Chapter 128

Four days after the witches’ court the chill was still in my fingers, and the only cure Nana believed in was a brick out of her bread oven, wrapped in flannel. So a little after nine I went down the back stair from the archive to fetch one, in my stockings, because the stair was stone and carried every footstep straight into the kitchen.

I stopped four steps from the bottom, because the kitchen was not empty.

The door at the foot of the stair stood a little open. Through it I could see the end of the long scrubbed table, home from the great hall with a new scrape along one edge, and the range with its doors shut and its brass rail, and beside the range, on the three-legged stool Nana used for reaching the top shelf, the King of Vaelmoor.

He had sat there since seven that morning. The laundry girl with the cracked copper had been the first, a week ago. Since then there had been a groom who wanted his sister taken on in the dairy, and a ward of nine who wanted to kno