She felt her cheeks and ears flush with anger. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t—not that she really wanted to be out in the Great Hall either, showing off for potential suitors and their lord-fathers. Bad enough that Rathgar never thought of her; worse that he’d think of her only in terms of being marriage bait.
Which he would, if he ever thought past Lordan’s marriage ... Lordan’s far more important marriage. After all, he was the male and the heir ... Kero was only a girl.
Kero set her jaw and tried to look cheerful, or at least indifferent, but something of her resentment must have penetrated the careful mask of calm and competence she was trying to cultivate. Wendar patted her arm again and looked distressed.
“I wish I could help,” he said unhappily. “I told your father three years ago, when—when—”
“When Mother died,” Kero said shortly.
He coughed. “Uh, indeed. I told him that you needed a housekeeper, but he wouldn’t hear of ft. He said you were already doing very well, and you didn’t need any help.”
Kero clenched her teeth, then relaxed with an effort. “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. Father—” She clamped her lips tight on what she was going to say; it wouldn’t do any good, it wouldn’t change anything.
But the sentence went on inside her head. Father never really notices anything about me so long as I stay out of sight, his dinner arrives on time, and the Keep doesn’t smell like a stable. I suppose if anyone had mentioned that a fourteen-year-old girl shouldn’t be forced into the job of Keep Lady alone, he’d have said that the girls in his village were married and mothers by fourteen. Never mind that the most any of them had to manage alone was a two-room cottage and a flock of sheep, and usually didn’t like even that....
She sighed, and finished her sentence in a way that wouldn’t put more strain on Wendar than he was already coping with. “Father had other things to worry about. And so do you, Wendar. You’ve got a hall full of guests out there, and no one keeping an eye on the servitors.”
Wendar swore, and hurried back toward the door into the Great Hall, just as the wave of servants returned with the dirty dishes from the last course. Wendar sidestepped the rush, and dodged between two of them and through the doorway.
Stuffed pigeons were next; a course that required nothing more than the bread trenchers. That would give the kitchen staff enough time to clean the platters now being brought in before the fish course of eel pies was served.
A full High Feast, and who was it had to figure out how our little backwoods Keep could come up with enough courses to satisfy the requirements? Me, of course. Tubs full of eel in the garden for days, the moat stocked with fish in a net-pen, crates of pigeons and hens driving us all crazy ... let’s not talk about the rest of the livestock. Kero rubbed her arms, and rerolled the sleeves of her flour-covered, homespun shirt a little higher. Damn these skirts. Breeches would be easier. The helpers get to wear breeches, so why can’t I? She wondered if Dierna had any notion of how much work a High Feast was. She ought to; she’d been trained by the Sisters of Agnetha—in fact she’d been sent to the Sisters’ cloister at the ripe age of eight, so she ought to have had time to learn the “womanly arts.”
Dierna ought to have had proper instruction in those womanly arts too, as well as the art of being womanly, whatever that meant ... unlike Kero, as Rathgar was so prone to remind her whenever she failed to live up to his notion of “womanly.”
Selective memory, she told herself bitterly. He keeps forgetting that he was the one who decided he couldn’t do without me. Wheat-crowned Agnetha was Rathgar’s idea of the appropriate sort of deity for a lady to worship—unlike wild, horse-taming Agnira, Kero’s favorite. There was a shrine to Agnetha in the Keep chapel, though the other aspects of the LadyTrine were only represented by little bas-reliefs carved into the pedestal of Agnetha’s statue. There in the heart of the chapel, Agnetha smiled with honeyed sweetness over her twin babies, her wheat sheaves at her feet, her cloak of fruit-laden vines around her, her distaff dangling from her belt of flowers, sheep gazing up at her adoringly. While on the pedestal, alternating snowflakes and hoofprints were all there was to show of the other two aspects, Agnoma and Agnira. Rathgar approved of Agnetha, occasionally waxing maudlin over his somewhat sketchy devotion when in his cups.
Well, after the feast, the wedding, and the month-long bridal moon, Kero could probably give up the keys of the Keep to Dierna. That would bring an end to the farce of pretending to enjoy being mewed up in the kitchen, still-room or bower day after endlessly boring day. Dierna was pliant enough to satisfy both Rathgar and his son, and she seemed competent when Kero had taken her on a quick tour when the girl first arrived.
Kero shook herself out of her reverie as the servitors appeared with platters piled high with soaked trencher bread. She had them dump the bread into sacks waiting for distribution to the poor. Time for the bowls and eel-pies.
Cook was head-and-shoulders deep into the oven, removing the next subtlety, and Kero overheard one of his assistants giving orders for the pies to be carried out first.
“Hold it right there!” she snapped, freezing the servants where they stood. She stalked to the table, plain brown linen skirts flaring, and countermanded the order, physically taking a pie away from one poor confused lad and shoving a pile of clean bowls into his hands instead. The harried young man didn’t care; all he wanted was someone to give him the right thing to carry in, and tell him what he was to do with it.
Kero repeated the instructions she’d given them all for the soup course, as she passed out further piles of bowls. “One bowl for every two guests, put the bowl between them, when you’ve finished placing the bread, go to the sideboard, get trencher bread, give each guest a trencher, then come back and get a pie.”
It made a kind of chant as she repeated herself for each servingman. Outside, Wendar would be directing the men to their tables; no matter that they’d been going to the same places all night. By now they were tired and numb with the noise and the work, and all they were thinking of was when the feast could be over so they could eat and drink themselves into a celebratory stupor.
Dierna was probably beginning to wilt under all this by now. That much Kero didn’t envy her. When the older girl had taken her on that round of the Keep duties, she’d been a little shy—and Kero knew very well how sheltered the girls trained by the Sisters tended to be. Not ignorant, no; the Sisters made certain their charges were well-educated in the realities of life as well as domestic skills. But perhaps that was the problem; Dierna was like a young squire who has watched swordwork all his young life and only now, at fifteen, was going to pick up a blade. She knew what was supposed to happen, but was unprepared for the reality of the situation.
The first of the servitors returned for his pie, and Kero made certain he didn’t take it without a towel wrapped about his hands. She wondered, as she passed out towels and pies in a seemingly endless stream, what Rathgar would do or say the first time dinner was inedible or there were no clean shirts for him.