“We certainly left enough cum in him last night for a bit of our personality to soak in,” the other one agreed.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or hang my head in shame. So there would be no secrets at all in the house, I supposed.
I decided I could live with that. The winks and proud looks Leander and Darius gave me—and the look of sour fury that Lucius shot at us all—was proof of that. I could see how things would unfold already. Leander and Darius would be my allies, Lucius my enemy, and Mara the one who tried to keep the peace between us all.
It reminded me of the situation on the frontier, and between the Old Realm and the frontier, for that matter. Our little house was a microcosm of the world.
It seemed only right and fitting. I could definitely live with it.
ChapterSix
The tone for my time in Royersford was set on that very first day. I was certain the tension in the house—both the antagonism with Lucius and the sexual tension with Leander and Darius—would have driven me to distraction, but the course itself was rigorous.
From the moment I sat down in my first morning class in the North Building, my brain was constantly running. Half the time, my feet were running as well. I’d missed the first week, which had been entirely lectures and examinations about the facts and theories of the body and healing, and had arrived just as the student healers began observational visits to the infirmary and trips out to the herb gardens.
We were a long way off from actually touching or treating patients—although I’d actually treated several of the things people were at the infirmary for, including someone who had been stabbed—or from doing the actual work of gardening, picking herbs, and making decoctions that would become medicines.
It was still hard work.
And instead of being able to sit down to lunch that first full day, I was called into Magister Titus’s office to be assigned my student work.
“Nobody expects a citizen of the frontier to know the ins and outs of kingdom bookkeeping,” Magister Titus said from his desk as he sorted through papers without even looking at me, “so I’ll spare you the clerical jobs and have you work in the dining hall kitchens.”
I opened my mouth to protest that I was more than capable of doing any sort of work he gave me, and furthermore, people from the frontier were not a bunch of mouth-breathing idiots.
I held myself back, though, and merely nodded and said, “Yes, Magister.”
Dushka always said that there was no point in trying to convince city-dwellers that wolves were just as sophisticated and intelligent as they were, and that any attempts to do so would only mark you as a threat.
The same principle applied to the Old Realm. If they wanted to underestimate me, they were more than welcome. They might even give me a chance to learn more about the situation in the Old Realm if they assumed I was a dolt.
I was able to use that assumption almost from the start.
To begin with, working in the kitchens, particularly at breakfast, required me to arrive when shipments of foodstuff were being delivered. I was tasked with unloading wagons a few times, and I was shocked by the sparsity of the deliveries.
“Where is the rest of the rice I ordered?” I overheard the head chef argue with the man who had delivered supplies one morning about three weeks after arriving in Royersford.
“That’s all there is,” the delivery man said with a shrug, pushing a sack of rice into my arms. “You’ve got plenty of dried peas, though.”
“And what in hell am I supposed to do with all these dried peas?” the head chef huffed.
“Make pease porridge?” the delivery man suggested.
The head chef merely grumbled and shoved my shoulder to get me to take the sack inside.
The interaction was brief and ostensibly uneventful, but it hit me hard. The Old Realm was experiencing shortages like the kind that refugees from the cities had reported in the early days of the Dying Winter. The men and women who had limped into Kettering, and the other settlements of the Wolf River Kingdom, had told us about rationing and the uneven availability of food and other things.
That had been the first clue that something was wrong last year. Then came the dying.
Of course, the inconsistency of supplies being delivered to the kitchens was likely an aftereffect of the war, famine, and plague that had happened in the Old Realm a few years before. It took time for kingdoms to build up their stores again after hard times. And no student ever went hungry, especially when I was serving. Unlike several of the other student workers, who would heap their friends’ plates full, I tried to be fair and make certain there was enough to go around.
Another hint about the true character of the Old Realm came six weeks after I arrived, during the grand harvest festival that took place throughout Royersford just after the equinox.
“I’ve been waiting for this all summer,” Leander said as our group of housemates left the college to walk up the main thoroughfare of Royersford to the palace, which was where the main activity of the faire was taking place.
Well, the main activity for people of good birth who had connections. The common city-dwellers of Royersford and the poor of the city did their celebrating all through the streets. Honestly, some of their booths and street shows, as well as a few peeks I got through garden walls and inside of taverns as we all walked, hinted that they were having a marvelous time.
We, on the other hand—me, Leander and Darius, Mara, and Lucius by default—had gilded invitations to enjoy the festival inside the palace grounds. We were some of the few students from the college who were lucky enough to be admitted into the grander parts of the festival, all thanks to Mara. None of us had planned to attend the festival from inside the palace, and we’d started making plans for activities that our fellow students were going to, but Mara had interrupted our discussion by plunking five invitations on the middle of the table during study time one night.