Joel Rosenberg - [D'Shai 01] - D'Shai Read Online Free

seriousness.
    There was really one too many apples in the porcelain bowl; it looked overstocked. As a matter of policy, Crosta Natthan didn’t formally break his fast until after he had finished his morning rounds, but what is not seen is not, after all. He selected one with a slight green tinge, and tucked it into his pocket as he left the room; when he rounded the corner and passed out of the view of the guards, he took the apple out and bit into its tart sharpness as he slowly, painfully made his way up the steps to the second floor, pride preventing him from leaning on the wall. Stairs were the hardest, and it was best to walk them when nobody else could see his weakness.
    He liked the apple. It tasted like retribution.
    When he was but a boy, careful matchmaking had matched his elder sister, Ilda Verken, to a true bourgeois, an orchardman. Ilda Verken and Trevan Idn Abeta had looked down on the little middle-class boy, and had shunned him when he had entered Lord Eveshtai’s service.
    But that was long ago, and now the best of Trevan Idn Abeta’s son’s apples graced his table, and—every once in a while, when his duties allowed—Trevan Idn Abeta’s young niece, one of the bourgeois attendants to Lady Walasey, warmed his bed. Altogether a perfectly pleasant arrangement, he decided, slightly disappointed that there was nothing requiring his attention on the second floor.
    He took a last bite of the apple and set the core in the salver on a hallstand. It would be gone within the hour. It had best be gone within the hour.
    He made his way to the third floor, and stopped outside one of the rooms assigned to the acrobatic troupe.
    The guard was sitting in the chair across from the strange contraption of plaster and wires that the wizard had put up. That was acceptable; there was no need for him to stand when he could do his job sitting.
    But the carpet!
    Crosta Natthan shook his head. It wasn’t that Lord Toshtai would ever see the dirt on the carpet; the lord of Den Oroshtai hadn’t been above the first floor of any wing of either donjon in Crosta Natthan’s memory, and Crosta Natthan’s memory was perfect.
    But it was a wrongness, and would have to be corrected. Even though the acrobat-peasants would dirty the carpet again that night, it would have to be rolled up and taken out back to the laundry to be gently beaten, cautiously washed, carefully shade-dried, and then replaced.
    Still, as his father used to say, in every bruise there was a lesson to be learned: Crosta Natthan would wait until midmorning and see if old Varta Kedin noticed by, say, the hour of the hare.
    She was getting old; it might be time to retire her, send her back down to the village to live with her children and grandchildren, have her drive her daughters and daughters-in-law mad with her insistence on polishing already well-polished woodwork.
    He completed his rounds of the donjon and staggered down the stairs to the foyer, kicking off his sandals and tying up the ends of his pantaloons before he headed out into the quadrangle, toward the old donjon.
    The ground between the flagstones was muddy and squishy between his toes. He liked the feel of it; it almost made his old bones feel young again, he decided as he washed his feet in the foyer of the old donjon, dried them with a clean towel, and donned the sandals hanging from a peg on the wall.
    His tour through the old donjon always took less time than the rest of his rounds did, but that was just because it was smaller; it was not indifference. The old donjon was where the first rulers of Den Oroshtai had lived, back when the whole domain was only a summer residence of Oroshtai himself, and it deserved the respect due to an aged and trustworthy servant of the family.
    Today his rounds were even shorter than usual: the entire top floor was occupied by Lord Orazhi, his guards and personal attendants, and was to be considered part of Glen