The innkeeper’s mouth had pinched tight. “I’ll tell you this,” he began in a low, passionate voice, “you in the Houses may stand high, and you may look down on us who crawl beneath you, but there rises a tide of sentiment—”
I saw my supper and my hope for a night’s sleep sliding away. “Maester,” I cut in, “what if I fetch a tray myself from the kitchens and take it up to the attic?”
Checked, the innkeeper stiffened, maybe not sure whether I was being respectful or derisory.
Andevai broke in. “Catherine, you are not a servant to fetch and carry what others are obligated to bring.”
“I want to eat. I’m very hungry. If I fetch the tray, then I know we’ll eat.”
“Furthermore,” my husband went on inexorably, “the Houses are the bringers of plenty, not of want. People should be grateful to us, who have spared them from the tyranny of princes many times over, who have saved them from the wars of monsters like Camjiata who meant to crush all beneath his boot.”
“Get out of my house,” said the innkeeper so quietly that Andevai did not react, and after a moment I began to think he had not heard because there was no sound at all; even the conversation in the supper room dropped into a lull.
For a moment.
Then the sword hilt burned against my palm like ice.
The fire whoofed out with a billow of ash like a cough. I felt as if a glacier loomed, ready to calve and bury me.
“Catherine,” Andevai said in a low voice, “go outside. Now.”
My skin was chapped from the cold, and my stomach was grumbling, and the soup smelled so good, and it was sleeting outside, and in only three days the end of the year would arrive and with it, on that cusp between the dying of the old year and the birth of the new, would rise my own natal day, my birthday, when I would welcome a full round of twenty years and therefore become an adult. Only now I was severed by magic from my beloved family and standing here cold and exhausted and hungry and far from the home I could never return to and meanwhile about to be kicked out into the night. And the worst of it was, Andevai was probably going to do something stupid and awful, because he was the arrogant child of a powerful House unused to being spoken to by a common innkeeper far below him in birth and wealth and without any cold magic to protect himself, and all I could think of was snuggling into a warm bed and sipping hot soup, because I was the most selfish, miserable person alive.
To my horror, I began to cry hot, silent tears.
“Excuse me, maester,” said the throaty voice. A personage loomed behind the innkeeper at the door of the supper room, its bright crest startling in the drab surroundings.
Andevai looked over, no doubt surprised to hear himself again improperly addressed by a stranger, and then doubly surprised to see a troll who was, after all, not speaking to him but to the innkeeper. I sucked back my tears as the prickling anticipation of destruction abruptly eased: He was too startled to be angry.
“You are quite run off your feet, maester—we can see that—but we have run out of wine, I am sorry to say, which comes about only because you offered us such an excellent vintage.” From a distance, trolls’ smooth, small feathers were easy to mistake for strangely textured skin, but this close, the drab brown feathers of this troll’s face stood in contrast to a crested mane of yellow feathers flaring over its head and down its neck. “If we might get more when you are able to fetch it. Our thanks.”
“I’ll bring it at once.” The innkeeper bolted across the common room to an opening hung with a curtain.
“And plates for the new guests,” called the troll as the curtain slashed down behind the innkeeper. The creature turned an eye toward me. It wrinkled its muzzle to expose teeth, a gesture perhaps meant to be a grin recognizable by humans as a friendly smile, but overall the effect was of a big, sleek, feathered lizard displaying its incisors as a threat. “We’d be honored to guest you. If you wish to sit with us, of course. My companions are good company, so they assure me. Witty, well read, and willing to put up with me, so that may be a point in their favor. Or it may not be. You will have to determine that for yourselves. I’m Chartji. I won’t trouble you with my full name, which you would not understand in any case. I’m a solicitor currently employed by the firm of Godwik and Clutch, which has offices in Havery and Camlun, although I’m originally from Expedition. I’ve been employed in Havery for the past four years, but we’re setting up new offices in Adurnam.”
It thrust out a hand, if one could call it a hand, what with its shiny claws curving from the ends of what might be fingers or talons, offering to shake in the style of the radicals and laboring classes. Andevai actually took a step back, and the troll’s head tilted, marking the movement.
“So it’s true what they say about trolls,” he said.
Fiery Shemesh! Could he never stop offending people?
“It is,” said the troll as its toothy grin sharpened, “but only we females.”
I stuck out my hand a little too jerkily. “Well met, Chartji. I’m called Catherine Hassi Barahal.” The name fell easily from my tongue; too late I recalled I was someone else now, although I did not know who.
The featherless skin of its—her!—palms was a little grainy, like touching a sun-warmed rock. For an instant I felt the scent of summer in my nostrils, a whisper like falling water, the breath of cut grass and the juice of crushed berries. Then she let go.
“Interesting,” she said as she looked me up and down, as if she saw something surprising in my height, my hair, my eyes, or my features. “Can it be you are a child of the Hassi Barahal house, originally established in Gadir? The old histories call your people ‘the messengers,’ known to bring messages across long distances in a short time. There’s a branch residing in Havery, founded by Anatta Hassi Barahal. The left-handed Barahals, they call them. I see you hold your… ah”—she seemed about to say one word but changed her mind—“your cane in your left hand.”
“Why, yes!” I laughed out of sheer surprise. Even in the cold common room, bereft of fire, the air felt abruptly balmier. “Almost no one knows the ancient origin of our House. I’m from Adurnam. The Havery Barahals are cousins. My aunt’s great-grandmother’s descendants, in fact.”
“They are acquaintances of ours. Come sit, come join our clutch.”
I followed her into the supper room, eager to stay within the orbit of one who linked me, however tenuously, to my family. She was tall, as trolls were, a hand taller than Andevai, graceful on her feet, although her gait hitched strangely. She seemed unaware of the glances fired her way from the other two tables of diners, well-to-do merchants or artisans by the look of their fashionable clothing, gold and silver necklaces and bracelets, and tiny leather charm cases sewn to their sleeves. Respectable people not happy to be sharing a supper room with a pair of trolls, even if the trolls were dining with people.
“I hope he did not insult you,” I murmured, feeling a flush creep up my cheeks.
horror, I began to cry hot, silent tears.