Eat the Poor

XXXV

Drunken laughter rang out as I followed the path from the gardens to the stable. The sun shone overhead, glinting in my eye. Charles' words swam in my head. I couldn't shake the image of the Lord Chamberlain and the King. Lovers.

Another burst of laughter. Slumped in the shade of the hedges, a bottle between them, Geoff sat with two other men in the grass.

Our eyes met once, and then his dropped.

A coat of mauve. Long greasy hair. Grime in the creases of his wide palms, dirt caked beneath broken fingernails.

Disgust crept up my throat. The days spent at Court with baths and fine perfumes had nearly washed my memory clean of what it meant to live this way. Nearly.

"What are you doing here?" I asked lowly. "You lot shouldn't be up here." The sick stench of the slaughterhouse hung on him, on all of them. Smears of red stained their clothes. Flashes of pigs on hooks dangled in my mind, blood still dripping from their throats.

The men all gazed at me with the same expression, lazy, squinting against the sun, distrustful. Like they were daring me to turn them in.

If I am not one of you, who am I?

"You a guard now... Auden?" Geoff circled the rim of the bottle with one finger before flashing me a smile. His teeth showed, lip curled a little before the scowl returned. He said the words slowly, surely so I would understand. Then I would have to kill you.

"Still slicing up pigs, Geoff?"

"Still slicing up men?" he returned, just as vicious.

Immediately my eyes flashed to the other two men. They made no visible reaction, just stared at me with those drunk, defiant eyes.

"Shouldn't have told me what you did to Fletcher." Geoff leaned back with a contented smile, one ankle crossed over the other. "Good man, he was." The man beside him raised the bottle and took a swig.

"If you think I killed him, why not report me?" Nerves pricked along my skin at the memory of that night. The butcher's blood on my knife. On my fingers. In my mouth. I eat you, pig.

Geoff laughed. Leaned back and let his head loll on his shoulder. "When rats kill rats in the dungeon, do you think they bother to report it to us?"

I stumbled back. The heat and the memories were enough to turn my stomach. I walked down the path without a word, trying to shake his sickening laugh from my mind.

A rustle of grass. Behind me, Geoff climbed to his feet, wiping both palms on his trousers. Left the bottle for the other two. The corners of folded parchment stuck out from the pockets of his mauve coat. His hair clung to his neck in stiff, greasy strands.

"You kill since?"

My stomach lurched. "No."

"You want to?"

A flash of red. Bubbling heat. A low hum in my head like screaming. A rotting pig's head with vines of green and black. A sweet, sickly smell.

Yes.

"Someone bigger than Fletcher?" Geoff turned to the chipped stone wall of the castle. "Someone up there?"

I angled my gaze up, past the darkened windows, where the towers seemed to break past the sky. There was something devastatingly distant about them. Distant and unattainable.

"Do you ever wonder what we could have been?" I whispered. "If we weren't born rats?"

The look in his eyes told me he did. Every day. Despite all else, we would always have that in common.