3. The Women in Grey Eat Dinner and Pell Has Something up Her Sleeve

3. The Women in Grey Eat Dinner and Pell Has Something up Her Sleeve

The women in grey and Pell took their dinner in the refectory of Grey House. The other two apprentices, Grith and Ban, joined them at the long oak table. Meant for dozens, if not hundreds more, the table's age-worn length stretched away into the dim corners of the refectory, while the five residents of the house huddled around three candles at one end and ate their barley gruel in silence. Yarrow and Arnica sat at the head; the apprentices, according to custom, were several places down. They were served, if service it was, by the nameless ancient retainer who had always cooked and cleaned for the women. Each woman had her proper chair, carved with their names and as old as anything, having contained the buttocks of generations of Yarrows and Arnicas since time immemorial. Other chairs bore other names, but were now dusty and disused, as one by one the lines had died out: Goldenseal, Lavender, Agrimony, Comfrey, and so many others.

Pell had always liked the refectory, with the quiet, half-conscious liking one feels for something one has known since childhood. A clerestory of tiny square windows ran along the eastern wall, letting in morning sunlight and evening breezes. Vast old tapestries covered the stone walls. Their rich colors had dimmed, many were moth-eaten, and some had fallen, but the stories and strange figures they held made her feel as if she were a creature of legend herself. Bats roosted in the south rafters, pigeons flew in and out, and ivy curled in at the windows, but even in its state of decay the refectory held some clear beauty quite separate from the ancient chaos of the rest of the palace.

Yarrow and Arnica kept the tradition of silence while eating, but they did not enforce it for their apprentices unless the conversation grew too loud or annoying (or if Yarrow simply didn't want to hear anyone talk when she couldn't), so Pell, Grith, and Ban were able to whisper gossip to each other all through the meal. Grith had news from Blue Tower, where a harvest accident had injured one of the laborers, and Ban had heard from a cousin near Red Tower that the beacon had nearly gone out when an apprentice forgot to bring in more wood. Pell had no people elsewhere: she was no titheling, just a baby left on the doorstep in secret. She never had any news to share, but now both girls went silent as Pell, with an agreeable feeling of superiority, detailed the funeral rites of the old woman.

"The mask broke ?" said Grith. Her whiskers twitched.

"And Yarrow didn't have a fit?" said Ban.

All three glanced at Yarrow, but she didn't seem to have heard and went on spooning gruel.

"No," said Pell. She reached for the ladle to take a little more gruel and something in her sleeve thudded against the tabletop. Pell froze. All that should have been in her sleeves were washing herbs, a handkerchief, and some little stalks of candied angelica—certainly nothing that would thud. A glance at Yarrow and Arnica told her that they had not noticed, or maybe didn't care. Pell resumed eating. "Yarrow didn't say a thing," she added, in as normal a tone as she could manage.

The women in grey always said the laws and customs were sacrosanct and unbreakable, but this was not the first time one of them had reacted calmly to a breach. Arnica frequently went so far as to crack and eat nuts in the schoolroom, something she expressly forbade even as she did it. But a broken mask seemed to warrant stronger feeling.

"Well, thank North for that, at least," said Ban. Her voice cracked a bit at the end, as it often did these days. She clicked her talons against her bowl.

"And you got to see the funeral," said Grith. "It must have been beautiful."

Pell thought of the butterflies' yellow shimmer, the crows' sable, the dark blood. "It was," she said, forgetting to whisper.

"Sshh," said Yarrow.

The apprentices hushed and lowered their heads. With her hands under the table, Pell rooted around in her sleeve until her fingers touched a small, flat object. She pulled it out halfway. It was the book from the old woman's room.

Pell jammed it back into her sleeve and looked at the women. Yarrow was scraping the last bits of gruel from her bowl. Arnica was doing the same with a finger. If they knew Pell had taken something, even accidentally—well, it would be worse than the time she spilled the breakfast curds all over the kitchen floor. Her palms still ached from that feruling.

Servant cleared away the bowls and brought out some dried fruit for the girls and two tiny glasses of honey wine for the women. A bottle of it came once a month from the cellars of Black Tower, and was one of several house privileges so old that nobody remembered its origin. Yarrow and Arnica raised their glasses cursorily to the North, then each let a little golden drop fall to be drunk up by the dusty floor. When the women finished their wine, it would be bedtime, so the apprentices hastened to eat their fruit, which they could not take from the table. Even just a few years ago there had been more women—Foxglove, Willow, Marigold—and they had all taken long enough to drink that the girls could linger as well. But Yarrow and Arnica were quick.

Then each woman took a candle from the table, and Yarrow handed the third to Pell, the eldest girl. Pell quaked as she put out her hand for the light. What if the heavy swing of her sleeve alerted the woman to the book? But Yarrow only muttered the proper words for passing a candle to a girl and opened the door.

Everyone proceeded out of the refectory and up the damp stairs into the dormitory. The women had their own room, where they slept end to end in a huge curtained bed, while the girls slept in little cots lined up against the vast central chimney of Grey House. They parted, and the two other apprentices followed Pell into the dormitory, where their three beds sat white and clean amidst dozens of empty, dusty, mildewy ones.

Each girl kept one pair of shoes under her bed and wore the second, and each kept one brown dress under her pillow and wore the second. But they only had one pale surcoat apiece, which they had to keep quite clean, or Yarrow would be angry. Grith was very bad at cleanliness, Ban was very good at it, and Pell was somewhere in the middle. They unbuttoned each other's surcoats, but the dresses were easy enough to remove. Pell tried to take hers off as quietly as possible, but when she hung it on her peg, the book thumped against the stone wall. She stilled its swinging, but the others had noticed.

"What's that?" said Grith, shrugging into her nightgown.

"A book," said Pell.

Grith shrugged, not much interested: sleep was more important than getting details. Pell was always in the Archives looking at the pictures in those moldy volumes.

Pell traced the writing on the first page with her finger. Perhaps she could sneak it back in the morning. If there had been pictures she might have wanted to keep it, but girls and women in grey could not read. Even with pictures, it wouldn't be worth the risk: Arnica occasionally inspected the dormitory.

"Blow out that candle," said Grith, snuggling into her bed.

Pell put the book back in her sleeve. She wrapped a soft cloth around her twiggy scalp, slipped into her nightgown, and extinguished the candle.

In her clammy bed, Pell closed her eyes. All she could see was the blanket of crows, shining black in the sun, and the broken mask with its sightless eyes. She rolled over. Her hair crinkled inside the cloth; Servant would need to steam and rebind it soon. On her side, she closed her eyes again. Butterflies, bright gold and blue against darkening red. Sighing, she rolled onto her back and looked at the dark, raftered ceiling. The latticed windows let in filaments of moonlight, illuminating only dust. Ban and Grith were already asleep, it seemed, or at least had no interest in talking.

Yes, she could return the book. It would not take long, and nobody need ever know she'd left. She slid back her covers and swung her legs out of bed. The cot creaked and she paused. Neither Ban nor Grith said a word. She put her shoes and headscarf back on. Taking the book and candle, she tiptoed out of the dormitory and down the stairs.

The fire in the refectory had not been banked yet. She relighted the candle with a spill and left Grey House. The great front portico opened onto a courtyard of grass and twisted trees, and before that a fountain. The grass and trees and fountain had all been dry for centuries. Above them rose the shadowed shoulders and crown of Grey Tower, with the moon snagged on Tamarisk like a bit of lint on a thorn. Nothing moved, not even the wind.

Pell started down the wide, deep steps. Something flickered in the corner of her eye. She stopped dead. When nothing else happened, she kept on. Once under the trees, she felt a little freer. Even if the women in grey had been looking, it would've been harder for them to see the candlelight through the branches.

There was another slight motion. She turned.

A lone fleck of white was fluttering down through the trees. It vanished on the flagstones. Another came down. Then another. A cold wind rose. Pell's breath became a white vapor.

Snow? But winter was supposed to be over Yellow, at least by Arnica's reckoning. Grey was scheduled to have summer for at least another month. A season out of step—they had always said that was a punishment. Red Tower's rebellion had been quelled by imposing winter on it for a year and a day: its harbor frozen solid, Red's supplies were cut off, and it was starved into submission. Did breaking curfew disturb the ancient mechanisms of palace seasons?

The snow was coming faster now, and it was sticking. Shivering, Pell returned to Grey House, though the guardians' side of the courtyard was nearer. Would Yarrow and Arnica blame her? She determined to confess in the morning. It might bring back summer. And it would certainly be better than Yarrow finding out on her own and summoning Pell in for a punitive audience. This way, at least, Pell would only get penance.

She pulled the huge ratty curtains over the windows and blew out the candle. Her bed was still clammy, and now it was chilly, too. She gritted her teeth and bore it. She'd taken a book; she'd broken curfew. She deserved the cold.