“Hmm.” She eyed the table; the ham and bread would reappear at dinner, the fruit and cheese at lunch, the hard-boiled eggs would keep for quite a while, and the oat porridge would be gone at this meal. All four of them liked a good big bowl of it, laden with sugar and swimming in cream.
“One cook and two helpers could take care of all this and more, and still have time for the helpers to double at light cleaning and laundry,” she said. “We all clean our own rooms, that means the only places a servant would have to clean would be the common rooms.”
Daren blinked at her in surprise. She dished out her own bowl of porridge, loading it down with maple sugar and sweet raisins, leaving just enough for him. “How do you know all that?” he asked.
“All what? Household nonsense?” Tarma and her grandmother had evidently just finished; they were disappearing together through one of the doors that was always kept locked. Kero knew what was on the other side of that one, though—her grandmother’s magic workroom. She’d visited it once, and had no desire to do so again.
Daren completed his selection and followed her to one of two small tables beside the hearth. “I thought you said you weren’t interested in marriage and a family.”
“I’m not. I took care of the Keep for five years after Mother died, and for most of two years before that.” She made a face, and cut a careful bite out of her ham slice. “I hated it. But I learned it anyway. Why do you look like you spent the night tossing?”
“Because I did,” he replied. “Rotten dreams.”
She put her knife and fork down. “You, too?”
He nodded, then stopped in mid-chew to stare at her. Finally he swallowed, and asked, “Were you in the middle of some kind of battle? In a scout group? And you went off looking for something in a party of about six?”
She nodded. “And you were there, and we had an argument about something?”
“Yes. And then?” He leaned forward.
“Then—you wouldn’t listen to me, or I wouldn’t listen to you; I can’t remember which. But the party split, and we both missed something really important, because when we got back, we’d lost half the scouts, and we discovered that the enemy had cut around behind us—”
“And everyone on our side was dead.” He sagged back in his chair, his eyes closed. “Oh, gods. I thought it was just a dream—”
“It was just a dream,” a new voice entered the conversation. Kethry’s. Daren jumped, then tried to leap to his feet.
“Sit,” Kethry ordered him; she was in russet today, the color Daren’s cloak used to be, but as if to underline what Kero had told him earlier, she was not wearing a gown, she was in breeches and a long tunic. “If it had been a prophetic dream, certain warnings would have been triggered, and I would have known.”
“If it wasn’t prophetic,” Kero asked hesitantly, “What was it?”
Kethry smiled, as if she had expected exactly that question. “A warning,” she said. “This place—seems to trigger things like that. It’s happened perhaps a dozen times since we moved here. It’s not showing any possible future so far as I’ve been able to tell—it’s showing you the general outcome of a negative behavior pattern.”
“So what we saw isn’t going to happen to us?” Daren asked hopefully.
“No, not likely,” Kethry repeated, “and you won’t dream it again unless you continue the pattern.”
“But if we do, we get the same dream over and over?” At Kethry’s nod, Daren grimaced. “Pretty effective way of getting someone to break the pattern.”
“Evidently the builders of this Tower thought so.” Kethry patted him on the shoulder in a very motherly fashion, turned and vanished back through the heavy wooden door leading to her workroom.
Daren sighed, and turned back to Kero. “Will it help to say that I’ve been a blockhead and I apologize?”
She considered him with her head tilted to one side for a moment. “Will it help to tell you I’ve been just as pigheaded as you?”
He smiled. “It’s a start.”
“Good,” she replied. “Let’s build on that.” Then she laughed, feeling a burden lifting from her mind. “Besides,
