The boy crammed food into his mouth with both hands and one eye on the cook, the other on Mags. Probably he was getting ready to grab anything Mags uncovered that looked better than what he had, but nothing turned up on Mags’ side of the table. The cook finished his dinner, heaved himself up, and evidently that was the signal for eating to stop.
“Clean up,” the cook said. The boy scuttled off and came back with a big hessian bag, grease-stained and grubby on the outside. He gestured to Mags to help him, and together they scraped everything off the table and into the bag, which was put outside the door.
Mags followed the boy’s lead without a word while the cook watched them both, arms folded over his chest. The boy kept glancing furtively at the cook, as if he was expecting a cuff to the head. The cook, however, kept most of his attention on Mags.
Next, they scraped all the crumbs off the table they’d eaten from, throwing them at the cook’s direction into the fire, and scrubbed down the table with soap and water and pumice-stone.
So that would be why no one got sick from the leftovers on the table.
The boy got brooms for them both, and they swept the floor, throwing the sweepings out the back door. Then they got down on hands and knees, with buckets of water and soap and big bristle-brushes and scrubbed it as the cook watched. Oddly, the cook washed his own plates and cutlery, but that might have been because he didn’t trust them with it. When they were done, he grunted approval, reached into a cupboard, and pulled out two bundles of bedding.
These proved to be a couple of thick sacks made of multiple layers stitched together, a patchwork of old, worn blankets. The cook tossed one to each of them. Mags caught the one thrown to him and watched the boy to see what he did with his. The boy moved his sack to the best place by the fire, pulled off his shoes, stuck his legs into the opening and wriggled until he was all the way inside it with just his head sticking out.
Mags copied him, and the cook grunted with satisfaction again. “Don’t think to steal anything from the pantry, boy,” he warned as he put the rushlights out, so that the only light was from the dying fire. “I’ll beat both of you senseless if anything is missing or nibbled. Both of you. So no use thinking you can nick something and get away with it by blaming the other.”
Then he left, and the kitchen was quiet except for the sound of the fire and the other boy breathing.
Mags became aware that his arms ached from scrubbing, his back ached from bending over the sink, and his legs and feet ached from standing on stone all that time. He welcomed the pain, even as his muscles began to stiffen and hurt more. Pain on the outside was easier to deal with than pain on the inside.
Nevertheless, black sorrow descended on him, and with his arms pillowing his head, he cried, silently sobbing himself to sleep.
A kick in the side roused him. He sat up in his cocoon of bedding with a groan, and was rewarded with another kick. He managed to squirm out of the bedding, and it was snatched away from him by a maid and bundled into the top of the cupboard.
The room was full of sleepy people, complaining, ordering each other about. He and the boy were put to fetching firewood from the pile outside, and the roasting fires and the big ovens were set to burning hotly. The bag of meal-remains they had left outside last night was gone. He remembered, now that he thought about it, that he had noticed chickens in a pen in one corner of the kitchen-garden. It probably went to feed them. Another evidence of frugality, that they kept hens to have their own eggs and roasting birds.
Last night’s bread was shoveled out of the oven and laid out in order of quality, to be served at breakfast. Huge pots of pease-porridge and oat-porridge emerged from the ovens as well, the staple breakfast food for the servants. Serving maids appeared, caps a little askew and yawning sleepily; they were swiftly burdened with great trays of bowls full of both, or baskets of bread. The servants would eat earliest of course, and not with the masters, who would lie abed and probably be served there.
As the porridge kettles emptied, they came to Mags and the boy, who began their work. The bowls and utensils from cooking the better foods came to them too, and they labored to keep up.
“New potboy?” asked one serving-maid of one of the cook’s helpers.
“Aye. Thick as two short planks, but does the work,” came the reply. “Hasn’t said a word since he was taken on yesterday.”
“That’ll suit Cookie, then,” came the laconic reply.
“It’ll suit Cookie better if he’s too thick to count to three,” said the helper. “Cookie’ll give him two pennies and keep the third.”
The maid snickered.
Mags kept scrubbing, concentrating with all his might, the way he used to concentrate on chipping out a stone without fracturing it, on getting every last fragment of food from every pot he was handed. When he and the boy ran out of pots, they were sent for more wood, or to haul in bags or baskets of coarser foodstuffs from a root cellar, or to carry the garbage from the cooking out to the chicken pen. They emptied out the peelings and ends and bad spots, the leaves and the burnt bits of bread into the pen and the hens fell on the bounty, clucking and fighting over the best bits, like the servants in the kitchen. Then back they went to scrubbing. Mags bent over the work, always with an ache in his soul that felt as if someone was squeezing his heart in a vice.
At least he could do this. And he could do it well. He could do it without hurting anyone.
And when he started to weep, he could put his head down over the basin, let his hair fall to cover his face, and no one would be the wiser.
So there it was. This, for now, would be what remained of the wreckage of his life.
The days blurred one into another. The days lengthened, and the kitchen grew hotter by day because the weather outside was warmer. He and the boy worked stripped to their trews; the women in shifts and chemises. He threw himself into the scrubbing and anything else that was given to him to do—and seeing that, the cook gave him every task that two hands and no mind to speak of could perform. He was set to scrubbing the soot from all the walls, and bleaching the stone floor with lye. He did it all without complaint, without a word.
He couldn’t hear Dallen at all. He began to think that if Dallen had not actually repudiated him yet, it was only because Dallen was not in any physical shape to. As soon as Dallen was as healed as he could get, the Companion probably would do exactly that. And in the meanwhile the silence meant that Dallen had decided that Choosing Mags had been a terrible mistake, and this was the way to keep him isolated until the Companion could be rid of him.
It hurt, it hurt terribly, but he had to acknowledge that everyone was better off without him.
And all he was waiting for now was for that ghostly, silent presence in the back of his mind to one day become an echoingly empty place.
When that happened... well, then he would decide what to do.
And it occurred to him that once Dallen left him, there was one option he hadn’t considered—a painless, easy way to put an end to everything. One that now, in retrospect, he wished had happened last winter, in that blizzard.
All he had to do was be patient and wait for winter. Whether or not a blizzard came, there would be snow. Then all he needed to do would be to walk out into it, until he started to feel sleepy; he could ignore the cold, he had done so before. Then, when it was too hard to move, too much effort to keep going, he could sit down, close his eyes, and let the snow take him and his misery away forever.