Chapter Text
1. Mayke
Kal laughed with her as they finished the jug of cheap wine between them, one of several Apollony and Octavia and Marcus had sent down to the kitchens while they finished their own supper with their parents upstairs. In a few hours Mayke would have to go upstairs to help put Apollony’s owly children to bed, but that wasn’t for a few hours yet. In the meantime, Mayke would linger over the nutcake and honeyed pears in the little corner by the kitchen hearth she and Kal had set up in.
"Do they have Cerealia in the north?" Kal asked, one eye closed to steady the bottle as he poured. They'd both had too much to drink, all the rest of the household staff busy running after the family.
"Aelfadienst?" Mayke said. "Not like this. If my mother could see me now,” Mayke laughed. Mayke would take roast goose, stuffed songbirds, and drinking cheap wine in the cellar with Kal over laying out the best of the harvest in the cold fields for the elves to take. Full and warm and wearing a collar was just fine with her, given the alternative.
Kal made a face as he set down the jug, more steady than he'd been a moment ago. Mouth twisted around something he wasn't sure he would say, always so charmingly transparent. "What was she like? Your mother?" Kal asked finally. He leaned back against the stone wall of the kitchen and pretended to not watch her sideways.
Mayke grimaced. "I don't know, a mother. What was yours like?"
Kal shrugged tightly. "I don't know. I was five or six the last time–I don't know. I don't remember."
Mayke frowned at Kal’s bent head. He wasn't asking what her mother was like, he was asking what his mother was like. Mayke's mother was a horrid bitch who slapped her soon as looked at her, and who'd expected her to marry and have ten whelps before thirty the same as she had done. Mayke tried not to think of her much.
"She was short, and thin," Mayke started. Because there'd never been enough to eat. She swirled the wine in her clay cup; she’d hated wine for–years, after Apollony bought her. "She made ashcakes the size of your hand and she'd turn them on the griddle with her bare fingers." Mayke hadn't seen her since she was fourteen or so. She'd been with Apollony longer than the family she'd been born in, Mayke realized with a jolt.
Bruno came down to the kitchen with some of the serving boys, helping juggle one of the big silver platters the family had been served from.
"Io Cerealia," Bruno said as he and the boys set down the platter. He gave Kal a sour look like Kal was a real rival for Mayke's attention. Which, maybe Kal could have been, if he wasn't so painfully young and so painfully pining after Marcus, but he was, so he was just a little brother, and that was that.
“Io Cerealia,” Mayke said to Bruno sweetly, giving him that look that got him flustered enough to shut up. Kal watched Bruno pick up a tray of gilded chestnuts and figs, warily like a hare with hunting dog.
"My mother always made an extra ashcake for the elves," Mayke said when Bruno had gone; Bruno didn't hold with any of that superstitious northern nonsense, born in the south with a collar like Kal. Kal's attention snapped back to her, his face pinched. Mayke leaned towards him to tell him the secret she hadn't thought about in years. "She said it was to keep the elves from stealing our food, and we were supposed to burn it. But she always gave it to me," Mayke said with a smile. Kal laughed, some of the tension gone out of him as she poured out a bit of wine in the ashes for the elves, like she did every Cerealia.
2. Teunis
“I don’t know anyone here,” Cyril said, hands tight around his battered hat as they stood in the doorway. Kal beside him looked about ready to bolt.
Alida Nothus' Cerealia banquet was too much, more than a hundred people in the rented hall. The only parties Teunis had been to like this were his master's, to be either decorative or passed around or both, and from the looks of them, Kal and Cyril had been the same. None of the three of them had worn a collar for almost a year, but with so many people passing plates it felt like it had been no time at all.
"Io Cerealia!" an older man with a northern accent said. "You're auntie's new boys come over the mountains, aren't you? Take what you like, there's more coming." He herded the three of them into the line for plates, an enormous roast goose at the far end of the table being served up.
"Uncle, we're not–" Kal started, sounding ill; they weren't citizens, they weren't free, and they weren't supposed to be there. Teunis didn't know exactly how Kal meant to finish that sentence, but he felt exactly the same. There was more food on the long tables than Teunis had ever seen in one place, nicer than anything his master had let him have and nicer than anything he'd ever be able to afford on his own.
The northern uncle looked at them very seriously, the line of others getting their plates moving around them. "It's your first Cerealia since the annexation, isn't it," he said. He turned his head a bit and pulled on his shirt collar, just enough for them to see the corded whip scars snaking over his shoulder just like Teunis'. "Take what you like and then come back for more, you're exactly where you ought to be."
Kal, Cyril, and Teunis glanced at each other. Behind them, there were little groups having the same conversation. "Io Cerealia," Teunis said finally, pulling Kal and Cyril along with him. "We're brothers now, you know us."
3. Marcus
"Io Cerealia," Marcus said, raising his glass to Kal's. The bright noise was clear in their little kitchen, quiet except for the noise of the fire in their big stove.
"Io Cerealia," Kal said, smiling down at his plate. It wasn't properly Cerealia; they'd have to attend at Apollony's for the large family dinner the next day, but Kal had insisted they have a private dinner just the two of them. And watching Kal cut into the roast pheasant their cook had left, with the pleased, secret way he kept looking around at their warm house, Marcus had to admit Kal had been right to insist. Among Marcus' many regrets was that Kal had spent most holidays alone or below stairs while Marcus was with his family; it wouldn't have been proper to spend a holiday together before.
"Don't forget to eat," Kal said, a little secret smile through his lashes when he caught Marcus gazing at him foolishly.
"I'm being properly grateful," Marcus said, and leaned in to kiss Kal tasting of wine.
4. Antony
"Shh, shhh," Antony whispered, laughing as he leaned into Mayke, trying to keep quiet at the sound of someone out in the kitchen.
"Don't you shush me," Mayke hissed back, too tipsy to be properly quiet. "You shush," she said as the doorknob turned and began to open to the housekeeper's pantry where they'd been hiding.
"So this is where you've been hiding," Kallius, Marcus' boy said, sagging against the door as he closed it. He wasn't so stuck up after all, not nearly as bad as Apollony had said. "You abandoned me with them."
"And now we've rescued you," Mayke said brightly, pouring him a glass of wine.
"I don't know how you manage it, I thought their mother alone was terrifying," Kallius said. Out in the dining room, Apollony's mother, father, sister, and assorted terrifying aunts and cousins were gathered around the grand table. Mayke and Antony had abandoned ship early on with a plate of cold goose and a bottle of wine, as had been their tradition for several years now. They'd left Octavia's poor husband Helios, who was too proper by half to escape to drink in the pantry, and Kallius, who by tradition as the newest in-law had to figure out how to abandon ship himself.
Mayke laughed indelicately. "What do you think we're doing in here?"
"Oh Antony, the children don't know a scyphus from a cantharus, they'll never amount to much," Antony said in a haughty imitation of Apollony's mother.
Mayke snorted, hiding her laugh behind her hands. "Don't you know, Marcus got highest marks in etiquette in finishing school," she added in a pitch-perfect imitation of Apollony's father.
"And look at him now," Kal sighed, a perfect echo of Apollony. The three of them dissolved into foolish giggles, Mayke almost spilling their stolen wine as she leaned into Antony trying to stop laughing. He put an arm around her waist, breathless on the warm smell of her and her bright laugh.
The door started to open again, jolting Kallius suddenly. He backed away from it, the three of them trying to pretend they weren't drunkenly giggling in the pantry.
"This is where you've all got to," Marcus said, poking his head in.
"We're taking shelter from the storm," Mayke said. Kallius snorted over his glass of wine.
"Can I hide in here with you?" Marcus asked, plaintive.
"I'm afraid not, chap," Antony said very seriously, handing Marcus the empty jug of wine and ignoring Marcus' look like he was going to spit nails. "That's your birthright out there, this hermitage is just for the poor souls who've married in. But you can bring us more wine." Antony shut the door behind Marcus, trying not to laugh.
"And more goose!" Mayke called through the door.
"And more nutcakes!" Kallius added.
5. Jacomin
"Io Cerealia," Jacomin yelled as she handed little baby Arent to Kal, loud over the noise of some dozens of cousins packed into the house. Arent, nine months old and trying to walk, bounced on fat legs standing on Kal's lap, holding his lapels.
Kal rolled his eyes at her as she left but smiled at Arent, the two of them with matching dimples. Jacomin didn't remember, being several years younger than him, but mama said baby Arent was the spitting image of Kal as a baby, all fat chunky thighs and gold curls and sunny smiles. Hard to imagine now with the way he kept every thought close to himself for fear of showing it to anybody, but with the baby bouncing on his lap it was easier to see.
Kal was finished with his supper anyway, and mama had been after him to adopt a baby with his stupid rich husband. He could mind the baby for a bit while Jacomin got her own food. She left Kal sitting in pride of place where mama and daddy could fuss over him and coo at the baby and went back to the kitchen to scrounge for scraps.
Jacomin elbowed her way through too many cousins eating up all their food and dodged past the packs of children racing unsupervised through the big house, sticky with nutcakes and honeyed pears and all the good things she'd never grown up with. The smell of roast goose and stewed fruit hung heavy and warm in the house, full of too many people and too much food.
Lyntie stood with her hands on her hips in the kitchen, frowning at Kal's stupid rich husband. "What did you do?" Jacomin sighed. She'd told Kal his stupid husband was bound to say something stupid sooner or later, but he'd let Marcus wander off unsupervised anyway.
"I only said–" Marcus started.
"That you'd never seen so many helots outside of a field," Lyntie finished for him.
"You're so stupid," Jacomin sighed, going to pick the shredded leavings off the goose and serve herself stewed quince.
"I know," Marcus said, resigned. At least he knew he was stupid, Jacomin supposed.
+1. Kal
Kal dithered in the parlor, unsure what to do with himself. Between their cook and Marcus, supper was finished, the cook putting the last touches on the goose in the basement kitchen and Marcus finishing the table setting. Kal had no idea what to do with his hands or the rest of himself, trying to keep himself from going to twitch the front curtains every two minutes. There would be no hiding in the kitchen, not when he and Marcus were hosting both their families together for the first time.
"It will be fine," Marcus said, coming to kiss him again as the front bell rang. "They can only stay so long." With that, Marcus went to answer the door, Kal hovering behind him.
Mayke, bless her, led up the parade with a dish of what smelled like stewed quinces in hand, Apollony and Antony behind her, the children behind, and Marcus' parents last of all. Mayke passed the quinces to Marcus and went to kiss Kal on the cheek as Marcus hung up coats. "They're all on their best behavior," Mayke said quietly as she brushed a kiss across Kal's cheek. "And I'll come hide with you in the kitchen if they're not."
Kal nodded tightly, barely hearing her. The house felt too full already, so many people in their narrow townhouse. Kal twisted his hands together and took a breath.
Marcus' mother watched Kal approach to kiss her hand, Marcus to one side and his father to the other. She'd dressed informally in a brown coat and skirt, like she had been a grocer and not one of the most formidable architects of the old regime. Mayke's doing, Kal thought, to make her seem less fearsome than she was.
He took her hand to bow over it, sure she could feel his hands shaking and aware of everyone in the room watching him. His mouth felt too dry for words. "Mother," Kal said formally for the first time, because Marcus had thought he ought to. He straightened and stepped back, unable to look up from his shoes in his own house.
"Io Cerealia," she said, and stepped forward to kiss him on the cheek. Marcus behind her sagged with relief.
"Isn't this lovely," Marcus' father said brightly, the whole family coming back to life around them. "Marcus, what a pretty house you keep."
"Thank you, papa," Marcus said dutifully, going to the sideboard to begin to pour drinks.
"You should see their garden," Antony said, guiding Marcus' father back to see the cold back garden.
The doorbell rang again. Kal traded looks with Mayke as he went to answer the door. One hurdle down, only hundreds more the rest of the evening.
"This house is too big," Kal's mother said, fretting as soon as he opened the door. Kal's father, Jacomin, and her husband stood on the step behind her.
"Mama, it's just as big as it was yesterday," Jacomin sighed, following her in with little baby Arent in her arms. Not so much a baby anymore, almost three and trying to wiggle out of Jacomin's arms. Kal hung up their coats in the foyer, achingly aware of Marcus' family waiting in the parlor.
Then there was no putting it off any longer and Kal could all but feel his mother vibrating with tension beside him as he took her hand on his arm to lead her into the parlor.
Around them, everyone held their breath again. "Mother," Kal said, trying not to think about what it would have been like before, his mother and Marcus' mother in the same room before the annexation. "Madame Livia Hortensiae. Madame, my mother Janneke Geertruidae."
There was a minute beat as Marcus' mother glanced from Kal to Marcus, Kal's mother's hand tightening on his arm. "A pleasure, madame," Marcus' mother said finally, holding out her hand to take Kal's mother's hand in hers like they were new friends. "Io Cerealia. Come sit with me, Marcus has told me so much about you."