first flight of stairs she came to. As she climbed them, she felt something scratch the inside of her wrist, like a fingernail drawn across the skin. She ignored it. For now.
* * *
Up a broad marble staircase, down a twisting narrow one: nothing in the House was straightforward. Generations of City Lords had lived there, and it had been built and rebuilt and demolished and built again. The floors were flagstone or cool ceramic or, in one room, copper, although nobody remembered why. She passed gas lamps and oil lamps, dark corridors where you were meant to light a torch or carry a lantern and even darker ones where nobody respectable had passed in years. She navigated by feel and memory and, when there were windows, starlight. Eventually she made it back to the rooms where she and Gavin and Theron had lived since birth and Elly had lived since she was eight. The suite was modest enough, just two bedrooms with a shabby parlor between them. It was tradition that the Lord’s heir stayed in his childhood rooms until he married or took power, but normally those childhood rooms were lovingly tended by loving nurses who’d been lovingly chosen by loving mothers. Gavin and Theron’s mother, Clorin, was dead, and in the absence of the loving mother the system had fallen apart. The sofa was losing stuffing and the curtains were riddled with moth holes; the silk on the walls was threadbare and the furniture still bore every scratch and dent from their childhood. Nobody, including them, had ever thought to replace any of it.
Tucked away in each bedroom was a tiny alcove, meant for a nurse or a handservant and big enough for a narrow bed and not much else. As the irrelevant second son, Theron slept in one alcove, and as the mostly unwanted witchbred foundling, Judah slept in the other. (Or was supposed to; half the time she slept with Elly, who didn’t mind sharing.) Now all three rooms were empty, because everyone else was still stuck down in the hall being official. Unwanted foundling status had its advantages. The ashes in the fireplace were cold. Nobody had laid a new fire. Judah did, and lit it; then she kicked off her useless court shoes, slid into the pair of Theron’s old boots she’d claimed as her own, put on her coat and went out onto the terrace while the room warmed.
The snow had stopped. They were on the quiet side of the House, high above the ground. The pasture stretched below her, weird and blue with light reflecting off the snow. To the far left, she could just see the inky black puddle of the orchard and the western woods beyond it; across the pasture, just barely, she could make out the haze of brush and ivy that marked the edge of the Wall. The Wall was flawless white stone, impossibly high, eternal and unyielding. The ground rose slightly on this side of the House, so from their terrace the Wall loomed almost as high as the House itself. On the other side, the Wall was just as high, but the ground there sloped downward. From a certain height the smokestacks and spires of the city could be seen bristling above the Wall like a poorly hidden beast. The city had a name—Highfall—but Judah rarely thought of it as anything other than the city or outside. People lived there, down among the steeples and high gabled roofs, under the dim glow of the underlit clouds. They tended the ceaseless fires that kept the factories running; they bought and sold, worked and rested, lived and died. A sluggish river called the Brake wound through the city, full of water from other places: places like Tiernan, where Eleanor was born, and the provinces where the courtiers were from, and all of the lands that Elban had invaded or annexed or simply strode into and claimed with his army at his back. All of the place-names she’d seen on maps, all of the lakes and mountains and peninsulas and oceans.
And somewhere out there, among the dark and the fires, was the place where she’d been born—or so she’d been told. Somewhere lived people with the blood-colored hair and black eyes she could not disguise; people who were solid and round instead of lithe and delicate, whose noses were strong and sharp instead of buttonish like Elly’s or straight like Gavin’s. She didn’t even know which direction to