“My Son Hasn’t Spoken In Seven Months” — Until The Kitchen Girl Sat Beside Him And Asked For Nothing
The boy had not eaten in 3 days. Roz knew this because she had counted the untouched trays, three of them stacked neatly outside the eastern corridor door each morning.
The bread going stale, the broth skinning over with cold.
She was not supposed to notice. Her station in Ash and veil keep was the lower kitchens where she scrubbed iron pots until her palms mapped in red lines and her knees ached from the stone floor.
She was not a nursemaid. She was not a governess.
She had no business knowing anything about the children of King Everard Voss who ruled the northern wolf packs from this fortress of dark stone and older silences whose name was spoken in the great hall with the particular reverence people reserve for winter storms and deep debts.
She had no business knowing his son at all. She had no business being noticed in the first place.
She understood that about herself, had understood it since childhood when the women of her village would say of her in tones of mild bewilderment that a girl who looked like that ought to have a better situation than a dry village at the edge of a dry summer.
She was not sure what they meant by a girl who looked like that except that her hair was the particular dark auburn of embers going cold and her eyes were a green that people sometimes glanced at twice and her face was the kind of face that made people she had observed this as a phenomenon briefly forget what they had been saying.
She had never found this useful. She found the scrubbing more useful.
And yet the first time she had seen the child, perhaps 4 months past ye, when she had taken a wrong turn carrying a load of pressed linen.
He had been sitting at the end of the eastern corridor with his back against the wall and a carved wooden horse clutched to his chest staring at the arrow slit window as though he were measuring the distance to somewhere else entirely.
He was perhaps five, small even for that with his father’s dark hair but none of his father’s cold certainty.
He looked like something that had been set down carefully and then forgotten.
Roz had stopped. She should have turned around. Instead she had sat down on the stone floor 3 ft away not close enough to frighten, not far enough to seem dismissive and began quietly sorting the linen she carried.
She had not spoken to him. He had not spoken to her.
After 20 minutes she had stood tucked the linen under her arm and walked back to the kitchens.
The carved horse was lying on its side when she left.
She chose to believe that meant something. She had been taking wrong turns ever since.
She left things near where she found him never handed, never pressed, always set down and walked away from.
A heel of bread with honey. A small round stone that caught the light oddly.
Once a sprig of dried lavender she had pulled from the kitchen stores which she tied with a length of thread into a shape that was not quite a horse and not quite a person but was something at least.
She never knew if he took them. She did not look back to check.
She understood from her own childhood in a village where the well had run dry for an entire summer and everyone had gone inward and quiet that some animals needed to come to water in their own time or not at all.
And the trays had gone untouched for 3 days. That changed the calculus.
She climbed the eastern stairs on the fourth morning with a small clay pot of warm broth not the formal silver service not the elaborately covered trays that were clearly making the boy feel watched.
Just a simple pot with a fitted lid and a cloth handle the kind of thing you might carry to a friend.
She moved quietly along the corridor and found him where she had learned to find him in the alcove before the window, knees drawn up, the wooden horse in his lap.
His eyes were closed. He was not sleeping. She recognized the posture from her own childhood.
It was the posture of trying to take up as little space as possible of hoping that if you were still enough the world would flow around you and leave you be.
Roz sat down cross-legged 4 ft away and she set the clay pot between them.
She said nothing. She watched the corridor wall. She could feel him watching the pot.
After a while, she did not count the minutes. It would have been unkind to count.
She heard the soft scrape of the lid being lifted.
She did not turn to look. She was still sitting there watching the wall when the footsteps came.
They were not the footsteps of a guard. Guards had a particular rhythm purposeful, evenly spaced, trained into them.
These footsteps were uneven with contained fury, the stride of a man whose authority was so total he had never needed to learn how to make it quiet.
She stood before she turned which was the right instinct.
She turned to find Everard Voss 6 ft away and looking at her the way a man looks at something that has walked into his house uninvited.
And he was taller than the stories. That was the first thing she registered the way you register a detail when your mind is cataloging exits.
Broad through the shoulder in traveling clothes still dark wool, road dust on the hem which meant he had returned this morning and come directly here which meant someone had reported to him directly which was information she filed away without knowing yet what she would do with it.
His eyes were gray and very still. There was a scar along his jaw, old and thin the kind that comes from a blade rather than a fall.
He looked like a man who had not slept in some time and had decided to be angry about it instead.
He did not raise his voice. That was the thing that frightened her most.
He lowered it. “You are not permitted in this corridor.”
He said. “You are not permitted near my son. And you do not touch him.
You do not speak to him. You do not come within sight of him.
Whatever you left for him you will remove it. You will return to whatever station you occupy and you will not leave it without permission.”
Roz held very still. Her hands were at her sides.
She could feel the shape of the clay pot on the floor behind her warm still, the lid replaced.
She did not argue. There was nothing to argue. He was the king and she was a pot scrubber who had spent 4 months wandering the eastern corridor like a woman with no sense of direction and she had no standing here and knew it.
What she did was this. She glanced once at the child.
He was watching his father. Not with fear or not only with fear because fear was not quite the right word for what was on his face.
The word was something older. The word was a child who has learned that the people who love him are sometimes an incoming storm and who has decided that the safest response is to become a wall.
He had eaten half the broth. Roz lowered her head.
“Yes, my king.” She said. And she picked up the clay pot and walked back down the corridor toward the stairs.
She had made it no further than the base of the stairwell when the guards came for her.
There were two of them. The king’s own household guard not the kitchen corridor boys she had learned to navigate and they did not ask her to come with them.
The first caught her by the arm above the elbow hard enough that she felt the bruise form before she understood what was happening.
And the second positioned himself behind her with the professional efficiency of a man who has escorted unwilling people before and found the choreography straightforward.
The clay pot dropped from her other hand and shattered on the stone.
She heard it more than felt it. The sound of the lid cracking the broth spreading dark across the flagstones.
“King’s orders.” The first guard said. “You are to be confined to the lower levels pending your dismissal from service.”
The keep swam briefly. She had been doing something right.
She had been doing something right. She was certain of it.
And now she was being marched through the corridor with her arm in a grip that left no room for argument past two junior maids who stopped and stared with the particular guilt tinged relief of people watching a punishment happen to someone else.
She thought about her 30 copper coins which were in a cloth at the bottom of her pallet.
She thought about the letter of reference from the miller which would do her little good if the reason for her dismissal became known.
She thought about the boy’s face and the half empty broth pot on the floor and the carved horse clutched to his chest.
She was confined to the root cellar for 2 days.
It was cold. She had her work cloak. She sat on a barrel of salted turnips and thought methodically about what was worth doing next.
She went back. It took her 2 weeks to navigate what had changed because something had changed though she could not name it precisely.
The guards on the eastern corridor watched her now when she passed.
The head housekeeper called her into the storeroom twice and spoke obliquely about her duties and what they did and did not encompass which was the housekeeper’s way of delivering warnings without saying anything that could be reported.
Roz listened, thanked her, and returned to scrubbing pots. She was good at scrubbing pots.
She had learned the skill at 10 when her mother had taken ill, and someone needed to keep the household, and she had kept it because there is a particular kind of satisfaction in making something clean that was dirty, in bringing order to a small corner of a disordered world.
She did not go back to the eastern corridor. She went to the courtyard instead.
The boy came to the courtyard sometimes. She had seen him from the kitchen window, a small figure at the edge of the training yard, and watching the soldiers practice with the carved horse pressed to his chest, never getting close enough to be in anyone’s way.
She began sitting on the courtyard steps during the hour the kitchen staff took their midday bread.
She brought her mending. She sat in the winter light and worked her needle and said nothing.
He appeared on the fourth day, stood 20 ft away, watched the soldiers.
She kept mending. On the sixth day, he sat down on the steps, not beside her but nearby, close enough.
She noticed that one of the carved horse’s legs had broken and been repaired with a strip of leather cord, carefully wound.
She noticed because she was not looking at him. She was looking at her needle, but some part of her was always building a picture of what was in her peripheral vision.
She pulled a spare length of cord from her mending kit.
She She set it on the step between them without comment and returned to her work.
The next day, the horse had a new leg, the cord wound more tightly, more precisely.
She thought someone had helped him. Then she looked at the knot and understood that he had done it himself.
She continued to say nothing. This was deliberate. She had learned from the summer of the dry well, from the months after her mother’s illness resolved into something quieter and more permanent, from her own body’s experience of what it means to be treated like a problem to be solved, that words require a response, and a required response is a kind of pressure, and pressure is the thing that makes animals bolt.
Silence asks nothing. Silence is just weather. The boy looked at her once, just once in all those days, direct, measuring, the way children look at adults when they are deciding something.
She kept her eyes on her needle. She understood later, much later, when she could think about it clearly, that it was this moment he had decided.
She had not known it at the time. She had been thinking about the dropped stitch three rows back and whether it was worth unpicking to fix it.
She was unpicking the dropped stitch when she heard the sound.
It was not loud. That was the thing about the sound.
It was so small that it almost wasn’t there. A word, barely a word, more the shape of a word carried on breath that had almost run out.
It was her name, which he should not have known, which meant someone had told him, which was its own kind of thing to think about later.
Roz. She looked up. He was pointing at the training yard.
One of the younger soldiers had dropped his practice sword, and it had skidded along the cobblestones, and the soldier was red-faced, and the others were laughing, and the boy’s expression was she could not read it exactly, but it was something, something alive and directed outward at the world, and she had never seen him do that before.
“Yes,” she said. “He’ll be embarrassed about that for at least a week.”
He looked at her. He almost smiled. It was the almost that broke something open in her chest, very quietly, the way ice breaks in spring, not all at once but in one specific place, and then another, and then another, until the river is moving again.
She did not make a production of it. She returned to her mending.
He returned to watching the soldiers, and they sat in the winter courtyard for another half hour, and she pointed out two more things, the way the captain telegraphed his right swing, the raven that had been stealing bread crusts from the supply cart for the past 3 days, and he listened, and he did not speak again, and that was fine.
That was more than fine. That was everything. She was still warming herself on it 3 days later when Everard Voss came to find her.
She was at the courtyard steps, her spot, established by now as reliable as a piece of furniture, and he came from the direction of the great hall, still in his formal council colors, which meant he had come directly from something important to be here, which again was information she did not know what to do with.
He stood a careful distance from her. She rose because the situation required it, and waited.
He looked at her the way he had looked at her in the corridor, not the same.
Something in it had shifted, but the foundation was the same, the gray stillness, the quality of a man accustomed to measuring everything he looks at.
“Maren tells me he called you by name,” he said.
Roz was quiet for a moment. “Yes,” she said. “She says he hasn’t spoken.”
He stopped. His jaw worked briefly, the muscle jumping. He looked out at the empty training yard.
“She says it’s been some time since he’s spoken to anyone.”
“Months,” Roz said. And then, because she had not been given permission to know this, and there was no point in pretending otherwise, “I know.
I noticed.” Something moved through his face. It was brief, and it was quickly controlled, and she filed it away without comment, the way she filed everything.
The broken leg on the horse, and the untouched trays, the way he had lowered his voice rather than raised it in the corridor, which is what people do when they are frightened and have decided to be angry instead.
“I told you to stay away from him,” Everard said.
Not a question. “You did,” she agreed. “You didn’t.” “No.”
He looked at her directly. She held the look. She was a pot scrubber who had spent 3 months learning the shape of a child’s grief at a distance, and she had nothing to apologize for, and she thought he might understand this because something in the gray of his eyes was working very hard on a conclusion.
“Why?” He said. She thought about the clay pot of broth.
She thought about the cord on the horse’s repaired leg.
She thought about the almost smile and the soldier’s dropped sword, and the small word her name had become in a child’s mouth the first time he had decided to use it.
“The trays were untouched,” she said. “Someone had to do something.”
The silence stretched. A raven crossed the courtyard overhead, possibly the same bread thief.
She could not be certain. He watched it pass. “You could have come to me,” he said.
“I didn’t know you,” she said. And he didn’t need more people deciding what he required.
He needed someone to sit nearby and ask nothing. Another silence, longer this time.
She had learned that his silences were not empty. They were the opposite of empty.
They were full of something being decided, the particular quality of a man who is accustomed to making decisions alone and is finding himself uncertain for possibly the first time in some years.
“I’ve been away,” he said finally. Th- This was not an explanation.
It was something raw than an explanation. It was a man acknowledging a ledger he did not know how to balance.
“I know,” she said. “He’s seen your campaigns on the walls.
He looks at the maps in the morning sometimes.” He turned to look at her fully.
She met his gaze. There was something in his face that was not anger and not quite grief, and was possibly the thing that lives between them, in the territory that has no name.
“He’s watching the training yard right now,” she said. “From the arched window, second floor.
He goes there when he knows you’re in council.” Everard’s gaze went to the window.
She watched him look. She watched the thing that crossed his face when he saw, or when he understood, because perhaps the window was empty now, perhaps the boy had already gone.
But Everard understood something. She could tell, the way you can tell when a locked door has finally been tried from the inside.
He stood there a long time. She kept her distance.
She had learned that keeping distance was not abandonment. It was the thing that made it safe to come closer.
“You’ll keep coming to the courtyard,” he said at last.
It was not a question. “If it’s not forbidden,” she said.
He looked at her again. Something in the gray had shifted, not warmed exactly, but opened, the way a window opens when someone finally reaches the latch.
“It’s not forbidden,” he said. He walked back toward the great hall.
She sat back down on the steps and picked up her mending.
She heard the sound of the great hall doors some minutes later, and then, she thought, even though she could not be certain, footsteps on the second floor corridor.
Not her footsteps. Heavier, slower. The footsteps of a man choosing his direction carefully.
She kept her head down and her needle moving. She was thinking about dropped stitches and how sometimes the best thing you can do for a piece of work is to unpick it carefully back to where the mistake happened and begin again from there.
She had not anticipated Lady Aldis. She should have. The signs had been there.
The particular way the lady’s eyes moved over her during the council dinners Ross occasionally served.
The quality of attention that was not curiosity but inventory.
Aldis of the western houses was dark-haired and precise and had been proposed as a potential queen consort for Everard Voss for at least two years according to kitchen talk.
The way she moved through Ashanvale Keep with the particular confidence of a woman who considers herself to be waiting for something she has already been promised.
She found Ross alone in the upper corridor outside the receiving room three days after Ross had returned from her conversation with Everard.
She came around the corner without announcement with two of her ladies two steps behind and she stopped when she saw Ross and her face did the thing that faces do when they find something that confirms a suspicion.
“You’re the kitchen girl.” She said. “The one the king has been meeting with.”
Ross did not correct the characterization. She held her mending and waited.
What happened next was very fast. Lady Aldis covered the distance between them in four steps.
Heeled boots on stone. He sharp and deliberate and took hold of Ross’s wrist with a grip that was nothing like a greeting.
Her fingers were cold and she knew how to hold.
Ross felt the bones of her wrist compress against each other and held very still because fighting was not an option here and flight was not an option here and all she had was the capacity to not give this woman anything to use.
“Whatever you imagine is happening.” Aldis said very quietly inches from her face.
“You are incorrect. You are a human pot scrubber in a wolf king’s court and you will be gone before the spring thaw.
Do you understand me?” Ross looked at her. Aldis’s eyes were brown and genuinely angry.
The anger of a woman who has arranged her life very carefully and perceives a variable that doesn’t belong in the arrangement.
And Ross recognized the anger because she had seen a version of it on Everard’s face in the eastern corridor and she had understood then what she understood now.
This was the anger of fear. People who are certain of their position do not threaten pot scrubbers in hallways.
She did not say this. She said quietly “You’re hurting my wrist.”
It was the wrong answer apparently because Aldis’s grip tightened.
She held it for three more seconds long enough to establish that she could long enough to leave a mark.
And then she released Ross’s wrist and stepped back and smoothed her skirt with perfect composure.
“Remember what I said.” Aldis told her and walked past with her ladies and did not look back.
Ross stood in the corridor and looked at her wrist.
The marks of four fingers would be bruises by morning.
She flexed her hand. Yeah, it worked. She filed the encounter away with everything else in the part of her mind where she kept things that were information rather than wounds and went back to the kitchens.
She was still warming herself on it three days later when Everard Voss came to find her.
She had come in the autumn with a letter of reference from the miller in her village and 30 copper coins pressed to her by her aunt who had said “You’re clever enough to find a place.
You’re quiet enough not to lose it.” She had heard enough of pack society to know the shape of it the selection the mate bonds that paired wolves by the will of something older than law the rigid hierarchy of rank and bloodline that made her own standing as a human woman something beneath the notice of anyone who mattered.
She had found the place lower kitchens, pot scrubber invisible by design and she had not lost it though she had apparently expanded its geography somewhat without authorization.
Winter had come full in now. The training yard frosted each morning.
The soldiers’ breath plumed in the cold air when they drilled and there was something in the sight of it all that effort made visible that she found she couldn’t look away from.
Aemon came to the courtyard steps every day now. That was the boy’s name.
She had learned it eventually from the kitchen talk from the way the maids spoke about him in the careful tones people reserve for something they are trying not to break.
Aemon Voss five years old sole heir to the northern wolf packs and the Ashanvale territory who had not spoken in seven months and now said perhaps two or three words a day all of them to Ross.
He had begun in the past two weeks to bring the carved horse to show her not to hand over.
She understood he was not ready to hand it over that the horse was the kind of object that had absorbed a significant portion of his interior life and was therefore not transferable but to hold up, to display to say, “Look.”
She looked. She told him things about it. She said “The neck is carved at a particular angle.
Did you know that means the horse has been caught mid-turn?”
And he considered this with the gravity of a person receiving information that matters.
She said “The grain of the wood goes against the direction of the mane which means whoever carved it worked with a particular kind of patience.”
He ran his thumb along the grain. He nodded once as though confirming a theory.
His father had begun appearing at the edge of the training yard and not approaching.
Not yet but present in the way that kings are present when they are pretending to have business nearby.
She saw him watching Aemon. She saw Aemon from the corner of his eye know that he was being watched and decide this was the thing the decision Ross could track in the small adjustments of the boy’s posture decide to continue anyway to show her the horse anyway to point at the ravens anyway.
Progress. Unmistakable if you knew where to look. She was watching the ravens one afternoon.
They had established a genuine operation at the supply cart at least three of them with what appeared to be a division of labor when Aemon set the carved horse down on the step between them.
This had not happened before. She kept very still. He pointed at the horse’s repaired leg.
And he pointed at the cord she had given him.
He said in his careful way as though each word required some small expenditure “It held.”
“Yes.” She said. “Good knot work.” He picked the horse back up.
He held it in both hands and looked at it for a long moment.
Then he said not to her or perhaps to her it was hard to be certain “He taught me.”
She did not ask who. She understood who. “He’s good with his hands.”
She said carefully. “He made it.” Aemon said “before.” She did not know what before meant in this context.
She filed it away with everything else and said “Then it’s a good horse.”
He looked at her. He had his father’s gray eyes.
He said and this was the most words at once the most sustained construction she had heard from him and when she felt the weight of it the way you feel the weight of something fragile being handed to you.
“He doesn’t come.” “I know.” She said. “Why?” She thought about what she knew.
Campaigns, maps on the walls, a man who lowered his voice instead of raising it because he was frightened.
She thought about ledgers that don’t balance and grief that turns into logistics and how sometimes the hardest thing is not fighting the war but knowing what to do when the war is over and you come home to find that time has moved without you.
“I think” she said slowly “that he doesn’t know how to come back to where he left from.
He needs a door to walk through.” Aemon considered this.
The ravens concluded their supply raid and departed in a businesslike cluster.
“You could make him a door.” Aemon said. She looked at him.
He was looking at the carved horse. “Yes.” She said.
“I could try.” She thought about it for three days.
She was good at thinking while she scrubbed. The motion of it freed something in her.
The repetitive back and forth. The way you don’t have to decide what to do with your hands and so your mind can go where it needs to go without being called back for small tasks.
She thought about what she knew of Everard Voss that he had come directly from the road to scold her in the eastern corridor which meant someone had told him immediately and he had cared enough to act on it immediately.
That he had come directly from council to find her after Aemon called her by name.
That he stood at the edge of the training yard in the attitude of a man who wants something but does not know how to want it without it becoming a command.
On the fourth day, she went to the great hall and asked to speak with the king.
She was not expected. She was a pot scrubber. The steward looked at her the way stewards look at things that have appeared in places things should not appear.
She waited. She was very good at waiting. The steward came back and told her in a voice of cautious neutrality that the king would see her in the smaller receiving room which was not the great hall which meant something she thought.
The smaller receiving room had a fire and two chairs and no one in it when she arrived.
She stood beside the fire because she was cold and because there was no protocol here and so she could make one.
Everard came in 3 minutes later. He was in his plain working clothes.
Dark wool, sleeves turned back. A man between things rather than presiding over them.
And he looked at her beside the expression was the gray stillness and something she thought might possibly be curiosity.
“You asked to see me.” He said. “Yes.” She said.
“I wanted to tell you something and I thought I should tell you directly rather than find another way around it.”
Something shifted in his face. He said nothing. He sat down in one of the chairs which she understood was an invitation.
She sat in the other. “Aemon told me you made the horse.”
She said. Before His hand stilled on the arm of the chair.
She watched his face. There it was. The thing that lived between anger and grief.
The uncharted territory. His face moving through it in the space of 3 seconds and coming to rest at something that looked for the first time simply sad.
“He told you that.” He said. “He wants you to come back to where you left from.”
She said. “He doesn’t know how to ask you. He doesn’t have enough words yet.
But if someone were to open a door.” She stopped.
She thought she had perhaps said enough. She was a pot scrubber in a receiving room and she had told a king that his 5-year-old son was waiting for him to remember how to walk toward something and she was not sure what happened next.
What happened next was that Everard Voss looked at the fire for a long time.
She watched the light move across his face. She watched the calculation that was not calculation.
The thing that happens when a man who is very good at deciding is faced with something that cannot be decided only done.
“He called you by name.” Everard said not looking away from the fire.
“Yes.” “Before that he hadn’t.” His jaw moved and the scar along it caught the firelight.
“Not in 7 months. Not since his mother.” She did not fill the silence.
She let it be what it was. “I don’t know what you did.”
He said. “I told you to stay away and you didn’t and I” He stopped again.
His hands moved once on the chair arm. He ate the broth.
“Yes.” “I found the clay pot.” He said. He’d kept it.
He had it in his room. He finally looked at her.
The gray eyes were very direct and a little raw.
The look of a man who has finished performing a particular kind of management.
“I didn’t understand that at first. I thought you had put it there deliberately to I don’t know what I thought.
I thought you were working toward something.” “I was working toward him eating.”
She said. He was quiet. “He’s a child.” She said more gently.
“He doesn’t need strategy. He needs someone to sit nearby and ask nothing.
I’m good at that.” Everard looked at her for a long moment.
She held the look the way she had held it in the corridor because she had nothing to hide and no position to defend and she had simply been doing what seemed necessary and she was prepared to continue doing it as long as she was permitted.
“I know.” He said finally. “I know you are.” He looked back at the fire.
“I’m not very good at that.” “No.” She agreed. “But you made the horse.”
He turned to look at her. Something in the gray for the first time was not performing anything.
It was simply present. She noticed that his hands had gone still on the chair arm.
Not the stillness of control but the other kind. The kind that comes when someone has been holding something for a long time and has finally in a specific moment and set it down.
“He’s in the courtyard tomorrow morning.” She said. “After the first bell.
He watches the soldiers drill.” Everard said nothing. “I’ll be there.”
She said. “Mending.” She stood because the conversation had found its ending.
She smoothed her skirt. She said “You don’t have to say anything to him.
You can just be nearby. That’s usually enough to start.”
She walked back to the kitchens. She had a pot to scrub, a very large one the kind used for the week’s salt stores and she worked at it until her arms ached and her mind went quiet and easy.
She did not know. She would not know until much later when it could be spoken plainly that Everard had stood in the receiving room for some minutes after she left looking at the chair she had sat in and thinking about auburn hair in firelight and green eyes that held a look the way a person holds something they have decided not to put down.
In the morning, she came to the courtyard steps with her mending.
Aemon was already there. The carved horse in his lap.
He looked at her and he looked at the space on the steps and then he looked up at the arched doorway that led from the keep’s interior.
Everard Voss came through it at the first bell. He was in his plain wool again.
He walked without ceremony to the steps not to Ross’s side, not to Aemon’s side but to the step above where he sat down and looked out at the training yard.
Aemon looked at the horse. Aemon looked at his father.
He held the horse out not handing it over. She knew the difference.
Displaying it. Saying “Look.” Everard looked. His voice when he spoke I was very quiet.
“You fixed the leg.” He said. Aemon nodded. “Cord’s tighter than I’d managed.”
Everard said. “How did you get it that tight?” Aemon showed him.
His small hands demonstrated the wrap and the knot carefully in the deliberate way he had.
And Everard watched and his face was the face of a man who is watching something he had believed was gone and finding that it is not gone.
It has simply been waiting in the courtyard in the cold holding a carved horse with a newly wrapped leg.
The ravens came to the supply cart. Ross pointed them out to no one in particular.
Aemon nudged his father’s elbow and pointed also. Everard watched the ravens with an expression that was very close.
She thought to bewildered gratitude. She returned to her mending.
She kept her head down. Did she let the morning be what it was?
Three people in a courtyard. Two of them finding their way back to each other.
One of them carefully not watching because some animals need to come to water in their own time.
She heard Aemon’s voice steady and small explaining something about ravens.
She heard Everard answer him. She kept her needle moving.
She was thinking about dropped stitches about unpicking carefully back to where the mistake happened.
About how the best repair always holds better than the original because you know exactly where the weakness was and you wind the cord tighter and this time it stays.
