A brisk knock at the door aroused him. Two chambermaids pushed it open without waiting for a response, dragged in a large metal tub, placed it close to the hearth, then left again. They returned moments later with a trolley loaded with buckets of steaming water. These were big, muscular, sturdy girls who lifted the buckets of water easily and poured them into the tub. Then one of them laid a fire in the fireplace, which she lit with a coal from a tin box.
While Ash watched from his seat on the hearth, the servants came and went twice more, bringing more water, and soap and scrub brushes and towels. Then they stood on either side of the tub, as if awaiting further orders.
The hot water in the tub looked wonderful. Ash decided that if he were going to be arrested or knifed to death, it might as well be after a bath. He creaked to his feet, his body remembering every bad thing that had happened to it. “Thank you,” he said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to take my bath now.”
They moved forward in tandem, like well-matched carriage horses. One of them began untying the cord at the neck of his tunic, and the other fumbled with his trousers.
“Stop that!” Ash stepped back hastily, nearly stumbling over the edge of the hearth, clutching the top of his breeches, which were in danger of falling down. “I can manage on my own,” he said firmly. “Although I may not look like it now, I’ve taken a bath before.”
Though Ash had been brought up in a palace, staff at Fellsmarch had more important things to do than bathe him, once he’d left the nursery. That prepared him for his years at Oden’s Ford, where students were expected to clean their own rooms, change their own linens, and walk across the commons to the bathhouse. Though it came as quite a shock to some, the school was known as “the great equalizer,” humbling the proud and raising up the less fortunate.
After some protest, and with many backward looks, the servants left.
Ash waited a minute or two to make sure they were gone, then stripped off his filthy clothes and dropped them on the floor. Wearing only his amulet, he eased into the hot water gratefully, despite the stinging of the wound on his leg and all his bumps and bruises from the cellar. He sank down to his chin and soaked. Despite his best intentions, he promptly fell asleep.
When he awoke, he noticed to his chagrin that someone had been in and taken his clothes away. New clothes were laid across a chair. He decided he’d better finish up before anyone else intruded. First he washed his face again and rinsed his eyes before he got soap in the water. Then, using the soap and scrub brushes, he scrubbed himself from head to toe, cleaning out the wound on his leg as well as he could. It looked like a clean cut, and not too deep.
It was hard to get out of the water. Despite the fire on the hearth, the room was chilly. He climbed out and wrapped a towel around himself. As if by signal, the bathing girls burst back through the door, bringing warm towels to dry him off with. This time, Ash submitted. He was too tired to resist.
“You look much better, sir, without that layer of dirt,” the smaller girl said approvingly. She ran the tips of her fingers over the muscles on his chest, raising gooseflesh. “We don’t see many men who work with their backs for a living. It looks well on you. And you’ve a fine backside, too, if I may say so. It’s all muscles, not like them who sit all day.”
“He has a nice frontside, too,” the bigger girl said, elbowing the smaller one. “That’s a fancy neckpiece you got on,” she said, reaching for his amulet.
“Don’t touch that!” Ash yanked it out of reach.
“I wasn’t going to steal it,” the girl said, pouting a little.
“How did you cut your leg then?” the small girl asked. “Looks like a bad gash.”
“I don’t know how that happened,” Ash said.
They had a basket of fragrant lotions and ointments that they wanted to use on his burned face and the cut on his leg, but he refused. He thought of asking for his remedy bag from the stables, but then remembered that it was likely either burned up or lying somewhere in the maze of passages in the cellar.
The servants finally left him on his own to get dressed. The clothing that had been left for him consisted of smallclothes and a tunic and trousers in a soft, plain-woven fabric of a dark brown color, like bark. They were comfortable and fit as if they had been made to size. There were soft brown boots, also. He wondered what had happened to his old clothes, in case he was expected to give these back when his audience with the king was over.
He padded barefoot to the door and opened it a crack. The bathing girls were gone, but two blackbirds stood just outside. They both turned and looked at him, hands on the hilts of their swords. He closed the door and sighed. He sat down in one of the chairs by the fire, feeling trapped and helpless and half-sick and hungry and dead tired. It would take a while to recover from healing Hamon, and in the meantime he’d be close to helpless.