Pell did not let a boy starve on a principle. She had never let one starve in her life, not in the market at Sallowmere when she was a girl with her hair in a rag and her mother selling buns from a barrow, and not at the back door of a Lessary bakehouse, where she had scrubbed ovens for cold porridge. The principle was simple. You fed the boy, and then you asked him what he had been doing in your yard, and by then he was too full to lie about it.
So she fed Corran Kell. She sat him at the end of the long kitchen table with his splinted arm propped on a folded cloth and his good hand round a bowl of mutton broth, and she put a loaf in front of him, and she stood over him with her arms folded while he ate it.
He ate the first loaf in silence, with the speed of a boy who has been hungry for longer than he has been polite. He ate the second more slowly. By the third he had stopped looking at the door and begun looking at the bread, and when Pell cut the fourth and put it in front of him he hesitated, his eyes going from the crust to her face and back again, as though the loaf might be a trick.
“It’s bread,” said Pell. “Eat it.”
“I’ve had three.”
“I counted them,” said Pell. “You’ve had three and a half, and the half was on your sleeve, and I’d like it back in your belly by the time the sun’s up. Eat.”
He ate. She watched him with the satisfaction of a woman who has been right about a number. He was thinner than he ought to have been, even for the marsh. His wrists were all bone under the cuffs of his shirt, and the skin across his cheekbones had the stretched, waxy look that comes from a winter without much fat. She could see the marks of old beatings along his forearms and the back of his neck, faded and yellow, the sort a man leaves on a boy who has been let out of the house only to fetch water. He had a cut on his lower lip that had scabbed over and split again.
“You’re a little boy,” said Pell, without any particular malice.
“I’m not little.”
“You’re little for fifteen,” said Pell, “and you’re fifteen, according to Harrow, who never lies about a number even when it would be kinder. So you’re a little boy with a broken arm who’s eaten three loaves and a half and is still looking at the fourth like it might bite him.”
Corran swallowed. He put his good hand flat on the table beside his bowl. “What did you do to my arm?”
“I set the bone, and I bound it with oak, and I told you it was no worse than a sprain.” Pell poked the splint with one finger and watched him wince. “It’s not a sprain. It’s a broken bone, and the bone’s knit crooked, and you’ll have a bend in it all your life if you don’t keep still for the next thirty days. Your marsh-men will be here in a day or two, I expect. They’ll be coming with salt. Great boats full of it, all the way up the river from the Coldharbour side, and they’ll pay you a fair price for your arm, and you’ll be back on the reeds in a week, mending your net.”
Corran stared at her. Then he said, quite flatly, “There aren’t any salt boats.”
“There are.”
“There’s no salt boats this month. Not on the river. There’s been none since the frost. My uncle’s been trying to get salt from the Coldharbour side for a month and the boats have all gone to Lantern Ford, to the toll, and the toll-men won’t let a marsh boat past without a Lessary seal.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “You’re a bad liar.”
“I’m a wonderful liar,” said Pell. “I’m the best liar in the north of the Sallow. I’ve told a Lessary magistrate his pie was the best in Sallowmere and he ate the whole of it and paid me double.”
“It wasn’t.”
“It wasn’t,” agreed Pell, after a moment’s thought. “It was terrible. But he thought he was getting something, and I thought I was giving it, and the two of us went off happy. That’s all a lie is.” She sniffed. “And I’m a bad liar about the salt boats, and you’re right. There’s no salt boats. I made them up, so you’d be easy in your mind. That was a kindness. It was also a lie. I don’t like it when I’ve done both at once.”
Corran laughed.
It came out of him suddenly, a sharp, startled, unwilling sound, and then he seemed to be unable to stop it. He bent over the table with his good hand over his mouth and his splinted arm pressed to his chest, and he laughed until the tears came into his grey-green eyes, and the sound of it went round the kitchen and into the rafters and came back. Pell watched him with her arms still folded and a small hard knot in her throat that she did not intend to acknowledge.
“That’s the first time I’ve heard you laugh,” she said, when he had got his breath back.
“I didn’t laugh.”
“You did. It was a very bad laugh. It sounded like a goat with a cold.” She unfolded her arms and took the bowl away, and wiped the table with her apron, and did not turn to him. “Don’t do it again in front of the Chamber. They’ll think I’ve been feeding you on jokes.”
They sat for a while without speaking. The kitchen was warm now, from the oven that had been lit that morning with the cold ash swept out and a proper fire of dry reed and split wood laid in its mouth. The bread was rising in its tins on the rack. Outside the north windows the sky was pale and bright, and a wind came off the marsh in gusts, rattling the shutters on their pins.
“Why is the gate alive?” said Corran.
Pell looked up. “What?”
“The gate. My uncle says it’s alive. He says it’s a thing that was made to keep out the marsh, and it’s been listening to the Hold for two hundred years, and now the Hold’s got a prince, and the gate’s got a voice in it, and it’s done what the prince says.” He was frowning, his head on one side. “Is that true?”
Pell considered the question for longer than she had considered anything in days. She thought about the bread on the rack, and the yeast in it, and the sour smell of the starter in its pot.
“It’s the same as the bread,” she said at last. “You can’t see the yeast. You put it in, and you leave it in the warm, and it does what it does, and you don’t see it doing it. But when you come back in the morning, the loaf’s risen. The gate’s the same. It’s been rising in the dark for two hundred years, and nobody’s been looking at it, and now the prince has come up the hill and knocked on the door, and the whole thing’s gone up under his hand.”
Corran thought about this. “So it’s alive.”
“It’s warm,” said Pell. “That’s what I know. You put your hand on it and it’s warm as a loaf is warm, and it doesn’t tell you what it wants. That’s the trouble with things that rise. They never tell you the recipe.”
He nodded slowly. “I want to see the wall,” he said. “Properly, from the top, where the sentry stands. I want to see the causeway from there, and the reeds, and where my uncle’s boats are kept. I want to see if he’s coming.”
“You can see from the kitchen step,” said Pell. “There’s the sky, and there’s the marsh, and there’s the river, and there’s the gate, and if your uncle comes up the hill with a boat full of salt I’ll shout.”
“I want to go home.”
Pell said nothing for a moment. The boy’s face had changed. The laughter had gone out of it, and what was left was tired and young and afraid, and it was not a face she wanted to look at for long.
“Do you?” she said.
“I want to.” He looked down at the splint. “But if I go home now, my uncle will take the blame for the three men on the causeway, and the Hold will take it out on him, and my mam will have no one to cut the reed for her. And I can’t go back to the house, not with my arm in this. They’ll say it was the prince’s men who did it. They’ll say I was taken, and I came back broken, and that’s the Hold’s fault.” He swallowed. “I don’t want to go home with a broken arm and a story they won’t believe.”
“So you’ll stay here.”
“I don’t know,” said Corran. “I don’t know what I’ll do.”
Pell pulled a stool across the flags and sat down on it beside him, heavily, with a grunt. She put one floury hand on the table next to his good arm, not touching him.
“Then you’ll sleep in the Kitchen,” she said. “Tonight, and the next, until you know. That’s my decision. It’s not the Chamber’s. The Chamber hasn’t made one yet, and the Chamber can’t make one till the Hands have worked out how to count themselves, and that’s a week, I expect, or a month, and I’m not going to let you sleep on the causeway in the wet while they argue about it. You’ll have the bench by the oven. It’s warm. And if anybody asks you what you’re doing in my kitchen, you tell them the cook is feeding you and you’re not to be sent anywhere until you’ve eaten.”
Corran looked at her, and his grey-green eyes were wet again, but he did not let them spill over.
“Does the Hold’s bread come from marsh grain?” he asked.
“Our grain comes from the Crown’s stores,” said Pell. “Four hundred sacks of it, mostly mice. Where the Crown got it, I couldn’t tell you.”
“Marsh doesn’t grow grain,” said Corran. “It grows reeds, and nothing else. My mam says the marsh grows nothing but reeds and grief.”
“Does she?” said Pell, delighted. “I say that about Lessary. Every day I say it. They never listen.”
“She says it about the marsh, too,” said Corran, and then he began, very quietly, to laugh again.
They were still laughing, the boy with his face in his good hand and the cook with her floury knuckles pressed to her mouth, when the oven door at the end of the kitchen swung open on its own, slowly and heavily, on its hinges, and banged shut again with a crack that made them both jump.
Pell stood up. She went to the oven and put her hand on the iron door and found it hot. She opened it. The loaves inside had not yet been set in. The fire roared in the mouth of the oven, bright and clean, and the heat rolled out over her face. But on the rack beside it, where the tins had been rising all morning under their cloths, the bread had gone flat.
She stared at it. The loaves had sunk in their tins like cakes left out in a draught. There was no crust on them and no sheen, only a sad, grey, wrinkled skin, and when she pressed one with her thumb it gave under her touch and did not spring back.
“That’s never happened,” said Pell softly.
“What is it?” Corran had got up, his good hand on the table to steady himself. He came to stand beside her and looked at the rack. “Is it the gate?”
“It’s the gate,” said Pell, and her voice was steady, though her hand had begun to tremble on the oven door. “The gate does what it’s told. Everybody knows that.” She looked at the boy. “But it’s never once in my life done anything I didn’t ask it to.”
Corran’s face had gone very pale. “Will it let me leave?” he said. “The gate? If I ask it?”
Pell did not answer straight away. She stood in the warm, bright, dreadful kitchen, with the flat bread on its rack and the boy beside her, and she thought about the arch and the chain and the oak doors that had come up out of the stone. Then she shut the oven door, very carefully, with the flat of her hand, and turned round.
“You’ll have to ask it yourself,” said Pell, “and see what it says back.”