“I would like a face that can eat soup without frightening Hobb the cook,” the Last Guest said.
The reply came so softly through the mortar seam that for two heartbeats Noll wondered if the sound had been nothing more than the cold wind slipping past the drainage weeping holes.
Then the words settled into the passage, small and round and unadorned.
Prit’s grey chalk paused in midair, an inch above the master slate. The little bone imp blinked his yellow eyes, his pointed ears swiveling toward the door as if he suspected a hidden trap in the syllables.
“A face for soup,” Noll repeated, the dry stone valves in his slate chest clicking once. “Out of everything an army can imagine—wings of iron plate, horns like siege grapnels, a stride that shatters stone dikes—you want to be able to take a wooden spoon from Hobb?”
“I have smelled the kettle,” the Guest answered from the dark. Its voice had that gentle, wistful quality Noll had heard in village boys staring through the grease-stained windows of a bakehouse on market day. “Every evening around sundown, when the wind turns from the north and comes down the kitchen chimney flues, the draft brings the smell through the gallery cracks. Salt pork rind. Boiled barley. Turnip greens cut fine so they do not catch in an old man’s throat. Hobb grumbles a great deal when he stirs it. He curses the damp wood, he curses the carters who spilled the coarse salt…
