The man had expressive eyebrows; one quirked now, cocking up as he examined me. He looked again at Andevai to identify what possible relation we might have, and nodded. “Supper is served in the supper room, maestra. Or must I also address you as Magister?”
“No. Thank you.”
His eyebrows lifted again before he recovered his composure. “I’ll send my niece to show you up when we’re done serving supper, but you’ll have to have your own people carry up your cases or what have you, as we’re shorthanded tonight what with the wedding of my wife’s cousin’s nephew in Londun. I would have shut up the inn and gone over the river myself for the wedding feast if not for—”
A trill of laughter—humanlike but not human—lilted out of the supper room.
The man nodded at me, pointedly not looking at Andevai. “Business is business, maestra. We serve any who pay with hard currency and comport themselves like decent folk. If you’re wanting a wash, there’s a trough out by the stable where you can fill a pitcher. There’ll be a basin up in the room to pour in and wash out of.”
“We will receive a tray of food in our private chamber,” said Andevai abruptly.
The man’s lips thinned. “As I said, Magister, tonight we haven’t the means for private service no matter what I might wish one way or another, for besides the lad out in the stables, it’s just me and my brother’s daughter. She’s tending the kitchen, and I’m running food into the supper room, and soon enough I’ll have customers here in the common room as well to pull drinks for, the usual locals with their music and talk.”
“Even if I were to eat in a public room, you can scarcely wish me to eat in your supper room, since I will extinguish your fire and then all your other customers will be cold.”
“Even if you sit at the very farthest table from the hearth, Magister? I just want to make clear I’ve nothing to be ashamed of in my inn. We’re a respectable establishment well known for our savory suppers, our excellent brew, and clean beds. Yet I’ll tell you truly, we’ve never had a cold mage set foot in this establishment, not a Housed mage, not once, just hedge mages and bards and jellies and such.”
“This corruption is absurd,” Andevai said with a glance at me, contempt trembling like unspoken words on his lips. Yet he would go on speaking. “Jelly is a substance congealed or, in its manner, frozen. A djeli”—he pronounced it more like “jay-lee”—“possesses the ability to channel, to weave, the essence that binds and underlies the universe. Like bards, they are the guardians of the ancient speech. I wish you people would use the word correctly to show proper respect.”
A throaty, somewhat monotone voice called from the supper room with a request for more wine.
The innkeeper’s mouth had pinched tight. “I’ll tell you this,” he began in a low, passionate voice, “you in the Houses may stand high, and you may look down on us who crawl beneath you, but there rises a tide of sentiment—”
I saw my supper and my hope for a night’s sleep sliding away. “Maester,” I cut in, “what if I fetch a tray myself from the kitchens and take it up to the attic?”
Checked, the innkeeper stiffened, maybe not sure whether I was being respectful or derisory.
Andevai broke in. “Catherine, you are not a servant to fetch and carry what others are obligated to bring.”
“I want to eat. I’m very hungry. If I fetch the tray, then I know we’ll eat.”
“Furthermore,” my husband went on inexorably, “the Houses are the bringers of plenty, not of want. People should be grateful to us, who have spared them from the tyranny of princes many times over, who have saved them from the wars of monsters like Camjiata who meant to crush all beneath his boot.”
“Get out of my house,” said the innkeeper so quietly that Andevai did not react, and after a moment I began to think he had not heard because there was no sound at all; even the conversation in the supper room dropped into a lull.
For a moment.
Then the sword hilt burned against my palm like ice.
The fire whoofed out with a billow of ash like a cough. I felt as if a glacier loomed, ready to calve and bury me.
“Catherine,” Andevai said in a low voice, “go outside. Now.”
My skin was chapped from the cold, and my stomach was grumbling, and the soup smelled so good, and it was sleeting outside, and in only three days the end of the year would arrive and with it, on that cusp between the dying of the old year and the birth of the new, would rise my own natal day, my birthday, when I would welcome a full round of twenty years and therefore become an adult. Only now I was severed by magic from my beloved family and standing here cold and exhausted and hungry and far from the home I could never return to and meanwhile about to be kicked out into the night. And the worst of it was, Andevai was probably going to do something stupid and awful, because he was the arrogant child of a powerful House unused to being spoken to by a common innkeeper far below him in birth and wealth and without any cold magic to protect himself, and all I could think of was snuggling into a warm bed and sipping hot soup, because I was the most selfish, miserable person alive.