Captain Janlav notices the empty plates and glasses only then, the bowls and stained beards and sleeves. When he speaks, his questions aren’t aimed at me. “It’s that late already? But not too late for a few more drinks, I hope!”
Beard and Tabard assure him that it’s not too late. This is the cue for my sisters and me to return upstairs, first into the drawing room, then later into our rooms for the night. But he still holds the dead bird up in the air. I dare not to think what will be left of it come the morning if he starts drinking with the guards now.
“Why don’t you take the bird to hang in the cellar first?” I suggest with the innocent tone that has never let me down.
He turns on his heels, and his eyes widen. Again, he looks at me as if he had never seen me before. The spell the gagargi worked on him has made him forget me so many times already that all I feel is mild annoyance. “Ah, yes! What a splendid idea!”
He sways back to the hallway, and I instantly regret my suggestion. Father Moon help me, he will fall on the stairs and break his neck. That wasn’t my intention. His death would benefit no one. It would shatter me beyond repair.
“Should someone not go with him?” I ask.
But the other guards find his inebriated state only funny. Celestia and my sisters remain seated. Of course they do. Descending to a cellar for a man’s sake isn’t something any one of them would ever do.
“I shall come with you.” And without waiting for an answer or protest, I rush to shelter the man who can’t remember that once upon a time he swore me love under my father’s light.
The arm of the man I once loved is around my shoulders at last. But this isn’t what I imagined the return of his affections to be like. He smells of frost and smoke and brandy. His steps are heavy and unsteady, and if it weren’t for me holding him upright, he would have fallen down the stairs multiple times already. The arm that isn’t wrapped around me clutches the feet of the dead pheasant, and I’m sure he wouldn’t drop it even after breaking every single bone in his body.
“And then I saw this pheasant, strutting with its head high and wings wide, and I thought—” Captain Janlav belches. He wipes his wet beard into the sleeve of his fur coat, then looks at the sleeve to see what he left behind. He seems boyishly happy to find nothing but an old, rusty stain. “A feast! I shall shoot it dead and bring it here, and we shall have a proper feast.”
“And a feast we shall have, but for that Millie needs a bit more preparation time, don’t you think?” I say as we pass the door that leads into the room that once was a library, but now serves as the guards’ living quarters. I think of the third floor and the three chambers there. When we first came to the house, I insisted on having a room of my own. Celestia must have realized instantly what I had in mind, though not even once has she asked if I still intend to… “There are, after all, the feathers to pluck, the bones to break, the sauce to simmer, and meat to roast.”
“Suppose so,” he mutters when we come to the steep steps leading down to the cellar. Just as no soul lights the bird’s eyes, none lit our way down. “But, mark my words, we shall have a feast to remember!”
With all the grandiose waving of his arms, I manage to keep us both upright only barely. Out of sheer annoyance, a part of me is tempted to let him fall, or even push him down the stairs. But my sisters and I, we might yet need him. Even though Celestia hasn’t asked me to try and win over his trust, during the lonely nights, I have often asked myself: if it were to benefit us, would I share my bed with him?
I don’t trust myself enough to provide an honest answer.
We reach the door of the cellar. It’s plain and undecorated compared to the other doors of this house. And yet, a terrible sense of foreboding lands heavy on my shoulders. My gaze returns to the stain on his coat’s sleeve. Is it blood? And if it is, is it from the dead bird or from someone else that the previous owner of the coat let out of their days?
“Mashed potatoes!” Captain Janlav pulls the door open triumphantly.
His voice doesn’t echo in the corridor beyond. The walls are too porous to reflect back sound. But I sense… I don’t know, a presence of sorts, something vicious waiting for us. No, it’s just my imagination, a childish fear of the dark. If someone had been hiding in the house, the guards or Millie would have found them weeks ago already.
“We shall have mashed potatoes and roasted onions!”
This boisterous talk of his! I consider telling him to be silent, but I can’t go around giving orders, for that might sow in his mind the idea that I’m not as meek and demure as he thinks I am. As my sisters and I must be in his eyes for the time being. Though I don’t know what Celestia’s plan is, I know it depends on this.
“I’ll gut this bird myself and take the carcass apart!”
On the even, black floor he leans on me less. The smell of dark spring, of wet soil untouched by sun, and persistent mold and root vegetables floods my nostrils as we wander deeper down the corridor that is so very narrow, almost like a tunnel. He stumbles closer to me so that we can walk its length—a distance feeling longer than it possibly can be—side by side.
“And a sauce! What would a roast be without a decent sauce?”
I can’t stand thinking of him as a fool, though he would very much deserve to be called such now. For to be so close to him, to reclaim what I once cherished… I still find this man too much to my liking regardless of whom he serves now.
“When did it get so dark, eh?” Captain Janlav laughs, a throaty sound accompanied by a friendly jab. “Can’t see a thing!”
“Hold on to the wall, will you?” I’m more annoyed at him than anything else, and at myself for thinking of him and all that we once had. I really should have brought a lamp with me. But I didn’t have time to think, and going back isn’t an option. My sisters have no doubt retired for the night already. I don’t want to face the guards alone. And given his drunken state, Captain Janlav might well end up piercing himself in the hooks if left unattended for even a minute. Some boys never grow up. Some never get the chance.
“The wall is gone,” Captain Janlav announces, and he sounds both proud and smug, as if he were a particularly keen student of a particularly harsh master.
I can still feel the cold honeycomb of bricks against my trailing fingertips. But I sense the room widening off to our left, the tune of our soft footfalls changing. We turn, and there, right before us, faintly glows a narrow, rectangular window. A slanting ray of Moon’s light paints a white beam on the floor, and in this light, I see that the walls here in this low-ceilinged room are made of bare, frosted granite.
“Ah, the hooks!” Captain Janlav sways toward the window, and I’m left behind.
Though I’m comforted by my father’s presence, something in this space, in this sad room under the house, haunts me. It’s not the wooden crates of beetroots and potatoes, onions and carrots, and other simple things that people who don’t live in palaces rely on for sustenance during the long winter months. It’s not the pile of empty bottles waiting to be reused come next harvest. It’s something else.
Father Moon, will you show me what it is?
I step into the beam of the Moon’s light. At this spot, on this stripe halving the room, I’m safe.
“Why, where is it?” Captain Janlav waves the pheasant in the air, near the wall where the Moon’s light can’t reach him. Feathers tall and small come off from the carcass. He will ruin the bird if I don’t stop his fumbling. I don’t like the thought of even one life lost in vain, not even an animal one.