– one of six working appliances left on the whole estate. It was his personal domain, and he stood there watching the two boys bolt the gravied meat scraps he had produced. Be-

hind, before, and all around, cookboys, scullions, and various underlings rushed through the foaming, humid air, rattling pans, stirring stew, slaving over potatoes and vegetables in nether regions. In the dimly lit pantry alcove, a washerwoman with a doughy, miserable face and hair caught up in a rag splashed water around on the floor with a mop.

One of the scullery boys rushed up with a man from the Guards in tow. “This man, he wantchoo, Hax.”

“All right” Hax nodded to the Guard, and he nodded back. “You boys,” he said. “Go over to Maggie, she’ll give you some pie. Then scat”

They nodded and went over to Maggie, who gave them huge wedges of pie on dinner plates… but gingerly, as if they were wild dogs that might bite her.

“Let’s eat it on the stairs,” Cuthbert said.

“All right”

They sat behind a huge, sweating stone colonnade, out of sight of the kitchen, and gobbled their pie with their fingers. It was only moments later that they saw shadows fall on the far curving wall of the wide staircase. Roland grabbed Cuthbert’s arm. “Come on,” he said. “Someone’s coming.” Cuthbert looked up, his face surprised and berry-stained.

But the shadows stopped, still out of sight It was Hax and the man from the Guards. The boys sat where they were. If they moved now, they might be heard.

“… . the good man,” the Guard was saying.

“In Farson?”

“In two weeks,” the Guard replied. “Maybe three. You have to come with us. There’s a shipment from the freight depot…. “A particularly loud crash of pots and pans and a volley of catcalls directed at the hapless potboy who had dropped them blotted out some of the rest; then the boys heard the Guard finish: “.. . poisoned meat”

“Risky.”

“Ask not what the good man can do for you – “the Guard began.

“– but what you can do for him,” Hax sighed. “Soldier, ask not”

“You know what it could mean,” the Guard said quietly.

“Yes. And I know my responsibilities to him; you don’t need to lecture me. I love him just as you do.”

“All right The meat will be marked for short-term storage in your coldrooms. But you’ll have to be quick. You must understand that.”

“There are children in Farson?” The cook asked sadly. It was not really a question.

“Children everywhere,” the Guard said gently. “It’s the children we – and he – care about.”

“Poisoned meat. Such a strange way to care for children.” Hax uttered a heavy, whistling sigh. “Will they curdle and hold their bellies and cry for their mammas? I suppose they will.”

“It will be like a going to sleep,” the Guard said, but his voice was too confidently reasonable.

“Of course,” Hax said, and laughed.

“You said it yourself. ‘Soldier, ask not’ Do you enjoy seeing children under the rule of the gun, when they could be under his hand who makes the lion lie down with the lamb?”

Hax did not reply.

“I go on duty in twenty minutes,” the Guard said, his voice once more calm. “Give me a joint of mutton and I will pinch one of your girls and make her giggle. When I leave – “My mutton will give no cramps to your belly, Robeson.”

“Will you… “But the shadows moved away and the voices were lost.

I could have killed them, Roland thought, frozen and fascinated. I could have killed them both with my knife, slit their throats like hogs. He looked at his hands, now stained with gravy and berries as well as dirt from the day’s lessons.

“Roland.”

He looked at Cuthbert. They looked at each other for a long moment in the fragrant semidarkness, and a taste of warm despair rose in Roland’s throat. What he felt might have been a sort of death – something as brutal and final as the death of the dove in the white sky over the games field. Hax? He thought, bewildered. Hax who put a poultice on my leg that time? Hax? And then his mind snapped closed, cutting the subject off.

What he saw, even in Cuthbert’s humorous, intelligent face, was nothing – nothing at all. Cuthbert’s eyes were flat with Hax’s doom. In Cuthbert’s eyes, it had already happened. He had fed them and they had gone to the stairs to eat and then Hax had brought the Guard named Robeson to the wrong corner of the kitchen for their treasonous little tete-a-tete. That was all. In Cuthbert’s eyes Roland saw that Hax would die for his treason as a viper dies in a pit. That, and nothing else. Nothing at all.

They were gunslinger’s eyes.

Roland’s father was only just back from the uplands, and he looked out of place amid the drapes and the chiffon fripperies of the main receiving hall that the boy had only lately been granted access to, as a sign of his apprenticeship.

His father was dressed in black jeans and a blue work shirt. His cloak, dusty and streaked, torn to the lining in one place, was slung carelessly over his shoulder with no

regard for the way it and he clashed with the elegance of the room. He was desperately thin and the heavy handlebar mustache below his nose seemed to weight his head as he looked down at his son. The guns crisscrossed over the wings of his hips hung at the perfect angle for his hands, the worn sandalwood handles looking dull and sleepy in this languid indoor light

“The head cook,” his father said softly. “Imagine it! The tracks that were blown upland at the railhead. The dead stock in Hendrickson. And perhaps even.., imagine! Im agine!”

He looked more closely at his son.

“It preys on you.”

“Like the hawk,” Roland said. “It preys on you.” He laughed – at the startling appropriateness of the image rather than at any lightness in the situation.

His father smiled.

“Yes,” Roland said. “I guess it… it preys on me.

“Cuthbert was with you,” his father said. “He will have told his father by now.”

“Yes.”

“He fed both of you when Cort – “

“Yes.”

“And Cuthbert. Does it prey on him, do you think?”

“I don’t know.” Such an avenue of comparison did not really interest him. He was not concerned with how his feelings compared with those of others.

“It preys on you because you feel you’ve killed?”

Roland shrugged unwillingly, all at once not content with this probing of his motivations.

“Yet you told. Why?”

The boy’s eyes widened. “How could I not? Treason was – “

His father waved a hand curtly. “If you did it for something as cheap as a schoolbook idea, you did it unworthily. I would rather see all of Farson poisoned.”

“I didn’t!” The words jerked out of him violently. “I wanted to kill him – both of them! Liars! Snakes! They —“Go ahead.”

“They hurt me,” he finished, defiant. “They did something to me. Changed something. I wanted to kill them for it.”

His father nodded. “That is worthy. Not moral, but it is not your place to be moral. In fact… “ He peered at his son. “Morals may always be beyond you. You are not quick, like Cuthbert or Wheeler’s boy. It will make you formidable.”

The boy, impatient before this, felt both pleased and troubled. “He will – “

“Hang.”

The boy nodded. “I want to see it.”

Roland the elder threw his head back and roared laughter. “Not as formidable as I thought… or perhaps just stupid.” He closed his mouth abruptly. An arm shot out like a bolt of lightning and grabbed the boy’s upper arm painfully. He grimaced but did not flinch. His father peered at him steadily, and the boy looked back, although it was more difficult than hooding the hawk had been.

“All right,” he said, and turned abruptly to go.

“Father?”

“What?”

“Do you know who they were talking about? Do you know who the good man is?”

His father turned back and looked at him speculatively. “Yes. I think I do.”

“If you caught him,” Roland said in his thoughtful, near-plodding way, “no one else like Cook would have to . . . have to be neck-popped.”