Sect Year 0 · eleventh month · night of day 11 · the third life: Marrin Quay, his eighth year
The fig tree grew against the north wall of the stable yard. There, the sun lay longest in summer and the stones gave back their heat after dark. Nobody had planted it. The steward said it had come up through a crack in the mortar the year the old queen died, and the grooms had let it stay because its shade kept the flies off the water trough. Its leaves were broad and rough. In late summer the fruit swelled on the branches until the skins split and showed the red inside, sticky and sweet and full of small grit.
Vesh had been told not to climb the wall. The steward had told him. The head cook had told him, and his mother had told him twice, so he sat on the trough with his back to the warm stones and counted the figs that were ripe enough to pick. That was none. He had counted to nine when a boy dropped from the top of the wall into the straw beside him.
Serel was eleven now. He had grown a hand taller since the spring, and his blue coat had been let out at the seams, and a thin red scratch ran along one cheek where a branch had caught him. He held two figs in his fist. He was out of breath and pleased about it.
“Here.” He held out the bigger one, the one with its skin split down the side. Vesh looked at it and did not move. Serel frowned at him. “Keep the good half. I’ve had my morning.” He broke the other fig in two and ate it in two bites, seeds and all, and then he sat down on the trough, close enough that their shoulders touched.
Vesh took the good half. It was warm from the wall. The inside was soft and pink and gritty between the teeth, and the sweetness came up slowly, the way warmth comes into cold fingers. It was the first kindness he could remember, and he didn’t know what to do with it, so he ate it very slowly. It was gone he pressed the seeds out of the last pulp with his thumb and folded them into a corner of cloth. Then, because nothing had ever been given to him that he wanted to keep.
“Vesh,” Serel said. He said it carefully, as if the word might crack if he set it down wrong. “That’s your name. The head cook calls you the cook’s boy. The steward calls you the boy with the flour. My nurse calls you whatever comes into her head. But that’s your name.”
“My mother says it.”
“Then it’s a real one.” Serel drew a line in the dust of the yard with the toe of his boot. Then he picked up a stick and wrote in the dust beside the line, large and leaning, the letters of the name. The strokes leaned and sagged. “Mine look like a fence falling over. Show me how yours turn.”
Vesh took the stick. He made the letters small and close and let each stroke finish before the next began, and when he had finished, Serel looked at the result with his tongue between his teeth. Then he copied it. He copied it twice, badly, and then a third time, almost right.
“There,” said Serel, pleased with himself. “Now they’re both ours.”
* * *
The well in the kitchen court was older than the kitchen. Its stone lip was worn into a dip where a hundred years of ropes had dragged across it, and the bucket came up dark with grit. The head cook sent Vesh down with the pail every morning, because the steward said the boy could carry as well as any cart. On the third morning of the autumn Vesh dipped a cup at the rim before he poured the pail into the kettle, as boys learn to do when nobody has told them not to.
The water was grey on the tongue. It tasted of rust and of sand, and faintly of old iron. He spat into the drain by the step.
“It’s sand,” he said.
“It’s the palace well.” The head cook came out of the back kitchen with a wet cloth over his shoulder. “The palace drinks it. The palace has drunk it for two hundred years.”
“Then the palace is drinking sand.”
“Drink what you’re given, boy. Boiled.” The cook pointed at the kettle on the hook. “Boiled water doesn’t taste of anything. That’s how you know it’s good.”
So Vesh drank the boiled water, and it did taste of nothing, flat and clean, and after a week he could tell one cup from the other with his eyes shut. He didn’t say so again. He only tasted every cup before he drank it, and watched the others drink without tasting, and kept his face still when a stable hand coughed grey at the bottom of the yard.
* * *
The cough came into the kitchen in the autumn, and it sat down beside the bread oven and did not leave.
His mother coughed at the rack, and then at the table, and then at night on the bench beside the oven. There, the bricks were warmest. He could hear her breath whistle when the ovens were banked and the kitchen fell silent. In the mornings she ground her teeth against the pain before she stood, and she didn’t let him help her up.
Serel’s nurse sent for the palace physician. The physician came in a fur-trimmed collar, looked down the kitchen stairs from the top step. Then he said that a kitchen woman with a cough could be seen at the servants’ sick room by the harbour gate, if she could walk there. Then he went back up the stairs. Teyan could not walk there. She sat on the bench and laughed, and the laugh turned into coughing, and he held the cup for her.
On the first frost Serel came down the back way with a basin of hot water. He carried it in both hands, slopping it on the steps, and the nurse scolded him from the top of the stair in a voice that carried across the whole court.
“I’m carrying it,” Serel said through his teeth. “Let me carry it.”
He set the basin on the bench beside Teyan and stood back, breathing hard, with his coat dark at the front from the spill. Teyan looked at him for a long moment. Then she bent her head over the steam and did not say anything, and Serel did not say anything either. He only went up the stairs slowly, one step at a time, so that the nurse could not hurry him.
“Stay on the warm side,” Teyan told Vesh that night, when he had moved the sack closer to the bench. Her voice was thin. “Don’t stand under the chain. If the king looks at you again, look at the floor, and don’t ask me why. And when you’re frightened, count the loaves. Then eat one.”
“I’m not frightened.”
“Then count them anyway.” She closed her eyes. “Whatever they call you, you’re mine.”
* * *
She died in the middle of winter, at grey dawn, with her back against the warm bricks of the oven. Vesh woke on the sack to a silence that was wrong. The ovens had been banked all night. The fire was low, and her breath had stopped. He sat up and looked at her for a long time, and then he closed her eyes with two fingers the way he had seen the cook close a dead hen’s.
He couldn’t think what came next. So he counted the loaves on the rack by the oven, one, two, three, all the way along, until he reached the end of the row. Then he started again from the beginning, the way she always had.
The steward came through with his rod at the first bell and saw the bench and the shape against the bricks. He stopped. Then he looked at the loaves. “The kitchen does not mourn,” he said. “Work or go to the yard, the pair of you. Nobody cries over a fire.”
Vesh did not move. The steward raised his rod an inch, then let it fall to his side, because someone was coming down the stairs very fast, and it was the prince.
Serel had no coat on. He didn’t look at the bench. He took Vesh by the wrist, not hard, and walked him out of the kitchen, across the frozen court and through the stable gate. The horses shifted in their stalls. The straw was dry and sour and deep, and Serel pushed him down into it, and then sat down in the straw beside him with his knees drawn up under his chin.
“Cry on the straw,” Serel said. “Straw doesn’t tell anyone.”
So Vesh cried into the straw until the horses lost interest in him and his face was cold. Serel did not speak through any of it. He only sat close, with his shoulder against Vesh’s shoulder, just as he had sat on the trough in the summer, and when the crying finally stopped he picked a piece of straw from Vesh’s hair and held it up to the light.
Later the steward gave the cook’s boy a new task. He was to carry the morning bread to the prince’s table, up the back stair and through the long hall, with a cloth over the basket so the flies would not reach it. He told the head cook it was a favour to the nurse. The head cook told Vesh it was the steward’s fault.
“You’ll carry for me,” Serel said at the top of the stair, when Vesh came up the back way with the basket. He hadn’t asked anyone. “You’re the only one who doesn’t drop things.”
* * *
On the way back down that afternoon, Vesh stopped at the stable gate. It was an iron bar set into two posts, black with age and furred with rust at the ends. He took the knuckle of his first finger and struck the bar once, lightly. There, the ring was clearest.
It rang true. The sound went out across the frozen yard and came back off the stable wall.
Serel had followed him down the stair. He stood in the gateway with the basket on his hip, watching. “What are you doing?”
“Making sure it’s still there.”
“What is?”
Vesh struck the bar again. He listened to it until the note had gone out of the iron and into the air, and then he didn’t answer, because he couldn’t have said it in words.
Serel took a fig from his coat pocket. It was the last of the summer’s, dried and wrinkled and sweet with age, and he broke it in half and held out the bigger piece. “When I’m king,” he said, “you’ll have a place at my table. Not the kitchen. The table.”
Vesh took the half. He didn’t eat it. He held the fig seeds that had been saved in a twist of cloth inside his shirt, from the good half of the summer, and he closed his fist around them, and he believed the prince.