frustration. Firo had spoken of the House as a web and it felt like one, sticky and confining. She couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there. She couldn’t brush it away.
Later that night, lolling in front of the fire with his head in Elly’s lap, Gavin asked what had made her so angry earlier in the day. “Nothing worth talking about,” Judah said, sure that one of them would catch the odd note in her voice—but Gavin was playing with Elly’s braid. She was slapping his hand away. Theron lifted his head from his notebook; gave her a long look, then dropped it again. Judah let it go.
Chapter Three
On Nate Clare’s second night in Highfall, the fog rolling up from the Brake was a half step away from being as wet as the river itself, and not much cleaner. It clung to the brim of Nate’s hat, wormed its way inside his coat, stuck his shirt to his skin and collected on the lenses of his spectacles. More than once he nearly tripped over a beggar or a child or a begging child huddled for paltry shelter in the lee of a building. Elban’s House Magus lived in Porterfield, one of the city’s richest neighborhoods; beggars weren’t allowed there. Nate didn’t know about children.
Limley Square wasn’t the grandest or biggest square in Porterfield, but it was still nicer than anything Nate had seen while staying across the city in Brakeside. The cruel blue spires of the guildhalls and manors stabbed at the sky here just as they did elsewhere in the city, but there was grass here, there were trees and trim iron fences and flower beds in front of the houses. Which were mostly freestanding—unlike in Brakeside, where people built on every square foot, squeezing shanties and half-shanties into the narrowest of closes and then squeezing entire families into them. Multiple families, even. The wagons he’d grown up in hadn’t been much bigger, but they’d used the space better, and they’d never been parked in the grimmest part of Highfall, where the fog and stench of the Brake were thick enough to cut.
And over everything, the implacable Wall loomed like the end of the world. Here in Limley Square the sidewalks were paved in the same white stone that formed the Wall, so the featureless expanse felt more like an architectural feature and less like a prison. Seeing it made Nate’s breath catch so he didn’t look.
He found the magus’s house easily. The door was painted blue, with an ostentatious brass knocker shaped like a hawk’s head. Nate lifted the heavy ring and dropped it, three times. Belatedly it occurred to him that he had no idea if handshaking was the custom in Highfall or not. His fingers were wet from the fog that had condensed on the metal, and he wiped them on his coat, which wasn’t much drier.
The door opened. The man behind it was dressed in neat but plain gray—servant’s clothes—but the look he gave Nate seemed reserved for things just dredged up from the bottom of the Brake. “Magus doesn’t see people off the street,” he said, and started to close the door.
Quickly, Nate stuck his boot in it. “I’ve got a letter.”
The servingman eyed him. “Let’s have it.”
So Nate reached into his coat and found the packet, which he’d been smart enough to wrap in waxed paper so it was more or less dry. He handed it over, then pulled back his foot. The servingman closed the door and that was that. Nate would either get in, and his mission could continue, or he wouldn’t, and everything would be lost. While he waited to see which it would be, he stood on the step, in the fog. His wet hair made the back of his neck itch under his collar.
Just when he was becoming convinced that the door would never open again, it did. The servingman stepped back. “Come in,” he said.
The dim hallway smelled like wood smoke and dried herbs. The floor was dark and glossy, but Nate couldn’t tell by the light of the servingman’s single candle if it was wood or stone. Before Nate set foot on it the servingman handed him a towel and told him to dry the soles of his boots. Nate had cleaned them as best he could before he came, but they were still coated in layers of dirt from the Barriers and beyond. Some of the dirt he wiped off in the hall had probably traveled all