Chapter 39
Mother’s Sugary Tea Cakes
This was my mother’s favorite recipe for sugary cookies. Take 2 cups of good flour, well sifted, and add to it a cup of well powdered sugar, three pinches of salt and a quarter pound of softened butter. The butter should be soft, but not runny. Stir well until all is well mixed. After that, add the yolks of two eggs and a fourth of a gill of cream. Mix these, not with your spoon or whisk, but by hand. It will form a ball, with a texture not much different than potter’s clay. When it reaches that stage, dust your kneading board with a little flour and knead it until it’s more pliable. It shouldn’t take many pushes.
Divide the dough into lumps the size of walnuts. Roll the balls in sugar, not so finely powered as the sugar you made the dough with. You could also use seeds like Anise. You could add a little rosewater to it for flavor, but you’ll have to subtract a bit of cream to keep the dough from getting too wet. Crushed almonds work, too. Bake the cakes in a quick but not too hot oven. When done, they will be only the tiniest bit brown. You could dust with more sugar if you like.
Recipes from the Kitchens of Comrie , edited by Mella Cowrie. Recipe by Gan Thistleberry
At DIC Headquarters in Sunderland, a bemused Haran followed Tansy into the foyer of the DIC building, and didn’t even blink at the jar of no-space transport from the foyer to the main office of the center.
“Here we go,” Tansy said, throwing open the main door. “Don’t let anybody here get on your nerves. They’re all lower level than the people you’ll be answering to.”
The room they entered was filled with desks, maps, chart, and doors to other offices. One place near the front was marked “Reception,” and a young, grayscaled Dragonkin woman in a neatly pressed uniform sat behind the desk. Her exposed wings flickered momentarily as she waved for them to come towards her.
As they neared, she looked down at a document laying on her otherwise mostly clear desk, then looked up and met his gaze with an officious but determined look, as if challenging him. Haran raised an eyebrow and stifled a grin as he waited for her to begin.
“You are Margani Haran?” Her voice was soft, but edged with iron.
“I am,” Haran said, nodding. He kept his voice calm, not responding to her invitation to be irritated.
This was not as true for Tansy. “You know who he is, Zedna,” she butted in, rolling her eyes. For a moment Haran thought she was going to take him by the arm and drag him off, but she didn’t. Still, her ruff colored up with impatience. “What other Jinn would dare walk in here?”
“It’s just for the record, and part of my job, Tansy.” Zedna’s tone was mildly disapproving, less gruff than Haran had expected, evidently pleased at Tansy’s reaction. “You know that. It all goes on record,” she said. Opening the desk drawer, she pulled out a small flat device attached to a cord. “Here. This device will give you access to everything that Master Investigator or Commander Byrony has decided you need access. You should feel impressed. That’s more access than most of us have.”
He took the device from her hand and examined it. It resembled a jumpstone, a polished slap of some agate-looking stone. The cord it was attached to looked to be a simple black leather thong. It tingled in his hand. “Touchstone powered?”
The receptionist nodded. “It’s already activated, but if an emergency happens and you need to shut it down, there’s a button on the back. It will require Byrony or Master Investigator to reactive it, though, so don’t do it lightly.”
Haran nodded, examined the back, and noticed a darker, round spot on the device, and put it around his neck. “Thank you.”
“Well, Master Investigator and his team are waiting for you. Do hurry him through, Tansy,” Zedna said. “You can give him the grand tour later.”
Tansy’s ruff turned dark and laid down, an obvious sign of her displeasure, while Zedna’s signaled some amusement. Haran looked at his escort, half expecting her to say something in retort, but instead, she took a deep breath. “Zedna is right. I need to get you to Bryony. He’s waiting for you. Come on.”
Tansy led him past the maze of desks in the main room. It was filled with mostly gray scaled Dragonkin. Heads turned as he passed by, and a few wings fluttered, but most of them seemed to be engaged in record keeping and analysis jobs and had no time to give him more than a little glance. Unlike the smartly uniformed Zedna, few of them were in uniform, although a number of them had their uniform jackets draped on their chairs. It gave a colorful effect; most of the gray scaled evidently favored bright colors for their shirts. Several of them who were busy writing had their sleeves rolled up to prevent ink stains.
“Most of the people here are lower level paper pushers,” Tansy said, as they passed by a worker working behind a mountain of books and loose papers. “Support people. It’s considered quite a cushy position for those who survived their first year. Everybody that matters has their own office.”
“So what’s your excuse, Tansy?”
The person who said that didn’t bother to look up. Haran was beginning to get the feeling that Tansy, not being a gray scale, had some problems with the lower ranked people working here.
“Someone has to keep the uppers in tea and run interference, Gerrand,” Tansy replied, with an acid smile. “Don’t mind them, Haran. It’s what Byrony thinks about you that really matters.”
“It’d take someone like Byrony to bring in a Jinn on this case,” someone muttered. “Hope President Grimsbeard can take the heat once the word gets out.”
Tansy ignored him, walked to a desk in the very back, not far from what Haran suspected was the break room, as the door was open and he could see tables and chairs and a counter with cups laid out on a tray. The desk had a small name plate emblazoned with “Tansy Redwood.” It had a scattering of curios on it, a stack of papers, and an empty tea mug.
The two of them passed Tansy’s desk, and she went to a door right behind her place. She knocked. A muffled voice bid them enter.
“Let me know if you need anything. Have fun with the big boys.”
Tansy opened the door and Haran stepped in.
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In Pixie Hollow, Gan was working in her kitchen. Moxie was sitting on the fireplace mantle, intentionally not talking.
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Arne flittered by, landing next to the little woman. She gave him a hard shove, knocking him off. “She’s in a mood,” he said, and flew off to a safer perch by the kitchen window.
“I’ve noticed,” Gan said, taking an onion out of the bin. Going to the kitchen counter, she deftly peeled it, and grabbing her cutting board, sliced and began chopping it. “She won’t tell me why, though.”
Onions done, she scraped them into a bowl and went back to her bin to grab a head of cabbage and a couple of carrots.
Gilly flew in through the open door, followed by Dahlia who carried a tiny flower from a henbit plant. They sat on each side of Moxie, but didn’t say anything. Moxie didn’t acknowledge them with words. All she did was cross her legs in the opposite direction. Gilly and Dahlia exchanged glances, and Dahlia began playing with the little flower in her hands, twirling it.
Gan cleaned and chopped the carrots, then shredded the cabbage. She put her spider frying pan over a hot bit of fire, and let it warm up. Very carefully, she sliced some bacon into thin slices, and then cut them into quite small pieces. When done, she put the bacon and onion into the frying pan.
“Making soup?” asked Rosebud asked, flying in. She landed on Gan’s shoulder.
“Trying to,” Gan said. She moved over to the fireplace with a huge spoon. She gave the bacon and onion a stir, then lifted the soup pot, where the beans she soaked the night before were bubbling, more than half done. She gave it a good stir, then put the lid back on. “After I get the soup on, I’ll bake the bread and make something else. We still have enough pie left over from yesterday.”
After another stir of the bacon and onion mix, she added the carrots and cabbage and threw in a bundle of herbs – thyme, oregano, marjoram. She added a bay leaf and some black peppercorns. Giving the bacon and onion one more stir, she lifted the frying pan off the fire, and poured its’ contents into the pot. Setting the spider to the side, she gave the pot a final stir, added a bit more water, and lidded it.
“It smells so good,” Rosebud said. “It’s making me hungry.”
Arne flitted down to the table. “Me, too.”
“Hungry, eh?” Gan said. “Everybody had breakfast who wanted to.” She gave Moxie a look, knowing the little Pixie had refused to come in and eat. “Let me see after I get the bread in and these dishes washed. I have a special treat for you all. I was going to save it for after lunch, but maybe we’ll have it for a snack.”
Moxie looked up briefly at the words special treat, then went back to pouting, hoping Gan hadn’t seen her. Gilly and Dahlia had, though, and shared knowing looks.
Hillby flew into the kitchen. “Is it lunch yet?”
Gan, who was raking coals out of her bake oven, shook her head. “I just put the last things in the soup pot.”
He plopped on the table, and sitting there crosslegged, sigh. “But it smells like lunch.”
“That’s because lunch is cooking,” Arne said. “But Mistress Gan promised us a treat.”
“After I wash up,” Gan said. She slid pans of risen bread dough into the bake oven and closed it shut. “Now, time to clean up.”
She put the kettle on to boil water, and gathered the skillet, the cutting board, the bowls and other miscellaneous kitchen tools and gave them a good washing in her dish basin. As she dried the utensils and put them away, she noticed Moxie glancing at the kettle.
“There’ll be clouds without rain in just a moment, Moxie dear,” Gan said, putting up the spider.
The Pixie huffed, but didn’t stop watching.
First, Gan prepped her teapot. Next, she wiped down the table and counter. Third, Gan took a saucer out of the cabinet. A few other pixies wandered in: Bu, Cowslip, Damask, Rufus.
“I do believe that you Pixies have a special magic that lets you know when I’m getting ready to give out special things,” Gan said.
“Yes we do,” said Cowslip, landing on the edge of the table. “Something tingles inside my head.”
“Me too,” said Bu, sitting on the window frame.
Gan tilted her head to one side, and tapped her bottom lip.“I never knew that,” she said. “It’s going to make it very hard to surprise you.”
She took a cup and a couple of saucers out of the cupboard, and grabbing a folded towel, took the kettle out of the fire, and poured it into her teapot. Reaching for a canister, she opened it to add three cookies to one of the saucers.
She turned around and faced the group of Pixies. “Sugar cookies, anybody?”
Moxie’s eyes grew wide and she shot up into the air, flying circles around Gan’s head. She began to talk in rapid, breakneck speed. “You were gone so long, two days in a row. Places we couldn’t go with you. I could smell cookies on you when you came home, but you didn’t share. I didn’t know what was wrong. I was afraid you didn’t like us any more. I was afraid I did something wrong. I was afraid Arne had done something wrong. I was scared. Then I was angry because I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. And you just did all your morning stuff without trying to make me talk about it and I knew you had started to hate us all.”
She finally stopped long enough to catch her breath and land on Gan’s shoulder.
“Now if I hated you, would I be baking bread and cooking soup?” Gan asked. “Or sharing cookies?”
“Uh, no, I guess.” Moxie said. She hugged Gan’s neck as far as her arms would reach.
“Told you so,” Arne said, flitting by.
“You...you - I’m still mad at. Go away!” she told the little man.
“Well, let’s all make up, and stop being mad,” Gan said, putting the saucer on the table, and breaking up the cookies into little pieces. She picked up a slightly larger crumb, and handed it to Moxie. “So you say sugar cookies are important?”
“The most important,” Moxie said, taking it graciously, and taking a big bite.
“You know Leila doesn’t make these herself,” Dahlia said. “She buys them at Goblin Market.”
“Doesn’t matter. They’re delicious,” Moxie managed to mumble with a full mouth. “May the baker be blessed. My tummy is blessed eating them.”
“If I had known you took sugar cookies that seriously - ” Gan started to say, but she was interrupted by a knock on the door. “Now who could that be?”
Seamus flew in, out of breath. “Two people. A little horse monster. Right outside!” Taking a look at the table he stopped and snagged him a piece of the cookie, which was fast disappearing. “Rob’s one of them.”
“I told Rob he didn’t need to knock.” She moved to the door as the person outside rapped on the door again.
Opening it, she didn’t see Bob’s earnest young face. “Oh, Arriane! What brings you out here today?”
“Gweir,” Arriane said. Her voice sounded exasperated.
“Gweir, your brother-in-law?” Gan asked, surprised by the tone in her voice.
“Yes! He came home this morning, and that means all of Elaine and my plans for today have gone out the window. Maybe for days!”
Chuckling, Gan asked her to come in. “Would you like some tea?”
“I would,” Arriane said, finally smiling. “There’s something I want you to see.” She looked over Gan’s shoulder at the cookie feat the Pixies were having. “Do you have any more cookies?”
“A few,” Gan said. “Probably be making more before the day’s over.” Together, the two women stepped outside.
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Umber walked through the freight carriage, clipboard in hand. The porters had moved all the freight stopping at Dragon market near the rear door, and he began going through each of them. Grabbing the papers off the first crate, he glanced at them, saw their seal was marked paid, and made a note on his master list.
“You can take this one, Hezney,” he said to the porter.
The short Spriggan man nodded, and moved it outside. This went on for six crates.
On the seventh, the paperwork was marked “To be paid by the receiver.” He looked at the invoice, which had been checked in at the town of Bithanay, just north of the Inland Sea. Dyestuffs, the invoice said. He checked the name of the addressee. It wasn’t to the local wool mill, like he was expecting, or even the draper with all his bolts of cloth. Instead, it was addressed to one Margarthy Hempseed, who he knew from other things, was the most popular hairdresser in the town. “Someone’s been keeping a secret,” he muttered. “Wonder who it is?”
He put the papers in a separate file, and heard footsteps behind him. He assumed it was Hezney moving back into position. “All right. Let’s put this in the collection pile.”
“I don’t think so,” said a soft female Dragonkin voice.
Umber swerved around, his wings flittering behind him. “Lana! What are you doing here?” His spikes glowed with pleasant surprise.
“I’m on break,” she said, airly. “So I thought I’d come to see if you’re going to be in the usual place for lunch.”
Her smile was warm, and part of Umber felt like he could fall into it forever. He took a deep breath, and nodded. “I can’t see why not. Unless you know who decides to pull a stunt or something.”
“Good. I have something for you to try today. I’m tired of watching you eat field rations.” Her smile grew even brighter, her ruff blushed prettily, and his heart started to beat just a little faster. Pirouetting around, she waved at him, and headed out of the carriage, passing Hezney on her way out.
“I think that girl’s sweet on you,” he said, in a deep gruff voice that was surprising for someone of his size.
“Is she?” Umber asked. Shaking his head he directed Hezney to put the dyestuffs crate on the collect pile. It took the young Dragonkin slightly longer than normal to check the next crate.
“And I think he’s sweet on her,” the Sprigan said to himself. “Wonder how it’s all going to turn out?”