Liveblogging - two

[desperance]

10,104 / 15,000 (67.4%)

Harlan has reached the palace kitchens, after - well, no, not adventures, it's not that kind of story. Delays and misadventures. He's depending on servants to grease his path to the chancellor - but what must he offer in return?

I don't know. I'm going to boil potatoes and carrots, and to roast carrots and butternut squash. It'll buy me time later, if I do it now; and by the time I get back, maybe I'll have figured out the cost of an introduction.




My own boots were the first to land, as was my right and duty. I leaped over the rail and landed two-footed and emphatic on the wharf.
I don't rightly know what I expected, what I was stamping against: a snake's welcome, perhaps, soft and sibillant, hissing at me from the shadows? That was surely how I saw the place: as a nest of serpents all writhing together, spies and assassins and traitors in exile from a dozen different lands, poison no doubt their weapon of first resort. Cowards and schemers they all were, in my head.
My head is a slow, dull thing. Even in my own country they call me "Harlan the Wily", expressly because I am not; Rulf should never have sent me to Skander. He should have known, not to do that. I was never the man for this.