3. Renard #2
“I haven’t food enough for your men,” she bites out at Bjorn, who has the grace to look chagrinned. “If your horse’s ass of a commander wants to send troops just to flex his might, he better be sure to fill your saddlebags himself!”
“Be at ease, Millie,” I chuckle, placing a hand on her shoulder and tucking a gray curl back beneath her wimple. “I offered them oatcakes and ale. Surely there’s enough in the larder to see to that while we discuss Arden and the news from court.”
She squints, shooting a glare at the uneasy soldiers presently milling about in the front garden. After rolling her eyes and muttering curses that would curdle milk, she lets our group enter somewhat unmolested.
“Wipe your feet,” she barks. “I just cleaned these floors.”
The soldiers exchange harried glances but do as they’re bid, looking to me for guidance.
“Best to do as she says,” I say. “My housekeeper inflicts more terror than any enemy I’ve stood against. I try not to find myself on her bad side.”
While the men find seats around the long table in the center of the hall, I follow Millie to the attached kitchen and corner her in the pantry.
“I don’t have enough!” she whispers, frantic.
Looking around at the overflowing shelves stuffed with hard breads, oatcakes, massive wheels of aging cheese, countless earthenware crockeries full of fermenting vegetables and preserved fruits, I raise an incredulous brow.
“We have enough to feed an army through the winter, darling girl.”
“Not food. I mean petaldown,” she hisses, eyeing me as if I’m the one who’s gone mad.
I still. “Petaldown? You mean to drug twenty soldiers after I offered them hospitality?” While I appreciate the somewhat bloodthirsty manner of my housekeeper and friend, sometimes I do wonder at the speed with which she would resort to murder.
I suspect her mysterious past—of which I know little—is to blame, but I’ve never felt the impetus to press.
Still, it warms my heart to have someone, anyone, feel compelled to protect me.
“They’ll not be taking you to that bastard Arden while I breathe!” The wooden spoon she’s clutching is the length of her arm and gives a worrying crack beneath her white-knuckled grip.
“They’re not taking me anywhere. I’m going to sit with them and listen to the news from court, and see that they’re comfortable for a while.
They’re going to go back to Valehar and tell Arden I was away.
By the time he gets off his ill-gotten throne and makes his way out here, the wheat will be planted and we’ll have the seasonal hands for the apples and pineberries, plus whatever kitchen help you need for the winter,” I say calmly, drawing her into my arms. The top of her head only comes up to the middle of my breastbone, but her stout arms wrap tightly around my waist.
“I don’t trust them, Renard,” she says softly. “They serve a court of no honor. I say we poison the lot of them and feed them to the pigs.”
I chuckle, though I know she does not mean it in jest.
“While I appreciate your bloodthirsty loyalty as ever, worry not. I don’t trust them either.
But these aren’t hardened soldiers, Millie.
They’re barely out of squiring,” I say, loosening my hold on Millie only when she ceases vibrating like a kettle about to boil over.
“If Arden wished me dragged in chains, he would have sent veterans. These are just boys in polished steel.”
“Polished fools,” she mutters.
“Perhaps,” I allow. “But fools still need feeding.”
The soldiers sit stiffly at the long table, clearly uncertain about what to expect.
It’s awkwardly quiet, save for the occasional whisper of confused distress and creak of armor when they shift.
The youngest lad, still looking disheveled from being bested in the barn, glances sheepishly at his commander and at me.
I struggle to hide my smile, however, when he regards Millie with abject terror.
She whirls into the room on my heels, arms laden with platters of oatcakes and a crock of cinnamon-spiced apple butter. Twenty pairs of eyes track the food as it finds its way to the table, followed by a wedge of hard cheese, pitchers of water, and a jug of ale.
“Eat,” Millie commands, her tone firm and her gaze hawk-like.
There’s a moment of silence before the first lad moves, as though the food might be something from a dream.
And then they eat—falling upon the food as though it might grow legs and run from the table.
Gone is any hesitancy or suspicion. They devour everything like locusts—or like men unaccustomed to regular meals.
With their initial caution and unease giving way to their desperate hunger, Millie’s famous oatcakes and warm cinnamon spiced apple butter win over even the most reticent among them.
The youngest soldier closes his eyes while chewing, as though the act itself requires reverence—an understandable response to Millie’s cooking, but less, I suspect, to do with her recipes and more to do with the sharpness of their cheekbones and the hollows beneath their eyes.
When I was their age, this kind of hunger hadn’t made its way to Valehar, and again, a swell of pity rises in my well-fed gut for what these soldiers must be enduring.
Millie’s eyes cut to mine—her brow furrowing and a frown tugging down the corners of her generous lips.
It doesn’t take long for her concern to overpower her ire, and my heart gives a painful thump in my chest. I cannot seem to help it.
These soldiers are so young. What kind of a man sends boys out to do his dirty work?
A man I know only too well.
“How long was the journey from Valehar?” I ask mildly. 4 days from the seat at Valehar. 2 days from the nearest inn. Plenty of time to eat a couple decent meals and restock supplies.
“A few days,” Bjorn says. “Not too long.”
“And you came with enough rations?” I ask. I doubt he’ll give me an honest answer—doing so would be tantamount to treason.
“Of course,” Bjorn replies, a little too quickly.
“Of course,” I echo.
The bench creaks loudly beneath uncomfortably shifting bodies, the lie evident in the charged silence.
“Good rations?” I press, unable to resist my hunger for the truth. I won’t put it past Arden to have these young men make do with scraps out of detached disinterest, but if Valehar cannot even feed its armies, things have become more dire than I’ve feared. “More than hardtack and salted fish?”
“Aye,” intones the youngest. Before he can stop himself or think better of it, he swallows and says, “It doesn’t—” He freezes, color flooding his face.
“It doesn’t what?” Millie asks sharply. I cut her a look.
We both know what the lad means to say—what the older ones will not.
Has Arden instructed them to hide the state of things in Valehar?
Does he not think I can see with my own eyes how gaunt and worn these men look when they should be in the prime of their youth?
Anger cracks through me like a whip, and I must force myself to exhale slowly lest I threaten our momentary truce.
Bjorn shoots him a warning look, but I gesture to him to continue.
“Let him speak.”
The boy grips his cup, knuckles turning white. “It doesn’t satisfy. The feeling doesn’t stay,” he mutters. “The food just… sits, like a stone in the belly. And before you can take another bite, it’s as if what you’ve already eaten has vanished from your gut.”
As if summoned by his description, my own stomach drops to the floor.
It is as I feared—the plague that has stretched the breadth of the kingdom has breached the castle walls and now none are spared.
Everyone that finds their way to my boundary gate describes it the same way: a belly full of nothing.
Eating and eating, with nothing remaining in the gut.
Nothing in the limbs. Nothing in the marrow.
Nothing assuages the hunger, and nothing seems to nourish the body.
At first, we all thought it was a curse on the people of the kingdom.
Only recently have we learned that it’s a curse on the crops.
The curse leaves a certain look on a man’s face, even before the hollows of his cheeks and eyes deepen.
There’s an unease beneath the skin, a tightness at the mouth, a constant flexing of the fingers against the abdomen as though kneading pain out of it, and these boys have that look.
Even Bjorn, who tries hardest to hide it.
I nod, as though this is new information and not something I have seen in every hollow-eyed merchant and exhausted, trembling mother who has staggered up my lane this past couple of years.
The first time someone came, it was at the late dusk in midsummer, when everyone should have plenty to eat.
The well-dressed man—a merchant, I’d guessed—shuffled up to the gate, the hood of his cloak pulled low, with enough coin to buy a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs, and six apples—proudly insisting that he didn’t need charity.
The second came a week after that—this time a mother carrying a sleeping child with arms as thin as reeds.
After that, they came in twos and threes and then in quiet, desperate lines.
I’ve been feeding them for the better part of a year now, and still they hesitate at the boundary marker that separates my land from Valehar. They’re all afraid, as though charity or starvation itself might be treason. Then again, knowing Arden, it might be.
Since they started coming, I’ve had to produce more than what I ever planned to.
I’ve sold relics of my old life to buy more seed, more chickens, more sheep.
I’ve expanded my fields as far as I can, pressing right up against the Verge and praying that I’m not angering whatever dark things live inside.
I sell when I must, give when I can, and turn no one away unless my own stores run thin enough to endanger the winter.