Pell had promised the envoy a feast, and a promise made to a Lessary woman in front of nine Hands and a dog was a promise that could not be taken back without losing face in the Kitchen for a year. So she went down to the granary at first light with a lamp in one hand, a tally-stick in the other, and her sleeves rolled to the elbow, and she counted.
She counted the way her mother had taught her in the house on the hill above the harbour, with the flat of the hand and no mercy. You did not count sacks by looking at them. Sacks lied. They looked full from the top and empty from the side, and a clever granary-man could stack a row of hollow ones in front of a row of full ones and cheat a whole town in a morning. You had to put your hand on each sack and feel the weight of the grain through the burlap, and you had to lift the corner of each one, and you had to smell the grain, because a sack that smelled of damp was a sack that would be mouldy by the spring.
She started at the door. The first row was full. The second row was full. The third row was full, but it had a fat, purposeful bulge in its middle sack, and when she lifted the corner of that one she found a Lessary mouse’s nest in the grain, very neatly made, with the mouse’s own bed of dried barley-husk and a single shining scrap of tin that had once been the lid of a Kitchen pan. Pell looked at the scrap for a long moment. Then she shook the nest out onto the floor, put the scrap in her apron pocket, and went on.
By the fourth row she had stopped lying to herself.
The granary was not full. It was not even half-full in the way a Hold needed it to be full before a winter. The Hold had eaten through the summer, as Hands do when they carry stone from dawn to dusk and sit in a Chamber all afternoon arguing over bread. It had eaten through the share-days, and the envoy’s escort, and the herald’s ten sacks, and Pim’s double share, and the goats, and the dog. It had eaten a great deal. The sacks left in the pit were the sacks it had not yet got round to eating, and there were some two hundred fewer of them than there ought to have been at this time of year, if the Hold had been counting properly.
Pell counted properly. There were three hundred and eighty.
She put her hand flat on the last sack in the row and leaned on it with her whole weight, and it gave under her palm with a soft, honest sigh, like a loaf that has been left too long on the sill.
“Three hundred and eighty,” she said aloud, to the lamp.
Tallow came down the wooden steps behind her, with the Register under one arm and his pen behind his ear, because he had heard the lamp move and known who was carrying it. He stopped on the last step and looked at her. He had the face he wore for an inconvenient range.
“Three hundred and eighty,” he agreed. “The granary holds three hundred and eighty sacks, Pell. That is the figure in the book.”
“It is full,” said Pell.
“It is not full. It holds three hundred and eighty sacks. It has held three hundred and eighty since the first share-day, and it is not the granary’s fault that the number is smaller than it used to be.”
“It is full in a kitchen,” said Pell, folding her arms. “That is what full means. A kitchen does not have a number for full. A kitchen has a feeling, and the feeling is that there is enough bread to last until the next time someone comes up the causeway with a Lessary face and wants feeding. Three hundred and eighty is the same as full, Clerk. I have cooked for three hundred and eighty mouths before.”
“You have cooked for three hundred and eighty mouths in a single morning,” said Tallow, “and then sent the rest of us out to the marsh for more salt.”
“That is why I need a feast,” said Pell, and then, because she could not hold it any longer, she laughed, short and sharp, and sat down on the nearest sack with the lamp in her lap. “Oh, Tallow. Oh, my dear mean little ledger of a man. Do you know what I did? I promised the Crown a supper of the Hold’s own grain. The Hold’s own mutton. The Hold’s own bread.”
“And the Hold has none of those things.”
“The Hold has the mutton,” said Pell. “I stole it, from the collector’s cart on the Lessary Road, the week before the envoy’s train, and I have been hiding it in the cold-cellar under a sack of salt, where the Warden will not look for it, because he thinks the cellar is for beer.”
“The mutton is a Lessary sheep,” said Tallow, writing without looking down. “The Register records that the Crown’s sheep is in the Hold’s cellar. The range of its theft is one.”
“Write it down, then,” said Pell, “and tell the Warden I said the envoy will eat from the Lessary carts.”
Tallow looked up.
“I said that to the Warden this morning,” Pell said, quite cheerfully, “in the court, with the carts in full view. I told him the envoy and her clerks would eat from their own carts and their own provisions, the Crown’s own bread, because the Crown would not dare to eat a Hold loaf. He believed me. He is very trusting, the boy. He would believe a sheep if it told him the time.”
“That is a lie.”
“Of course it is a lie,” said Pell. “It is a good one. I will admit it in a line or two.”
She did, too, as though she had been waiting all morning to hand the admission over. She got up from the sack, shaking out her skirts, and went back up the steps with the lamp, and at the top she turned round and called down, very loudly, so the whole court could hear it: “The granary is short, the mutton is the collector’s, the envoy’s supper is a wager, and the Warden knows nothing about any of it. Write that in the book, Tallow. Put it in the cellar with the sheep.”
Tallow wrote it in the book.
By the time she reached the Kitchen the whole of the Hold seemed to have heard her. The Hands were gathering at the long table by the hearth, the way they gathered for a cook’s argument, with their elbows on the boards and their faces turned toward the oven like men at a play. Gaunt had come in from the forge with his leather apron still on and his arms folded, and he was grinning, which he rarely did in front of anyone who had not yet earned it. Harrow stood by the window with his hands behind his back and his eyes on the granary door, counting the steps Pell had climbed. Korrin sat on the bench with his back to the wall. Sella was at the end of the table, writing. Ysra had not come in at all, but Pell could hear her in the passage, counting the bricks in the floor.
“Tell us the wager,” said Gaunt.
“It is not a wager,” said Pell. “It is an argument with a supper on the end of it. The Crown will be too proud to eat Hold food. That is what the wager is. The envoy will sit at my table, in the Hold’s own Hall, and she will look at the barley and the mutton and the bread, and she will think, I shall not eat that, because she is a Lessary woman and it is beneath her. And then she will smell it, and she will eat it. That is the bet.”
“You are going to make the Crown eat our mutton,” said Gaunt, delighted.
“I am going to make the Crown eat its own mutton,” said Pell, “served on our own plates, and let it choke on the Hold’s manners while it is about it.”
Gaunt threw back his head and laughed, a huge, creaking laugh that shook the rafters. “The most entertaining thing I have seen since this Hold was built,” he said.
“You have seen nothing since this Hold was built,” said Pell, “except the inside of your own forge, and the back of your own objection.”
Tamsin, by the hearth, said softly, “Pell is lying again.”
“I am not lying,” said Pell.
“You have been lying since you woke,” said Tamsin, “and you have been very kind about it, and I think that is the only sort of lie the Hold has any use for.”
Pell opened her mouth to answer, and found, to her irritation, that she had nothing to say. She turned to the table instead and took up the envoy’s feast list, which had come up from the gatehouse that morning in Tallow’s own hand, with the envoy’s additions in another. It was a long list. It had the bread and the barley, the mutton and the onions, the salt and the beer, all in the proper order, with a note against each item in the margin. At the very bottom of the page, under the last line, there was a single request in a clear upright hand that was not Tallow’s.
I would be glad of a meeting with the Hold’s cook, at her convenience, on the matter of the tenant.
The word tenant had been underlined twice. The line had been drawn hard enough to tear the paper a little at the end.
Pell read it twice. Then she folded the list in half, very neatly, and put it into the pocket of her apron, next to the pan-lid scrap from the mouse’s nest, and turned back to the oven with her back very straight.
“She wants to talk to the cook,” said Pell, to nobody. “Well. I am the cook. And I know the difference between a tenant and a guest, and I am not going to tell her which one the Hold is.”