Then, in his own voice, he added, “Not that Gainell’s family are the best courtiers. I picked the wrong family. They’re barely courtiers at all. Anyway, when I met her, I was prettier. I don’t think she’s noticed the change. She drops more than I do, which is saying something.”
Nate recapped the vial and tossed it back to Charles. “I think you should stop taking them.”
“I think you’re right, but I like them too much.” Charles twisted the vial in his fingers. The firelight played on the dull surface. “You’ve seen her. The girl.”
Not Gainell. “Yes.”
“And do her feet float half an inch above the ground? Does a faint aura of unearthly light surround her wherever she goes?”
Nate felt oddly hurt. “Of course not. She’s a person. Like you and me.”
Charles shook his head. “No. Not like you and me.” Then he seemed to reconsider. “Although all three of us had our lives mapped out long before we were born, so there’s that. I hear she’s strange.”
“So would you be, in her circumstances.”
“So I am. So are you, for that matter. At least in Highfall, we are.” Still fingering the vial, Charles said, “It’s funny, you know. Gainell’s mother can’t pay her own daughter’s way inside, let alone mine, but even if she could—I don’t think I’d want to see the girl. I thought I would, after everything. But I think I’m afraid to.” He opened the vial and shook a drop from the thin rod onto his tongue. The motion had such ease, such practice, that he might as well have been taking a sip of wine. “To be honest, I don’t even like being in the same city as her.”
Nate wondered how long the drops took to kick in. “What are you afraid of? She’s a girl.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. That she’s a girl. An ordinary girl. Ten fingers, ten toes. Feet on the ground. No faint aura of unearthly light.” His eyes began to drift, as if he were having trouble focusing them. “I’m afraid that she’ll be nothing. That we’ll all be nothing. That it will be a waste.” Charles saw Nate’s face, then, and laughed. It was a high-pitched, giddy laugh. Lord Bothel’s laugh. “Oh, come on. It must have occurred to you, too.”
Hot with indignation, Nate said, “How can you say that? How can you even think it?”
“You said it yourself.” Charles’s words were slurred and thick. “She’s a girl.”
“She’s not just a girl,” Nate said. “She’s everything.”
But Charles’s head was sagging. His eyelids drooped and his mouth hung as slack as Arkady’s had. As Nate watched, breathing deeply to quell the anger inside himself, a thin rivulet of drool dropped from Charles’s lower lip. If his friend hadn’t blinked, just then—slowly, with great effort—Nate would have thought he was dead.
Chapter Seven
A shattered cup could be glued back together, but it would never hold liquid again; its shape might remain but its essence was gone, its purpose annihilated. That was how the four of them felt to Judah now: broken into shards. They hardly talked. There was nothing to say. Sometimes she saw Gavin watching Theron with shielded eyes and guessed that he was thinking about killing his brother—his odd, half-present brother, who seemed so much less than he used to be. But she knew, and Gavin knew, that killing Theron would not fix what was broken. It would not rescue any of them; it would merely lock them in a different kind of prison. Later, she’d see how gentle Gavin could be with Theron, helping him shave or cutting his food for him, and she knew that the murder was idle daydreaming. The gentleness was real.
It didn’t matter. Nothing changed.
Every afternoon, the gates creaked open to let in a long train of supply carts and carriages and entertainers for the betrothal ball: acrobats and jugglers and musicians, arriving sometimes on foot and sometimes in gaudy wagons with their names and talents painted on the side. Some were from Highfall, some from elsewhere, and they had skin and hair and eyes in every color Judah could imagine. It wasn’t Staff Day but by special dispensation, two dozen new children were brought in to serve as pages. They wandered the halls, wide-eyed and afraid; usually lost, often weeping, and trying to hide both. A person couldn’t pass the kitchen or the laundry or the tailor’s suite without hearing one of them being berated.
The three dresses Elly would wear for the actual wedding, on the