BOILING WATER

In the eleven years since he had come of age, Soren had set foot in the kitchens of Vandermere Hall perhaps five times, and on each occasion the staff had behaved as though the sky had fallen in.

This one was no exception. He came down the stone stair at half past five in the afternoon with a sheet of paper in his hand, and the babble of voices below him dropped away so abruptly that he could hear the spit turning in the great fireplace. By the time he reached the bottom step, twenty-odd servants had risen from their benches and stood in a ragged line with their hands clasped, the cook with a spoon dripping gravy onto her apron, the scullery maids with their sleeves rolled to the elbow, and a footman who had evidently been caught with a pie in his pocket. The vaulted room smelled of onions and roasting fat and steam. Copper pots gleamed along the walls like rows of small suns.

"Please sit down," he said. "I have come only to leave an instruction."

Nobody made any move to sit. Mrs. Halloway, who had materialized from a pantry door with her keys jingling, took the paper from his hand and read it with the same expression she might have worn for a summons to a hanging.

"This is a list of the foods to be served to Her Highness," she said.

"It is a revised list. The Princess has been eating nothing but custard and white bread for three years, and I am told by her tutor that a child who never tastes a vegetable will never grow strong." He addressed the cook rather than the housekeeper, since the cook was the person who would actually have to do the work. "I should like her to have boiled greens, roast chicken with the skin, eggs, brown bread, and whatever fruit is in season. Nothing is to be sent up that has been prepared by anyone other than yourself or a person you trust."

The cook nodded stiffly, her red face working. "As Your Grace commands."

"Thank you, that will be all." He turned to go, and then paused as a flicker of movement drew his eye to the far end of the kitchen.

She had come in through the scullery door at the back, carrying a tray of dirty dishes, and she had stopped when she saw the room full of standing people. In the flickering firelight she looked small and tired, with a smudge of ink on her chin and her sleeves pushed above her elbows. The ash-ribbon around her arm had come loose and trailed down her wrist like a gray vine. Her gaze met his across the length of the room, and for an instant her face opened with an expression he could not interpret, something between surprise and wariness and a very faint, unexpected pleasure.

Then it happened.

A maid at the stove, a stout, freckled girl with a blunt, sullen face, lifted a huge iron pot from the hob. It was the pot in which the afternoon's potatoes had been boiled, and it was full to the brim with water that was still at a rolling boil. The girl swung round with it, as if to carry it to the sink, and as she did, her elbow caught the edge of the table. Her feet, in their heavy boots, slid on the wet stone. The pot tilted in her hands, and a sheet of steaming water leaped out of it in a long glittering arc, straight toward the scullery door.

Tamsin had turned just far enough to see it coming. She dropped the tray and flung up her left arm to shield her face, and the boiling water struck her hand and wrist and forearm with a hiss like a branding iron.

…

The scream that cut through the kitchen did not come from Tamsin. She made no sound at all. She stood rigid with her teeth sunk into her lower lip, her face gone white as a sheet and her eyes wide open, and the skin of her hand and forearm blistered and reddened before his eyes. The tray crashed to the flagstones in a spray of broken china. The freckled maid dropped the pot with a wail, which landed with a clang and sent the remaining water in a hissing tide across the floor.

"An unfortunate accident," said Mrs. Halloway, in a perfectly level voice. "The girl slipped. These things are bound to happen when the floors are wet."

Soren did not hear her. He was already across the room.

He did not remember deciding to move. One moment he had been standing at the foot of the stairs with a list in his hand, and the next he was among the servants, shouldering a footman aside, vaulting a bench, and catching Tamsin Reed as her knees began to fold. Her wrist was swollen and scarlet, and a wet, shining blister had already risen across the back of her hand. She was shaking, a fine continuous tremor that went through her whole body, but she did not cry out. She only looked up at him, her gray-blue eyes enormous and bright with pain, and whispered through clenched teeth, "It's nothing, Your Grace. Please put me down."

"You are in no condition to stand."

"I assure you that I am quite capable of..."

"You are not." He lifted her as he spoke, one arm beneath her knees and the other around her shoulders, and she was so light in his arms that he felt a cold lurch of alarm. Her unburnt hand clutched at his coat. He felt her heart pounding against his chest. He turned on his heel and addressed the stunned kitchen in the voice that had once silenced a riot on the Prairie rail line.

"Mrs. Halloway, you will have the surgery prepared at once. Cook, you will send up cold water and clean linen. The rest of you will remain precisely where you are until I give you leave to go."

Then he carried her out through the long stone passage and up the narrow stair, past the astonished stares of the pantry boys, and a hush of utter disbelief followed them like a wake. No one in the Imperial household could remember a Grand Duke carrying anyone anywhere, and certainly not a Blightborn scholar in a scorched brown sleeve.

…

The infirmary of Vandermere Hall occupied a small, whitewashed room on the first floor of the east wing, furnished with a narrow cot, a deal table, and a cabinet of bottles and bandages. A single window looked out on the cold green sweep of the lawn. It smelled of carbolic and lavender water, and the sunlight that fell across the cot was thin and gold.

He laid her down on the cot with great care, as though she were made of glass. She was biting her lip so hard that a bead of blood showed, and the hand and forearm lying on the coverlet were a ghastly red, glistening and swollen from wrist to elbow. A pair of sodden maids came hurrying in with a basin of water and a tray of linen, and he took the basin from them and set it down, then dismissed them with a single look.

"Leave us," he said. "All of you, please, and close the door."

The maids hurried out. Dorian, who had arrived at a run, stood in the doorway for a moment, glanced from the cot to his friend's white face, and retreated into the corridor without a word.

"I will dress the burn myself," Soren said. He pulled off his right glove, which he had not done in the presence of anyone but his valet in several years, and dipped a strip of linen in the cold water. His hand was not quite steady. "It will be easier if you do not move."

"I would rather you did not." She had pulled herself upright against the pillows, with her injured arm cradled against her chest, and her expression had changed from pain to something harder and more resolute. "Thank you, Your Grace, but I can do it myself. I know exactly what to use, and I would much prefer to be alone."

"You can scarcely lift your arm."

"I can lift it far enough." She met his eyes. "I'm used to tending my own hurts, and I do it better without an audience."

He stood very still with the wet linen in his bare hand. Every instinct he possessed told him to override her, to summon the physician and have the burn properly bandaged and the whole house made to answer for what had happened. But there was something in her voice that he had not heard from anyone in years, a quiet insistence that was neither a plea nor a command, and he found that he could no more refuse it than he could refuse to breathe.

"Very well," he said, and laid the linen on the table. "I shall be outside the door. Call out if you need me."

He pulled on his glove, walked out of the infirmary, and closed the door behind him.

…

The corridor was empty and dim. The afternoon had darkened toward evening, and a servant had lit the gas bracket at the far end, so that a thin flickering light lay along the floor. Soren stood with his back to the wall and his arms folded, staring at the grain of the opposite door, and counted to sixty.

At sixty he realized that he had been trying not to listen, and that he had been listening anyway. There was no sound from inside the room. No groan, no gasp, no clink of glass. Only a small, faint silence, like the silence of a held breath.

The door had not latched. It had swung inward a finger's width, and a thin bar of light fell across the floorboards at his feet. He had intended to look away. He had trained himself for years not to look at what he was not meant to see, and he had always considered the discipline one of his few unqualified virtues.

He allowed himself one look.

Through the narrow gap he could see the end of the cot and the white pillow, and Tamsin Reed sitting upright with her back against the wall. She had pushed back her torn sleeve to the elbow. Her injured arm lay across her knees, blistered and angry, and she was gazing at it with the grave, abstracted attention of a craftsman looking at a damaged tool. Then she laid her good hand flat over the burn, closed her eyes, and breathed out.

A soft green light welled up between her fingers.

It was not like the cold white brilliance of Gilded Light. It was gentler and richer, the green of new leaves with the sun behind them, and it pulsed slowly, like a heartbeat. Fine threads of it spread outward from her palm along the veins of her wrist, glowing under the skin in delicate branching patterns that resembled the roots of a tree. The air in the little room seemed to thicken and grow warm. A faint scent drifted into the corridor, damp earth and crushed stems and something like rain. The angry red of the burn faded as he watched. The blisters flattened and shrank, the swollen flesh smoothed, and the new skin came in pink and clean beneath her fingers, the way spring comes over a hillside in a single week.

In less than a minute, the burn was gone.

She slumped back against the wall, pale and sweating, and wiped her upper lip with the back of her hand. It came away stained with blood, and she looked at it with a rueful twist of her mouth, as though it were a familiar irritation.

Soren stepped back from the door.

He stood in the corridor with his back against the plaster and his pulse roaring in his ears. He was aware of the precise wording of the Quarantine Acts, which he had been taught to recite at the age of twelve. Any person who witnesses an act of Blighted magic within the precincts of an Imperial residence is obliged to report it to the Chancery within one day. Failure to report is a felony punishable by imprisonment. The act itself, if proven, is punishable by Committal.

He had seen a Rootkin woman heal herself in the infirmary of his own house, and the law required him to deliver her to the Chancellor.

…

He wrote the report in his study that night.

It took him forty minutes. He composed it in his formal hand, on the cream-colored paper reserved for official correspondence, with the date and time at the head and the paragraphs numbered. He described the incident in the kitchen, the injury, the infirmary, and the manifestation of Blighted ability that he had witnessed through the door. He named the subject and her employment. He cited the relevant sections of the Act. When he had finished, he read it through twice, carefully, as he read every document, and found no error in it.

Then he stood up from his desk, carried the sheet across the room, and fed it into the fire.

The flames curled around the edge of the paper and ate it slowly, turning the black ink to silver. He watched until the last corner had crumbled to ash, and then he poked it into the coals with the iron poker, as if he had been trying to hide something from himself.

"Treason," said Dorian, from the doorway, "is a hell of a hobby."

Soren did not turn. "I did not hear you come in."

"You were busy." Dorian crossed the carpet and dropped into the armchair by the fire with a boyish, comfortable sprawl. He had a mug of something steaming in his hand, and he regarded the grate with an air of detached amusement. "I have known you since we were thirteen, Your Grace, and in that time I have seen you break exactly four rules. One of them was in the Cathedral library. The other three were all this week."

"I broke no rules."

"You burned an official report on an act of Blighted magic in an Imperial residence. I believe the sentence is five years in Frostgaol for a commoner. For a Duke I imagine they would find something more creative." Dorian took a sip. "I'm not criticizing, mind. I'm only making sure that you know what it is that you did."

"I know very well what I did."

"Then I am content." The captain stretched his legs toward the fire. "Then I shall go on pretending that I saw nothing, and when the day comes that I have to lie to a Chancellor's inquisitor, I will tell him with a perfectly straight face that you were burning love letters."

Soren did not smile. But he felt the iron tension in his shoulders relax a little, and he turned from the fire and sat down at his desk.

…

He acted on the other matter the next morning, in a manner that astonished the household.

The freckled maid was summoned to the study at eight and dismissed within the quarter hour, without a reference, with a month's wages and a sealed note to the housekeeper of her next employer that could only be read as a warning. She left the Hall in tears, and nobody dared ask what she had said. Mrs. Halloway received her own summons an hour later. She stood before his desk in her black bombazine, with her hands clasped before her, as rigid as a rod of iron, and listened while the Grand Duke informed her that the discipline of the kitchens had fallen below the standard of a respectable house.

"Any further injuries to the Princess's staff will be treated as your responsibility, Mrs. Halloway," he said. "I have placed a note to that effect in your file. I do not wish to discuss the matter again."

"Your Grace is very good," said the housekeeper through her teeth, and her face did not change, but her knuckles whitened on the keys at her waist.

When she had gone, he sat for a long time in the quiet, with the winter light grey against the window and a cup of tea going cold at his elbow. He was thinking of the way the girl had looked at him across the kitchen before the pot fell, with that brief, startled warmth, and how that warmth had turned to pain, and how some part of him had moved before the rest of him could stop it. He did not understand what had happened. He knew only that he had broken a law that he had sworn to uphold, in defense of a woman he had known for ten days, and that he had felt no hesitation, no fear, no doubt at all.

"I have just broken the law for a woman," he said aloud, to the empty room, "whose first name I have never once said aloud."

The words hung in the stillness. After a moment, feeling slightly ridiculous, he lowered his voice and tried the name, carefully, the way one tests a thin patch of ice.

"Tamsin Reed," he said, and the sound of it was softer and stranger in his mouth than he had expected.