Exile's Honor

'Possibly. Some things should be common knowledge, and by the time anyone reads my Chronicles, all of those covert identities you've got now are going to be outdated.'

So she knew about what he was doing! Well, he shouldn't have been surprised if she was Elcarth's Second; she'd be reading the restricted Chronicles that he was writing. He wondered, knowing that she must know about the secret room here, if she'd come down on purpose to waylay him.

She ate two or three bites, reminding him that his own dinner was getting cold. He started in on it; delicious, as always from the Bell's kitchens. Pigeon pie was a delicacy in Karse; the only pigeons there were the larger wood pigeons and calling doves, hard to catch and reserved for those with falcons to take them. Here in the city, though, there were pigeon lofts everywhere, and the common rock doves bred like rabbits. It was rabbit pie that was the ordinary man's fare in Karse, in fact. Rabbit pie, rabbit stew, rabbit half-raw and half-burned on a stick over the fire....

'I grew up on this—' Myste said, gesturing with her fork to her plate. 'We had a loft in the back yard. I find I miss the taste at the Collegium.'

'Hmm. It is good,' he agreed. 'Not common fare where I come from.'

'Well, here—in the city especially—you make up your pies with whatever you have to eat for supper in the morning, and drop them off at your neighborhood bake shop as you go off to work and pick them up when you return, along with your bread. Most people with small apartments or single rooms don't have a bake oven; in fact, especially in the city, most people only have the hearth fire to stew over and not a proper kitchen at all.' Myste didn't seem to want a response; she went back to her dinner, and he followed her example.

'It is much the same in Karse,' he offered, 'Save that there is no bake shop, or rather, the baking place is often the inn. And we steam food as often as stew it.' He well remembered the smell of the baking rabbit pies in the kitchen of the inn where his mother worked. They'd come out, and woe betide anyone who touched them, each with a particular mark for the family that had left them, and a star cut into the crust of the inn pies. He'd never gotten a quarter pie like this, hot from the oven. He and his mother had been on the bottom of the hierarchy of servants, and were treated accordingly. First were the customers, of course, then the innkeeper, his wife, and children. Then came the cook and the chief stableman, who got whatever intact portions the innkeeper's family left. Then the cook's helpers, the serving girls, the potboys who served the drink. Then the grooms in the stables and the chambermaids. Then, at last, Alberich, his mother, and the wretched little scullery maid and turnspit boy. Which meant that what he got was broken crust, gravy, bits of vegetable. Or anything that was burned, overbaked, or somehow ill-made—too much salt, he recalled that pie only too well. But they got enough to eat, that was the point; once his mother got that job at the inn, scrubbing the floors, they never went hungry. There was always day-old bread and dripping, the fat and juices that came off the roasts and were collected in a drippings pan underneath. There was always oat porridge, plain though that might be, and pease porridge, the latter being such a staple of the common fare and so often called for that there was always a pot of it in the corner of the hearth. Pease porridge was the cheapest foodstuff available at his inn, and they sold a lot of it; when the pot was about half empty, the cook would start a new lot, so that when the first pot was gone the second was ready to serve. All of the inn's servants could help themselves to a bowl of it at any time, even the scullery maid and the boy that sat in the chimney corner and turned the spit in all weathers. The innkeeper was thrifty, but generous with the food, not like some Alberich encountered over the years, who starved their help as well as working them to exhaustion.

'Ah.' Myste stacked her emptied plates to the side with a sigh of satisfaction; Alberich pushed his beside them. 'I don't mean you to begin nattering at me at this moment, Alberich. I just meant that when you feel like it, I'd be glad of your addition to the Chronicles. And I don't mind being a listener if all you want to do is talk. Think out loud, maybe. Or just talk to hear Karsite.'

He smiled slightly. 'Knowing your unending curiosity, I thank you for your patience.'

'My curiosity has as much as it needs on a regular basis right now,' Myste replied. 'You know, before Elcarth took me on, I was never satisfied. I wanted to know, not so much what was going on, but why. That was the thing that drove me mad, sometimes. Why had this or that law been made, why were your people such persistent enemies, why—Well, there are always more questions than answers. Now I'm able to find out my whys, more often than not, and more to the point, I'm entitled and encouraged to do so.' She smiled, and her lenses glittered. 'Maybe that's why I was Chosen; I can't think of any other reason.'

He laughed. 'Is that why you were always such a thorn in my side, as a Trainee? That you could not be told to do a thing without wanting the reason for it?'

She shrugged. 'I don't take orders well unless I know why the order is being given. And I'll be the first to admit to you that I'm very lucky and have been unusually favored in that way. Most people can't afford to indulge that particular luxury; they either follow their orders without question, or—well, there are unpleasant consequences for wanting answers.' She rubbed her thumb absently against the little 'clerk's callus' on the side of the second finger of her right hand, a callus created by hours of pressure from a pen.

He nodded, wondering suspiciously if she was hinting at his past.

'The more I'm in the courts, the more I realize that,' she continued. 'As a clerk, well, I knew why I was doing what I was doing. It was obvious. Pointless, perhaps, but obvious.' She glanced up at him, sideways. 'You know, you have to be a clerk, I think, before you realize just what a pother people make over nothing. And the sheer amount of ill-will that people seem to think must go down on paper, or die. Dear gods!'

'What, letters?' he asked.