Book One – Chapter 19

And then, just when he thought he was somewhat getting the hang of it, the fireplace people asked for drinks. They asked with such casual assurance certainty that Yu could only assume this was the normal routine. So he complied. Naturally, each of them wanted something different. From how quickly they fired their requests, they seemed to know exactly what was available. Yu did not. He struggled just to remember the four separate requests. Once Nion had asked for whatever Dundinway was, the others had immediately thrown in their own special wishes. Repeating the names under his breath, Yu trudged from shelf to shelf, hunting for bottles he had seen but not truly registered. He had already torn through the countless cupboards earlier when searching for drinkable stuff for himself, but since he remembered none of the unfamiliar names, he had to do it all over again. He ran around all four corners of the room, climbed up on a stool for every top shelf, and pushed mismatched bottles around and aside to decipher all their oddly foreign labels.

The Sharran Vey was still out.

Yu passed it again and again. He looked at it each time. Too often.

But he did not touch it.

He found the Dundinway first. In fact, it was the only thing he found. He dragged the tall bottle from the shelf, wrestled with the twisted bindings and the stubborn metal spring of its seal, and began to pour. He had thought the ladle had been humiliating enough, but smooth, rounded glass was worse. It was even harder because the bottle was full, which meant that tilting and spilling were essentially the same action. The moment Yu tipped it, liquid ran everywhere. Half fell into the mug. The rest slid down the neck of the bottle, over his feathers and across the workbench; a vivid sheet that gathered momentum as it drifted towards the edge. Acting on reflex, Yu snatched another mug, the nearest he could reach on the centre table, and held it beneath the overhang to catch the spill. Naturally, he got the worst one: one of the earlier bowls of stew. So now he held a mug of Dundinway laced with lumps of mush. He shoved the abomination far back against the wall, where it almost vanished underneath the shadows from the above cupboards.

After a moment’s consideration, he pushed the opened bottle of Vey back there as well.
             And then he wondered,
                     very seriously and for a very long time,
                                             how and when
                                    he had opened it.