Gorgantern used her absence to complain to Master Caseen that she wasn’t attending to her studies. They called her and Gorgantern into the dining hall as the clearers were washing down tables, and, bathed in stained light from his windows and surrounded by trophies collected from battlefields and bits of dragoneer equipment, Caseen heard them both out. She demonstrated her knowledge of knots and quoted the weight of dry and wet line of the two most common types the Serpentine used. She explained instead that she’d been learning geography, map reading, and the art of sketching landscapes, which Galia was teaching as she was so good at it and allowed the odiferous novice to sit in, provided she kept out of her air. Caseen was satisfied and suggested that perhaps she should take over Gorgantern’s tutorship, before he released her of any further need to study lines and splicing. Gorgantern’s expression remained calm on the outside, but his inner boil erupted on his face with a choleric red. She heard him huffing out his anger behind her as they passed out of the dining hall.
“Girls! Always finding a reason to beg off,” Gorgantern said.
Ileth had to bite her tongue to keep from replying with an insult she’d picked up from one of the Captain’s friends.
From that day on Gorgantern “rode her” as Joai had predicted, with an aim of getting her kicked out of the Serpentine. He ordered her to remove the wrist bracer she wore (a gift from the cooks above—they wore them to help shift the huge dragon-meal-sized frying pans they worked with) for long hours of knife work because it was not part of a novice’s uniform for Catch Basin work. He made her ask his permission to attend to her bodily needs (generally you just slipped away; it was obvious to everyone that you were headed to the little outhouse built out over the lake, and he liked to recite as loudly as he could for all to hear the number of trips to the privy she’d made that day), and if she did not keep her gutting-board spotlessly clean he made her run all the way up the outer stairs and back down again with a fish eyeball in her mouth. The sooner she came back, the sooner she could spit it out.
One thing he couldn’t do was beat her. He could (and did) beat the male novices, provided those in the Catch Basin gathered to hear the offense and witness the punishment. The Matron could discipline her charges physically—she struck one novice across the palm with a dried reed for sneaking out after the door was locked—but ignored the note Gorgantern had scrawled demanding that she be beaten for disrespect (he’d said that with her close-cropped hair she could be mistaken for a boy, and she replied that with his fleshy breasts and belly he could be mistaken for a mother in expectation of her third child). She relayed the entire story to the Matron. One of the Matron’s oddities was that what her girls did or said to her within the Manor and its grounds was suspect and assumed to be an evasion even if it wasn’t an outright lie—if you told her you’d cleaned the windows in the second-floor bedrooms, she’d check each one—but whatever happened outside the Manor door, her “young charges” (as she styled them) became unimpeachable in word and stainless in deed. The Matron didn’t even give Ileth her usual sharp look when she recounted the conversation; she just folded up Gorgantern’s note, said, “We can’t have disrespect shown to an apprentice,” and made her walk back and forth across the dining room with a platter balanced on her head (along the shorter wall of the rectangular room beneath where LET YOUR PRESENCE IMPROVE ANY ROOM was painted in neat block letters) three times.
On the Matron’s discipline scale, this was the equivalent of most girls her age getting a sharp look from their mother. The Matron made you scrub out the privy by hand if you left a sock on the floor.
The Matron had her return the note with Ileth was punished according to her fault written on the back. When Gorgantern demanded to see the marks left by the beating he’d demanded, Ileth told him she’d plunge her arm into a hornet’s nest before she’d let him see her backside.
Things came to a head during the next week-over pass day at the Serpentine. The summer lingered on into fall, waves of heat alternating with storms, making their rooms stuffy even in the mountains next to the chilly lake. Food went bad quickly, and all the Serpentine sweated, chafed, and quarreled.
On pass day no real work was done, save for a switch where the kitchen staff had a day off from preparing meals and other groups took their place at the stoves and ovens in rotation. All but the novices and a few members left to supervise them were allowed to leave the Serpentine if they wished, to go down to the lakeshore to bathe and refresh themselves, walk in the cool of the nearby wood (called the Scalewood because every year they held a dragon-scale hunt for the children of Vyenn at the conclusion of a lesson year), or visit the town.
Gorgantern, showing his usual enthusiasm, had volunteered his team for kitchen work that pass day. They worked in the Great Hall, the newest and finest building in the Serpentine. The hall was partially circular in a style Santeel Dun Troot described as an “auditorium.” It was built around one of the great natural rocks of the landscape, which had been shaped and used as a kind of great tent pole for the dragon-scale roof (outside the Serpentine, a dragon-scale roof would be an expense only the richest of the great Names could afford). Captured flags and banners decorated the columns and the rafters above. All around the walls stood trophy weapons and armor, and glass cases containing tattered old pieces of uniform, art, and equipment, colorful relics of the Serpentine’s history.
The diners ate either seated at long tables or at the counters at the walls if they wished solitude at their meal. A pulpit was carved into the central rock so that someone might observe or address, if necessary, most of the room, but the Great Hall had never been filled to capacity in Ileth’s time there (though she missed most of her dinner meals because of extra tasks in the Catch Basin and the long trip to the up end of the Serpentine). Everyone was served across a broad, waist-high counter in a wall that divided kitchen from dining hall, one gap for food, a second for pitchers of water—or beer and wine, on feast days and celebrations. The wall also held a wide double door leading into the kitchens that stood open at mealtimes, allowing plenty of room for wheeled pushcarts that could bring out clean crockery and utensils and return them for the washing-up staff.
To Ileth, it was a marvel of efficiency, a well-ventilated kitchen as up-to-date as it could possibly be. Even the charcoal stoves were easy to rake out. You could feed hundreds with not much more effort than it took to feed twenty at the Captain’s Lodge.
It being Gorgantern’s team’s job that pass day to prepare food, Ileth was working in the kitchens at the soup, an easy enough dish she’d made, following instructions to fill a vessel that could only be described as a cauldron. Someone else had started it; all she had to do was keep the broth up and the fire coaled and stir now and then when she wasn’t serving the soup. She ladled it out into wooden bowls passed to her by Gorgantern, who shuttled them to the food counter as the diners asked for it.
Gorgantern’s work did not engage him, so he livened up the steaming kitchen with what passed for jokes. “Another s-s-s-soup,” he called, mimicking her stammer. “A-A-Another s-s-soup.”
She’d been stirring the cauldron with a wooden stirrer the size of a small oar. The steam tingled on her face and arms, and she kept changing hands so the arm with the ladle would not be cooked along with the soup.
Santeel Dun Troot stood a few steps away at the water pump and drink station. Ileth thought it strange that she’d volunteered to work the kitchens on such a hot day. The Master of Stores had purchased barrels of cider from the northwest as the fall apple crop had come in and been pressed. Santeel had nothing to do but fill pitcher after pitcher of the cool cider and hand it to an apprentice named Rapoto who was shuttling drinks to the tables. He was exceptionally handsome. He took good care of his hair and brushed it out in the style of a Name, but she’d never spoken a word to him, just overheard the Dun Troot girl brag him up as a favorite of hers to her coterie.