The stew was supposed to be for the Lowgate queue, and it was a bad stew, and Pell knew it before she had got the lid off the pot.
It was barley. It was a thin grey broth of barley and water with a handful of salt pork cut into it, the last of the pork that had come up from the marsh cart before the caravans stopped, and she had been saving it for a week in the cold-larder under a cloth. It did not smell of much. It smelled of a Kitchen trying very hard to be a Kitchen. She had made it in a hurry, in the grey of the morning, after the furnace had come back to life in the bread-oven with a sullen roar and a shower of ash, and she had stood over the pot in her nightgown with her left hand on the ladle, and she had found, halfway through the first stir, that she could not close her fingers.
They would not come round the handle. They lay on the wood like the fingers of a glove that had been stuffed with wet straw, slow and heavy and swollen at the joints. She could feel the wood under her palm. She could feel the heat of the pot and the weight of the ladle and the sharp edge of the handle digging into her skin. But she could not make the fingers close, and when she tried, they moved only a little…
