Briarheart

by Mercedes Lackey

  The seamstresses made up their minds that I was going to have the tightly laced two-part oversleeves that would let the silk chemise show through the lacings. Mama would probably have the big dagged oversleeves that looked like angel wings; they wouldn’t want us to look too much alike. They finally decided that the fitting was over and let me slip out of the gown into something a lot more robust because today was my day to work in the kitchen. As the seamstresses sped away with drifts of fabric over their arms, I pulled my tough canvas skirt on over my linen chemise, tied my fustian apron over both, and slipped my feet into wooden clogs. Then I ran out through the solar and down the servants’ stair to the bottom floor, where all the things that kept the palace going got done. The first room off the stairs was the laundry—which was lovely because when the big outer doors were closed in winter, the steam came up the stairs, carrying with it the scents of clean linen, lavender, and rose water. Then came the drying room, then the ironing room, and then the first of the kitchen rooms, the scullery, where all the pots and pans and dishes were washed. The next room was my goal, the bakery.

  “About time, girl!” the chief baker shouted at me. “You’re doing manchet bread today! Hop to it!” When I was in the kitchen, I (mostly) got treated like everyone else down here. This was on Papa’s orders so I would get used to how servants were treated. Papa had very strong beliefs about how those who ruled should know exactly how those who served were treated and felt.

  You might think it strange that here I was, the Queen’s daughter, learning to work in a kitchen. You see, we are a very small kingdom. You can stand on the top of Mount Snowdown on the northern border and see all the way to the southern border, and if there had been a mountain on the eastern border, you could have seen all the way to the west. We’re at peace with everyone around us now, but my father died in the last war only a couple of years ago, so the possibility that war could come again is always on everyone’s mind. And though the last war was just between human armies, there was always the chance for something or someone magical and big and powerful to decide that little Tirendell would be a good morsel to gobble up. There is magic of all kinds in this world, and even little Tirendell has its very own wizard. So Papa insisted that I choose something useful to learn in case the kingdom was ever defeated and I might have to hide among the people. “A boy can always make his way as a common fighter,” he’d said, and put a finger under my chin to tilt up my face so I could see that he was serious. “I want to be sure my darling Miriam will never go hungry—or find herself exposed and at the mercy of our enemies. No one will look for you up to your arms in flour or tending a stable.”

  So I decided to learn baking. And the chief baker—Odo—was told to treat me like any other apprentice.

  I ran over to my station, where everything was ready, right next to my good friend Giles, who was doing trencher bread today. Trencher bread is a loaf that’s sliced in half from end to end and given to servants to eat off of instead of plates. That saves on plate washing. Then, if they’re really hungry, they can take it away to eat later, although I never saw any of Papa’s servants doing that because Papa makes sure every single person in the palace down to the lowest scullion has plenty to eat. And even if it’s not eaten, it’s not wasted; the monks come every night and collect everything that isn’t eaten and isn’t being saved for the next day to give to the poor.

  “You’re late,” Giles said, vigorously kneading his dough. Trencher bread is made of coarser flour than manchet bread, part barley or rye flour or both, as well as unsifted wheat flour. Manchet bread is made only of wheat flour that’s been sifted through three sets of cloths. Only the flour used for cake is finer and whiter.

  The bakery is a wonderful place to be except in hot weather. If there’s anything better than the heavenly smell of baking bread, I don’t know what it is, except maybe the smell of baking cakes. And today the air was full of both. There were a lot of conversations going on all over the bakery—the chief baker is strict but fair, and as long as the work is done, he doesn’t shout about chattering. And with the christening coming, there certainly was a lot to chatter about.

  I rolled up my sleeves, not just because I needed to get them out of the way but because it was good and warm down here. I picked up where the last person at my station had left off, peeking under the cloths over the bowls of second-rise dough first. Sure enough, they were ready, great mounds of creamy-white dough with a tight skin on them, so I carried them over to the bakers. Then I tilted out the bowls of dough on their first rise, punched them back, and covered them with the second-rise cloths. Then I set about making more dough.

  I’d already mastered flatbreads, quick breads, and trencher bread. Now I was being given manchet to do, the “king” of the breads. Next I would learn pies, then cakes. But probably not the decorating of the presentation pieces and fancy subtleties; that took years to learn. Odo’s brother had a bakery in the town, and if anything terrible happened, I was to run for my life to one of the secret doors out of the palace and go straight to that bakery. There were five of those doors, all hidden in places that were very hard to get into, all built so they couldn’t be opened from the outside, and all guarded by Wizard Gerrold’s magic so only a few people could use them.

  We were making a lot of manchet bread; the christening was going to be in three days, and not only was every important person in the kingdom invited, so were a lot of eminent people from the kingdoms on our borders. There would still be cooking going on the days of the christening and celebration, but everything that could be prepared in advance would be. We had a special pantry with a spell on it that ensured whatever was stored in it wouldn’t go stale or get moldy, and we intended to stuff it full.

  Giles plopped his dough into a bowl and covered it, then measured out flour onto his board and began a new round of dough. I did the same, although my bread got milk instead of water and my dough was going to end up a little stickier than his was. But it would be easier to knead.

  “You’re soon going to have enough muscle to join the squires,” I said, teasing him.

  He grinned back. Giles wasn’t exactly handsome, but he had dark brown eyes that generally danced with mischief and a mouth made for smiling, and he could always manage to make us laugh. “What makes you think I don’t now?” he countered.

  “Mostly because you’re here in the kitchen instead of out in the yard rolling the barrels to shine the knights’ chain mail,” I replied.

  “Pish. This is a better job,” he retorted with a toss of his head. “Half of what a squire does is wait on some arrogant, empty-pated bully who swaggers around because someone tapped him on the shoulders with a sword. I’d rather do honest work.”

  “Not all knights are arrogant, empty-pated bullies,” I said, and then, unexpectedly, I choked a little as a vision of my father suddenly sprang up in my mind and I was ambushed out of nowhere by how much I missed him.

  I must have sniffed or something, because Giles stopped his mixing and shoved a clean square of cloth at me that he’d taken from the piles of bleached linen rags we used to cover the bread bowls. “Hey now,” he said, patting my back. “I didn’t mean—I mean, I’m sorry. Sir Geniver was… amazing. Nobody would ever have called him arrogant or empty-pated or… Miri, I’m sorry!”

  “It’s all right,” I said, wiping my eyes, blowing my nose, and looking up into his concerned face with a watery smile. “I know you didn’t.” I choked up again, and he held my head against his shoulder and patted my back until I got control of myself, and Odo left us alone without yelling at us until I did. This wasn’t the first time I’d fallen apart in the bakery because something had reminded me of Father, after all; and Odo was probably one of the nicest people you could ever have in charge of you if you were working in a kitchen. When Liss, the girl in charge of cleaning vegetables, got her heart broken by a flirtatious stone carver’s apprentice, Odo had someone leave a big pile of clean rags next to her so she could stop and cry whenever she
needed to, and he wouldn’t let anyone tease her, either.

  When I stopped feeling like my throat was too tight to breathe through, I pulled away from Giles, and he let me go with a last pat, and we got back to work.

  When Odo dismissed me for the day, my arms were good and tired, but my day wasn’t nearly done yet. There was still christening business to attend to, and as one of the people who could read and write, I was needed to help with that. If there hadn’t been christening business to do, I’d have been going over the accounts from my manor with Papa’s seneschal. One of the things Papa had done for me when he married Mama was to give me an estate of my own, which would give me my own income. Which was lovely, but that meant I also had to learn how to take charge of it, which involved… well, an awful lot of work. Things like finalizing orders for the work on my property (even though all I was doing was signing off on them, it was important to keep track of what was being done). If I were living there instead of here, I’d be doing even more work—keeping track of the household by taking reports from my chamberlain, my gardener, and my stable master, as well as taking care of the business of the manor properties with my steward or reeve. I’d have to know when the food budget didn’t match the food accounted for and be able to inspect stock and crops to know they were healthy and prospering and what to suggest if they were not. For now, Papa had assigned a trusted man as bailiff to tend to all that for me, but if I ever went there to live, I had to know how to do all of that for myself.

  But christening business took precedence over everything else right now. Today, it was checking off replies to the invitations on the master list. I was just one of a small army of people doing that, an army that included some of Mama’s ladies and several borrowed secretaries, while Mama and the rest of her ladies greeted the incoming guests, saw that they were settled, made sure that they had everything they needed, and oversaw the rest of the arrangements. Of course, not everyone who was invited and intended to come would send a reply, but most would. And there was another reason for sending out invitations.

  The Dark Fae.

  Every kingdom has Fae, Light and Dark. The Light ones are said to live on human joy, the Dark on human sorrow. Obviously, the more of that sorrow there is, the happier the Dark ones are—which is why they seldom actually kill humans. They do things to make us as miserable as possible when we are alive. Fortunately, all the Fae have to obey the Rules, and one of the big ones is that they cannot act against humans unless the humans have harmed or offended them or are experiencing certain very specific times of vulnerability, times that usually correspond either to their ages or to rites of passage like—say—getting married. It’s as if there is some sort of protection around us humans for most of our lives, but during those moments, those protections get weaker. For most people, those times don’t matter. It’s not as if the Dark Fae are keeping track of every single farmer’s birthday. But for anyone with rank—people whose misery could impact the lives of dozens to thousands—you have to be mindful of those vulnerable dates because that is when the Dark Fae will jump at the chance to do some harm. Birth, christening, thirteenth birthday, sixteenth birthday, and wedding. And although it is rare for them to go that far, your entire first year of life can be a vulnerable time, as can your third and twenty-first birthdays. The more important you are, the more likely it is that you’ll have a lot of vulnerable periods. Wizard Gerrold has a theory that this is because the expectations around you thin out whatever protection you have. The seneschals have a theory that it has to do with prime numbers. They often get into long congenial arguments about it during state dinners, enlisting whichever guest is nearest if they can.

  And there are the Rules. We know that a long time ago, there were no Rules, that the Dark and Light Fae fought with one another indiscriminately and that the Dark Fae could pretty much do what they wanted to humans. That is, until the Light Fae allied with humans, and together we fought the Dark Fae into a corner. And for a while, it seemed that they were perfectly willing to destroy everything rather than surrender, but they finally agreed to a permanent truce. That was the Fae Compact. It was bound in place on all of us by the most powerful of magic, and it laid out a lot of Rules about interactions between Light and Dark Fae and humans. Some of them are simple: Dark Fae can’t attack humans or Light Fae unless they have been attacked or offended. Light Fae can’t attack Dark Fae (or their human allies, because there are some) unless attacked first. There are more Rules: Unless also attacked, a Light Fae cannot directly aid a human against the Dark Fae, but indirect help is allowed. Those are the main Rules that affect us. There are more, because the Light Fae wanted to give the Dark Fae no loopholes (they find loopholes anyway), but humans don’t know most of those Rules and aren’t directly affected by them. Breaking the Rules destroys the offender’s magic. All of it. Which means that if a Fae breaks the Rules, he or she can end up with their home turned into dust and with every curse and spell they have ever cast broken—and there will be a long list of people and Fae they’ve hurt who will now find them fair game. That’s the force of the Fae Compact.

  Obviously, you would offend one of the Dark Fae terribly if you were inviting all the important people in the kingdom to a celebration and didn’t invite her. Or him, though the worst Dark Fae, insofar as holding grudges goes, seem to be female. The female Dark Fae tends to attack individuals—the male tends to ally himself with really terrible humans and get involved in tyrannies and warfare. No one knows why that is, although Wizard Gerrold once told me that it’s because men don’t like to hunt alone.

  But, of course, they are Fae, which means that the next day they could decide to do the opposite. Or both—back up a tyrant and act as his personal assassin, taking out his enemies one by one.

  So before you held some great celebration or event, you first had to scour the kingdom for all the Dark Fae and be sure to invite them. Since Dark Fae can’t resist announcing themselves by erecting lightning-shrouded towers and gloomy castles, it’s not that hard to find them if you go looking for them.

  But you could still offend them by only inviting them by themselves. So if you were smart, you invited the “Fae Sinistressa and guest(s).” That almost always guaranteed they wouldn’t come because the Dark Fae were generally quarreling with one another as well as preying on humanity. You really did not want to live anywhere near one of the Dark Fae, given that they were prone to sending storms and plagues of insects and poisonous miasmas at one another—or calling one another out in mage duels, and you definitely did not want to be within a mile of one of those.

  And even if the Dark Fae did come, partly because each of them would be very busy looking for any possible chink in the armor of his or her rival and partly because the Rules had been obeyed, there would be nothing they could do unless they were somehow offended by someone doing something they could take as an insult or a challenge. But the odds were that they’d be too busy glaring at one another, making brief alliances, or finding a new nemesis to take any notice of the humans around them.

  It would make for a somewhat uneasy event… but that was better than the alternative, which would be for every Dark Fae in the kingdom to take offense. Which they would no matter what you did, because if you thought to escape retribution by simply not having the event in the first place, they’d take offense at that.

  I ran up to my room and changed for a third time, back into my everyday gown, a lovely soft thing the color of bark. I sat on a stool for a few minutes and let Belinda take down the braids I had wound around my head to work in the bakery and wrap them in matching bark-colored cloth and embroidered ribbons. Then before I went to the library, where the replies to the invitations were sent as they arrived, I ducked into the nursery, gave my baby sister a kiss under Melalee’s disapproving glare, and hurried off.

  The library, which was where virtually all of the kingdom’s paperwork was done, was the brightest room in the palace, with floor-to-ceiling windows and additional lanterns in case of bad weat
her. I got a fat handful of envelopes; joined the group of ladies-in-waiting, clerks, secretaries, and a couple of novices at the big table; and began my work. And even with all of us, if there were others who could have been spared, they’d have been crowded in here too.

  It was pretty boring except when I got a reply from one of the Fae. They had this habit of embellishing their replies. When you opened the envelope from one of the Light Fae, illusory birds might fly out and sing, or vines covered in flowers would grow out of it and vanish, or miniature fireworks could shoot all the way to the ceiling. And as you might imagine, the replies from the Dark Fae needed someone who wasn’t easily frightened—spiders would pop out and run over your hands, or the envelope would drip blood on the table, or you’d open the seal and be treated to several minutes of nerve-racking screams. I suppose that every time we opened one of those, the corresponding Fae got a little pinch of extra power, but it seemed to me that it could hardly be enough to make up for the effort that was put into the reply in the first place.

  But maybe I was just thinking too logically.

  None of these scare tactics counted as “harming” us because the effect was purely emotional and temporary. The Dark Fae were masters at skirting as close as they could to the edge of the Rules without violating them. They lurked in their creepy cottages or lonely swamp towers or fog-shrouded castles or arcane manors under a perpetual night, and I suppose that they fed off the fear of those living nearby. And when they were forgotten, they’d make village appearances, complete with dramatic entrances, to dispense vague threats and remind everyone of their presence. All things considered, if you were a peasant and didn’t have the money to move and knew there was a Dark Fae living nearby… you’d be terrified most of the time too, and maybe that sated their appetites.