Chapter 2 Servant Grey

The clapping followed me out of the hall.

It was thin and happy and far away, like rain on a roof I no longer lived under, as they closed the tall doors behind me. I walked on my own feet, as I had said I would walk on Adrian's. Along the long hallway. Past the torches. Two court ladies who went silent at my sight and started talking at my back. My dress whispered, too, over the cold stone, and my empty hands kept wanting to hold flowers that were lying on a floor behind me.

My mother was there with a cup in her hand in the family rooms.

Thin tea. The light, sharp tea she'd been doling out to me since I was fifteen, that she was supposed to have a smile on. She stretched out her arm and said, "Drink; you will feel less. Tomorrow you must be useful and calm.

I took the cup because my hands were shaking and it provided work. I placed it on the wash stand undisturbed and observed the steam rising from it.

This was my first cup of that tea that I refused. My mother saw it. Her face turned into a pancake. My father called my name once, low, like a man calling across water, behind her, in the doorway. Then my mom said, "Henry. The queen will want a full report of the evening," and he was gone, and the door shut, and I was alone with the sound of my own bond hurting.

I did not sleep. The broken bond hurt when cold air got to it. Whenever my pain increased, Vega increased, walking in my ribs, too large for me in the little dark room. I heard her settle at last near dawn, and I slept for one hour, having my ceremony dress on; nobody had thought of helping me off it, and it had hooks down the back of it.

I went to the warden tower in the morning.

Work had always been my savior, and so on this bad morning I went to work as I had gone to work on every bad morning of my life. The tower reeked of pine resin and dried herbs and clean ash, and for one breath my chest loosened. I saw the roster board, then.

My name was chalked out.

A new white stripe was there for four years with the words CLARA BEAUMONT, and beneath them, in gold paint, in letters too large for the space, AURORA BEAUMONT, Head Warden. I had lost my stool from my bench. I didn't have an apron hook.

Master Oswald had a paper in his hand and couldn't look at me when he came out of his office. He glanced at the blackboard. He glanced at the ground. He searched like a coward who is looking for the truth, which is standing in front of him in a wrinkled ceremony dress.

“The register has been rectified, Clara,” he said. By order. Your post is closed. You were never, that is, the post was always understood to be well; you know how these things are kept.

I said, "My name was on the board yesterday.

He said, "Yes," and his white beard trembled a bit. Well. It's not on it now.

I waited there until he closed the door of his office softly, like a man closing a door on a fire in another room. So I pulled open the bottom drawer of my old bench. They had stolen my tools, my scales, and my good copper pan. Yet my measuring spoons were still there on their brass ring, the little set my father had given me when I was fourteen, and my hands no longer trembled with the pots. Those were mine. They could not be contained in any register. I put them in my pocket and went home and packed a bag.

Two plain dresses. A comb that my father made. A warm cloak. I put the bag on my bed, and I sat by it, and I cried then in the light of day, no one watching, for a body can hold only so much standing.

Tara arrived at noon with the servant, Grey.

She carried it over her arm as a dead thing. She had her wild black bob, her eyes red-rimmed, she shut my door with her foot, and she said, "I sewed this under orders, and I cursed every stitch. " Grey. For you. At his table. If there was a God with any taste at all, she would strike this court with fleas.

I said, “Tara,” and my voice broke, and she came across the room and wrapped her arms around me, protecting my ribs from harm, smelling of thread and soap. She clutched at the door as if to hold back the wind.

“I sewed it strong,” she replied into my hair. There's no seam you're going to split in front of them tonight, whatever else they take tonight, that they don't take.

At dusk I wore the grey.

The feast took place in the smaller hall, where long tables were set up and there were too many candles, and the scent bowls burned at all the doors. Sweet. Thin. Wrong. I walked through the tables with a wine tray in a dress the color of dishwater, and the court watched me go with the happy silence of people at a play. King Roland was seated at the high table in black. Queen Isabel was sitting up straight and proper. And golden and clean and smiling, he raised my sister's hand in his and told the hall that the Goddess had blessed him with a second sight, that Aurora Beaumont, jewel of this court, warden of its borders, should be his Luna, his wife.

The hall cheered. My connection pulled apart a bit more, and the tray in my hands didn't rattle. I was proud of that tray! I want that written in some place true. I was pouring out the wine, and my heart was being opened up by a law of heaven, and I was not dropping a single drop.

I was called by Aurora to pour for her. “Water, I want," I asked her, in her soft carrying voice, and then, lower, for me alone, with her sweet face close, "Wine sits heavy on a figure, sister. You would know.

"Yes," I said. I have a lot of nifty tricks I know.

Her smile thinned. I moved on.

I heard his voice for the first time in the service passage, while the tray was resting against my hip and I took one breath of cool air from the yard door.

“There are the wrong bowls in there.”

I turned. He was in the passage, standing in its shadow as if he were one of the walls. Tall. Broad. His hair was black and short, his eyes were grey, and his thin scar went through his right brow, making his hard face harder. He was dressed in plain black, no court colors, and he had a clean northern smell under the sweet rot of the hall, like a knife cutting through cloth.

It was the safe answer, I said, because it was it, the court mix.

It's sugar and flowers. His tone was quiet and gentle and not mean. I came down here last winter to plead for the warden who made it to keep forty wolves alive in the snow: "At my border last winter, the posts burned deep. Bitter: nightbane and pine and ash. His eyes went to my hands, to the green stain under my nails I could never get rid of. “Every day they've brought me a lady in silver, who never smelt her own work; tonight the real one pours my wine in grey.”

The tears fell so quickly, I didn't have time to feel bad about them. One person. In all this stone court, one had said the true thing in plain words, as if it were simple.

I whispered this to him, "You are wrong, my lord," for the truth had never been safe in my mouth.

His name was Kellan Brooks. “Alpha of Emberfall. And I'm not wrong.” He took out a small thing from his coat and showed it on his palm. A rough-made iron token with a wolf head cut into it. North gate, Dawn, show that to my guards if I am held at the council table, Clara Beaumont, work in your own name, pay in your own purse, and have a room with a lock that opens from your side of the door.

"Why?" I asked. I did not have a steady hand when I took the token. It was hot on his skin.

My pack is dwindling behind a waning line. You are the only true warden in this court. He glanced back at the bright hall, at the gold and the laughter, and his face set. Because no wolf should ever have to eat on the streets and sleep in the gutter, no wolf should ever have to beg for air. Eat. Sleep. Decide. But decide as a free wolf.

I said, “I decide now,” and my voice stopped shaking. Dawn, the north gate.

After that, he changed; he relaxed, like a knot loosened from his face. Once he nodded, as men do over a sworn thing, and returned to the feast.

I made a steady shot on the last one. Once, Adrian looked at me through the candles with narrowed eyes, like he had lost his hold on the rope. I poured, and I bent, and I thought of inside locks.

At the end of the feast I went to my room to take my bag and sleep one last night in my own bed.

My key wouldn't turn.

I did it twice and didn't get it. The lock was new. The door plate was a new one. One of the sleepy servant girls came down the corridor with an armful of silver silk, and she told me, not unkindly, that this room was being prepared for Lady Aurora's dresses, by the Queen's household order, and that no one had informed her where the old things had been taken.

That was the door behind which my bag was. My dresses. My comb. My small life, small and dark, was tightly sealed and barred from me.

I was in the corridor in a state of servanthood, grey with a mark up my arm. My father's spoons are in one pocket. In the other, a warm iron token.

Vega lay down at last inside me, calm as deep water.

"Dawn," I told her. "We go at dawn. As we are."