Book One – Chapter 19

At least none of the guards demanded food. Throughout the whole time, they never settled in the common room. Deltington remained with Bubs. Estingar drifted in and out, mostly standing sentinel at the entrance until Gurs relieved him. After that, the ulbatan lingered just long enough to coax Harrow into letting him try her weird rock, then vanished upstairs. Yu knew there were guardposts above, and another somewhere along the eastern wing from where he had first entered the guild, though inside the building he had seen little more than the stairs between the common room and the washroom, and the corridor leading to his own petty cell.

Yu had not heard of any who-goes-where schedules, so he never knew when a guard would appear. Those who did appear did not approached him. No one corrected or directed his work. Estingar granted him the occasional nod, but that was really it. Yet Yu was not so dumb as to mistake their distance for disinterest. Of course they were watching. They assessed him, for sure, even if he did not see them do it. So Yu kept going with the drinks, and did his best to appear engaged, obliged and industrious; in short, idiotically eager to serve. And because he needed the exhaustion. He needed the body to smother the restless mind.

But the exhaustion refused to return. Not the right kind. Not the deep, settling heaviness that should have long sunk into him, after all the countless climbs up and down the stool, and the hour-long scooping of stew, and the never-ending lifting of bottles in between.

So he worked without pause, ferrying drinks and wiping up spills. In between all of that, he mopped the puddles of meltwater that had been tracked into the common room earlier — because of course he would do that too. That would well confirm to everyone that he was exactly the kind of idiot who thought of nothing but his work and dutifully absorbed every additional scrap of drudgery as if it were a personal honour; the sort who did all the wapa-shit and grunt work nobody asked for, and apparently fucking loved to do it twice, as though the afternoon humiliations had not yet met his daily minimum. Yes, Yu did all of that, while everyone else basked in the fire and watched.