Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
That night I slept with my knife under my pillow, my fingers wrapped around the grip. My sleep was light, and I woke at every noise beyond the door to my chamber. I had no idea what tomorrow would be, except that Dorian and I would train for trials we couldn’t predict.
In some small part of my heart that I could only acknowledge in the deepest, deadest hour of night, I wondered if I had been waiting all my life for this.
When you grow up in a kingdom of acid and barrenness, when your last name is Waters, you become a strange child.
You begin to fantasize, to wonder what would happen if the monsters ever did come.
What if the wall did fall? What if this life did end?
Every day, you live with that kernel deep inside you. The quiet, relentless what if—what if?
That day had come. It hadn’t been a day after all; it had been nighttime. And in my imagination, it had never been so terrible, so irrevocable. But when do our imaginations ever match reality? That’s the whole point of fantasy.
I woke with the afteressence of that feeling in my mind, the knife still in my grip. The thing I had always been half-waiting for had finally come to pass, and here I was. In Feyreign. Perhaps for the rest of my short life.
I dressed in the predawn light. Now, on the second day, I understood the rhythm of this place, that the purple crystals, which hung by some strange magic, only flared to life when the sun appeared. And when I got up, my room was still dark.
When Dorian’s knock came, I was already standing at my door. I said, “Open.” It was the first time I’d ever told someone they were allowed into my space. I felt, briefly, like the regiment commander.
A pause, and then the door opened a hair. His face appeared, his gaze wary. Then, with a flick of his eyes down and up, “You’re dressed.”
I stood with crossed arms. “I said I’d be.”
“And you aren’t leaping on me.”
“Not this morning.” I stepped forward. “But you never know.”
He pushed the door open wider for me, allowing me to pass into the hallway. He had dressed himself differently, in a dark leather jerkin and pants and tall boots. “One upside to our pairing,” he said. “No more knives to my throat before breakfast.”
At least he wasn’t humorless. “I’ve heard a little bloodshed sharpens the appetite.”
His lips twitched, and he started down the hallway in the opposite direction of the throne room. “Then you must be ravenous. This way.”
I was, though I hadn’t expected to eat. I’d thought we would begin our training immediately. I followed him down the immaculately scrubbed hallway and up another flight of stairs.
We came through a tall curved doorway and into a large dining room with its own balcony at the far end.
Morning light streamed past the trees, pooling over a table with eight chairs and no one at it.
Every place had been set with wooden plates and utensils; there was a rustic formality to it all.
The ceiling was tall and curved, with an enormous tiered light fixture hanging low.
It had been set with small purple crystals and grew with vines, which gave the room a lavender hue.
The vines were fragrant and blossoming with the same yellow blooms I’d seen Dorian crush in the gardens.
On the two opposing walls, tapestries three times as wide and colorful covered the whole of the walls.
I glimpsed a battle with bows and gleaming swords on one wall and had to force myself not to stare.
It looked like the whole history of Feyreign in one room.
Elisabet would have been rapt; she could probably have spent an entire day on just one panel.
Dorian crossed to a seat closest to the balcony. “Sit anywhere you want, except at the head.”
I hesitated at the threshold. Across the room, the chairs were all the same except for a high-backed one at the far end. A smaller version of the bramble throne, though it was still larger and grander than any of the others. “That’s Rhiannon’s seat,” I said.
A small, almost amused noise escaped him. “Yes.”
Of course it was. “It’s just us here?”
“Most don’t rise this early.” He pulled out a chair. “Rhiannon and her consort of the night will be in later.”
“Consort of the night?”
His lips curled. “Surely your ruler has consorts.”
“Our king has a queen, if that’s what you mean.”
He gestured for me to sit in the chair he’d pulled out. “I’m referring to the women who don’t wear the crown.”
I ignored his gesture and came to the chair opposite him at the balcony-end of the table, setting my fingers on the back. I liked a little distance between us. My eyes traveled over the expanse of table; there was no food set out.
No doubt Dorian caught my snub, but he sat without comment in the chair he’d pulled out. He noticed my gaze roaming over the place settings. “Someone will be out once you sit.”
I met his gaze, beginning to understand something about this place and these people. I remembered the young woman I had seen on her knees yesterday. “All of you are nobles.”
He flicked out a brown linen piece of cloth over his lap. “Not during a solstice moon.” When I didn’t react, he glanced up at me. “That was a joke. Sit.”
I pulled out the chair, struggling with its size and weight.
It dragged loudly over the floor. When I sat down, I felt undersized in it—out of place.
All the more when footsteps sounded behind me.
That same young woman’s sharp-eyed face appeared, no towel or bucket this time, but two wooden cups on a tray.
She set the cups before each of us. Steam curled from the liquid inside. Her eyes, somehow greener in this light, fixed on Dorian. She waited.
“The usual, with boar,” he said. “The flank, not the shoulder.”
She gave a nod, then turned to me. I waited for some recognition in her eyes, but she gave none. It was as though I was an honored guest.
“I…” What food did they eat here besides boar? Maybe that was all they ate, but I’d never so much as smelled it. Only royalty ate boar. “Bread?”
She blinked, waited.
“I’ll have bread,” I said.
“What kind?” Dorian said, slow and emphatic.
“Wheaten,” I said. “Wheaten bread.”
The young woman’s lip twitched, but she didn’t speak.
“Regular wheaten bread,” Dorian said to her. “A loaf, with blackberry jam and butter. And eggs—two of them, poached.”
She nodded and left us, the drinks’ steam still rising from the table between us. The scent was different—thick and dark, curling through the air like smoke from charred wood and something sweeter beneath.
I peered into the cup, then up at him. “Blackberry jam and butter and eggs?”
“Simple fare, but—”
“I’ve never had jam,” I said. “Or butter, or eggs.” I’d never even fantasized about them; fantasies like that were pointless when you knew you’d never taste such a thing.
His eyebrows rose. “Not once?”
“Of course not. Do you know the rarity of keeping a single hen in my kingdom? Not in the Dip, of course. The inner districts only. And of course the egg-laying ones are even rarer.”
He took up the cup in his hand, clearly bemused. “And what about coffee?”
I gazed at my own cup. Coffee—it was said in the southern district that the king and queen drank coffee every morning, but that was all rumors. And here it was, steaming on the table before me. All for me.
I wrapped both hands around the cup and brought it close to my face.
The scent enveloped me, sweet and nutty and spicy all at once.
My eyes closed on their own. It was hard to think of these people as bastards when I was sitting here like royalty.
Here, with all these smells, I could feel myself being swept into this strange dream of an existence.
Feelings swirled through me: curiosity, resentment, embarrassment, anger.
But all were tamped down by the smell of the coffee.
I raised the cup to my lips and tilted it.
The liquid was hot and bitter. I choked, the bitterness biting the back of my throat, and set the cup down hard enough to slosh the dark liquid over its rim. I coughed hard and loud and long.
Coffee tasted like shit.
Across the table, Dorian didn’t move for a beat. Then—slowly—he reached for the small clay pitcher beside him and poured a stream of cream into his own cup. The swirl turned the coffee pale.
“You’re not supposed to inhale it,” he said, voice smooth but quiet. “Do they sip in the Dip?”
I shot him a glare between coughs.
He slid the pitcher toward me. “Try easing into it next time.”
“It tastes nothing like what it smells like.” I grabbed at the linen cloth and wiped at my mouth.
“That’s part of the complexity.” He poured from the pitcher into my cup. “Careful; you might begin to love it.”
I didn’t touch the cup again.
Soon the young woman began bringing out plates. I couldn’t figure out where she came from—she didn’t seem to open a door when she entered and exited—but that question was soon overcome by the sights and scents.
So much food. Food I had never seen in my life, glistening and steaming in vibrant color. She set a petite bowl of blackberry jam in front of me, and I stared at it like I’d set eyes on Vallorn himself.
When she left again, I turned in my seat. Dorian had already set into his meal, but I pointed after her. “She goes through the tapestry.”
“Hmm?”
“She pushes the tapestry aside and goes into a door there.”
“Yes. Eat—we’re already losing the morning’s dew.”
I turned back. I didn’t know where to begin, so I started with the bread.
It had been sliced so cleanly it seemed almost geometric, and the smell was divine.
I sliced the butter with a wooden knife and then cleaned the knife before I set it into the jam.
The whole process had to be precise; I couldn’t waste a dab or a crumb, and I definitely couldn’t contaminate the jam with the butter.
Dorian watched me with a piece of boar speared on his fork. His mouth worked as he observed my process. “You truly had nothing.” His voice was low, soft.
I had just taken a bite of the bread. The taste seeped onto my tongue—heavenly—even as his words sank in. I swallowed hard. “This might be the greatest moment of the rest of my life. Don’t remind me how much I hate you.”
He stopped chewing. “It’s not a judgment.”
My lips curled in; my fingers closed tighter around my knife. For a heated flash, I wondered how long it would take me to die if I killed my partner with a butter knife. I wondered if it would be worth it. Probably not.
“I had everything.”
That wasn’t at all true, but it also was. What you have is everything, even if it’s nothing.
Dorian kept eating, not meeting my eyes. No doubt he’d sensed what he’d brought on, and now he affected a certain casualness as he sipped at his coffee.
We ate the rest of the meal in silence. As we finished, the others arrived—Rhiannon and the throng of noble men and their wives, taking up all the places at the table. I wondered which was her consort for the night.
Rhiannon sat on the high-backed chair at the head of the table, the light from the balcony streaming over her. And as Dorian and I got up to leave, she gave me a slow, meaningful nod.
I nodded back and turned to go.
“Girl,” she said to my back. I paused. “You can leave the napkin.”
I looked down, surprised to find a linen napkin bunched in my fist. I set it on the table next to my empty plate and cup, and before I left the room, I stood at the threshold and glimpsed the young green-eyed woman pick it all up and set it on a tray, then disappear through the tapestry.
So this was what lay on the other side of my imagination. Someone had served me my food and cleaned up after me, and it left me feeling both sated and strange.