to let nature take care of the scrabblers. Let the weak ones die. Not all the children you see in the streets are sun-starved, are they?”
A chill came over Nate, despite the roaring fire. “No.”
“There you go. The healthy ones, those are our factory workers, right there.”
“The sun-starved ones can contribute, too.”
“Maybe. If they live long enough. Better they don’t, though. Otherwise they’ll just spawn a bunch of children prone to sun-starvation, and everything starts all over again. We need the courtiers healthy. We need them smart, to run their provinces and factories, to manage trade. But the scrabblers are a crop that never stops growing.”
“I see,” Nate said.
“Just think of the plagues,” Arkady said. “There’s always those that survive a plague. Maybe a few men are left with seed that won’t take, but for the most part, the strong ones live and the weak ones die. If you’ve ever been here after a plague—once it’s run its course, I mean—what a sight, young Nathaniel. What a sight. The streets are so clean.”
Except for the dead bodies, dying orphans and ashes from the pyres. “So you think the foundling should have been left to die? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I think raising a rat in the stables doesn’t make it a horse,” Arkady said.
* * *
In the caravans, there were a thousand ways to make a living and none to make a fortune, but it was enough. Nate’s mother had said that. The wisdom of Caterina Clare: you’re born with your blood, but you earn the dust on your shoes. Judge a lie by the fruit it bears, but don’t judge a man in a box for not noticing the stars. Rain falls where it will; keeping out of it is up to you. Have patience with drunks and little children, for we’ve all been one and we could easily end up the other.
He did not sleep well the night after Arkady’s trip to the palace. Trying to figure out if there was a way to have patience with Arkady, to believe that the things he’d said were just drunkenness and spite. He didn’t know where Arkady had been born, how he’d lived. Maybe he’d spent his entire life in Highfall. Maybe that life had been too easy, or not easy enough. Maybe he was the man in the box who never noticed the stars.
Or maybe he was a mean old shit who didn’t care what happened to the world as long as he got his.
Nate racked his brain, trying to think of some herb he could give Arkady that would incapacitate him just enough to render him needy but not dead. And he came up with a few, but they were slow. Too slow. He did not have years to make Arkady clumsy and weak, not when Elban’s heir was nearly betrothed, attractive courtiers were complicating matters, and Arkady thought of the foundling as a rat in the stable. If the young lord was careless with his seed, Nate needed to know that, and sooner rather than later. If she was in danger, he needed to know that, too. (The very idea made him feel half-suffocated.) He had months, and not many of them.
Books were rare in the caravans—they were heavy and took up space—so they kept only those with value. And the most precious of all were Caterina’s journals. She hadn’t written them all, but they were hers now, and if Nate ever made it back, someday they would be his. They held the life knowledge of a half-dozen traveling herbalists, going back five generations to the days of John Slonim himself: every scrap of knowledge, every theory or rumor or vision. He would have cut off his left arm for an hour with those books now.
In the morning, a sour, hungover Arkady sent him out for willowbark. Once Nate had it in his pocket, he wandered first the Grand Bazaar and then the Beggar’s Market, searching for an answer to his other, greater problem. When he didn’t find one, he tried a few of the smaller markets. There were no answers there, either. He was about to give up when he heard someone calling him.
It was the girl from the day before and her brother, who seemed absurdly huge, tied precariously as he was on her back. The girl’s eyes were alert and interested and her forehead was beaded with sweat. “Gate Magus!” she said. “I was going to come see you later.”