Doma Reel wiped the maple butcher’s bench with a clean linen cloth dipped in boiling water, scrubbing away the last red smears of Len Vey’s blood until the wood was white again.
She tossed the rag into the wash tub, turned around. Then she took Len by the collar of his woolen coat with her thick, flour-dusted right hand.
She didn’t ask him if his arm throbbed. She didn’t ask him if he felt faint. She hauled him off his feet with the brute, uncompromising strength of a kitchen boss who had dragged two hundred drunken boilermakers out of her back kitchen, marched him three paces across the flat stone slabs. Then she shoved him down into a heavy, ladder-backed oak armchair set before the central route table.
The chair creaked under his weight.
Doma reached onto the hearth-shelf, snatched an empty wooden bowl. Then she slammed it onto the pine boards in front of him. An instant later, an iron ladle plunged into the nearest cooking pot, coming up with a thick, steaming heap of brown lentil mash. It was followed by a heavy, dense heel of coarse barley bread and a chipped clay pot mug of boiling chicory broth.
