Page 112 of Untempered
“Have you a moment?” Audrey asked Kaelson, though she’d been called to his office.
“Of course, my lady.” He waved her in, and I followed after her, closing the door gently. “I’ve been meaning to put together a report for you.”
She waved it off. “Report when you need me or want to celebrate. Daily running I don’t need to hear about, unless it pleases you to share it.” Kaelson’s face didn’t falter from its polite lines as she spoke. “I won’t waste your time. We’ve had thieves taking too heavily from the larder. I’m opening up the mess hall to anyone who’d like to access it, but I want to secure the kitchens, and we need to reclaim some of the hoarded food.”
Kaelson nodded, regret in his face. “I like that move, my lady. It ought to help some. Better if we could deliver food to those who need it. We had the men to do that a moon ago. I don’t know if we’ve even got enough to put a decent guard on the larder, though.”
It wasn’t what Audrey wanted to hear, but to her credit, she heard it nonetheless. “Can I recruit people from the public?” she asked. “Have someone with integrity tracking it?”
He shrugged. “It’s the same issue, my lady.”
She looked down at her hands, and I stood, as useful as ever, holding a shield in the doorway. Everything was unraveling, and here she was, trying to hold onto only the best parts of a pattern she hadn’t chosen herself. I wasn’t a monster. I respected that.
“Can you see any way forward?” she asked him.
He shook his head slowly. “Declare the kitchens open. Ask for donations of supplies to be shared or offer to trade uncooked for cooked. Lock what we have securely. It’s the best we can do.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” she said. “Do you think, if I loaded up some wagons and sent them around with bread, that they’d be safe?”
Kaelson hesitated. “Today? Probably. But next week?”
Beneath the desk, where he wouldn’t see, she was strangling her hands together. Her voice was perfectly even as she asked, “What if I paid volunteers to transport people? Instead of taking the food to people, I could bring people to the food. The castle needs staff, so I’d have work for folks.”
“Bernadette told me she’s shorthanded,” Kaelson agreed. “Run it past her, but I’m in favor.”
“If we need to fall back into the castle, it’ll simplify things,” she noted.
His expression was as neutral as hers. “It will, my lady. And…I had considered that may need to happen before the spring, unless a regiment returns early.”
“Have you requested that?”
“I have.”
She nodded. “Thanking you. It’ll add weight to my own request for immediate aid.”
His brows furrowed. “When did you write the Duke, if I may ask, my lady? You hadn’t mentioned it.”
No, she hadn’t. I watched her quick shrug. “After Steward Daniel left. Respecting his intelligence, I thought it wise to take his concerns to heart. Since then, I’ve contacted all my father’s liegemen. Every response I’ve received states the plague is everywhere.”
I thought of Ylva and the Southerners, the lost opportunity to question them. But Kaelson just nodded with a gusty sigh. “That matches what I’m hearing. It’s good to know help is on the way, though.”
At no point had Audrey said that, but it was stated so firmly that she didn’t question it, though I saw the sharp look she shot him. “Indeed,” she agreed, a little awkwardly. “Thanking you for your time, Captain, and your service.”
“Don’t,” he said brusquely. “But do be safe, milady.”
She accepted that with an awkward half-nod, then stopped partway out the door to curtsey. His door closed behind her, and she shook her head aggressively, muttering something under her breath. But the moment she saw me looking, her expression smoothed. “Not all bad news, I suppose,” she said brightly. “A path forward is a path forward.”
You could go forward through hellfire, too, but I didn’t tell her that. In the bailey and out of earshot of anyone, I asked quietly, “Are you well?”
“I am, thanking you for asking. And yourself?”
The polished, practiced sentence was jarring. The last time she’d spoken to me like a real human being, she’d been begging me to leave her alone.
I almost preferred it to this shiny layer of bullshit.
She used a less formal version of it in her interactions with the cook who’d taken over responsibility for the staffing, and a more formal version of it with Kaelson. But I knew what she looked like without those layers of expectations.
And I knew what she looked like when those practiced layers of politeness shattered, too.
