CHAPTER FOURTEEN
After I regaled everyone with the story of my day—the many stiff-backed guards, the queen’s mountain of whipped cream—I took supper in the kitchen, hunched over a wooden bowl of soup, eyeing our cook as she moved around me.
“You must not help Elin with the ashes,” I instructed Wenthelen, pausing to blow on a spoon of hot broth.
“What’s the difference if you get your pennies?” Wenthelen scoffed. She stopped her bustling and settled into a wooden chair by the hearth, crossing her tired feet in front of her.
“Fairness.”
She removed one of her boots and scratched her heel on the floor. “Nothing about this life is fair.”
“You don’t help the other girls.”
“They don’t need my help.”
“Elin won’t learn how to be on her own.”
“Mayhap she won’t need to!”
“I think that is the same gamble she’s been willing to make.” I finished the last of my stew and pushed the bowl away. “But listen tome—I forbid you from helping her anymore. It’s a deal she and I made, and she must do her part.”
“Forbid me?” Wenthelen crowed, tilting back in her chair with some delight.
“Yes.” I nodded. “You are henceforth proscribed. Now, fetch me an extra bowl. I’ll bring some supper to our guest.”
I found Moussa in his camp, crouching by the light of a small fire. I handed him the stew and a small pitcher of cider and sat down on a roll of carpet he had laid on the ground.
“One for me,” I commanded. I waited, watching him pour the cider into two wooden cups.
“I pour, you choose,” he suggested, squinting as he ensured the drinks were even.
“Oh, come along. We have plenty more cider.”
“That you keep under lock and key. You should be selling this cider.” He held his cup aloft. “I think about it every time I have pond-water ale.”
I crossed my arms. “A lady doesn’t sell things.”
“A lady doesn’t sit with a minstrel on a roll of carpet.”
“Hush, you old graybeard.” Moussa had come through seasonally since that first year, and we had learned to barter what we could—a dry place to sleep for dance lessons, a warm meal for a night of song. But his circling of the territory had begun to slow down. “It is not just your carriage that creaks when it moves.”
He grinned and then laughed.
“I’m quite serious, Moussa! You are getting older.”
“So are you.”
“I am not forty years. You are—”
“Young at heart.”
“And gray at the chin and crown.”
“And when you are gray, you will see it is nothing but a color.”
“When I am gray, I will accept that my years of labor must come to an end.”
He took a drink from his cider, unbothered by the thoughts I was voicing out loud. “May you be so lucky.”
