“Hard to say,” Gravya said. “She was smarter than anyone in the house by the time she was ten, that’s for certain. And she was... good at understanding people, better than he was.” She transferred a cast-?iron pot to the stove top and set to stirring. “You’re his friend, so you must have seen how he can be a bit... distant?”
“From time to time,” Marcus muttered, which made Gravya laugh again.
“He hasn’t changed, I take it. Once when he called for me in the middle of the night, I told him off for waking me, and he said he’d forgotten that I needed to sleep. Other people just don’t always register, you know? He’s lost in his own head.”
“Mya wasn’t like that?”
“Oh, no.” Gravya stopped stirring for a moment, lost in memory. “If anything, she understood too well. She couldn’t bear seeing anyone suffering, and she knew when they were hurting, even if they didn’t know it themselves. You couldn’t lie to her, not ever. She would always know.” The old woman sniffed, and started stirring again. “Once when she was nine, one of the stableboys played a prank on her, dirt down her dress or some such. She spent all afternoon devising a way to get back at him, a sort of hunter’s trap in the yard that dumped him into a pile of pig shit. But then, when everyone was laughing at him, she broke down and started to cry. She understood how it made him feel, she told me later, and she couldn’t stand it.”
“She sounds like a kind soul,” Cyte said.
“She was, I think,” Gravya said slowly. “Difficult, sometimes, and with strange ideas. But ultimately kind.”
“Strange ideas?” Marcus prompted.
Gravya was quiet for a moment, taking dried leaves from a small box and grinding them between her fingers to sprinkle in the pot. She sniffed again, and, apparently satisfied, resumed stirring.
“She read a lot,” the old woman said finally. “They both did, of course, but by the time she was twelve Mya had read every book in her father’s library and sent away for more. She loved history, but she was never satisfied with it. She always said that she could have done better.” Gravya shook her head. “For a while she and Janus would play with toy soldiers, over and over. She would get angry and shout at him if he wasn’t good enough, even though he was only six. They would draw, not like ordinary children draw, but... diagrams, charts, that sort of thing. I asked what they were doing once, and Janus told me they were inventing a new kind of king. Then Mya shushed him. She was getting to that self-?conscious age, poor thing. Poor girl.”
“Was it the Red Hand?” Cyte said. Marcus blinked, surprised, but when he added up the dates it worked out. The plague had swept through Vordan City, brought by ships from the east, and worked its way out into the country, the worst epidemic since the age of tyrants.
Gravya nodded. “It was worst on children, you know. That was always the cruelest part. They both caught it, and for a time we thought they would recover, but Mya took a sudden turn for the worse. Janus... didn’t react well. At first he kept demanding to see her, no matter how we tried to explain it to him. Later he burned all their papers, all the work they’d done together, and nearly set fire to the house. Sometimes he’d stop eating for days at a time. He went into the library and started reading. He knew Mya had read all the books, and I think it helped him feel closer to her. But he just... stayed there.
“We were worried sick about him. He’d never really recovered from the Red Hand, and he was so thin you could see his ribs. He’d get sores, sometimes, from not washing properly, and he’d ignore food until he fainted. I finally figured out that he’d run out of books—?he’d read everything in the library ten times—?so I would have peddlers bring in a cartload and refuse to hand them over until he’d taken care of himself. That got him washing and eating, at least, but he still wouldn’t go outside.”
“I remember going through a similar phase,” Cyte said. “Though it wasn’t quite that bad.” She chuckled, to show it was joke, but Gravya merely continued stirring. Awkwardly, she continued. “How long did this go on?”
“About eight years.” Gravya dipped a small cup into the pot and held it in one hand, waiting for it to cool. “Sometimes we could convince him to leave for a few days, a week. But something would always set him off again, and he’d be back in the library before we knew it. I practically beggared us buying new books for him. Eventually we ran out of room, and I could at least sell off the old ones. He still looked like a scarecrow, those big gray eyes in such a hollow face. It broke my heart.” She blew across the cup, tasted the contents, and downed the rest.
“That doesn’t sound like the Janus I know,” Marcus said.
“It’s not.” Gravya poured from the pot into three waiting mugs and handed one to Marcus and one to Cyte. “Try this.”
Marcus sipped. Almost too hot to drink, it was clearly based on the apple cider he’d had downstairs but with something else added, a dark, subtle flavor with a hint of spices. When he inhaled the steam, he could smell cinnamon and other things he couldn’t identify.
“It’s wonderful,” he said.
“I make it for him whenever he comes back,” Gravya said. “My special recipe. He says he can never quite get it right himself.”
“What happened to him?” Marcus said.
“I don’t know.” Gravya sipped from her own mug. “Something changed when he was twelve. Maybe it was because that was how old Mya had been when she died, but I don’t think so. I’ve always figured it was something in the books. Something he found.” She shook her head. “We were bringing them in by the cartload by then, just buying whatever the vendors in the city had handy. He read everything anyway, so we weren’t picky. I think he read something that... affected him.”
Gravya laughed. “Not that I believe in magic or anything like that, you understand. But it was like he’d found a purpose. He came out of the library the next day and started taking exercise. At first he could scarcely run around the yard without falling over, but he kept at it, every day. He learned to ride, to fight with a sword, anything else anyone could teach him. And he sent off for more books from the University, whole courses’ worth. Mathematics, philosophy, war. Always war. He liked history as much as Mya did.”
“And he never told you why? What he was doing?” Marcus said.
“No.” Gravya stared into her mug. “He would talk to us, and he was always polite. But there was this feeling that he wasn’t paying attention, not really. He was always... somewhere else.” She sighed. “Eventually he left. Traveled for a while and then went to court. He must have impressed the king, because he stayed in the palace. He’d come back here from time to time and help us manage things. He designed a new way to lay out the orchards, you know? Said it would work better because it would make the bees happier. I don’t know why he thinks he knows what makes bees happy, or how you could tell if they were.”
“Did it work?” Cyte said.
Gravya laughed sharply. “Of course it did. You’ve met him. Everything he does works.”