"I can take the bed linen you wanted washed," Ilna said to Lora from the kitchen doorway. "I'll have it back to you tomorrow evening if the weather holds."
Lora was sitting in the corner beside the stone ledge on which she'd mixed bread dough and set it to rise. She looked up sharply. "I'd given up on you coming," she said with peevish belligerence. Her cheeks were puffy and her eyes red. "I thought you'd forgotten."
"I don't forget work I've said I'll do," Ilna said in cold distaste. "Do you want me to do the wash for you or not?"
Lora rose from her stool and began beating the unbaked loaves into shape again. She'd allowed the dough to rise too high, then collapse in ugly smears across the ledge. The loaves, though made from wheat as table bread, would have the wooden consistency of rye-flour trenchers by the time they came out of the oven.
"Yes, go on, take it," Lora said. "I don't have much choice but pay you, do I, now that Sharina's gone?"
"I was waiting for that mob in the common room to leave before I came over," Ilna said. The clothes hamper was a large wicker basket near the courtyard door, handy both for the well and cauldron in which the linen would be boiled if washed in the inn. "I didn't want to be mistaken for one of them. Trying to impress a woman from Ornifal!"
"They're nobles, you know," Lora muttered as she knuckled the dough angrily. "That Benlo may claim he's 'or-Willet,' but there's a 'bor' in the name he was born with or may the Lady withdraw her favor from me."
"Where is she now?" Ilna asked. She stretched a sheet out on the floor, then started to lay the remaining laundry in the center of it. Her grim mood matched Lora's, though the reasons for it were different. "The fancy woman?"
"Out, I gather," Lora said without particular interest. "On the beach with Garric."
Ilna staggered, though the news was exactly what she'd feared from the moment she laid eyes on the strange woman in her fine clothing. Ilna knew Valles fashions. The merchants she sold to made sure that she did when they placed orders for the fabrics she was to weave for them to pick up on their next trip through Barca's Hamlet.
"On the beach?" she repeated coldly. "Well, that doesn't surprise me. No better than they should be, these fine ladies, I'm sure."
"I treated Sharina as if she was my own daughter!" Lora said. Her hands clenched in the dough. She stood rigid for a moment, looking as if she was about to resume crying. "Better than I would have treated my own blood, because I knew she was real nobility. And what does she do? Cast me away as soon as she comes into her due!"
Ilna folded the corners of the bottom sheet over the rest of the laundry and tied a double knot. "Yes," she said, looking at Lora with eyes as hot as the embers beneath the oven, "you did always treat Sharina better than you did your own offspring."
She shouldered the linen, a bundle bigger than she was. The soldiers had soiled every sheet in the inn during their stay.
At the door she looked back. Lora hadn't moved.
In sudden anger Ilna said, "Not every woman in the borough is as great a fool as Garric's mother, unable to see his merits, you know!"
And as she stumped out into the night with the bundle of washing she added under her breath, "And that Ornifal slut won't have him!"