Everything was cold here, and alien.
Sophia looked down at her skirt and found her fists clenched in the black wool.Foolishness, she told herself,sentimental foolishness, and you’re too old for that. She’d left home knowing that her absence was apt to be long, and that she was going among strangers. Her mother had wept, and her father had cleared his throat more than necessary, but every child leaves eventually. She might have married and moved to Holland, as one girl they’d known had done. As it was, if she didn’t die, she’d at least return in a year or so.
Uncurling her fingers, she told herself that Cathal knew her and was still kind. (Morethan kind, and that memory wisped across her body with a tingling pleasure, but that was not the point.) His people had been kind too, and friendly enough, given that she was still clumsy with the language, and perhaps inclined to accept anyone Edward of England had wronged. She didn’t know. She didn’t have to find out.
She was here with a task, and she was here to learn. Once those goals were complete, she’d go home, and Loch Arach’s inhabitants could think as they wished. Standing about moping wouldn’t help.
Out of both habit and caution, Sophia made a last inspection of her vessels, made sure that progress was steady and that neither instability nor contamination was a danger. Then she descended the staircase, walking briskly and not giving herself time to think very much.
The hall was crowded as always: benches pushed back against the walls between meals, servants cleaning or changing tapers or simply going hither and yon on various errands, and a few people with more leisure sitting by the fire. Sophia spotted Alice’s blond curls among the last crowd. She sat listening to an old man play the harp. The tune was one that Sophia recognized by now, and she found, as she heard Alice’s voice mingle with both the old man’s and the sound of the harp itself, that she could even pick out a few of the words:eatandI,know, andlady.
She didn’t know enough to follow the song, not as quickly as they were singing it, and she had no taste just then for standing by and watching, but she smiled as she passed by, glad to see the intent look on Alice’s face. At least her friend was gaining something from the journey, other than freezing and worrying about Sophia; she’d always claimed to, but it was good to see impartial evidence.
Out of the great hall, Sophia descended into the kitchen, welcoming the heat that almost immediately surrounded her. When her experiments demanded flame, the tower was warm enough, but otherwise it became quite chilly—the small hearth that could fit into the room didn’t quite make up for the height of the place and the age—and Sophia stretched out her hands in pleasure.
“Lady,” said Matain, the dark-haired page she’d slightly met on her first morning in the castle. He came toward her quickly, smiling. He was a helpful one, or well trained, or just eager for a change in routine. He also might have been glad for an excuse to stop turning the spit—there was sweat running down his face. “Are you hungry?”
It was one of the sentences she knew, but he still spoke slowly and as clearly as he could, given the noise of the kitchen: a considerate lad.
“If you have anything,” Sophia said, and for a moment she could tell herself that it was because she didn’t want to waste his time, and that mayhap a good meal would put her in a better mood, even if she felt not at all like eating just then.
“Half a meat pie,” he said. “From dinner. But—”
His hesitation told her what she’d already guessed would happen: a few of the servants, at least, had realized that she ate no flesh. “No, that will be good,” said Sophia.
If she’d wanted to, she could have kept deceiving herself a little while longer. She could have told herself that she’d only accepted to try to keep suspicion down, and that any subsequent ideas had sprung into her head only later, when she didn’t want to throw good food to the dogs. She could have lied inside her head, but she didn’t.
Strengthening her willpower—putting all of that force toward contemplation, experiments, and resisting Valerius’s subsequent dreams—hadn’t left her very much for daily life, it seemed, and tearing herself away from melancholy had used a great deal of what remained. As soon as Matain brought the pie back, wrapped in a white cloth, she headed not to the kennels, nor to the hall, but to the staircase that she’d walked her first night, the one that led to Cathal’s solar.
The door was closed when she arrived, but she knocked—she’d come too far to waste the effort—and gruff as his “Come!” was, it relieved her. She would have felt foolish indeed if she’d faced an empty room.
Cathal was leaning back in his chair, booted feet on his desk. A bottle of wine was open in front of him, but he didn’t look drunk. Indeed, he was carving into a block of wood, which argued either that he was sober or that he could regrow fingers. When he saw her, his hands stopped moving.
“Are you well?” he asked, giving her face and body each a quick look that was nonetheless hot with intensity.
“Yes,” she said, and it wasn’t an untruth, just a wholly inadequate description. “I… My work doesn’t require me at this moment.”
“I can say the same. That I’m not needed,” he added as he got to his feet with a smile that might have been apologetic.
His mouth looked very firm. It had been when he kissed her—but not hard, not brutal, though she thought he could have been, and the idea wasn’t entirely unpleasant either. He’d simply known what he wanted and guessed very well what she did. But then, he wouldn’t lack experience, really, even less than most men of the world.
She dropped her gaze from his lips to his hands, which didn’t help, and tried to ignore the warmth between her legs. “I came with a bribe,” she said and held out the pie, an inadequate and not entirely welcome shield. Then, because it was the first thing that came to mind thatwasn’this body pressed against hers, she asked, “What’s the song that sounds like this?” and hummed a few lines.
Briefly Cathal frowned, puzzled, and then his face cleared. “Ah. ‘Twa Corbies’ I think is the title. It’s two crows, talking over a dead knight.” He lifted his voice, a pleasant baritone if nothing that would have impressed Alice, and sang:
His hound is tae the huntin gane,
His hawk tae fetch the wild fowl hame.
His lady’s ta’en anither mate-o
Sae we may mak oor dinner swate-o.
“It is,” he added, with a shrug of his broad shoulders, “a wee bit grim for some. My brother never liked it.”
“No? But it’s not untrue… It’s almost comforting in its way. Life going on, even after us, and our mortal remains being useful at the end. Though I suppose nobody really wants to think of the world going on, even if we should.”
“We should?” Cathal asked, not disagreeing, just interested to see what she’d say.
