The Kitchen was hot before dawn, as it always was on a baking day, and Pell had already decided the feast.
She had decided it in the night, lying on her cot with her boots still on and her hands folded on her stomach, which was how she thought best and how Sella had once told her she slept worst. The winter grain would go into the Kitchen at one sitting, every loaf the old oven would take and two more the oven would not, because the Hold had never once in two hundred years baked for every living person in the March at the same table, and she was not going to be the cook who let the first time go by with a sour loaf. There would be goat milk from Tamsin’s pens in the big copper pails, warm, with a skin on it that the children would fight over. There would be two dozen eggs from the Lowgate hens, which had stopped laying out of spite and would have to be bribed with barley to start again. There would be salt, a great deal of salt, because she was not going to have any guest tell her the bread was flat.
