Unkind, untrue, and unfair. She stalked out of the bathing chamber and flung herself down on her bed, seething. I’m not the one that went pelting up the trail, leaving tracks and traces a child could read! I’m not the one that decided he knew what was happening without bothering to consult his partner! I’m not the one that decided to divide the party—he wanted me to go downstream while he went up!

She turned over onto her back and stared at the ceiling. The more she thought about Warrl’s little lecture, the angrier she became.

What gives him the right to sit in judgment over me anyway? What gives an overgrown wolf the right to dictate what I should and shouldn’t have done? How could he possibly understand? He isn’t even human!

She was still simmering when exhaustion finally caught up with her and flung her into sleep.

Daren appeared the next morning at the common room; breakfast was a self-serve affair she sometimes shared with Tarma and her grandmother. Daren sported sunken cheeks and enormous dark circles under his eyes. Since she didn’t have a mirror, Kerowyn couldn’t have said if she looked the same, but she was very much afraid that she did. It had not been a restful night, to say the least.

“Well, you look like hell,” Kero greeted him over the buffet table, handing him a piece of hot bread.

“Thank you,” he replied. “If you’re curious, it’s mutual. Where in hell does she get all this food? I haven’t seen a single servant since I got here.”

“Magic, I suppose,” Kero replied. “Although ... you know, not that much of it has to be cooked. Just the bread and the oat porridge. Everything else could be set beside the bread ovens to warm. I’ve never seen the kitchen; it could be just on the other side of that wall. I have no idea how they’d vent ovens this deep in the cliff—that would be magic, but I’ve seen stranger things in this place.”

“Like the bathing chambers?”

“Hmm.” She eyed the table; the ham and bread would reappear at dinner, the fruit and cheese at lunch, the hard-boiled eggs would keep for quite a while, and the oat porridge would be gone at this meal. All four of them liked a good big bowl of it, laden with sugar and swimming in cream.

“One cook and two helpers could take care of all this and more, and still have time for the helpers to double at light cleaning and laundry,” she said. “We all clean our own rooms, that means the only places a servant would have to clean would be the common rooms.”