The Mate He Gave Away novel · Chapter 3 of 40

Chapter 3: Frostgate

The garrison calls her the king's leftover, Clem turns the cook's rye scraps into bread for the whole hall and spots the burned mill on the falls, then finds a note on her pillow: 'One moon. Then they check.'

Frostgate sat at the mouth of the Wolfpass.

Gray stone, four towers, and one of them had no roof at all.

Below it a village of maybe forty houses clung to the slope above a river.

The river dropped over a falls, white and loud.

On the falls stood a black shell of a building with no roof and a burned wheel.

"What was that?" I asked.

"A mill," Corvin said. "Once."

We rode into the yard at sunset on the fifth day.

A boy came running out of the stable before we'd even stopped.

He was about eleven, all knees and sandy hair, with a gap in his front teeth.

"Is that her? Is she the queen? Why are her shoes in the bag?"

"Davy," Corvin said. "Horses."

"But is she?"

"I'm not anybody's queen," I said. "My shoes are in the bag because they pinch."

Davy considered this.

"Mine pinch too. I don't wear them."

He looked at my bare feet in the stirrups and seemed to approve of me.

Soldiers were coming out of the barracks to look.

They were lean, all of them. Too lean. Their coats were patched at the elbows.

A big man with a gray beard and a sergeant's knot on his shoulder folded his arms.

"So that's what the king sent," he said, not quietly. "His leftovers."

Somebody laughed.

Corvin's head turned.

"I can hear you," I said, before Corvin could open his mouth.

The sergeant looked at me.

"Good," he said.

A short, solid woman came out of the kitchen door, wiping her hands on her apron.

She had flour to her elbows and a long gray braid.

She looked at Corvin, then at me, then at my red gown, then at my feet.

"Well, boy," she said. "You've brought home something."

"Agnes," Corvin said. "This is Clem Millward."

"I heard. A rider came through yesterday with the news. The whole pass has heard." She jerked her chin at me. "Can you eat?"

"I can eat."

"Then come in. There's soup. It's mostly water."

The kitchen was enormous and nearly empty.

Agnes ladled out thin onion broth with a few lumps of barley in it.

The soldiers came in to eat at the long tables in the hall beyond.

Every one of them got the same thin bowl and one hard heel of bread.

I watched the sergeant finish his in four spoonfuls.

"Is this every night?" I asked Agnes.

"Since spring. The king's grain comes later every month and lighter every load." She dropped the ladle in the pot. "And now it won't come at all, I hear."

"Who told you that?"

"The same rider. News travels faster than flour up here."

"Can I see the stores?"

She gave me a long look. "Why?"

"Because I ran Ravenscar Hall's stores for three years, and I want to know what we've got."

Agnes unhooked a key from her belt.

The storeroom was cold and smelled of mice.

Twenty sacks of rye flour. Four of barley meal. A crate of onions. A barrel of salt pork, mostly salt.

In the corner, three sacks of sweepings. Bran and rye husk and broken grain swept off the floor.

"Pig feed," Agnes said. "If we had pigs."

I put my hand in a sack and let it run through my fingers.

"It isn't pig feed. Soak it overnight in hot water, mix in a third flour and some onion, and it bakes into flatbread. My mother fed a whole village on it one bad winter."

Agnes looked at me.

Then she rolled up her sleeves higher, which I hadn't thought was possible.

"Show me," she said.

We soaked the bran that night and baked at dawn.

By the noon meal there was a stack of brown flatbreads on every table, hot, soft, smelling of onion and salt.

The soldiers came in and stopped in the doorway.

The sergeant picked one up, tore it, and ate half in one bite.

Then he ate the other half.

Then he reached for another.

"Where'd this come from?" he said with his mouth full.

"From the leftovers," Agnes said, and slapped his hand away from the third.

Davy laughed so hard he choked.

The sergeant chewed for a long time. Then he looked down the table at me.

He didn't say anything.

But he didn't say leftovers again, either.

Corvin found me at the storeroom window that afternoon, writing numbers on the wall in charcoal.

"Fifty days with the sweepings," I said. "Sixty if we're mean about it."

"And then?"

"And then we need grain we don't have."

I pointed out the window at the falls.

The black shell of the mill stood over the white water.

"How long has that been dead?"

"Eight years. It burned the autumn I came north."

"What happened?"

"Lightning, they said." He looked away from the window. "The court said I was drunk and careless with a lamp. I wasn't drunk."

He didn't say anything else.

He showed me his rooms after supper.

They were at the top of the west tower. A bed, a chair, a table, a shelf of books with broken spines.

A row of tiny carved animals stood along the windowsill. A horse. A hare. Three wolves, one of them howling.

"The door locks from the inside," he said. "The key's yours."

He handed it over and left.

I heard his boots going down the stairs, all the way down, and across the yard to the barracks.

I locked the door.

I turned back the blanket on his bed.

On the pillow lay a square of folded paper.

The paper was fine and white, court paper, not the gray stuff from the keep.

I unfolded it.

The handwriting was neat and slanted, the way the clerks at Highcrown wrote.

One moon. Then they check.

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