The Drone Who Claimed the Marshal novel · Chapter 28 of 32
Chapter 28: No Fever
Ambrose ate three eggs, a heel of bread and half a pot of Wystan's bitter tea, and he did not taste any of it.
He was thinking of a boy writing him a note to eat something.
The kitchen at Roark Keep was low and warm, and no plate had risen on his arm since the night they poured the fire into each other.
He kept turning his left hand over on the table to check.
There was no fever in it.
There was only a steady, quiet gold.
Linus came in with his hair on end, in one of Ambrose's old shirts, and stopped at the loaf on the board.
"Sit," Ambrose said.
"It's not even light."
"I have been awake since before the gulls. Sit down."
He cut the bread himself, thick slices, and buttered each one to the edge.
He had told Linus once, in the keep, that he wanted to cut the bread for him in the morning.
He had not known then that he would be allowed.
Linus watched him with the corner of his mouth lifted, and ate two slices without a word.
"You're doing it on purpose," he said.
"Doing what?"
"Looking after me. You've done it for a week."
"I intend to do it for fifty years," Ambrose said. "Eat the third slice."
Wystan, at the stove, pretended to be deaf.
The reading house stood at the end of a narrow lane in the drone ward, behind the river wall, with a green door and a handful of children sitting on its step.
Ambrose had been to every barracks in the empire.
He had never once walked into a drone lane, and he felt that in every step.
Old women at the windows watched him come.
A man with a broom stopped sweeping.
Nobody bowed.
They only looked at the Marshal in his plain coat, carrying a spade over his shoulder, and at the grey-eyed man beside him with the tin box under his arm.
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