7. Chapter 7
Lorne learned the castle the way he learned gardens. By walking it. By kneeling in its corners. By paying attention to what grew where and what had been left to want.
The first thing he learned was the names.
Hanne, who had steady hands and who applied powder to bruises without ever once asking a question, and whose silence was not indifference but a form of protection so careful it made Lorne's chest hurt.
Miri, who blushed when he spoke to her directly and left small wildflowers tucked beside the teacup on his breakfast tray when she thought he wasn't looking.
Maddox, who ran the household like clockwork and who unbent, on the third day, far enough to answer a question about it without consulting his ledger first.
Greta, the head cook, twenty-two years in that kitchen, whose bad hip made the stairs an agony she endured twice a day without mentioning it.
Willem, the stable master, who called every horse love regardless of temperament.
Peg, the scullery maid, whose six-year-old son Tam had a cough that rattled in his chest like stones in a cup.
The guardsmen. Hale, who took his tea bitter.
Dunmore, who took it sweet. Garrett, who took coffee if it was offered and had a laugh audible three corridors off.
Oswin on the night watch, quiet and careful, who had begun walking a little slower past certain corridors when Lorne was out in them, giving him room, looking the other way with a deliberateness that made it clear he had chosen a side.
Lorne had all of them inside three days. Not as strategy. A name was the first thing you handed a person that said I see you, and he had been handing them out his whole life without ever deciding to.
The staff of Thessmere did not know what to do with him.
They were used to royalty that moved through the castle like weather, powerful and impersonal, a thing to be navigated around.
The king noticed them when he wanted something.
The courtiers treated them as furniture.
Nobody in the household's collective memory had ever asked the scullery maid about her son.
Lorne asked on his third morning, passing the kitchen corridor on his way to the garden.
"Is Tam any better? I heard him coughing at first light."
Peg stared at him as though he had sprouted wings.
She was small and wiry, with chapped hands and a permanent look of harried determination, and the prince consort standing barefoot in her corridor with his hair tied back in a blue ribbon, asking after her child by name, appeared to have stopped her brain entirely.
"He's. Your Highness, you don't need to trouble yourself with..."
"Lorne. And a chest cough that hasn't broken in a week wants looking at. Has the physician seen him?"
Peg's mouth tightened. "I asked. He said he'd come when he had time."
Which meant he had not come and would not come, because a scullery maid's son sat nowhere near the top of any list in a castle where the list was ordered by proximity to power. Peg had none. Tam had none. And until this week, neither of them had anybody to stand up and say so.
The physician's office was on the second floor of the east wing, a tidy room smelling of dried herbs and spirits and the particular smugness of expertise that has never been questioned. Cresswell was thin and grey and looked up from his ledger with the polite dismissal he kept for interruptions.
"Your Highness. How may I assist?"
"The scullery maid's son. Tam. He has a chest cough going on two weeks. I'd be grateful if you'd examine him today."
Something shifted in Cresswell's face. Not concern. A kind of amused condescension he plainly believed was invisible.
"Your Highness is very kind to take an interest. I'm sure the boy is well enough. Children cough. It's what they do."
"Children cough, yes. This one rattles, which suggests congestion low in the chest, and if it settles there it becomes something else entirely. I'd like you to see him."
"With all due respect, medical matters are best left to..."
"To physicians. Quite. Which is why I am asking a physician."
Cresswell looked at him. Lorne looked back, pleasant and warm and entirely immovable, a man who had been underestimated his whole life and had never once let it slow him down.
"I'll see what I can do."
"Thank you so much," Lorne said, and they both understood each other perfectly.
He went to the kitchen instead.
Greta watched him rummaging through her herb stores with an expression suggesting she had seen a great many things in twenty-two years and none of them had prepared her for this.
"Your Highness. What in the world are you..."
"Do you have thyme? The broad-leafed sort, not the creeping. And honey, proper honey, raw if you've got it."
She had both. She produced them with the dazed compliance of somebody who had calculated that argument would cost more than cooperation, and she watched him clear a space on her worktable and set to work.
He made the chest poultice the way his mother had taught him.
Thyme steeped hot until the oil came out of it, mixed into raw honey with a little beeswax to thicken the paste.
The method was older than physicians and older than castles, the kind of medicine that lived in kitchens and in the hands of mothers who could not afford to wait for a doctor who was never coming.
"On his chest, thick," he told Peg, who had appeared in the doorway with Tam on her hip. "Cover it with a warm cloth. Morning and night. Keep the room warm but not hot. And if you can boil water and let him breathe the steam off it, that loosens what's sitting in there."
Tam regarded him with the flat enormous stare of a child confronting an adult being kind for no reason he can identify.
"Hello, Tam. I hear you've been coughing."
A solemn nod.
"Very tiresome. I'm sorry. This is going to help, but it smells strong, so I need you to be brave about it. Can you manage that?"
Another nod.
"Excellent. That makes you braver than most knights I've met, and I've met several."
Tam almost smiled. The corners of his mouth moved and his eyes came alive, and Peg's hand tightened on his back, and she looked at Lorne with a look he had seen before, on farmhands' wives in Aelholm when he brought something down for a child's fever.
The look of a mother whose child has finally been seen by somebody who can do something about it.
"Thank you," she whispered.
"It's thyme and honey. Nothing miraculous. Though my mother would tell you honey is always a little bit miraculous, and I've never been able to prove her wrong."
The cough broke on the third day. By the fifth Tam was tearing through the kitchen corridors again, small and loud and entirely well, and Peg cried in the pantry where she believed nobody could see her, and Greta saw her and said nothing about it to anyone, and the kitchen staff began looking at the prince consort with something new in their faces.
After that it was small things, and there were a great many of them.
Edith the laundress had an apron more hole than fabric, and tucked the worst of the fraying behind her waistband so it wouldn't show, and would never have asked the steward for another with the wedding accounts still bleeding.
Lorne went around the steward entirely, because a requisition would have made her feel like a line item.
He went to Ada the seamstress, who had scraps enough, and sat with her while she sewed and learned a reinforcing stitch she had invented herself and told her it was ingenious, and meant it.
He handed the apron over without ceremony.
"Yours was going thin. Ada had the fabric. Don't make a thing of it."
Edith held it in her raw hands and her chin went unsteady. "You didn't have to do that, Your Highness."
"No," Lorne agreed. "That's rather the whole point of it."
He learned which guards took their tea bitter and which took it sweet, and he remembered, and the first time he carried the tray down to the night watch himself, barefoot at midnight because he couldn't sleep and making tea beat staring at a ceiling, Oswin and Hale looked at each other for a long moment before either of them moved.
"Drink it," Lorne said, "before it goes cold and we all have to pretend it didn't happen."
He found Greta stuck on the kitchen stairs on a bad day, teeth set, knuckles white on the rail, and made her sit down while he brewed chamomile and fetched a salve he'd rendered in the greenhouse out of beeswax and calendula.
He showed her how to use it, warming the wax between her palms first, working it into the joint in slow circles.
"You're a healer," she said, with the bluntness of a woman old enough to recognize competence and disinclined to flatter it.
"I'm a beekeeper. Beeswax is simply useful for an unreasonable number of things."
"You're a healer and a beekeeper and a prince and you're sat on my kitchen floor."
"Is that a complaint?"
"It's an observation. Twenty-two years, and nobody out of that family has come into my kitchen except to ask where supper was."
Lorne laughed, which was the first time he had laughed in Thessmere. "Then they've all been missing out. This is the best room in the building."
Greta harrumphed and said nothing further on the subject.
But he noticed that on the nights the king sent him from the table before the food came, there was a plate waiting on the worktable under a cloth.
Always warm. Always more than he needed.
Never any note, because Greta was not sentimental and had no intention of becoming so.
She had simply decided that the barefoot prince who sat on her floor talking about beeswax was worth feeding, and she went on feeding him, and that was the end of it.
He met Valdyr in the west corridor on the eighth day.