Kalchan never asked him where he’d been, so long as he came back before dark. He just welcomed Skif back with a cuff to the ear, and shoved him into the kitchen. By now, the kitchen was full of smoke, and the cook coughed and wheezed while she worked. It wasn’t just the fault of the chimney, which certainly could have used a cleaning—the cook routinely burned the bottom crust of the bread, burned what was on the bottom of the pot, dripped grease on the hearth, which burned and smoked.

Skif didn’t have to be told what to do, since his duties were exactly the same thing every day. Poor half-witted Maisie, on the other hand, had to be told carefully how to go about her business even though it was all chores she’d done every day for the last however-many years. That was why, if Skif wasn’t back by dark and the time when the big influx of customers came, he’d get more than a cuff on the ear. If you gave Maisie one thing to do, then interrupted her with something else, she became hysterical and botched everything.

First, the water barrel had to be filled again—not because anyone had used much of it in cleaning, but because like everything else in the Hollybush, it was old, used, and barely functional. It had a slow leak, and it cost nothing to have Skif refill it. To have it mended would have meant paying someone.

So back and forth Skif went, doing his best not to slosh the icy water on himself, particularly not down his boots. When the barrel was full, the next chore was to take the bundle of twigs on a stick that passed for a broom and sweep the water and whatever else was on the floor out into the courtyard, where the water promptly froze (in winter) or turned into mud (in summer). Since Skif was the one who went into and out of the courtyard most often, it behooved him to at least sweep it all to one side if he could.

Next was to bring wood in from the woodpile in the courtyard and mend the fire in the common room, which was also full of smoke, but not as bad as the kitchen. Then he collected the wooden plates left on tables, carried them to the kitchen and thriftily scraped the leavings back into the stew pot over the fire. It didn’t matter what went in there, since it all blended into the anonymous, lumpy brown muck, well flavored with burned crud from the bottom, that was already there. A quick wipe with a rag, and the plates were “clean” and ready for the next customer.