Pell folded at the stove.
She did not fall as a person falls. She went down the way bread goes down when it has risen too far and the crust gives under its own weight, all at once and without a sound until the last moment. One breath she was standing with her hand on the rim of the broth pot, and the next she was on the flags with her cheek against the cold stone, and the Kitchen’s ceiling was turning slowly above her, like the spit on the fire when nobody has remembered to wind it.
She could hear the Hunger in the walls. It sounded like a bucket being emptied in the next room, a long slow glug and a clatter and then another, and under it a thin high note that she could not place and did not like.
She lay still and thought about the pot. It was still on the stove. She could see it from where she was lying, a dark round bulk against the lamplight, and she could smell the broth catching on the bottom, which meant somebody had to get up and stir it or it would stick. She was the somebody. She had always been the somebody. She had been the somebody for two hundred years, in the builder lines and in the Kitchen and on the Hall’s back stair with her arms full of bread, and she was not going to be the somebody who lay on the flags…
