Pell had cooked on the same two iron pots for longer than the Hold had had a gate, and she was not going to be told by a mason that they were spare.
“They are not spare,” she said, with her back to the room and a ladle in her fist. “They are the only two pots in this Kitchen that will hold a whole winter’s pottage without warping, and they were here before the first stone of the wall was laid, and the first stone of the wall was laid by a man who could not boil an egg.”
“Pell,” said Harrow, from the door.
“I am cooking, Mason.”
“I can see that.” He did not come in. He never came into the Kitchen, not since the first year, when he had stepped on a loaf and apologised to it for three days. He stood in the doorway with the cold coming in round his boots and his count-cord wound twice round one wrist, and he watched her stir, the way he watched a wall he was not yet sure would stand. “The Form in the Undercroft needs iron for the pour. The forge has given eleven loans. It needs another eleven and a half. The Kitchen has two pots that weigh six and a half each, and the Chamber has voted to borrow one.”
