“Hair like blood,” he said. “It looks soft. Is it soft?”
She imagined Bertram’s fingers sliding into her hair—questing, invading, clenching, pulling—and decided that her head would be on a spike before she let him touch her. He came closer.
Suddenly, she heard boot heels. Not Gavin’s or Theron’s formal leather boots, but hard wooden soles, with the staccato clip of high heels. The pomaded courtier who’d sat on Judah’s other side appeared over Bertram’s shoulder: neither young nor old, earrings sparkling in the gas lamps and visage unsullied by anything so common as emotion. Only the wryest lift of an eyebrow suggested that there was anything odd about the scene before him.
Bertram hadn’t seen him yet. His fingertips brushed against Judah’s hair just as the courtier, sounding bored, said, “Guildsman. Lady Judah,” and then the guildsman’s whole body flinched, as if he’d been doused in cold water.
He snatched back his hand and his face filled with horror and shame. Staggering backward, he said, “Forgive me.”
“Forgive you?” the courtier said with benign interest. “Whatever for?” But Bertram was already stumbling away down the gallery, a tangle of coarse robes and fumy sweat. The courtier watched him go, then turned back to Judah, one eyebrow lifted in what looked like curiosity. Contemplating the poisonous hay he could make of what he’d seen, probably. It was what courtiers did.
Quickly, Judah circled him, putting the length of the gallery at her back. Normally, no courtier would acknowledge her existence, let alone chase her. But for all she knew, this particular courtier was as drunk as Bertram. Surely there was an aphorism in that. From the grasp of the guildsman to the grip of the courtier.
“You should be more careful. It’s a strange night.” Mocking, but they all sounded like that, so it was impossible to tell if the mockery were directed at her. His kohl-lined eyes drifted up to the gas lamp overhead. “And oddly lit.”
“The House is full of drunk courtiers,” she said, bolder with an escape route at her back. “Nothing strange about that.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “Nothing particularly safe about it, either. You might find yourself running into unsavory characters. You might find yourself owing them favors.” Courtiers trafficked in favors, and reputation, and fear.
“A favor? In exchange for walking down the hall? Seems like a low threshold.”
“Oh,” the courtier said, “but think of the rumors.”
“I try not to. Good night, lord courtier.” Giving him a wide berth, Judah walked past him and away, acutely conscious of his gaze on her back.
“Good night, foundling,” she heard him say, as she left the gallery by the first flight of stairs she came to. As she climbed them, she felt something scratch the inside of her wrist, like a fingernail drawn across the skin. She ignored it. For now.
* * *
Up a broad marble staircase, down a twisting narrow one: nothing in the House was straightforward. Generations of City Lords had lived there, and it had been built and rebuilt and demolished and built again. The floors were flagstone or cool ceramic or, in one room, copper, although nobody remembered why. She passed gas lamps and oil lamps, dark corridors where you were meant to light a torch or carry a lantern and even darker ones where nobody respectable had passed in years. She navigated by feel and memory and, when there were windows, starlight. Eventually she made it back to the rooms where she and Gavin and Theron had lived since birth and Elly had lived since she was eight. The suite was modest enough, just two bedrooms with a shabby parlor between them. It was tradition that the Lord’s heir stayed in his childhood rooms until he married or took power, but normally those childhood rooms were lovingly tended by loving nurses who’d been lovingly chosen by loving mothers. Gavin and Theron’s mother, Clorin, was dead, and in the absence of the loving mother the system had fallen apart. The sofa was losing stuffing and the curtains were riddled with moth holes; the silk on the walls was threadbare and the furniture still bore every scratch and dent from their childhood. Nobody, including them, had ever thought to replace any of it.
Tucked away in each bedroom was a tiny alcove, meant for a nurse or a handservant and big enough for a narrow bed and not much else. As the irrelevant second son, Theron slept in one alcove, and as the mostly unwanted witchbred foundling, Judah slept in the other. (Or was supposed to; half the time she slept with Elly, who didn’t mind sharing.) Now all three rooms were empty, because everyone else was still stuck down in the hall being official. Unwanted foundling status had its advantages. The ashes in the fireplace were cold. Nobody had laid a new fire. Judah did, and lit it; then she kicked off her useless court shoes, slid into the pair of Theron’s old boots she’d claimed as her own, put on her coat and went out onto the terrace while the room warmed.
The snow had stopped. They were on the quiet side of the House, high above the ground. The pasture stretched below her, weird and blue with light reflecting off the snow. To the far left, she could just see the inky black puddle of the orchard and the western woods beyond it; across the pasture, just barely, she could make out the haze of brush and ivy that marked the edge of the Wall. The Wall was flawless white stone, impossibly high, eternal and unyielding. The ground rose slightly on this side of the House, so from their terrace the Wall loomed almost as high as the House itself. On the other side, the Wall was just as high, but the ground there sloped downward. From a certain height the smokestacks and spires of the city could be seen bristling above the Wall like a poorly hidden beast. The city had a name—Highfall—but Judah rarely thought of it as anything other than the city or outside. People lived there, down among the steeples and high gabled roofs, under the dim glow of the underlit clouds. They tended the ceaseless fires that kept the factories running; they bought and sold, worked and rested, lived and died. A sluggish river called the Brake wound through the city, full of water from other places: places like Tiernan, where Eleanor was born, and the provinces where the courtiers were from, and all of the lands that Elban had invaded or annexed or simply strode into and claimed with his army at his back. All of the place-names she’d seen on maps, all of the lakes and mountains and peninsulas and oceans.
And somewhere out there, among the dark and the fires, was the place where she’d been born—or so she’d been told. Somewhere lived people with the blood-colored hair and black eyes she could not disguise; people who were solid and round instead of lithe and delicate, whose noses were strong and sharp instead of buttonish like Elly’s or straight like Gavin’s. She didn’t even know which direction to look. She had no sense of the city; she had no memory of being there. Twice a year, on each solstice, the four of them were taken to the small antechamber built into the Wall, where a balcony cityside overlooked the Lord’s Square. When she thought of the city, it was the Square she pictured: grand manors, graceful linden trees waving like the fans the lady courtiers carried these days, the same sea of pale golden-haired people dressed in their best and most vivid colors surging below. Never among them did she see hair or eyes like hers; always, Elban’s red-and-gold banner hung from every window ledge and lamppost. The air felt thicker in the Square, and smelled faintly of burning from the factories.