When I stumble into the kitchen the next morning, wearing a simple black dress Lora has laid out for me, Hinton finds me right away. He has a tray of bread and cheese, a mug of tea. I sit with him at a side table and eat in silence. My senses are blunted—the gossip of the kitchen servants is a dull, distant roar, and Lora’s food tastes like ashes in my mouth.
“My father was killed too,” Hinton offers after a while. His voice is quiet, his eyes trained on the wood whorl of the tabletop. “His name was Cormer. The ferrier for Lord Liam . . . before.”
I draw in my breath, causing Hinton to look at me sideways. I knew Cormer—a compact, steady-handed man with an almost magical ability to soothe any horse, who always had a joke or tale at the ready. Had Liam killed him?
The question—the rage—must show on my face.
“Captain Ivan.” Hinton’s eyes return to the tabletop, but a hint of anger has entered his voice. “After my father had cared for his team of horses, he lost a chariot race to Lord Wystan, from the east. He didn’t like that. So my father paid for it.”
A piece of old gossip from Crofton flashes through my mind—a ferrier for the Gerlings who, after losing a race, was tied to the back of a carriage and dragged until he died. I’d never connected it to the man I’d known. For a moment, my grief recedes into the background as I stare at the boy in horror.
I’d always known that life at Everless could be cruel and arbitrary—if you outlasted your usefulness, if you got old or sick or lost a limb, the Gerlings would turn you out in a heartbeat. But this is a darker place than I ever knew as a child. I lean in and wrap my arms around him for a moment. “I’m so sorry.”
After a beat, Hinton shakes himself, as if he can fling off the memories. “It was a long time ago. Anyway, I wanted to tell you—just keep busy. It’s worse if you let yourself be alone.” He holds out his hand to me. The coin I gave him two days ago in exchange for Papa’s safe passage gleams in his palm. I see how his hand trembles.
Instead of taking the coin from him, I reach out and fold his small fingers around it. “You’ve done so much for me,” I say, pushing a loose strand of hair behind his ear. And I mean it.
He shakes his head. His eyes—so young, still, after everything he’s lost—bloom with tears. “I’m sorry, Jules,” he says, letting his head fall to his chest. I know what he’s thinking—it’s my fault. I recognize my own thoughts on his face.
I clutch him to me. “You did nothing wrong. He’d decided on his course.” If I knew anything about my father, it was that. “Nothing you could have said or done would have swayed him from it.”
If the blame for his death lies on anyone’s shoulders, it’s mine. Mine, for not leaving when he begged me to. Mine, for lying and abandoning him, for leaving Crofton in the first place.
Hinton hesitates for a moment, then nods. His tears recede and his face brightens. He’s lost his father too, but he’s still smiling, kind, struggling to be good.
Watching him weave through the servants’ tables, greeting people as he goes, I know I will never be so lighthearted again.
The rest of the day, I lose myself in work: tearing fragrant leaves from spiny stems, salting meat, turning cream to butter. The other servants mostly avoid me. I don’t mind—I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to feel.
When I trudge back toward the dormitory that night, I find a handful of servant girls and one boy clustered around a doorway where the servants’ corridor leads into the main hall. I recognize Bea among them, and Alia’s mop of hair, and hurry toward the group to see what’s the matter. In her drab gray laundry clothes, Alia looks even smaller than I remember. Guilt and worry prickle through my grief. I promised Amma I’d look after her little sister, but I’ve scarcely given her a thought since before the Queen arrived at Everless.
Bea is just outside the dormitory, holding court in the center of the wide-eyed servants. I stand next to Alia.
“But have they caught the bleeders?” a freckled girl asks her.
Bleeders? I feel Alia shudder beside me. She tugs at my sleeve, and when I bend down, whispers to me: “Highwaymen attacked the Queen on her way here. Bea heard that over twenty of her maids and guards died, Jules.”
My stomach turns. So it’s true.
“Some of the bleeders were killed in the raid,” she tells us. “The rest, not yet. But the Queen sent her soldiers after them, so it’s only a matter of time.” She wraps her arm around a whimpering girl, holding her close until the girl’s shoulders stop shaking.
“I hope the Queen bleeds them for all they’re worth,” someone mutters darkly.
But I can’t stand to hear about more death, not now. As the others’ questions start in again, I squeeze Alia’s shoulder and turn toward the dormitory, hurrying away with my head down.
There, I find what Hinton tried to give me the other day laid out neatly on my bedspread. The drawing of my mother. I snatch it up—at first intending to bury it in the bottom of my trunk or throw it away with the kitchen scraps, so I don’t have to see it. I don’t want to remember.
Something stops me. Instead, I sit down on the bed, shrinking back into the shadows so none of the other women can see the tears forming in my eyes. I look down at what’s left of my father.
The paper is soft with age, and the smell that drifts off it momentarily stops my heart: I breathe in the straw-and-woodsmoke that lingers on the paper along with the sharp scent of lead. In the image, my mother looks over her shoulder, captured so deftly I wouldn’t be surprised if she opened her mouth and laughed.
I put the paper facedown on the bedspread before the ache in my chest gets worse, and stop—because the back side of the drawing isn’t blank.
Picking it up again, I angle it toward the candlelight and peer closer. It’s covered with text, although the letters are faint with age, as if it’s been torn from a very old book. The language itself is ancient too—a dated high Semperan tongue from what I can tell, something that the Queen might have spoken when she was a girl. Though some words and letters are unfamiliar, I can read enough formal, curling script to know that it’s a tale about the Sorceress and her enemy, the Alchemist.
I laugh for the first time in days—of course my father would have sacrificed a page in this book for a drawing of my mother. Papa hated anything superstitious.
But stranger still than the square of text is what’s scribbled in the margins: handwritten notes in a child’s scrawl. The ink is so faded and smudged, and the writing so illegible, that I can only discern snippets.
fox
to the forest
snake
of lead
Fox, forest, snake, lead. Roan’s game. The words drag a memory to the surface: curling before a fire in the forge, my father reading to me from a leather book about a fox and a snake who were the best of friends.
I’m not sure whether it’s the words or the smell of home on the page that expand painfully in me, pressing against the inside of my ribs.
A small voice sounds at my elbow, making me jump. “What’s that—a love letter?” she chirps.