Compassion
The corporal sighed, running a hand through his hair and staring at the woman in front of him helplessly. The head cook, and undisputed ruler of the kitchens of the Imperial Barracks, stood in front of him like a colossus, stance wide and fists propped on her generous hips. Her normally merry eyes were zeroed in on him like a hawk's and he struggled not to feel like a child again, squirming under her scrutiny.
Goytha had been head cook when he was a boy, and old habits died very hard, especially when she looked at him like that.
"You dare stand here and tell me," she thundered, "that your sergeant killed a man and it was somehow decided that his daughter would be shuffled off to my kitchens to live? Is that what you are telling me?"
The corporal gulped. "Y-yes, ma'am. Captain Hergcrest had determined the girl might be a future danger to the empire. The man in question was accused of m-magic."
Goytha narrowed her eyes. "I suppose I should be glad they didn't kill her outright. Or throw her in those dungeons with that beck-and-call shaman they have down there." Her foot tapped and she pursed her lips in thought.
"Um, does that mean I can inform the captain the girl will be lodged here?"
The corporal jumped when Goytha snapped her attention back to him.
She scowled. "I suppose I have no choice. Where is she now? I'll bring her down and get her some things from the stores."
Relief practically steamed off the young man. "She's in the captain's office, ma'am."
"Hmph," Goytha grumped and swept past him.
"I shall kill that man," Goytha grumbled to herself, arms full. Oh yes there was a girl, and she was indeed orphaned thanks to the Turgonian military. But not once - not once! - did that corporal tell her the girl was only a toddler. She knew Hollow, that old curmudgeon, and also knew first hand what he did to children he considered useful enough to train, which was the only reason to keep her alive. The girl's father was a shaman, skilled enough to call attention to himself and there was always a chance the girl could have the same ability. Well her ancestors be cursed if she was going to let him at this child. She hadn't been enough to save the boy - now almost a man - but she would save this girl from the same fate if it killed her.
The girl, whose name no one knew, hiccuped in her sleep. She'd cried herself out before Goytha had her fill of railing at the captain for his utter lack of sense and all around bad breeding. Thirty years of being head cook had its perks; many of the young brats she'd had underfoot in her kitchens in years past were now high ranking officers and a little of the respect she'd commanded in their childhood carried over. The captain did not cower like the corporal, but he sat silently as she growled her opinions at him; any other servant would have been put to death for such appalling behavior.
And so Goytha trudged down the steps and into the silent, darkened kitchen. Her own apartments were on the other side of the dry stores and that's where she decided to keep the girl. She'd been planning on giving her the tiny scullery maid's quarters off the main kitchens, but that was when she thought the girl was a girl and not a baby.
Exhausted by her earlier anger and the weight of the nameless girl, Goytha almost missed the figure in all black that sat in a worn rocking chair near the banked hearth. He'd positioned the chair as he always did, angled in a way to the hearth was to his left and he could observe the whole room. She's scolded him as a child for it because she'd always had to move it back. After a while, though, she'd come to think of it as his way of leaving a mark on the world, and she'd stopped making a fuss about it. The out of place chair seemed to her to say "I was here" in a very small way and in those times she felt even more that she'd failed him, the bright boy who would sometimes hide away from the world in her kitchens.
The faint light coming from the coals glinted off the steel hilt of a dagger at his waist and she frowned. "What did I say about those knives in my kitchen?"
As always, there was no response.
She heaved a sigh and hitched the toddler in her arms a little higher. It had been a long time since she'd held a sleeping baby and her arms were tiring. There was a deliberate shifting from the figure in the chair and she narrowed her eyes.
"Don't tell me," she said icily. "You're here to tell me that the old coot and his dancing dog will be watching this child, yes?"
The single word was chilling, for all the voice that delivered it was emotionless. "Yes."
"Well," she said over her shoulder, holding the girl tighter. "You just remember what they put you through - still put you through - before you go and help deliver her on a silver platter."
Silence followed her all the way to her room.
The girl's name was Bryn and the next few weeks were an adjustment for the entire kitchen staff as they relearned how to cope with a baby underfoot, for Bryn was a curious girl and she found trouble like a moth to flame. More than once Goytha extricated the girl from open flour bags or pulled her hand away from a boiling pot.
But Bryn was such a happy child it was impossible to be angry with her. Just one look at her clapping her floury hands and laughing fit to burst was enough to draw a smile out of anyone. Even when she was upset she didn't even touch some of the children Goytha had dealt with over the years, which was a blessing. She didn't think she had it in her to deal with a difficult child at her time of life.
She'd not seen Sicarius since the night Bryn had become her responsibility, and she looked back on the exchange with a little chagrin, supposing that her words to him had been harsh. He'd always been her favorite of all the children who had passed through her life, although she'd seen far less return with him than any of the others. The others had become enlisted men, or officers, or officials. There were even a few high ranking enforcers that had a healthy memory of her.
The first time he'd returned from a mission she had quietly shut herself in a handy closet and cried. But her favorite he stayed, always welcome in the kitchens even with blood on his hands.
Thus it was a surprise to see him when she turned from the bread dough she'd been shaping to search for Bryn, who had been far too quiet to be up to anything good. He'd once again snuck in without a sound, and this time he sat at the table where the staff ate their dinner, books spread out across the large surface and a pencil in hand. Barring the knives that adorned his person, it was so like the days when he was young and avoiding Hollow it took her a moment to catch her breath and remember what she was actually looking for.
Bryn was indeed up to no good, sitting on the flagstones near the table and doing her level best to stab herself with a fork she'd gotten from who knew where.
"Bryn!" Goytha said sternly, making her way across the room.
The girl looked up, dark eyes wide, and then struggled to her feet, fork still in hand. She headed for the table to escape the cook bearing down on her, little face screwed up in determination. She darted under the table and Goytha grumbled to herself as she was only halfway there.
"Ancestors save me from precocious children," she muttered to herself, peering under the table and ignoring the bland look slanted at her by Sicarius as he paused in his work.
Bryn had wiggled through the cross supports of the chair he occupied and sat looking at Goytha wide-eyed from around one of his legs, fork clutched in a chubby fist and legs splayed so one bare foot stuck out near his boot. Perhaps she was getting old but the sight of the tiny foot so near the larger black boot made her pause, and sadness filled her chest at the contrast.
Abruptly, a lightning fast hand plucked the fork from the girl's grip and Bryn blinked as Sicarius laid it down on the table with the brisk click of metal on wood, not looking up again from the treatise he was studying. Jumping into action before Bryn could work herself into tears Goytha shamelessly bribed her out from under the chair with the promise of one of the first sticky rolls from the oven.
After Bryn was happily full and the glaze had been cleaned off her face, hair, front and arms, Goytha looked for a place to install the child to keep her out of the way but still in sight. Preparations for the dinner meal were in full swing, however, and all of the usual spots were in use. She ran out of time, when one of the women wailed the bread had dropped and another called for Goytha to correct an over salted soup. She plopped the girl on one of the chairs with a stern command to stay where she was and rushed off to prevent the starving of half the Imperial Barracks.
Half an hour and three averted crises later, she was watching the dinner courses being marched out the door by the last of the serving lads when Vera, the woman who'd overrisen the bread, tapped on her shoulder and pointed back toward the hearth, a look of disbelief on her face.
He was still there in the shifting shadows of the fire, studiously jotting down figures while consulting the many books that surrounded him like a university student. And yet he still managed to appear unapproachably deadly with the full armory he was kitted out in. One leg was extended slightly in front of him and there was Bryn, fast asleep with her rump on the top of his foot, arms clasped loosely around his leg and one cheek squashed against his shin. It looked supremely uncomfortable and unbearably sweet.
Sicarius, feeling the weight of her gaze on him, glanced up from his work. He pinned her with an unreadable stare, but Goytha thought there might have been something there. An agreement perhaps? She raised her eyebrows questioningly but he returned his attention to his work, refusing to give her anything further.
Goytha looked around, but it was only the four of them in the kitchen. She turned to Vera, a dangerous look on her plump face. "I trust," she said, and her tone of voice was terribly stern, "that I do not have to warn you to keep this to yourself." The other woman shook her head quickly, glancing between Goytha and the black clad young man, who was ignoring them.
A couple of weeks after the nap-that-did-not-happen, Bryn disappeared from the kitchens of the Imperial Barracks.
Some time later - perhaps the amount of time it took to get from Stumps to Sunders City by train - a little girl called Fern was not delivered to a nice couple there. This couple definitely did not have some background in the mental sciences. And Goytha most certainly knew nothing about any of this.
She gave a rather aloof Sicarius a tight hug anyway, the next time he slunk into her kitchen.
END