by S E Zbasnik
Though… Hayley chewed on her bread, barely tasting this impossible feast as she bunched a hand to her chin. Something that shiny, that size…it’d get her a couple groats, maybe even a gold noble. She might be able to get herself some place out of the sewers with that kind of backing to the other gangs running through the streets.
“Elbows off the table,” Gavin suddenly said, snapping Hayley awake. She sat up fast, causing both her apparently offensive elbows to slide into her lap.
“Wha…? How come?” Jamming the last of the bread into her mouth, she twisted the filthy elbow around and pointed at it. Crumbs sprayed out of her lips as she said around a bolus of bread, “Wha’s wron’ wif ‘em?”
Her knight groaned deeply while he delicately ripped off his own hunk of bread. Despite being built like an ox everything he did was delicate. Hayley half expected him to wear nothing but silk under his clothing. For a moment the image of his muscle-swamped body bound in tight white silk flashed through her brain and her cheeks lit up bright red.
Unaware of her thoughts, Gavin sighed, “Because it is not proper to eat with one's elbows on the table.”
Proper this. Proper that. Hayley dug her fingers up under her hat, trying to scratch away at her scalp when she felt more glares. “Let me guess, it ain’t proper to itch neither. Can one do anything at a proper table but sit like a dead fish and hope no one stabs you as the dinner?”
A giggle erupted not from Gavin, it’d shock her stone dead if he could giggle, but out of Ania. She blanched a moment when the knight trying to teach proper eating etiquette turned his pinprick glare on the girl who didn’t deserve it.
“Squire,” the poor, put upon man sighed, “you will be expected to dine at the table with gentry. Lords and Ladies who have spent their entire lives around such rules. I do not tell you this to put an undue burden upon your head.”
Hayley sneered, gave another itch to her scalp, then bundled both her hands in her lap. “Is that why you’re so testy all the time?” she muttered to herself, causing Gavin to look over at her hoping for elaboration. “Cause you ain’t a Lord?”
His eyes widened, though she couldn’t tell if it was in surprise or due to him wanting to smack her upside the head. She knew enough to know people without titles didn’t like being reminded of it. Gavin paused in his chewing, careful to swallow every offending crumb before speaking.
It was a softer, breathy voice that said, “Yes. The waters are often choppy for those of us not born into it.” There was a lot in there, Hayley could feel it. She suddenly wanted to ask a hundred questions, but when his fiery amber stare shifted over to her, Hayley sunk deeper and shut her mouth.
“I give you a warning,” Gavin said, blotting off some stew that clung to the whiskers along his jaw, “so you can prepare yourself for anything you might face.”
What did it matter if she ate with her elbows on a table? In a week’s time, she’d be eating where there were no tables, and no one to get their knickers knotted up for her using her hands. The side of Hayley’s eye swung over to the silver knife, still slathered in butter.
Clattering his hands to the table before him, Gavin said, “I have finished my meal, and it seems you have as well. I suggest you get yourself cleaned up and then to bed. Tomorrow will be…rough for your body.”
“You said it was an easy day,” Hayley complained, not wanting to rise away from the shiny.
“It isn’t the work tomorrow that will burn through you,” he said so cryptically she wanted to whack him with the bread. Standing at attention, Gavin moved towards Hayley as if he’d scoop her up and carry her out like the fighting dummy.
“Uh,” she reached for his bowl and hers, slapping them together, “I’ll clean up.”
“That isn’t necessary,” Gavin began before he stared over from Hayley’s arms stuffed with all the bowls to Ania watching. The girl’s eyes were narrowed but she didn’t say a word. “Very well,” he relented. “Do you know how to clean bowls?”
“I…” Hayley wafted on her feet, her arms trying to expand to fit the mass of bowls clutched inside like a family of chicks. “I’ll figure it out.”
“Ania,” he spoke over her head to the girl, “could you be kind enough to show her?”
She bobbed her head and rose from the table. “Of course.” Frilling out her skirts, Ania curtsied then reached for Hayley’s mass.
“Uh,” Hayley shifted away, “Not smart. I think…whoa! That one’s about to! Nope, no, got it. We’re all good!” She smiled wide, proud to have locked the bowls back in place.
“This way,” Ania said, directing the girl trying to juggle too much through a couple of doorways. There wasn’t any hearth big enough to hold a cooking pot, but a smaller fire rested at the end of the room. To that Ania walked, rolling up the sleeves of her dress as she plucked up a bucket full of black water.
“Here…” This time Hayley let the experienced girl pick up the bowls one by one. “By the way,” Ania continued, “next time it’s easier to stack them all inside. See how they fit…”
Hayley nodded her head as if it was the wisest advice she’d been given today. One by one, each of the empty bowls vanished to its cold, watery grave. Ania scooped the unused compotes into some larger bowl, then covered that all up safely with a towel. “If they are not eaten soon, I fear it’ll be destined for the pigs. No one seems to ever want to try the pepper jelly.”
The girl sounded defeated, as if every person at the estate was trying to scorn her. Sliding in quick beside, Hayley dipped her finger into the unnaturally green mass. Before she let common sense stop her dead, she jammed the goo into her mouth and swallowed. A gentle sweetness struck her first, a bit like the pickled veg sometimes found at the back of people’s cabinets. Nodding her head, Hayley was about to compliment it when a fire broke out on her tongue.
Sweat burst from her bright red forehead, the flush traveling clean down her face and body. Gasping for relief, Hayley fanned at her face when Ania dunked a ladle into the water bucket. Even drinking all of that, and another two refills couldn’t tamp down the fire. “That’s…”
Ania laughed at Hayley’s tongue burned to a cinder from the pepper’s heat. Damn it! “You,” Hayley sputtered, “you did that on purpose!”
Lifting her shoulder, Ania took an even greater finger dip than Hayley and swallowed it down quick. “No,” she said, her lips fanned out in a great smile before a rosy burn traveled across her face to butt up right against the white mark. In a shared pain, both girls laughed at the other.
It felt nice. Hayley could remember her cynical laughs, her laughs of misfortune, her chuckles at herself or authority, but this was… It didn’t matter.
Ania plunged both hands deep into the bucket, cleaning off the bowls. Hayley stepped closer, watching. “How about I do that part?” For a beat, the girl’s glowing eyes turned cautious, when Hayley jabbed to the side, “You can dry?”
That seemed to be the right answer, causing Ania to nod and smile. Just before she went to yank up a towel drying on the hearthstones, Hayley said, “Oh yeah!” Deliberately she fished into her pocket to yank out the silver knife. “Wouldn’t want to forget this.” Opening up her hands, she dropped the treasure into the watery grave — well aware how the girl watched it.
Hayley managed to get the bowls all scrubbed, laying each out for Ania, while she whistled to herself. It wasn’t until they were nearly done that Ania interrupted the jaunty song to ask, “From where do you hail?”
“Where do I…?” She placed the silver knife safely in Ania’s rubbing hands. “Oh, where do I come from. Duh. I…he picked me up at Ostmount.” Hayley said it all with a breeze, turning to lean her back against the spread of drying bowls. “What about you?”
“I have not been to the city in many years,” Ania didn’t answer the question, at least not the one Hayley asked. She finished buffing up the silver knife and draped the towel over the hearthstones.
“So you’re from Ostmount?” she tried to pic
k up the line of conversation.
“No.” For the first time, Ania showed discomfort, including her eating an entire palmful of pepper goo. Shifting in place, she bit on her lip. “I am from elsewhere.”
“Oh, I know elsewhere,” Hayley nodded, “It’s next to the city of somewhere.”
“What?”
“Roundabout nowhere but, you know, everyone always talks about anywhere instead.”
Ania giggled at the foolishness. “You are an odd one.”
“Don’t I know it,” Hayley shrugged. She reached out to shake Ania’s hand, but in doing so accidentally flicked some of the mud from her shirt onto the pool girl’s face. “Oh no!”
Yanking off the drying towels, Hayley tried to scrub off the mud splattered over her white mark, Ania batting at her hands as she shifted in place. “Wait, wait, there I got it!” Leaning back proud, Hayley moved to lay the towels down over the table of drying silverware, when she eyed up the mud now speckled over the filthy drying towels.
“For all the saints in…” Hayley groaned, “I am so terrible at this.” To try and hide her mistake, she bundled the towel up tight in her fist.
“It’s no matter, you are to bathe. Perhaps you can wash it along with yourself,” Ania said, clearly looking flustered by the sudden flurry of activity.
“Oh,” Hayley extended her palm, once again revealing the mud splattered cloth inside, “that’s a great idea!”
“Here,” Ania stepped quickly towards the door, “I will show you to the baths for your wash-up.”
When the girl’s back turned to her, Hayley slipped her hand into her pocket. She shifted the sleeve a bit until the silver knife dropped safely into her possession.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Welcome to your new supposed life, Squire Hayley. Up at dawn for a meager breakfast of whatever didn’t get eaten the night before, followed by a hearty wash-up. Sometimes she’d be sent to fill the basin with cool well water, other times she’d stumble from bed, her jaw distended in a yawn, to have her knight thrust it at her.
Her second day at this squiring business, Gavin introduced her to her other duties. On top of the fighting stuff, which she had yet to return to what with her shoulders breaking out in bruises like mushrooms after the rain, Hayley was put in charge of keeping something alive. A whole flock of somethings. She dashed away from her duty the second a small herd of hissing geese ran for her shins.
Hayley managed to nearly leap perfectly vertical onto the well’s wall, but no one was going to applaud the move. Her knight was too busy tossing a bunch of ground up millet towards the evil creatures. They turned from pecking and nibbling at her flesh to doing it to the ground instead.
“You will feed them every day lest we are away. If we are called, it is your duty to inform Ania.”
Hayley nodded before whipping her eyes down at the snarling burst of feathers, “What if they eat me instead?”
Cold as the winds of the mountains, Gavin’s eyes darted down to the creatures pecking away the last of the grain until nothing remained on the ground. “Try to not let that happen,” was his only advice. So he left Hayley armed with nothing save a sack of food and a small shovel to handle the geese.
Oh, there was one other surprise for her. The barn for the geese wasn’t anything special. Little more than old wood nailed up to an a-frame, a small patchwork of planks forming a loft above that was crammed full of itchy straw. The main beam itself extended beyond the door out into the open, and off of it dangled a rope all the way to the ground.
As thick around as her wrist, Hayley tugged on it out of boredom. Which was when her knight stepped up beside her and said, “Climb it.”
All she could do was laugh at him, but when the man didn’t join in, her hackles poked out of the back of her tunic. “What do you mean, climb it?”
Gavin slotted his hands behind his back, “I assumed you knew what the word climb meant. It is to —”
“I know what climb…” Hayley threw her hand up, her face pinched in exhaustion. Dread flooded her gut as she stared up the rope. What’d seemed a minor jaunt was now an unscalable peak. Squaring her shoulders, she wrapped the rope tightly around her hand and spat out, “Fine.”
Hayley bent her knees deep, her palm — yet sore from the sword’s grip — throbbed against the bristly rope. Taking a deep breath, Hayley leapt upward and grabbed with her free hand. She clung tight, her body swaying with the swing. Just do another. Higher. She moved to let go but her body pitched downward, her hand lashing right back to where it belonged.
That sent her body spiraling, the rope curling and twisting at the top. Maybe she could climb it by tying the whole thing into a knot? The idea was moot as the second it reached some pinnacle, the damn rope began to twirl the other way. Hayley dug her forehead into it, trying to will herself to reach higher, to give it another go.
Hands gripped onto her shoulders, tugging back on her tunic so her body stopped its twirling. Sheepishly, she eased one foot to the ground — that wasn’t even a few feet away. “That…” she stuttered, staggering back and staring at her cramped up hands, “that’s impossible.”
Hayley curled up her nose and jabbed a finger first at the rope, then Gavin, “No one can do that!”
He didn’t say a word. Didn’t tell her to get back in line, to do as commanded. Hooking one of his wide hands around the rope, Gavin launched into the air. Dear lord, he worked like a snake devouring its prey.
One hand then another, both darting over top each other sending his body high up to the heavens. Hayley barely had a chance to call for someone else to come watch this with her before he reached the top beam. Rather than place his hand to it, or shimmy on down, the man hooked his left arm around the wood and rose up. Balanced by just that hand’s grip, he reached into his boot to unearth a knife.
Pulling himself tighter to the beam, he carved something into the wood. Hayley had to place a hand over her eyes to get a glimpse, when she was distracted by how much his muscles were working. That bicep bit, the part that gave the boys their upper hand — so to speak — was huge. Like you could hide a badger behind it huge.
“There,” Gavin said sounding triumphant. He slid the knife back into his boot and shimmied down even faster than he went up.
As the dust rose around the full-grown man, Hayley kicked her boot into the dirt. “What’d you put up there?”
“Climb it and see,” he said causing her to snarl. This was that damn fighting all over again. He could make it look easy because…because he just could. It wasn’t fair.
Walking away, Gavin patted a friendly hand to Hayley’s shoulder. “I don’t expect you to reach it today, not even tomorrow. We fight for one day.”
“So, am I a squire when I can climb that?” she jerked her head up to the beam, her stomach flopping at the thought.
His amber eyes fluttered and he sighed, “No, you’re already a squire. When you can climb that then you’ll know you’re capable of climbing a free hanging rope.”
With that cryptic bit of bullshit out of the way, Gavin sauntered off to the main house. He often had meetings with the Lady Bernadine which didn’t require Hayley. No doubt he was worried she’d shit in the corner or something and offend her ladyship. It was for the best, last thing Hayley wanted was to be caught anywhere near the landed gentry. They were always trouble.
For two days she’d shlep out to the barn, hurl a bunch of grain at the geese before they pecked her eyeballs out, then have a go at the rope. She never got higher than her first try. Sometimes Gavin would walk past, keeping an eye on her, but just as often he’d be busy. No doubt he was watching her, just off in the distance.
Glancing over at the small dug-in trough, Hayley noticed the water level was getting low. Some of the geese were trying to splash in it and having a hell of a time getting back out. “All right,” she sighed, looking around for a bucket. When she reached into the barn for one, a grey blur came snapping for her fingers. She snatched them away just before losin
g both to an orange beak.
“You’re lucky I don’t strangle you right now,” she shouted at the goose who lifted its wings high and made that annoying hissing sound.
Rolling her eyes, she trudged off to the well. Hayley had to ease around the barn, then slide past another building that seemed to always puff out smoke beside the bathing hut. Darting her head out between the two close walls, she caught Finn standing next to the stones of the well.
He looked at ease, a wide smile on as he bobbed his head then laughed. A splash broke through the giggling air and Hayley twisted far enough to spot Ania holding his fascination. The servant’s eyes drifted from the bucket she tugged off the line towards the boy beside her. He stood close, so close Hayley’d probably jab at him if he did that. But Ania didn’t seem to mind.
Ania tucked her hand up to her forehead to bury a lock of black hair under the kerchief, then began to reach forward. For a breath, Hayley feared Ania was going to touch Finn, but her hand slipped in front of her chest as if she was casting a line. There was nothing in her fingers, but she brought the fake cast back up and folded her hand around. Hayley couldn’t make out what her thumb and fingers were doing, but they looked to be knotted strangely.
It was to them Finn’s glance twisted, and he smiled again. Nodding his head, he said, “Yes, completely.” Then he too collapsed a hand across his chest and wafted an open palm outward.
What in the world were they doing? It looked like a…Hayley had no idea. She’d never seen anything like it. Almost like a dance, but the most complicated one ever and without any feet. And Ania was laughing again, the bucket perched upon the lip of the well while she continued to wave her hands about at Finn. He too was enthralled with their very private…whatever. Hayley would almost call it a conversation, but they weren’t exchanging any words aside from a few here or there.
The girl’s eyes were only on Finn when they both suddenly glanced towards the main door. Lady Bernadine waltzed stately down the steps, her cane banging into the ground while Gavin kept at her side. Whatever Finn and Ania were up to fell away instantly, both dropping their hands to the side while they watched as their Lady was guided towards the eastern part of the estate.