A Hunger Most Dark novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The Dinner

I held a dinner on the eighth night, because a lord who hides his new clerk looks like he has something to hide.

Six guests came, the Master of the Scales and five merchants who owed me money.

Lenore sat at the foot of the table with a ledger open beside her plate, in the same grey coat.

The Master had a round, red face and a habit of leaning into a woman's space when he spoke to her.

He had been leaning into hers for the length of the soup.

"So you're the Rooke girl," he said. "I remember the stories."

"Do you?" Lenore said. She buttered her bread.

"Everyone in the old quarter knew about the boy they kept below the kitchen." He grinned at me down the table. "The one the daughter played with. I heard she had him fetching and kneeling before he was ten."

The table went still.

A merchant's wife looked at her plate.

I put down my spoon, because if I kept holding it I was going to bend it.

I had never heard it said out loud in a room of people.

Lenore did not look at me.

"Yes," she said. "I did that."

The Master blinked.

He had expected her to deny it, or to cry.

"I did it for six years," Lenore said, in a level voice. "Ask him whether he remembers it. I would."

Nobody said anything.

I could not have spoken if the house had been burning.

The Master recovered first.

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