Enngel groans as she pulls on the table, unable to get it to budge. She turns away from Hester, who stands across from her, and turns to the common room. “G?ri’Seliani, can you give me a hand with this?” She asks, fidgeting with her braided hair, which flops over her shoulder.

  “Certainly.” Placing her book on the table next to her, Eue-Lysae stands up from her chair. Someone, whoever was on table-setting duty last year, had forgotten to wax the slides.

  Eue-Lysae places herself next to Gele and wraps her fingers under the apron. “Hold with all your weight, Fronika.”

  Nodding, Hester braces herself, planting her feet into the carpet and locking her arms.

  Enngel and Eue-Lysae begin to pull. Slowly starting to budge, the wooden table-slides creak and groan as they rub against each other.

  “This should be enough.” Eue-Lysae stops pulling when her feet leave the large carpet under the table.

  “How many people are coming?” Hester asks, looking up just in time to watch as the sudden stopping of the table causes Gele to lose her footing on the hardwood.

  Eue-Lysae places a hand behind Gele’s back, stabilizing her. “I’m sorry, I should have told you I was stopping; could you wax the slides before we put the leaves in?” She turns to Fronika. “There will be twenty-one, including us. I’m assuming Ilsenila will accompany Dyder, and Arn will accompany Faerthryne.”

  Hester nods and starts removing five of the dark oak table leaves from the kitchen storage.

  Eue-Lysae makes her way back to the common room to keep Morziwayn company while her coven works.

  Sprawled out on the leather couch by the fireplace, Morziwayn stares at the ceiling with her head hanging over the armrest. She remembers when the mural on the ceiling was painted, five... maybe six centuries ago. Who was the high priestess then? Who was the monarch? She delves into her memories but finds nothing—names, faces, voices, all long forgotten. Turning to Gyrshke, she asks. “What time will the others be arriving?”

  Eue-Lysae, not even back in her chair yet, turns around to Morziwayn, her wet red bob swaying as the girl moves her head back and forth, seemingly playing with it—and dripping water on the floor. “About an hour. More than enough time for you to take a towel and soak up the water on the floor under your head and dry your hair. You have a broken arm already; the last thing you need is a cold.”

  Flushing, Morziwayn jumps up from the couch and bolts to the door of the common room, hurriedly making her way to the bathhouse to get a towel.

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  “AN HOUR!” Faey yells from the kitchen. “I have an hour to cook all of this?” Pulling her hand from a goose, she motions to the food covering the counter, flinging apples and onions from the stuffing against the green tile backsplash. She does not know how she is supposed to cook four geese, fifty potato dumplings, fifty beef dumplings, five loaves of bread, and roast all the vegetables. What she remembers of the dinners with her family is foggy, but the servants surely had more time than this to prepare everything.

  “Calm down.” Says Gilg, trying to soothe the usually sensible freckled new girl; she had forgotten this was ?ppolonia’s first time cooking for the Day of Our Lady [1]. “We use the larger ovens in the kitchen attached to the great hall for the geese. Everything else tends to fit in the two we have here—though we are making a few more portions than usual.”

  Faey breathes a sigh of relief, thankful there are other ways to cook a goose on the college grounds. “We should put them in now, shouldn’t we? it’s still going to take 3 or more hours to cook all of them.”

  “We try to eat around 17:00... So yes, once they’re stuffed, we will bring them to the other kitchen; everything else goes in when everyone arrives.” Gilg adds another fistful of stuffing into the large goose in front of her.

  Faey nods and turns her head to face the archway into the common room. “G?ri’Seliani, do we burn the portion at the altar with everyone else?”

  “No.” Eue-Lysae, not looking up from her book, responds in a curt tone. She is really sick of having to answer this question. “She just eats it.”

  Elbow deep in the goose Faey stops, confused at the statement. “What do you mean she just eats it? where does it go when she appears and disappears?”

  “I mean, she appears and eats the food. She sits at the head of the table every year—it’s her birthday. She doesn’t cease to exist when you can’t see her; she’s still there.” Eue-Lysae pauses, only briefly, just enough time to look up from her book. “Which version of the Guardsmen have you read? the Magistrate version or the Ianian version?”

  “Only the Magistrate version.” They had not taught or provided access to the Ianian version of the Guardsmen when she was a handmaiden.

  Eue-Lysae groans—those useless hags. “Do you read old Ianian?”

  “Yes.” This she had been taught.

  “You can borrow my version—the annotations might help you. I want you to read at every spare moment you get. In the Magistrate version, the reason the Saintess is special was never specified; it only states that she was blind and a Daughter of the White Orchid. The Iania version, however, says something different: that the Saintess was not blind but instead had the ability to see the gods as flows instead of corporeal beings.”

  “And that she wasn’t a Daughter of the White Orchid?” Asks Faey.

  “Yes, correct; that is the reason Wylh?lm died. What I’m saying is that Our Lady is always here.”

  The cupboard above Faey creaks open and slams shut, scaring both her and Gilg immensely.

  Hearing the noise, Eue-Lysae returns to her book, figuring that Luhnylla has just proved her point for her.

  Faey calms down quickly after the scare and returns to hurriedly stuffing the goose before her. She is not entirely trusting of Elspeth’s timeframe.

  Footnotes

  [1] A day to celebrate the birthday of the wife of Wylh?lm Herst, Gyselle ?nnywella Herst (b. 06/11/4967 EotTS, d. 05/09/4999 EotTS). Homes will traditionally cook a large feast, with an extra portion for Gyselle. These portions are then left as a holocaust under the moonlight on either private altars or larger public ones.