wind whistling around you, great emptiness waiting below.
Nate had almost fallen off a cliff once, in the Barriers.
So, after his next trip inside, he was more careful. Before meeting Derie he cut open the heel of his thumb, letting out just enough blood to draw her sigil on his shaving mirror. He didn’t know where she was living in Highfall—or where Charles was living either—but it didn’t matter. She would feel his Work, and know he had something to tell her.
It worked. When they met again in the midnight quiet of the plague shrine, she was able to sit patiently—as patient as Derie ever was, anyway—while he told her the story: how he’d walked into the lab, smelled the poisonous herb Arkady was distilling, and known immediately what it was and how it would be used, if not on who; how, when the phaeton came for them that afternoon, Nate had brought along one of the precious few vials of medicine he’d carried with him over the Barriers, prepared by his mother and labeled in her hand; how, after Arkady took Elban’s younger son into the bedroom, he’d passed the vial to the girl herself, and how clever and troubled her eyes had been. He did not tell Derie he’d touched her. He didn’t tell her how that had felt.
When the story was done, she stroked the cane between her knees. There was nothing special about it. It was just a plain wooden stick, worn smooth with use. “Quick thinking, bringing the antidote,” she said finally. “You want her trusting you. You want her confiding in you.” This last she said with no small amount of distaste. As if the act of confession was inherently weak.
“Why do you think Elban wants the young lord dead?”
“Who’s to say it was Elban?”
“The Seneschal came to the manor a few days before,” Nate said. “He does Elban’s bidding, doesn’t he?”
She brushed the topic away. He could see it didn’t interest her. “More likely he’s doing some courtier’s, this time. Poison isn’t Elban’s style.”
“Wasn’t he the one who told Arkady to poison the children in the orphanage?”
“That was expedience.” Her cane tapped the hard-packed dirt. “No, if Elban had been behind this, he would have made more of a show. Elban likes a show. Poison’s a courtier’s game.” She smiled wickedly. “Courtiers, and us. You saw her with the boy? How did they seem?”
When Derie said the boy, she meant Elban’s heir. They’d always spoken of him that way, and although intellectually Nate knew how old he was, he’d still been surprised by the tall, broad-shouldered man he met inside, golden and handsome. At first glance, the younger son—bony and pale—seemed to have more of Elban in him; but the more Nate had looked at the older, the more he’d seen the hard lines of the father’s face under the glowing warmth on the surface. “I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “He was concerned about his brother. They were both uneasy.”
Dissatisfaction came off her in waves. He didn’t need any particular skill to feel it. She spat into the dust. “Bah. Give me your hand, boy. I need to know.”
He slipped his coat off, let it fall to the bench behind him and pushed up his sleeve. “Use my arm.” Derie was not always kind with her cuts. “I need my hands.”
“Guess you do.” Derie pulled a small folding knife from her pocket. In the wavering light from the shrine torches, the metal of the blade barely shone at all. He saw a fat crust of blood on the heel of her thumb, just where he’d cut himself to signal her earlier. She reopened the wound before he could ask about it. Knife still wet, she carved a line in the meat of Nate’s arm, then pressed the cuts together so she could draw their two sigils in the mixed blood. Derie was powerful and she’d been doing the Work for a long time. She was confident and formidably skilled. When she reached into him, he could feel the Work behind every cut she’d ever made, for good or ill; all of those people, through all of those years, and each one rummaging in Nate’s head like a hand in a pocket. He even felt the echo of his mother’s touch, faint among all those invisible groping hands.
It was all a little horrible. But he’d learned to push the horror aside, and focus on the wonder of it. And wonderful it was. With Derie