The lion's den

Esme

The kitchens of the palace are a city of their own.

Firelight licks the undersides of iron pans. Steam rolls off great copper pots, a butcher’s block gleams wet beneath a cleaver. Knives flash, not as weapons but as instruments, and the rhythm of work is so relentless I forget to breathe for a few heartbeats.

“Eyes forward,” Rastin murmurs. His hand grazes my elbow as if to steer, and I force myself to be air, something that moves and goes unnoticed.

A man with broad shoulders and salt at his temples stands near the main hearth, watching it all with an expression that says he knows where every ingredient in this room is and where it will end up. When he turns, the noise bends around him. The staff don’t stare, exactly, but they listen without needing to be told.

“Marek,” Rastin says, voice smoothed to something respectful. “New hands. From the north route.”

Marek’s gaze slides over Joren and Hannah and stops on Marla long enough for her chin to lift. He doesn’t smile, but something softens in his eyes. Then he looks at me. There’s no cruelty there but no warmth either, just a weighing.

“Names,” he says.

“Joren, sir,” the freckled boy says quickly.

“Hannah, sir,” the other girl murmurs.

“Marla,” she says, definitely too bright.

 “You’ll add the ‘sir’ by supper,” he says dryly, and moves on. Marek’s brow lifts a fraction as he takes me in.

“Esme,” I whisper.

“The silent one,” Marla mutters, but under her breath.

“Hands?” Marek says. He catches mine, turns them palm up with gentle, impersonal thoroughness. The calluses from blades. The raw places along the fingers where water and soap make skin weep. The healing cuts. He releases me, and I pull my sleeves down to hide the worst.

“Work first,” he says to all of us, voice carrying without strain. “Questions later. You two,” he nods to Joren and Hannah “,with Hara on vegetables. Marla, scullery for the week. Esme, you’re on scrubbing and delivery with Kai. If he says run, you run.”

A boy with curls and flour dust along his jaw grins at me from behind a tray tower. “Welcome to the storm,” he says, like a secret greeting.

Rastin steps in again, his shadow cooling the heat on my shoulders. 

“She reports to me for special tasks,” he tells Marek, voice mild but threaded with iron.

Marek’s eyes don’t flinch. 

“In my kitchens, they report to me,” he says, and the room does a small, quiet exhale. “You’ll get her when she’s off shift.”

 “Of course.” Rastin smiles without changing his eyes. He melts into the flow, already speaking to a spice boy by the door. I let air out slowly, careful not to show it.

“Here.” Kai thrusts a stack of folded clothes into my hands. “We’re feeding the lower hall first. Bread, broth, and a miracle if the oven gods are kind.”

I follow without question.

It is impossible to be still here. I am aware of every angle of my body, every time my shoulder brushes a passing tray or my hem catches on a splinter of wood. Marek’s domain is a choreography of blades at one table, peelers at another, spice girls with their boats of seeds and salt and water haulers threading the gaps with their sloshing pails. Scents layer until they drown though, rosemary singed in pan fat, onions that bite when the knife breaks their skins and the buttery hush of dough opening its crumb. I find myself in awe, despite the mission I always have in the back of my head. 

“You’ll learn the routes,” Kai says, shouldering a door with the ease of practice. “Three hallways to the lower hall if one clogs. Don’t try the north stairs at the third bell, guards use them for rotation and they don’t yield.”

“Noted,” I say.

“Marek likes runners who think. Rastin likes runners who don’t. You’ll do fine.” He flashes me a grin.

The corridor on the other side is cooler. Stone leaches heat from my ankles through thin soles, and somewhere above, the palace breathes. The walls change from the rough utilitarian plaster of the service wing to clean limewash and then to carved wood and stone inlaid with silver. My eyes drink it because my father’s maps were lines and measurements and nothing about light.

The lower hall is full already with guards sitting with their plates and messengers gulping broth with one foot still toward the door. A cluster of young pages are shoving each other hard enough for one to spill, and then scrubbing at the mess in frantic silence when Marek’s second, no, not Marek’s second, I correct myself because that’s Rastin and he is not a supervisor here, when a tall woman with a flour mark on her cheek clucks her tongue and points the boy to a bucket.

“Lady’s private rooms have added two guests,” Kai murmurs as we lay bread in baskets along a long trestle. “We’ll need more fruit cut before the second bell.”

“Which lady?” My voice is too soft. The hall swallows it.

“The one who thinks the world looks best when she’s centered,” he says, eyes dancing. “You’ll meet her. Or she’ll make sure you do.”

Enough gossip. My hands are already memorizing where to stand to avoid a guard’s elbow when he rises with too much speed and which table likes extra ladles. Or where the crumbs collect fastest and how to sweep them quickly into a hand so no one slips. I keep my head down. If I look up too long, someone will meet my gaze with their own and I will have to calculate what to do with that.

We return to the kitchens with empty baskets and wet sleeves. Marla stands above a mountain of pans like a queen on a scrap-iron throne, hair frizzing at the edges in the steam.

“Thought you’d gone and joined the nobility,” she says when she spots me. “The silent girl runs fast.”

“Runs well,” Kai corrects, nudging my arm. “There’s a difference.”

“Uh-huh.” Marla tosses a pan into the rinse and catches another mid-tumble with reflexes that would have served in a fight. “You, shadow. Trade. I’m starving. If I don’t eat something soon, I’ll start seeing visions of roast fowl dancing across the table.”

I reach for the ladle at the broth pot. Marek appears cleanly at my shoulder, unstartled by his own stealth.

“No trading without call,” he says, and Marla rolls her eyes like a rebellious apprentice.

“I was joking, sir.”

“Joke while you scrub if you must, but keep the line moving.” He tilts his head at me. “Esme. After the third bell, fetch from the herb shed. List is on the peg. You know mint from marjoram?”

“Yes, sir,” I say, and it’s not a lie. My father made sure I knew every leaf I could put into a cup and what it would do to a body when it dissolved there.

Marek’s gaze holds me a moment too long, as if the word sir has a different flavor from my mouth. Then he nods once and moves on.

Rastin is there when the pot lids clang again, uncanny as a cat slipping along rafters. He angles his body so his shoulder blocks me from the rest of the room.

“Your posture,” he says mildly, “is too ready.”

“I’m working,” I murmur.

“You’re measuring distances,” he counters, lashes, hooding his gaze. “Door to table, table to exit, exit to stair. Good. Keep measuring. Your schedule is pinned in the dormitory. You’re on dawn prep and night clean for the first week. We’ll talk after.”

A small glass vial touches my palm. His hand hides the exchange.

“Nightly,” he says. “You know that.”

The tonic. My stomach turns as if I have swallowed the vial whole. I close my fingers around it without letting my expression change. 

“Yes, sir.”

“Good girl,” he says, and the words scrape like nettles under my ribs.

By second bell my arms shake inside my sleeves. By the third, I have moved from delivery to prep, watching how Hara’s hands teach the knife to do work without waste. By the time Marek sends me to the herb shed, the sky beyond the courtyard has cracked open enough to spill a little cold light between clouds.

The herb shed sits at the back of a small yard where steam pipes like a snake from the kitchen wall and bleed warmth into the air. A cat sleeps on the stone threshold as if it owns the door. 

Inside, bundles of sage and thyme hang from rafters, lavender in braided ropes, dried bay leaves crinkling like paper when my sleeve brushes them. The list on the peg has a tidy script, Marek’s, I think. Mint, marjoram, bay, rosemary, and a handful of dried pepper pods crushed to dust.

I pack them into a basket, nose filling with the clean green of crushed stems and something sweet underneath from the lavender ropes. For a moment, just one, my chest loosens. Herbs don’t lie. They do what they do, every time.

On my way back, I pass the laundry opening where hot air billows and a pair of linen workers argue in low voices about deliveries from the north. I don’t mean to listen, but their whispers hook on an old habit inside my ear.

“Captain says the Western Road will be cleared by the week’s end,” one says.

“The King?” the other asks, lowering his voice until it’s more breath than sound.

“Not yet. Patience.”

I move on before either looks up, pulse quickening for no reason that has anything to do with me. Not yet. Good. Every day he isn’t here is a day I can learn the palace’s ins and outs and decide where not to kill him.

When I slip back into the heat, I find Kai with his sleeves rolled and an apple balanced on his forearm as he tries to show Hannah how to core without losing flesh. Apple skin curls like ribbon along the board.

“Your basket smells like a garden,” he says. “Bless you.”

“List,” I say, handing it to Hara. She gives me a look that might be approval but it’s hard to tell when her eyebrows do all her speaking.

Work swallows the afternoon. The lower hall again. Then the guard barracks. Then trays up the narrow stair to a corridor that opens to a carved screen. I pause just long enough to memorize the pattern.

Marek’s rule is clear, don’t look. Don’t linger. My father’s command is louder, look everywhere. Learn. Survive. I walk on.

By dusk, my back hums with a dull ache and my knuckles are split along the old lines. When Marek finally calls the end of shift, the room doesn’t so much go quiet as tilt into a softer motion of cleaning water sloshing into buckets, embers banked, knives wiped and hung.

“Esme.” He says and I freeze.

“You kept up,” he says. “You’ll sleep. You’ll come back and keep up again.”

A compliment. Or the closest to it he gives. It sits strangely in my chest, like a warm stone.

“Yes, sir.”

“And you,” he glances past me, "eat. No one in my kitchen faints on the line.”

I don’t realize he’s speaking to me again until Kai presses a bowl into my hands. Broth. A scrap of meat. A heel of bread. I swallow around the sudden tightness in my throat and manage, “Thank you,” without choking.

The dormitory is a long room with rows of narrow beds and hooks along the wall for aprons and cloaks. Marla throws herself onto her mattress with an exaggerated groan loud enough to make the girl in the next bed giggle.

“If I ever stop scrubbing,” she says to the ceiling, “I’ll haunt Marek’s pans just to keep screaming.”

“You’ll scrub again tomorrow,” Kai sings back, stretching like a cat. “But maybe less if you say ‘sir’ like a good little court mouse.”

“We’ll see.” She says, flipping a hand at him. 

They are a noise and a heat that wants to settle in my bones. I sit on my bed and look at my hands instead. The tonic vial is a small weight in my pocket, burning like coal. Do not make friends of any kind, the words burn in my mind. I wait until the room dims and  the chatter thins into softer, end-of-day sounds. Then I slip out with my cup and go searching for a pump. The courtyard is quiet, the herb cat opens one eye and decides I am not worth moving for.

I pour the tonic out behind the rosemary, where the soil is dark enough to swallow it. The smell wrinkles my nose, bitter, metallic, something sour underneath. It sinks and disappears. My hands shake when I wash the cup.

Back inside, the dormitory shadows feel closer. I lie on my side and watch the rafters blur. My father’s letter has colonized the space behind my ribs. Three months. The Blue Moon. Do not disappoint.