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When the man first appears in the foyer, Rose stops a few footfalls short. She recognizes him well—the wicked king’s tax collector who threatened to starve her family’s whole village. “No,” she says quietly, watching him wait, observing the tapestries and heraldry on the walls of the great entrance.
But that isn’t how the deal she has with the castle works; it impels her forward, and once again she plays Good Castle Maiden. The man—Hux—shows no recognition when she welcomes him, and it figures as much. The castle clothes her in sumptuous gowns, provides never-ending streams of delicious, clean water; since they last met she’s changed and bathed and learned to do her hair. Still Rose imagines wistfully the opportunity to reveal her origins—this time, she thinks, she’d have the whole finger off.
She shows him to his room, gestures to the banquet hall, which will soon fill with whatever manner of food he desires. She hopes at least he has good taste there, for what the castle feeds guests, it also feeds her.
The last several visitors had all been Grail knights, taking a short respite before continuing on their way. She wonders if any of them has reached it, or perhaps all, and whether it could be possessed or was otherwise a congregating place—if the Grail has some force to draw people to it, or if there are a great many of it, one for each worthy knight.
It’s also possible it doesn’t exist. Rose would never have believed in this place—a castle that appears only to the worthy—had it not decided to employ her: her family’s village needed wages, and the castle had needed a new maiden. Rey, the leaving maiden, had explained everything: the chores, the payment, the mysteries insofar as things that happened (not how or why). Rose couldn’t help noticing that Rey had been in the company of another, a man who waited just far enough away to give the illusion of privacy and just close enough to be on hand to aid her whenever he was needed. His armor had surprised Rose—it resembled that of the monstrous Sir Ren, the wicked king’s right hand; but the fluffy-haired man who’d waited patiently for Rey to finish had not one hostile bone in his body, and after all, he, too, had found the castle. That was how it worked, wasn’t it?
Over dinner, the man Hux speaks of the confusion in the wicked king’s lands, how poorly governed, how rumor told it the Knights of Ren had lost their leader.
“To death?” Rose asks, the strange feeling she’d had about Rey’s companion coming back to her.
“That a man may have felled Sir Ren without bragging and spreading the word in every town he comes to—that would be the unlikely part. No, he’s only missing, and I aim to find him.”
“And do what?” Rose nods to his attire. “You’re no Knight of Ren.”
“Of course,” the man says, lowering his goblet, “I’m going to kill him.”
.
“I told you!” Rose hisses to her room when Hux has retired to his quarters. “I told you he was bad.”
She has a general sense that the castle must be listening—that it must be aware of the moves she makes, considering the invisible hand she feels nudge her around now and again—but, most frustrating of all today, it doesn’t really seem to have a way to talk back. As Rose sees it, Hux should have been thrown out of dinner, but the meal had continued after he revealed his goal, a silence he didn’t seem to object to in spite of Rose’s simmering rage.
She remembers all too vividly the day Hux had mocked her in the market, had curved a finger under her chin and found out how the locals could fight back. Her father had been a fair and generous leader to her village. Now, even with Rose’s work in the castle, the letters from Paige told of a tired and disheartened community, giving up the best of crops and handcrafts to pay the king’s taxes and saving precious little to go around for themselves.
Rose thinks of her letter-opener then, a long, thin, metal thing she’d found in the room, and hurries to retrieve it. But the drawer where it sits seems stuck shut. She yanks and yanks to no avail, realizing after some time that the castle is blocking her again.
She stamps her foot. There are things she could throw, bigger messes she could make; but it might come out of her wages later, and she’s here—after all—for her family.
The cover pulls back on her bed, and Rose sags, defeated. Carefully she removes her clothing, knowing the house won’t have her rebellion. With any luck, he’ll be gone tomorrow.
.
At the morning meal it becomes clear very quickly that the man has no intention to depart so soon. “A curious castle you have here,” he remarks, rapping his knuckles against the long dining table.
Rose doesn’t think the castle will take kindly to her bad-mouthing, so she keeps her thoughts to herself.
He continues: “In the passage to my quarters last night I noted a great room with many books and large windows.”
Rose glares at the ceiling. That room isn’t usually there. Such are the ways of the castle, rearranging itself on a whim.
“I aim to take a good look in the daylight. My horse can use another day of rest, and I may find the information I seek.”
“The castle chooses only worthy guests,” she says when he seems to be awaiting a response. “If it considers your aims worthy, it will allow you to stay.”
For a long moment after, she feels his eyes on her, but she doesn’t look up. Maybe she reminds him of someone. Maybe he’s a little afraid.
.
The day passes without much incident. Rose keeps to herself as best she can, sweeping up in rooms that hardly need it, avoiding the wing where Hux’s room and apparently the library have located themselves. She hears the man make his way to the hall for the midday meal—one she avoids out of sheer spite, though she finds she regrets it later. Just before dark, the table is yet to be set for dinner; and Rose drops into the kitchen. Mercifully, there’s a loaf of bread, though a little harder than to her liking. On her way out of the room, she bangs her hip into a drawer she certainly hadn’t opened, takes it as sullenly as any scolding.
The castle nudges her toward the banquet hall some time later, and this time she’s quick to obey. The man has waited for her; though he’s served himself, his food remains untouched until Rose begins eating.
“How fares your horse?” she asks, referring to his excuse for staying.
“Well,” he responds, drinking from his wine cup. “But I’ve found more texts I ought to understand. When the day breaks tomorrow, I’ll return to the library.”
Rose glares at him—a look he misses entirely, too engrossed by the food set before him. The Grail knights she’s served had all stayed two nights maximum, thanking her effusively for her hospitality and the riches of the castle. That this man assumes he’s welcome yet another day—well, it seems just like him. Spoken like a tax collector, she wants to say; but instead she takes another mouthful of food and averts her eyes again, determined to ignore him so as not to encourage more talking.
“The king’s actions have been deplorable,” he says after some time eating in silence.
Rose almost chokes on the bite of vegetable she’s chewing. She manages to cover the moment with only a small cough, reaching quickly for her own wine cup.
“Sir Ren has mismanaged every responsibility he’s been given, and yet the king still relies on him and that ragtag group of knights to be the enforcers of his wishes.” Fiercely he cuts at the meat, as if it’s personally offended him. “With Sir Ren out of the way, true law and justice can finally reign.”
“And you as arbiter?” Rose stops just short of adding, Was that ‘law and justice’ that you brought to my father’s village so long ago? Still, the critique in her tone is clear.
Hux seems startled by her question. “Obviously.” He takes a draught of his wine, setting the cup on the table again with more force than is polite.
.
The whole next day, Rose stays strictly in her wing in spite of how her stomach grumbles—some days back home had been worse anyhow; it’s nothing new to endure. The following morning she’s up with the sun, sneaking to the kitchen for something to eat and finding the castle shows mercy: some good bread and cheese and the usual seasonally impossible fruits. She expects this means Hux has left without her, and good riddance; but some hours later she’s startled to see him making haste for his quarters. She skips dinner, having saved a little of the bread and cheese from breakfast, and wakes late the next day, certain he’s gone once and for all.
She doubts he’d the sense or skill to clean the stables, so she makes for that part of the castle after her quick breakfast; but before she’s even halfway to the structure she hears hoof beats at a gallop and watches as Hux and his horse burst out of the fog, both looking far worse for the wear. Seeing Rose, Hux leaps down from the creature and staggers toward her. His hair is all at odd angles, his jacket askew, and Rose barely steps out of his path when a stone halts his reach, bringing him to his knees in the grass and dew.
“Call off this enchantment,” he pants, wild-eyed, glaring up at her. “At once.”
He looks nothing like the cruel, well-dressed official who’d paraded through the market square, nothing like the man who’d first set foot in the castle’s foyer with the calm of someone who believed they belonged. The man looks out-of-his-mind frightened; though he commands with his words, there’s a desperate plea in his eyes.
Rose takes immense pleasure in the answer she gives him: “What enchantment?”
His plea becomes a glare, and he spits in the grass in his fury. Scrambling to his feet, he runs back out into the fog, abandoning the horse, abandoning the pack he’d left on her flank; but it sounds as if he’s merely circling where they stand. Rose turns her head this way and that, tracking his footsteps. The castle gets like this whenever she’s outdoors—it conceals other foliage and scenery in a thick fog, even when the sight from the windows is of fields and trees.
Soon, exhausted, Hux comes back into view, slightly left of where he’d left his horse, and walks slowly toward Rose again. “Call it off,” he demands, though there’s no bite to his words. He stops walking, takes a deep breath. “Please.”
She doesn’t expect that. “The castle does what it wills. I cannot make the fog go.”
“The fog!” Hux exclaims. “If only it were the fog.” His horse draws closer to him, nudging at him with her big, tan face. His shoulders sag, and he pats her with an idle gloved hand. “Ever since I sighted the castle I’ve been unable to leave it. My intention the first night was not to stay, but it seemed I could not get further away, no matter how far we rode. I’ve tried every day to no avail; I truly cannot leave.”
To see him upset, downtrodden, afraid—that had been a victory, but far too short-lived. Rose looks back to the castle with disgust, feeling as if punishment has been leveled at her as well. She takes a few deep, steadying breaths, then turns and meets Hux’s eyes. “There’s a rake just at the back,” she gestures at the stable.
“What?”
“For the stable,” she says. “If you’re to stay, the castle will expect you to make yourself useful.”
He goes redder about the face, a surprising development considering how red he is already from exertion and anger. He makes to storm off back inside. “I’ll do no such—” A root trips him, and down he goes, flat on his face.
“Then I wish you luck,” Rose says. “You’ll find the castle usually gets what it wants.”
.
Days stretch into weeks. The castle permits them to eat most meals separately, but it forces them together at dinner, especially when it takes two more guests—a few days apart, two more Grail knights. Hux spends dinners questioning the men, a gesture Rose considers less than hospitable but nonetheless interesting to watch. One knight, raised in a noble family, speaks earnestly of purity. For a learned man, he seems to disappoint Hux—which might amuse Rose if she didn’t feel much the same way.
The next knight the castle hosts grew up in a poorer village and speaks, when pressed, of the trials of daily living. After a particularly harrowing story about an uncle’s injury and the scarcity of resources to treat him, Hux presses, “But the law was on your side.”
“The law?” the knight asks.
“Of course. A village so near to the castle was bound to be patrolled by the king’s men. How was the man who struck your kin made to pay for his crime?”
The knight gives him a look of disgust. “The man’s cousin was one of your ‘king’s men.’ We buried my uncle and took in his daughters; and the king’s men fined us for the burial plot and taxed us for what he’d been unable to pay when he fell ill.”
“Every man owes—”
“Even a dead man?”
Hux does not like being interrupted, and his face reads as much. Rose imagines it is the castle that keeps both men in their seats, unable to reach each other for a brawl. Later, when the knight has retired, she passes Hux in a corridor and hisses, “Perhaps you should make yourself scarce when we have guests.”
“Perhaps you should—”
But Rose keeps walking. She does not care what the king’s tax collector thinks she should and should not do.
.
Several weeks and three Grail knights later, the castle shows no sign of freeing Hux, and Rose finds she almost tolerates him. Early mornings he spends in the stables with his horse and the large orange cat Rose had glimpsed but failed to befriend; he’s named the cat “Millicent,” she learns one day, and out of an uncharacteristic bout of politeness she stops herself from snickering at the name. On occasion they share the vast space of the library without a word between them, and most meals are occasions of quiet.
Still Hux presses every man he meets for thoughts of governance and justice. Though his questions have begun to change, Rose still finds him pompous and judgmental—far too slow a learner for her to be rid of him anytime soon. It’s her secret guess that the castle has chosen Hux to teach him; not infrequently, she wishes he’d become the pupil of some other magic castle.
One evening after the late departure of the latest knight, Rose carries a candle about the corridors, putting out all the extra torches the castle had lit. It does seem to have the magical energy for such tasks, but it prefers her help; and because she loves her family, because the wages matter to them, she doesn’t skip the corridor with Hux’s quarters.
As she makes her way, she becomes aware of a scent of burning slightly dissimilar to the smoke of extinguished torches. Ahead of her, the passage is growing hazy, and when her mind puts two and two together she rushes forward toward the source, bursting through a heavy door into the room producing the smoke.
The first sight she sees is the fireplace, in which burns some large quantity of papers and other materials she can’t quite identify. Even with the vent of the chimney, the burning material is producing extra smoke, and Rose dashes forward for a fire poker to try to rearrange the blaze. A few more jabs of the iron stick, and she makes out that the offending material is clothing: the tunic bearing the king’s crest that Hux had arrived to the castle in.
A cough alerts her to the fact that she’s not alone in the room, and Rose whirls around in surprise to see a tub. She’d been so focused on the fireplace, so bewildered by the smoke, that she’d completely missed that Hux is bathing, submerged in a large tub of water up to his shoulders.
The firelight dances on his face, throwing his features into sometimes ghastly shadow. There’s not enough light in the room to illuminate for Rose the intricacies of his body, but as if in a trance she notes his copper-colored hair, slicked flat against his head, and the droplets of water that fall from his beard.
Beautiful, her mind supplies, but the shock of discovering the word reminds her of the first day he saw him—on her knees in the hard stone street of the market, his face fixed with a sneer.
And then her hand remembers the poker.
Without a word Rose advances on him. The castle doesn’t stop her, doesn’t trip or shove or nudge her as she brandishes her weapon. Perhaps she’s got it wrong. Perhaps the castle hasn’t brought him here to learn. Perhaps he’s a gift for her, to right the wrongs from long ago.
Hux doesn’t flinch, his expression blank, as Rose stops just short of him, the poker already in striking distance.
“Before the day you came to the castle,” she says fiercely, “we had met.” She waits for him to question her, but the question never comes.
He thinks he’ll win her over by playing the martyr, but she’s smarter than that. She refuses to let him think he’s the more genteel of the two of them, refuses to take the bait of offering him praise for burning the symbol of his prior ways. No amount of questions at dinner can mend the evil he’s done to her village and so many others.
“I’m sure you don’t remember,” she continues. “My fath—”
“I’ve known you since the first moment you stepped into the room.” He looks her directly in the eye. “Village rat.”
Rose lunges forward, holding the tip of the poker to his chest. He flinches, his shoulder twitching with the movement, but doesn’t make any other attempt to escape.
Smoke floats through the room and Rose imagines the fireplace as the scene of a funeral pyre. No—she’ll dump him in the courtyard, let the fog take him. To burn would be honorable still. Let him be taken by wolves.
Then, for just a moment, she thinks of her mother.
Anger motivates, but too much is a poison. Don’t lose your heart to it, little Rose.
So we can’t get revenge? she’d asked. She’d been a young girl then—young enough that the revenge she sought was at another child in the village who had thrown a rock at Paige’s pet hound, Nosewise. The dog had avoided the blow, but the whole incident had Rose seeing red.
Her mother had embraced her then. Take that energy and put it back into saving what you love.
Rose clenches the poker tighter in her grip. The fire reflects in his eyes; there’s venom there, a kind of dare.
With all the force of her frustration and anger, Rose turns and hurls the poker at the fire. It ricochets off the stones of the fireplace, clanging onto the hard stone floor, and she leaves.
Later, in bed, weeping furious and confused tears, she thinks of how the castle didn’t stop her—wonders bitterly if she, too, is its pupil.
.
The castle does not give her time to wallow. The next day, a man comes through the foyer who seems unnaturally pale, perspiring heavily; and as soon as Rose shows him to his quarters, he collapses.
Rose does not know much in the ways of medicinal herbs, but luckily the castle provides. The man suffers from fevers, chills, and delusions. Another Grail knight, she deduces from his delirious ranting, but there’s other information there, mentions of Sir Ren and a beautiful woman and—strangest of all—the death of the king.
Rose places cool cloths on his forehead, feeds him the simple meals the castle sets upon the low table, listens to his nonsense-babbling for two days, at times pacing anxiously to her own room before returning to tend to him. She’s seen people fall ill like this before; not all of them see the other side.
Still, she grows tired. Her whole body begins to feel heavy, and the next time she leaves the room, Hux—who’d made himself so scarce over her days of caretaking that she’d nearly forgotten he was there—is waiting in the corridor. He nods to her, and she takes that and the castle’s nudging to mean it’s time to rest.
.
Her body is ice, and her body is fire, and time is a fiddly thing.
Cool cloths on her forehead.
Salty broth.
Her limbs are as heavy as stones, and every part of her aches.
Water—cool, clear water: she swallows and swallows, scrabbles to take the cup for herself, spills across her chest. A soft cloth soaks up some of the moisture. She’s too tired to care.
And then it is morning, and the details begin to resolve themselves, and Rose feels as if she may be able to move. She tries—her arms are no longer made of stone, nor her legs. There’s a bowl of warm broth on the low table beside her bed; she’s sitting up and sipping at it when Hux walks in. He starts a little.
Rose wonders how long she’d been ill, understands conceptually that he’s the one who’s been caring for her, but she can’t sort through it now. Instead, she asks: “Does he live?”
“Who?”
Her voice is creaky and weak, but she still manages to make her frustration known. “What do you mean, ‘who?’ The Grail knight I tended.”
“Yes, he lives.”
Rose breathes a sigh of relief.
“He left on foot some days ago, just after you—” Hux gestures to the bed.
“Who else did you think I meant?”
Hux eyes her narrow bed, then makes the surprising decision to sit on it, choosing the far end from where she sits drinking her broth. “It seems Sir Ren has returned. The king is dead.”
Rose entertains the idea that, perhaps, she may still be sicker than she thinks. “The king?” she repeats.
“Word is already spreading. The old guard are being disbanded. Sir Ren himself—Benjamin, as he wishes to be called—rides from village to village dismissing them to their homes. Those who don’t comply are rounded up and brought on the way. A massive, ridiculous operation, but—”
Rose doesn’t hear the rest, only stares dizzily at the broth in her hands. She thinks of her family’s village, of the Grail knight’s babbling, of Rey and the fluffy-haired man who could have been—might have been—must have been Sir Ren. Stupidly, what she blurts next is none of those things. “You tended to me.”
“I did.”
Rose looks at the man. The castle has given him plainer clothes, but they become him, somehow. “So you believe it? One Grail knight’s word, and—?” She gestures helplessly, forgetting the broth, knocking some of it into her lap.
Hux stands then, relieving her of the bowl. He crosses the room, going to stand at her window, looking out of it. “In one of your deep sleeps, the house nudged me outside. The fog had lifted, so I rode into the next village to see for myself.”
“You came back?”
Hux cuts his eyes to her in an expression that reminds her of one of their dinner conversations. Obviously.
“Why?”
“It would seem,” he addresses the window, “I still have much to learn about the ways of laws and justice.”
“Has Ren placed a bounty on your head?”
The corner of his mouth twitches. Finally, he admits, “That, too.”
Watching him stare out the window, Rose begins to grow sleepy, even though practically all she’s being doing is sleeping. She reclines again, trying to sort out her thoughts, but things are growing a bit fuzzy.
Hux hears her moving, glances back at her over his shoulder.
“Don’t think we’re done,” she warns. “Don’t you go—” a yawn overtakes her—“running off to other villages just yet.” Her eyes are drifting shut.
“I don’t intend to,” Hux’s voice says, gentler, from much closer proximity.
Rose isn’t sure what that means yet, can’t quite put it together; but much to her surprise, she doesn’t really mind. She thinks about it, their next conversation, the food on the table, the possibility of a Grail knight joining them, and Hux’s face in the firelight, and the color of his hair, and the hand that smooths the blanket over as she drifts to sleep.