Chapter 365 --365
Ken in the palace kitchen turned out to be a diplomatic incident.
Not immediately — the first hour had apparently been a careful, circling negotiation conducted entirely in the language of professional courtesy, wherein Ken had observed the kitchen operations with the specific quality of someone watching something they have strong opinions about and choosing, for the moment, to keep those opinions internal. The head cook, a man named Barro who had run the palace kitchen for eleven years and had the specific confidence of someone who had survived three administrative upheavals without his domain being significantly touched, had watched Ken watch his kitchen with the specific wariness of someone who senses incoming weather.
The second hour was when it had started.
Elara heard about it from Fen, who had heard it from one of the guards who had been stationed near the kitchen corridor and who had described the sounds emerging from the kitchen as "vigorous discussion" in the tone of someone trying to be diplomatic about something that was not entirely diplomatic.
She went to see.
The kitchen was a large space — large in the way that any kitchen feeding several hundred palace residents needed to be large, with multiple cooking stations and a hierarchy of staff that had its own internal logic and its own established rhythms. When she appeared at the kitchen doorway it was the middle of the afternoon, which was technically between the main meal preparations, which meant the kitchen should have been in its quieter maintenance mode.
It was not in its quieter maintenance mode.
Ken was at the central station. This was Barro’s station — the position in the kitchen that everyone understood was Barro’s position the same way everyone understood certain things about territorial arrangements, not because it had been formally designated but because eleven years of consistent occupation had made it simply true.
Ken was currently occupying it.
Barro was approximately four feet away, in the specific posture of a man who is extremely unhappy about a situation and is making that unhappiness known through the quality of his stillness rather than through volume, which was actually more alarming than volume would have been.