He dreamed of seeing her with his own eyes. He thought of her as he fell asleep at night and when he woke up in the morning and as he shaved his chin in Arkady’s dank backyard. Walking the streets of the city he practiced what he would say to her, when the time came. If he would be able to speak at all. It would be like speaking with the great John Slonim himself, the first Worker from the first caravan, like one of his childhood fantasies come to life. Years of hard work and careful planning had gone into getting Nate to Highfall, to that musty pallet in Arkady’s kitchen; years to get her here, too, to give him a reason to come. Years spent and lives spent, and it was an honor for him to be chosen, an honor to wait. So he forced himself to be patient.
Once a week, at noon, he met Derie at the plague shrine outside the Harteswell Gate. It had been years since the last plague, but people still left offerings at the shrine for luck, cheap trinkets and stale buns. Nobody remembered which god the tokens were supposed to flatter; they left gifts because their parents had taught them to do so when they were young. And enough people still did that nobody noticed when Nate stopped and knelt next to the old woman for a minute, just long enough for her say, “News?” and him to say, “No.” Then she’d cough or spit and he’d get up and walk away. One day, though, he passed her in the street, which he’d never done before, and as he did she muttered, “Midnight.”
So out he crept through the dark yard. In Porterfield the gas lamps burned all night, but in Brakeside people still carried torches to light their way. Only the taverns were open at that hour, and even the shadows were full of shadows: moving shadows, writhing shadows, fighting shadows. Some of the noises the shadows made were ecstatic and others were gurgling and choked. The moon’s reflection quivered in the thin stream of liquid that ran down the middle of the street, and he could hear the quiet lap of the river itself, one street over; he could smell it, ripe and unwholesome.
He wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he’d been robbed on the way—he’d even brought a few small coins so a frustrated thief wouldn’t kill him out of spite—but the few people he saw out in the open seemed uninterested in him, and he made it to the Harteswell Gate unmolested. The guards were dozing. He didn’t see Derie anywhere; the plague shrine was deserted. Without the crowd around it, the shrine wasn’t very impressive, just a stone pillar reaching up from a dry basin. The basin was half-full of offerings, indistinguishable in the darkness. He reached into his pocket, took out a coin, and dropped it in.
“Warding off the pox?” Derie said, almost in his ear.
Trying to pretend she hadn’t startled him, Nate took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt. They probably needed it anyway. They usually did. “Can’t hurt, since I’m here.”
She grunted and, leaning heavily on her cane, dragged herself over to a nearby bench. He followed. She had hobbled all the way across the Barriers on that cane. Or maybe she hadn’t needed it quite as much when they’d set out; he couldn’t remember. “Best not to mess around with other people’s gods,” she said, and dropped heavily down to sit.
Derie had been old as long as Nate had known her. Her skin reminded Nate of the floured dumplings his mother had made to sell for extra money, except that beneath Derie’s soft whiteness was hard, unyielding bone. You could see it jutting out at her elbows and her shoulders and in her eyes. “Too slow, Nathaniel,” she said.
He sat down next to her. “I’m doing everything I can. The old man’s stubborn. But I’m making myself useful.”
“It’s not enough. You need to make yourself indispensable.”
“It takes time.”
“You’re not seeing this with big enough eyes, boy. Making yourself useful.” Her voice mocked him. She shook her cane as if to hit him with it. “This is useful—unless you can walk unassisted, yeah? Then it’s just another goddamned thing to carry around. Make him need you.”
“He will.”
“When?” Her eyes, fierce and frightening, burned with power. “The boy will be betrothed to that Tiernan girl by summer,