Chapter 8 - The Bread Basket
The square emptied quickly once the King turned his back. Not because they were ordered to leave, but because ordinary people in Ravenford had spent three generations learning that when history happens too close to your front door, it is best to bolt the shutters and pretend you are boiling turnips.
Within ten minutes, only three figures remained in the center of the town: Adrian, Eleanor, and old Thomas Hart, who was hovering near the pump with his baker’s apron clutched in both hands like a prayer shawl.
"El," Thomas called out, his voice trembling across the empty stones. "El, come away from... come away from His Majesty."
Adrian looked down at his own feet. They were gray with frost-dust and smeared with old soot from the gorge. "Your father is right, Eleanor. You should go inside. The wind is turning from the north, and the bakery will be cold by now."
Eleanor didn't move. She reached down, picked up her wicker basket where it had fallen into the dirt during the scuffle, and checked the contents. The three rye loaves were still there, slightly bruised by the drop, but otherwise intact.
"The bread’s getting stale," she said quietly.
Adrian blinked, a slow, bewildered expression crossing his lean features. "What?"
"You missed your dinner," she said, looking up at him with those steady, gold-brown eyes that had looked into his dragon’s snout every evening for a thousand days without a tremor of fear. "And my father still has three sacks of rye that the carters couldn't sell to the garrison. If you’re going to stay in Ravenford, you’ll need more than a stone by the gorge."
A slow, dry sound escaped Adrian’s throat—not the rumble of a beast, but the first genuine laugh he had emitted since the smoke cleared from the Sunken Palace three years ago.
"You are a remarkably stubborn girl, Eleanor Hart," he said.
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"And you are a remarkably thin king," she replied, turning toward the lane that led back to the bakery. "Come along before my father closes the shutters. The oven’s still warm, and I saved a jar of blackberry preserves from the autumn harvest."
Adrian stood for a moment longer on the cracked stones of the square, feeling the cold air bite into his shoulders through his torn coat. Then, with a slight shake of his head, he stepped off the cobblestones and followed the baker’s daughter into the dark.
