and that’s as good as married to these high-bloods. They don’t wait for the vows to start working on an heir, here, and if they pass on Elban’s blood to a child, your task’s all the harder, don’t you agree? And I hear that old walking corpse is planning another trip across the strait to harass the Nali in a month or two. Good time to make our move, when he’s their problem and not ours. Things are bad in the city. The people are restless. That Seneschal’ll have his hands full, too.”
“I can’t guarantee Arkady will bring me inside within a month or two.”
“Your parents were both such clever people,” she said. “I don’t understand how they spawned such a stupid boy. Maybe the bleach from your hair got to your brain. You can guarantee it. He doesn’t need you now because he’s strong. Make him weak.”
Nate frowned. “You mean—deliberately?”
“Why not? You know how.”
Of course he did. There were as many herbs with negative effects as there were beneficial. Already a tiny voice was whispering their names in his head: turp root, bitterweed, milkscorn. “I didn’t think we’d have to hurt him,” he said.
Derie laughed. “Have a soft spot for the old crank, do you? Think he’s a kind old soul, sprinkling healing fairy dust everywhere he goes?”
“No, but—”
“He’s a cruel man, your Arkady.” She pointed her cane toward the plague shrine. “When the pox came, he holed up inside the Wall. After it was done, he went through the orphan halls with a tonic. To make them strong, he said. Wasn’t a tonic at all, of course. The very strong ones, who hadn’t been long on the streets—they survived it. Solved old Elban’s orphan problem, certainly.”
“Still, if we can get in without—”
“If we can get in without.” Her bark of laughter was violent in the quiet night. “If only we could do any of this without. If only we could have just walked into Mad Martin’s throne room and said, Hello, old chum, there seems to have been an injustice here, what can we do to resolve it? How much better would that have been, eh? How many of our lives saved?” She spat into the hard-packed dirt. “You and that Charles. You bleach your hair and steal some Eastern clothes and you think you’re in the stew. I’ve spent my whole life in this, Nathaniel Clare, as did my mother before me and your mother before you. Too many good people, planning for a time they knew they’d never live to see. We watched them die. We buried them. And now you sit here and you whine and you whimper because dear, oh dear, a stone-hearted old man might have to die.”
Under the steely force of Derie’s regard Nate felt himself shriveling, as if he were still a small boy in bare feet standing shamefaced by her campfire. That gimlet stare of hers could sweep a quarter of a century away like nothing.
“Did we choose the wrong Worker for this job?” she said. “Because I’ll tell you, Nathaniel, there were those that had their doubts.”
“I know, Derie.”
“I had some doubts, myself.”
“I know.”
“Arkady’s vermin. Kill him. Make him sick first. A nice wasting illness. Not too long.” She put both hands on top of her cane and pushed herself up to stand. “I’m told the orphans convulsed and spewed blood before they died. Conscious every minute, too. At least plague brings delirium.”
“See you Friday, Derie,” he said, and she said, “See you Friday, Nathaniel,” and hobbled away.
The phaeton came for Arkady the next afternoon. When the old man read the note the messenger brought, he’d grunted. Sometimes Nate heard Arkady’s grunts in his dreams. It was the kind of sound that made a person fantasize about pushing a knife through the grunter’s throat: even if a person considered themselves a healer, even if a person had lain awake all night trying to figure out a way to avoid killing the grunter.
“Trouble in the House?” Nate said, his shears continuing to snip at a plant as if the question didn’t particularly concern him. Nobody who actually had anything to do with the palace called it the palace; to those who spent time inside, it was always the House.
Arkady grunted. Nate’s shears closed with particular ferocity. “The head Wilmerian has gut trouble. Stupid guildsmen,” the old man said, beginning to pack brown glass vials and bags of powder into his satchel. “They ought to stay in their guildhalls. They leave