OOC: Tags to
@Draco !
The cook carried over a half dozen dead, black-and-white feathered chickens by their neck and plopped them down on the worn wooden worksurface in front of her. "There, you can pluck and clean those."
The cook was an old, rotund woman who'd worked at Wulfbauer Keep for as long as Constance Carwick, or Olive, could remember. She certainly was there when Olive had been a girl. Once upon a time, when Olive was a duke's daughter and only entered the kitchen to steal a cake or cookie. It felt like a lifetime ago. But Olive had to wonder if that was why the old cook kept giving her these jobs; in hopes of scaring her out of the kitchen. But Constance Carwick wasn't a duke's daughter anymore, however much the new duke might like to wave her around like a banner: 'The Last Carwick.' No, Olive had changed in the last five years. She couldn't bare the idleness of her house arrest. In her years away from Wulfbauer, idleness had only ever been a punishment. In the mage camps, she'd had work duties like all the others, save only for when running her mouth had landed her locked away in a solitary cell for a few days in hopes of shutting her up. And when she wasn't working under the yoke of the guards, she'd still been active. She'd been always active. Working with the underground in the camps, taking advantage of her social standing to take risks others couldn't afford, always doing something, something useful. And the years after the camp? She didn't dare breathe a word of those years to anyone other than to Erwin Therrien, and to him only as much as truthfulness dictated. Needless to say, they had been just as active. Not with 'working' in the same sense, but fighting. Fighting against the army and the government, that sought to wipe them out, and fighting to survive. It was a constant struggle, and one she believed in. Or... Yes, she told herself, she did. What happened in Hellvion wasn't what she had been fighting for. She believed in everything, she told herself, that she'd fought for.
So the isolation and idleness of the first weeks of her house arrest, here in the house that had once been her home, had been torturous for her. In addition to the madness of being always idle, Olive had also been so
alone looked away in the East Wing. She'd almost never been alone between entering the mage camps, and being brought in shackles to Wulfbauer. So once Erwin Therrien had loosened the conditions of her 'stay' in Wulfbauer, and once her shoulder had healed from the bullet and buckshot the corrupt guard had slugged into it, she sought out anything to do to keep busy. Not just busy - she could, like any young noble lady, cross stitch or play instruments or read or whatever - not just busy, but useful. She'd proved useful, perhaps, as the rather unofficial advisor to the Duke, but he called on her sporadically. Olive needed to fill the hours in her day. Her first thought was that perhaps she could work with Bairn in the stables. The work suited her more, and Bairn had been something of a second father to her as a child. But the stables, of course, were outside of the house, and Olive was still a 'flight risk.' She wondered, too, if there wasn't some effort to keep her from being too close now to the staff most sympathetic to her. So instead she'd come to the kitchens to beg work, any work! The cook was shocked at the idea - Lady Constance! In the kitchen!? - and many of the younger kitchen maids looked shocked as well. But, lucky for Olive, one spoke out in her favor, reminding the cook that they were short staffed anyway after Anna married and left service. Olive hadn't learned the real reason the maid, whose name was Astrid, had spoken up for her until later.
But that had been a week prior. Here she was, working just alongside the cooks and kitchen maids, dressed much the same as they were, and the cook was still trying to scare Olive out of the kitchen. Scrubbing gross pots, cleaning the ovens, and now plucking the chickens. So far, however, she hadn't succeeded in fazing the girl. Olive simply laid out the birds and got to work. She'd done the same with wild game birds more than once during her years in the wild.
The other thing that was useful, or interesting, at least, about working in the kitchen was that it was one of the best places to be if you wanted to know what was going on in the Keep. Olive had to say, she was quite impressed by how much of the Keep's going-ons the staff knew! And it made her blush a little to think of what all they'd known when she'd lived here
before! She'd learned a number of enlightening things so far (and many unenlightening things), but always kept her ears open for some other news: What had become of the stablehand's boy? Bairn's son, Vale. All she could get out of Grace was that he'd left for the army and, yes, he was still alive, and any further discussion of the topic was quickly steered away. Grace, of course, had never approved of her mistress's daughter running around with the stablehand's boy! The stablehand! Servants, it turned out, were sometimes twice as elitist as the nobles they worked for. On that day, Olive hadn't been thinking of him, not at the front of her mind, anyway. Her thoughts were circling around Lord Kenins and what would come of his open challenges to the duke, and what would become of Wulfbauer, until she heard something.
A voice in the hall that made her heart stop. All other thoughts evaporated from her mind in an instant, replaced by a loud thumping of her heart in her head. Suddenly, Olive felt terrified without knowing at all why. Her brain said,
'Go, see who it is!' But her feet were planted firmly in place. What if it wasn't? What if she was wrong? What if -
But the questions stopped when a tall young man, lugging along a sack of flour that'd just been delivered, walked awkwardly into the kitchen. Olive dropped the half-plucked chicken, causing a flurry of feathers.
