The wooden spoon moved with deliberate, contemptuous slowness.
Doma Reel didn’t touch the iron badge with her fingers. She extended her right arm. She pressed the carved edge of her pear-wood ladle against the cold cheek of the seven-pointed star. Then she shoved it three inches across the pine boards.
The iron slid over the grain with a dry, scraping rasp, coming to rest against the splintered side of an empty cabbage crate that sat on the corner of the table.
Doma didn’t look down at the badge. Her eyes remained locked onto Bram Ash’s face, her gaze hard, flat, and fully empty of warmth. In her fifty years in the lower basin—thirty of them spent running heavy-duty bakeries and communal kitchens through the long winter of the sky shield—she had seen every variety of office collapse. She had seen judges offer bribes of flour, clerks trade forged passes for coal, and court guards beg for bowls of broth when their guard posts ran out of firewood.
None of it moved her. Sympathy in Rookvale was an expensive commodity that cost bread. Doma didn’t spend bread on men who carried iron batons until their own houses caught fire.
“Do you want me to clap my hands, Ash?” Doma asked, her voice low, dry, and cutting as an ungreased hand-saw. “Do you want me to cry on your waistcoat and tell you what a noble, beautiful soul you have because you finally remembered you’re a father?”
