Somehow I survived the day, though the memory of how fades into a blessedly vague haze. I remember how sore I was when she finally dismissed us; how the others raced up the path and back to the keep while I trailed dismally behind them, berating myself for ever coming to the King’s attention. It was a long climb to the keep, and the hall was crowded and noisy. I was too weary to eat much. Stew and bread, I think, were all I had, and I had left the table and was limping toward the door, thinking only of the warmth and quiet of the stables, when Brant again accosted me.
“Your chamber is ready,” was all he said.
I shot a desperate look at Burrich, but he was engaged in conversation with the man next to him. He didn’t notice my plea at all. So once more I found myself following Brant, this time up a wide flight of stone steps, into a part of the keep I had never explored.
We paused on a landing and he took up a candelabra from a table there and kindled its tapers. “Royal family lives down this wing,” he casually informed me. “The King has a bedroom big as the stable at the end of this hallway.” I nodded, blindly believing all he told me, though I later found that an errand boy such as Brant would never have penetrated the royal wing. That would be for more important lackeys. Up another flight he took me and again paused. “Visitors get rooms here,” he said, gesturing with the light, so that the wind of his motion set the flames to streaming. “Important ones, that is.”
And up another flight we went, the steps perceptibly narrowing from the first two. At the next landing we paused again, and I looked with dread up an even narrower and steeper flight of steps. But Brant did not take me that way. Instead we went down this new wing, three doors down, and then he slid a latch on a plank door and shouldered it open. It swung heavily and not smoothly. “Room hasn’t been used in a while,” he observed cheerily. “But now it’s yours and you’re welcome to it.” And with that he set the candelabra down on a chest, plucked one candle from it, and left. He pulled the heavy door closed behind him as he went, leaving me in the semidarkness of a large and unfamiliar room.
Somehow I refrained from running after him or opening the door. Instead, I took up the candelabra and lit the wall sconces. Two other sets of candles set the shadows writhing back into the corners. There was a fireplace with a pitiful effort at a fire in it. I poked it up a bit, more for light than for heat, and set to exploring my new quarters.
It was a simple square room with a single window. Stone walls, of the same stone as that under my feet, were softened only by a tapestry hung on one wall. I held my candle high to study it, but could not illuminate much. I could make out a gleaming and winged creature of some sort, and a kingly personage in supplication before it. I was later informed it was King Wisdom being befriended by the Elderling. At the time it seemed menacing to me. I turned aside from it.
Someone had made a perfunctory effort at freshening the room. There was a scattering of clean reeds and herbs on the floor, and the feather bed had a fat, freshly shaken look to it. The two blankets on it were good wool. The bed curtains had been pulled back and the chest and bench that were the other furnishings had been dusted. To my inexperienced eyes, it was a rich room indeed. A real bed, with coverings and hangings about it, and a bench with a cushion to it, and a chest to put things in were more furniture than I could recall having to myself before. That they were for my exclusive use made them larger somehow. There was also the fireplace, that I boldly added another piece of wood to, and the window, with an oak seat before it, shuttered now against the night air, but probably looking out over the sea.