With a murmured good-bye, I moved to the doorway and passed through it, anxious to get away.
I occupied myself in the kitchen, preparing a tray for Sivo to bring to Madoc and Dagne. Perla returned to the room. She would see to the needs of our visitors—and likely make certain that they didn’t get any ideas about staying any longer than necessary.
After I made the tray, I took up the knitting—a task I loathed, but I needed to keep my hands busy. My fingers moved deftly with needle and thread through the supple leather, darning the hole in Sivo’s jacket. I tried not to concentrate on the sounds floating from my bedchamber, but my ears were too keen to shut off. At one point Fowler emerged from the other chamber to rejoin Dagne and Madoc without a word to me.
Finished with the jacket, I folded it across the basket and started preparing dinner. Perla had already cut up some vegetables, so I finished what was left, cutting them on the wood table and tossing the modest amount into a pot.
Vegetables were few and far between. We’d rigged a garden on top of the tower. Sivo worked on it constantly, trying to encourage what he could to grow with only the paltry sunlight offered during midlight. I often joined him. It was outdoors, after all, and it won out over inside chores.
I liked standing near the edge with my shoulders back, my fingers dusted with soil. I would lift my face to the wind and inhale the loamy musk of the Outside as Sivo worked, stabbing at the ground, cursing his undernourished greens, radishes, and beets. Occasionally peas would flourish, and that was a good day when we would actually have pea soup. Perla would make it with bits of rabbit meat and Sivo swore it was nearly as tasty as when his mother had made it with ham.
I’d never tasted ham. Boars had not lasted long after the eclipse. They didn’t move fast enough to avoid the dwellers.
Sivo sat at the table, the smooth swishing sound of him sharpening knives a familiar rhythm as I placed the lid back on the pot over the hearth and then moved to slice the loaf of bread baked yesterday.
The creak in the floor signaled Perla’s approach. I knew her tread well, the length of time that stretched between each steady step. Sighing, she set down the basket full of soiled bedding and rags she used to tend to Madoc. She moved to the washstand. The gentle splashing of water filled the room. After she finished, Sivo collected the basin and dumped it out the window, returning within moments.
“Dinner ready?” she asked, patting her hands and arms dry with the towel.
I nodded. “Almost.”
Sivo resumed sharpening his blades. “How is he?”
“If his fever breaks, he’ll live. He’s young. Strong. Whether or not he will walk again is another matter.” She moved beside me. I felt her gaze on my face. “What were you thinking?”
I sighed. “I was thinking they would die if I didn’t help.”
And I was thinking I was tired of being alone. That I would go stark mad staying all my days inside stone walls with never once encountering another soul.
I didn’t say that, of course. It would make me seem ungrateful. It would make it seem like Perla and Sivo weren’t enough—that they hadn’t done enough for me.
When the high chancellor slew my father and my mother after she had just given birth to me, Perla snatched me from the nursery and fled. Cullan had clearly been waiting for an opportunity to seize power, and he found it the night of the eclipse, in the outbreak of chaos and wave of blood and death.
I shouldn’t have lived. If not for Perla and Sivo, Cullan would have ended me, too.
I held my tongue, determined not to say anything that made this life they had miraculously carved for us seem too little.
“And why should whether these strangers die concern us?” Perla grumbled. “It’s enough to keep just ourselves alive.”
I felt Fowler’s arrival even before I heard him step from my bedchamber. I lifted my head, wondering if he had heard Perla’s comment. And if he cared one way or another.
His tread vibrated along the floor with a stealth that even Sivo couldn’t manage.
“He’s asleep,” he announced.
“Fallen unconscious more likely,” Perla responded. “Pain will do that to you. Knock the fight right out of you.”
After a long pause, he replied, “If that’s what pain does, it’s a wonder any of us still live.”
I stopped sawing on the bread and lifted my head in his direction. We all fell quiet at these words, and I knew that Sivo and Perla were staring at this stranger, wondering at him. Afraid of him.
And there was me, overcome and eaten alive with curiosity, the back of my neck prickling with awareness. I wanted to know about him. Where did he come from? Where had he been? Where was he going?
He was too new to be anything other than fascinating.
Heat scalded my cheeks and I lowered my head lest anyone see how he affected me. I concentrated on arranging the thick slices of bread into a basket.
“It smells good,” Fowler offered, easing the awkward stretch of silence.