else who’d have you. Love was never what our marriage was going to be about and it’s childish and stupid of you to suddenly want me to pretend that it is.”
Gavin’s skin seemed to shrink on his body. Judah felt it. Elly shook her head. “I know you feel like everything’s been taken from you, and I’m sorry. Truly, I am. But I’m not the last coin in your treasury and I’m not the last piece of your great lost empire. I’m a human being.”
They hadn’t spoken since. That afternoon, the Seneschal had unlocked the door, and Gavin more or less disappeared.
The rest of them went to work. The guards had taken their belt knives, but Elly had begged to keep hers, on the grounds that it was the smallest and least lethal and they needed some sort of blade to prepare food. They didn’t bother looking for a way out; the Safe Passage was locked, as always, and the gate winches took six large men to work. They were one smallish, addled man and two women, and they had enough to do. A handful of chickens had managed to evade the plunderers. Judah, out foraging, found a wily ewe that had absconded into the thick hedges at the foot of the Wall, spring lamb in tow. The stables were closer to the House than the sheepfold, so Elly had tied a drapery cord around the ewe’s neck and led her there. (Judah had wanted to name the two sheep Current Mutton and Future Mutton, but Elly had preferred Cheese and Warm Socks, and since she was the only one who knew how to milk a sheep, she won.) On top of that, the plunderers, who were guards and not farmers, had missed a good bit of actual food in the kitchen garden, so they’d had greens and would eventually have tubers to eat. Some of the dustier shelves of preserved goods in the pantry had escaped notice, too.
But the tubers still weren’t ready and the spinach was long gone. Elly was saving the jars of jam and pickled peaches to eat when the snow came, when there would be nothing fresh at all. The squash from the midden yard seemed a boon at first (Judah forced herself not to think about Darid, or her mother, or any of the other bodies buried there) but they’d long since grown sick of it. Past the kitchen garden were fields of rye, oats and wheat—which were how the sheep had survived—and at first the Seneschal had suggested they make use of those for food. But Elly remembered the scything-threshing-winnowing process from her childhood in Tiernan, and had resisted this, on the grounds that it was impossible. Two women, one smallish addled man.
“And what do you think small families do in the countryside?” the Seneschal had said.
“They don’t grow oats as their primary food crop, and when they do grow oats, at harvest time they either hire help or trade for it,” Elly said. “Are you offering me a field full of farmhands?”
“What would you pay them?”
“How about quarried stone? This whole place is built of it. They can take it away rock by rock for all I care.”
The Seneschal had brought the twenty-pound sack of oats the next day, and after that Elly was in charge. She was the only one of the four of them who had ever seen bread baked or wheat ground, and it quickly became apparent that she was the only one of them who knew anything useful. In addition to milking the sheep, she could tell which of the plants in the ruined garden were weeds and which were beets and potatoes. She’d dispatched Judah and Theron to search the pillaged storerooms and pantries and guest rooms for anything forgotten, and she’d brought a pile of ancient, moldering herbals and cookery books from the Lady’s Library. In addition to the oats, the Seneschal provided them with paltry amounts of oil, stringy meat, a wizened vegetable or two (never soap, coffee, butter or wine), and Elly was the only one who could make the packages into actual food.
The coup had made all of them more of whatever they’d been before. Elly had always been pragmatic and difficult to ruffle, and now she kept them all alive. Theron had been half-insane, and now he muttered to himself about cats nobody else could see and twitched at imagined noises; but he had also always been an ingenious problem-solver. When Elly