Chapter 374 --374
Simply because the room had a quality in the evenings that other rooms in the palace did not have, a quality that was difficult to name precisely but that people navigated toward the way plants navigated toward light.
Tonight: Elara, Samuel, Fen, Demerti, Mahir, Ken — who was present in the specific way of someone who had made the food and was now managing the complicated experience of watching other people eat it — Jesper, who had arrived with the careful casualness of someone who had always been planning to be here, and two of the newer guard staff who had been invited by nobody specifically and had appeared in the doorway at the right moment and been waved in by Samuel, who had developed a policy of waving people in that Elara had not instituted and did not intend to stop.
The fish was extraordinary.
It was the only word. She had eaten in many contexts, in both lives, in expensive restaurants and field conditions and every point between, and she had a reliable sense of the range of what food could be. This was at an end of the range she had not previously located. Not complicated — it was not elaborate, it did not announce itself. It was simply the most accurate version of what it was, the way Oren’s mechanisms were the most accurate version of their function. Someone had understood something and built the understanding in.
The table was quiet for the first several minutes in the specific way of people whose mouths are occupied and whose attention is fully on what is occupying them.
Then Demerti made a sound.
Not a word. Just a sound, involuntary, the kind that escapes before the filter catches it. He looked slightly embarrassed. Then he looked at Ken and said, with complete sincerity: "This is the best thing I have eaten in eleven years of palace service."
Ken received this with the expression of someone who does not need the compliment but is not indifferent to it.
"What is it?" Samuel asked. He had eaten half his portion with focused attention and was now looking at the remainder with the mechanism-expression — the how-does-this-work quality.
"Northern territory preparation," Ken said. "The fish is cured first. The curing changes the protein structure — it changes what the heat does to it afterward. Most preparations cook the fish without curing, which is—" He paused. "Adequate."
"But not this," Samuel said.
"But not this."