Rhiannon - Dragonrider

Chapter Fifteen - The Amendraig

As the nonda just dumped their stuff and meandered up towards the main house, I just stood there, a bit stunned, I suppose. "Come on," Carodoc said. "We've got to tidy up the quad... then clean the kit and put it away... and then we've got to get ready to wait at table for the nonda."

I was about to tell him what I thought about that idea but decided against it. I mean... he was trying to be nice to me and I was going to need as much nice as I could get if I was going to survive in this crazy place.

And, as I was struggling back to the storeroom with a pile of wooden swords, Zalibar walked past me. "Not too bad, " he said with a nod, "after that first embarrassment."

"That," Carodoc said when he was gone, "is high praise indeed from him."

When we were done with all the kit, we hurried over to wash our hands in the water trough... then we hurried into the kitchen.

It was a large, low beamed room, broader than it was long, with rough, heavy flagstones on the floor. In the middle was a long table, which looked as if it got a lot of scrubbing, and there were huge pans hanging from nails in the ceiling above it. There was an enormous, black cooking range in the back wall and, to its right, there were shelves with herbs and spices with knives and things hanging from hooks below.

But the most striking thing about the room, as far as I was concerned, was the delicious smell. When I saw a large pot of soup and plates of meat and cheese at one end of the table, I was reminded that it had been a long time since breakfast. "That looks good!" I said, my mouth watering.

"I'm sure it is," Carodoc agreed with a rueful grin. "Shame it's not for us."

There was a lady, putting a last basket of rolls onto the table. She was short and quite old and basically ball-shaped. "Have you all washed your hands?" she asked. "Let me have a look!"

So we all held out our hands for inspection like five year olds. "Not good enough, Bryn. Go and do it again."

"Should I do the soup, Cookie?" Carodoc asked, going over to some pegs behind the door and putting on a white apron.

"Yes, please, love," the cook answered. "Get someone to give you a hand."

"You can do that," Carodoc told me, chucking another one of the aprons in my direction. "Put this on and grab the pot."

I picked up the heavy pot and followed Carodoc up a flight of stone stairs in the corner. Behind us, the cook was organising the rest of the tyros. We went through a heavy wooden door and found ourselves in a small alcove, hidden from the rest of the room by a curtain. On the far side, you could hear people gathering.

I looked through the curtain at a huge dining hall. Two long, dark, wooden tables ran the length of the room whilst another was set on a dais at one end. Most of the chairs were quite simple but the ones at the top table were elaborately carved and, in the middle, dominating the room, was one that looked a bit like a throne. The place was quite dark because there were only windows on the courtyard side... none in the other walls.

It took me a couple of seconds to work out that the elegant young people who were gathering there were the nonda who'd just dumped their stuff out in the courtyard. They'd obviously been washing and changing and generally relaxing whilst we'd been tidying up after them. The wave of resentment and jealousy that I sort of expected was smoothed down to a slight twinge by my implanted node and, because of this, I could see that I wasn't really jealous of the fine clothes... or even the food. I'd never been all that bothered about that kind of stuff.

But if the world was going to be divided into the weak and the powerful, I knew which side I was going to be on

Carodoc nodded at two of the older boys who were standing like guards on either side of the door. "They're the Amendraig and the Armenclethyfur," he told me in a whisper.