The Orc's Wedding Cook

The orc in the timber-shed doorway stood a head and a half above her and half again as broad, built like something that had been asked, once, to be gentle, and had decided to keep practising at it.

He did not come out. He stood inside the open front of the shed at the bottom of the yard with a plane in one hand and a curl of shaving still hanging off it, and he watched Tamsin Prewe come up the last of the hill with her knife-roll under her arm as though she were the dangerous one arriving. When she looked back at him he did not move at all — not a step, not a shift of the shoulders — and it took her a moment to understand that the stillness was a courtesy. A man that size held himself still the way other men stood aside. Then the dark of the shed took him back, and he was only a sound in it, and she went on up to the gate.

The Kadrun steading sat up the valley side where the orc steadings all sat, above the human fields and the market road, and she had walked up to it the way she walked up to every job: early, with her knives in a roll under her arm and her own apron in a basket, because you did not cook in a strange kitchen wearing an apron you had not broken in.

The morning was late-harvest cold, the kind that made the breath show and promised a warm afternoon it had no intention of hurrying toward. Below her the shared road ran pale through the valley, and a cart was already on it, going down toward the market with something covered in sacking. She had cooked in half the kitchens between here and the mill. She had never cooked up here, and the difference started at the gate, which was hung for people a head and a half taller than she was, and latched at a height she had to reach for.

An orc woman going past with a yoke of buckets glanced at the basket, at the knife-roll, and nodded once, as at a tradesman's cart. Nobody asked her business. That was the first thing she put away to think about later: they knew she was coming, and they knew what she was for, and it did not occur to a single one of them to help with the gate.

The lower kitchen was below the hall, down six worn stone steps, and it was a good kitchen. That was the annoying thing. She had steeled herself for a bad one — a feud kitchen, dark and spiteful, with a fire that smoked on purpose. Instead she got a room built by people who loved cooking and were enormous. A hearth you could roast a sheep in whole, already laid. Ovens banked and breathing warm through their iron doors. Benches of scrubbed oak that came to her ribs. Hooks along the beams with ladles hanging off them like fruit off a high branch, well out of reach. A chopping block that was, for her, a table, and for them, presumably, a stool.

She put her basket down and stood in the middle of it, pinking up already from the hearth, and took the measure she always took in a new kitchen. Work off the block, not the bench. Ask for the step before they offer it. Tie everything back; a fire built for orcs was a fire that ate sleeves.

"You are the cook."

She turned. The orc in the larder doorway was olive-green and narrow by orc standards, which meant he was merely very large, and he had a ledger under his arm bound in oilcloth, held the way other people held hymn-books. He did not fill the doorway as she had been warned the brother would; he was not the man from the timber-shed. He stood to one side of it, as though doorways were for other people and he was for the edge of them.

"I'm the cook," she said. "Tamsin Prewe."

"Halvek Kadrun. I keep the pantry." He said it like a man saying his name twice, once for the record and once for the door he is standing in. "You will want to see it before you plan. Come."

She went, down a passage that smelled of cold stone and vinegar and stored apples, and the pantry at the end of it was the best she had ever stood in. She had been cooking in other people's larders for fifteen years and she knew a kept one from a performed one. This was kept. Barrels off the floor on stillage. Flour in chests, tight-lidded. Strings of onions and the last of the garlic plaited along the wall, hams and flitches above them out of the wet air, a whole shelf of crocks in ranks, and everything — this was the part that made her respect the man — everything in the ledger. He opened it on the shelf-edge and showed her, without being asked: what had come in, when, from whose field. His hand when he turned the pages was exact. Split nails, ink at the first knuckle. A pantry-keeper's hands, which were a clerk's hands that could lift.

He turned back a leaf and showed her a short page in a different ink, ruled off and kept apart from the rest. "Skell has sent up for the rites," he said. "Their ale, their butter and cheese, and the wax for the hall. It is not much beside ours and it is not meant to be — the roof is Kadrun's, so the larder is mostly Kadrun's — but it is theirs, and every line of it must be squared against their book on the clearing-up day, when the wedding is accounted." He set his finger under the last entry and lifted it away again. "One table fed out of two larders. It has not been done in this valley before. I would rather the counting of it were tidy."

"Three days of rites," she said. "First night, second night, third night. Midday tables as well, I was told."

"Midday is nothing," Halvek said. "Midday is bread and cold meat and nobody reads it."

Reads it. She noted the word and let it go past, because he was already moving, and his tour of the pantry had a shape to it. It went along the near wall, and along the far wall, and it did not go past the low shelf under the window-slit where the rank of crocks thinned out into older, stranger jars — two stone crocks, wax-sealed, brown with age, with a different hand's marks on them.

She walked that way. He was there before her, not hurrying, simply already standing at the next thing he meant to show her, which was the brine barrels. "For the pickling," he said, "if you pickle."

"I might," she said, and marked the shelf, and came back to it with her eyes twice while he talked. The second time she drifted toward it he drifted her away again, smooth as a boat off a bank, into the matter of the smoke-house key. Obliging. Exact. Twice.

She had worked for enough houses to know that every pantry had a shelf nobody talked about — the mistress's cordials, the master's bottles, the cheese that was being saved for somebody's funeral. She had never before had one steered around twice by a man with a ledger who accounted for everything else down to the onion.

"Halvek." She said it plainly, because plainness was all she had ever had to trade on. "I was hired because neither house can say I'm theirs. That's the whole of my value, and if I get it wrong the first night I've got nothing left to sell anyone. So. What must I not serve?"

He looked at her with an expression she would spend the next three days learning to read off orc faces, which was kindness, entirely real, and entirely useless.

"You will know," he said.

"I am asking you," she said, "so that I will know."

"You will know," he repeated, gently, as if she had asked him what colour the sky was and he was telling her to look up. "It is the rites. What is served is — " He moved one hand, a small helpless shape in the air, a man trying to hand her something that had no handle. "You are a cook. You understand what a table says."

"A table says dinner," Tamsin said.

"Yes," said Halvek, with enormous relief, as though she had proved his point, and closed the ledger.

She stood in the cold passage with her arms folded and watched him go back up toward the light, obliging and exact and no use whatsoever, and she thought: a lifetime of being nobody's, and this is the job that teaches me what it costs. It did not occur to her to be frightened. It occurred to her to be annoyed, which was safer, and she was good at it.

The second pair of hands arrived mid-morning, let in by the same impossible gate, and Tamsin heard her before she saw her, because the woman came down the six stone steps already talking.

"— told the carter I'd walk before I'd pay him a penny to be bounced up here on the tailboard like a side of bacon, and he said suit yourself, Maddow, and I said I always do — "

She came into the kitchen and took it all in with one sweep of dark eyes: the benches at rib height, the ladles on their high hooks, the hearth. "Oh, they've built it for giants," she said, delighted. "Well. I've cooked for giants before. You get a box and you stand on it and you don't let them see you mind." She put out a broad hand. "Nonie Maddow. Mill lane. Your man at the gate said the cook was a human and small, and you're both, so you're mine for four days."

Nonie was fifty-something, deep brown skin with grey coming in hard at her temples, broad through the back and shoulders out of thirty years of other people's wash-pots, and she did not stand still for a whole minute of the conversation that followed. She tied on her apron while she talked, she took down ladles by reaching for the beam and swinging, once, like a woman who had solved taller people's kitchens long ago, and she had opinions about both houses and gave them while filling the kettle at the water butt in the yard, where Tamsin had followed her with the washing list.

"The Kadruns," Nonie said, working the butt's tap with one hand and holding the kettle with the other, "are a decent lot to work for and pay on the day, which you cannot say for every steading up this side, whatever they think of themselves down in the square. And the Skells are the same, only they pay slower and tip better, and their women talk to you like you're a person, which the Kadrun women will do exactly once, to see if it takes." The kettle filled. "Two hundred years they've been at each other over a strip of root beds you could spit across, and in all that time not one of them has thought to just — give it back. They'd rather marry each other. That's your feast. Two houses that can't say sorry eating off one table and reading the plates like letters."

"That carter you wouldn't ride with," Tamsin said. "Whose is he?"

"Ganner? Nobody's, and that is the whole of him." Nonie said it the way she said everything, cheerfully and with the bottom taken out of it. "Carts for the both of these houses and belongs to neither, up that road and down it every season since before I was first hired, and he has never once in his life asked a question he was not paid to ask."

"You know the grammar, then," Tamsin said, with the first real hope of the morning. "What the dishes say. The rules."

Nonie laughed, one short bark, and set the kettle down. "I know what a hired hand is told, which is nothing. They tell you where the pots are. What the pots mean, they assume you were born knowing, like the weather." She looked sideways at Tamsin, shrewd and cheerful. "That's you too, is it. The famous neutral cook, hired so nobody can say the table favours a house, and nobody's told her the rules. Oh, that's good. That's very them. They'll eat four days of your cooking and it won't cross one mind in that hall that you might need telling anything, because telling you would be admitting there was something to tell."

"You're not neutral, then," Tamsin said.

"I am paid by the day," Nonie said, "and let go by the evening, and in between those two I say what I like, because what are they going to do, not hire me? They always hire me. They have hired me since I was a girl." She picked up the kettle like it weighed nothing, which for her it did not. "One day I won't be hired by the day. One day I'll have a standing kitchen and my name in somebody's book by the year and a rate I say once, in January, and never again. I tell them that too. They laugh. I keep saying it."

Tamsin carried the washing list back down the steps behind her and thought about the woman ahead of her, who said everything she thought over a water butt, loudly, to the valley's face, and had done it all her life and eaten every winter anyway. There was an envy in it that she did not enjoy admitting to. Neutrality had fed her since she was sixteen and orphaned onto her first kitchen, and the rule of it was simple: be useful, be unremarkable, take nobody's side, and no house can ever afford to be angry with you. It had never occurred to her that you could do it Nonie's way — that you could have a side about everything, say it out loud, and be hired anyway because you scoured a pot like nobody else in the valley.

She would not copy it. She had a name built the other way, and names were all a cook had; hers was the whole reason she was standing in this kitchen with the ladles hung out of her reach.

But she stood on the box Nonie found her — a fish-crate, sound, and Nonie was right, you stood on it and didn't let them see you mind — and she took stock of the high shelves and the good hearth and the pantry at the end of the passage with its one steered-around shelf with the two old stone crocks on it, and she made her plans for the first night as she always made them: what the ovens would hold, what the block would bear, what could be done by a small woman and a broad one in a kitchen built for giants.

What the table would say, she left alone, the way you leave alone a dog that has not growled yet.

She would know, Halvek had said, kindly, like a man telling her the sky was up.

She intended to. She just intended to know it before the first plate went out, and not after.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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