CHAPTER 03: MARIGOLD: THE TASTE OF SOMETHING NEW

The marigold is a funeral flower in half the world and a wedding flower in the other half, and the people who grow it have never managed to agree about which. It is planted along the edges of vegetable beds because its roots poison the things that would otherwise eat the crop. It protects by being bitter. It is the only flower in the garden that is useful, and no gardener has ever entirely forgiven it for that.

The first one was a disaster.

That was the part she always left out, later, once the story had hardened into something people told at dinners and eventually into something people told at inns. In the version the kingdom finally agreed upon, the child prodigy of House Astrea walked into a kitchen, spoke a few words, and produced a miracle out of nothing.

In the actual kitchen, on an actual Tuesday in an actual winter, the first attempt came out of the oven with a base like a roof tile, a lake of grey liquid standing in the middle where the sauce had wept down through it, and cheese that had gone stringy and then gone to oil and then gone to nothing whatsoever.

Bram looked at it for some time. Then he looked at her with an expression of enormous and carefully managed patience.

"It is a bit wet, my lady."

"It is extremely wet," said Theresia, prodding it with the handle of a spoon. "That part is my fault. The sauce has to be cooked down first, and cooked down much further than you think, and there is about three times too much of it on there. And the oven was too cool. And I think the cheese is wrong."

"The cheese is the best cheese in the province."

"It is the best cheese in the province for eating. It might well be the worst cheese in the province for this." She had her chin nearly on the table and her sleeves shoved up past the elbow. "We need one that melts and then stays melted. Something young. Something wet, that goes stringy when you pull it and does not simply give up and turn into a puddle of grease. Is there anything like that anywhere?"

Bram thought about it for a long moment, because the question had been asked seriously, and because he had been a cook for thirty one years and nobody in that house had ever once asked him a serious question about cheese.

"There is a soft white one they make out past Halgren," he said slowly. "Sits in brine in a barrel. The carters bring it up when the road is dry. It is a peasant thing. We do not buy it."

"Buy it."

"My lady, I cannot simply order in a barrel of peasant cheese on the word of a-"

"On the word of a six year old. Yes. I know." She slid off the stool. "So I will ask my father, and he will say yes, because it costs almost nothing and because he currently believes that everything I do is adorable. And while I am gone, please have somebody look at the big oven. I want it hotter than anybody in this kitchen thinks is sensible. If a person can stand comfortably beside it with the door open, it is not hot enough."

Bram picked up the tray with the ruin on it.

"I will need three mornings," he said, "and the young men out from underfoot."

"Take four."

"I will take three," said Bram, and went to see about the cheese, and that was the first negotiation Theresia van Astrea ever lost in her second life, and very nearly the last.

It took eleven attempts across nine days.

She was there for every one of them, which was the detail that changed everything, although she did not understand that at the time and would not understand it for years.

She had assumed, in the manner of a person from a world with printed recipes and refrigeration, that she was providing instructions. What she was in fact doing was standing in a room at six o'clock in the morning with her hair tied back out of the way, burning her fingers on the edge of a tray beside a man four times her age and three times her size, failing, and then failing again, and then wiping her face with the back of a floury wrist and saying, right, again.

Kitchens notice that. Kitchens notice it faster than any other room in a great house, because a kitchen is full of people who have spent their whole lives taking instruction from men and women who have never once stood in the heat.

The second attempt burned on the bottom and was raw in the middle. The third had too much cheese and came out as a single unified sheet of grease that slid off the base when it was lifted. The fourth was actually promising and then somebody opened the oven to look at it and dropped the heat forty degrees in eight seconds, and the fourth was not spoken of again.

By the fifth, the two undercooks had stopped pretending to be busy elsewhere in the room.

By the seventh, a girl from the scullery named Nell had taken over the stretching of the dough, because it turned out that she was better at it than anybody else in the building by a distance that nobody could account for, and she had been given a stool to stand on so that she could reach the table properly. She was nine. She would still be doing it when she was sixty, in a building with her own name over the door, and she would tell the story to apprentices who did not believe her.

By the ninth, Aldous the gardener had begun finding reasons to come in through the kitchen yard.

By the eleventh, there were nine people in that kitchen who had no business being in it, and when Bram drew the tray out of the mouth of the big oven with a cloth wrapped twice around his hand, the room went so quiet that the fire became the loudest thing in it.

It came out blistered and gold at the edge, with the cheese gone molten and patched brown in three places, and the whole thing throwing off a smell so powerful, so enormously and unreasonably good, that one of the undercooks actually made a sound.

Bram cut it. It held. The slice came away in a single piece, drawing cheese behind it in a long slow thread, and he lifted it, and it did not fold or collapse in the middle, and the underside was the right colour all the way across.

He took the first bite himself. That was his right and nobody in the room considered arguing about it.

Theresia watched him chew. She watched him stop chewing. She watched a man in his fifties stand in his own kitchen with his eyes closed and his jaw working, and then open his eyes and look down at the tray as though it had spoken to him.

"Well," she said. "Verdict?"

Bram set the rest of the slice down on the board very carefully, in the manner of a man handling something he is not certain he has permission to touch.

"My lady," he said. "What in the name of the Dragon is this?"

"It is called pizza," said Theresia.

She had had eleven days to think of a better answer. She had considered every available lie, and several unavailable ones, and in the end she had decided that if she was going to hand this world a thing that it had never had, she was at the very least going to hand it the correct name.

"Pizza," Bram repeated.

"Pizza."

"That is not a word."

"It is now," she said, and reached past him and took a slice up in both hands and burned the roof of her mouth on it, and did not care in the slightest, because it was the first thing she had eaten in six years that tasted like home.

The household lost its mind in stages, which she afterward found to be the most interesting part of the whole business.

It had been meant to be a private trial. She had been very clear about that, largely because she had assumed that the first one would be bad, and she had been correct. But the kitchen fed two hundred people, and the two hundred people included four boys with no restraint whatsoever and a staff who talked constantly, and the smell had gone up the service stair and along the upper corridor and under three separate doors.

Karan reached it first, because Karan had the nose of a hound and roughly the manners of one. He came down at a run, took a slice without asking anybody, ate the entire thing standing in the doorway, and then said a word that Theresia had never heard before and which caused Bram to hit him across the shoulder with a cloth.

Casiles arrived next, on the general principle that anything Karan was that excited about was probably worth stealing. Thames came down to retrieve both of them and did not leave. Carlan came because his brothers had gone and had not come back, ate one slice, went away without comment, and returned four minutes later with their father.

Veltol van Astrea stood in the doorway of his own kitchen in his shirtsleeves with his hands on his hips and surveyed the situation: three of his sons eating off a board with their fingers, his head cook flushed scarlet to the ears, a scullery girl on a stool, his gardener loitering by the yard door with his hat off, and his six year old daughter sitting on the flour bin with tomato on her chin and an expression of enormous undisguised satisfaction.

"What," he said, "is happening in my house."

"Dinner," said Theresia.

He ate two slices. Then he sent up for his wife, and Tishua came down in her evening things with her hair already half taken down, and ate a slice standing at the table with one hand cupped underneath her chin to catch the oil, laughing at herself the entire time.

Theresia sat on the flour bin and watched her mother, this mother, the second one, eating something that her first mother had used to buy in a cardboard box on Friday nights when nobody could be bothered to cook, and had to look away at the wall for a moment and think very hard about ovens.

By the following week the kitchen was producing it twice a day and could not keep up with demand. By the end of the month the staff had their own version, cooked in the smaller oven out of whatever the house did not want, and there was a rota for it, and the rota was enforced with real menace.

And then the house had guests, because houses of that kind always have guests, and the guests went home and told other houses.

The thing about aristocracy, as Theresia discovered with enormous private glee over the following year, is that it is a machine for distributing gossip which has successfully convinced itself that it is a machine for governing.

There were perhaps four hundred people in the kingdom whose opinions mattered socially, and every single one of them knew every other one, and every single one of them was mortally afraid of being the last to hear about anything at all.

A minor baroness ate at the Astrea table in the spring and described what she had eaten to a viscountess in the summer. The viscountess wrote three letters. By the autumn there were households in the capital quietly offering their cooks bonuses to work out how it was done, and failing, because the cheese came from a village that nobody important had ever heard of, and because the oven had to be hotter than anybody thought was sensible, and because the sauce took four hours and everybody kept trying to make it in two.

Two separate noble houses sent men to the Astrea kitchens with money. Bram threw the first one out personally. The second one got as far as offering Nell three times her wage to come and work in the capital, and Nell, who was nine years old and had lived in that house since she was four, looked at him for a while and then said that she would think about it, and then went and told Bram, and Bram threw him out as well.

Theresia heard about both incidents a week later and went and found Nell in the yard.

"You could have taken it," she said.

Nell shrugged, up to her elbows in a bucket. "They wouldn't let me make it. They'd just want to know how."

"That's true."

"And it wouldn't be as good," said Nell, "because they haven't got you standing there being annoying about the edges."

Theresia thought about that for a long time afterward and never found a way to say what it did to her.

The Princess came in the winter.

She was sixteen years old, her name was Anastasia, and she was not remotely what Theresia had prepared for.

She had prepared for a doll. Everything about this world, the histories and the tutors' anecdotes and the general grammar of the place, had suggested that a princess would arrive upholstered, be gracious for ninety minutes, and depart without having said one single thing that could be quoted afterward.

What actually came up the front steps was a tall girl with an untidy plait over one shoulder, a mud splash on one boot that she had made no attempt whatsoever to conceal, and the flat evaluating stare of a person who has been reading state papers since she was eleven and has stopped expecting to be impressed by rooms.

She looked at the entrance hall of the Astrea manor the way a builder looks at a wall.

She looked at Theresia, six years old, standing in the receiving line in an appalling quantity of lace, with considerably more interest.

"You are the one who invented the bread," she said.

"It is not bread, Your Highness."

"My chamberlain has been calling it bread for two months and it has been annoying me for two months without my knowing why," said the Princess. "Thank you. What is it, then?"

"It is pizza."

"That is a ridiculous word."

"It is a foreign word," said Theresia, who had rehearsed this in front of a bed of hellebores the previous evening, "and foreign words are always ridiculous right up until the moment they become ordinary."

There was a pause. Behind her, she felt rather than heard her mother stop breathing.

Then the Princess of Lugunica laughed out loud, a single sharp unregal bark of a laugh, and said, "Well. Feed me, then," and the afternoon proceeded from there.

They had an hour before the meal, and Anastasia announced that she wanted to walk, and the household reorganised itself around her in a panic while she simply set off out of the terrace door with Theresia trotting to keep up.

The garden in winter was a skeleton of itself, everything cut back hard, the beds black and bare, the hedges sharp. Anastasia looked at it with an expert eye and asked three questions that Theresia had to think about before answering.

"Your father is very proud of you," the Princess said eventually.

"He is proud of the boys."

"He is proud of the boys in the way a man is proud of a good harvest. He expected them." Anastasia had stopped in front of the empty rose bed and stood looking down at the cut stems with her hands behind her back. "You are something else. You are a thing he did not expect and does not entirely understand, and men of that sort find it very difficult not to talk about those."

"You have met a lot of men of that sort."

"I have met nothing but men of that sort since the day I was born." She glanced sideways. "How old are you?"

"Six, Your Highness."

"That is what I was told. It is not what I asked."

Theresia's mouth went dry, and she looked up, and found the Princess of Lugunica watching her with an expression of mild and entirely serious curiosity, the way somebody looks at a lock.

"Six," said Theresia.

Anastasia held the look a moment longer, and then let it go, and turned back to the bed.

"Very well," she said. "I am only nosy. It is my worst quality and it is going to keep me alive." She started walking again. "That thing in the corner with the black stems. What is it, and why has nobody killed it?"

"It is a quince, and it will fruit in three years if Aldous stops being sentimental about the shape of it."

"Tell Aldous to stop being sentimental about the shape of it."

"Would Your Highness be willing to put that in writing? He will not listen to me."

Anastasia laughed again, and after that she was a great deal easier to talk to, and they were friends for the next forty one years.

What Theresia remembered about the lunch afterward was not the food, because she had eaten it a hundred times by then and the novelty had worn down to a nub.

What she remembered was watching a sixteen year old girl who had been trained since infancy to display precisely nothing take the first bite, and stop, and hold absolutely still.

The hall went quiet in the way rooms go quiet when everybody in them is simultaneously deciding not to be the one who speaks first.

Anastasia chewed. Swallowed. Set the remainder of the slice down on her plate with considerable precision. Wiped her fingers one at a time on the napkin, in order, without hurrying.

Then she turned in her chair to look down the length of the table at a small red haired child who was sitting on two cushions in order to reach her plate.

"Theresia van Astrea," she said, in a voice that carried cleanly all the way to the doors, "you are the Master Chef."

Theresia blinked at her.

The words did not mean anything in particular. They were not a rank. There was no such office anywhere in the kingdom. It was a sixteen year old girl being funny at a lunch party in front of forty people, and the forty people laughed, and somebody at the far end applauded, and her father went red to the ears with pride and shouted for more wine.

What. What the hell.

It stuck.

That was the thing that nobody could have predicted and everybody should have. It stuck because it had been said by a princess, and because it was short, and because the kingdom had spent six months attempting to find a way to talk about the child in the Astrea house and had not been handed a word to use until that afternoon.

Within a year it was appearing in letters. Within two it was in a ledger, written down as a description, as though it were a profession with a guild behind it. Within five there was a man in the capital selling extremely bad flatbread out of a handcart under a painted board that read MASTER CHEF'S OWN, and Theresia was eleven years old and giving genuine consideration to having him killed.

She never lived it down. Not ever. She was a woman of forty, with a legendary sword across her back and a great many considerably worse titles attached to her name, and people still called her that in the street, and she never once managed to be entirely annoyed about it, which annoyed her most of all.

After that she stopped pretending to be careful.

That was the honest account of what happened next, and she gave it to herself squarely, years later, in a tent on a border she did not want to be on, with the rain coming down and forty men dead outside.

She had spent six years being cautious about what she brought across. She had told herself she was avoiding attention, and she had told herself she was avoiding unintended consequences, and both of those things had been true, and neither of them had been the actual reason.

The actual reason was that every time she made something from the other world, she had to hold it in her hands and know that the world it had come from was gone.

The pizza had broken that open, and she had discovered that the grief did not kill her, and once a person has discovered that a thing does not kill them, all discipline concerning it is finished.

So she went through her own memory the way a man goes through a house ahead of a flood, grabbing everything he can carry and cursing the things he has to leave.

Bread rolls, split and filled and eaten in the hand, which the household initially regarded as an obscenity and which the stable hands adopted inside a week and the knights inside a month, because knights are always hungry and almost never sitting down. Ground meat pressed into rounds and seared hard on both sides, which took four attempts and a new kind of pan and a long argument about salt. Sausage, which already existed, improved past recognition by the simple heresy of using enough salt and then letting it rest for a day. Chicken cut small, dipped, rolled in crumbs and dropped into hot fat, which she watched the entire kitchen fall silent over exactly as she had known they would, and of which Karan ate eleven in one sitting and was comprehensively sick.

None of it was hers.

She knew that. She was not inventing anything. She was a woman with a stolen library standing in front of people who had never been permitted through the door of it, reciting from memory, and taking the credit for all of it because there was nobody left alive in any world to take it from her.

She thought about that occasionally. Mostly at night.

Mostly she thought about it a great deal less than she should have, because the alternative was sitting still.

It was Fribal who noticed.

He came out to the garden on an evening in early spring, when she was six and a half and had been up since before five, and found her on her knees at the end of the long border with a trowel in one hand and a lantern set on the path beside her, working in the dark.

He did not say anything at first. He simply came and sat down on the low wall a few feet away, with his forearms on his knees, and looked out over the beds the way a man looks at a river.

"It is past nine," he said eventually.

"I know."

"You were in the kitchens at six this morning. Bram told me. He tells me things when he is worried and pretends he is complaining."

"There was a lot to do."

"There is always a lot to do."

She kept working. The soil was cold and heavy and it was in under her fingernails, and she pushed the trowel in and turned it and pushed it in again, and did not look at him, and after a while her uncle said, in that flat uninflected tone he used for everything including the end of the world:

"You do not rest."

"I rest."

"You sleep. That is a different thing." He turned his head. "I have watched men do this. Not children. Men. Men who have come off a bad field and cannot be still afterward, because the moment they are still it is in the room with them. They take on every duty anybody will give them and then they invent more, and everybody says, what a fine soldier, look how he works, and then one morning they do not get up."

Theresia went on turning the soil.

"What happens to them?" she said. "In the end."

"Most of them are all right. Some of them are not." A pause. "It depends largely on whether anybody says anything to them, and on whether they are the kind of person who can hear it."

"And which kind am I?"

"I do not know yet," said Fribal. "That is why I am sitting on this wall."

She stopped, finally, with both hands flat in the dirt, and sat back on her heels, and for a moment the whole of it was right at the top of her throat. All of it. The concourse and the tile and the cracked controller and the name that nobody in this world would ever say. The entire impossible weight of it, wanting out.

"I am fine," she said.

Her uncle nodded slowly, as though she had said something else entirely, and got to his feet.

"Come in when the lantern is out," he said. "Not before. I am not going to tell you to stop."

"Why not?"

"Because you would not," he said, "and I do not care to give orders I know will not be obeyed. It ruins a man's authority." He paused at the edge of the path. "But I want you to know that I have seen it. That is all. If you are ever tired enough that seeing it is useful to you, come and find me."

He went in. She stayed out until the lantern guttered, which was another two hours, and then came in with her hands filthy and her eyes dry, and did not go and find him.

Not that year. Not for eight more.

The Crown bought the recipes in the spring.

She had not expected that and had no framework at all for it. A man came up from the treasury with a leather folder and a proposal, and sat in her father's study, and talked for forty minutes about exclusive rights and licensed production and revenue in perpetuity, and Theresia sat on a footstool in the corner with her feet not reaching the ground and listened to a grown man explain intellectual property to her father in a world that had never had a patent.

She interrupted him twice.

The second time, she proposed a different structure, in which the Crown took the capital and the risk and the overwhelming majority of the revenue, and the house took a much smaller share that did not have an end date on it.

The treasury man stopped talking and looked at her for a considerable period of time.

"That is more favourable to us in the first eight years," he said carefully.

"Yes."

"And catastrophically less favourable to us afterward."

"Yes," said Theresia.

Her father put a hand over his mouth.

They signed it anyway, because the treasury man's instructions had been to secure the thing at almost any price, and because the first eight years were the ones on which his own career would be judged, and that was a lesson Theresia filed away whole and used, in one form or another, for the rest of her life.

The money that came in was not money in any sense she had previously understood the word.

It was a change in the temperature of the house. The east wing roof was repaired for the first time since her grandfather's day. The staff was increased by a third, and then increased again. Three of the tenant farms had their rents adjusted downward and nobody at the table thought that was worth discussing, which told her a great deal about her father that she had not previously known.

Her mother acquired a ground dragon that she had been quietly not asking for since before Theresia was born, and was so transparently delighted about it that Thames made fun of her at dinner and was ignored by everybody including the dogs.

And in the spring of her seventh year, a letter arrived with the royal seal on it, and Theresia van Astrea was summoned to the capital.

Not as a noble child presented at court. Not as a daughter of the house of Astrea, in the train of her father, to curtsey in the correct direction and be looked at by strangers.

She was summoned by name. In her own right. Alone.

She stood in a hall with a ceiling so far up that it had its own weather, and a chamberlain read out a declaration in a voice like a badly hung gate, and somewhere in the middle of it she stopped following the sentences and simply listened to the sounds, because the sentences had begun to describe a person she did not recognise.

Something about the enrichment of the realm. Something about the common table and the dignity of the common table. Something about a contribution of lasting and incalculable value to the kingdom of Lugunica and to all who dwell within its borders.

And then the phrase national treasure, which she was reasonably confident they had not intended literally, and which the clerks wrote down literally, and which therefore became literally true in the standing registry of the kingdom on the fourteenth day of spring.

She was seven years old.

She stood on a marble floor in shoes that hurt, in front of four hundred of the most important people in the world, and had absolutely no idea what to do with her hands.

The family dinner that followed was, by a comfortable margin, the worst hour of her life to date.

It happened perhaps a week after they came home, and it was one of the rare evenings when everybody was under the same roof at the same time, which in a household of soldiers occurred roughly as often as an eclipse. Thames was between postings. Karan had broken a finger in a bad fall and was being insufferable about it. Casiles and Carlan had come back from the eastern estate. Her uncle Fribal was there, which meant her father was in an expansive mood, which meant there was rather too much wine on the table before the soup had even arrived.

"Behold," said Thames, standing and raising his cup. "A rare and wondrous sight. Every Astrea in one room, in one hour, in good health. Historians will record it. Children will be taught it."

"Sit down," said Karan.

"I will not. This is a moment."

"You were licking butter off a knife four seconds ago."

"I was savouring. You were inhaling bread like a man with three days left."

"I have not eaten in two days."

"You have eaten twice since we sat down."

"Training," said Karan, with enormous dignity, "does not count."

Carlan put his head in his hands. Their mother told all four of them that they were a disgrace to the name and failed entirely to keep her face straight while saying it, which demolished whatever authority the statement might otherwise have carried.

And then Fribal, who had been quiet all evening and had eaten almost nothing, and who had that particular gleam he got perhaps four times a year, leaned forward on his elbow and said, in the tone of a man dropping a coin into a machine:

"So. I hear our Theresia has been causing a great commotion at the palace."

Every head at the table turned.

"Oh no," said Theresia.

"A national treasure," said Casiles, with relish.

"When I said," Karan began, wiping his mouth with the back of his good hand, "that I hoped one of us would one day make history, I should like the record to show that I was picturing something involving a sword."

"A legendary swordsman," Thames agreed. "A name spoken with reverence in three kingdoms and with terror in a fourth."

"Not," said Casiles, "a legendary cook."

"It is Master Chef," said Theresia, "thank you very much."

That was a mistake. She knew it was a mistake before the end of the sentence, and she could not stop the sentence, and the table came apart.

"Master Chef," Thames repeated, rising again and laying a hand flat over his heart. "Oh, how the mighty house of Astrea has fallen. Four centuries of Sword Saints. Four centuries of protectors of the realm, bleeding on every border this kingdom has ever had. And we are to be remembered for the flatbread."

"The flatbread is extremely good," said Carlan quietly, which was the first thing he had said all evening and which got a larger laugh than anything Thames had managed in ten minutes of effort.

"You are all being very funny," said Theresia, "and I would like to point out that I am presently the only person at this table earning any money."

There was a short silence.

"She has a point," said Casiles.

"She has a point," Karan agreed.

"She eats like a farmhand, she talks like a carter, and I have personally witnessed her sitting on the kitchen floor," said Casiles, nudging her with an elbow hard enough to nearly put her face into her soup, "and if Father permitted it she would be out selling food off a cart in the market square inside a week."

"Confirmed," said Thames. "Our sister's true ambition. She will renounce the name, flee into the night, and become a legend of the culinary underworld."

"Honestly," said Karan, tipping his chair back onto two legs, "I would not be even slightly surprised."

"I will have you know," said Theresia, pointing her spoon slowly around the table in a wide arc, "that I have extremely noble goals. The expansion of culture. The sharing of knowledge. The instruction of this backward kingdom in the wonders of properly fried chicken."

"You are a menace."

"I am a rich menace."

"Enough," said their father, who had been laughing so hard that he had put his glass down for the safety of the tablecloth. "Enough, all of you. Let the girl eat her dinner in peace before this becomes one of those evenings."

It quieted. Dishes moved. For a while there was nothing at all but the sound of eight people eating, which in that house was not a small sound, and Theresia let herself sink down into it the way a person sinks into a hot bath at the end of a long day.

This, she thought. This is the part they leave out of the stories. Not the palace. Not the marble, not the chamberlain, not the declaration with her name in it.

This. A room with too many people in it and the wrong number of chairs. Somebody laughing with their mouth full. The clatter of it. Her mother's hand on the back of Carlan's neck as she reaches past him for the salt.

She had had this once before, in a flat in a city that no longer existed, with a father who made faces at cameras and a mother who covered his mouth, and she had not known for one single second what she was holding.

She knew now. That was the entire difference between the two lives. That was the whole education of a death and a rebirth and seven years of work, and it amounted to one sentence: she knew now.

Then Carlan, who was nine years old and who meant absolutely nothing by it, set down his fork and said, "So you really are not interested in the sword training? Not even a little bit?"

The table did not go silent, exactly. It was smaller and worse than that.

It hesitated. Half a beat, the way a ground dragon hesitates at a jump.

Theresia felt every one of them decide, individually and in the same instant, not to look at her.

Her mother reached for the water jug. Her uncle examined a point in the middle distance somewhere above the fireplace. Thames began, with tremendous and entirely unconvincing casualness, to tell a story about a captain in the northern muster and a ground dragon that had eaten a hat.

She let it happen. She had had three years of practice at letting it happen. She kept her face pleasant and her hands still and she heard her own voice say, from somewhere slightly to the left of her body:

"Not really my thing."

"Hm," said Carlan, who had already moved on, and took another piece of bread.

"That is perfectly all right," said Thames from the other end, too quickly, too kindly. "It is hardly as though this family is short of blades."

"Exactly," said Karan. "Who needs steel when we have holy cooking powers?"

"Truly," Fribal murmured into his cup, "a talent beyond combat," and the table found that a great deal funnier than it was, and the conversation moved on to a tournament in the south, and it was over.

It was over, and it had taken eleven seconds from beginning to end, and every single person at that table had performed their part flawlessly and without rehearsal, and Theresia sat with her hands in her lap and looked at the candles and understood something that she had been circling for three years without ever once landing on it.

They were not protecting her from the sword.

They were protecting themselves from the moment.

From the memory of a four year old on her knees in courtyard dust with her arms wrapped round her own middle, breathing wrong. Every one of them had watched that happen. Every one of them had decided, privately, in their own head, that they would rather die than watch it happen again, and so they had built a small careful silence around it and furnished the silence with jokes, and all seven of them had been living inside it quite happily ever since.

It was love. She never had the slightest doubt about that. It was the most considerate thing anybody had ever done for her in either of her lives.

It was also a room with no door in it.

She looked around the table at them. At Thames with his hand over his eyes at something Karan had said. At her father shouting down the length of the room for more wine. At her mother laughing with her head tipped back and her hand still on the back of Carlan's neck. At her uncle turning his cup slowly by the stem and watching all of them with an expression she could not read at all.

I am going to lose you, she thought.

It arrived from nowhere, with a clarity that felt like cold water going down the inside of her spine, and it had no argument attached to it and no evidence behind it, and she could not make it go away.

There was no reason for it. Nothing had happened. There was no war, and no summons, and no cloud anywhere on the horizon larger than a man's hand. The kingdom was at peace and had been for a decade. She was seven years old, and rich, and clever, and safe, and surrounded, and loved past all reasonable measure.

She put the thought away where she put all of them, and reached for the bread, and told Carlan that if he took the last of it she would end his line.

Outside, past the windows, the garden stood black and quiet under a spring sky, and in the bed nearest the terrace the anemones had opened in the wind and would be shut again by morning.