“Too slow, Leya,” the cook barked at her. Rianna had given her middle name when asked. “We need more tankards, and we don’t need them now. We needed them an hour ago.”
“Then I’ll stop washing plates, and then we won’t have enough of those,” Rianna retorted.
Quicker than Rianna could see it coming, the cook boxed her ear. Rianna reeled back, wet hands clasped to her head to halt the rattling pain. It didn’t work.
“Don’t ever backtalk me,” said the older woman. “Or I’ll see to it that you’re out on the street—yes, no matter what Irma says. We don’t need an overly pretty, uppity dishwasher here. You’re here only because Irma has a soft heart, and for no other reason. I’d as soon get someone who knows her place, like the last one did before she fell pregnant.”
The humiliation was worse than the pain, as it had been when Irma had slapped her with a spoon. Rianna could do no more than avert her face to conceal her flush, the sudden stinging tears that she would not shed. Not with everyone watching.
The serving girls had taken in this scene with avid interest. She had seen the hostility in their eyes from the moment Irma had released her hair from its cap, even though she wore it bound in a knot ever since. These were girls whose matted hair had never been cared for as Rianna’s was, whose meager diets had never allowed for the shine she took for granted. There was a world behind the world she knew; she had not known it until now.
One thing sustained her. Her face became a cold mask as she thought, Soon I will be quit of this life. Her eyes slid to the woman who had berated her moments earlier, mechanically chopping meat and humming tunelessly. Rianna looked away, thought, You, you will stay in it forever.
Plenty of heroines from the stories she knew so well had fallen upon hard times, had had to work for their bread. There was no shame in that. If she could keep in mind those tales, she could yet maintain her pride. I will come out of this, she thought. The copper a day that she earned from dishwashing she hid each evening inside the pallet upon which she slept. Thirty coppers would earn her passage to Tamryllin. And perhaps when she returned, she would discover that it had all been a mistake: Master Gelvan had done nothing wrong.
If this new life had taught her anything, it was that pride was sometimes an obstacle to survival. She could afford to put it aside, at least for a time.
One thing she would not compromise upon, and that was cleanliness. The heroines of tales, she was sure, did not smell like stale sweat or have black ridges under their fingernails. Rianna had learned to bathe before dawn, drawing the water herself and warming it on the kitchen fire. Otherwise, the serving girls and the cook would crowd about and make lewd comments about her body, how well-fed she looked.
“Does that look to you,” one of the serving women smirked, “like someone who has ever known a man’s touch? Maybe we should introduce her to some of the boys.” She meant the regular customers, who pinched the bottoms of the serving girls black and blue and groped under their bodices with dirty hands. Rianna was not often enough in the common room to observe for herself—she kept closely to the kitchen—but she heard the tales.
“A little doll,” another woman mocked as Rianna hastily covered herself, biting her lip almost hard enough to draw blood.
Soon I will be quit of this life. Two weeks meant fourteen coppers, which meant that she needed sixteen more. Sixteen days. And today it was nearly dusk, and so fifteen. Very soon.
Another seven days had passed—another seven coppers—when it happened again. One of the larger girls, with a leering laugh, said as Rianna was bathing, “Maybe we should introduce her to the boys,” and made a lewd gesture. Rianna said, “Do that, and I’ll cut off his manhood and cook it for your dinner.” And even as the girl recoiled, surprised, Rianna went on with, “That would get rid of some of the diseases you could get from eating cock—though it’s too late for you, isn’t it?”
It was known that the girl was given to pleasuring the inn’s customers for extra coin. She reddened and turned away, muttering imprecations.
One of the other girls said, “You’re not going to get away with that, Leya,” before they left her to bathe alone.
No longer the Snow Queen, she thought, imagining what her father or Darien would think if they had heard her filthy words—weapons obtained from the enemy. If she kept her thoughts steered away from those she loved, she could survive, using whatever weapons came to hand.
* * *
THEY came for her that night—five of them. Two held her legs, one twisted her arms behind her back, one stopped her mouth with a rag. That left the fifth, who wielded shears, with a laugh Rianna knew. She struggled in the silence and dark. But for the one laugh, it happened quietly. The shears made short work of Rianna’s hair, but the girl who used them took her time, until Rianna felt the cold blades on her scalp. Scraping off anything that remained.
When it was done, they tossed her hair in the hearth, beside which the kitchen boy either still slept or made every pretense of it.
After they’d gone she lay shivering so hard her teeth rattled. Tears channeled silently down her face in the dark. She thought of running away. Then she thought of the perils of Dynmar and the money she needed and knew there was nowhere to go.
There was nothing left of her now. Each gold coil that had snaked to the floor was a piece of her story falling away, Leya the kitchen maid replacing Rianna Gelvan at the last. And kitchen maids had no prominent part in any tale. She was no heroine, then, but a cipher, and had been so all along.
When Irma saw her the next day, she said, “I see. It may be for the best.” Rianna even understood. Now she was one of them. While the other girls avoided her gaze from then on, they no longer seemed hostile. A girl named Bella helped Rianna tie a rag around her head that first morning, to conceal her shame. Drained and sad-eyed, Bella seemed to have few opinions, but she did say, “They should not have done that.” Rianna took to sleeping with her knife close at hand, but no one disturbed her nights again.
In the days that followed, she was consumed with a feverish energy. Each day was no more than a number. She ignored the women who had attacked her; they were nothing, less than nothing. She gave no thought to her father’s face, to Ned’s hurt; she did not even think of Darien. She thought only in numbers: six more days. Five. Four.
* * *
IT was when she had three more days that she first saw Rayen Amaristoth in the inn’s common room. Shocked, Rianna retreated to the kitchen. He had not seen her, and even if he had—she doubted he would know her. She had no mirror here, but she knew she was hideous. Her shirt was nearly in tatters, and holes had worn through her trousers at the knees. Only three more days, and she would earn her own freedom; there was no need to allow the handsome Rayen Amaristoth, who once had attempted to woo her, to see her reduced to this.
So from then on, Rianna was even more zealous than she had been previously about avoiding the common room, leaving the kitchen only at dawn and in deep night to draw water from the well. Her efforts were successful: she did not see Rayen again.
One more day. She awoke joyful and with a sense that perhaps she had been wrong; there could still be a story left for her. She had survived a month of purest misery, had at last reached her goal. She could even believe that when she returned to Tamryllin, it would all have been a misunderstanding, and Master Gelvan would be waiting for her at the house. “I was so worried,” she could imagine him saying. Of course it had all been a mistake.
But two things happened on that day. The first was that the kitchen boy had finally wearied of his duties and fled the inn, leaving them without a kitchen boy to keep the fire stoked and sweep the ashes from the hearth. The other thing, related to the first, was that he had seen fit to finance his departure by stealing every last copper from inside Rianna’s pallet as she slept.
Rianna’s first instinct was to leap at the girl who had used the shears on her, grip her around the shoulders, and press her knife against her throat. �
�My hair not enough for you?” she hissed. “I swear I will spit you on this like a rabbit.”
The girl’s eyes rolled up in their sockets in her terror; she looked as if she might faint on the spot. “I swear I don’t have it,” she shrieked. “I swear. I swear. I swear.”
Weeping, Rianna shoved her brutally away and jammed the knife into her boot. She had known, really, that the girl had not taken her money. Only the kitchen boy had known where it was, and it was too great a coincidence that both he and her money had vanished at the same time. And while she had entertained fantasies of carving out this girl’s eyeballs and feeding them to her—startlingly vivid ones, in fact—the consequences would not be worth the satisfaction.
Rianna’s eyes were blinded with tears as she left to draw water. Yet even so, she wondered later if it was truly because she could not see that she found herself stumbling into Rayen Amaristoth and in a shaky voice begging his pardon. For if it had happened because she was blinded, she could have scurried away before he recognized her: so thoroughly had she transformed into Leya the kitchen maid. But she stopped to apologize, aware that he might know her voice. And so the events set in motion that evening were, she was to know for always, her own doing; hers alone.
CHAPTER
25
LATER, Rianna would recall the moments that followed as a muddle of images, and in her memory she could stop each moment short, examine it from all angles. Rayen Amaristoth’s face turned toward her with a start, eyes narrowing. A hand rising to his jaw as the realization struck. “Rianna?” he said, the first time she had heard him sound uncertain. His arms fell to his sides.
Yes, it’s me, she’d said, her voice sounding hoarse in her own ears.
Such an odd thing to say, she would later think. It’s me. And she would wonder whether it was an assertion that underneath her present hideousness, she was still Rianna Gelvan … or an admission of defeat: This is what I am now.
Slender hands gripped her shoulders, steadying her. “Come with me,” he said, his voice thick with what sounded like emotion. “Rianna, dear, come with me and tell me what’s happened.”
She would remember: his hands sliding from her shoulders to take up the yoke that held the buckets she carried, sinews tightening in his forearms. Shouldering her burden. “Take my arm,” he instructed. “Stay close to me.” She almost laughed, that he sought to protect her now. It’s late for that. But she was stopped short by the solemnity in his voice, for it reflected back to her how she must look. In contrast, his face seemed more handsome than ever, a mask of perfectly proportioned marble like one of the statues in her father’s garden.
Rianna would remember the warmth that flooded her in that moment, the relief. And at the same time, a numbness, as if she were herself of stone. “The kitchen will want them,” she said.
He nodded. Down the street they wended their way together, with him bearing her burden beside her. She admired the way he did not so much as bend beneath its weight. There had been times, she recalled, when she had thought the bones of her shoulders would break. It was astonishing, really, that one could endure so much, and still not break.
It would linger in her memory, the feel of his muscled arm under her fingers as they walked.
Irma had stared, as had all the girls, and one thing Rianna would not remember later was what she had said to them. Somehow she must have made clear what she’d decided: that she was not returning to the kitchens for a copper a day. Even if it meant letting Rayen see her as this skeletal, hairless version of herself.
He had a room upstairs, all to himself. Only a man of his station could procure such a thing, and so clean. Rianna almost cried at the wonder of it. A bed, a washstand, even a rug slapped against the dingy floorboards. The bed sank beneath her as she sat; she resisted the impulse to curl into a ball amid the blankets.
“You ran away,” Rayen said. He sat beside her on the bed in the same way he had once sat beside her on the garden bench—at a careful distance.
“I had to. My father was arrested by the king’s guard. I don’t even know why. Please, Rayen, can you help him?”
“This is serious,” said Rayen. “I always suspected your father had—secrets. Rianna, even a lord of Amaristoth carries scant influence with the king.”
“It was Nickon Gerrard. I know it was,” said Rianna. But I can’t tell you why, she thought. She didn’t know if Rayen would willingly help them if he knew the truth.
His features were still and sorrowful. “All the more so,” he said. “But I can shield you until your father stands trial. Perhaps his crime was minor. We can’t yet know.” He leaned toward her. “But that doesn’t explain why you are here, Rianna Gelvan,” he said softly. “Why run to the heart of the cruel north? I am sure Ned’s family would have taken you in.”
Rianna dropped her eyes, confused, and looked down at Rayen’s hands where they rested on his knees. Callused, embattled hands that still retained an aristocratic delicacy. His nails were nearly as long as Darien’s harpist’s nails, and perfectly shaped. “Why here?” he prompted.
Rianna shook her head, unwilling to tell him, yet equally unwilling to lie.
“This is about the man you love, isn’t it,” Rayen said gently.
Rianna buried her face in her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said. And then thought: Idiot, why would he care? No one would want you now, not unless they were blind. She didn’t realize the tears had come until she felt their wetness against her fingers. She dashed them away, angry at herself for being so weak.
Rayen laid a hand on her arm. The warmth of it and the strength were comforting. Even knowing that he did not want her, that was comforting too—it simplified everything. “I do not cast judgments,” he said. “He must be an extraordinary man for you to risk yourself in this way.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again, but now she met his eyes. Quirking her lip and gesturing downward—a gesture that encompassed all of herself—she said, “Though you can hardly want me now.”
He withdrew his hand from her arm, and for a moment she thought he was withdrawing from her. Then he wrapped his arm around her shoulders. Strong and warm. “Dear, hush. You’ve been through a horror, that’s clear. Rest now. I will see you safely home.”
And it was thus, encircled in Rayen Amaristoth’s arm, her head sliding to his shoulder, that Rianna fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.
I will see you safely home.
So he had said, and when she woke, he began to make good his word. But first, he insisted on buying her clothes.
“I’m a wealthy man, Rianna,” he said, overruling her protests. “Some women’s garments, hastily fitted, will hardly be the ruin of me. Whereas, you…” He smoothed down the rag on her head with a glaze of sadness in his eyes. “You must gather your dignity back to you.”
The dresses he procured for her were simple and hastily fitted. She did not think anything could make her happier than the feel of proper clothes against her skin. But she was wrong, for Rayen also bought for her matching snoods of soft velvet to conceal the shame of her stubbled head. She could hardly look pretty without hair, but the snoods were a vast improvement over the rag she had been tying around her head.
* * *
RAYEN knew better than to ask more questions about what had brought her to Dynmar, but she could read them in the space of their silences. To divert him she asked, “How is the search for your sister progressing, Rayen?”
It was remarkable, come to think of it, that she could address one of the most powerful men in the country by name. Rianna wondered when she had begun to consider him a friend, how it had happened so quickly.
Such a thought might have never occurred to her, had she not recently been working in the kitchens as Leya the maid. A girl whom such a man would never deign notice, unless it were merely to bed for a bare hour of the night.
Leya the kitchen maid. Rianna Gelvan. Which was she, or was she truly either one?
Rayen sighed as he considered her ques
tion. At last he said, “No word yet. I’ve been asking around all the past week, with no luck.”
They were in the room he had rented. It was evening, and Rianna was wearing one of the new dresses and a sleek snood that hid her scalp. One more night they would stay here, Rayen had decided, so she could build up her strength.
“I’m sorry I never told you this, but I did meet Lin, and knew her, if only for a short time,” said Rianna. “She did not seem to want to be found.”
Rayen nodded. “I know. She would not.”
Rianna waited, watching his face and the candle-shadows that flickered across it. For a moment she felt a queer sense of vertigo, as if she hovered now on the edge of a precipice.
Rayen bowed his head. “You must want to know why such a highborn lady as my sister would flee her own home. The truth is…” He trailed off. Rianna watched him, and waited. There was something here, she felt—something that was important for her to know. Something that held the key to what was puzzling her about him.
When he saw she was waiting, Rayen went on. “The truth is, I am ashamed to tell you. She—she did have her reasons.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, dear. I cannot tell you.”
“It’s too private?”
“That,” he said. “But mostly … it’s too ugly.”
“I’ve grown accustomed to ugliness,” said Rianna.
Rayen reached out and touched her cheek, tenderly but without desire, as if she were a child. “You think so,” he said. “But when I look at you I see—a white rose. Pure and untouched by everything around it, in spite of rain, in spite of the surrounding grime. And I—I will not be the one to sully such loveliness. You are who you are.”
“The man I love,” Rianna heard herself say, “used to call me his Snow Queen.”
Rayen smiled, half wryly. “He saw it, too.”
* * *
Last Song Before Night Page 27
