The kitchen block stood across the yard from the granary, a long low range of rooms with a slate roof and a row of narrow windows, and its door had not been opened since Idrin first walked through the gate. He had looked at it each morning. He had thought of it as a store, because it had the look of one, with its shelves bare of pots and its hooks empty, and its great stone hearth black and cold at the far end of the main room. The air inside smelled of ash. It smelled of nothing else at all.
Except that now it smelled of bread.
He stood in the doorway with his hand on the frame and the warm, yeasty, slightly scorched smell coming up round him like steam from a bath. The room was dim. The windows were small and deep in their embrasures, and the light from them lay in pale bars across the flags. The hearth was grey. There was no fire in it. There was no fire in the oven, either, which stood in the wall beside it, its iron door shut tight. Idrin could see the dry grey ash on the hearthstones, and the blackened bars of the grate, and the rusted hook where a pot had hung for a generation.
In the middle of the ash, cross-legged on the hearthstones like a child at a fair, a woman was sitting with a spoon in her hand.
She had flour to her elbows. It was on her cheeks and in her hair, which was dark and tied up in a cloth, and it lay in pale drifts on her skirt and her apron and the stone beneath her. She had a broad face, open and cheerful and slightly flushed, and small black eyes that moved over Idrin’s coat and boots with the frank, appraising speed of a woman who has been selling bread in a market and knows exactly what the buyer can afford. The spoon was stirring a bowl in her lap. Something in the bowl was rising. She was watching it, not him, with the particular absorption of a cook who has been interrupted at a tricky moment and does not intend to forgive the interruption.
“Shut the door, boy,” she said. “You’re letting the warmth out.”
Idrin did not shut the door. He stood where he was, with the cold yard at his back and the ash in front of him, and he found that he could not think of anything to say.
“I said shut it,” said the woman. “There’s no fire in this hearth worth keeping, and I’ll not have the bread sulking because of a draught.” She stirred the bowl once more, then looked up. Her eyes were quick and bright and perfectly unafraid. “Oh, you’re the prince. Good. You’ve got that look. The one that says he’s been told it’s his kitchen and he’s come to see if it’s true.”
“Who are you?”
“Pell,” she said. “I’m the Cook.”
“The Hold doesn’t have a cook.”
“The Hold’s got one now, and I’m it, and the kitchen’s mine, and you’re my boy until you can lift a sack on your own without swearing at it.” She tapped the spoon on the rim of the bowl, neatly, twice. “I’ve seen you try. You were swearing at the sack. That’s a boy.”
“I am not your boy.”
“You’re nineteen, and you’ve been in this kitchen three times and never once eaten a crust that you didn’t drop on the floor. Nineteen is a boy’s age in any kitchen I’ve known.” She set the spoon down and pulled the bowl into her lap with both arms, as a woman might hold a sleeping baby. “Sit down, before you fall over. You’ve got the look of a man who has been walking up and down a wall for ten days, counting things.”
Idrin did not sit. But he came in, a step at a time, and let the door swing shut behind him, and the warm air of the room closed round him like a cloak.
The hearth-ash moved under his boots. It was soft and dry, the fine grey dust of old fires, and it puffed up around his ankles and settled again. He stepped carefully round the edge of the hearth and stopped by the long scrubbed table, which had two benches and a chair with a broken arm, and he put his hand on the table. The wood was warm. Not as warm as the bread, but warm, as a table is warm when someone has been leaning on it for a while.
“How did you wake?” he asked.
“Through the Kitchen,” said Pell, cheerfully, as though the answer were obvious. “That’s my trade, and it was waiting for me, and when you came in with your muddy feet and your shouting, the Kitchen got up and went looking for its cook. I was in the ash. I’d been there a while, I think. It was very dark and very quiet, and then there was a smell of somebody’s bread and I thought, well, that’s mine, then, and I sat up.” She shrugged, expansively. “It’s not complicated. The cold fire’s been waiting two hundred years for someone to light it, and I’m the one it woke for.”
“And the bread?”
“I made it,” said Pell. “This morning, before the sun. With the flour out of the granary and the water from the well and a bit of old starter I found in a pot under the bench. It’s good starter. It’s been sleeping. You don’t waste a starter like that on a cold oven, so I put my hands in the ash and told the oven to get on with it, and it did, after a fashion. It’s not a proper fire. But it’s warm enough to rise a loaf, and the loaves are rising, and they are the best bread I have made in my life, which I can say with confidence, because I have a good deal of experience in disappointing people.”
Idrin looked round the room. He saw the rack by the oven, and on it, neatly laid out on a clean cloth, two round brown loaves with split tops and a faint golden shine. He had not seen them come in. He did not think they had been there a moment before.
“Where did the flour come from?”
“The granary,” said Pell. “The sacks by the north door. You’ve been up and down that granary like a clerk counting sheep, and you’ve never once thought to bring me a handful, and I had to go and get it myself. I have been very patient about it. I am going to be patient for another while, but not for ever.”
“The sacks are stamped,” said Idrin. “They’re the Crown’s.”
“They’re grain,” said Pell. “The Crown can stamp what it likes. Grain doesn’t read the stamp. It just gets eaten.”
“Do you know how many there are?”
“Four hundred,” said Pell, very promptly. “And you’ve got a list of them, somewhere in that book you carry about under your arm like a mother with a cuckoo chick. And I’ll bet it says four hundred, and I’ll bet you counted them twice, and I’ll bet the second count was wrong, because you’re a prince and you’ve never once been asked to count a sack of grain in your life.”
“It was right.”
“Oh, it was right,” said Pell. “I’m not disputing it. It’s just not enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“For eating,” said Pell. She reached out and broke one of the loaves in two with a single expert twist of her hands, and the steam came off the crumb in a soft pale cloud. “There’s enough, Your Highness, and I’ll say it as often as you like. Four hundred sacks will feed a good many mouths for a good long time, and you’ll never go hungry in this Hold, not while I’m stood at this hearth. We’ll eat well. We’ll have fat in the broth and salt in the bread and a bit of honey for the feast of the new moon, if the bees come back, which they won’t. Four hundred sacks is plenty.”
She said all of this cheerfully, without a flicker of doubt, and Idrin, who had been brought up among courtiers, believed her completely for almost a full minute. Then something in the way she said plenty caught on his ear, a hitch, a catch in the rhythm, the faint extra weight a liar gives to a word she has been practising in the mirror. He looked at her face.
“The sacks are mostly mice,” said Pell.
“Mice.”
“Mice, and a few rats that are too fat to run, and a great deal of droppings in the corners, and I’d say a third of the grain in the back row has gone to something that has a tail.” She sighed, and her broad face went, for a moment, very tired. “I’ve been telling you there’s plenty. That’s a lie. A kind lie. I’m a cook, I’m allowed one kind lie a day, and I’ve used it on you because you looked like you needed it, and now you’ve looked at me like that, which is exactly what I didn’t want.”
“You said plenty.”
“I did say plenty,” said Pell, “and I’m sorry for it. There’s enough. There’s not plenty. It’s not the same thing, and I knew it wasn’t, and I said it anyway, because you were standing in my kitchen with your face the colour of cold porridge. That was a mistake, and I’ll not make it twice.”
Idrin found that he had sat down on the bench after all. He had not meant to. The wood was warm under him. He looked at the broken loaf in her hands, and she tore a piece from it and held it out to him across the table, the crust still crackling, the steam curling up off the soft pale crumb.
“Eat that,” said Pell. “It’s not for sale. I don’t sell things. I’ve never sold a loaf in my life, and I’m not going to start with a prince.”
He took it. It was hot and tasted of salt and smoke and something green and sharp that he could not name. He ate it slowly. Pell poured him a cup from a black iron pot that she had hauled out of the ash, a thick brown liquid that steamed and smelled of scorched barley and something faintly briny.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Tea,” said Pell. “It’s the kitchen’s first cup in two hundred years, and it’s made of barley I roasted in the ash and a pinch of salt from a jar I found in the back, which I’ve tasted and which tastes of salt. You should be grateful to be the one who gets it. Most princes would be.”
He drank. It was bitter and hot and not very good, and it was the best thing he had tasted since he rode up the Lessary Road. He said so. Pell looked enormously pleased and tried to pretend she was not.
They sat in the warm grey light for a while, the prince and the cook, and the ash settled round their feet. Outside, across the yard, the wind moved over the wall and the bell-frame creaked, and somewhere in the gatehouse a pen scratched across a page, slow and exact, the sound of a clerk recording a count.
Pell put down her cup and looked at the door, and then at the hearth, and then at Idrin, with a sudden frown of concentration, the look of a woman trying to remember where she had put a spoon.
“Where’s the rest of them?” she said.
“The rest of whom?”
“The Hold,” said Pell. “Are you going to tell me there’s nobody else? I’ve been counting since I woke, and I’ve got a cook’s count of seven, and I’ve been counting for two days. I’m always right about the number of mouths.” She picked up her spoon again and tapped it on the rim of the bowl, twice, the way she had when he came in. “Seven. That’s not a guess.”