Pell baked in the smoke, because there was no other way to bake in a siege.
The oven drew badly when the wind sat in the south, and the wind had sat in the south since the ring was lit, pushing the marsh’s breath down the chimney-throat and out again through the bread-hall door in a grey, tarry sigh. She had tried everything. She had banked the fire low and then high, and opened the flue-damper a finger’s width and then shut it, and once, in the small hours, she had sat on the Kitchen step with her apron over her head and sworn at the chimney in a voice that had made the Watch on the stair stop counting. None of it had helped. The loaves came out of the oven with a faint grey taste that clung to the back of the tongue, and the lodgers, who had nothing else to eat, had decided to call it the Chancery’s seasoning.
Pell did not argue with them. The Chancery could have the credit. It had cost them enough.
She stood at the posterngate on the third morning of the siege with a tray of loaves on her hip and her sleeves up past the elbow, because the line was long and the line was hungry, and a hungry line wanted to see the bread before it wanted to hear a speech. The line stretched back from the posterngate along the cart-track and up the crescent. It was made of…
