Blood Ward

The swans have been on the spits since just after dawn. There are twelve of them over the big hearth, two to a spit, and a kennel boy named Pell turns the crank at the end while I work down the line with the basting ladle, scooping fat and honey out of the drip pans and pouring it back over the skin. The skin is starting to go dark gold. The fat spits at me every time it runs off into the coals.

I’ve been in the kitchen since three. The first job of the morning was the fish, still slick from the river, and I scaled and gutted and filleted them on the long board until my fingers stopped feeling the cold. My hands still smell like them under the honey.

My left hand is wrapped in a strip of linen from the knuckles to the wrist. I hold the ladle in my right and use the left only to steady the pan, and even that makes the cut under the wrapping pull.

Behind me the kitchen is louder than I’ve ever heard it. The pastry women have the far end by the bread ovens, rolling out crusts and filling them from a row of crocks, and the girl who usually turns the cheese and skims the cream in the dairy is chopping onions beside them with her eyes streaming. Two men come in from the yard pump with fresh buckets of water slung on a pole between them. The head cook stands in the middle of all of it with her sleeves pushed past her elbows, tasting from a spoon and calling out whatever’s next.

“Bread boards to the hall passage. Where are my bread boards?”

“Coming,” someone shouts from the end of the kitchen by the ovens.

On an ordinary day I’m upstairs with a bucket and brush, scrubbing floors and hearths in the family wing. Three days ago the head cook asked the housekeeper for every pair of hands that could be spared, and the housekeeper sent down most of the cleaners.

Pell stops cranking to wipe his face on his sleeve.

“Keep it going,” I tell him. “That side’s catching.”

He starts up again. He’s maybe eleven, and both his arms are shaking. The kennel mistress sent up anyone big enough to carry something. Two of the older boys are hauling in firewood from the yard, and a girl Pell’s age is picking over herbs at the end of the pastry table. Sorrel, who is eight and smaller than most of the six-year-olds, has spent the morning running clean spoons from the scullery to whoever shouts for them.

Somebody has just put a gravy tureen in her arms.

It’s one of the big brown earthenware ones, full almost to the lip, meant for the warming shelf by the hall passage. The under-cook who filled it turned back to her stove before Sorrel had a proper grip. Sorrel holds it out in front of her with her elbows locked and walks very slowly toward the passage with her eyes on the gravy, which means she isn’t watching where she’s going.

One of the water men comes around the end of the onion table. Sorrel steps sideways to get out of his way, and the tureen swings with her and keeps going after she stops. It slides out of her hands. It hits the flagstones and breaks into four or five big pieces, and the gravy goes out across the floor in a brown sheet, over the man’s boots and under the onion table and nearly to the hearth.

The man swears and lifts his feet. For a moment that whole end of the kitchen stops.

Then the head cook says, “Sand,” without raising her voice, mostly because she’s already shouting, and somebody is already running for the bucket by the ovens. A scullery boy gets down with a pail and starts picking up the pieces of crock. The under-cook looks at the mess, says, “Well, that’s that,” and goes back to her stove to start again.

It’ll cost them half an hour. There’s more stock in the cauldron, and a dozen swans’ worth of drippings in the pans under my spits.

Sorrel is still standing where she dropped it, with her hands out in front of her.

Ressa gets to her first. Ressa scrubs pots. She’s done it for as long as I’ve been at Silvercrest, and nobody upstairs could tell you her name. Gravy has splashed the hem of her skirt. She grabs Sorrel by the upper arm and shakes her.

“Look what you did. Do you know what that crock cost?” She shakes her again. “They send us useless kennel brats on the busiest day of the year.” She bends down until her face is level with Sorrel’s. “You do that again and Cook’ll have you taken out past the boundary stones and left there. You know what’s out there? Things that eat little girls who can’t hold on to anything. They’ll find you before dark.”

Sorrel’s face goes red and folds up, and she starts crying, high and hiccupping, trying to say she didn’t mean it and not getting the words out.

I lay the ladle across the drip pan, tell Pell not to stop, and go over.

I don’t say anything to Ressa. I put my good hand on Sorrel’s shoulder and turn her, and Ressa’s grip comes loose because she wasn’t expecting anyone to move the child. I steer Sorrel around the sand and the broken crock, past the end of the pastry table, into the corner by the larder door, where nobody is carrying anything hot. There’s an upturned crate there and a basket of thyme that needs stripping.

“Sit.”

She sits, still crying. I put the basket on her knees and a bowl beside her on the floor and show her once: pinch the top of the stem, pull down, leaves in the bowl, stems in the basket.

“Just this. If anybody tries to give you something to carry, tell them someone put you on the thyme.”

She wipes her nose on her wrist and pulls a stem through her fingers. Half the leaves go on the floor. She tries again.

When I get back to the hearth, Ressa is back at her tubs, and one side of the second swan has gone too dark because Pell slowed down. I baste it anyway. The under-cook comes over with an empty crock, and I tilt the nearest pan so she can ladle out the drippings.

The morning goes on. The bread boards finally come through, stacked six high on a boy’s shoulder. Somebody drops a pan of turnips, and nobody shouts about it because there isn’t time. Close to midday the head cook comes to my hearth with a long fork, stabs the thickest part of each swan, watches what runs out, and says, “Off. All of them.”

It takes four of us to get them onto the carving boards without tearing the skin. My shift is stuck to my back. My left hand is throbbing now, and there’s a dark spot coming through the linen on the palm side. I tuck that hand into my apron and finish one-handed.

I’m scraping down the spits when the bells start.

The chapel is on the far side of the main yard, but Silvercrest’s bells can probably be heard for miles around today. They ring long and all together, and everyone in the kitchen glances up at the high windows, though there’s nothing to see through them but sky.

Kellick has married Aurelia of Shadowmoon.

I found out about the wedding two months ago, when the housekeeper told us which rooms to air for the Shadowmoon party. Two nights ago, in the linen store on the third floor, I told Kellick what I would do if he went through with it. He asked me for one day to tell her himself. I gave him one. I haven’t seen him since.

I go back to scraping the spit.

“That’s the ceremony,” the head cook calls. “Everyone who’s been working in here, wash, clean apron, and be at the passage before the first of them sits down. You’re all serving. Kennel children stay in the kitchen.”

I wash my right hand in the basin and do what I can for my face. Before I drop the greasy apron in the laundry basket, I take the plate out of its pocket. It’s no bigger than a salt dish, wrapped in a scrap of cloth. I put it in the front pocket of the clean apron, which is deep enough that it lies flat against my hip, and tie the strings.

Sorrel is still sitting on her crate. The bowl beside her is nearly full.

The passage to the great hall runs past the buttery and up four steps to a carved wooden screen, so the hall doesn’t have to look at the kitchen door. I come around it with a platter of fish on each arm.

I’ve cleaned this room every week for years, and I’ve never seen it like this. Every trestle table has been brought up from storage and set end to end down the length of the hall, and every place on every bench is full. Evergreen garlands and white ribbon hang from the gallery rail. Candles burn on every table even in daylight, because the windows are tall and narrow. The musicians in the gallery are playing something with a drum in it, and under the music is the sound of several hundred people talking at once.

At the far end, on the dais, the high table runs across the width of the hall beneath the Silvercrest banners. Shadowmoon’s banners hang beside them.

The fish goes to the middle tables first. I work down a row setting platters between every four places, and the wolves on the benches reach past me to serve themselves before I’ve let go. A man leans back so I can get a platter past him without stopping what he’s saying. A woman moves her cup.

The steward stands at the top of the passage steps pointing each of us toward a section of tables. I take bread to the back. I take fish to the side benches under the windows. I fill cups down one long row from a jug of ale until it’s empty, then go down and fill it and come back up.

The further from the dais, the plainer the tables get. The high table has white cloths and silver plate, silver cups, silver salt cellars shaped like little boats. The tables below the dais have cloths and pewter. Halfway down, the cloths stop, and near the screen people eat off wooden trenchers and drink from horn and clay. It’s the same food at every table, but it reaches the back last, and the second platters of fish are cold by the time they get to the benches by the door.

On one trip past the front tables I see a woman with a silver chain around her throat and a red line underneath it, and when I come back by with the bread, the line is gone. Up on the dais, Aurelia has a collar of flat silver links lying over her collarbone.

The swans go up next, carried whole on boards by two servers each, and the hall makes a noise when they come around the screen. The gravy follows. I’m given a silver sauceboat for the second table below the dais, and I carry it by the base with a fold of my apron between my hand and the metal, because silver burns me. Halfway down the table a man reaches for it before I can set it down and knocks the rim against my wrist. It stings like a coal. He doesn’t notice. I set the sauceboat down and move on. The mark will still be there tomorrow, and probably the day after.

Iella is at the last table before the screen, close enough to the passage that the draft from the steps hits her neck every time somebody comes through. She’s wearing the blue wool dress she bought with her first quarter’s wages, and her hair is pinned up the way she pins up her lady’s. She’s between a groom from the stables and an old woman I don’t know, eating cold fish off a trencher. She sat at the back of the chapel this morning and watched them say the words.

I come by with the ale, and she holds her cup up without looking, the way everybody does, and then she sees it’s me.

“Annis.” She catches my wrist, the burned one, and I flinch, and she lets go. “Sorry. Are you—” She looks past me, up the hall toward the dais, and back. “You look like you haven’t slept.”

“Nobody in the kitchen did.” I shrug. “Here, let me pour.”

She holds out her cup, but shakes her head. “That isn’t what I meant.”

“I know what you meant.” I pour the ale, and she looks lie she wants to say more. Two seats down, the old man is tapping his on the table. “I have to keep going.”

She watches me go down the row.

On my way back up with a full jug, I look at the high table. Kellick sits in the center with Aurelia on his right and his uncle on his left, then the council, then Shadowmoon’s people on Aurelia’s far side. He’s bent toward her, listening to something she’s saying. She has one hand on the cloth near his. Neither of them is eating much.

The swans are carved down to the frames. Servers carry out the roots and the pies and carry back platters of bones. The light in the high windows goes from white to yellow. People finish eating and get up to talk to friends at other tables, and children run down the gaps between the benches until somebody’s mother catches them by the collar.

The next time I come down the steps, the steward is setting out trays for the toasts. Most of them are plain boards with pewter cups and clay jugs of the good wine. The last one has a white cloth over it, a silver ewer, and a row of glass goblets with stems so thin the candlelight shows through them.

I wrap a clean cloth around the ewer’s handle and pick up the tray.

The steward glances at it and at me and goes back to setting out cups.

I carry it up the length of the hall. The goblets ring against each other with every step, and I slow down until they stop. At the foot of the dais I go up the side steps and start at the far end of the high table, with Shadowmoon’s councilors, and pour.

The wine is dark red, and the ewer is heavy. I pour for a grey-haired woman and a man with a scar through one eyebrow and the man beside him. Then Aurelia. She glances up at me, says thank you, and turns back to the woman on her other side.

Kellick has stopped talking.

His uncle is speaking into his ear, and he isn’t answering. His hands are flat on the cloth on either side of his plate. He watches the ewer come down the table toward him, and then he watches me, and his face has gone the color of the cloth. His uncle has to say his name twice before he turns his head.

He doesn’t move his hand from beside his goblet. I pour around it. Then his uncle’s, and down the rest of the council, until the ewer is light, and I step back to the end of the dais with the tray.

His uncle stands with his glass.

At the back of the hall, the steward raps his staff on the floor. The musicians stop. Benches scrape as people turn toward the dais, all the way down to the screen, to look at Kellick and Aurelia sitting side by side at the center of the high table.

The other servers come down off the dais with their empty trays and move along the walls to the screen and the side doors, where we belong while someone important is speaking. The girl who poured for the near end of the table brushes past me on her way down.

I stay where I am.

Kellick is still looking at me. A man at the nearest table below the dais is frowning at me over his cup, and the girl who brushed past me has stopped on the bottom step to look back.

Kellick’s uncle lifts his glass and waits for the hall to quiet, and it does. He takes a deep breath, about to start the toast. I don’t wait for him to speak. Instead I fill the silence with my own words.

“Kellick of Silvercrest is my fated mate, and he has known it for three years.”