of Eleanor at his mercy?” The Seneschal stood very close to her now. “Because Eleanor’s life with Elban would have been afternoon tea compared to what yours will be. You will sleep in his tent at night, if he allows you to sleep. He will write his messages on your skin in blood and he will not care how much it hurts. He will chain you like a dog and he will do anything he wants to you, and everything he does, Lord Gavin will know. Everything he does, Lord Gavin will feel. Did you consult with him before you took your clever little plan to Elban? Did you ask him which outcome he’d prefer? Because at least when Eleanor suffers, Gavin doesn’t have to feel it.”
Judah couldn’t speak. She had no breath.
“Stupid girl,” he said, for what seemed like the thousandth time, and this time she understood. He was right. She had been stupid.
It was worth it! something in her cried. I saved them!
But the Seneschal wasn’t done. “He wants to break Gavin to his will, and you have given him a better way to do that than anything Lady Amie could offer. How long do you think it will be, once Elban has you, before Gavin is willing to give his father anything he wants, do anything he says—not even to stop it, but just to make it not quite so bad? A week? A day? An hour?” He shook his head. “The campaign tomorrow is a pleasure excursion, now. He has no reason to break the bond, since you’ve shown him how useful it can be, but if the stars are with you, he’ll find someone who can do it anyway. That way, when every inch of your body is covered with scars; when he’s driven you insane and killed everything inside you; when dragging your carcass around becomes more trouble than he deems it worth, he can kill you. That is the only peace you will ever know again.”
“I don’t care.” She was barely able to hear her own voice. “I don’t care.”
He stared at her for a long moment. Then: “You have no idea what you’ve done,” he said, then turned around and walked away.
* * *
Her shoes dissolved in the walled garden, halfway to the stable. They literally came apart: with one step she was wearing shoes and with the next step she wasn’t. She saw the pale leather soles half-sunk in the earth between the broken paving stones, surrounded by scraps of embroidered green felt. She kept walking. The stones felt so smooth they were almost soft under her feet; where there were no stones, the soil felt as thick and lush as the richest carpets in the House. Her mind had gone blank. It was true that she had saved them and it was true that it was worth it and everything the Seneschal said was probably true, too, and it was also true that she was scared. She felt as if she were perched on the edge of a yawning void and she wanted to selflessly believe that it was better she fall than any of the others. But the Seneschal was wrong; she wasn’t stupid. She knew Gavin would be furious when he discovered what she’d done. She’d done it to both of them but she hadn’t let herself think about that—she had only let herself think that he would be on campaign anyway. He might even hate her, and she couldn’t let herself think about that, either; couldn’t imagine a world where Gavin hated her.
Her mind kept going back to the new pages, hunched over courtiers’ shoes on the corridor floors, small hands scrubbing furiously.
The stablemen’s barracks, a long building tucked behind the stable itself, glowed with the warm light of oil lanterns. She could hear a chaotic hum of voices, too many for the stablemen alone. A woman laughed. Somebody played a violin, the music high and giddy. She stopped, suddenly aware of how she would look in her fine clothes, barefoot and muddied though she was. She didn’t belong here. The haven she was hoping for was somewhere else, was nowhere. She should go back to her room. Wipe the mud from her feet so she didn’t leave a mark on the fine marble floors.
A figure stumbled out of the barracks. Drunk, by the looks of it. Somebody from the brewery staff must have brought a barrel of beer. As she came closer she recognized his long