Chapter Six
That year was the worst of Bait’s life.
One might take exception to this assessment and argue that the year the dragon incinerated her mother and tore the child from the bosom of the royal family, and she survived only because a stone-hearted gargoyle took pity on a mewling lump of meat – that year must surely be worse.
But she barely remembered that former life, and had not been Bait then.
Also, all that carnage and fiery uproar was done in a brief time. This year was a mill, grinding without end, and Bait’s spirit was its grist.
This was not deliberate cruelty on the part of Sir Rudyard – far from it.
On balance, he is a better man than I, and was as kind and generous as his position permitted.
But he loved order, and loved to see things put into their place.
The proper place for Bait, in Sir Rudyard’s scheme of all things, was a box marked “Ealdufrida: a scullion in the kitchens of Dunshelm Keep”.
He thought it a good box: the orphan girl would have bed and board and be a productive part of the great machine of the kingdom.
The peasant labours in the field to bring grain to the miller and pigs to the butcher; the miller, the butcher, the baker all have their appointed tasks, and the scullion runs and fetches so that the knight may have his eggs and bacon.
Thus fortified he goes out and patrols the borderlands to keep the monsters from the doors of peasants and assorted village worthies alike.
Bait would not stay in her box.
At first, she found the castle more to her liking than the forest. Corridors and chambers, crumbling stone walls, innumerable nooks and crannies to hide in – not so different from the Dungeon.
She found a corner of the pantry where she was out of the way of the trampling feet and blaring voices of the other servants.
The pantry was windowless and blissfully dark, and from this lair she could sneak out and explore the rest of this level.
The Dungeon was a ruined city, twisted by cataclysm and the passage of ages; Bait had learned to navigate its unlikely byways, and did not think it strange to get from, say, the Trapsmiths’ Arcade to the Hall of Pillars by crawling through a crack in one wall, climbing down a dry well shaft to the level below, cutting through the sanctum of a ruined temple and then up a spiral stairs and through a secret door.
Crawling, squeezing, climbing, doubling back along twisted routes were all natural to her.
Similarly, in this new dungeon, she quickly discovered that the best route from the kitchen to the solarium where Sir Rudyard liked to break his fast was to scale the cupboard, squeeze out of the narrow window, run along the roof of the adjoining chapel, climb in through another window, out of the door, up a spiral stair and hence to the solarium.
The best route for Bait; for Ealdufrida, this was plainly disobedience and mischief-making.
The orderly design of Sir Rudyard had a solution for this. Ealdufrida the Scullion was a servant of Clove the Cook, so instructions were passed down to Mistress Clove that her new serving girl should be disciplined – for her own good, of course.
Clove had ruled the kitchen of the keep for many years; she’d claimed her lair long before Sir Rudyard’s tenure, and defended it fiercely.
Indeed, I remembered Clove from my own unpleasant sojourn in the keep.
Then, she’d been a merely unpleasant serving girl with her constant scowl and sharp tongue – which, along with a much blunter kitchen knife, was her only defence against the miscreants and criminals of the garrison.
Orphir and I, being con men instead of robbers, rapists or murderers, were gentler than our peers; young Clove rewarded that by tormenting us, as an example to the rest. Fifty years had changed her in two ways only – first, the baking heat of the kitchen had turned her into a pinched scrap of leathery malice so shrivelled that she might be mistaken for some sort of undead horror if encountered in the Dungeon.
Second, she had tripled her culinary range, adding “boiled eggs” and “bacon” to her signature grey slop.
I can still taste it now, despite being a skull without lips or tongue or any organs of sense. I said back then that it tasted like death, and I was right.
But this is not the tale of my sufferings. For now, it’s Bait’s.
“Wicked thing,” said Mistress Clove, “no wonder your kin cast you out. Offa! Show the wicked thing the proper way up to the dining hall!”
Offa was a kitchen boy, born of a serving girl who had died of the flux a few years prior.
To say Clove cared for him is to overstate the matter, but she found him useful.
Offa was big and broad-shouldered, and caked in flour from his official role as the baker’s boy, and a big broad-mouthed grin caked in blood from his unofficial role as Clove’s special little enforcer to terrorise the other kitchen servants.
In this case, he grabbed Bait by the ankle and dragged her up the stair, along the narrow stone passage, up another stair, and hence came to Sir Rudyard’s solarium.
The proper route was thus graven onto both Bait’s memory and her face, every step a scrape.
If Offa thought to terrorise Bait by this method, he was mistaken. She had encountered trolls twice Offa’s size and with ten times more teeth. He did not scare her.
After three weeks, she resolved to murder him.
Sir Rudyard confiscated almost all of Bait’s possessions when he took her in.
It was not fitting for a kitchen scullion to wander around in ill-fitting boots, or the meanest goblin rags, and certainly not with a jewelled dagger.
The boots he gave to big-footed Offa, the rags burned for fear of disease, and the dagger taken into safekeeping by Sir Rudyard as a relic of the elder days.
Bait was permitted to keep her silver coin, and was issued with a tunic, a thin rope belt and other clothing, including a pair of sandals.
She contemplated beating Offa to death with a sandal, or strangling him with the belt. Neither seemed promising. She was also distracted in her murderous mission by the other servants, and – on happy occasions – by Neb.
The other servants lived in terror of Offa and Mistress Clove, though none of them contemplated murder with the same degree of intensity or intention as Bait – or Eel, as they called her, which was at least less of a mouthful than Ealdufrida.
Their relationship with her went through three distinct stages in as many seasons.
The first of these phases was pity, and began on the day Bait arrived at the castle.
Sir Rudyard made a rare appearance at the top of the kitchen stair, and all the servants respectfully paused in their work and pretended to listen – all except Mistress Clove, who continued to massacre onions without the slightest glimmer of a tear.
(She always felt that discrimination had barred her from her true vocation as an executioner.) “This girl,” declared Rudyard, “is named Ealdufrida. She was stolen away by a wood-hag. The monster has been driven back into the Dungeon where it belongs, and will trouble us no more. Ealdufrida will work here until her family are found.” Bait was hiding behind Sir Rudyard’s cloak, so he produced her like a conjuring trick and pushed her a few steps down the stair.
“Go on, child,” he ordered her. “Do as you are told.”
Bait froze at the sight of all those faces staring up at her. She had never seen so many humans assembled in one place before.
“I cannot tell if she’s frightened out of her wits, or just a half-wit by nature,” muttered Rudyard. “Come fetch her!”
Fortunately for Bait, Offa was at the back of the crowd, so it was two of the serving girls who sprang up and escorted Bait into the warm belly of the kitchen.
The girls gathered around the poor orphan, cooing over her, stroking her hair and whispering that she was now safe and secure and protected from all the horrors of the Dungeon.
Bait, who missed the horrors of the Dungeon desperately, endured the torment of this comfort by clutching her silver coin so tightly that it dug deep into her callused palm.
It was a relief when Mistress Clove snarled at the servants to get back to work.
The pity of the other servants deepened in those first weeks.
Bait, alas, understood very little of the surface world.
For this deficiency I must take some responsibility – my curriculum was overly academic, when the child would have benefited from an intensive course explaining, say, the difference between carrots and parsnips, or even the difference between carrots and firewood.
She had no sense of time, either – in the Dungeon, she slept when she was tired, ate when she was hungry, and if she did not like whatever lesson I was trying to impart, would slip away in search of amusement.
In the kitchen, one slept when it was night, ate when everyone else in the castle had eaten, and if you did not like your assigned chore you swallowed your discomfort and got on with it, or you would face the vinegar-spittle wrath of Mistress Clove.
Mistress Clove had Offa punish Bait when she used a box of carrots as kindling for the cooking fire, when she climbed inside the oven on a cold night, when she talked to the steam from a kettle, believing it to be a wraith in distress, and – worst of all – when she tried to go exploring.
It became a cruel game of wits between the two – or wit on Bait’s part, and dogged cruelty on his.
He’d barricade one window, she’d wriggle out of another.
She’d try sneaking out of one door, and she’d be waiting on the other side, spoon in hand.
Once, she tried reasoning with him, saying she needed to go to Lastease to find Squire Atten, but Offa called her a liar and beat her harder.