Victor Grimholt's Arc

Chapter 9 of 9

The rumor reached Victor at the market on a gray morning. A woman selling turnips would not meet his eyes. A boy pulled his sister to the far side of the road. Then the baker leaned over her counter and told him plain: someone had been saying a butcher was no fit father, that a child raised among hooks and blades would grow crooked or worse, that the proper folk should write to the officer who handled such things. Victor thanked her. He walked home with Lunella asleep against his coat and set her in the basket. He put his hand on the pocket over his ribs where the cloth lay. Then he sent word to three doors. They came before dusk. Zephyr Myrrh arrived first, blue and bright under a chef's hood, carrying a covered pot that steamed through its lid. Elliro Fernspire came next, leaves rustling at their shoulders, a small wrapped bundle in one green hand. Queen Melisandra came last, wings folded small in his doorway, her crown catching the low light. She looked at the sleeping baby in the basket and her face softened. "Tell us who is speaking," she said. Victor named the man the baker had named. Melisandra nodded once. "Then we answer at the coliseino tomorrow, in front of the market crowd. A whisper dies loudest in open air." They planned it at his table. Zephyr would set a table of food outside the great mossy hall and call people to it, loud as he always was, and while they ate he would tell them how Victor had asked him for a soft porridge recipe for a teething child. Elliro would bring the bundle: a carved wooden rattle they had shaped from swamp cedar, and they would say, in that leaf-rustle voice, that a man who commissioned a toy was a man building a life. Melisandra would stand last and speak as queen. Victor listened. He did not like being spoken for. But he looked at Lunella in the basket and he nodded. The next day the crowd gathered under the neon and vine of the great hall. Zephyr ladled stew and shouted the story of the porridge. Elliro held up the rattle and pressed it into Lunella's fist, and she shook it and laughed, and the sound carried. Then Melisandra stepped forward. She did not raise her voice. She said Victor Grimholt was her friend, and that any petition against his guardianship would first cross her desk, and that she would answer it. The man who had whispered stood at the back of the crowd. He did not speak. He turned and left. That night Victor set the rattle beside the leather hare in the basket. Lunella slept with one hand on each. He sat by her and felt the weight in the pocket at his ribs and knew the town had heard him now. He also knew the man who had left the crowd had not spoken because he had not yet been answered. The door held. It would be tested again.