The communal kitchen beside the Lowbank ferry landing was built inside the thick, vaulted stone substructure of an ancient toll tower that had guarded the river crossing two hundred years before the college existed. Its walls were four feet of river granite, weeping a fine, cold sweat of lime moisture whenever the wind blew from the marshes.
Sister Merrow stood before the great iron soup cooking pot, her heavy horn-handled iron ladle moving with a steady, circular rhythm that kept forty gallons of yellow split-peas, salt pork rinds, and winter cabbage from catching on the bottom.
She was fifty-four, with hair the color of raw, unwhitened flax pulled tight into a linen razor-sharp cap. Her right knee was stiff, braced by two curved bands of blackened iron riveted to a leather gaiter that clicked with a dry, clockwork sound every time she shifted her weight from the hearthstone.
“Move that wicker hamper of parsnips, Tavi,” she commanded, not turning her head. “And don’t drag it across the flags. Lift it with your legs. Or you’ll have a back like an old cooper before you’re twenty.”
Thirteen-year-old Tavi, his giant wool smock tucked into his trousers with a piece of binder twine, hauled the basket three feet to the left, puffing loudly to ensure everyone appreciated his labor.
Pella entered through the low arched door. She carried her tool bag and a bundle of clean linen rags she had washed in the graywater trough. The kitchen smelled of simmering ham stock, burnt peat. The sharp, healing tang of vinegar and dried yarrow that always hung around Merrow’s corner medicine room bench.
“Ada’s coming in ten minutes,” Pella announced, setting the rags on the preparation table.
Merrow stopped the ladle. She set it across the iron rim of the cooking pot with a dull, heavy clatter that rang through the granite chamber.
“I don’t care if the Archchancellor himself is coming through your brass hoop with an entourage of golden peacocks,” Merrow said, her voice flat and gravelly from thirty years of breathing peat smoke and battlefield dust. “The soup line starts when the noon horn blows from the High Terraces. The ferry wagon drivers have six minutes to eat their bread before their barges turn on the slack tide. If your foreign plumber leaves her iron wrenches in the hall so an old cart driver with bad eyes trips into my grease tub, I’ll throw her wrenches into the river.”
“Ada doesn’t leave tools lying about,” Pella said defensively. “She puts everything back in her canvas bag before she steps off the mat.”
“Good,” Merrow said. She wiped her hands on her coarse linen apron, her fingers thick, scarred. Then she permanently calloused from holding curved stitch needles and bone saws under canvas tents. “That makes her the first person with summoning magic I’ve met in fifty years who has the manners of an ordinary blacksmith.”
She walked over to the dry preparation bench, her iron knee brace clicking rhythmically against the stone flags. She took a bottle of neatsfoot oil and rubbed a drop into the brass pivot pins of the brace to quiet the squeak.
“You think the college masters are gods because they can make a fountain dance in a marble basin,” Merrow said. She watched Pella check her brass measuring tongs. “I spent four years at the Black Basin during the border campaigns. I saw Master Kaelen—the one with the silver embroidery on his sleeves whose statue sits in the college quadrangle—summon a five-hundred-yard wall of river water to drown an enemy cavalry squadron.”
“He broke the siege,” Pella said, repeating the official history taught to every first-year student in the lecture halls.
“He drowned six hundred horses and eighty farm wagons,” Merrow corrected. Her voice dropped into a cold, cold and exact flatline. “And then the water broke through the diversion weirs and wiped out three villages three miles downstream because he hadn’t bothered to calculate where fifty thousand tons of mud goes after it leaves the battlefield. We spent three weeks in the rain digging wagon drivers out of cellar silt with wooden shovels. Not one of those grand summoners came down from their pavilions to hold a spade. They had already gone back to the capital to receive their gold medals.”
She looked directly at Pella, her gray eyes clear, hard. Then she fully unclouded by romantic illusions about the craft.
“Magic in this city has always been an eviction notice served on the poor,” Merrow said. “The High Terraces get the fountains, the clean water tanks, and the marble gutters. Lowbank gets the overflow, the silted drain pits, and the wet cellars. Now Sorell is building his Hollow Crown up at the weir. You tell me he’s diverting water through our old foundations?”
“He’s bleeding pressure,” Pella said quietly. “Ada heard it through the drain on Tuesday. It isn’t a natural runoff. It’s pulsed. Like a pump that’s being forced.”
“I know what an over-driven pump sounds like,” Merrow said, turning back to the kettle. “It sounds like a horse being whipped up a granite hill until its heart bursts. When an elemental spirit is forced past its boundary, it doesn’t just stop. It tears the stone apart.”
She pointed the heavy wooden salt paddle toward the small door leading to the back washroom.
“Eren is in there now with the oak shores,” she said. “If you’re going to take a hammer to that larder wall, you do it while the soup line is moving. The noise of forty wagon drivers shouting for more bread will drown out your chisel. If the college beadles hear iron striking granite behind this kitchen, they’ll have thirty guards down here with padlocks before you find the first pipe.”
“They won’t hear,” Pella promised.
“They will if you do it like a student,” Merrow snapped back. “A student makes a speech before she swings an adze. A mechanic just swings it.”
She reached into her apron pocket, pulled out a small, stoppered clay vial of bitter clove oil. Then she dropped it into Pella’s apron.
“What’s this for?” Pella asked.
“For your plumber’s knuckles,” Merrow said, her knee clicking as she stirred the peas. “Working cold pipe in a wet gallery turns the joints into crab claws within twenty minutes. Rub it on her thumbs before she picks up her wrench. I don’t need a foreign specialist dropping an iron valve on her toes because her fingers went numb in my cellar.”
Pella took the vial, feeling the thick, pine-scented oil inside. She tucked it securely into the tool bib beside her marking gauge.
Merrow reached into the wooden cupboard behind the medicine room bench. Then she lifted down a heavy clay pot jar sealed with pigskin. Inside was three quarts of coarse rock salt steeped in dark cider vinegar, floating with bruised winter savory and dried tansy leaves.
“Take a clean rag and soak it in this,” she instructed Pella. She pointed with her wooden spoon. “If anyone gets a scratch from those old iron pipes behind the wall, you wash the wound with this vinegar until the flesh turns gray. You don’t let some student chant over it. You scrub the canal grit out with coarse linen until it bleeds bright red. Then you pack it with dry tansy.”
“The third-year lesson plan said healing magic cleanses internal corruption,” Pella murmured, dipping the rag.
“The third-year lesson plan was written by gentlemen who never had to dig black flesh-rot out of a carter’s thigh with an oyster knife,” Merrow said. Her voice dropped into a harsh, dry gravel. “I treated three hundred men during the retreat from the Basin. The summoners came through with their glowing hands, sealed the skin over the top of the mud. Then he told the soldiers they were whole. Four days later, the flesh beneath the closed skin was black soup. We were sawing off legs by candlelight while the men screamed into horse-bits.”
She stirred the pea cooking pot with a slow, heavy sweep that brought up thick, yellow clouds of savory steam.
“Tissue knits when the blood is clean and the edges are pulled together with waxed flax,” Merrow continued. “Magic can speed the knit by three days. But it can’t remove an ounce of canal slime from a puncture wound. If your plumber scratches her hand on a rusted stud, you bring her straight to this bench. I don’t care if her lunch countdown has five minutes left or five seconds. Sepsis doesn’t care about a foreign clock.”
Tavi sat on a low stool by the hearth, peeling winter turnips with a curved paring blade. Merrow glanced down at his wrists, her eye catching the awkward angle of his elbow.
“Drop your shoulder, boy,” she barked. “You’re cutting with your wrist tendons. In two hours, your thumb will lock like a rusted hasp. Cut from the elbow, keep the thumb behind the spine of the knife. Then he let the turnip turn against the blade. A cook who ruins his wrists before noon is as useless as an ungreased wheelbarrow.”
Tavi adjusted his grip, ducking his chin. His knife took thinner, cleaner peelings from the purple root.
“We’ll keep the exit clear, Sister,” Pella said.
“See that you do,” Merrow answered, her ladle sinking back into the simmering cooking pot. “And tell Eren if he gets stone dust in my flour sacks, he’s buying the next bushel out of his wheelwright wages.”