Law of the Broken Earth(7)

They turned a corner and entered the kitchens, which were wide and sprawling, with three ovens and four work counters and a long table in front of two large windows. The windows were shaded by the branches of overhanging trees, but open to catch any breeze. The door to an ice cellar stood open, with a cool draft rising from it, and only one of the ovens glowed with heat. It was immediately obvious that there was no proper kitchen staff, for the meal was being prepared by a man who looked like a soldier.

“Yes,” said Lord Bertaud, evidently amused by Mienthe’s expression. “I did not want to hire a cook you did not like, cousin; the cook is almost as important as your maids. So it’s camp cooking for us today, I fear.”

“Well, my lord, I think we’ve managed something better than camp fare,” the man said cheerfully. “Nothing fancy, I own, but a roast is easy enough, and you can always tuck potatoes in the drippings. And I sent Daued into town for pastries.” The man nodded to Mienthe politely. “My lady.”

Mienthe hesitantly nodded back.

“We will all eat in the staff hall today, with perfect informality,” declared her cousin.

“Yes, my lord,” agreed the man, and poked the roast with a long-handled fork. “This is so tender it’s near melted, lord, so we can serve as you please.”

“Half an hour,” said Lord Bertaud, and to Mienthe, “I think you will like to meet my new gardener. I hired him just two days past, but I’m quite pleased. Just step out through that door and I think you will find him working in the kitchen gardens, just here by the house.”

Mienthe stared at her cousin.

“Go on,” Lord Bertaud said, smiling at her. “Tell him that everyone will be eating in the staff hall, please, cousin. In half an hour, but if you are a little delayed, no one will mind.”

This all seemed strange to Mienthe, but then everything about her cousin seemed strange to her. When Lord Bertaud nodded firmly toward the kitchen door, she took a cautious step toward it. When he nodded to her again, she turned and pushed open the door.

The gardener was sitting on a short-legged stool, carefully setting new ruby-stemmed chard seedlings into a bed to replace long-bolted lettuces. Though his back was toward Mienthe, she knew him at once. She stopped and stared, for though she knew him, she did not believe she could be right. But he heard the kitchen door close behind her and turned. His broad, grizzled face had not changed at all.

“Mie!” Tef said and reached down for the crutch lying beside his stool.

Mienthe did not run to him. She walked, slowly and carefully, feeling that with any step he might suddenly turn into someone else, a stranger, someone she did not know; perhaps she only imagined she knew him because the smell of herbs and turned earth had overwhelmed her with memory. But when she reached the gardener and put a cautious hand out to his, he was still Tef. He rubbed dirt off his hands and put a hand on her shoulder, and pulled her into an embrace, and Mienthe tucked herself close to his chest and burst into tears.

“Well, now, it was an odd thing,” Tef told her a little later, when the brief storm had passed and Mienthe had washed her face with water out of his watering jug. “This man rode up to my house four days ago. He asked me was I the Tef who’d used to be a gardener for Lord Beraod. I said yes, and he asked me all about the old household.”

“And about me,” Mienthe said. Four days ago, so Lord Bertaud must have sent a man to Kames almost as soon as he had left Uncle Talenes’s house. So he must have been thinking even then about bringing her to live with him in the great house. That decisiveness frightened Mienthe a little because she still had no idea why her cousin had brought her to live with him.

“Yes, Mie, and about you, though not right at first. I could see he’d been working around to something, but I didn’t rightly know what, and then after I knew what, I’d no idea of why. But I couldn’t see what harm it would do to answer his questions, so I told him.”

“Yes, but what did you tell him?”

“Well, the truth! That your mama died when you were three and your father barely noticed you except when you got in his way; that Lord Beraod had a temper with a bite to it and couldn’t keep staff no matter he paid high; that you had twenty-seven nurses in six years and hardly a one worth a barley groat, much less a copper coin; and that—” He paused.

Mienthe looked at Tef wonderingly. “What?”

“Well, that I’d let you follow me about, I suppose,” Tef said gruffly. “So this man, he said Lord Bertaud, Boudan’s son, had come back to the Delta and meant to be lord here, only he needed staff, and would I want to come be a gardener at the great house? I said I wasn’t any younger now than I was then, but he said Lord Bertaud wouldn’t mind about that. And then he said the lord would be sending for you, Mie, so I gave my house to my nephew’s daughter and packed up my things, and, well, here we are.”