Afternoon, Fourth of One, Harvest, 236 CR

Lunch at the Fall refectory was pleasant and social, full of food and good vibes. The bread was perfect and fluffy, and the butter that went with it tasted of duck fat, some sort of malt, and just the right amount of salt.

It was still nerve-wracking, just because of what I was girding my loins, metaphorically speaking, to do: engage with someone in their own domain of interest, rather than mine, which I hadn’t even realized was something I had a mental block for.

“Sophie.” Thesha nodded at me as she stopped by my table moments after Tizpa had made our dishes disappear. She raised an eyebrow at Keldren—sitting next to me with an impatient hunger on his face that had everything to do with food and nothing to do with eating—and the tightness of her lips eased into a quirk of a smile. “Finally decided to loosen up, did you?”

“I don’t—”

“Relax, girl.” The refectory manager leaned on the table, looking over the four of us—myself, Kelly, Keldren, and Shafta. “Alright, I’ll ask the obvious question.”

Kelly nodded firmly, bracing herself. “Ah, ma’am, we were hoping—”

“The obvious question, not the ones I don’t need to ask,” she scowled. “You, I understand plenty well; you’re attached to that girl at the hip. And you, Little Levali, are here to borrow my kitchen so that the Traveler can show you how she cooked. But has James decided that his apprentice needs a real hobby?”

“I’m pleased to be remembered, ma’am,” Shafta said with a prim tone—a tone prim enough that it suggested there was history going on, history that I wasn’t at all privy to. “I am, as part of my duties to Kibosh, here to notice anything that needs noticing.”

“And ain’t that a clever formulation of a sentence.” Thesha’s weight came off the table, and I noticed it shift as she stood back up. “You know well enough not to get in the way. You can use my workspace, but.”

Keldren’s eyes went wide, and his body language shifted in something like shock, but his voice was almost steady. “Ma’am?”

“You take those two obnoxious lovebirds with you. Neither of ‘em’s got any idea what they’re about, but they’re hard enough workers at looking, and maybe one of ‘em will get bit.”

I watched comprehension dawn across the faces of all three of my lunchtime companions, so there was clearly something I was missing. The two people being mentioned pretty much had to be Yalad and Dana, who were both very much teenagers and very much an item. If Thesha was saying that they might get bit, that could mean that she was hoping they’d get burned or something and learn some caution, or it could mean—

“Thesha, ma’am,” I said, and she turned to fix me with a look intense enough that the words dried in my throat for a moment. “I don’t want to pry,” I managed, “but are you hoping that one or the other of them, or both, decides to take up work at your refectory as their Path?”

For a long moment, she fixed me with a stare that made me wonder what deep-set taboo I’d just violated. I held myself still and calm, letting the feeling flow around and through me without disrupting my visage of equanimity, and the moment passed before my face cracked.

“Got a couple of solid workers,” she said by way of explanation. “Don’t have an apprentice, not since Aya died.” Something in her body twitched in pain, a spasm I couldn’t exactly localize but one that I could understand perfectly. “Been long enough, I suppose. Wouldn’t do to leave the village having to bring in someone from outside. Wouldn’t be proper.”

Loss, I thought to myself. “Condolences,” I said softly. “A grandchild, or someone like it?”

Her eyes narrowed at me, but she obviously didn’t have the heart to put actual fire into the expression. “Appreciate the sentiment,” she said with uncharacteristic softness, “but even if it was a fair while ago, best you hear the story from someone else. You’re a century from being a heart that can bear the pain of mine.”

I bowed at the waist, enough to make it not just a formality. “Then I’ll just apologize for bringing the pain to the surface. May their memory be a blessing.”

Thesha nodded at me stiffly, then less stiffly at the others. “I’ll let the two of ‘em know. You lot head over and see about doing what you’re doing. Tulag will help with whatever needs helping with, but I expect yon dumpling boy knows his way around a refectory well enough.”

“You honor me, craftsmistress.”

Keldren’s voice was pure respect, but his poker face wasn’t quite perfect. Thesha laughed, a little harsher than normal and a little shorter than normal, and then she was gone.

“She really does honor you,” Shafta pointed out dryly. “Not long ago, she’d have stayed herself to look over your shoulder instead of trusting Tulag.”

“That’s as much Tulag as it is me,” Keldren demurred. “But that doesn’t much detract from her kindness.”

“Because she trusts Tulag to keep you from setting the place on fire, as opposed to recognizing that you’re competent enough in a kitchen to avoid it on your own?” I made it as much of a question as I could, hoping that my expression made the humor clear, and the laughs all around suggested that my efforts were successful. “So… are we all done with lunch?”

“Yes.” Keldren’s eyes roved across the table, landing heavily on Kelly. “Don’t you dare, Kels.”

“Dessert is delicious! We could—”

“I know exactly when you come by to get baskets, and exactly which herbs make your tongue itch,” he threatened. “Don’t tempt me.”

“Who needs dessert?” Kelly asked breezily. “I’m excited to get cooking! You’re okay with no dessert, right, Sophie?”

“I could be convinced,” I said dryly, getting up from my chair. “I’ve already had one case of literal chemical burns in my mouth from eating things in the wrong order. I can’t imagine what Keldren could do if he decided to make trouble for me on purpose!”

The chef in question had already gotten up and started walking towards a side door, but he stopped at that to look at me with a crestfallen expression. “I wouldn’t—”

“I know you wouldn’t,” I said gently. “Come on. Let’s go through some of the recipes I used to cook, and you can see just how little you have to learn from me.”

“Even that,” he said with a wry smirk, “would at least let me stop wondering. And I would be grateful thereby.”

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“Alright,” I grumbled an hour later, “we’re getting into grateful thereby territory faster than I thought. This is ridiculous—and I should have known, too.”

Keldren shook his head at me. “You should know better than to say something like that,” he chided me. “Aren’t you supposed to be some sort of scholar of whatever it is you do?”

“Of whatever it is I do,” I agreed absently, glaring down at the readouts on the oven. “Yeah, I am. Can someone operate this thing for me? Apparently nothing here was meant to be used by someone who can’t manipulate mana.”

“Of course not. Everyone other than you can.” I turned to glare at Shafta, and she hesitated, then shrugged awkwardly. “I apologize—that was unkind and inaccurate. All that is within the kitchens is a tool of a professional trade, rather than for general use.”

That didn’t help much, but I didn’t have time to lecture her about something that I didn’t much care about. Giving up on the effort of glaring at her, I turned to Tulag as the spindly, fidgety man came up to the oven. “She can’t operate this either, can she? Since it’s not her professional trade.”

“No, no, no,” he muttered, sliding his fingers across the shiny glass front of the oven and its inscrutable glyphs. “Not a back-hall worker, never used an oven, no. Tulag, he knows, but a Clerk doesn’t know. This, temperature; do you see, do you see the shaping of it?”

“You can… program,” I said, and then shook my head. I’d said the last word in Koshe, which was a fascinating thing that I would have to add that to—no.

I pulled the notebook out, fishing in one of my pockets for a pencil. Holding up a finger as I completely ignored someone’s question, I scribbled down a reminder, then put the notebook back away. Better. Write the thing down, don’t try to remember to write it down later.

Everyone was politely not staring at me—or, more accurately, politely performing the act of not-staring—except for Tulag, who was just staring. “Sorry, there was a thought I didn’t want to lose,” I explained, flushing a little. “So uh, the shape of the curve here is the rise and fall of the temperature the oven’s going to be?”

“The planning, the desire, yes. But the oven, the heat is magic, but it is not magic, you understand? Ah, yes, you do understand!”

“Hence the up-curve,” I said absently, staring at the first of what I’d initially been reading as some sort of arcane glyph and was now obviously a temperature plan. “You might not want to have the oven hit the target temperature too fast, because it’s going to affect how something cooks.”

“This is fascinating,” Keldren interjected, “but you were saying something about Ease cooking?”

“Right!” I shook my head to clear it, looking over the kitchen. “Sorry. I got, uh, caught up in being fascinated by your… your everything, really.”

To be fair, there was a lot to be fascinated by. The kitchen was exquisitely laid out, perfectly arranged for efficient creation of enormous amounts of food. Everything was immaculately clean, every piece of food stored in hermetically sealed containers that were both meticulously labeled and stored in cabinets, drawers, or shelves that were themselves also labeled with just as much attention to detail.

There were magical mechanisms for sanitation of food, for cleaning, for assessing internal temperature and levels of spices and flavor. All of the actual cooking was done by means that were mundane, though, even if many of the tools were themselves magical. Those tools weren’t just the provision of temperatures both hot and cold—I saw out of the corner of my eye someone thumbing the enchantment on one of the cooking stations, and the solids in the soup they were working on slowly just decohered into a perfect homogeneous blend without a ripple or splash.

“Sophie.” Kelly tapped my shoulder, startling me out of my distant stare. “Yelem yearns for you.”

“Right! Okay.” I turned to the table in front of me, the prep area in what was clearly Thesha’s own experimental workspace. “So, as far as I’m concerned, my culture of origin had three iconic dishes worth including in anyone’s general repertoire. One of them isn’t really relevant, because you don’t have the same kind of fish—and anyway, I’ve tried like five times to replicate it and I only got as far as mediocre. It’s this steamed fish on top of tomatoes kind of thing, and it’s tricky.

“The other two are more tractable by a long shot. One of them’s a beet stew with lamb, or a lamb stew with beets, we called it hamad. But you’ve already got a dish that’s basically like it, and there’s nothing special about it from a technique or flavor profile standpoint that you’re not already doing. So the more interesting one is what we called hamim and other people mostly called tbeet, and I don’t know why there’s the difference.”

“Are the words regional variations?” Keldren managed to ask the question as though it weren’t obvious, giving me a kind of focused attention that I hadn’t seen from him before. “If so, do the dishes themselves vary by the region?”

“Kinda, and eh.” I made a vague side-to-side gesture with my hand. “The people in question intermingled, though I guess they stayed distinct enough to have their own dialects of various languages. And there’s regional variation in the dishes, but there was variation between families, and you’d have families in one place making hamim that was identical to tbeet somewhere else. But they all shared a key thing, and it’s why I brought up Ease—we also had a day of rest, a day where our religious laws said we weren’t supposed to do any work, and even just warming up food was considered work. So we’d cook this ahead of time, way ahead of time, and leave it in a warming oven to stay warm through the night and into the next day.”

Keldren’s head tilted, eyes narrowed in thought. “Show me. What ingredients do you need?”

“Some kind of poultry, a whole one high in fat or just the cuts that are fattiest. Rendered fat, to add on top of it. Eggs, rice, tomato paste, oil, potatoes, carrots, salt, pepper. A lot of spices and alliums—I used turmeric, cinnamon, garlic, onion, paprika, cumin, cardamom, allspices, and nutmeg when I could get them in good quality.”

“Yalad, Dana.” Keldren jerked his head at them. “Don’t get in anyone’s way, but find those spices, and the drain-fat. Do you need the list again?” They shook their heads, and he returned his attention to me. “We’ll go with rakin quarters. How do you begin?”

I blinked a couple of times at that, but then remembered—the rakin were halfway between feral and pets, roaming more-or-less free in the fields with enclosed homes waiting for them when they wanted. They ate bugs and critters out of the fields, helping the birds keep the levels of vermin in check, but mostly they ate feed and the cast-offs from processing grains.

They were chubby and had enormous, over-developed hind legs with vicious talons, and it was easy to imagine that they had the kind of fattiness that was going to make the dish come together.

“The rice gets cooked partway in water that’s had a bit of salt,” I said, peeling a few pieces of paper off of my notebook and starting to write the steps down. “Potatoes and carrots get chopped up, alliums get diced. We make a mix with the spices, using the tomato paste to hold it all together, and rub the meat with it. Sear the meat, the rakin, adding the alliums to cook while we flip ‘em, and cook the rice a bit under the chicken on low to get a nice crisping. Then everything goes into the pot with more of the spices and the extra fat and it’s into the oven for eight hours.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Keldren said with a near-manic grin. “Tulag, what’s the multiplier available to us?”

He ran his eyes across the pages of my notebook, humming. “For this, for this, mmmm. Miss seems as she might have something interesting, haven’t seen what she’s doing with the rice before, worth trying. Young man needs to be at work soon, doesn’t he.”

“In no more than four hours,” Keldren confirmed. “Even if Thesha has the seatings, there’s always work to be done.”

“Always, always, always work to be done,” Tulag agreed. He was silent and still a moment, then nodded his head in a rapid bobbing motion. “Four. This gives you enough time, yes, even in an unfamiliar kitchen.”

“You have a time dilation in your—no,” I interrupted myself in the midst of my own stupefaction. “Thesha, Thesha specifically, has a time dilation enchantment in her oven so that she can experiment with cooking things more effectively.”

“Thesha, and not Levali,” Keldren confirmed. “It’s not a common enchantment.”

I let my head sink into my hands for a moment—just a moment, taking in the immensity of that and what it might imply for all sorts of things.

“Okay,” I said afterwards, shoving all of that aside and meeting Keldren’s intense gaze. “Alright. Let’s get cooking.”