"Joel Rosenberg - Omnibus 03 - To Home and Ehvenor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenberg Joel C)

Tennetty shook her head. "Not like the old days at the castle. Used to be you could hear a servitor
jump."

He made a be-still motion. Unsurprisingly, it worked, at least for now. After years as Karl's bodyguard
(that's the nice word for it) Tennetty had fallen into the same pattern with Karl's son.

It was just the three of us alone around the small round table in what had been the old cook's nook in the
castle, a small room between the kitchens and the formal dining room, its mottled glass windows covered
with bars on both inside and outside.

The table and room could handle as many as eight or ten people, so Jason had coopted it as a breakfast
room for the family three weeksтАФpardon me: two tendaysтАФbefore, when we'd arrived to take over
what had been Castle Furnael and now was Castle Cullinane.

Over the clatter of cups and saucers out in the kitchen, I could hear U'len berating one of the younger
cooks, her voice rising in simulated anger, then falling into real, grumbled curses.

Pick your theory: if you assume that what you need in staff is experience with the people living there, I
would have been tempted to do a complete staff switch with Thomen FurnaelтАФexcuse me, with the
Emperor Thomen. Plan A: screw itтАФpay the two dollars. Plan B would be to keep almost everybody in
place, under the theory that experience with the local facilities is the main issue. The baronial keep didn't
need a quarter the staff that the castle did, after all.

Either way would have been reasonable, either way would have worked, but nobody was asking Walter
Slovotsky's opinion. Ahira and I were teaching the boy about what we tend to call the family business,
but running a castle has never really been part of that, and we'd kept our opinions largely to ourselves.
Unsurprising, really, that Jason had settled on an untheoretical compromise: bring in a few of his own
people, keep on all but a few of the locals, and let them bump into each other all over the damn place.

Which is why the rolls were blackened on the bottom, my rooms hadn't been swept out in a
weekтАФalthough the flowers were changed dailyтАФand hot baths were just plain not available without
special arrangement and a lot of effort.

Tennetty gave a quick glance at Jason; he nodded, and she turned back to me. "Need some company?"

"Eh?"

"Need some company? Hunting?" She cocked her head to one side. "We were talking about hunting,
no?"

"Yeah. And not really, no company needed," I said, then changed my mind. "Well, come to think of it, if
you've got nothing better to do, sure." Unless you're burdening yourself like the White Knight, it's just as
well to carry an extra weapon, and that's what Tennetty was. Pretty good one, too.

She smiled. "Nothing to kill here but time."

I would have been a lot happier if she hadn't meant it. I was going to spend the morning bowhunting, in
part to stay out of trouble, but mainly for practice, and effect. I don't mind killing my own foodтАФback
when I was majoring in meat science, I slaughtered and butchered more than a lot of cowsтАФbut it