Before the Thaw: A Wolf Among Ravens

The great hall of Winterhold smelled of mutton fat, woodsmoke, and the sour undertone of ale that had warmed too long by the fire. Banners hung from the vaulted ceiling, the Ravencrest hawk rendered in dark thread against storm-grey silk, and beneath them the noise of the feast rose like water filling a well.

Cael Ravencrest stood at the edge of the dais with a goblet he had not yet touched, watching his father's vassals drink themselves into forgetfulness. The musicians had begun their third set. A fiddle skirled, then fell, then climbed again in the old northern measure. Lanterns swung from iron hooks overhead, casting wobbling shadows across the long tables where bread was broken and wine was poured with the careless generosity of men who did not count the cost.

He turned the goblet between his palms. The silver was warm.

At the far end of the hall, the doors opened. Torin Ashbourne entered first, shoulders squared as though walking into a wind, his threadbare coat a deliberate insult among so much velvet. Behind him, half a step slower, came his sister.

Cael watched the room register her arrival.

Maeve Ashbourne wore a gown of deep green silk that clearly had never belonged to her. The bodice sat too high across her chest. The sleeves had been let down at the wrists, the original embroidery picked out in clumsy new stitches. A chain of small amber beads circled her throat, and they caught the lantern light each time she breathed. Her hair, dark and heavy, had been braided and coiled with pins that glinted like dulled coins. Someone, probably Sera, had done what she could. The effort showed.

Maeve moved through the doorway with her chin raised and her gaze fixed on some point past the crowd, the way a woman walks who knows she is being counted. Her hands, Cael noticed, were not quite steady. She kept them folded at her waist, and the knuckles were pale.

The whisper went up before she had crossed the threshold.

"Ashbourne," someone murmured near the salt cellar. "Daughter of the traitor of the north."

"The one who lost the ford."

"Her father's debt is her dowry now, I hear."

Cael did not move. He had learned, years ago in the southern courts, that the first ten seconds of any entrance determined the story the room would tell itself. He wanted to hear the story.

Sera appeared at his elbow, slightly out of breath. His youngest sister had a habit of arriving at a scene as though she had been waiting in the next room for precisely the moment to slip in. She wore her usual grey, and her hands were clasped tight enough to whiten the fingers.

"She came," Sera whispered. "Cael, she came."

"I can see that."

"She looks terrified." Sera's voice pitched higher than she meant. "Did you see her hands? She almost dropped the cloak when I gave it to her. I told her it was my mother's, but I think she knew it was borrowed from the storeroom. The pins are wrong for the era. She will have noticed by now."

"Sera."

"She noticed. I am certain of it."

"Sera." He set his goblet on the trestle beside him. "Breathe."

She did, shakily, and tucked a strand of pale hair behind her ear. "Lord Harmont has been watching the door since dusk. He asked me twice whether the summons had been answered. Twice. With a smile, each time."

"Then let us give him something to smile at."

Cael stepped down from the dais, crossing the hall with the unhurried gait he had been taught to use in rooms full of men who measured a lord by his stride. The crowd parted for him without seeming to, the way water parts around a stone, and the whispering shifted in pitch but did not stop. He reached Maeve and Torin just as the Ashbourne boy was reaching for a flagon of wine he had no right to touch.

"Wine, before the lord's daughter has been seated," Cael said, mildly. "Torin, you will set a scandalous example."

Torin's jaw tightened. He set the flagon down with exaggerated care. "My lord."

"Your sister looks as though she has eaten nothing since the road. Sera, fetch broth from the kitchen, and the pewter bowl, not the silver. The silver clatters." Cael turned to Maeve. "Lady Ashbourne. Welcome to Winterhold. The hall is colder than I would like. I have asked for braziers to be brought, but my steward forgets his own name by the third cup, so I do not hold out much hope. Will you sit?"

Maeve met his gaze. Up close, the amber beads at her throat threw warm circles across her collarbones. Her eyes were the colour of river water after rain, and they held the particular steadiness of someone who has been afraid for a long time and is tired of showing it.

"My lord." Her voice was quiet, a soft northern burr that caught on the vowels. "I was told the summons required my presence. It did not specify a feast."

"My father is fond of feasts. He believes a full table discourages treason." Cael offered his arm. "The chair at the lower end is draughty. The one beside me is not. You will have to tolerate my conversation, which I am told is tolerable only at certain hours, but I will do my best to keep to the early ones."

A pause. Then she set her hand on his sleeve. Her fingers were cold through the velvet.

"You are kind, my lord."

"I am rarely kind. I am occasionally useful. There is a difference, and you will learn it."

She almost smiled. Almost. The corner of her mouth moved and then stilled. He led her toward the high table, and the whispers rose behind them like gulls following a fishing boat.

Sera caught up at the salt cellar, breathless. "Broth is coming. I told them to put fennel in it. She looks as though she needs fennel."

"Sera. Stop fussing."

"I am not fussing. I am preparing."

"For what?"

Sera glanced toward the lower tables, where Lord Harmont sat with his goblet raised in a permanent half-toast, his round face arranged in the soft, attentive smile of a man who listened to everything and repeated only what served him. "For whatever happens after the second course," she said, very quietly. "Harmont has asked three times about the guest list. Three times."

"I know."

"Cael. He is not asking for news. He is placing it."

Cael said nothing. He seated Maeve in the chair to his right, adjusting the arm of the gown where it had ridden up over her wrist, and felt her flinch, very slightly, at the contact. He drew his hand back as though he had touched a hot kettle.

"Forgive me," he said.

"The sleeve is not mine," Maeve replied, evenly. "It rides up. It is not your fault."

But her color was high, and she did not look at him again until the first platter was set down between them, heaped with quails in their browned skins and pears poached in wine. The smell rose rich and sweet, and around them the hall leaned in, the way a hall does when the centre of gravity has shifted, and the centre of gravity, tonight, was the girl in the borrowed green.

Lord Harmont rose from his chair at the lower table. He did so slowly, the way a man rises when he wishes every eye to follow him, and crossed the rushes with his cup held at a careful angle. He stopped three paces from the high table and bowed to Cael with a reverence that sat on his shoulders like a borrowed coat.

"My lord Ravencrest. I am told the guest of honour has arrived." His gaze slid toward Maeve, and the smile did not waver. "Lady Ashbourne. The court extends its welcome, such as it is, to the daughter of a house long esteemed in these parts."

The pause sat in the air. Long esteemed. Cael kept his face still.

Maeve's hand, the one beneath the table, closed into a fist. When she spoke, her voice was level, almost gentle.

"My lord Harmont. I have heard your name spoken with affection in my father's house. The stores you manage have kept more than one northern village from a lean winter. We are grateful."

It was a careful answer. Gratitude, without servility. Cael watched Harmont's eyes narrow by a fraction, then widen again with practiced warmth.

"You are gracious, my lady. The northern roads are hard. I trust your journey was not too wearisome."

"Tolerable," she said. "The snow held off until the last ridge."

"A mercy. The passes are treacherous this year. We have lost two supply carts to the drifts above the old mill. Tragic. The crown feels such losses keenly." Harmont turned to Cael. "My lord, I wonder whether the lady might honour the lower tables with a moment of her company. The vassals are eager to pay their respects to the heir of Ashbourne. There is sentiment here, my lord. Old sentiment. It would not do to let it cool."

Cael took a pear from the platter and set it on Maeve's plate with the deliberation of a man buying time. The flesh was pale and faintly fragrant, a thread of clove and honey rising from it.

"She has only just sat down, Harmont."

"Of course, my lord. Of course. I spoke too soon." Harmont bowed again, lower this time, and withdrew two steps, still smiling, still watching.

Maeve did not touch the pear. Her gaze remained fixed on the table where Harmont had returned to his seat, and Cael saw, for the first time, the faint tremor at the corner of her jaw. She swallowed once, carefully.

"My lord," she said, low enough that only he could hear. "Why is he smiling?"

"Because he is deciding what you are worth," Cael said. "Do not let him see the answer tonight."

The hour grew late, and the candelabras burned low. Wine had done its patient work on the hall, softening laughter into something looser, dulling the clatter of knives against trenchers into a comfortable rhythm. Smoke from the long braziers had thickened near the rafters, drifting in pale ribbons over the banners. Somewhere behind the screens, a piper had begun a slow, wandering air, the notes rising and falling like breath.

Cael watched Harmont across the hall. The steward had drunk steadily since the second course, his goblet refilled by a servant who moved with the practiced invisibility of long training. Harmont's smile had not changed; if anything it had grown more settled, more proprietary, the expression of a man who believed the room belonged to him. He spoke often to the man on his left, a thin sheriff with a yellow mustache, and each time he leaned in, his hand drifted toward his cup.

When the laughter came, it came at the wrong moment. It was the laughter of a man who had forgotten to count the ears in the room.

"I remember the old Lord Ashbourne," Harmont said, his voice carrying with the careless lift of three goblets too many. "Stood at the king's table once, didn't he? Before the, ah, the arrangements." He waved a hand in a loose, descriptive circle. "Splendid man for a cup. Terrible man for a ledger. Borrowed from the crown and forgot to mention it. Borrowed from his neighbors and forgot to mention it more. A man of remarkable talent for forgetting."

He drank. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The sheriff beside him chuckled without enthusiasm.

"Taught the daughter everything he knew, I dare say. How to pour wine. How to count what isn't there. How to bow and scrape until the creditors lose interest." Harmont's lips made a small, soft sound against the rim of his goblet. "A fitting inheritance. A fitting one."

Maeve did not move. Her hand remained on the table beside the uneaten pear, the knuckles pale, the tendons drawn tight as harp strings under the skin. She did not look at Cael. She did not look at Harmont. She looked at the candle between them, and the flame burned steady in the still air of her held breath.

Cael set down his knife. He did it without sound, but the small motion drew the eye of the steward two seats down, and then the eye of the woman beside him, and then the room, by degrees, fell quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the piper.

He stood. The chair behind him did not scrape; he had lifted it clear of the flagstones with the kind of care one uses for a thing one does not intend to repeat. He stepped around the table, past the empty place where the salt had been, and walked the length of the high table until he stood behind Harmont's chair. The piper, sensing something in the change of air, let the air taper into silence.

Harmont turned, still smiling, the smile of a man who had not yet understood that the room had emptied around him.

"My lord," he began, half-rising.

"Sit down," Cael said.

The words were quiet. They carried because the hall had gone still, and because the particular stillness of a winter's night makes even small sounds travel.

"You will sit, Lord Harmont, and you will hear me, and you will not speak until I have done. You will then remove yourself from this hall, and from this table, and from the company of any guest who sits beneath my roof for the remainder of this evening. The steward will be told to set a place for you in the servants' hall, if you can find your way there, and the cup you will drink from will be filled by no one whose rank you have insulted tonight."

He let a beat pass. The fire popped in the hearth across the room, a single sharp sound.

"You spoke of a dead man's debts as though they were a jest for a supper table. You spoke of them in the hearing of his daughter, who sits beneath my protection and beneath the salt. You have reminded this hall what manner of man keeps the king's stores, and what manner of tongue he carries when the wine is in him. I will not have it again. Not at my table. Not under my roof. Not while I am lord here."

Harmont's mouth had opened a fraction. The smile had frozen into something else, something that did not know what shape to take. His hand, halfway to his goblet, hovered in the air, then lowered slowly to the table.

"My lord," he managed, his voice smaller now, the oiliness curdling at its edges. "I did not mean. There was no offense intended."

"There was every offense intended," Cael said. "You intended it because you believed it would cost you nothing. You have been corrected in your arithmetic."

He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. Across the hall, the vassals had gone still in their seats, and Steward Aldred, who had been moving between the side tables, had paused with a flagon half-raised, his eyes on the high table and a careful blankness on his face.

"You will go now," Cael said. "You will go quietly. And tomorrow, when the wine has left you, you will write to the lady a letter of apology, in your own hand, sealed with your own seal, and you will send it before the midday bell. If it does not arrive, I will take it as a formal declaration that the crown's steward of winter stores has no further business in this hall, and I will write to the council accordingly. Am I understood, my lord?"

Harmont stood. It took him a moment, the bench catching behind his knees. He bowed, low and stiff, the tendons in his neck standing out like cords.

"My lord," he said. He said nothing else.

He turned, and the sheriff with the yellow mustache scrambled to make room for him, and the two of them walked the length of the hall and through the lower door, and the door shut behind them with a sound that was, in its way, louder than the silence that had come before.

Cael did not sit. He stood for a moment longer, his hand resting on the back of his own chair, and he looked once at Maeve. She had not moved. The pear was still untouched beside her plate. The candle between them had not wavered.

Then he sat, and he lifted his cup, and he drank, and he set the cup down, and the hall, after a long moment, began again to breathe.

The piper started a new air, slower than the last, and the servants moved once more along the tables, and the laughter, when it returned, was quieter and more cautious, as if the room had been told something about itself and did not yet know what to make of it.

Beside Cael, Sera leaned in. Her face was pale and her eyes were very wide, and her voice, when she spoke, was barely more than a thread of sound.

"Cael," she said. "You cannot write to the council."

"I can," he said. "I have."

"But the stores. The winter. If he is removed from his post before the spring, the northern roads will not be opened in time. The vassals will not move the grain. He is the only man the crown trusts to carry the seal."

"He is the only man the crown has trusted," Cael said. "That is a different sentence."

Sera looked at him. Her hands were folded in her lap, and her thumbs were moving against one another in small, unconscious circles.

"You did it for her," she said.

"I did it for the table," he said. "I did it for the salt. Do not make it smaller than it was."

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, very softly, "She is weeping."

Cael turned his head, just slightly. Maeve was not weeping. Her eyes were bright, and her mouth was set, and there was a single drop on her cheek that she had not yet wiped away. She was holding it there the way one holds a thing one has decided to keep.

"Sera," he said. "Go to her."

"I cannot. Not from you. Not here. She will think I was sent."

"Then do not be sent. Be a sister."

Sera looked at him for a long moment, and then she rose, and she walked around the table, and she sat down beside Maeve in the empty place, and she put her hand, very lightly, over Maeve's hand on the table. Maeve did not look at her. She did not need to. The hand turned, after a moment, and held.

Cael lifted his cup again. Across the hall, the place where Harmont had sat was already being cleared by a servant with a soft cloth, wiping down the boards, removing the goblet, folding the napkin. In a few minutes there would be no sign that the man had ever been there at all.

Somewhere beyond the screens, a door opened and closed. The draft traveled the length of the hall, and the candles flickered once, and then steadied.

Cael did not look toward the door. He did not need to. He knew who had gone out into the cold, and he knew what the man would do in the morning, and he knew the letter he would have to write by his own hand before the council bells rang at noon.

The piper finished the air, and lowered the pipe, and the hall settled into the long, listening quiet of a winter's night with a great deal still to be said.

The hall emptied by degrees. The piper slipped away between one verse and the next, and the servants moved in their quiet choreography, lifting platters, folding napkins, banking the fires in the braziers until only the long table's candles remained, and they too were trimmed, one by one, until the great room held no more light than a chapel at Compline.

Cael remained in his chair for some time after the last of them had gone. The cup had gone cold in his hand. He set it down upon the boards without sound, and he folded his hands upon the table, and he looked at the place where Maeve had been sitting and saw only the faint warmth of a hand on the wood, already fading.

He thought of his letter. He thought of the council bells. He thought of the words he would have to choose in the morning, and how each of them would land, and on whom.

Then he rose, and he walked the length of the hall, and he went out through the smaller door that gave upon the east stair, and he climbed the stair in the dark, because the sconces here had not been lit, and he did not call for a servant to light them.

The stair gave upon the corridor of the family wing. The stones were cold through the soles of his boots. He passed the door of his own chamber and did not stop, and he went on, past the chapel door, past the door of the room that had been his mother's, to the door at the end of the passage where a single candle burned in a bracket of tarnished brass.

He stopped. He listened. He heard nothing but the wind at the casement, and the faint, faint sound of someone breathing who was not asleep.

He lifted his hand and knocked, very softly, twice.

The door opened almost at once, as if the person within had been standing just behind it. It was Sera. Her face was pale, her eyes were wide, and the look she gave him was the look of someone who had just seen a thing she did not know how to name.

"Cael," she said. "Come in. Quickly."

He stepped into the room. The candle on the bracket threw a thin light across the small chamber, and at first he saw only what he expected: the narrow bed, the washstand, the straight-backed chair, the traveling chest in the corner with the Ashbourne arms newly painted upon its lid.

Then he saw Maeve.

She was kneeling on the floor beside the chest. The lid was thrown back. The dress that had been returned that afternoon, the dark green velvet with the silver braid, lay folded across the chest's edge, and Maeve had turned back the lining of the bodice with her fingers, and from between the linen and the velvet she had drawn a thing that lay now in the palm of her hand.

It was a locket. Cael recognized it before his mind had time to name it. He had seen it a hundred times at his own table, at his mother's throat, and then, later, at Maeve's mother's throat, when the two families had still kept company.

"Maeve," he said, very softly.

She did not look up. Her face was turned down toward her open palm, and the locket lay there, a small oval of tarnished gold, the chain broken, the clasp sprung, and inside it, visible even in the thin light of the single candle, a thing folded small.

"Mother wore this," Maeve said. Her voice was not steady, but it was not broken either. "I had forgotten. I had quite forgotten. And the dress was returned to me by the housekeeper this afternoon, and I set it in the chest, and I thought no more of it, and now. Now."

She lifted her gaze. Her eyes were dry. They were the eyes of a woman who had decided, some hours ago, not to weep, and was keeping that decision with the same stubbornness she kept everything.

"I did not know it was there," she said. "I did not know she had put it there."

Sera moved. She crossed the small room and knelt beside Maeve on the cold floor, and she did not speak, and she did not touch her, only knelt there, close, the way a sister kneels.

Cael did not kneel. He remained standing, his hands at his sides, and he watched, and he waited, because he understood that the moment was not his.

"Open it," he said, at last, and gently. "Open it, Maeve."

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, and with her thumb she pressed the small clasp of the locket, and the oval sprang open, and the thing that was folded within it fell out into her palm.

It was a letter. It was folded twice, and one corner of it had been burned, so that the paper there was gone entirely, and the blackened edge ran at an angle across the words. The hand was a woman's hand, and the ink was faded, and it was the hand he had seen once, only once, in a letter that his own mother had shown him in confidence when he was very young, and that she had made him promise to forget.

He had not forgotten.

Maeve unfolded the letter. She smoothed it upon her knee, and she read it, and as she read her face did not change, but her hands, which had been steady, began to tremble, and the trembling went up her arms and into her shoulders, and she set the letter down upon her knee very carefully, as if it were a thing that might shatter.

She did not speak for a long time.

Sera's hand found Maeve's wrist. She held it there, lightly, on the pulse.

"Who is it from?" Cael said, and his voice was low, and he did not pretend that he did not know what the answer must be, and he did not pretend that he had not known, somewhere in him, for many years.

Maeve lifted her gaze to his.

"It is from her," she said. "From my mother. It is dated the week before she died."

She held the letter out to him, between two fingers, as if she could not bear to keep it in her hand.

He took it. He did not read it. Not then. He folded it once, and he folded it again, and he put it into the inner pocket of his coat, against his heart, and he looked down at Maeve, and she looked up at him, and between them the silence was the silence of two people who have just learned that the ground they thought they stood upon was not the ground at all.

Sera, on the floor beside her sister, drew in a breath and did not let it out.

"What does it say?" Sera whispered. "Cael. What does it say?"

He looked at her. He looked at Maeve. He thought of the council bells that would ring at noon. He thought of the letter he had promised himself he would write by his own hand. He thought of Harmont, riding north through the cold, carrying whatever he had learned in his silks and his smiles.

He thought of the half-burned corner of the letter, and the words that the fire had taken, and the words that remained, and the woman who had written them, and the woman who had hidden them, and the daughter who had carried them unknowing in the lining of a borrowed dress, all the way from the north.

"I will read it," he said, "in my own chamber, by my own candle, and when I have read it I will come back to you. I will come back before the bells."

He crossed the room. He lifted the latch of the door. He paused, with his hand upon the wood, and he did not turn.

"Maeve," he said. "I am sorry."

"I know," she said, from the floor, in the voice of a woman who had already, in some quiet room of herself, begun to forgive him for whatever it was that he was about to learn.

He went out. He pulled the door to behind him. He stood a moment in the cold corridor with his hand against the letter in his coat, and then he walked the length of the passage, past his own door, past the chapel door, past the door of his mother's room, to the small writing-room at the end, where a candle was already burning, and a sheet of paper lay upon the desk, and a pen was waiting, and the night had a great deal more to say.

He sat down. He drew the letter out. He unfolded it. He read it.

The half-burned corner had taken a name, and a place, and a date. What remained was enough. What remained was more than enough.

He set the letter down upon the desk. He picked up the pen. He began to write.

Outside, the wind rose, and the first of the winter's snow began to fall, and the bells of the chapel, far below, struck the small hour, and the sound went up into the dark, and was lost.