city, if you can afford them. Lime pits if you can’t.”
“Some of the courtiers keep private crypts in the provinces,” Charles said.
“I’ll say I sent him to family,” Nate said. “I’ll say they came and got him.”
“He has family?” Derie said.
“A brother.” This was true. It was also true that Arkady had told Nate the two hadn’t spoken in decades.
“Will there be trouble about the manor? Worth a lot, in this neighborhood.”
“I have no idea.”
Derie nodded. “I’ll hire a deadcoach, and livery for you, Charles. You’ll come for him tomorrow. Put on a show.” Too late, it occurred to Nate that it would have been both easier and safer to actually send Arkady out in the hired deadcoach. He felt a bubble of frustration but before he could say anything, Derie said, “Better he’s in the Brake, Nathaniel. A real deadcoach would keep records, and the Brake has more dead bodies than fish in it. Nobody’ll think twice if he washes up.”
Nate nodded. He’d grown used to the way Derie pulled thoughts out of his brain, but he still didn’t like it.
“Give me the money. I’ll take care of the deadcoach myself,” Charles sounded a little too eager.
“I think not,” Derie said and left.
Charles called her a few choice names. She was no longer there to hear, but Nate still flinched; Charles saw, and laughed bitterly. “We’re not children anymore, Nate, for all she treats us like we are. Did the old man have a wine cellar?”
He did. Vertus had taken the best bottles, but there were still several bottles of ordinary wine and one bottle of brandy. Charles chose the wine. They drank it in the parlor. Charles raised a glass.
“To Nathaniel Magus,” he said. “The master of the manor.”
His voice was faintly mocking. Nate ignored it. “Where have you been living?”
“Around.”
“You could stay here now, you know. There’s a guest bedroom upstairs. Three of them.”
“I’d be a terrible servingman.”
Nate was appalled. “You wouldn’t have to serve.”
“Oh, but we all serve.” The mockery was out in the open now. It twisted Charles’s mouth; it stained the air. “What purpose do we have, save slavish devotion to unbinding old Mad Martin’s evil work?”
“None,” Nate said.
Silence fell. Charles drank freely and blinked at the fire; Nate sipped his first glass and watched as Charles’s spine sank lower and lower into the chair. It was the same chair he’d occupied that first night, as the foppish Lord Bothel. He’d chosen the alias because it sounded like bother, as they sat around a campfire on a hill overlooking the city. They’d seen all of Highfall stretched below, that night: the white stone of the Wall slicing the city as surely as the Brake did, the palace hunkered beyond.
As if he could read Nate’s thoughts as well as Derie did, Charles said, “What’s it like inside?”
Nate chose his words carefully. “Elaborate. Why have a plain, functional doorknob when you can cover it in gilt filigree? But also run-down, in places courtiers don’t go.”
“Sounds fitting.”
“Is that where you’ve been? With the courtiers?”
“I was supposed to maintain my identity, remember? In case we needed it again.” Charles gestured wryly to himself. “I don’t think Derie likes the way I did it, though.”
“What way was that?”
Charles reached into his pocket and pulled out a battered metal vial. He tossed it to Nate. The surface was badly scratched and there was a dent in one side, as if it had been stepped on. Nate opened it carefully and found a thin rod attached to the inside of the cap, just big enough to extract one drop of the fluid inside. It was clear, but smelled odd, acrid and medicinal. Slippery; almost familiar. He thought he could figure out what was in it, given enough time, but he still asked, “What is it?”
“I have no idea,” Charles said, “but it feels amazing. Like someone wrapping half your brain in the softest blanket imaginable. I get it from Lady Maryle’s youngest, plainest daughter, Gainell. We drop together and fuck like cats, it’s delightful.”
Lady Maryle was a minor courtier; so minor, in fact, that Arkady had put her treatment off to a lesser magus. Her manor was near, but not technically in, Fountain Hill. Nate couldn’t remember the family industry, but it had something to do with manufacturing. “She buys drops for you, looking the way you do?”
Charles smiled a slow, sleepy smile and said, in Lord Bothel’s bored, condescending drawl, “These days, all the best courtiers are hopeless addicts, Nathaniel.”