Chapter 173

The first Thursday of December came in with sleet, as it had the year before, and I went down to the kitchen at six for bread because I always did.

The stool was by the range. It had been there every morning for a year, and every morning I had taken my bread and gone up the back stair with it before the first petitioner came in at the yard door. I had told myself it was the archive. The archive had a great deal in it that wanted doing. That was true, and it was not why.

I had not been able to watch him. Not once, in a whole year. I could ride ten days beside him and put my hand on his chest in a garden and tell him I loved him, but I could not stand in Nana’s kitchen and watch the King of Vaelmoor look up into a ward’s face and listen. Something in me went down the cellar stair every time I tried, and sat at a desk in the half-light, and waited for someone to come and ask it anything at all. Nobody ever had. It was jealous of being asked now, and ashamed of the jealousy,