Book Two Chapter 6: What Holds

Book Two Chapter 6

What Holds

The morning began, as the good ones did, with an argument about spices – cumin – and not about mages and corruption.

“By smell,” Bess was saying, not for the first time and not, Roen suspected, for the last, “you find a thing in a hurry by smell. Nobody in the history of cooking ever stopped mid-pot to read a jar.”

“It’s by region,” Roen said, enunciating and dragging the -on in region. He had a bowl of dough on the counter and worked it without looking. “South shelf, right side, eastern spices from the southern regions. Cumin, coriander, and the peppers. It’s a system.”

“It’s a man who likes the word system.” She thumped a tray down. “Move your…system. I need the table.”

He did just so. The kitchen at this hour was the warmest room in the district, the oven going, the windows fogged at the corners, and it smelled of the first bread, the fat that Bess was rendering for the week, and somewhere under all of it, the cardamom she pretended she hadn’t started a second batch of honeycakes with. Milo sat on the flour barrel with his heels knocking against it, shelling a bowl of walnuts at the rate of roughly one walnut per three eaten, and Nyx sat on the windowsill above him, entirely still, weighing whether anything in the room deserved her attention. So far, nothing did.

“You’re eating them, rather than peeling them,” Roen said to Milo, without turning round.

“I’m quality checking.”

“They’re walnuts. The same ones as always, each one is the same as the one before.”

“That’s what my checks are for,” Milo muttered with his mouth half full as he ate another.

The back door banged, which at this hour meant Brenner. He entered and stamped the cold off his boots, smelling of horse and road, grey and flat, carrying the early morning on him.

“That wagon’s axle is a crime,” he announced, pointing to a wagon through the window, to the kitchen at large, and started going straight for the kettle. “I’ve splinted it. It’ll hold to the river, and then it’s somebody else’s problem, and if Torben tells me one more time that he greased it in autumn I’m going to grease him.” He poured, drank, and seemed to become a person. “Morning, Bess. Morning, the boy. Roen.”

“The bread will be ready in ten minutes, if you can wait…”

“I can always wait for your bread. It’s one of the only things in this town worth being awake for.” He said it flatly, typical for him, and which was why, when he said a kind thing, you believed it more than from a man who smiled all the time. He took the stool by the door, the one with its back to the wall and a clear line to both the window and the yard, and Roen noted that even off duty, even safe, even with a mug of tea and no enemy – except the scholar – within three weeks’ ride, Brenner sat like a man who’d be very hard to surprise. Some things the body learned and didn’t unlearn. Roen knew the feeling.

“Where’s the scholar?” Brenner asked, casually, almost into his tea.

“Out and about. She walks the field most mornings before she eats.” Roen turned the dough. “Why?”

“No reason.” Which, from Brenner, meant a small reason, rather than an urgent one. “She asked me yesterday how long the wagons take to the capital. Made it sound like weather talk, but it wasn’t.” He drank. “She’s good at making things sound like weather talk.”

“She is.” Roen returned flat.

“You’re not worried?”

“I’m always worried,” Roen said. “I’ve just had a great deal of practice looking like I’m simply making bread.”

Bess, who knew nothing of mages or Towers, snorted at what she took to be a joke about her kitchen. “He’d worry the crust off a loaf, this one.” She turned to the boy. “Milo, if you eat one more walnut, I’m putting you on onion peeling duty.”

Milo set down the walnut.

• • •

Sera came down and took her usual place at the end of the bar, and her tea was already steeping when she sat: frostmint, the dark honey. She wrapped both hands around the cup and looked at him over the rim, and lately that look had started to carry more in it than good morning.

“You’ve flour on your face,” she said.

“I usually do.”

“Left cheek. No -” He wiped the wrong side. “- the other left. Wait.” She reached up without quite deciding to and brushed it off with her thumb, a small thing, done before she’d thought about whether to do it, and there was a half-second in which neither of them moved.

“Thank you,” Roen said.

“Don’t make it strange.” But the colour was up along her cheekbones, and she busied herself with the ledger that didn’t need her, and Roen went back to the bread but carried a little hum in his chest. He had, apparently, no defence whatsoever against a woman and a smudge of flour.

“Milo? How are you awake this early?” She asked.

“Couldn’t sleep, so I came down and got dragged into this…before breakfast…”

As the boy was voicing his concern about his belly, being left empty – not counting the walnuts – a plate with bread, honey and butter appeared in his usual spot. Needless to say, the walnuts were left unpeeled at this second.

“The honey jars are down to two and a half…” she said after a moment, merchant again, steadier on that ground. “The dark. You‘re burning through it.”

“It’s for you. I use it sparingly.”

“I know what it’s for but I’m telling you the man with the good hives is at the market until the end of the week, and you’ll want to send Brenner or yourself with coin before someone else clears him out.” She turned a page. “And buy the pale as well. For the guests. Don’t give them the dark; they won’t know the difference, and it’s wasted on them. “

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