It was here that Dariel ventured the morning of the Aushenian banquet. He approached, hearing the commotion from some distance away, smelling the soot in the air, growing warmer with each bend in the carved granite of the corridor. When he stepped out of the corridor, the heat of the ovens hit him in a roar, as if he had stepped into the mouth of some living beast. For a few moments the scenes of men lit by glowing red embers had a horrific look to it. Once he spotted a particular figure, though, Dariel moved toward him.
Val claimed to be a Candovian. He also claimed to have been a raider in his youth, a sort of pirate of the Gray Slopes. Dariel took his claims with a grain of salt. Val seemed such a part of the stone and earth of Acacia itself that Dariel could not imagine that he originated anywhere else. What was never in question, however, was his stunning physical presence. He had an upper body of such girth that the first time Dariel spied him-moving about with hulking grace before the stoves, backlit and highlighted by the fiery glow-he had clutched his chest with one hand, sure that he had stumbled on the giants that fuel the world’s volcanoes.
He still shuddered on seeing him now. Val yelled out a cursing order to someone and then stooped to get a grip around a chunk of coal as large as a small child. That was when he spotted Dariel. He straightened to his full height and wiped an enormous hand across his mouth, brushing away the profanity he had just uttered. “Young prince, what are you up to?” he asked, stepping nearer and dropping to one knee. “There’s a banquet tonight. Don’t you know that? Your father is honoring the Aushenian prince. It’s not a good time for distraction down here. Or is that why you’ve come-to try and get old Val in trouble?”
As ever, Dariel was struck with shyness on meeting this large man, even as he was drawn to him and loved something about how small he felt before his bulk. He answered as he often did, with a bashful smile and a mumbled declaration of innocence.
The man set his hand on the boy’s shoulder and gave him a playful shake. “Come on,” he said, rising back to his feet with some effort, “it’s time for my break anyway. Let’s get some air.”
Together the two retreated from the furnaces. Dariel walked behind Val, who cut a swath through the throng of workers. Shovels flinging coal, carts creaking past behind ornery donkeys, men swaying and cursing with the effort of their work: the movement was all around him, but as long as Dariel stayed close to Val, he knew he was safe. He stumbled occasionally on the rough contours of the floor and once bumped into Val’s legs when he paused to let a cart past. The man’s hand dropped down from a height and blanketed his shoulder, a momentary touch, and then they moved on again.
The sky was heavy with clouds, layer upon layer of them, but still, stepping out of the cavern and into the winter morning was blinding. The swift change was an overload of his senses, from dark to light in a few paces, hot to cold. They emerged as if from a fissure in a volcano, an exhaling fumarole of foul breath, greeted by the shock of salt-tinged air. They ascended a staircase cut into the stone and then walked along a sloping ramp from which openings led into the ovens that the lower furnaces fed.
Dariel stepped into the mess hall in time to watch Karan, the woman who doled out the laborer’s rations, straighten from a stooped position. She had just set a tray of hard biscuits into the slotted holder on which they cooled. The momentary sight of her swaying breasts froze him in his tracks; he flushed with an embarrassment he did not understand, one that pulsed in him when she glanced at him and seemed to read his thoughts better than he did himself. Her eyes passed on to Val. She perched her fists on her hips, which bulged out from under the constriction of her apron, and eyed the man with disapproving eyes. “You’re a bit of a sight,” she said. “Coming in here without so much as splashing water on your face.”
Young as he was, Dariel knew that he-not the foreman-was the target of her displeasure. She had never trusted him in the way Val did, Dariel thought, although why or how he could cause her harm escaped him. And he sensed that regardless of the cold tone she used with Val, she actually liked him, something that seemed to embarrass her enough that she wished to hide it.
“If I had a reason to care for my appearance, you can be sure that I would, woman,” Val said, “but I’m here for some biscuits and a bit of tea. Is that too much to ask? I didn’t know I had to clean up for a biscuit and a bit of tea.” He shot a glance at Dariel, asking for a little commiseration, and then he used one hand to swipe most of the biscuits off one tray and into his other fist.
“Don’t mind her,” Val said a little while later. The two had returned to the staircase and seated themselves, side by side with the biscuits and tea between them, one long pair of legs and one short dangling over the rocky slopes below them. “She’s worried that you shouldn’t eat laborer’s food.”
Dariel held a biscuit between his fingers, contemplating it with no actual interest in putting it near his mouth, tasteless and brittle as it was. “I like it all right,” he said. “It’s hard to bite,” he added, as if this was an understandable compliment.
“Sure you like it. That’s what I tell her, but some folks are funny.”
Dariel had certainly found that to be true. “Why does she not like me?”
“Her people have cooked for yours for generations now. She and I, we’re servants, got no business associating with royalty. She’s got a point, but I’ve my own way of thinking. You’re a good lad. And, anyway, in a year’s time or so you’ll not bother with me. You’ll stop coming around. I’m not meaning to offend. I just mean you’ll have better things to do. You’ll have your training. You’ll have the whole business of becoming a prince. Now, Karan, she thinks you’ll be the death of me somehow. Said she dreamed as much; to which I said she must’ve been eating her own cooking too close to bedtime. But she does have a way of making one think. So let me ask you…What’s this all about then?” Dariel looked suitably perplexed enough for Val to go on. He leaned close to the boy and squeezed his brows into one large central knot between his eyes. “Why are you down here with me, eating my rock biscuits, sharing my black tea? You’re a prince, Dariel, this food must be like eating dirt to you, not to mention the matter of my low company.”
Dariel looked away from him. It was not so much the question itself that made him uncomfortable as it was the tone of the large man’s voice when he asked it. There was something unnatural in it, as if he spoke it from something other than his true emotion. Dariel was able enough at hearing the deception. Deciphering it was something else. He had explained before how he had found his way into the workers’ quarters. He had said before that he liked adventure, liked danger, liked people not so stuffy and formal as those at court. Val had heard all this before, but every so often he posed the same question again, as if none of Dariel’s previous answers satisfied him. To fill the silence Dariel said the first thing that came to mind.
“The old woman that watches over me takes a drink that puts her to sleep.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, so it’s boring just sitting there.”
Val shoved a biscuit in his mouth and talked while chewing. “Who wants to watch an old lady sleep?”
Again, Dariel heard something ironic in the man’s voice, but he ignored it. He saw a rare invitation to speak about the things that troubled him. He explained that his older siblings were not always nice to him. Immediately afterward he corrected himself: Mena was pretty much always nice, but Corinn thought he was stupid and Aliver did not like him. Aliver had once shouted at him to leave him in peace, and Corinn had told him to stop breathing on her and said she wished he had been born a girl. None of them made time for him. None seemed to care that he had no one to play with, ever. He painted a sad picture of daily abandonment, hours in solitude, lifetimes of loneliness.