The Wine Goes Up

Maven said it once, low, and would not say it twice.

"The prince's stair," the old woman breathed, and her flour-white hand closed on the edge of the board the way a hand closes on a thing to keep from falling off the world. "The east turn, behind the still-room, the little oak door the grooms use to bring his horse round dry. No grey cloak puts a hand to it, because the man it serves is the King's own son, and a Warden who turned out the prince's own coming-and-going on the night the gates are shut would be a Warden the next morning with no cloak at all." She let it go, and her shaking hand came down flat on the wood. "It is the one door in Halvern that the Captain has just told you he will not watch, because it is the one door he is forbidden to. You'll go out through the prince's dark, Eiranwy, or you'll not go out tonight, and if you do not go out tonight you may as well have let the old man freeze for nothing."

Eira heard the whole of it land in her, the cold and the cleverness of it, and under both a cruelty Maven could not even see. For Maven did not know whose door she was naming. To Maven the prince's stair was a door, only a door, the cleverest door in Halvern, and the prince behind it was the King's get and no business of hers, a shape she had called "that boy on the bench, whoever he is" and never once stitched to the heir. She did not know that the man asleep at the top of that little oak stair was the same man who came down to the hearth under a coat to be no one, the man Eira had snapped at and fed and watched grow into the one warm thing in her cold work. Maven was handing her the way to Wystan Carrow, the way to the dead, the way to everything she had come for, and she did not know the toll she was setting on it was Cas. Only Eira knew that. So the one road out of the trap ran straight back through the man she had spent ten years not letting herself want and one bad week wanting anyway, and she had told herself, every night, that it changed nothing, the way you tell a banked fire it is out.

She did not let her face do anything. That was the first lesson and the last one. "He'll be in the great hall," she said. "Or his rooms. The grooms won't open his stair for a hearth girl."

"The grooms are abed and the great hall is dark and the gates are shut, which means the prince is shut in with the rest of us." Maven's old eyes did not waver. "You don't need a groom. You need the door. The bolt is on the inside, the still-room side, because it's drawn at night against the cold and not against thieves; a prince's stair has nothing in it worth stealing but the prince. You draw it, you go up the little stair, you cross the dark of his outer room while he sleeps, and you go out the way his horse comes in, into the east court, and from the east court a girl in a groom's coat is only a girl seeing to a horse. From there it's the river-gate to the lower town. They'll have it barred tonight with the rest, but the milk and the bread go through it before light, hunt or no hunt, for even a shut city must eat, and the cloaks at that gate pass household business with barely a look. A girl going out where the milk goes is nobody at all." She drew the breath that shook. "You'll want the coat off the peg by the still-room, the spare one, the brown. And you'll want the saint's luck I have no right to ask for and will ask for anyway."

So Eira took off the hearth and put on the dark.

She went the way the kitchen does not go, the silent half of the floor, past the still-room with its hung herbs and its cold stone and its smell of vinegar and dried apple, and she found the brown coat heavy with another body's winters and put it on over her own, and she found the little oak door behind it exactly where five years of never once looking at it had filed it away in her, because the most dangerous thing she owned was the map she pretended not to keep. The bolt was a plain iron one, drawn against the cold. She set two fingers to it and breathed, and made herself the kind of nothing a bolt does not remember being drawn by, and slid it back silently, the way Maven had taught her to lift a lid off a pot so the steam would not say her name.

The stair behind it went up narrow and dark and smelled of horse and beeswax and the cold clean nothing of a place kept for one man. She climbed it with the salt-word locked behind her teeth and her ten years in her feet, and at the top there was a curtain, not a door, a heavy hanging that gave under her hand, and beyond the curtain a room with the grey of the shut night coming in at one tall window, and a banked fire, and the shapes of a man's solitude: a chair, a table with a book set face-down, a sword on its peg that had never been blooded, the whole quiet country of a prince who came down to her kitchen because he had nowhere up here to be a person. He was not in the chair. The inner door stood ajar on a deeper dark where she could hear, faint and even, the breathing of a man asleep, and she stood in the curtain with the cold gate of the east court two rooms away and thought, he is asleep, I can cross this floor on the silent foot and be gone and he will never know the maid walked through his dark, and that is best, that is cleanest, let him sleep.

She took one step onto the prince's floor.

The breathing in the inner dark stopped.

"There's someone in my room," said Cas, not loud, not afraid, the flat awake voice of a man who has lain a long time not sleeping and only let the breath go even, "and they came up my stair, which has a bolt on it, which means they came from below, which means it's one of mine, and I will tell you now that I sleep with a blade and a temper and neither of them is fond of company, so you had best be a friend, and you had best say so quick."

Eira's whole body went to the stillness, the country in the bones, the not-a-flinch that had held under the sharpest eyes in Halvern, and behind the stillness her mind ran the floor like a hare: out the curtain and down and the bolt would say she was here, across the floor and his blade was awake, the window and the drop, the lie, what lie, there was no lie that put a hearth girl in the prince's bedchamber at the dead of a shut night that did not end on a rope. She had walked into the one room in the world where being seen was being finished.

So she did the thing she always did. She gave him the truest thing she had that was not the fatal one.

"It's the bread," she said. "It's only the bread, my lord."

The dark went very still. Then a long breath, and the creak of a man sitting up, and his voice changed, all the blade going out of it at once, undone by two words the way only one voice in this house could undo him. "Eira."

"I'm sorry." She did not move. "I shouldn't be here. I know what it looks like and it isn't that, and I haven't the time to make it not look like that, so I'm going to ask you a thing no maid has any right to ask a prince, and then I'm going to go, and you're never going to have seen me." She made herself say it. "I need to go out of Halvern tonight. And the gates are shut, and the Captain is watching every door in this house but one, and the one is yours."

A silence. She heard him take that in, all of it, the shape of it, the danger of it, the trust she was spending that she did not have. When he spoke he had come to the inner doorway, a darker dark against the dark, the shut-night grey just finding the line of his shoulder.

"You're in trouble," he said. "Real trouble. The kind the Captain rings the gate-bell for." Not a question. He was quick; he had always been quick, it was half of why she could not stop. "And you came up the one stair he can't follow you up, because you knew that, because you know this house the way you should not be able to know this house." A beat, and the thing she dreaded most came into his voice, not suspicion, worse, the careful gentleness of a man stepping toward a startled horse over ice. "Eira. Who are you?"

The question fell into the cold room and lay there, and it was Aldric's question from the east room and Sera's question before the counted line and Vael's question from over the corpse, the same wrong thing read a fourth time, and this time by the one mouth she could not bear to hear ask it, because this was the one she had let herself like.

"I'm the girl who brings you bread," she said. "That's all I've ever been to you, and it's the truest thing in this house, and I'm asking you to let it be enough for one night." Her voice went raw and she let it. "Walk me out your door, Cas. Not as the prince. As the man who comes down to be no one. They won't put a hand to a door you walk through. Walk me to the east gate and put me through it and turn around and go back to bed and forget my face, and I will have one chance to do a thing I have waited my whole life to do, and you will never know what it was, and that is the kindest thing you can do for me, the not knowing. Please."

He was quiet a long time. The fire ticked the way her own fire ticked, two rooms and a world away, where Maven stood waiting with her shaking hand on the board.

Then Cas crossed his own dark floor, and took his plain coat off the chair, the one he wore to be nobody, and put it on, and said, low, in the flat brave voice of a man walking out onto ice he has decided, again, against everything, to trust, "I don't forget faces. I've tried. I never could forget yours, and I'm not going to start tonight by pretending I can." He drew the inner bolt back. "But I'll walk you out. The saints help us both, I'll walk you out. Stay at my shoulder and let me do the talking, and if any cloak speaks to us, you keep your eyes down and your mouth shut and let them see the prince annoyed at being kept from his bed."

He opened the little east door, and the cold of the shut night came in, and the courtyard lay grey and empty under the dark bulk of the gate-tower, and they stepped out into it together, the prince and the maid in their two plain coats, and they had gone six steps across the frost toward the river-gate when a lantern came up gold out of the black arch of the tower, and the voice that came with it was quiet, and tired, and never had to be raised.

"Out late, my lord," said Roon Vael. "And not alone."