She unlocked the door, stepped out into the corridor, and found them mid-conversation.
Or mid-something. Caewyn had propped himself against the far wall with the ease of a man who could make himself comfortable anywhere. He had, by the look of it, been saying something to Rhevan for some while — because he was wearing the single most enormous grin she had ever seen on a grown man, a vast, delighted, entirely unrepentant thing, the grin of someone who has just landed a joke exactly where he aimed it and intends to keep landing it.
And Rhevan looked as though he wanted to walk into the sea.
She’d never seen him look like that. She’d seen him unreadable, and dry, and quietly amused, and once, only once, genuinely undone — but she had never seen him wear the flat, weary, hunted expression of a man deeply regretting every choice that had led him to be standing in this particular corridor having this particular conversation. It was so unexpected and so human that she nearly laughed before she’d even understood it. Whatever Caewyn had been saying, it had cost Rhevan something, and Caewyn had enjoyed every second of the spending.
“—and all I’m saying,” Caewyn was in the middle of, “is that a man doesn’t pay three months of a—”
Then the door clicked behind her, and they both looked up.
And both of them stopped.
Caewyn’s grin didn’t fall — it changed, the mischief in it softening into something plainer and more surprised, his quick clever face going briefly, honestly still. And Rhevan—
Rhevan looked at her the way he had in his own doorway, that morning, when she’d stood in a grey-blue dress with her hair anyhow, and he’d lost a sentence about the colour. Except she wasn’t in a dress she’d chosen, and her hair wasn’t anyhow; she was clean past anything she’d ever been, dressed plain and whole, her hair washed and dried to a bright fall of red, her own good face — she knew it now, she’d seen it — bare and clear in the corridor light. And he looked at her, and the weary hunted expression went entirely out of him. What came into its place he did not fold away fast enough, so that for one full second she saw it plain: something that had nothing to do with a captain’s teasing or a lieutenant’s composure, something that simply stopped.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Then Caewyn let out a low whistle, breaking it, delighted all over again.
“Well,” he said. “There she is.” He pushed off the wall, and his grin came back full and wicked, and he cut a look sideways at Rhevan that Lyrwen caught the whole of. “Songbird. They’ve gone and made you presentable. Turn round, let’s see the whole—no, I’m teasing, don’t hit me, Selvane’s already looking at me like he’s costing out where to hide the body.” He was thoroughly enjoying himself. “You look well. You look very well. Doesn’t she, Selvane?”
“She does,” Rhevan said.
He said it evenly. He’d got himself back by then — the second was over, the thing folded away where it went. But he said it looking at her, plainly, the way he said true things, and he did not dress it up, and he did not deflect it onto the clothes or the washing or the light, and after a whole day of Caewyn Hael’s chatter it landed in the quiet with more weight than all of it put together.
Lyrwen looked at the floor, because her face had gone hot and there was a mirror’s worth of new knowledge sitting behind her ribs and nowhere in this corridor to put any of it.
“You were saying something,” she said, to Caewyn, “as I came out. About three months of something.”
The grin that spread across Caewyn Hael’s face was a thing of pure joy.
“Was I,” he said. “Do you know, I’ve completely forgotten.”
“Mm,” said Rhevan, in a tone that promised the conversation was very much not forgotten and would be revisited at length the moment she was not present. Caewyn laughed, and clapped his hands together, and said, “Right! Food. Come on, both of you, before the cook gives our supper to someone she likes better,” and set off down the corridor without waiting, entirely certain, as ever, that they would follow.
The smell reached her before the room did — food, a great deal of it, cooking and cooked, and under it the warm noise of a lot of people eating in one place, and she knew it in her body before she’d turned the corner, because it was the tavern’s own smell and sound, near enough, and something in her both eased and ached at once.
It was a long hall, lower and plainer than the gold one, full of benches and long tables and the ordinary clatter of a meal. And at the far end of it, a knot of them were already at it — perhaps a dozen, grey-coated, though they’d loosened the coats the way off-duty men do, sitting close over their food and their talk, laughing at something, easy in the room the way people are easy in a place that’s theirs. She marked them the way she marked everyone, and marked, too, that they had the same feel to them the officers had had in the tavern that first frightening night — bright, and clear, and potent, the struck-match weight of the trained, a whole table of it.
“That lot won’t bite,” Caewyn said, catching where she was looking. “Well. Not before they’ve eaten. Come on.”
“Who are they?”
“Sworn.” He said it easily, already steering her toward the counter. “Full Sworn, that lot — done their Institute, taken the oath, drawn a section. The proper article.” He glanced at her, and something in his face adjusted, quick as ever. “You don’t know the word.”
“No.”
“Sworn,” he said again, gentler, dropping the pace of it for her. “It’s what we are. All of us — me, Selvane, the General, that table of reprobates over there. Anyone who’s passed the Institute and sworn to the Bastion. It’s the whole of the order, top to bottom; a captain’s Sworn and a first-week recruit’s Sworn the day they take the oath. You’ll be Sworn yourself, once the Institute’s had you and you’ve said the words.” He grinned. “Which makes that table your future, songbird. Terrifying thought, I know. Try not to hold it against them.”
She looked at the table again — the loosened coats, the laughing, the ordinary tired ease of people at the end of a working day — and tried to put herself among them and couldn’t, quite, and filed the word away with all the others. Sworn. One more thing she hadn’t known this morning.
Caewyn brought them up to the counter, where a broad woman with her sleeves shoved to the elbow, and a face like a closed fist was working a great pot, and his whole manner changed — went bright and warm and shameless, a man walking up to a favorite.
“Bett,” he said, leaning on the counter. “Bett, my heart, my one true love, light of the whole grey misery of this place. Tell me you saved the good stew and not the grey water you feed the Marshals.”
“I fed the good stew to the Marshals an hour ago,” said Bett, not looking up. “There’s grey water left. It’s what you get for coming late and bringing your noise with you.”
“She doesn’t mean it,” Caewyn said to Lyrwen, confidingly, as though sharing a secret. “She loves me. She’s loved me for years. It’s a great tragedy, the difference in our stations.” He turned back to the cook, and his voice gentled under the theatre of it. “Bett. Be kind. I’ve brought you someone worth being kind to.”
And the woman looked up, at last — at Caewyn, flatly, and then past him to Lyrwen, and the closed-fist face did the same thing the washing-woman’s had done: swept her once, head to foot, taking her measure, and softened by a degree at what it found.
“This is Lyrwen,” Caewyn said, and there was something almost careful in how he set the name down, for all the flirting. “She’s come up from the Sink. She’s for the Institute tomorrow, and she’s had a very long day of being looked at by important men, and she has, I’d stake my rank on it, not been properly fed in longer than either of us would like to know. So.” He spread his hands. “The good stew, Bett. Whatever you’ve got that’s got meat in it. For her, if not for me.”
Bett looked at Lyrwen a moment longer.
“Sink, is it,” she said. It wasn’t unkind. “You’ve the look of it. Too much cheekbone and not enough else.” She was already reaching for a clean bowl, a proper one, and turning to a different pot than the one she’d waved Caewyn off with. “Sit yourself down, girl. I’ll bring it. And I’ll bring enough, so don’t you go being polite about it the way the thin ones always do — I can tell a girl who’s learned to eat half and call it plenty from clear across a room, and I’ve no patience for it at my counter.”
Something caught hard in Lyrwen’s throat.
Because it was the keeper’s voice, it was Maren’s voice, eat, all of it, not the polite half you think you’re allowed — it was the exact language of the tavern, the same rough kindness handed across a counter by a hard-faced woman who’d sized her up in a glance and decided to feed her properly. It reached into the cold homesick place the whole enormous day had opened in her and warmed one small corner of it, four streets and a world and a fortress-wall from the only home she’d ever had.
“Thank you,” she managed.
“Mm,” said Bett, already ladling, exactly the way the keeper said it, and Lyrwen had to look hard at the counter for a moment and blink.
“See,” said Caewyn, delighted, oblivious, steering her toward a bench. “Told you. Loves me.”
They sat, and Bett brought it over herself.
She set it down in front of Lyrwen without ceremony and with a great deal of it all the same — a bowl of stew that steamed, thick and dark and full of things, meat in it that she could see, none of the grey-edged end-of-the-night thinness she’d eaten standing at a bar for three years. Bread beside it, a whole heel of it, soft and fresh. And a second small dish, and a cup, that she didn’t understand at first.
“Eat the stew while it’s hot,” Bett said, “and don’t leave the bread, and I’ll not hear a word about it being too much.” And she was gone, back to her counter, before Lyrwen could thank her again.
Lyrwen ate.
She tried not to fall on it. She’d meant to be careful, to eat like a person and not like a thing that had learned to eat fast before it got taken away — but it was hot, and it was good, and there was so much of it, and she was hungrier than she’d let herself know, and she got most of the way down the bowl before she remembered to slow. Caewyn talked the whole time, mercifully, so that her quiet went unremarked; Rhevan ate beside her without much attention, the way he did, and let her have the food without watching her have it, which she was grateful for in a way she couldn’t have said.
The small dish stopped her.
She’d left it to the side, not knowing what it was. She looked at it properly now — bits of something, dark and wrinkled and small, and she turned one over with her spoon and could not place it at all. It looked like nothing she’d ever eaten. It looked, if anything, like fruit gone wrong, shrivelled and dried past use, the sort of thing you’d throw to a pig or throw out.
“Go on,” Caewyn said, watching her frown at it. “It won’t hurt you.”
“What is it?”
He blinked. “It’s fruit. Dried fruit.” And then something crossed his quick face, the same adjustment she’d watched him make about the word Sworn; a small quiet recalculation as he understood that she was not being difficult, that she genuinely did not know. “You dry it,” he said, more gently, “so it keeps. Fresh fruit spoils in a week; dry it and it’ll last you a winter. Sweeter, too; the drying pulls it in, concentrates it. Try a piece.”
She picked one up in her fingers, doubtfully, and put it in her mouth.
And her whole face changed before she could stop it.
It was sweet. Sweet the way she hadn’t known food could be, a deep, chewy, dense sweetness that flooded the back of her mouth and went on, nothing like the thin sweetness of the one honeyed thing the tavern sold at festivals, nothing like anything. She’d thought it was fruit gone wrong. It was fruit made more, all of a summer’s worth pulled into one small dark shrivelled thing, and she sat on a bench in the heart of the Bastion with the taste of it filling her mouth and had to work not to make a sound.
Caewyn was grinning at her. “Good, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t know,” she said, and heard how it sounded, and didn’t care enough to hide it. “I didn’t know it did that.”
“Have the lot,” he said, pushing the little dish an inch toward her. “I’ll get more off Bett; she can’t say no to me. Well. She can. She does, constantly. But she’ll do it for you.”
She had another piece. And another. And then, because her mouth was sweet and dry with it, she reached for the cup Bett had set down, and drank without looking, expecting the small ale or the water she’d have got in the tavern—
—and stopped.
It was milk.
She held the cup and looked into it. Milk, to drink, a whole cup of it, cool and white and thick on her tongue — and she had had milk before, of course she had, a splash of it in something, a bit spared into a child’s portion, the way you got a little of a dear thing when there was a little to spare. She had never once had a cup of it. She had never had milk as a thing you were simply given, a full cup set down beside a meal as though it cost nothing, as though anyone could have milk, as though milk were water. It was rich and faintly sweet, and it coated her mouth, and she thought, with a small helpless lurch, of the fold of coin at her waist and the arithmetic she’d done her whole life, and of how a cup of milk had been, for as long as she could remember, a thing that belonged to someone else’s table.
She set the cup down carefully.
“All right?” Rhevan said, quietly, beside her. He’d noticed — of course he’d noticed; he noticed everything; he’d watched her count coins from across a room. He wasn’t looking at her, which was its own kindness; he was looking at his own bowl, giving her the question without the weight of his eyes on it.
“I’ve never had milk to drink,” she said. Low, so only he’d catch it. “A whole cup of it. I didn’t — “ She stopped. “It’s very good.”
Rhevan didn’t say anything for a moment.
“No,” he said at last, and there was something under the evenness of it, something she was beginning to be able to hear. “I don’t suppose you have.”
He didn’t make it more than that. He didn’t tell her it was sad, or that she’d have milk every day now, or any of the things a lesser kindness would have reached for. He just let it be true, and let her have her cup of milk, and went back to his stew — and she sat between the two of them in the warm loud hall, clean and fed and full of a sweetness she hadn’t known existed, and drank the whole of it slowly, and did not think, for a little while, about anything at all.
“When were you born, then?” Caewyn asked, around a mouthful of bread. He asked it the way he asked everything, idly, a man filling a comfortable silence. “You’ve the look of someone with a season on her. Some people you can just tell.”
Lyrwen turned her cup on the table. “The end of Harvest,” she said. “Toward the end.”
“Toward the end.” He said it back to her, and something in his quick face caught on the vagueness of it, a small recalibration behind the brightness. He didn’t remark on it. He’d worked out, somewhere in the day, that she came from a place where a person knew the season they were born in and not the day, where nobody had written it in a book because there was no book and no one to keep it, and he let it go by without making her say so. “Well, that’s near enough now, isn’t it? The Harvest’s all but done — there’s a bite in the mornings already, the Freeze is right behind it.” He tipped his head at her, cheerful. “How many years are you to be, then?”
“Twenty,” she said.
“Twenty!” He said it as though she’d told him something marvelous. “Twenty, and coming up on it any day, by the sound. Well.” He raised his cup to her, mock-solemn. “A very happy near-birthday to you, songbird. Twenty’s a fine age. I barely remember mine; I expect I spent it being insufferable, I usually do.”
“You spent it,” said Rhevan, beside her, “falling off a wall in front of the whole of Ellune sector, if the story I had is true.”
“That is slander, and I’ll thank you not to repeat it in front of impressionable young women.” Caewyn pointed his bread at Rhevan. “It was a controlled descent.”
“It was three storeys.”
“A controlled descent of three storeys.”
She let their bickering roll over her and drank her milk, and did not say the rest of it, which was that she had never once, in her whole life, known the day she was born — that toward the end of Harvest was the entire sum of what the woman who raised her had ever told her, a season and no more, no date, no year written anywhere, nothing but a dead woman’s word for a dead woman’s guess and birthdays had not been a thing that happened to her. She’d marked the turn of the seasons because everyone did, and let her own age tick over somewhere inside them without ceremony, and never thought twice about it, because there had never been anyone to make a fuss and nothing to make a fuss with.
And now she was going to turn twenty within days, somewhere behind these walls, the first birthday of her life spent away from the tavern, from Maren, from the keeper — the only people who’d ever known she had one to mark.
She didn’t say any of that. She drank her milk.
But she felt Rhevan register it. That was the thing. He’d gone on bickering with Caewyn about the wall, easy and dry, and he hadn’t so much as glanced at her — but she felt it happen all the same, the small quiet filing-away, the same attention he’d turned on a cup of coins across a tavern and the wording of a question over breakfast. He’d heard end of Harvest and twenty and any day now, and he’d put it somewhere, the way he put everything somewhere, and she had learned enough of him by now to know that a thing he filed did not stay filed idle.
She wasn’t sure what she felt about that. She turned it over, and drank her milk, and let it sit unnamed with all the rest.
