Page 78 of Warrior Queen
She waggled her head from side to side. “Not in favor no more, thass what. I got sent over here a year or so back. This is where the king houses guests he don’t like. As far from his palace as he can get ’em.” She sniffed. “Folks do say as this house be haunted. I’m thinkin’ he must’ve heard those tales.”
I managed an uneasy laugh. If any house could be said to harbor ghosts, surely it was this one. “I don’t believe in ghosts.” Not really true, but I was trying to convince myself and saying it out loud seemed a good idea.
Karstyn glanced over her shoulder as though she feared an on-the-spot manifestation. “Thass what I thought…” she mumbled.
I held up my hand. “Enough talk of ghosts. If we’re not careful, we’ll convince ourselves we can see them. And they don’t exist.”
She raised a single quizzical eyebrow, which, accompanied as it was by a knowing smile, did nothing to soothe my nerves. Damn the woman. Now I couldn’t get the thought of unquiet specters walking the corridors of the Domus Alba at night out of my head.
She turned back to the table. “I’d best be getting’ on wi’ makin’ this bread then. There be a whole lot o’ ye to feed. I b’lieve there’s other kitchens in other houses atakin’ care o’ the men what didn’t fit in this here house. I did hear as how young Arthur has brung all his army with him this time.” She chuckled. “A wise precaution, I’d say.”
The Domus Alba kitchen was a long, high ceilinged room with stone cooking troughs down two of the sides. These already glowed with hot coals, making the room as sultry as the interior of a volcano. A few large cooking pots, responsible for the alluring aromas, sat on tripods over the heat, with large, leaf-wrapped parcels resting on top of the coals. The bread Karstyn was preparing would go to the ovens set in the earth banks against the city walls. Not many houses cooked bread at home as it was such a dangerous undertaking.
“Something smells good,” I said, peering into the nearest pot and risking getting my eyebrows singed off by the heat of the coals. The rich smell of the cooking stews mingled with the acrid, eye-watering stink of woodsmoke. Working in a kitchen long term, or even in a great hall with its huge open fire and smoke-filled rafters, couldn’t be good for the lungs. Did people here die of things like emphysema and lung cancer? Or did they die of some other cause before those things developed?
As if to illustrate my thought, Karstyn coughed long and deep, then hawked and spat onto the flagstone floor beside the cooking troughs where her globule of mucous sizzled on the hot stone. I’d never get used to the casual disregard for hygiene common in this time.
“Oyster stew,” she said. “We did get a deliv’ry from the coast this mornin’. Shucked ’em already, I have, and popped ’em in wi’ the beef.” She sighed. “That were the Lady Morgawse’s favorite. I did cook that for her right often.” She looked up from her kneading. “Have ye seen owt of her at all?”
I filled her in on what had been happening to me and Morgawse in the last five years. She’d started on a second batch of bread by the time I’d finished, and a row of neat round patties of dough sat on a tray covered by a linen cloth, ready to be carried to the nearest oven.
A pimply boy staggered in, hefting a lumpy sack, and threw it down on the terracotta floor tiles. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand, and his curious gaze traveled to me. As soon as we’d arrived, and conscious of the part I had to play as wife to the High King, I’d put on a pretty, pale-blue gown and redone my single braid with gold thread woven through it.
He bobbed a bow and tugged his forelock in deference. “Milady.”
“Off you go, Nyle, and take this tray o’ loaves to the oven. But mind as ye stay an’ wait for ’em, lest that oaf of a baker sends ye back wi’ the wrong ones.”
Good. I didn’t want poisoned ones coming back.
With a wary look for me out of his curiously pale eyes, as though I were some kind of weird alien creature, the boy bolted with his load, leaving the kitchen to Karstyn and me.
She sighed. “Can’t get the help nowadays. Boys’re bone idle. Girls no better. Weren’t like that when I were a youngun. That boy, he dreams o’ bein’ a warrior, not a cook. Foolish boy. Soldiering ain’t for the likes o’ him.”
I forbore from commenting, and instead, turned the conversation in the direction I’d been wanting it to go in all along. “Do you know anything about the Lady Morgana’s child?”
Karstyn’s gaze sharpened, and she stopped kneading. “I might.”
Good. For Merlin’s sake, after hearing his sad story of a fatherless childhood, a determination to discover what I could had become one of my priorities. “She’s well?”
Karstyn nodded. “She is. Thrivin’s what I hear.”
I sat myself down in the one chair at the table, back straight as befits a queen, hands folded in my lap, conscious of keeping up appearances. “If you’ve been sent here, how is it you know?”
She smiled, setting her own pudgy hands on the table and leaning her weight on them. “I’ve a dear friend what works in the palace still. She be a waitin’ woman, and also a midwife. ’Twere she what d’livered the babby. And she do wait on the Lady Morgana still. And the babby.”
“Oh.” Useful bit of information. “Has she told you much?”
Karstyn narrowed her eyes. “Well, that the babby’s mami seems smitten by her. That the Princess Morgana do be’ave more like a proper mother’n you’d’a thought she could.”
I nodded. “You’re right about that being strange. I wouldn’t have expected her to have one ounce of maternal instinct, and yet when we sneaked in here earlier this year so Merlin could see his child, it was Morgana singing her baby to sleep, not a nursemaid.”
Karstyn grinned, starting her kneading again, thumping the dough down on the table. “I did hear a fair bit aboutthat. Talk o’ the palace it were– talk o’ the town too. Soon got out. Can’t keep a secret like that.” She chuckled and her ample bosoms shook. “’Twere my friend what found the lady Morgana, all bound up and fair aboilin’ wi’ rage. My friend were right scared to untie ’er, lest she took it out on her. Turned ’er into a frog, or summat like that. Ye never know with her sort.”
I chuckled. Whatever powers Morgana had, turning people into frogs probably didn’t feature on the list. But it felt good to know the small people thought it did. “Do you know when she found her?”
“When she come to help with the child, first thing in the mornin’.”
Brilliant. Morgana must have had to sit tied up and gagged like that all night long. I couldn’t have asked for more. Our fears that she’d raise the alarm before we were well clear of Viroconium had been unfounded.
