Chapter 269: Dinner With The Kings

Morgana did not notice. She was telling Thorne about the time Garrick had caught a stable boy dozing in the hay loft and had dumped a bucket of cold water on him from the rafters. She laughed at the end of it, bright and unguarded, and the candles bent a little further.

Draeven’s eyes lifted.

Kaelen had seen it. He was frozen with a forkful of pheasant halfway to his mouth, his gaze fixed on the glass. Thorne, across the table, had gone perfectly motionless, his face a mask, and beneath the table the shadows around his boots spread outward until they covered the rug, curling lightly around the legs of Morgana’s chair.

She is already becoming visible, Astraea had said.

Three men sat in a warm room around a single table with a girl who was laughing, and not one of them said a word. Kaelen put down his fork. He picked up his wine and drank too much of it, with great concentration, as though it were a task. Thorne turned his face to the fire. The shadows pulled in.

The glass finished steaming and went still.

The candles straightened.

"What?" Morgana asked.

She had stopped, mid-story, and was looking at each of them in turn. Her smile faltered.

"Nothing," said Draeven. His voice, to his own surprise, was steady. "You were telling us about the bucket."

"I was." She hesitated. "You all looked very strange."

"It was an unusually good bucket," said Thorne.

She stared at him. Then a laugh burst out of her again, and the tension dissolved, and the candlelight steadied over her hair. She picked up her water, drank half of it without looking, and went back to her story.

Draeven watched the empty glass.

Days, Astraea had said. Perhaps weeks. Perhaps less.

He looked at Kaelen. Kaelen looked back, and his eyes were very blue and very afraid.

Not tonight, Draeven told him, with his whole face. Let her have tonight.

Kaelen set his jaw. He nodded, once.

"How do you do it?"

It was Kaelen who asked, after the pheasant had been cleared and a dish of baked apples sent in, steaming, with cream. He was leaning back in his chair with his boots stretched toward the fire. The wine had loosened him, and the question came out easy and curious, a thing he could not have stopped himself from asking if he’d tried.

"Do what?"

"With animals." He waved a hand. "Garrick says nothing else could touch that stallion. And you come in, and he lies down in a courtyard." He shook his head. "It’s uncanny. I’ve known men who’ve spent their lives with horses who couldn’t manage it."

Draeven’s eyes flicked to him.

Thorne’s went to his plate.

Morgana’s spoon stopped halfway to her mouth.

"I don’t know," she said.

"You must have some..."

"My Ma used to say," she began, and then did not finish.

The fire popped.

She had said it without thinking. It had been waiting there on her tongue, an old warm piece of her childhood, and it had slipped out the way a coin slips from a pocket. She heard it in the quiet and knew at once where it led.

Ma used to say I had a way with things. Ma had a garden. Things grew for her. Things grew for me.

"Never show them."

Her hand tightened on the spoon.

"My Ma used to say," she said again, carefully, "that animals can tell. When you’re afraid. When you’re not. That’s all it is." She lifted a shoulder. "I talked to the carter’s mule. And our goat. They liked me well enough."

"A goat," said Kaelen.

"A very opinionated one."

"I see."

She smiled, and it felt like a plank across a river, thin and brittle.

"Is the bread from the east kitchens?" she said. "I’ve been wondering. It’s very good."

For one long heartbeat, no one spoke.

She felt their eyes, not hard, not suspicious, only careful. They were looking at her the way one looks at a shy bird that has landed on a sill. Do not startle it.

"It is Agnes’s," said Draeven.

She turned.

His gaze was warm and steady, and he had picked up a piece of the bread and was turning it in his fingers. "She bakes it herself every second morning, from a recipe she will not give the cook. The kitchen believes she pays off the miller to guard it."

"Does she?"

"She told me once she’d rather be hanged."

"I believe it."

"So do I." He bit into the bread and chewed, and gave her a look of deep gravity. "I have tried to bribe her with a seat on the council. She laughed in my face."

Morgana laughed. It came out thin at first, then truer, and the bridge she had been standing on seemed to widen under her feet.

"She would be good on the council," she said.

"She would run it," said Thorne.

"She would run it better," said Kaelen.

The room warmed again. The candles burned straight. Kaelen reached for the cream, with a faint flush along his cheekbones, and she thought he looked like a boy who had said a wrong word and been quietly forgiven. He glanced at her once, quick, apologetic. She gave him the smallest shake of her head.

It’s all right, it said.

He let out a breath.

Across the table, Thorne was watching her. His dark eyes were thoughtful, and there was something in them she could not name. It wasn’t suspicion. It was closer to tenderness, wrapped in something harder, like a man holding a flame with both hands.

She looked down at her bowl.

The baked apple was sweet and soft and sharp with cinnamon. She ate it slowly and tasted every bite.

It ended the way good evenings do, a little at a time.

The apples were cleared. The wine went down. Kaelen told a long and wholly implausible tale about a bear and a bishop. Thorne corrected him twice, in a single dry word each, and Kaelen threw a plum at him. Draeven caught it, examined it gravely, and ate it. The fire burned lower and the candles guttered. Somewhere in the palace a bell rang, and she realized with a faint shock that the hour was late.