the girl—was a feat on another order. It was as if, having been assured all his life that his body contained a heart and lungs and a liver and two kidneys, someone had actually unzipped his skin and taken them out, one by one. It was unnerving and fearsome and magnificent, so bright he could barely think of it. Also bright was the memory itself. Which happened: when someone fooled around in your head, the things they touched never quite went back to the way they’d been. Sometimes the memories were left detached, almost faded, like they’d happened to somebody else. Sometimes only the shape of them remained, like a glass empty of water. In very rare cases, this was done deliberately, as a punishment or a healing; an unskilled or malicious Worker could leave them burning more fiercely than ever. Spreading them out like sketches on a table, and not bothering to put them away.
This was what Derie had done to Nate—not out of any deliberate choice, but because she simply hadn’t cared enough to undo what she’d done. It wasn’t the first time she’d left him this way. When he and Charles were together they could fix each other, but Nate hadn’t seen Charles in weeks, and when he reached for the sense of his friend in his head, the other man was there, but also...distant. Like there was smoke between them.
So as he stumbled home through Brakeside, as he stopped twice to retch in the dirt, his head was full of the girl, clear as crystal. He had the time and luxury now to notice her without the press of the other people in the room, without Derie dragging his gaze around. The girl’s hands were strong; their movements were quick and determined, not languid and ornamental like those of the courtiers. They were hands that wanted to grab, to hold tight. Her mouth seemed full of words bitten back. She was a torch waiting to burn; she was a Working, the moment before it ripped the world open.
Ever since he was nine years old, the idea of the girl had been the center of his existence, his reason for training and learning and being. Comely, not comely—who cared? She was real. He had heard tales of her his entire life, for half a decade before she was even born, and she was real. He had seen her, spoken to her, touched her. He soaked himself in her Work-brightened image like a drunk in a keg of whiskey. Nate had lusted; he’d loved, even. This was neither. This was—bigger. This was like the first Working he’d ever done as a child, the quick painful flick of Derie’s knife opening a world that was so much deeper, so much more possible than he’d ever considered. He’d been frightened beforehand, but never again. That vast stretching possibility that he only ever felt under the knife was worth any pain. It had changed him. It had changed everything. And now, he found everything changed again. The girl was real. The bond between the girl and the heir was real. Once he’d helped her untie old Mad Martin’s knot, he could have that sense of possibility anytime he wanted, no knife, no bloodshed. Anybody could.
She could. He’d never seen her when she wasn’t hurt or worried; the Work would make her happy. To be the one to make her happy, to be the one she confided in: yes, that would be nice, to have those dark liquid eyes trusting him to listen, to help. He sometimes indulged in ridiculous private fantasies wherein he entered the shabby parlor and her face lit up because now, finally, here was somebody who truly understood her. In his smaller moments, he indulged in even more ridiculous fantasies in which he came upon her being mistreated somehow, at the mercy of those poisonous lady courtiers who peopled the House like beribboned vipers or—and these fantasies were very secret—at the mercy of one of the men. Sometimes the imaginary man he rescued her from was the heir himself. Even in his fantasies he knew better than to think he could physically best the tall, strong young lord, who’d been training in combat since he was half-grown, so in these fantasies Nate’s tongue became as acerbic as Derie’s, his wit as quick as Charles’s, his sense of justice as stalwart as Caterina’s. It was one of these fantasies into which he slipped, with the preternatural clarity of his