the herb sellers at the Bazaar waterlogged or oiled their wares, to make them seem heavier or healthier. In the Beggar’s Market the same herbs would be wizened and bruised but sometimes more potent, and the small market by the Harteswell Gate—just a few stalls—often had unusual things, because the foreign merchants on their way out unloaded unsold goods for cheap to stallkeepers who had no idea what they were buying. One day, near the Beggar’s Market, he stopped a man with a rash on his cheek. “I can treat that,” he said when the man glared at him. And he could. It was simple enough, and he’d just bought the very herb he needed: a pathetic specimen, but once it was simmered in oil and the oil cooled to a solid, it would soothe away the rash in a matter of days. He told the man to come to Arkady’s manor, to the back gate by the slop bin. Nate didn’t expect that he would, but he made the salve anyway. He was pleased when the man showed up.
“Why do you do this?” the man said, still suspicious, as he took the salve.
Nate shrugged. “Because I can.”
Word got around. People started to stop him on the street—the shabbier streets, anyway—to pull him aside. “You the magus?” they said, and he was always quick to say no, he was just an apprentice, but they called him magus all the same. (He would rather have been called healer or apothecary or even herbalist, but on this side of the Barriers it was always magus.) Sometimes he could help on the spot, telling the women to feed their babies goat’s milk instead of cow’s, or suggesting the men alternate their bundles between their left and right shoulders. Others, he told to come to the gate. They began to call him the Gate Magus. They paid in small goods, eggs from backyard chickens or bags of brown flour, or in services. One seamstress sat down cross-legged right in the alley to sew a button onto his coat. Another time, a shoemaker brought his tools and fixed the worn heel of Nate’s boot.
More importantly, they paid him in goodwill. “You’re a good man, magus,” the weaver’s husband told him once, when he gave the man a syrup for his son’s colic. “You go all the way down.” In Brakeside and Marketside, the original cottages that lined the narrow streets had been built up and out, with rooms propped unsteadily over the streets themselves. Collapses weren’t uncommon. Nate had talked a young boy through a breathing spasm in one of these attaches, as they were called, barely able to breathe himself for fear while the floors bent and creaked perilously beneath him. Back on the hard cobbles, he finally understood what the weaver’s husband had meant. All the way down, indeed.
Merchants in the Beggar’s Market showed him better goods. Pickpockets left him alone. If the guards were raiding a specific street, a wink and a shake of the head would tell him to take another route. The fruitmonger would pass him an extra date. All of this was nice, and gave Nate some small sense of belonging to this strange place where pale people lived on top of each other. He had tried to be friendly to the foreign traders, but had soon discovered that they didn’t trust him any more than they did any other Highfall citizen. Their reticence made him lonely but he could understand it. He supposed, even, that it was for the best.
Because what he valued more than anything else were the stories the locals told: of their lives, of Highfall, and (best of all) of the palace. No matter where he was or what he was doing—clipping herbs in the dim miasma of Arkady’s yard, making his way through the Market with a loaf of bread under each arm—he could feel the palace, with her in it, pulsing quietly under his days like his own heartbeat. He had seen the whole thing once, from the crest of a hill outside the city. The land enclosed by the Wall was almost as big as the city outside it, the palace itself a patchwork tangle of colored roof tiles and mismatched towers, crenellated, peaked, brick or stone. The people he spoke to in the streets knew it only through stories. Inside were trees that grew any kind of fruit you could dream of; inside were herds of fat cows that gave milk