30

The guard took us to the kitchens and left us. A dozen women at least were hurrying around the crowded set of rooms, but one—a tall, pretty woman around thirty, with dark hair and a smattering of freckles on her pale cheeks—looked us over, drawing back in horror at my bloody footprints on her floors. She tried a couple of different languages before landing on one we understood.

“You must wash,” she said, a little impatient.

A sink full of plates and cups and pans caught my eye. “Wash the dishes?” I asked.

“Ni!” the woman burst out, flinging a string of exclamations at me I didn’t understand. “Go wash yourselves.” She motioned us toward a huge tub of water in the next room. A scullery maid passed us a cake of soap, and one at a time, we began to clean ourselves, wincing at the water’s icy temperature, hissing in pain as the lye soap stung our broken skin.

When I climbed out and pulled on my new plain gray shift, I finger-combed my hair and quickly braided Torden’s ring back into it, tying the end with a thread—the last relic of my ruined gown before another maid tossed it onto the fire. I tried to swallow the lump in my throat as the dress smoldered on the logs, tried not to think of how I’d felt in it when Lang kissed me goodbye, when I sat down to meet with Gretel.

The cook was sweating before the stove and the great oven at the center of the kitchen, ringed by worktables, surrounded above by hanging cast-iron pots and bunches of dried herbs. She dragged the back of her hand across her forehead and then did point to the pile of dishes. The cracked porcelain sink was full of pans filmed with fat, with dirty dishes coated in gravy and gristle. “You three—wash.”

My bones ached, and I wanted nothing more than to lie down before the fire and sleep for a hundred years. But we were clean, we were together, and we had traded the company of male soldiers on the road for that of women in a kitchen. These were blessings.

Most important of all, Anya had protected me. With luck, it was possible that the tsarytsya might never learn who I truly was—that we could exist just beyond the bounds of her notice while we lived in her house.

I tried not to think about how long that might be. I tried not to dwell on what Anya’s announcement of her presence might cost her. I tried to tell myself a house this large was bound to be full of gaps, and that we would stay alive until we could find one and slip through it.

I didn’t ask the house to hide me, as Burg Rheinfels and the Shvartsval’d woods had pretended they would. I’d learned not to trust a place that felt safe.

Cobie and Anya and I—we were our only shelter. I asked only for a door. For an escape.

I would watch. I would wait patiently. And when the time came, we would run.

For now, we set to work, me washing, Anya rinsing, Cobie drying. The cooks were plating dinner by the time we finished. My stomach growled and I tried not to stare at the dumplings, the brilliant red-pink soup, and what appeared to be lard sliced onto bread. Two of them disappeared upstairs carrying trays, one hauling an enormous thing like a silver vase full of hot coals and scalding water.

The pots and pans went immediately into the sink, and I was prepared to be ordered back to washing. I was grateful when the head cook beckoned to us instead and ladled each of us a bowl of something hot, like grits with cheese and mushrooms in it.

It was gone too soon, but the cook was probably wise to give us no more than a half cup each. I didn’t fancy waking up in the middle of the night to vomit beside the fire.

I turned to Anya. “How do you say thank you?”

She cut me a wry glance. “Spasibo.”

“Spasibo,” I repeated to the cook.

She nodded, not ungraciously, pushing back flyaway strands of her dark hair. Then the cook pointed again to the mountain of dishes in the sink. “Wash.”

My arms were trembling when we finished our chores hours later. The cooks and serving maids had long since left, and the kitchen had cooled considerably; someone had banked the fire in the great oven. Cobie, Anya, and I lay down close together on its hearth.

Anya’s hair was pale gold by its faint light; Cobie’s brow, in sleep, was finally smooth. I wished they were far away, safe, but I was thankful they were beside me.

I longed for a story. But absent my godmother’s book, I told myself the ones I already knew—the tales I’d read, and the ones I’d lived. As the embers burned low in the fire, I thought of the way Torden’s hair looked in the sunshine. Of his confident hands on his weapons and on my waist, and the way he’d joked with his brothers.

Thinking of Torden made me think of Lang—Lang and his jealousy, his competition, his kiss that had smelled of salt and summer. I’d forgotten my guilt on the Gray Road, but sifting through my memories brought it back.

Would Torden come for me, or was he too devoted to his father to leave home?

Would Lang come? Or was he bound up in some fresh endeavor now—in something new that had caught his attention, or some other prior commitment he’d hidden from me?

Had his kiss been a goodbye, or a promise?

I hoped the crew, at least, would push for our rescue. I had been so angry at them—but they were my friends.

I had read the old tales. I knew friends made along the way mattered at the story’s end, and that to be generous to friends and strangers alike was to pave one’s own way to a happy ending. Gods and queens and powerful fae rewarded those who proved themselves less cruel and selfish than the world said was only practical, only fair.

I had seen cruelty in abundance, and we had much to fear. But threatened though we were on all sides, we were still whole, still not broken or alone. My friends and I had passed through the gate of bones, and still, against terrible odds, we lived.

Sleep dragged at me. But I couldn’t rest yet.

I tore a very thin strip from the hem of my shift, though it was already threadbare and short. In the ragged cloth I tied careful knots in sets of ten, then joined the ends; a few more knots and two crossed splinters finished my makeshift rosary. In the silent kitchen, I began to pray.

I poured out my thanks for the fire, for the bath and the food and the door between us and the wolves beyond. Most of all, I offered my gratitude for the friends safe at my side and the ones I believed with all my heart would come for me.

I would hope. I would wait.

We were in a wicked, brutal house, a cold cast-iron cage, and we would survive it. But I would not let it make me brutal. I would not let it make me cold.