Pell had decided to beat the Crown at its own game, and the game, as far as she could see, was hospitality. Lessary people were very good at hospitality when they were paying for it. They laid out long tables with white cloths and silver spoons, and they served six courses of meat that had been roasted to a stranger’s taste, and they never once asked whether the guests had been fed before they came. Pell had no intention of playing by those rules. In the Hold, a guest was fed because she was hungry, and the bread was the same bread the Hands ate, and the envoy would eat it sitting on the same bench as the boy who had carried the stones.
So she laid the envoy’s supper herself, at the end of the long table in the Kitchen, with a board of barley bread still warm from the oven and a crock of goat’s butter beside it. She set down a bowl of barley stew thick with onion, and a plate of Lessary mutton, sliced thin and dark at the edges where the fat had caught. She did not put a cloth on the board. She did not put out a silver spoon. She put out a wooden one, scrubbed white, and a tin cup of the Hold’s own thin ale, and she stood back with her arms folded and watched Ossane sit down.
The envoy studied the board. Then she looked at the bench, which was scrubbed pine and had a crack along one end where a Hand had once sat too hard. Then she looked at Pell.
“Is this the Hold’s supper?” she asked.
“It is the Hold’s supper,” said Pell. “The mutton is from the Lessary road. The bread is the Hold’s own. The butter is from the goats, and the goats are the Hold’s, more or less, depending on which of the Crown’s clerks you ask. Eat it while it is hot, or do not, I shall not be offended. I shall only throw it to the dog.”
Ossane picked up the wooden spoon.
She ate slowly at first. Pell watched her from the oven with her arms folded and her face carefully empty, and she saw the envoy take a mouthful of the barley stew and hold it on her tongue for a long moment, like a woman tasting a wine she has been told to dislike. Then she swallowed. She put the spoon down. She picked up a slice of the bread and broke it, and looked at the crumb, and smelled it, very carefully, with her eyes half closed.
Then she ate more. She ate a great deal more. She ate the stew to the bottom of the bowl and mopped the bowl clean with a heel of the barley loaf and ate that as well, and she took a slice of the mutton and ate it without looking at it, and she took a second slice, and by the time she had finished the cup of ale her cheeks had a faint colour in them that Pell had not seen since the envoy had come up the causeway.
The envoy did not speak for the first mouthful. She sat with her spoon raised and her grey eyes on the bowl, and Pell, who had not meant to watch, found she had stopped moving and was watching too. It was the look of a woman who had been brought to a table by a long road and had not expected to be fed at the end of it. Then the spoon went in and came out again, and the envoy closed her eyes for a moment, as though she had heard something a long way off that she had been trying to remember.
“What is the bread made of?” Ossane asked.
“Barley,” said Pell. “Ground in the Hold’s own mill, which is a mill the Lessary Crown has never seen, because the Crown has never once come up the hill in daylight. Water from the Sallow. Salt from the marsh, which the Crown taxes. And a pinch of goat’s milk, which the Crown does not know about, and which I will not tell it, because it would only want to count the goats.”
“It tastes of the marsh,” said Ossane.
Pell stared at her. Then, very slowly, a broad pleased grin spread across her face, the kind of grin she had not worn since the Kitchen had been put in order in the summer. “Does it?” she said. “Does it really?”
“It does. I did not expect it. The salt is strong, and the grain is old, and there is a flavour under the crust like river-mud after a rain. I think it is the best thing a Lessary woman has eaten in a year.” Ossane wiped her fingers on a cloth. “Is that the lie? That the bread is marsh and not Hold? I think it is.”
“No,” said Pell, cheerfully. “I am not going to tell you the bread is the Crown’s grain.”
“Then that is the lie,” said Ossane, and laughed.
“It is not the lie,” said Pell, rather put out. “The lie is that I said the bread was from the Crown’s grain. I had it all ready. I was going to say it with a straight face and then watch you swallow it, and you would have been very cross with me in the morning.”
“I know the Crown’s grain,” said Ossane. “The Crown has counted every sack of it, Cook. Every sack that comes into the Hold’s granary is written in the Crown’s ledger, down to the last pinch. The number, as the Crown has it, is three hundred and twenty.”
“That is a lie,” said Pell, and then, because she could not help herself, “it is not three hundred and twenty. It is three hundred and forty. Or it was, on the morning of the gate.”
“There,” said Ossane, quite pleased. “You have admitted it a line later, as the Hold always does. Your Clerk told me you would.” She picked up the cup and drank the last of the ale. “It was a good lie, Cook. It was the best I have heard in Ormhold, and I have heard the Warden say the Crown’s grain in a voice like a bell. I shall remember it.”
“Remember the bread,” said Pell, rather gruffly. “Remember what you ate. That is the only thing I want written in your book.”
Ossane put down the cup. She looked at the empty board. Then she set her hands flat on either side of it, the way she had set them beside the bowl in the Great Hall, and her face changed. It did not harden. It only went quieter, the way a room goes quiet when someone has come to the door with a letter that must be read.
“The Writ of Vermin is being drafted in Sallowmere,” she said. “I should tell you that, Cook, because you will hear it from your own men before the week is out, and I should rather you heard it from me. The Chancellor has signed the draft. The Assembly has not yet voted, but it will. The Writ names the Mantle as vermin, as an unentered creature that the Crown may take, and it orders the Hold’s men to be stood down. It requires the Crown’s Hunt-wardens to take the creature alive, for the Crown’s inspection.”
Pell’s hand went still on her hip. “Alive,” she said.
“Alive,” said Ossane. “As a specimen. For the Crown’s own study. The Chancellor is very fond of studies.” She paused. “The Hunt-wardens will come up the causeway in grey. I have seen them ride. They do not make a great noise. They do not carry flags. They come up in a line, and they come up quietly, and they are very patient, Cook, and grey is the last colour the marsh sees before the reeds take it.”
Pell did not answer for a moment. Then she unfolded her arms and went to the board and gathered the empty bowls, slowly, one by one, and stacked them on the tray. Her hands were not steady. Her face had gone pale under its flour.
“And what do the Hunt-wardens eat?” she asked, very quietly. “On the road, up the causeway, in the grey. What do they bring, when they come to take a creature alive?”
“They eat what the Crown sends them,” said Ossane. “Which is nothing, Cook. The Crown sends paper. The Hunt-wardens are paid in promises and fed from their own saddlebags, and when the saddlebags are empty, they are fed by whoever is in the nearest kitchen, if they are lucky. I have never known a Hunt-warden who was not hungry.”
Pell set the tray down. She stood for a moment with her hands flat on the scrubbed pine and her head bowed, and Ossane, watching her, did not say anything at all.
Then the cook straightened up, and went to the bread-board, and took the second loaf from the oven rack, where it had been keeping warm under a cloth. She set it on the envoy’s board, in front of the empty bowl, without a word. She would not meet Ossane’s eye. She turned round, pulled her apron straight, and walked out through the Kitchen door into the court without a backward glance.
Ossane looked at the loaf. She reached out, very slowly, and touched its crust with one finger, as if testing whether it was still warm.
“Where are you going?” she called after the cook, in a voice that was quite unlike her lawyer’s voice.
“To find the mutton,” said Pell’s voice from the court. “I have not stolen the last of it yet, and I am not going to let a Hunt-warden in grey have it while he is still hungry.”