to her cheek. She couldn’t feel the touch of her fingers at all. “Like that?” he said calmly.
Whenever she or Gavin broke a rule as children, Judah had taken the blows for both of them, although they’d shared the pain. But there had been warning then. There had been reasons given. She had never bothered arguing because she was a child (and not an important one, as she was constantly reminded). She wasn’t a child now, and she was filled with a prickling sense of anger and affront so huge that she could make no sound big enough to express it.
“I suspect that Gavin is planning an attempt on his father’s life,” the Seneschal said. “If he asks you about the blow I just gave you, tell him that an axe through the neck hurts a great deal more. I cannot protect him from a charge of treason.”
Only when he was gone did words come to her. “How dare you,” Judah said, but she was alone in the room, and speaking to nobody.
* * *
“He hit you because he didn’t dare come after me,” was all Gavin said when he saw Judah’s bruise that night. “I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t worry you that he knows?”
He shrugged. “What can he do about it?”
“Behead you?” she said. “Us?”
They were on the terrace, leaning on the balustrade. Elly had gone to see Theron, who still said—as he’d told Judah, when she visited him earlier that day—that he was not ready to come back down. Gavin had not been to see his brother at all since the hunt. Now he surveyed the greenhouses and oat fields and sucked his teeth. “I think we can call that bluff, for now.”
“If it’s not a bluff, I’ll resent you as long as I live,” Judah said with more bravado than she felt.
She didn’t go to the stables the next day. She didn’t want to explain the bruise to Darid. Instead, she went walking through the fallow fields where the sheep grazed on wild grasses. After spending so much time with the quick, strong horses, the sheep seemed placid and dull. The ewes hadn’t been sheared for lambing yet and they barely moved; it was hard to believe they could, under the weight of all that wool. A few herding dogs loitered around the edges of the flock, long-nosed and intelligent. They watched Judah curiously but without malice. She wondered if the hounds had ever been dogs like these, or if they had started as some other animal entirely—something imported from the Southern Kingdom or Duviel, made of heat and jungle.
When she returned to the parlor, the door stood ajar, and she paused outside it. She could hear strange voices within. Through the opening she saw a pair of boots, well-made but plain. If she tilted her head she could see the back of a thin, shabbily-coated person, blond hair tied back in a leather thong at the nape of his neck.
She pushed the door open. The boots were the Seneschal’s, extended before him where he sat in Judah’s chair. The man in the shabby coat was Arkady’s assistant, whatever his name was, the one who never spoke. And on the sofa, hunkered like a bird, limbs hanging limp around him as if he lacked the strength to compose them, sat Arkady himself. “What are you doing here?” she said to the three men, reserving her harshest glare for the Seneschal. “Get out. You’re not wanted.”
“You’d know what that feels like,” Arkady said.
The Seneschal stood, one hand upraised. “We’re not here for you, Judah. Come back in an hour, and we’ll all be gone.”
“I’m not leaving. I live here.” She stepped inside. “Why are you here?”
Arkady eyed her dress and boots, mud-spattered from her walk. “Foul girl. Have you been rolling in dirt?” The apprentice merely stared, eyes wide behind his glasses. He always stared. Judah paid no attention to either of them.
“There are rumors in the city about Lord Theron’s health,” the Seneschal said. “Arkady needs to examine him so we can issue a statement and dispel those rumors. People are putting in orders for mourning,” he added as an afterthought.
Rumors. Firo had mentioned rumors. He wants Theron dead, Gavin had said. Elban always got what he wanted. Judah’s fingernails were already at the soft skin of her wrist. Come, come home, emergency. “Theron’s not here,” she said, managing to sound normal.
“We know. Lady Eleanor has gone to fetch him,” the Seneschal said. “She was very reasonable about it,