Chapter 6

Rhea’s POV

The basket was already there when I opened the door, set on the boards a foot from the doorframe with the handle turned toward me.

I looked past it first, both ways down the corridor, before I looked at what was inside.

The guard stood motionless at the door.

Somewhere below, someone was sweeping slowly and evenly, dragging a straw broom along the floor and stopping to knock it against a wall.

Inside the basket were two folded shirts of coarse grey wool, a pair of boots, and a girl's coat that had been taken in at the sides and still hung wrong.

Tessa took out the coat, and Maisie was in it before Tessa had finished straightening the collar. With her arms raised and the sleeves hanging past her fingers, she turned in a circle on the bed to make the hem swing.

"You'll trip," Tessa said. Maisie turned again.

I turned the boots over.

The soles had worn down at the outer edge and been built back up with a strip of harder leather by somebody who knew how to repair boots, and the uppers were creased across the toes where another foot had bent them.

They looked as though they had come from the stores.

"Where did he get old boots?"

"Out of the stores," the guard said. "Owen signed them out."

"Oh." I sat on the edge of the bed, put my foot in one, and felt my heel lift and drop.

Half a size, maybe a little more.

"Can I look through the boots myself?"

"Captain says this is all there is today."

I tore a strip from the corner of the lining that was coming loose anyway, folded it twice, and tucked it inside the left boot behind my heel.

Then I stood, walked to the window and back, and stamped my heel down twice on the boards.

"Close enough," I said.

Maisie held her arms out at me, the cuffs over her knuckles like a bear's paws.

I caught one cuff and folded it back twice, then did the same with the other, pressing the folds flat with my thumb.

Then I put the rest of the rag in my pocket, and we went out.

The guard at the turn only said, "Not the stable side," and let us by.

I remembered that. Not the stable side.

Three ways out of the yard: the main gate, the kitchen's side door, and a passage between the storehouse and the wall.

A boy came up it with a bucket, headed for the horses.

I counted all three as we crossed the yard, and counted them again at the wall.

Then Maisie stopped.

She had Tessa's sleeve in her fist. She had led us all the way to the kitchen door, close enough to feel the heat and smell fat and flour with something sweet underneath.

I stepped around her before I thought about it, but nobody was blocking the way.

Three women were working at the long table, one cutting and one talking, a third at the oven with a cloth over her hands.

They were laughing at something one of them had said, and none of them had looked up.

I crouched down beside her.

"What is it?"

She shook her head and watched them.

"They'll be done soon," she said.

So we waited.

The laughing went on, and a lid came down on a pot, and one of them said something about a brother that set the other two off again.

Maisie stood with her hand gripping Tessa's sleeve and watched the whole of it from outside the door.

One of them turned round at last. "You're the ones the Captain brought in."

"Yes," I said, and nothing more.

Tessa bent over Maisie's collar and smoothed it flat.

"Come for the bread, then?"

"No. Is there a shop in the town that sells it?"

"Left out of the gate and down the road," she said. "You'll smell it before you see it."

Maisie looked back once at the kitchen as we left, and she walked faster than she had on the way there.

I went back for the bread.

It was still under the corner of the mattress where I had put it, flat as a card and gone hard at the edges.

My hand was still under the mattress, gripping the bread, when I noticed the door was open. Then I caught a smell that was not ours—wool, leather, and the cold air someone had brought in from riding.

I turned my head, and Adrian was at the window with his back to me.

"Door's open," he said.

I looked at the table first, then the shelf, then the chest, then the corner where my knife lay under the folded blanket. Nothing had moved.

"The letter's gone," he said. "It asks after the sale papers and where they're held. Four days there, four back, if the road is clear."

He turned. His eyes went down to my feet and came back up to my face.

There was a small cloth bag in his hand, and he set it on the table and pushed it an inch toward me with two fingers.

"You'll need money to go out. For the day. Food, whatever else."

I looked at the bag and not at him. "And what do I owe you for it?"

"Nothing. Take it and use it."

The next question was already forming—who kept the tally, and how much would be deducted from whatever they decided I'd earned.

I was halfway through it when he reached past me, close enough to move the air, and straightened the bowl rack by the door where Maisie had knocked it crooked.

He set the top bowl level. He left the second one slightly crooked.

Then he took his hand back and looked at the shelf.

It was only the bowls. That was all it was.

The quiet held. He didn't say anything more about the money, and he didn't make a joke about the bowls either.

I just stood there with a flattened heel of bread in one hand, unable to remember what I had been asking.

I picked up the bag and pulled the drawstring tight.

"I'm counting it," I said.

"All right."

"And I'll remember the number."

He nodded once.

I went out with the bread still in my fist.

The shop had two tables at the window and four at the back, and the whole place smelled of hot iron and butter.

We pointed out what we wanted to the woman because it was too noisy to talk.

I had Maisie sit against the wall and sat beside her on the outside, with Tessa across from me.

The bread came folded in a cloth, too hot to hold, and the butter ran down between my fingers before I got the first bite into my mouth.

Maisie ate hers from the middle out, getting butter and crumbs across her chin and both cheeks.

Tessa licked her thumb and went at the chin, and the crumbs turned to paste and spread instead of coming off.

"Leave it," I said. "Finish first."

Tessa lowered her hand, and Maisie ate on, extremely pleased with herself.

We were most of the way through when Tessa said, quiet and easy, not looking up from her plate, "Anwen would have called me a thief for this."

Maisie sat up straight and tucked in her chin, lowering her voice and drawing out the words the way her sister did. "You went and bought food again. Behind my back."

I got my hand over my mouth and laughed into it until I was bent over, ribs aching, coughing twice, wiping my eyes with the back of my wrist.

Tessa laughed too.

Then her laughter faded, and she picked up her spoon and ate her broth with her head down.

I straightened and wiped my mouth and looked past her shoulder, out through the window, and there Adrian was.

He was going by in the street with two men behind him, and he stopped just short of the doorway with the light on one side of his face.

I stopped too, with half a piece of bread in my fingers.

He looked at my boots for a moment and asked, "Do they fit?"

"They fit," I said.

He nodded, and went on, and the two men went with him, and the woman behind the counter was already calling for the next customer.

I looked down at my boot.

A corner of the cloth had worked up over the back of the boot. I pushed it down behind my heel with my thumb, leaving a dark smear of butter on it.

Tessa had not said anything. She slid the last piece of bread across the table and left it in front of me.