Wild Gourmet: Chapter 3

Brand nodded. If the boy was letting him go, he wasn’t going to drill him for information. He doubted someone that young would understand much of what was going on anyway. He plodded down the street, conscious of the pain of every underfed step and taking in what he could through the dark. Most of the buildings that had once filled the town’s walls were burned to ash. Only about one out of ten had been made of stone or brick, and of those only about half had roofs left on them.

He realized that even those dismal numbers did nothing to change the fact that the town was likely overpopulated now. Men and women had both fought in the war, and the effort had drawn heavily from rural outposts like these. Brand understood that a few cities in the center of the kingdom had mostly escaped unscathed. Here at the edges, nothing had escaped.

The red building was new. It was little better than a shack, but it was new, made with what looked like newly milled wood and lit by a large lantern hung inside the window. He wondered how much more new there was out there in the burned city, obscured by the darkness. He’d see in the morning, he supposed.

The door felt sturdy under his fist as he banged a few times. He might be starved, but he was still strong, and he winced a little at how unintentionally loud the sound was. The building wasn’t large. Anyone in it would have to have been surprised by the sound. That was proven out when the door opened to reveal a young woman, very evidently just woken up from some kind of slumber.

“Hello.” She yawned. “I’m sorry. I fell asleep, I guess.” She rubbed her eyes and shook her head. “Refugee?”

“No.” Brand might be starving and scarred, but he was still a bit better than the truly worst off. “Work redistribution. My name is Brand.”

“Ah.” The girl stepped back and took a better look at him. Her face didn’t reveal much of what she got out of the examination. “Come in, then. I’ll get you set up.”

Brand followed her into the shack, which was set up with a desk, a few chairs, and a small bookcase into which piles of paper had been filed. She went for one of the larger piles, extracted a folded map, and smoothed it out over the desk before turning back to look at a small table in the back of the room with annoyance. Brand followed her gaze to a plate of vegetables and bread, cut but not evidently yet eaten from.

“No meat?”

“No meat. We don’t have much in town, and I can’t cook.” The woman threw up her hands in a hungry kind of crankiness. “I left it for people who could.”

Brand took a closer look at that side of the room. There was a small wood-fuel stove standing on iron feet, already burning. There wasn’t anything like a full kitchen’s worth of equipment, but Brand could see a single iron skillet and a small flask of what was probably cooking oil tucked onto a shelf under the table.

“If you share your vegetables, I’ll share some meat I have,” Brand said. “And cook.”

“Really?”

“Yes, but fair warning that the meat came from a monsterized boar I killed last night. So if you are careful about that kind of thing, you might want to say no.”

The woman stood, a new and confusing type of intensity in her eyes.

“A little food poisoning is a small price to pay.” She held out her hand, suddenly interested in Brand in a way she just hadn’t seemed to be before. “I’m Moira. Nice to meet you, Brand.”

In a few seconds Brand had his knife out and was slicing the meat into thin strips he hoped would cook quickly and thoroughly. The boar was far from quality meat, all things considered, and the possibility of getting sick from it made him want it to be as well done as possible. The vegetables were added to the oil once the meat was mostly done, and almost entirely just to warm them.

“Too bad we don’t have any seasonings,” Brand said. “I used the last of my salt on the way here.”

“It’s no problem. Trust me that anything cooked halfway decently will taste good right now. Actually, would you say there’s enough for three people there?”

“Sure.” Brand moved the pan off the heat. “It won’t be a feast, but there’s three meals here.”

“Then wait for me. I’ll be back in just a minute.”

Moira left the room, and Brand took the opportunity to pore over her map as he waited. It was obviously of the town and a bit of the surrounding area and seemed to be from the pre-war period. There were circles drawn around several buildings and an X drawn through far more. He guessed that the X-marked buildings were no longer in existence, which made the small handful of O’s on the page a sobering sight. The town was dark enough as he entered that he had seen little of the total devastation, but if this map was correct, the wall was almost entirely empty.

The door opened again, admitting both Moira and the guard from the gate, who was holding a small stack of plates and a few small bags of what looked like salt, pepper, and a reddish spice mix.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Here.” Moira took the stack of plates and ingredients and plopped them down on the table. “The salt and spices you can keep. It’s almost the last the town has, but we are supposed to be getting a shipment of supplies in the next few days. For now, they should go to someone who can cook.”

“Thanks.” Brand wasn’t about to argue with free ingredients. “I’ll make it up to you once I get hunting.”

He used his knife to scrape three equal servings onto the plates, then handed out the food. With an apparent shortage of utensils in the building, everyone started to pick at the bits of meat and vegetables with their hands.

“You never really clarified what your class does,” Moira popped a small bit of cucumber into her mouth. “Obviously you can cook.”

“I’m still figuring that out. I just got it yesterday. I’m level zero,” Brand said. “But hunting and cooking seem to be the main elements.”

“Odd.”

“I didn’t get the class under normal circumstances,” Brand said. “I killed the monsterized boar without a class.”

Both of the non-Brand people in the room went slightly wide-eyed at that.

“You must have almost died,” Neil said. “What were you thinking?”

“It was a Eberhund. I wouldn’t have been able to outrun it,” Brand said. “Besides that, it would have reproduced. There was little enough game anyway that…”

“You did us a favor,” Moira said. “Don’t do us any more like that. There’s no use in trying to build back up this town if we let townsfolk die. Understand?”