For all her confidence in learning our fate, Kizzy was refused, and we were sent to bed with no answers from Cook. We slept on straw mattresses on a cold stone floor, in a narrow room beside the kitchens. The walls streamed with water, and green mould bloomed in the cracks.
There were ten of us, Dot and Szilvie included. Mira slept along the wall closest to the kitchen, beside a grate that wept stale water. We were given the mattresses nearest the draughty door, which snagged on the uneven floor with a sound that set my teeth on edge every time someone went in or out.
‘You’ll be moving in with the serving girls soon,’ said Szilvie. ‘Their rooms are bigger.’
‘Not that they spend much time in their own beds,’ said a red-haired girl with high cheekbones, who Dot had introduced as Elena. She had an evenly featured face made ugly by her cruel smile.
Kizzy stared Elena down.
‘Hark at you,’ said Dot. ‘Szilvie told me about your tumble with Nicholai.’
Elena flushed, but managed to cast another haughty glance in our direction before collapsing, fully clothed, into bed.
I knew she hated us on sight, because we were Travellers. The thing that was my pride, was something they thought should be my shame.
The reasons the Settled hated us were many and stupid: because we had brown skin, because we lived in wagons, because we called no land our own. And they were kept in fear by the stories they were told. That we had dark skin because devils live in us. We could read the weather because the Iele suckled us. We travelled because we steal from everyone, and moved on before we could be caught. None of it was true, of course, but people always prefer their own explanations over the reality of things.
My disdain grew from Elena’s, and made me strong. But there was fascination as well as disdain in the way she and some of the others watched us. Elena’s gaze reminded me of the Settled men in the villages, who coiled Kizzy’s tight curls around their thumbs and asked her to show them her gums to see if they were pink as theirs.
Szilvie lay down near me, not even bothering to unlace her boots. As the sounds of sleeping filled the room, I turned on my side and whispered to her.
‘Is Mira’s throat all right?’
‘Not really,’ said Szilvie briskly. Kizzy nudged me with her foot. I knew she wanted me to let Szilvie sleep, so we could speak, but I had a further question burning inside me.
‘What did she do? Why did they crush her throat?’
Szilvie’s eyes were wide in the darkness. ‘It’s not my story to tell.’
‘She can hardly tell it.’
Szilvie shuffled closer, and brought her lips close to my ear.
‘Her friend. This girl. Another serving girl, she—’ Szilvie shifted uncomfortably. I heard the straw grating against her skirts. ‘Cristina. She was an offering.’
‘An offering for the pact?’ I said.
‘Dot and her mouth,’ hissed Szilvie. ‘Yes, for the pact.’
‘What is the pact?’
‘Malovski really told you nothing?’ I could hear the mingled fear and hope in Szilvie’s voice. She did not want to be the one to tell me what it meant.
‘No.’
‘I should have let Dot tell you.’
‘I want you to tell me,’ I said. Szilvie was drawing away, about to close off completely.
‘The pact the boyar has with … him.’
‘The Dragon?’ It was a hunch, and I could tell by Szilvie’s frightened gasp I was right.
‘Not in the dark,’ said Szilvie. ‘I can’t dwell on it in the dark.’
‘But what does it mean?’
‘For Saints’ sake. I’m worn out.’ She pulled the covers over her head and refused to say more on it that night, or the next morning, or at all.
Our lives quickly took on a harder shape.
My sister’s certainty that we should hear our divining shrank with each passing day. We had a moon-cycle to hear our fate: a month before it faded for ever. I tried to reassure Kizzy it didn’t matter, that we could do without a Seer. I didn’t feel there was much point in learning my fate until I could see beyond the kitchens. But Kizzy’s heart was restless, and still she went every day to Cook, and every day Cook refused.
The castle beyond the kitchen remained as much of a mystery as the world outside the walls. We saw no sign of the boyar – I refused to think of him as ‘ours’ – and no men but the stable boys, though the stories the kitchen girls told made me glad of that.
The boys flirted with Kizzy every time they came to the kitchens with meat or gossip, but she turned mute as Mira, though nothing about her silence was meek. They started to call her gheaţă, the Settled word for ice, because she was beautiful and cold as the frost that found us even in the kitchens.
The relentless amount of food we had to prepare made me queasy, but hardly any ever came back. This was a land of more plenty than I had ever known, and I wondered how the boyar could be so prosperous with his bounds pressed upon by the properties of many others. The ground must be worked to dust.
Mira’s bruises ripened to black, and I sometimes heard her whisper to Szilvie, her voice recovering slowly, but she never talked to me. I don’t know why I longed for her to do so.
Out of her earshot, I attempted to learn more of the offering, the Dragon and other mysteries kept from us, but Dot and Szilvie were deaf to my questions.
‘Mamă would not give up,’ Kizzy said into my neck every night. But, I would think. Mamă never knew what it was to be a slave.
In her worst moments of that first week, when the scars on her hands cracked and bled, Kizzy told me she wanted to join Mamă. She said it quietly, because on her second day she shouted and raved like a fevered beast, until Captain Vereski was drawn from his sentry place down the corridor, came with a strap and made a new scar down her perfect, soft cheek. It split like an overripe peach, bled so sudden and shockingly she did not even cry. He gave me one too, re-opening my stitches so we would match.
She stopped shouting then; not for herself, but to protect me.
From that moment on, it was clear: anything done to her would be done to me. So Kizzy didn’t act on her threats of joining Mamă. She only took Old Charani’s cloth out from her pocket every night and pressed it to her face. I think it made her feel better, to know death would be there, as it was for everyone in the end.
‘Even the boyar,’ she whispered against my cheek, breath furred with stale water. ‘Even he has a grave waiting.’
She didn’t say so aloud for fear of being overheard, but I knew she would dearly love to be the one to put him in it. Kizzy lost none of her bravery, but it became a harder sort, honed as a blade, and though I would never have told her, it frightened me.
It also frightened the other girls we shared a room with, but they admired her too. No matter we worked the same hours, ate the same bread – despite the hardship she remained beautiful, vital, fierce. A grace, as Old Charani said. But such grace could not last long in such a place, and with the arrival of a visitor, another boyar from the north, it turned to a curse.
Elena had it from her stable boy Nicholai that the visitor was Boyar Calazan. He ruled lands larger than these, and was a man far richer and crueller than even our master, Boyar Valcar.