Intrigues: Book Two of the Collegium Chronicles (a Valdemar Novel)

by Mercedes Lackey

  He tapped on the door—he didn’t even know whose house this was, only that it was moderately sized, and wasn’t Master Soren’s. A frazzled kitchen-maid answered it. Her apron was splashed and stained with whatever she had just been working on, and there was flour in her hair.

  “Got work?” he asked, dully.

  “Mebbe. Stay here,” she replied, and scuttled off. She came back with a broad man in a white shirt and enveloping apron.

  The red-faced, balding cook eyed him, frowning. “One of our boys ran off. You gonna run off?”

  “Nossir,” he mumbled, not looking at the cook, since that would be insolence.

  “I ’spect hard work outa you. You don’t work, you get beat. You understand?”

  “Yessir.” He looked at his feet.

  “You get eats, and a bed at the fire. Twice a year, get a suit of clothes and three pennies. Understood?”

  “Yessir.” He bobbed his head. “Thenkee sir.”

  The cook shoved him inside the door, then to a place at a sink already full of hot water, soap, and pots. “Get to work.”

  Evidently the staff here was considered large enough to keep two potboys busy; the other one was younger than Mags, but they were about the same size. And the size of the stack they were to clean was daunting. So, the household—or the cook—was frugal when it came to staffing. There was too much work for just two small boys, unless one of them was Mags, who threw himself into the job in a way that made the cook grunt with surprise and satisfaction.

  This, at least, was one thing he could do right. With pumice stone and harsh soap, he attacked each pot as if it was his life. Unlike his life, he could clean this mess up. The cook was not stingy about hot water and soap, ordering them to change it whenever it got merely warm and not when it was as foul and cold as a sewer.

  He did two pots for every one of the other boy’s, which made the other boy glower at him when the cook shouted abuse at him for not keeping up. Mags didn’t care. It wasn’t as if he was going to try and make friends ever again. So he kept his head down and his shoulders hunched over, and eventually the boy stopped bothering even to glare at him.

  The other boy reminded him of the mine-kiddies, with his sullen looks and grunts instead of speaking—shoulders hunched much like Mags, and hair falling down over his face and into his eyes. But he didn’t look ill-fed, and there weren’t a lot of bruises on him. Maybe the cook beat him for assumed shirking, but it didn’t look as if people in this kitchen were beaten for no reason other than that the cook wanted to beat someone.

  All afternoon they scrubbed the luncheon pots, which were snatched out of their hands as soon as they finished and pressed into service for dinner. Mags concentrated every bit of his mind on getting the pots so clean they were slick under his fingers. When the last of the pile was clean, he turned to look for more.

  There weren’t any, and the other boy scuttled across the kitchen, a rapid sort of slinking walk that, again, was much as the mine-kiddies used to do. He sidled over to a table in an alcove, where the remains of the kitchen staff luncheon was. After a moment, Mags trudged over there too.

  It appeared that the kitchen staff was fed on what the masters of the house left over, and right now, after everyone else had picked the remains over, what was left for him and the other boy looked like the aftermath of a plague of insects. Mostly what remained were odds and ends of bread, the crusts from pies, and some bits of vegetable. Some pickles. A little fruit. In terms of bulk, they wouldn’t go hungry. The other boy pounced on anything that looked like it had gravy or sauce on it, hunted for scraps of cheese or shreds of meat. He gathered his finds greedily to him, glaring at Mags.

  Mags didn’t even bother picking things over, he just shoved whatever was nearest into his mouth, not even tasting it, just mechanically chewing and swallowing until his stomach told him he was full. Dully, he noted the other kitchen staff looked all right—not starved, and they didn’t cringe much. It looked as if he’d fallen into a situation where he was going to survive all right.

  They weren’t given a moment of rest though, and no time for the sort of banter and gossip he’d seen in the Collegium kitchen—and others. They were working every moment, the head cook looming over them and lashing them with words, if not his fists. As Mags watched, he figured out what the pecking order was, and who was best to steer clear of. Then the cook, who had kept a fraction of his attention on them the whole time shouted at both of them. “Get your lazy bums over here, you two! Pots are piling up!” So it was back to the sink.

  The kitchen was hot and noisy, the cook shouting at his helpers, the cook’s helpers shouting at the kitchen maids, and the maids shouting at each other. Pots and pans clanged and clattered, people bustled about, ran into each other, and cursed, people did things wrong and got yelled at or hit with a ladle or a ham-like hand—not a beating, but definitely a heavy cuff. And he and the boy just scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, while the sweat poured down his face and back, and the air filled with the smell of baking pie and cake and roasting meat and savories and complicated dishes involving cheese and spices.

  The boy yearned piteously in the direction of the spits, where big roasts were turning. Mags felt apart from it all—he could remember being someone like the boy, for whom a taste of meat was the highest possible dream. And he could remember another Mags, who had rejoiced over his good fortune in landing somewhere like the Collegium with all its wondrous food. But he was neither of those boys. He was hollow and indifferent to his surroundings, and all he wanted was for exhaustion to numb his mind and make it impossible to think. He couldn’t help observing and filing it all away, but it dropped into an empty place in his head, a place where things that had no use would go.

  Then the serving maids arrived, and were laden with trays that in turn were loaded down with food. The first course went out—coarse stuff for the servants that ate in hall, the best things for the master and his table.

  Food went out to be served, remains returned from the hall and were piled on the table in the corner, atop the remains of the luncheon. Except for what came back untasted, which went into the pantry—probably to reappear at breakfast—and a few things that were set aside for the cook’s private table.

  The pots continued to pile up, he continued to finish two for every single one of the boy’s, and finally, as clean pots were taken away and stored for tomorrow, or set up to cook porridge and the like overnight, the pile of stuff waiting to be scrubbed began to decrease. People gathered at the leftover table, squabbling over the best bits, heaping what they wanted on crude wooden plates or the leftover bread-trenchers from the lower tables up in the dining hall. The helpers ate first, then the kitchen maids. The helpers left after eating; the maids stayed to clean. This was no slattern’s kitchen; it was clear the cook here might be penny-pinching, but he knew his business. Every surface was scrubbed clean, every dish put away clean, only the floor was left to do.

  The maids finished their cleaning, and left, probably for real beds somewhere. The cook was still making his leisurely way through his own dinner, one eye on his winecup and the other on the staff.

  Finally there were only two pots left, and the boy scuttled to the table like a rat to scramble up onto a bench and stuff his face, leaving them to Mags.

  Mags scrubbed them clean without a word, which evoked another grunt from the cook.

  When he was done, he trudged to the other side of the table and picked up and ate whatever was nearest. He couldn’t have said if anything was bad or good, he was only interested in getting eating over with so he could go back to work. He couldn’t taste anything anyway.

  The boy crammed food into his mouth with both hands and one eye on the cook, the other on Mags. Probably he was getting ready to grab anything Mags uncovered that looked better than what he had, but nothing turned up on Mags’ side of the table. The cook finished his dinner, heaved himself up, and evidently that was the signal for eating to stop.

  “Clean u
p,” the cook said. The boy scuttled off and came back with a big hessian bag, grease-stained and grubby on the outside. He gestured to Mags to help him, and together they scraped everything off the table and into the bag, which was put outside the door.

  Mags followed the boy’s lead without a word while the cook watched them both, arms folded over his chest. The boy kept glancing furtively at the cook, as if he was expecting a cuff to the head. The cook, however, kept most of his attention on Mags.

  Next, they scraped all the crumbs off the table they’d eaten from, throwing them at the cook’s direction into the fire, and scrubbed down the table with soap and water and pumice-stone.

  So that would be why no one got sick from the leftovers on the table.

  The boy got brooms for them both, and they swept the floor, throwing the sweepings out the back door. Then they got down on hands and knees, with buckets of water and soap and big bristle-brushes and scrubbed it as the cook watched. Oddly, the cook washed his own plates and cutlery, but that might have been because he didn’t trust them with it. When they were done, he grunted approval, reached into a cupboard, and pulled out two bundles of bedding.

  These proved to be a couple of thick sacks made of multiple layers stitched together, a patchwork of old, worn blankets. The cook tossed one to each of them. Mags caught the one thrown to him and watched the boy to see what he did with his. The boy moved his sack to the best place by the fire, pulled off his shoes, stuck his legs into the opening and wriggled until he was all the way inside it with just his head sticking out.

  Mags copied him, and the cook grunted with satisfaction again. “Don’t think to steal anything from the pantry, boy,” he warned as he put the rushlights out, so that the only light was from the dying fire. “I’ll beat both of you senseless if anything is missing or nibbled. Both of you. So no use thinking you can nick something and get away with it by blaming the other.”

  Then he left, and the kitchen was quiet except for the sound of the fire and the other boy breathing.

  Mags became aware that his arms ached from scrubbing, his back ached from bending over the sink, and his legs and feet ached from standing on stone all that time. He welcomed the pain, even as his muscles began to stiffen and hurt more. Pain on the outside was easier to deal with than pain on the inside.

  Nevertheless, black sorrow descended on him, and with his arms pillowing his head, he cried, silently sobbing himself to sleep.

  A kick in the side roused him. He sat up in his cocoon of bedding with a groan, and was rewarded with another kick. He managed to squirm out of the bedding, and it was snatched away from him by a maid and bundled into the top of the cupboard.

  The room was full of sleepy people, complaining, ordering each other about. He and the boy were put to fetching firewood from the pile outside, and the roasting fires and the big ovens were set to burning hotly. The bag of meal-remains they had left outside last night was gone. He remembered, now that he thought about it, that he had noticed chickens in a pen in one corner of the kitchen-garden. It probably went to feed them. Another evidence of frugality, that they kept hens to have their own eggs and roasting birds.

  Last night’s bread was shoveled out of the oven and laid out in order of quality, to be served at breakfast. Huge pots of pease-porridge and oat-porridge emerged from the ovens as well, the staple breakfast food for the servants. Serving maids appeared, caps a little askew and yawning sleepily; they were swiftly burdened with great trays of bowls full of both, or baskets of bread. The servants would eat earliest of course, and not with the masters, who would lie abed and probably be served there.

  As the porridge kettles emptied, they came to Mags and the boy, who began their work. The bowls and utensils from cooking the better foods came to them too, and they labored to keep up.

  “New potboy?” asked one serving-maid of one of the cook’s helpers.

  “Aye. Thick as two short planks, but does the work,” came the reply. “Hasn’t said a word since he was taken on yesterday.”

  “That’ll suit Cookie, then,” came the laconic reply.

  “It’ll suit Cookie better if he’s too thick to count to three,” said the helper. “Cookie’ll give him two pennies and keep the third.”

  The maid snickered.

  Mags kept scrubbing, concentrating with all his might, the way he used to concentrate on chipping out a stone without fracturing it, on getting every last fragment of food from every pot he was handed. When he and the boy ran out of pots, they were sent for more wood, or to haul in bags or baskets of coarser foodstuffs from a root cellar, or to carry the garbage from the cooking out to the chicken pen. They emptied out the peelings and ends and bad spots, the leaves and the burnt bits of bread into the pen and the hens fell on the bounty, clucking and fighting over the best bits, like the servants in the kitchen. Then back they went to scrubbing. Mags bent over the work, always with an ache in his soul that felt as if someone was squeezing his heart in a vice.

  At least he could do this. And he could do it well. He could do it without hurting anyone.

  And when he started to weep, he could put his head down over the basin, let his hair fall to cover his face, and no one would be the wiser.

  So there it was. This, for now, would be what remained of the wreckage of his life.

  The days blurred one into another. The days lengthened, and the kitchen grew hotter by day because the weather outside was warmer. He and the boy worked stripped to their trews; the women in shifts and chemises. He threw himself into the scrubbing and anything else that was given to him to do—and seeing that, the cook gave him every task that two hands and no mind to speak of could perform. He was set to scrubbing the soot from all the walls, and bleaching the stone floor with lye. He did it all without complaint, without a word.

  He couldn’t hear Dallen at all. He began to think that if Dallen had not actually repudiated him yet, it was only because Dallen was not in any physical shape to. As soon as Dallen was as healed as he could get, the Companion probably would do exactly that. And in the meanwhile the silence meant that Dallen had decided that Choosing Mags had been a terrible mistake, and this was the way to keep him isolated until the Companion could be rid of him.

  It hurt, it hurt terribly, but he had to acknowledge that everyone was better off without him.

  And all he was waiting for now was for that ghostly, silent presence in the back of his mind to one day become an echoingly empty place.

  When that happened . . . well, then he would decide what to do.

  And it occurred to him that once Dallen left him, there was one option he hadn’t considered—a painless, easy way to put an end to everything. One that now, in retrospect, he wished had happened last winter, in that blizzard.

  All he had to do was be patient and wait for winter. Whether or not a blizzard came, there would be snow. Then all he needed to do would be to walk out into it, until he started to feel sleepy; he could ignore the cold, he had done so before. Then, when it was too hard to move, too much effort to keep going, he could sit down, close his eyes, and let the snow take him and his misery away forever.

  15

  :MAGS. . . .:

  The voice in his mind echoed through the nightmare. He always had nightmares, worse than ever before, far worse than he’d had at the Collegium. The cocoon-like bedding at least kept him from thrashing—not that anything would wake up the boy—but he had them every night. The odd thing was, even though they were horrible, and even though he woke up from them with the top of his bedding soaked with tears and the rest damp with sweat, he welcomed them. He always woke exhausted, which left his mind in a numb fog. And a numb fog was preferable to thinking.

  :Mags. . . .:

  After days of working here—he still didn’t know who he was working for—his body knew when to wake up. Had to be before Cookie came in, since he would kick them awake. Which, oddly enough, seemed kind of fair, to Mags—Cookie didn’t kick Mags hard enough to break anything, and he and the
boy did have to clear away from in front of the hearth so that the fires could be built up again, and the big water kettles swung into place on their cranes to heat. Cookie was a strange combination of brutal and fair. He never meted out punishment to anyone who hadn’t earned it, but those who earned it got the receiving end of a beating just short of breaking bones. Cookie was exact in doling out precisely enough punishment that the recipient was still capable of working. The boy had gotten two beatings since Mags had been here, both for shirking. So far, aside from morning kicks, Mags was unscathed.

  He woke straight up out of the nightmare; he was just in time to hear Cookie’s heavy footsteps in the passage outside the kitchen. The voice still echoed in his head as he struggled out of his cocoon and rolled it up into the bundle that Cookie preferred, shaking his head a little to clear it and knuckling his eyes to get the fog out of them.

  It wasn’t Dallen, of course. Dallen was surely only days away from withdrawing from Mags completely. Maybe that was why he was hearing the memory of Dallen’s mind-voice in his dreams, the few dreams he had that weren’t nightmares, the ones on going to sleep and again on waking.

  “Bath,” said Cookie, when he saw Mags waiting beside his bundle. He gestured to the door, and Mags went out into the yard while Cookie kicked the boy awake. Cookie set a great deal of store by cleanliness, and every other day was a bath day for the potboys. “Bath day,” in the sense that they went out into the yard, stripped down to singlets, doused themselves under the pump that stood out there, washed with the same soap they used for the pots, washed their clothing the same way, put it on wet and came back to work. Small wonder they’d actually need a new suit of clothing every six moons. Mere cloth couldn’t stand up to that sort of treatment every other day.

  He was already clean by the time the boy came out to the yard with a bruise along one side of his face. Mags wondered what he had done to anger Cookie this time. It didn’t seem that difficult to avoid a beating. All you had to do was work hard, not steal, not be insolent or waste time. Just how stupid was the boy?