in his head he saw the girl as if she were standing in front of him again, that moment when he’d dropped the antidote into her lap—more clearly than the first time, even, because Derie pulled his eyes to parts of her he hadn’t had time to notice. Her muddy boots, her ill-fitting dress. Her dark eyes. Her hair, wild with running her fingers through it. Not at all the color of berries—what a spurious comparison that had been—but a dark cool red, almost black in its depths. Like the last embers of a cooling fire, like the darkest wine. Her cheekbones were broad, her chin round. He couldn’t see her ears but he imagined them small, like a forest creature’s.
Derie was already pulling the eyes of his memory away from her to the boy. Elban’s heir. Who, he saw now, would not look at Judah, who barely looked at the woman he stood next to (delicately built but steely-eyed; except for the steel and the fine clothes she seemed like a nice girl, the sort Nate might once have asked to dance a creel around a bonfire without hope of much more, just to enjoy the sight of her). Elban’s heir was not merely worried, Nate saw now. He was being eaten alive. There were shadows beneath his eyes and he could not stop clenching his fists.
Distantly, Nate was aware of an increase in the warm flow of blood on his arm. At the plague shrine, Derie grunted; back in his mind’s eye, she unfolded the picture before them. Like a napkin wrapped around a morsel of food, like a rose with a bee at its heart. Like nothing Nate had ever seen before. He’d once seen a human arm dissected, skin sliced open, muscles and tendons and ligaments all on display, and it was a little like that, but it was also completely different. It was nothing he could have drawn in ink, not if his life depended on it.
In the center of everything, exactly where it was but also everywhere else, like wind or smoke or music, he saw the Work, like a thick purple rope that led from the young lord’s chest to the girl’s. But the words thick purple rope were too small, too limited. He had never seen the Work before, and like the spots that danced on the inside of his eyelids, he could not quite manage to focus on it. He knew that thick purple rope was the only way his mind could process the strength of it, because it was immense. It was everything. The people in the room were half-real by comparison. Nate himself barely existed.
Then Derie dropped his arm and, like that, it was over. The memory, the power, the invading hands: all gone. Nate found himself blinking into the darkness, feeling empty and disarrayed. Real again. Real enough that he was nearly sick. Hard Working did that to the inexperienced—while Derie was training him, their Workings had often left him puking and reeling in the dirt—but it had not happened to him for a long time.
Derie merely said, “More Maia’s side than Tobin’s. Comely enough. Wish I could see if she has enough power to break the binding, but—she must, with that blood in her. And the boy’s well bound to her, at least.” She took a scrap of cloth from her pocket, wrapped it around her hand and used her cane to hoist herself to standing. Only then did she squint down at Nate. “Pull yourself together, boy.” She sounded faintly disgusted.
He did so, as well as he could. Although he couldn’t stop the great whoops of air forcing their way into and out of his lungs, and couldn’t stop the way the world lurched around him. He didn’t have anything to wrap his bleeding arm with so he would just have to hope it wasn’t noticed. He wasn’t the only one to ever walk around Brakeside bloody. “This isn’t your first Work today,” he said, making his voice as neutral as he could.
“Caterina sends vague feelings of pride,” Derie said. “Try to earn them.”
* * *
As he made his way back to Arkady’s manor he had a headache, and the smell of the Brake seemed worse than usual. The Work Derie had done on Nate shouldn’t have left him feeling so bad; it was small, specific, and over no great distance. But the Work Derie had done inside the Work—exposing the bond between the heir and