"Rumors."
"You came to the mountains on heresay alone?"
"I've done more reckless things."
A pause. He ran his tongue along his gums and said, "We don't take well to outsiders."
"I sent a letter of forewarning."
"How reliable do you think a courier can be?"
"It depends on how much he's paid."
* * * *
That had been months ago.
There was no warmth here. The gray sky above and the ragged edges of the mountains broke apart any breath of warmth the sunlight might bring. Sometimes there was snow. The flakes were not majestic, but rather fat and sharp and treacherous. In the right swirl of wind, they were knives. At night the wind howled against the stone walls and crept in through the cracks between the bricks. Somehow, even in this bitter clime, insects still thrived: roaches, resilient to the chill, found their way into the stores of cornmeal and saltmeat, burrowed themselves into the rubbery porkfat.
And you did not deny the ration of meat because its helping bore an occupant.
And you did not remove the little roach, for he deserved sympathy; he'd come here generations ago in a bag or a parcel, long-undetected, and his family line thrived despite the cold. No, you ate him too, for to free him from his fatty bed would be to commit him to a frozen death.
Farnie leaned over and whispered, "I quite like them too. I like the crunch."
Farnie was a dumpy girl whose lip and cheek sagged because in her childhood she had been forced to sleep in a barn near manure and every night she breathed in the fumes of rotten hay until the stink of it poisoned her blood. Sometimes her right eye stared off into the distance, like it hadn't been set right in the socket of her skull at birth. That was the way with her. That was the way with everything.
Chewing, Farnie asked, "Do you like it here," and wiped her mouth on her dress-sleeve.
"I like the work," said the newest girl.
"Are you daft? Nobody likes the work."
"I like the work."
Farnie tugged on saltpork with her eyeteeth. "Alright," she said. "Alright, so you do. I don't. But I like the mead. They brew good mead here. That's worth the work alone."
The dining hall, as cold as every other half-crumbling building on the premises, was dreadfully silent at this time of day: the Studious had already come for their rations and their helpings and their mead; after them, the Servitors had come for the leftovers. They were the last two who remained, and both harbored the same idea: that there was no place else that was ever as quiet as this, the uninhabited dining hall, where one could truly be alone with their thoughts.
That apparently didn't matter too much to Farnie Portfaunt.
The newest girl, trying not to look at Farnie, tilted her head and said, "Do you want my mead?"
Farnie's palsied face brightened. "I couldn't do that," she said, with all the insistence of a girl who knew her modesty might win her a gift. "No, no, I couldn't do that."
"It's all yours," said the newest girl, nudging the meadhorn toward her.
"You don't mind? Truly?"
The newest girl shook her head and said, "No, I don't; I don't have a taste for it."
But Farnie's mouth was hanging open with an unspoken question, and she arched one of her brows, and the newest girl knew exactly what Farnie was looking at. For in all the weeks they'd seen each other passing throught he gray halls, their arms full of linens or their elbows hanging with buckets of wash-water, they'd never entirely looked at one another, let alone really spoken to one another; theirs, after all, was the same story, as seemed to be every Servitors. Servitors were unremarkable beings, all cut out of the same mold: they were quiet, they were diligent, and these gray walls offered them a solace that needn't be spoken: Here, you can hide. Here, you can rest. Here, for the price of your obeisance, you can fade away into nothing.
So when Farnie jabbed a dirty finger onto the newest girl's wrist and asked, "What happened to your hand," the curiosity shocked the newest girl: she had tried very hard to be anything but an individual.
"Oh. That," the newest girl said, brandishing the pinkish lump of her handless left arm.
This time she didn't mind retelling the tale.