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Otto looked away.
“Is he not coming?” I asked, panicked. “He’s the strongest of all of us!”
Otto still would not look at me. “Oh, he’s coming,” he said.
Sure enough, the rope was pulled tight, and soon I could hear the grunting final effort of his ascent.
“Almost here,” Otto said softly.
But when I saw Vazi, I gasped in horror. Because on his back he carried my sister, Mary.
CHAPTER 15
“What on earth possessed you?” I hissed as we crept through the tunnel leading to the storeroom. “Iknowyou always want to be included, but this is dangerous!”
“I want to help,” Mary said firmly. She sounded so much older all of a sudden. Was this what losing two brothers had done to her?
Though I couldn’t see her face, I could easily guess her expression: her jaw set firm, her pretty brows in a stubborn frown.I’m here, it said,and there’s nothing you can do about it now.
She was right, of course, and all I could do was pray our mother wouldn’t wake from one of her nightmares to find all but one of her children gone. “You have to keep close to me the whole time,” I said. When she didn’t answer, I said urgently, “Mary—promise me! I can’t let anything happen to you.”
“Yes, Hannah, I promise,” she said. “I’ll stay close.”
I gave her hand a quick squeeze, and she squeezed back, hard. My heart swelled in my chest. I loved her more than anyone. I would keep her safe, no matter what.
Only the rats were awake as we crept out of the storeroom and climbed the stairs. Even giant Vazi was as quiet as a shadow.
I barely allowed myself to breathe as we entered the kitchen.Coals in the hearth lit the walls with a dim red light. I scanned the room, peering into the corners for sleeping cooks or spitboys.
The way was clear, and my breath came out in a rush. Maraulf, whose sack was already bulging with apples, root vegetables, and nuts from the cellar, shouldered his way in and gave a low whistle. “There’s enough to feed the village till June.”
His son hurried over to a low table along the wall, on which lay the remains of the night’s dinner: meat suspended inside a jelly made of calves’ hooves, smoked fish, dove pie, pears boiled in wine, spices, and honey.
“Someone didn’t do the cleaning up,” Merrick said reproachfully.
“Well, then, it’s a good thing we’re here to help out, isn’t it?” said Otto. “The baron should thank us.”
Maraulf tore a hunk of bread from a loaf as he looked over the offerings. “Take all the food you can fit in your sacks,” he said, “but be sure you can still carry them. We’re a long way from home.”
“Baron Joachim eats all this?” Mary whispered to me in wonder. “Is he even bigger than Vazi?”
I swept a wedge of cheese into my sack. “When I saw him, he was a boy hardly bigger than Conn.”
That was ten years ago now at least, when he rode through our village beneath his father’s banners, wearing a child-sized suit of gleaming armor. Baron Jorian was giving Joachim a tour of everything he’d one day inherit: forests, villages, meadows, lands that stretched even farther than the eye could see.
We villagers went out, dressed in our finest, to greet him. And I’d never forget the way he’d looked down at us from the back of his shining black horse—like we were lower than livestock. Like we might as well have been mud.
As Joachim’s procession passed, Otto had reached down, picked up a handful of horse manure, and flung it after them. It missed the mark, or else Otto would’ve been flogged in the square. It wouldn’t have mattered that he was only eight; they would have stripped the skin from his spine. As it was, his own father beat him cruelly, because a boy—even a doctor’s son—must know his place in the world.
The incident had terrified me, but I didn’t know if Otto even remembered it.
“The baron has many, many men to feed,” I said to Mary. “Knights, guards, men-at-arms, craftsmen, gardeners—”
“And gong farmers,” Otto whispered, appearing at my side and grinning.
“What’s that?” Mary asked him.
Otto slung his arm around her thin shoulders. “A job you wouldn’t want if it fed you like a queen,” he said. He bent close to her ear and said, “A gong farmer goes down into the privies and cleans ’em out with his shovel.”
