A playing card

This living is so hard. I want a marker of it. A marker of Ruth dying. Of Black Fingers nearly killing me. Of the Willow Tree’s black magic. Of all the fright and confusion the folk at the castle have caused me. I want to catch Fair Hair. I want to catch her and make her feel all the grief she’s caused me. And when I do, I will cut a golden curl from her head and put it in my box as a token.

26. HONEY CAKE

THE THING ABOUT piss pots is that they’re in your chamber. So if you’ve got one, you don’t need to find a jakes. To catch Fair Hair, I’m going to need a jakes.

I lie abed in the slats of dawn light. Sometimes in the morning, the shiny, cunning notions you have in the night come back grey and small. I give mine a good think over. They’re still shiny.

Here’s what I reason: I need to get Fair Hair alone, and I don’t fancy searching for her chamber in the castle, picking the lock, avoiding her maid, mayhap getting stabbed again by Black Fingers, and all that. But folk who’re pregnant have to piss all the time. So I need a moment when she’s got to use a jakes and not a piss pot. And I know a moment that will do. Two nights from now are the Queen’s revels to mark the Norman emissary’s departure. The revels are taking place in a great tent in the field outside the castle. Not a piss pot around. But folk will need to piss, so there’ll be jakes dug. That’s where Fair Hair’ll go.

I hear Jane’s children below me knocking about with each other. Brida’s soft voice bubbles up the ladder.

A sin eater might pull too much notice near the festivities. But there are surely other sorts of folk whose presence won’t be questioned, especially in the bustle of getting everything ready. My uncles kept men in their company who used disguises. Abraham-men who feigned they were mad, lame folk that pretended to be heroes from past wars, dinder-danders who dressed up as highborns so as to make folk trust them before they fleeced them. I could do the same.

The best folk to counterfeit are the kind other folk want to forget. It takes some thinking to contrive a good disguise. It’s my squatters, finally, who spark the notion. I climb down the ladder with a handful of coins. Before I do, I put on my collar, securing it again with a pin. I daren’t let anyfolk see I can take it off. The punishment for removing it is surely dire. At the least, it’d be locked back on.