Kings of the North by Elizabeth Moon

the cellar may not be completely safe. These Marshals and I have done what we can in a half-day’s time, but poor Jori’s death …”
    “How did he die?”
    “He thought an illusion was real and walked off the landing up there.” Dorrin pointed. “He fell into that trap.”
    The officer shuddered. “And you think there might be more?”
    “Not that we know of. But again—not until I have had this taken apart to the outermost walls, and those walls carefully examined, can I be sure it’s free of danger.”
    “My lord! The chickens are ready!” Efla sounded more like Cook every day.
    Dorrin’s stomach growled. She was suddenly ravenous. “If you can watch down here even the turn of a glass, I can offer the Marshals some supper.”
    “You haven’t eaten? It’s late.”
    Dorrin felt the last of her energy running out as if she were the hourglass. “We’ve been busy. Excuse me,” she said. “I need to go back upstairs.”
    Despite the stuffed rolls Inder had brought and the two baked chickens, it was a somber group around the kitchen table for supper. A faint odor of death seeped through the house along with the sharp fragrance of herbs. The two local Marshals went back to their own granges. The Marshal-General and Marshal-Judicar stayed, but the talk was all of Jori: things Dorrin knew and things the others knew from the days before she became Duke.
    “He had this girl,” Gani said. “From the same village and all. Pretty, she was, but then one of the lord’s sons saw her, and that was that.”
    “There was the time he lost his badge, remember?” Perin said. “You wouldn’t know this, m’lord, but the old duke-that-was, he’d have the hide off a man’s back for losing anything he provided, badge most of all. And Jori was sure he’d left it on the ledge in the bathhouse and someone tooken it. He even quarreled with Eddes about it.”
    Eddes swallowed and took up the story. “But it was Kir, really. Kir went off with them as fought the Fox—the king—that time and never come back. Anyway, he took Jori’s badge and threw it to that dog—the brindle mastiff the old duke had—to get Jori in trouble. I saw it in the kennel; the kennel man, he hadn’t seen it yet. Jori and me, we stole some meat and baited the dog, but it left tooth marks on the badge, and Jori was punished, just not as bad.”
    Jori had been, it seemed, the butt of many jokes, apparently because his girl had ended up in the Duke’s son’s bed. Dorrin felt sick at yet more evidence of her family’s cruelty, and yet she had always known. Why hadn’t she, in adulthood, told someone? Even Kieri? As a duke, perhaps he could have forced an investigation into Verrakai practices. If others had known, it could have been stopped sooner.
    She had little appetite after that thought and sat waiting while the others finished.
    “Is the chicken too dry, m’lord? I did it just like Cook taught me—”
    “The chicken’s fine, Efla.” Dorrin forced herself to eat the last of it. “I’m not as hungry as I thought.”

 
    A fter supper, all of Dorrin’s people except Jaim, who refused, went to see Jori one last time. Eddes and Efla broke down, sobbing; the other three stood a few minutes and then walked out. When they had all left, the yeomen of the burial guild wrapped Jori’s head until nothing could be seen but the white strips of cloth. Dorrin waited until it was done and then, as the Marshal-Judicar had quietly suggested, gave Kosa a Tsaian gold coin wrapped in a white cloth as a grange-gift.
    Before she left, the Marshal-General took Dorrin aside from the others. “Do not take this amiss,” she said, “but because of your family, no Marshal-General—no High Marshal, even—has visited your family’s domain for a very long time. With your permission, I would accompany you eastward—meet with any Girdsmen in Verrakai lands, and perhaps—if some evil still lingers—be of assistance.” Dorrin said nothing for a moment, and