Leander and Darius burst into loud laughter at her sputtering and choking, which surprised me even more.
“Do you need something?” I asked Mara, getting up and hurrying to the table. “Can I get you a glass of water or something?”
Mara shook her head as she continued to cough and clear her throat. The look in her eyes as I moved close to her was almost fear.
Everything made sense a moment later when Darius said, “There you go, Mara. You’re not just the niece of the king, you’re the niece oftwokings.”
It was my turn to gape and stare. “You’re King Julius’s niece?” I asked, my voice going high.
“She’s the daughter of Lady Clelia,” Lucius said, as if I were stupid. “King Julius’s older sister.”
I stared at Mara again, searching for a family resemblance. And sure enough, it was there. Mara had a mouth similar to Magnus’s, and the shape of her eyes was familiar as well.
There was more than that. I’d immediately thought of Ox when I’d learned Mara was a girl, but hadn’t Neil told me something in confidence about Ox being Magnus’s cousin? Ox was born and raised in Good Port, but her mother was from the Old Realm and a member of the Gerzia family.
I had to sit down in one of the free chairs at the table. “This might take some time for me to sort out,” I said, shaking my head slightly.
I definitely needed to write a long letter to Dushka, explaining everything that had happened to me so far and all of the revelations I’d discovered in such a short time.
Thinking of Dushka sent another wave of homesickness through me. I missed him. I would have loved to lie in his arms that night, talking about all of the amazing things I’d discovered since leaving him and gaining his reassurance that he still loved me and I still had a home with him.
I was shaken out of those thoughts—vaguely aware that Leander and Darius had started up some sort of debate or another—by a bell tolling somewhere outside.
“That’ll be supper,” Darius said, dropping his debate with his brother to leap up from the couch.
“Hurry, or we’ll end up at the back of the line,” Leander said, getting up as well and rushing over to pull me to stand.
“And you don’t want to end up at the back of the line,” Darius said. “They always run out of something before you get to the front of the line.”
The twins seemed to take that for granted as they shoved me toward the door—Mara and Lucius got up too, Lucius dashed ahead of us, and Mara walked out of the house just behind us so that we formed a group of four—and out to the path that ran through our group of houses.
The dining hall was in the North Building, as Lucius had told me earlier when he’d taken me to our house, but I was less interested in the architecture and layout of the building than I was in the idea that a dining hall at a college in one of the largest cities in the Old Realm would run out of food before everyone was served. I almost wanted to be at the end of the line so I could see what that meant, but I hadn’t had a proper meal all day, what with all the traveling I’d done.
I hadn’t really been certain what Leander meant about a line for food until I was standing in it. I’d only ever been served while sitting at a table—whether that was in Yacovissi, in Kettering, or in any of my travels. I understood a bit once we joined a long queue that moved around one side of the room, leading up to a counter in a wall that divided the room full of long tables from what appeared to be a kitchen. Right there on the other side of the dining room wall.
“Do they hand you food directly from the kitchen?” I asked as the line moved quickly forward.
“Yes,” Mara said, though she didn’t elaborate.
I remained puzzled until we reached the front of the line. At that point, I could see that the kitchen was manned mostly by students with a few people who appeared to be cooks. The cooks brought freshly prepared food straight from the ovens and fireplaces at the far end of the kitchen to a counter in front of the window. That was where the students assembled plates with exactly the same meal, over and over. As soon as a plate was finished, it was handed over to whoever had reached the front of the line.
I nearly fumbled my plate as it was thrust into my hands, and as Leander tugged me on out of the line and around to one of the tables. Darius and Mara stayed close to us, even though they headed down the opposite side of the long table Leander chose for us.
The tables had cutlery, cloths to serve as napkins, and glasses of water already in place. As soon as Darius and Leander sat down, they picked up their cutlery and started eating.
“What are you waiting for?” Leander asked, patting the bench beside him. “Eat before it gets cold.”
I did as he told me, but the whole thing didn’t sit right. This was not the way meals were meant to be served. Perhaps in the army or in some sort of dungeon, but not at a college, not to students, especially when one of those students was the niece of the king.
“Why do they do it this way?” I asked. I was in the Old Realm to learn, after all.
“So there’s no waste,” Mara said from her seat across the table from me.
I paused with my fork halfway to my mouth to consider that. Up and down the table, everyone was eating as if the form of the meal was normal. They were eating everything on their plates. It wasn’t difficult, considering the modest amount we were all served.
I continued eating, but a bit slower. More pieces of the puzzle of the Old Realm were falling into place. There had been a famine along with the war and the plague. The famine was only a few years ago. How extensive had the famine been? Had it been so bad that the Old Realm hadn’t recovered?
I was reminded of some of the things refugees from the cities had told us in Kettering about how scarce food had been during the Dying Winter, and how those people would forever think of food and whether they’d had enough of it first, above all else, for the rest of their lives.