her palm. It was heavy, but not too heavy; it ticked, but not loudly. It was still burning. She held it at arm’s length, where the Seneschal couldn’t see it.
“Come on, now, Eleanor,” the Seneschal said. “Step aside.”
“I told you,” she said, “this is our House,” and threw the device down onto the oil-soaked mats. The flames leapt up like a crowd to its feet. The Seneschal’s eyes went wide with alarm and one of his guards cried out.
Theron slammed the door shut with surprising strength. With glittering merriment in his eyes, he grinned. “Run.”
Inside, the men were screaming. Elly laughed, high and horrified, and ran. Theron laughed behind her. She didn’t look back.
* * *
“Elban’s heir had to be the last of his line,” the magus said. “I’m sorry. We’ve all done things we’re sorry for. When this is over, we’ll grieve his brother together.”
But grief already boiled inside Gavin, thick and sludgy and hot. Judah couldn’t move any more than he could. She felt sick and sad and all the worse for the knowledge that it would have hurt more to lose Theron when he was himself. “Were you the one who poisoned him?” she said.
The magus shook his head emphatically. “No. No. That was Arkady and the Seneschal.” He tapped his chest. Behind his spectacles his eyes were wide and luminous. “I was the one who saved him. I gave you the antidote.”
Judah felt like a clenched fist. “Why, if you were only going to kill him?”
“For you,” the magus said. “I saved him for you.”
When she spoke, she could barely hear herself. “To make me trust you.”
“Take the knife.” The magus moaned. “Can’t you hear them? All the voices of all the people who’ve poured their power into you?”
The horror was that she could. She could feel them in her mind, whispering soft words. Beckoning her. Holding invisible arms out to her, like the tower had: come, lost one. Come, lonely. Come, you are ours. She hated how strong it was, the urge to slip into those arms, back into the slow sleepy dullness of all those weeks in the tower. Theron had talked about the voices, about feeling tangled. Was this what it had been like for him all those months? Poor Theron. He hadn’t wanted to die. He had never wanted to die. “Get out of me,” she said. “Get them out of me.”
“Put the knife in his throat and they’ll go.” Eagerness in the magus’s voice.
“Get them out of me!” she screamed.
“Kill him!”
Kill me, Gavin suddenly said. My brother is dead and my kingdom is gone. Kill me and we can both be free.
The black desire inside him was so strong. Judah’s eyes went to the knife. The magus raised it hopefully toward her. “If you both come down out of this tower alive,” he said, “the Seneschal will use you. The bond. He wants to do it to other people. Children. A whole guild of them. The Communicators.”
She wanted to tear herself out of her own skin.
“Your life,” the magus said, “lived over and over. All the pain of it.”
No. No, Gavin said, instantly. Kill me. Kill me now. The Seneschal won’t care about you if I’m dead.
Judah knew Gavin’s face as well as she knew her own. In her head he didn’t have this deathly pallor, this faint sheen of sweat darkening the hair at his forehead. In her head his eyes weren’t red-rimmed, filled with tears. One spilled over, ran over his fine cheekbone to cling helplessly to the ridge of his jaw. She wiped it away. It felt cold and clean. “Then he’ll have no reason to keep me alive,” she said to him.
But the magus was shaking his head. “The tower won’t let you die.”
She took her hand from Gavin, and looked at the magus. “Because the tower needs me?”