Pell did not care who came into her Kitchen. She cared what they ate when they got there, and she cared even more whether they ate it sitting down, which was the one thing the Crown had never once managed to make its people do properly.
So when the Crown’s envoy came in at the midday bell, with the dust of the Ruined Bridge road still on her good grey boots, Pell put a loaf on the board in front of the tenth chair before anybody could tell her what the Crown wanted this time.
“Eat that,” she said. “You look like a clerk who has been sent to fetch a debt and found the debtor dead.”
The envoy looked at the loaf. Then she looked at Pell, with the careful, measuring face of a woman who had been fed in a great many courts and had disliked most of the food. “Is that bread from this morning?” she asked.
“It is from last week,” said Pell cheerfully.
It was from this morning. Pell had been up before the carriers’ bell, with her hip grumbling and the oven door open to the yard, and she had shaped the dough herself because the Kitchen’s new girl could not be trusted with a fold yet. She had been lying cheerfully for twenty years. She was not going to stop for a Lessaran lawyer with a face like a ledger.
