The Scullion's Winter at Ravencross Inn

• Chapter 1 The Ash Pit and the Anvil
• Chapter 2 The First Snowfall
• Chapter 3 Greasewater and Tallow
• Chapter 4 The Master of the Spit
• Chapter 5 Strangers at the Pass
• Chapter 6 Scraps Beneath the High Table
• Chapter 7 The Locked Larder
• Chapter 8 Whispers in the Great Hall
• Chapter 9 The Cook’s Heavy Hand
• Chapter 10 Frost on the Flagstones
• Chapter 11 The Broken Cauldron
• Chapter 12 Midwinter Solstice
• Chapter 13 Shadows in the Cellar
• Chapter 14 Salt Pork and Bitter Ale
• Chapter 15 The Maid of the Upper Rooms
• Chapter 16 A Howl in the Blizzard
• Chapter 17 The Missing Silver Spoon
• Chapter 18 Firewood and Frozen Bones
• Chapter 19 Blood on the Scullery Floor
• Chapter 20 The Butler’s Secret
• Chapter 21 Night of the Black Thaw
• Chapter 22 Embers in the Cold Dawn
• Chapter 23 The Guest Who Stayed Behind
• Chapter 24 A Debt in the Stables
• Chapter 25 Breaking the Ice
• Chapter 26 Smoke Over Ravencross

The grease never truly left the stone flags of the scullery, even when the frost crept through the low mortared seams of the north wall to turn the spillages into a slick, grey varnish. Robin knew the nature of every stain in the lower hearth room. There was the black ring near the scullery trough where the lye pot had overflowed during the Michaelmas slaughter, the rusty smear beneath the butcher’s block where the sheep heads were drained, and the deep, scorched depression directly beneath the central chimney flu where the hot ash collected every morning before the first turnspit dog was kicked awake.

Robin’s hands were the color of turnip skins, cracked at the knuckles and permanently rimmed with soot beneath the nails. At fourteen years of age—or fifteen, though no one at Ravencross Inn kept a ledger for the birth of kitchen drudges—he occupied the absolute cellar of the inn’s human machinery. Above him stood Master Hobb, the head cook, whose girth was such that he had to walk through the pantry doors sideways; then came the upper parlor servants, the stablemaster, the cellarman, the under-cooks, the chambermaids, and the tavern-wench, Maud. Below Robin was only the ash pit, and during the freezing turn of late November, it was hard to say which of them contained less warmth.

He awoke before the bell of St. Jude-in-the-Fens sounded from the valley three miles down the pass. His bed was a hurdle mattress stuffed with threshing straw, tucked into the alcove behind the salt-meat bins where the heat of the main kitchen oven bled through six feet of masonry. It was the only dry spot in the scullery, though it smelled endlessly of brine, old lard, and the damp wool of his only tunic.

"Up, lad, before the lard freezes hard as cobblestones," a voice rasped through the dark.

That was Wat, the old iron-smith who doubled as the inn’s coarse repairer. Wat slept near the forge fire at the far end of the courtyard, but he routinely entered the scullery at dawn to drag out the iron pots that had cracked under the heat of the previous night’s boiling.

Robin sat up, his joints popping in the frigid air. He pulled his leather apron over his neck. It was stiff with tallow and cold grease, rattling against his knees like a sheet of dried oak bark. He shoved his feet into his clogs—wooden soles lined with dried fern leaves to keep out the damp—and stepped down onto the flags.

The main kitchen of Ravencross Inn was a vast, low-ceilinged vault of dark river-stone, dominated by two massive hearths. The High Hearth burned oak logs three feet thick to roast the mutton, venison, and capons for the merchants and local bailiffs who paid fourpence a night for a room with a curtain. The Low Hearth burned peat, gorse, and green birch, producing a thick, bitter smoke that hung at eye level while boiling the big iron cauldrons of pease pudding and salt-beef for the carters, drovers, and foot-travelers in the common room.

Robin’s first duty of the day was neither cooking nor washing. It was the ash pit.

Behind the Low Hearth lay a sunken stone chest, four feet deep, where the burnt remnants of the hearth fires were scraped every night. The ashes had to be sifted while they were still warm. The fine white ash was saved in wooden tubs for the laundry-women to make lye; the black, half-burnt cinders were separated to be fed back into the blacksmith’s furnace or thrown onto the ice on the high road outside the inn gates.

Robin took the long wooden ash-shovel and his iron sieve and climbed into the shallow pit. The air was dry and suffocating, thick with the sharp taste of burnt birch and old bone-bits that had fallen from the spits. Every breath choked him with grey dust that turned to mud in his nostrils.

"Mind the iron bits, Robin!" Wat yelled from the archway leading to the courtyard forge. The blacksmith stood framed against the grey morning light, his apron broad and scorch-marked, holding a pair of heavy iron tongs. "Master Hobb broke the ear off the great porridge pot last night. If you drop it in the ash bin, he’ll have your skin for a apron."

"It’s not in the ash, Master Wat," Robin called back, his voice thin and raspy from the smoke. "I set the broken ear on the bench by the vinegar cask last night after the dishes were turned."

"Good lad. Bring it to the anvil when you’ve cleared the hearth. And fetch the big bellows while you’re about it. The frost has got into the tuyere pipe again."

Robin shoveled the glowing embers into the iron bucket, his muscles burning under the repetitive weight. The temperature inside the ash pit was a strange, uncomfortable mixture of heat and cold: his shins were roasted by the lingering coals, while his back was chilled by the draught that howled down the chimney flue from the high crags of Ravencross.

Ravencross Inn sat at the highest point of the pass between the northern wool towns and the southern river ports. It was an ancient, sprawling structure of dark granite and heavy timber, built more like a small keep than a house of rest. The walls were five feet thick at the base, designed to withstand both the winter gales and the stray bands of moss-troopers who occasionally rode out of the northern marches to lift cattle and burn barns. In summer, the inn was full of noise, smell, and money—drovers shouting over mugs of small beer, peddlers showing ribbons to the maids, and noblemen’s couriers demanding fresh horses.

But winter was coming down fast. The sky through the high, iron-barred kitchen windows was the color of lead, heavy and swollen with unfallen snow. Within days, the pass would be blocked, the trade would trickle to a halt, and Ravencross would become an isolated timber-and-stone island in a sea of white drift.

Robin carried the bucket of coarse cinders out through the scullery door into the courtyard. The air hit him like a thrown bucket of well-water. The courtyard was a quadrangle of packed mud, manure, and gravel, now frozen hard as iron. In the center stood the well-head, its rope thick with white hoarfrost. To the left was the smithy, a three-sided shed where Wat’s forge was already winking with a small, red eye of light.

Wat was a man made entirely of rectangles. His jaw was square, his shoulders were broad and level as a lintel stone, and his fingers were short, thick iron bars topped with thick, scarred nails. He had worked at Ravencross for thirty years, surviving four different innkeepers and countless cooks. Unlike Master Hobb, who communicated entirely through clip-earings and hurled ladles, Wat spoke only when the iron was heating, and his words were as sparse as his hair.

"Put the cinders by the trough," Wat grunted, taking the broken iron pot-ear from Robin’s hand. He laid it on the anvil face and tapped it with a small hand-hammer. The ring was dull and thudding. "Bad iron. Cast thin in the foundry down at the valley mouth. They mix too much sand with the ore these days to make the iron stretch."

"Can it be welded?" Robin asked, leaning against the cold frame of the forge to rest his arms.

"Welded? Cast iron?" Wat spat into the forge embers, where it hissed instantly into steam. "You can’t weld cast iron, boy. Not with fire and hammer. I’ll have to drill two holes with the hand-brace and rivet an iron strap across the ear. It’ll look like an old boot, but it’ll hold five gallons of cabbage broth without dropping into the fire."

Wat blew into his hands and picked up his tongs. He pulled a length of square iron rod from the coals, its tip glowing a bright, shimmering lemon-yellow. He set it on the horn of the anvil, raised his six-pound sledge, and struck.

A shower of orange sparks exploded into the grey air of the shed, several landing on Robin’s leather apron and bouncing off into the dirt. The rhythmic clink-bank, clink-bank of the hammer on iron was a sound Robin knew better than his own mother’s voice. It was the beat by which the morning at Ravencross moved. Three strikes on the iron, one light bounce on the anvil face to keep the rhythm.

"You’re small for fourteen," Wat said between strikes, his arm moving with the mechanical certainty of a water-wheel shaft.

"Fifteen, I think," Robin said.

"Makes no difference. Small is small. Master Hobb will work you harder once the high snows hit. When the guests can’t leave, they sit in the Great Hall and eat six times a day out of pure spite for the weather. That means three hundred trenchers to scrape, twenty kettles of water to draw from the frozen well, and the spit to turn from noon until the candles burn down."

"I turned the spit five hours yesterday," Robin said, looking down at his raw wrists. "The grease from the pig kept spitting onto my skin."

"Wear an old rag around your hands," Wat grunted, tossing the shaped rivet strap into a bucket of water. A violent hiss and a cloud of white, metallic-smelling steam billowed up into the rafters. "And don't let Hobb see you resting here. He’s already in the larder cursing at the salt-pork."

As if summoned by his name, a roaring voice echoed across the frozen courtyard from the scullery door.

"Robin! You miserable little dog-scrap! Where is the kettle-water? Where are my hearth-irons?"

Robin stiffened. Wat didn't even look up; he merely reached for his file and began rasping down the rough edge of the iron strap with slow, heavy rasps that set Robin’s teeth on edge.

"Go on then," Wat muttered. "Before he uses the wooden spoon on your head again. And take this bit of scrap iron back to the scullery—tell him the pot will be ready when the bell strikes nine, and not a minute before."

Robin grabbed the piece of iron, wrapped in a oily scrap of canvas, and ran across the rutted courtyard, his clogs clattering against the frozen stones like loose masonry falling down a well.

Inside the scullery, the temperature had already begun to rise, brought up by the heat of the great ovens and the steam from the water kettles Robin had filled before dawn. But with the heat came the smells: the sharp, sour tang of fermentation from the ale casks, the thick, heavy stench of boiling sheep heads, and the cold, fatty air of the scullery sink where yesterday’s tallow had set into a thick white crust over thirty pewter trenchers.

Master Hobb was standing by the central table, a vast man wrapped in a grease-stained linen apron that could have served as a sail for a river barge. He was holding a ladle carved from ash wood, broad as a shovel head, which he used indiscriminately for stirring soup, measuring oats, and striking scullions.

"Where have you been, you lazy hound?" Hobb bellowed, turning his red, sweating face toward Robin. "The fire in the Low Hearth is half-dead, the lard is still in the tubs, and the tallow-man hasn't got his morning broth!"

"I was at the forge, Master Hobb," Robin said quickly, dropping his chin toward his collar in the customary posture of survival. "Fetching the iron-strap for the porridge pot from Master Wat."

Hobb grunted, his small, pig-like eyes darting to the canvas-wrapped iron in Robin’s hand. He snatched it away, glanced at it, and threw it onto the block with a heavy thud.

"Wat moves like a snail in a bucket of tar," Hobb growled. "Get to the trough. The tallow needs skimming before the parlor servants come down for their ale. And if I find a single speck of cinder in the clear grease, I’ll drop you in the ash pit head-first and leave you there until Sunday."

Robin didn't answer. He knew better than to offer excuses to Master Hobb. In the hierarchy of Ravencross Inn, the cook’s word was law within the kitchen quadrangle, subject only to the rare, cold interventions of Master Barnaby, the inn’s bailiff and manager, who rarely descended into the scullery unless the silver went missing or a guest died of the flux.

Robin walked over to the great wooden scullery trough. It was six feet long, hollowed out of a single trunk of elm, and held the accumulated grease-water of three days' cooking. A thick layer of grey-white lard had rose to the top and hardened in the cold air overnight.

Taking a brass skimmer perforated with small holes, Robin began the long, numbing work of lifting the lard off the surface of the cold water and scraping it into the tallow-tubs. The tallow would be saved for the candle-maker, who visited the inn twice a year to make the smelly, yellow dips used in the common rooms and stable lanterns.

His fingers were so cold he could barely feel the wooden handle of the skimmer. Outside the small, high-set window, the grey sky was beginning to drop its first offerings. A single, heavy flake of snow drifted through the iron bars, whirled in the heat rising from the kettle, and melted into the grease-trough without a sound.

Robin watched it go. The first snow of the year had arrived. Within twelve hours, the pass would be closed. The heavy oak doors of the Ravencross courtyard would be barred from the inside, the iron portcullis dropped across the outer arch, and for the next three months, the world would consist entirely of stone walls, wood smoke, Master Hobb’s ladle, and the endless, freezing mountains of ash beneath the floor. He dipped his skimmer back into the grease and kept working.

By mid-morning, the grey promise of the sky had broken into a steady, wind-driven curtain of white. The flakes did not fall gently; they were torn sideways by the draft through the High Pass, whipping through the iron-barred vents of the scullery and dusting the upper masonry with dry, sugar-like powder. Inside, the heat from the hearths fought a losing battle against the mounting cold. The floor flags near the northern wall had turned into a hazardous apron of frost, where a spilled drop of ale froze solid before a scullion could reach it with a rag.

Robin worked his way through the morning pile of trenchers. They were heavy discs of coarse, four-day-old rye bread, soaked through with the dark gravy of last night’s mutton stew. It was his task to scrape the hardened fat into the tallow bucket, strip the soften crusts into the swill tub for the swine, and stack the usable wood-stiffened remnants near the back of the pantry.

"Watch your fingers on the edges, boy," growled Cook Hobb, pacing past with a iron cleaver in his hand. He was carving a side of salt beef into slabs thick enough to survive a six-hour boil. "If you drop a single trencher into the bilge-trough, you’ll eat it yourself for dinner, grey grease and all."

Robin did not answer. He kept his head down, scraping with a dull iron spatulate. His feet inside his clogs were long past feeling; they had reached that hollow, aching state where they felt like two lumps of lead attached to his ankles. Across the kitchen, the turnspit dog—a long-bodied, crooked-legged terrier named Peat—was barking feebly inside his wooden wheel beside the High Hearth. The dog’s wheel was connected by a soot-blackened chain to the main spit, where three whole quarters of salt pork were slowly dripping onto a bed of glowing ash.

"Give that wheel a kick, Robin," shouted Giles, the under-cook, a skinny youth of eighteen who had survived two winters at Ravencross and considered himself an authority on all matters of domestic torture. "The dog’s slacking. The pork is singing on one side and raw as a ditch on the other."

Robin set down his scraper, wiped his hands on his tallow-crusted apron, and hurried over to the High Hearth. The air within three feet of the fire was scorchingly hot, a dry wave of intensity that made his cracked skin tighten until it felt ready to split. He gave the bottom wooden rungs of the turnspit wheel a gentle nudge with his clog.

"Get on, Peat," he whispered.

The small dog panted, his pink tongue hanging out over the worn wooden slats, and picked up his endless, trudging trot. The spit creaked, turned a quarter-inch, and a line of clear, white fat hissed into the dripping pan below, puffing up a plume of savory, mouth-watering smoke. Robin stood for a moment, letting the intense radiant heat soak into his knees and chest before the draft from the scullery door pulled him back to reality.

"Don't stand there gaping like an idiot at a fair," Giles yelled, slapping a wooden ladle against the side of the great iron kettle. "The stable-lads are coming in for their morning pottage, and the bailiff’s man wants six pots of ale warmed with a hot iron. Move!"

The outer door of the scullery slammed open with a crack like a musket shot, driven by a sudden gust of wind. A small avalanche of white powder spilled over the threshold, followed by Barnaby, the inn’s bailiff. He was wrapped in a heavy grey cloak lined with sheepskin, his beard already matted with white crusts of ice.

"Bar the outer gates, Hobb," Barnaby said, without waiting to clear the snow from his boots. He stepped into the room, leaving grey footprints on the flagstones. "The drift is already two feet deep at the Toll Stone. No wagons will come up from the south today, nor from the north until the thaw."

Cook Hobb lowered his cleaver, his heavy, red face darkening. "How many mouths in the house?"

"Forty-two in the common room," Barnaby said, counting off his gloved fingers with methodical precision. "Eight in the upper chambers, including the wool-merchant from York and his two clerks. The three drovers who came in at midnight, four stable-men, the two chamber-wenches, yourself, your scullery-dogs, and the blacksmith."

"Fifty-seven," Hobb muttered, doing the rough kitchen math in his head. "And how long does the sky look?"

"It’s a black thaw coming after a hard freeze," Barnaby said flatly. "The clouds are low and fat. We’re locked in for ten days at the least, maybe three weeks if the wind turns east and piles the drifts into the cut."

He turned his cold, watery blue eyes toward Robin, who was standing motionless near the spit wheel. "You, lad. Fetch the snow-shovels from the timber-shed. You and the under-cook need to clear the path between the kitchen door and the well-head before the yard fills up. If the well freezes over, we’ll be melting snow in the iron cauldrons, and that takes twice the wood and makes the ale taste like pine-bark."

"Yes, Master Barnaby," Robin said, dipping his head.

"And take the scrapings out to the pig-pen while you’re about it," Hobb added, gesturing with the cleaver toward the heavy wooden bucket by the door. "The hogs are grunting loud enough to wake the dead in St. Jude’s graveyard."

Robin dragged the swill bucket toward the door. It was made of oak, bound with rusted iron hoops, and filled to the brim with grey bread-water, potato peelings, and cabbage stalks. It weighed nearly as much as he did. He hooked both hands under the rope handle, hoisted it three inches off the floor, and waddled backward out into the storm.

The moment he stepped outside the kitchen door, the world changed. The kitchen was a place of noise, heat, and greasy stenches; the courtyard was a roaring, white vacuum. The wind came tearing off the razor-backed ridge of Ravencross, howling down the stone chimney pots and swirling the fresh snow into blinding eddies.

Within five steps, Robin’s eyelashes were rimmed with ice. The cold hit his thin wool tunic like a cold iron blade, sinking through his ribs and squeezing the breath from his lungs. He dragged the heavy bucket past the smithy. The forge fire was low, casting a dull, reddish glow through the open front of the shed. Wat was standing over his anvil, his leather apron stiffened by the frost, filing down the latch of a gate-bolt with long, mechanical strokes that sounded like a dying crow.

"Keep your head down, lad!" Wat barked over the noise of the wind, not stopping his work. "Don't stop to rest in the lee of the wall! That’s how the old stable-boy froze his ears off six winters back!"

Robin didn't answer—the wind would have carried his voice up over the roofs anyway. He dragged the swill tub past the low wall of the stable-yard toward the low timber lean-to where the inn’s four swine were kept. The pigs were huddled together in a corner of their pen under a thin layer of old straw, their pink snouts steaming like small kettles in the dark.

He hoisted the bucket onto the edge of the low stone wall and tipped it. The grey, slushy contents slathered down the wooden trough with a heavy gloop. The pigs did not rush for it; they merely shuffled forward, their backs hunched against the snow that sifted through the broken slats of the roof, and began to suck up the lukewarm mush with dull, repetitive snorts.

Robin stood for a second, panting, his hands tucked deep into his armpits to bring back some semblance of life to his white, numb fingers. Through the curtain of white, he looked up at the main body of Ravencross Inn.

The building rose three stories high against the iron sky, a chaotic mass of dark granite, oak timbering, and steep-pitched slate roofs. Up on the second floor, behind the glass-paned windows of the Great Parlor, he could see the warm, yellow flicker of tapers and high hearth-fires. That was where Master Barnaby served the wool-merchant from York. Up there, they would be drinking spiced claret heated with cinnamon rods, eating white roast capons off pewter trenchers, and sitting on oak benches covered with wool cushions.

Down below, at the basement level, the small square windows of the kitchen and scullery were barely visible above the growing snowdrifts. They looked like small, red eyes squinting out of the grey rock face.

He found the wooden snow-shovels—broad, flat boards of lime-wood with fire-hardened handles—leaning against the dry stack in the timber-shed. He took two of them, tucking one under his arm, and began to work his way back toward the well-head in the center of the yard.

The snow was already four inches deep, dry and powdery, rustling like dry silk under his wooden clogs. Clearing a path was simple enough work, but it was relentless. As fast as he scraped the granite flags clear, the wind whirled behind him and laid down a fresh layer of white dust.

By the time Giles joined him, carrying an iron ash-bucket filled with hot cinders from the Low Hearth, Robin’s breath was coming in short, ragged gasps that hurt his chest.

"Scatter these around the well-lip," Giles shouted, dumping the cinders into the snow. The hot embers hissed, sinking into the white drift and leaving small, black-bordered craters that smelled of sulfur and wet coal. "The bailiff says if the bucket rope freezes solid to the winch drum, you’re the one who has to climb down the masonry to loosen it."

"I’m too big for the well-pipe," Robin said, his chin trembling with the cold.

"You’re small enough if Hobb gives you a kick from behind," Giles sneered, though his own face was blue around the lips and his ears were tucked under a dirty wool rag tied beneath his chin. "Come on. Help me haul the first four tubs of water before the ice thickens on the surface."

They worked together at the well-pulley. The iron wheel was stiff, its axle creaking like an ungreased cart as they hauled up the big oak bucket. The water inside was black and clear, so cold it seemed to steam when exposed to the frosty air. Robin helped pour the water into the two wooden buckets they had brought out from the kitchen, his hands slopping with icy spray that froze almost instantly on his cuffs.

As they carried the heavy buckets back toward the scullery door, a commotion broke out at the main outer gate of the inn.

The heavy oak doors, studded with thick iron nails, were being pulled to by two of the stable-men, who were leaning their entire weight against the timber bars. Through the narrowing gap of the gateway, Robin caught a glimpse of the High Pass. The road was entirely gone, replaced by a smooth, white incline that vanished upward into the grey mist of the crags.

A single horseman was struggling through the drift just outside the gatehouse arch. He was riding a small, shaggy hill-pony whose knees were caked with frozen mud and ice. The rider was wrapped in a ragged dark cloak, his head completely obscured by a cowl bound with leather thongs.

"Hold the gate!" the rider shouted. His voice was thin and sharp, carried over the howl of the wind like the cry of a mountain falcon. "Hold the gate for the King's messenger!"

Barnaby walked out from the shelter of the porch, his hand resting on the heavy wooden handle of his short-sword. "There is no King’s mail moving through the pass today, stranger! The road is closed by order of the bailiff of Ravencross!"

"I carry a writ from the Sheriff of Lancaster," the man called back, forcing his pony through the last three yards of deep drift until its chest hit the outer timber barrier. "I’ve been six hours coming up from the valley floor, and my beast is spent. Open the gate, or I’ll have the inn fined forty shillings at the next assizes!"

Barnaby looked at the horse, then at the sky, which was darkening rapidly though it was barely two hours past noon. He spat into the snow and waved his arm to the stable-lads.

"Lift the bar," Barnaby grunted. "Put the beast in the small stall near the hearth-wall. But you’ll pay three pence for your bread and ale, messenger, writ or no writ. The Sheriff’s seal doesn't buy oats when the snow is six feet deep on the ridge."

The heavy gates groaned shut behind the stranger, the iron bar dropping into its stone slots with a dull, final thud that seemed to shake the courtyard flags.

The heavy lock clicked home. The world outside Ravencross Inn was officially cut off.

Robin stood by the scullery door, holding his bucket of well-water, his shoulders aching under the weight. He watched the stranger dismount. The man was small and lean, moving with a jerky, nervous agility despite his frozen clothes. As he pulled back his cowl to reveal a sharp, fox-like face with pale eyes, he caught Robin staring at him.

"What are you looking at, scullion?" the stranger snapped, his hand twitching toward a long, thin knife tucked into his belt beneath his cloak. "Fetch some hot water for my boots, before I pull your ears off your head."

"He doesn't fetch water for guests," Giles cut in, stepping between them with his ash-bucket. "Cook Hobb has him for the lard-tubs. If you want hot water, ask the tavern-wench in the common room and pay your penny like the rest of the mountain-tramps."

The stranger’s eyes narrowed, but he said nothing more. He turned his pony over to the stable-boy and stalked toward the heavy timber door that led into the lower warmth of the common room.

"A nasty one," Giles muttered as they hauled their buckets inside the dark warmth of the scullery. "Looks like the kind who'd steal the grease out of a lamp if you turned your back on him."

"He had a seal on his belt," Robin said, setting his bucket down near the main water trough.

"Seals don't mean nothing when the snow comes down," Cook Hobb roared from the stove, where he was stirring a massive brass kettle of grey pea soup with his ash-wood ladle. "Seals don't fill the larder, and they don't chop the birch logs! Robin, get to the Low Hearth! The messenger’s coming in, forty drovers are yelling for their pottage, and the bailiff wants two pigs' feet boiled with mustard for the wool-merchant’s supper. Clear those ashes, wash those bowls, and if I see you leaning against that wall again today, I'll roast your shins over the embers!"

Robin took his wooden scraper and his iron sieve and knelt back down by the ash pit. The heat from the low hearth hit his face like a hot hand, making his frozen cheeks sting with a sharp, prickling pain as the skin thawed too quickly.

Out in the courtyard, the wind gave a high, thin screech as it hit the roof ridges, piling the snow against the scullery window until the bottom three iron bars were buried in white. Inside, the steam from the soup kettles rose to the dark joists, condensing into large, oily drops of water that fell rhythmic and slow back onto the flagstones.

Robin lifted his first shovel of cinders. The long winter at Ravencross had begun.