Stonefather

“Runnel,” said an impatient voice. “What are you doing?”

He opened his eyes and saw Lark standing there again.

“Finishing my water,” he said.

“Without the beaker in your hand? What do you do, suck it up through your ears?”

Don’t be angry with me, he wanted to say. But he hesitated, and she talked again.

“Do you think you’re going to live out here in the garden? Come with me. I’m supposed to show you your room.”

Runnel dutifully followed her into the house. She walked briskly, so he scarcely had time to notice the different rooms or try to guess what they were used for. His family’s hovel was one room, with a chimney at one end. He had no idea why so many rooms would be needed; they did not look convenient for sleeping, there was so much furniture in odd shapes. Tall boxes with doors all up and down them. Tables with cloth covering them, and so bumpy that you couldn’t possibly get any work done on them. Until he realized that they were really huge, wide chairs, and the cloth was there to cover the wood so it wouldn’t hurt to sit a long time. Cloth, just to dress chairs and make them soft! No one in Farzibeck would even have understood it.

They went up a flight of narrow wooden stairs. “Why didn’t we use the wide stairs in the front?” asked Runnel.

She didn’t answer.

He sighed. So much for the hope that she might forgive him for what was, after all, an unintentional offense.

“Always use these stairs,” she finally said. “The front stairs are for the master, Demwor, and guests. Servants use the back stairs.”

So decency and good order had prevailed over temper. She didn’t want him getting in trouble because she never told him about the stairs rule. That was almost. . compassionate.

Up two, three flights, to the very top of the house. And then up another even narrower stairway to a room where the walls and roof were the rafters.

He had never climbed so high inside a building. Farzibeck had only one barn as tall as this, and he wasn’t allowed inside it. He had gone once anyway, with a group of his brothers, but they wouldn’t let him climb a ladder and he hadn’t wanted to anyway. It’s not that he was afraid of heights — he could climb as high as he wanted, outdoors. But going up the stairs he felt as though he were climbing right up into the air, leaving the solid earth too far behind him.

Three floors between him and the earth, each one shakier than the one before. He felt as though the house were swaying. He hated the feeling. “We have to sleep up here?”

“Too proud?” she asked pointedly.

“Too scared,” he said. “What holds us up?”

She looked at him as if he were crazy. “The walls of the house, the floors.” She touched one of the heavy rafters. “Huge beams of heavy wood.”

“It trembles.”

“It does not” she said, as if he had just accused her of something.

He tried to think of some rational basis for his discomfort. “It can fall. It can burn. I want to sleep outside on the stone flags of the courtyard.”

“Do you want to shame our master by making people believe he doesn’t have enough rooms for his servants to sleep in?”

“Who would know?” asked Runnel.

She apparently had no answer, so she glared at him. “Take it up with Demwor. I took you where he said you should go.”

She started for the stairs.

Runnel hated that she was so angry with him. “Please, Lark,” he said. “If I do 

ask him to let me sleep in the courtyard—”

She answered him scornfully before he could even finish his question. “What do you think happens to a servant who makes trouble on his first day?”

Since he had never had a paying job, working for strangers, the fear of being dismissed from his position had never occurred to him. The most he had feared was a blow or two — he knew, from life with Father, that he could easily cope with that. But he could not take the chance of giving up this place.

He didn’t even know whether this was a good place to work or not— there were probably reasons why this house did not have enough servants and needed to hire a stray freshly arrived from the mountains. It was his own problem that sleeping three floors above the ground bothered him. Other people did it. He would have to get over being such a mountain boy and learn to live in a town.

As all this dawned on him, Lark’s expression showed such contempt for him that it was like a slap. “Whose face is proud now?” he asked her.

She whirled her head away from him and went on down the stairs. He could hear the soft sliding of the soles of her bare feet on the wood. It was a sound he didn’t like. It made him shiver. Feet were meant to walk on grass or soil or hard-packed dirt or stone, not on trees sliced up and laid out sideways. It was unnatural.

He surveyed the straw-filled tick that was apparently meant to be his bed. Even in the scant light coming into the attic through cracks in the eaves, he could see that there were fleas jumping on it. He had nothing against fleas, he just couldn’t imagine how they had stayed alive with no one else sleeping up in this hot space.