The lard came out of the Kitchen’s store in grey blocks the size of a child’s head, wrapped in cloth that smelled of the pig it had come from, and Pell had the four vats going over the old bread-ovens before the morning bell had finished ringing.
They were iron, the vats, and they were old. The Forge had cast them in the first winter, when the Kitchen had nothing but a pot and three women and a grudge against the Mason, and they had been used for everything since: soup, dye, the mash for the Lowgate beer, and once, Pell remembered with a shudder, a quantity of tar for the Watch-wall’s joints that had nearly taken the eastern oven with it. Now they sat in a row on their brick stands with their fires banked under them and their lids propped open. Each one held a hand’s depth of lard, rendering slowly into a clear gold oil that went up in thin ribbons of smoke.
“Stir,” said Pell.
The children stirred. There were six of them today, too young for the dough and too old to be kept out of the way, and they had been given long wooden paddles and set one to each vat with a bucket of sand at their feet, in case the lard caught. They stirred in the slow, careful rhythm Pell had taught them, moving the paddle round the vat’s rim in a figure of eight, so that the fat would not scorch…
