Free Lamplighter by D. M. Cornish Page B

spittle flew.
    Wide-eyed, Noorderbreech stumbled back, mouth agape as if he were trying hard to prove Threnody’s insult true, finding for himself a vacant place at the far end of the other bench.

    THRENODY
    The prentices sitting near Threnody shifted away, afraid or glaring. No one other than Rossamünd dared put himself too near. Angry mutters began to stir. Rossamünd did not know what to say and fixed his attention on his food, avoiding every other eye in the room.Yet the filling of stomachs finally took priority even over so shocking an event as just witnessed. The hubbub of general chatter and the patter of forks and spoons on plates swelled once more.
    Threnody made to eat as if naught was wrong. “Who can eat this glue?” she snarled eventually, pushing the slopping pannikin of skilly away in disgust. “Must everything be against me today?”
    “Against you, miss?” Rossamünd dared after a few pensive chews.
    “I save us from the ambush of those ungotten baskets,” she suddenly fumed, floodgates inexplicably let free, “and all Lady Dolours can dwell upon is the possibility of bad things that never even happened! We were thrown about inside the drag, tumbled roughly in its wreck, and Dolours so unwell she was scarce capable of fighting. What else was I supposed to do?”
    Remembering the startling and dangerously incompetent effect of her wild witting, Rossamünd could not quite see how Threnody had done any more than make a bad situation worse. The way he remembered the play of things, it had ultimately been Dolours who had saved them all, the lamplighters included. Indeed, given that the prentices had dispatched two of the horn-ed nickers themselves, Rossamünd figured a little more gratitude might have been shown. Still, he held his tongue: he would not gainsay a woman in her distress, especially not one as fiery as this. She had done her bit, and had not flinched from the fight—and none should fault her on that. This girl had passion. All she needed was practice.
    “I reckon you did as boldly as you knew to, miss,” Rossamünd said matter-of-factly.
    She gave a little start, as if this was the last encouragement she expected.
    “You saw me take on those wretched bugaboos, then?” she said.
    Felt, more like . “Aye, miss.”
    “I’ll not shrink from the fact that I did not defeat them alone. Oh no,” she declared with a flourishing wave of her hand, “my sisters and I did it together, mastered and destroyed the nickers.”
    Rossamünd thought on the valiant fight the calendars had made as a troupe. “It was a genuine, heroical spectacle, miss,” he said. “I’ve never seen such a thing as happened last night.”
    “So it was, I know.Yet they made me apologize!” Threnody seethed. “They made me apologize to that . . . that pompous muck hill.”
    By “apologize” Rossamünd could only assume she had been made to repent of her clumsy, ill-advised witting; and by “pompous muck hill” she meant Grindrod, the lamplighter-sergeant. He thought she might consider herself fortunate not to have been made to apologize to the lampsmen and prentices as well—it was their lives she had endangered.
    “Yet it was we who were refused at Wellnigh!” She balled her fists.
    “Hardly seems fair, miss.”
    “Hardly, indeed! Pannette dead! Idesloe dead!” the girl continued. “And Dolours insists we make amends like your lot were the worst done by! To think I actually wanted to join in with you clod-headed blunderers!”
    “Don’t count me in too quick with the clodheads or the blunderers, miss,” he replied.
    “Well, since you are but half the size of all the other boys I suppose it would be hard to do so.”
    Rossamünd blinked at the sting of her insult. He knew he was undersized: his embarrassingly truncated fodicar was continual evidence. Dumbstruck and mortified that those near might have heard her, he realized she was no longer even paying him any mind. Instead she was looking up over