Book 3: Chapter 9 – Food, Glorious Food [Part 1]
Book 3: Chapter 9 - Food, Glorious Food [Part 1]
There is no sincerer love than the love of food.
- George Bernard Shaw.
Instead of taking her luncheon alone under the rafters of the dining hall, Seraphina had chosen the warmth of the kitchens, where the air was thick with the scent of woodsmoke, butter, and slow-boiling marrowbones. It was a clattering world of ladles and laughter, copper pots swinging like pendulums from soot-streaked beams, and at the center of it all reigned Catherina, broad as a bread oven and twice as hot-tempered.
“There you go again, toying with your food, my lady,” Catherina clucked, one floury hand on her ample hip. “You’re still growing, you are. You really ought to eat more at your age, otherwise you will never reach your mother’s height.”
“But that is precisely the problem,” Seraphina sighed, casting a rueful glance at her plate. “With meals like these, I fear I’ll be growing in all the wrong places. To the sides instead of up!”
The young girl was about to ask the fat woman if she could make meals with considerably fewer carbohydrates, with a greater focus on protein. However, she soon realized, there simply were not the words for it in the Aranthian diction.
She’d added an inch since coming to this world and more than a little curve to her hips besides, a fact made more vexing by her seemingly bottomless appetite. At times, she felt no better than her pet serpent, Cornelia—always peckish, always prowling for the next bite.
“To my eyes, you’re all skin and bones,” the cook huffed, plopping a fresh pie down in front of her. “A gust of wind looks like it might take you.”
Seraphine bit back a retort, and against her better judgment, she spooned a dollop of cold cream onto the steaming wedge of fruit pie—her third helping. It was maddening how good the food tasted at home. Her own tongue, or perhaps the tongue of the girl she now was, had longed for it in secret. But she shoved that thought aside. Down that path lay riddles she had no interest in solving: the nature of the soul, memory, and identity. Was she still herself, or merely a ghost in another's flesh? If the philosophers of ten thousand years had not cracked that nut, even with her supreme intellect, she would not be the one to do it—at least not today.
While Catherina busied herself with a cauldron large enough to drown a very large boar in, Seraphina slipped a generous piece of her pie to the sleek-scaled Cornelia, who had curled herself like a cat beside the hearth.
“Yummies,” Cornelia declared through their bond, one of her three heads gobbling down the offering with wet enthusiasm.
“Everything is ‘yummy’ to you,” Seraphina muttered, brushing crumbs from her lap.
Across the table, a tiny figure hovered—a flit of wings, a whisper of presence. Tia, the newest addition to her odd menagerie, eyed the pie with raw, desperate hunger. The pixie’s wings were the color of rotting leaves, her gaze hungry enough to shame a beggar. No one else, save for the young girl, could see her, of course. Glamour hid her from mortal sight, and where a man might go mad from using such magics, the Fae wore theirs like a second skin.
A human who dared to wield Glamour would soon find their thoughts unraveling, questioning what was real, what was illusion, until even the fabric of life itself seemed suspect. Down that road lay madness and meaninglessness, a spiral into the void. The Fae, by contrast, needed no such fall. They were born of that chaos, and in it, they were most at home—grounded not in reality, but in the unreality that defined their kind.
“You may have the rest,” Seraphina said, pushing her plate forward to the creature.
Tia darted forward with a greedy chirp, landing with all the grace of a drunk bumblebee. From the hearth, Catherina hummed some old nursery tune, stirring the stewpot with the sort of lazy strength only a lifelong cook could muster. By the looks of things, she was adding enough onions, cabbage, chunks of meat, and herbs and spices to feed two households.
Seeing the little creature tearing away at the pie, the girl realized that it was both a blessing and a curse that Tia was now bound to her Beast Lore amulet, the only magical artifact she owned that was of significant power. The alternative had been “The Realm of Four Gods,” but the consequences of binding her there would have been... complicated. Still, the result was the same—Tia was always near. Always seemingly watching with her odd, curious gaze. Even, Heaven help her, when she went to relieve herself. That was something Seraphina had most certainly not grown used to.
Catherina turned, a knowing glint in her eye. “And don’t you forget, my lady—you’ll be dining with your parents tonight. They will be expecting you in your best dress. I would hate for you to disappoint! And fair warning, you had best be on your best behaviour, too.”
Seraphina groaned. A dinner with her parents was less a meal and more a skirmish. Her father was soft, pliable, long worn down by her mother’s iron will. But her mother, the fearsome Oracle, Anaselena, was a creature carved from very different stuff. She was one of the only people that Seraphina truly feared.
“Catherina,” she said sweetly, tapping the table, “I brought you something from Undertown.”
She drew out a small velvet-lined box and placed it gently upon the table.
The cook’s eyes narrowed, though her lips curled in spite of herself. “Now what mischief is this? Every time you bring me a gift, it’s because you’re up to something,” she asked in mock resignation.
Seraphina smiled with all the guile of a veteran courtier. “It’s only a small token of my gratitude. Please, open it.”
Catherina did, and gasped. Inside lay a ring of worked gold, fat and heavy, inlaid with dwarven runes and set with a handful of small, perfect diamonds.
“I can’t accept this,” she whispered. “It’s far too much, milady.”
“You can, and you must,” Seraphina insisted. “If not for you, I’d have wasted away long ago to skin and bones. And if you truly won’t use it, give it to your daughter. I heard she’s to be married soon. Let this be my gift to her.”
Without warning, the woman swept Seraphina into a crushing embrace, warm and stifling as a quilt. The girl might have bested powerful warriors and cut down mystical beasts, but there was no strength in her to escape that simple hug.
“There is… just one small favor,” Seraphina tried to say, voice muffled against apron and bosom. “Might I be excused from dinner this evening?”
Catherina pulled back, hands on the girl’s shoulders. “A thousand thank-yous for the ring, but your mother would flay me alive if I let you slip away. It’s been months since she saw you. No, no. You’ll attend, looking your best. And be ready by the seventh bell, or I’ll be forced to take a switch to you myself. Your mother gave me permission before she left. Now off with you—don’t you have some Academy scribbling to see to?”
Seraphina sighed, long and theatrical. There was no escaping it. Arguing with Catherina was like trying to bargain with the tides.