The nearest entrance to the stables was the kitchen, which at this hour was dark and fragrant with the scent of the herbs in the cleaning water and a slight yeasty scent of the dough left to rise overnight for the first baking in the morning.

No one slept in the kitchens at Valdemar except, perhaps, the kitchen cats. With a superfluity of rooms, even the lowliest scullion had a little cot of his own tucked away in the warren of servants’ cells next to the kitchen. They were too small to be called rooms, in Kordas’s opinion, but they were private, comfortable, and each contained a proper bed, which was far more than most servants ever got. That had not been something that had been built into the structure. It was an innovation Kordas’s grandfather had made, converting a single large room next to the kitchen into twenty little kitchen servants’ rooms, each one with a door to allow the privacy that servants were so seldom accorded.

Kordas paused just inside the kitchen, next to the banked fire, to drip for a few moments. Cestin wrung out the hems of his robes at the hearth. “If you have no further need of me, my lord—?” he said, making it a question.

Kordas clapped him on the back. “Not tonight. There’s probably cakes in the larder.”

Cestin brightened at that. “I am a bit peckish,” he admitted, and went for a rummage, returning with a napkin full of tea-cakes. “It was a good night’s work, my lord.”

“And a success, thanks to both of you.” He clapped Cestin on the back again, and noticed as he did so that a cold draft was coming from the crack under the kitchen door. The temperature had dropped while they waited, just as he had predicted. Good work on Stafngrimr’s part, getting that mare and her foal up to the stables when he did. Wretched mage-weather! It just might blizzard by morning!

Cestin noticed too. “I believe I will get back to my room and enjoy these in bed with a cup of tea. I fear the weather is turning. Good night, my lord.”

“Good night, my friend,” Kordas responded with a smile.

When Cestin had gone, Delia made no move to leave. Instead she peered through the gloom at her brother-in-law. “Did you really mean that? About giving me the filly?”

“I wouldn’t have said it if I hadn’t meant it. I’d been thinking about it for a while. I might not have if it had been a colt, because I want to put any colts back into the breeding program, but you ought to have a horse you’ve personally trained, and I can’t think of anyone else who deserves one of Arial’s foals more than you do.”

Delia made a little sound he recognized as a sigh of pleasure. “Thank you, brother. This means a lot.”