THE DINNER THAT WAS NEVER BROUGHT UP

A Tale of Sogmarsh — told by the tray.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

I am a tray.

Ash wood, warped, and so heavy with two hundred years of Castle Bastable's grease that I have stopped being furniture and become, more or less, geology. For all that time I have rested exactly twelve steps below the parlour floor, on the cold stone lip of the cellar stair, held up by the trembling thumbs of a man named Sozzle who is, at every single moment, just about to climb.

I have never seen the parlour. I know it only as a rumour of warmer air leaking down the stairwell, and as a sound: the small, patient creak of a chair that will not be moved.

Let me tell you what I carry, since no one else will look.

There is a bowl of mutton broth. It was, once. It has since grown a thick grey pelt of mould so deep and so hairy that it breathes — rising and falling, gently, with the damp of the cellar, like a sleeping thing that would rather not be disturbed. Beside it sits a dish of cold pease pudding, which over the centuries has calcified into a single sulphurous brick; you could build a wall with it, if you had no neighbours you liked. And there is a tankard of ale, long since fermented down into a black, volatile tar that bubbles to itself in the dark and, now and again, swallows a stray petrified cellar-beetle whole, with a small, satisfied gloop.

The mould, I should say, is now load-bearing. It is the only thing holding the pewter spoon up; beneath it the wood of me has rotted to lace, and were it not for an enterprising blue-green crust spanning the gap, the spoon would have dropped into King Tiddles' drains around the reign of the third bad Bastable.

By every law the cook ever swore by, this dinner should be cold. Stone cold. Cold as the stair, cold as the grave, cold as a Pennyworth handshake.

It is not.

Deep in the centre of the mutton bowl, under the breathing pelt, under the grease, under two hundred winters of stagnant cellar air, there is a small stubborn knot of warmth. It has no business being there. It defies every sensible thing. And I have had a long time, balanced here in the dark, to work out why it persists — and it is not physics.

It is that Sozzle is still holding me.

Not idly. Not asleep, whatever the upstairs gossips say. He holds me the way a man holds the last thing that matters: with his whole trembling weight tipped forward toward the climb he means to make, because somewhere up those twelve steps there is a woman, and the winter was coming, and he wanted — he wanted, fiercely, with everything a careful man has instead of words — for her to have one hot meal before the cold set in.

Her name is upstairs. I have never seen her. But I have heard her, all this time: the creak of the chair she will not move. They tell me — the beetles tell me, the draughts tell me — that her slippers have worn two shallow, perfect dips into the parlour floorboards, just there, by the head of the stair, where she sits and listens. She could move the chair. She could turn it to the fire. She does not. Because to move the chair would be to face the stair, and to face the stair would be to see that it is empty, and to see that it is empty would be to know — and knowing is the one dinner she will not be served.

So she waits at the top with her two worn dips in the floor, and he waits at the bottom with his trembling thumbs, and I wait in between with my breathing broth, and none of us, you understand, can finish.

The night does not quite end. The chair does not quite still. The last bell — there is a bell, I am told, that a butler rings when the day is truly done — does not quite ring. And I do not quite go cold. Forever, and forever, and one more forever after that.

I have had two hundred years to consider my position, and I have reached a conclusion, which I offer to you free of charge, since I am a tray and have no other use left:

It is a terrible thing to be permanent, and better by far to be finished — but if you must wait forever, wait as Sozzle waits: holding something warm for somebody else.