4. Hospitality 101
Ciarán’s chest shuddered as it pressed against my face. His ragged breaths made it difficult to feel when the earthquake finally ended, but when I realized it had passed, I shoved Ciarán off me and sat up, taking stock of the cliffside.
Other than some dislodged snow and my racing heart, everything seemed to have settled.
Eerie silence hung over the cliff, as if the mountains were holding their breath.
I held mine too, wondering if the earthquake was a herald for greater catastrophe, if the towering mountain peaks were about to erupt, if Gams’s warning had been too late.
“Get off the ground and get inside!” Sorcha’s squawk echoed from the hovel where she stood silhouetted in the doorway. She stepped aside to make room for Sabrina and Orla to pass, and Ciarán helped me to my feet.
“I’m okay,” I grunted, but accepted his help.
“You always are.” Ciarán half-dragged me up the path to the hovel, apologizing under his breath as we went. Our fight on the cliffside didn’t matter anymore, not if the mountains were shaking.
Sorcha glowered at us as we approached. “I’m so glad you went all the way into the woods so you could train under tree cover. Sure would be a shame to blow yourselves up on the cliffside and give away our location. In the middle of an earthquake, no less!”
I froze in the low doorway. When we’d set out to train at sunset, Sorcha, Aoife, and Fana had been the only occupants of the hideout. Now, three dozen harried, orange-eyed faces stared at Ciarán and me.
Some of them stood, still braced against the walls after the earthquake, while others were extricating themselves from beneath the heavy long table where they’d sought shelter. Each one was hauntingly familiar, resembling the faces I’d known in Keel Watch Harbor, but all slightly different.
“The kitchen.” Sorcha prodded me in the back to usher us forward. “Now.”
The faces followed me as Sorcha led the way through the crowded hall to the kitchen behind the massive hearth fire. I tried not to stare back, but could see some of them bow in my periphery when I passed.
“Where did all these people come from?” I asked under my breath.
“They’re from Darragh’s Watch,” Sorcha explained. “Ronin took the horse to warn the settlements about the eruptions. Everyone here is on their way south of the mountains.”
“Darragh’s Watch?” I asked.
“It’s the village that overlooks the Bay of Teeth and protects your grandmother.” Ciarán scanned the room with a furrowed brow. “And it’s my home.”
His brow and shoulders relaxed when a woman broke from the ranks of villagers to rush at us.
“Ciarán! Are you okay?” She pulled Ciarán into an embrace, but then her eyes met mine over his shoulder. She pushed away to bow, her long, brown braid falling forward. “My Lady.”
“Olive?” I asked. Even with glowing eyes and dark sclera, she looked so much like her Nightmare. It was easy to identify the woman I’d known to be Liam’s aunt.
Ciarán’s aunt, I reminded myself.
“Odharnait,” she corrected me. “It is an honor, my Lady—”
“It’s just Wren, please.” Heat rose in my cheeks, and I was acutely aware of every face in the hall trained on me. Odharnait nodded and gulped.
Maybe Odharnait was less like her Keel Watch Harbor self than I’d initially thought. Olive had always regarded me with kindness and warmth. I didn’t like that Odharnait looked more scared of me than anything.
“Excuse the Saergrim.” Ciarán pulled his aunt in for another hug. “She’s still learning how to carry her title. Let me get her settled with Sorcha, and I’ll speak with you in a moment, alright?”
He released his aunt, and Odharnait bowed at me again. I was sure my smile looked more like a grimace, but I was much more comfortable as a patron of Olive’s harbor bagel shop than I was as Odharnait’s queen. God. Sovereign. Whatever I was to these people.
I looked down at my feet rather than the staring villagers.
“You need to be more respectful,” Ciarán murmured in my ear. “My aunt lost her sister and her son to their work as Grimguards, and she herself is descended from Darragh.”
“Am I supposed to know who Darragh is?” I snapped.
“He was the first Grimguard and a friend of your grandmother’s. He was the first to pledge his life to protecting her after she went into the glacier.”
“That doesn’t mean I have to like being called ‘my Lady’.”
“No,” Ciarán stepped aside and held his arm out to let me enter the kitchen ahead of him, “but it wouldn’t hurt you to be less awkward and show more grace to the people who have given everything in service to you and your family.”
My cheeks burned with the heat of indignation, embarrassment, and the double-sided fireplace. Orla and Sabrina already waited in the kitchen tucked on the other side of the hearth, and the people of Darragh’s Watch continued to try to stare at us through the flames of the fire.
Luckily, a large iron pot suspended over the coals and the woman stirring its contents obscured most of their view. The woman passed me a wooden bowl of thick soup, and despite the soup’s sludgy appearance, the savory smell made my stomach growl.
“Thanks.” I tried to smile, Ciarán’s admonishment fresh in my head, but startled at the woman’s face.
I’d known her in Keel Watch Harbor, and luckily, Siobhan had always been kinder to me than her daughter, but her resemblance to Sabrina still caught me off guard.
That and the sutured wound that traced the edge of her face. I wondered if she’d sustained it when Ferrin had attacked the Rift a week ago.
“My Lady.” She kept her hair short, like she had in Keel Watch, and something about her coy smile dampened my embarrassment at the “Lady” title.
“Ribs first. Soup later.” Sorcha tore my soup from my hands and shoved it towards Sabrina. “You three, make yourselves useful and help feed the people out there.”
Orla and Sabrina nodded and took more bowls from Sabrina’s mother to deliver in the main hall, but Ciarán stayed fixed at my side.
“There were men in the woods. Breachriver, by the looks of their clothing. They were headed towards the Rift,” he said.
“We saw soldiers, too, on our way in,” Siobhan said from her giant pot of soup. “Looked Shogunate rather than Breachriver, so they weren’t the same men you saw.”
“Word of our Lady’s release from the glacier is spreading, and if Skalterra has one thing, it’s power hungry Magicians who all want their own piece of the prize.” Sorcha sighed, then ladled more soup into bowls for Ciarán. “Speaking of hungry Magicians…”
“We aren’t inn workers,” Sabrina said, though she was already balancing six bowls of soup between her arms.
“Feed your people, Sabrina.” Siobhan handed another bowl to Ciarán. I reached for a bowl to help, but Sorcha batted me away.
“Not you. You sit.” She pointed at a dusty wooden chair next to a potato-laden pantry shelf.
“I feel fine,” I lied. Sorcha poked at my side, and I winced.
“Liar. Sabrina, was this you, undoing all my hard work healing her this last week?”
“It’s not my fault she didn’t block.” Sabrina stalked after Ciarán and Orla into the main hall, each weighed down with soup.
“I told you to take it easy,” Sorcha sighed at me.
I winced as I lowered myself into the wooden chair. “I’ll worry about my injuries after Gams is back in the ice and things can go back to normal.”
“You’ll worry about your injuries when I tell you to worry about your injuries, and that’s right now. You clearly spent too much time as a Nightmare. You’ve lost all sense of self-preservation.” Sorcha unstoppered a bottle of Skal at her waist and took a swig. “Armor off and tunic up.”
I rolled my eyes and unhooked the thin, leather armor strapped across my chest. My tunic took a bit more careful maneuvering with my injuries, but I managed to slip it up over one shoulder, exposing the splashes of bruises that painted my side.
I did my best not to look, worried that the sight of my battered flank might make me queasy and upset my ulcers more than I already had.
Sorcha pressed against the mottled skin, and I hissed at the heat that emanated from her palm.
“Hold still.” She gripped my shoulder with her free hand. “By the Frozen God, you smell terrible.”
“I smell fine.” I braced against the magick working its way around and through the bones beneath Sorcha’s wrinkled hand.
“Oh, yes,” Sorcha drawled. “You smell great, and all your bones aren’t broken. The picture of hygiene and health.”
Ciarán appeared in the doorway and froze. His eyes flitted over my face, and then grazed my exposed side.
His pale cheeks turned pink, then red, before he found the sense to look down.
“My Lady, I’m—” He choked on the end of his sentence, then tried to backpedal out of the tiny kitchen, but bumped into Orla as she returned for more soup. “Sorry, this is—”
His eyes rose to mine once more. The flush in his pale cheeks deepened, and he finally made a successful escape back through the doorway.
“You don’t see me getting flustered about Wren being half naked.” Orla grinned at me as she grabbed more soup.
“I’m not half naked! My shirt is still on!” Heat and Skalmagick flared in my broken ribs, and I inhaled through gritted teeth. “Dammit, Sorcha, watch it!”
“Do you speak to your grandmother with that mouth?”
“Yes!”
“Then who can blame her for keeping you at bay with a giant storm.” Sorcha clicked her tongue. “Now calm down. You’ve done this a dozen times.”
I dug my fingernails into the wood of the chair, trying not to wince.
“I’m not convinced you’re actually helping,” I grunted. “Feels more like you’re trying to kill me.”
“You’re fine. It’s a simple matrix construct designed to help your bones reform. It’s not exactly difficult nor lethal.”
“I thought Skalmagick was creation magick. Why can’t you create new bones so we don’t have to do this anymore?”
“Why can’t you sit quietly and let me do my job?” Sorcha retorted. Siobhan laughed from the soup pot.
“Bones are living,” Siobhan explained, still chuckling while Sorcha glowered. “Only your grandmother has ever created living constructs out of Skal.”