Excerpt: Diary of a Henchman

Day 43
First Day at the Keep, 37 YKAA

Ma let me sleep later than she should’ve. She said I needed all my wits about me that day. While I was breaking my fast (Ma made her special holiday bread for me, toasted it and served it with honey – my favorite), I saw and carrying my mattress rolled and bound out the door. Da asked them what they were about and told him she was following Ma’s instructions.

When I finished eatin, Ma had me board the wagon beside her. There was more stuff in it than I owned. Ma said she was lendin me the things that I might be needing sooner then they’d be unpacked. She couldn’t trust an alchemist to be knowin his henchman (she said that was my proper position, I wasn’t just any servant but I shouldn’t fret over what others called me) would be needin a bed and a man always slept better on his own mattress.

She did most of the watchin over the cleanin. She had the carpets unrolled and beaten – they smelled like horse pee and wild flowers. Ma said I better get used to it – an alchemist’s brews could smell like almost anything. Most of em had burn marks here and there. Ma said get used to that too. I don’t know how Ma knows so much about alchemists, but she was too busy to answer when I asked.

Ma did show me the BEST thing in the keep. It has a garderobe! No outhouses or chamber pots for us! We are too fine for things such as that. Ma told me all about them – the night dirt and waters go down into a great pit beneath the Keep. She said if we could figure out where that was it’d be the best place to plant a kitchen garden come spring.

Everybody has gone home now and its just me in the Keep. Ma told me that there weren’t any ghosts in here. I woulda felt better had she said ghosts didn’t exist. She ain’t wrong about much, but she ain’t infal right about everything either. I keep telling myself that it’s the wind whistling thru the shutters and the stairwell and not dead highwaymen and cutthroats whispering to each other before they do something I’d rather they not. It’s not working well. I think maybe I’ll go downstairs and build up the fire in the kitchen. Master Alazzar might be looking for something warm to eat when he gets here.