Pell made a last pot of soup the night before the answer, because a refusal was a meal that ought to be eaten warm, and she had never in her life sent a guest away on an empty stomach, not even a Crown’s marshal.
She had the big iron pot on the back ring by the ninth bell, with a ham-bone in it that the Thornwick carters had brought up in a sack as a gift and had not asked to have back. She had leeks from the Lowgate garden and the last of the winter barley and a fistful of dried marsh herbs that tasted of mud and salt and a long-gone summer. The Kitchen smelled of it. The steam rolled up off the pot in a slow grey tide, and it clung to the rafters and the hanging hams and the copper pans in their rows, and it made the whole room soft and dim, like the inside of a loaf.
The children had come in from the cold by the back door. There were six of them, from the lanes behind the goat-pens, and two of them were brothers and one was a girl who had lost a tooth that week and kept touching the gap with her tongue. They had come to watch the fire. Pell had let them, because a fire was a thing a child ought to be allowed to watch when the Hold was afraid, and because children did not notice the difference…
