Judah’s chest opened like a box and something vicious and scarlet escaped it. She watched it swoop around the room, hot and unsteady like a bird with a broken flight feather. Then it vanished through the tapestry that led to the broken staircase.
Her legs melted underneath her, and a soft gray nothing descended.
* * *
When she came to, she was sneezing. Gradually she realized she had been sneezing for some time. Apparently some part of her brain had been counting; she was at seven. By the time her eyes were fully open she was at fifteen. The light from the workshop’s one window seemed overly thick, a glowing fog that permeated the room, and her first dismayed thought was that the drops hadn’t worn off. But the fog was just sun hitting dust motes in the air. The edges of the room stayed where they were; the floor was solid. The world seemed to be behaving itself again.
Theron had stretched out on his code-breaking table to sleep, but now he was sitting up, rubbing his eyes. His legs dangled over the edge like a child’s. Judah herself was still on the floor. Theron’s hunting jacket lay rumpled around her waist, having evidently been draped over her at one point. A pile of books sat where her head would have rested. She guessed that Theron was responsible for both things, and was touched: he had propped her head up with the books in case she vomited in her sleep, and covered her with his jacket in case she got cold. The books were dusty. That explained the sneezing. “What time is it?” she said.
“Early,” Theron said.
A bit unsteadily, she climbed to her feet. Every muscle in her back protested. As soon as she was upright, all of the previous forty-eight hours slid back down onto her, a curious mix of relief and horror. Gavin had not killed Theron: that was the relief, both the relief of Theron remaining alive and the joy of Gavin remaining the person she thought he was. The horror was that Elly would marry Elban now. Theron didn’t know that, she realized, and on the heels of that realization came another. Theron must not know, not for the longest possible time. It could not be helped now. It would only cause him pain.
She made herself smile. It wasn’t too difficult. She would have Theron to smile at for years to come. “Let’s go find some coffee.”
“No,” Theron said.
“You’ll feel better when you’ve eaten.”
He didn’t move.
“Oh, come on,” she said. “You can’t just stay up here.”
“I’m not going to stay up here. I’m just not ready to come down yet.” He picked up his glasses from the bench and rubbed them on his shirt. “What am I going to say to him? Hey, older brother, thanks so much for not killing me?”
“He would never have killed you.” Judah could say that, now that Gavin hadn’t.
“I don’t even understand why. I don’t want to be Commander of the Army. I’d be terrible at it. They don’t have to kill me to keep me from doing it.” His voice was rich with anger and bitterness, which Judah’s brain processed properly, without adding taste or color. “Gavin knows I don’t want to do it. He told me I don’t have to.”
Judah tried another smile. It was harder this time. “You don’t. But you do have to come downstairs eventually. Elly will worry.”
“I’ll be down in a while,” he said. “Once I figure out what to say. I don’t want to tell her the truth. It will upset her.”
It was too early for staff girls carrying breakfast trays, but late enough that a different, younger set of girls crouched next to piles of dirty shoes in the corridors outside the guest rooms, furiously brushing and polishing. None of the girls looked up when Judah passed. If anything, they tried to make themselves smaller. And shoes were one of the first tasks House staff were given when they came inside, so the girls were pretty small already. The courtiers’ shoes, some high heeled and gaudy with embroidery and gems and some—Judah could not help but notice—tall mud-splattered hunting boots, seemed giant in their hands. In her younger years, when she’d come upon the newest staff members, Judah had been known to make her hair extra-wild and growl as she passed, to see them jump. Now she knew they’d been fed a steady diet of stories about the witchbred