Pathfinder (Pathfinder 1)

house,” said Flacommo.

Rigg immediately looked up at him in astonishment. “If there were a royal house, sir, I’m sure you would be right. But there is no such house and therefore no such son. There’s work to be done and I’m doing it.” Rigg turned to the chef. “Am I not doing it well enough, sir?”

“Very well, sir,” said the chef, “but it’s not for you to call me sir.”

“Are you not older than me?” asked Rigg. “My father taught me to call my seniors by ‘sir’ and ‘madam,’ in reverence for the wisdom and good luck of age.”

“‘Wisdom and good luck,’” repeated Flacommo, laughing as if it were a jest. “Only a boy could think we old people were lucky, with our creaking joints, thinning hair, and bad digestion.”

“I will consider myself very lucky and very wise, sir, if I live long enough for my joints to creak, my hair to thin, and my stomach to keep me awake at night.”

Flacommo laughed again, as if this, too, were meant as humor. But Rigg noticed—by his peripheral vision, for he would not look directly at her—that his mother nodded very slightly. Was it possible that she now understood his game, and approved of how he was playing it?

“We’ll take care of feeding the lad, sir,” said the chef to Flacommo. “And one of the boys can show him to his room—we all know which one has been prepared for him.”

“A room?” said Rigg. “For me? After my long journey, that will be a wonderful comfort. Yes, I’ll go there soon. I’ll not need much of a meal—a little bread and a good strong cheese will suit me well—so I’ll go to bed as soon as these apples are cored for the pies.”

Despite his words, Rigg planned not to enter any specially prepared room. If traps had been laid for him, it would be there. His best protection would be to go somewhere no one would expect him to sleep, and in a place with as many witnesses as possible.

“Will you leave your mother waiting to talk to you?” asked Flacommo.

“But there’s a stool, see?” said Rigg. “I hope my mother sits here, and talks to me while I core the apples.”

This suggestion rather alarmed the other servants, but Rigg looked at all of them with a cheerful smile. “What, does my mother’s work keep her in other parts of the household? Then we can all get acquainted with her together!”

“I’m afraid that our beloved Lady Hagia cannot help in the kitchen as you suggest,” said Flacommo. “By law, she is forbidden to put her hands upon any blade—even a kitchen paring knife.”

Rigg held up his coring shaft. “But this is not a knife,” he said.

“You stab it into the fruit, my lad,” said Flacommo, “and that makes it, in the eyes of the law, a dagger.”

“That would be a cruel weapon indeed,” said Rigg, laughing. “Monstrous—imagine being cored to death!” He pressed the corer against his own chest. “The strength it would take, to force it between the ribs!”

Some of the servants laughed in spite of their efforts to remain solemn. Another anecdote that would be spread through the city by morning.

“Mother, it is so late at night. I beg you to go to bed and sleep well, so we can talk tomorrow. I slept well on the boat and in the sedan chair, they both glided along so smoothly.” And it was true that Rigg was usually awake at this time of the night—one of the reasons he had trained himself on shipboard to sleep at such odd times was so he would not be helpless and unconscious at predictable times.

Flacommo and Mother both lingered for a while, and it was clear that Mother would have sat down to talk with him, even in front of the other kitchen workers, if Flacommo had not interposed himself. “Well, well,” he finally said, “you are certainly an unpredictable young man, Master Rigg!”

“Really? In the village of Fall Ford I was thought of as rather dull; I never did anything extraordinary.”

“I find that hard to believe,” said Flacommo.

“Oh, I’m sure you’d find all our village ways unpredictable, sir, life being so different upriver. For instance, when village folk gather to cut up vegetables and fruits, there’s always singing. But apparently no one in this kitchen knows a song!”

“Oh, we know songs, young sir,” said an old woman.

“We could curl your hair with the songs we know of fright and woe,” intoned another.

Rigg, recognizing the old tune, answered with the second line: “And your lady fair will be taught to woo by a love song true.”

The servants all laughed with approval.

“So the songs are the same, upriver or down!” cried Rigg. “Well, let’s finish that one and have another two or three, as long as we still work hard and sing soft, so as not to make the master sorry we’re so noisy at our work.”

Flacommo tossed his hands in the air and strode from the kitchen. Only now did Rigg allow himself to look directly at his mother. She also looked at him. He saw a ghost of a smile pass across her lips; then she turned and followed Flacommo from the room.

The pile of apples done—with a grateful smile from the boy whom he might just have saved from disgrace—Rigg wolfed down the bread and cheese with only water to drink. It was a finer bread than the coarse-ground loaves Nox used to send with them when Rigg and Father set out into the wilderness on one of their trapping jaunts, but that only meant it took more of it before Rigg felt full. The cheese was very fine, though of a flavor Rigg had never had before.