28. Box
Box
Kain had the Kettle's bar repaired before long, and Sasha never said a word about the nails. He went back to his own place after that, where the work was the steady kind, watching the plants come on in their rows.
Not long after Lathemtown, of an evening, Kain sat at his kitchen table with the gryphon still turning over in his head.
The trip had been a fine thing to take his mind off it, but the gryphon was a problem the village would have to face sooner or later, and the only questions left were when, and what they would do when the time came.
His sword lay on the table in front of him, and he worked the linseed oil into the blade with a slow hand. Mark's notes sat at the corner of the table where they always did.
The rust wasn't much, no more than a thin haze that the long while in the sheath had left on the steel, but even that little would pull at an edge. In a fight where a man's life hung on it, a dull edge was the kind of small thing that got him killed.
He pushed the oil in, back and forth, and let the rag do the work.
"If you knew I was turning over the idea of taking on a gryphon, you'd be doing everything you could to talk me out of it," he said to the notes.
"You'd reel off every way the thing could kill me, and then you'd set to working out how to turn its bones into fertilizer, on the slim chance we managed to put it down. "
He stopped, looked at the notes a moment longer, then finished the patch of blade he was working, wiped it down, and slid the sword home in its sheath. He set it aside, rose, and crossed to the cabinet.
At the very top of the cabinet sat a small box, small beside a treasure chest and large beside a knapsack, near two feet long and a foot deep, and he reached up and lifted it down.
It had been Darien's spice box, and Darien had carried it everywhere the company went. Kain set it on the table and flicked the latches open.
It had been a long while since the lid last came up. The night before that last job, most likely, which made sense enough. He had carried the box out of the camp after the accident and had found no reason to open it in all the time since.
The hinges creaked as he raised the lid. The smell of a hundred spices came up at once, and a few loose pages slipped free and fluttered toward the floor. He caught them, squared them back into order, and set them aside to look at the spices first.
Dozens on dozens of little glass vials filled the inside of the box, each one corked, some full, some half, some down to the last of their dust. He took out one of the fullest, dark in the glass. "Black Pepper." He read the label, and below the name there was a single word. "Everywhere."
He turned the word over without making sense of it and set the vial back. Beside it stood a vial of salt, and its label read the same, the name above and Everywhere written below.
Next along was a vial of pinkish crystals, near the same grain as the salt, and he picked it up. "Pink Salt. Lakes of Hert." That second part, he understood now, was where in the world a thing could be had. He put it down and went on through the rest.
The next was a green, crumbled leaf, oregano, marked from all provinces east of the Blue Mountains. The one after was a yellow powder, turmeric, out of the Sumahl Valley far to the south.
Some of the names he knew and a good many he didn't. Dragon's Foot came from near the Black Mountain, Ogre's Bane out of Gorwitch City, and sea-drake bone powder up from the coastal cities.
A few of the vials sat empty and unlabeled, kept ready, he supposed, for whatever a place might turn up that Darien had never thought to look for. Kain looked it all over, and then he took up the loose pages and spread them on the table, smoothing the crimped corners flat.
"Darien's book on the proper seasoning of meat and the like," he read off the top sheet. "This is a personal book, for the use of Darien himself, or of anyone standing in for Darien on account of his death or dismemberment."
It might have been a funny thing, had Darien been alive to hear it read back, but Kain only read on.
"Recipe One. Stewed Deer. Deer comes easier than most meat, so it gets cooked more than its share. Any meat will do in its place, but mind the salt. Deer takes more than you'd think. Chicken takes less."
He turned through the pages, and there were recipes for steaks and soups and sauces, and a deal more besides. On the road Darien had a way of throwing together a dip for their meat and greens, and Kain had never worked out how.
Now the how of it sat under his hand. A sauce was little more than butter to start, with a touch of flour to thicken, then milk in some and water in others, beer or wine in a few, and one that called for a drink whose name was written in a tongue Kain couldn't read at all.
There were forty-three recipes in all, the most of them with notes for swapping one meat or vegetable or spice for another. At the end of them he found a short run of lines in Darien's hand.
"Cooking for the team, keep in mind Mark wants it a shade hotter and Sarah a shade milder.
Splitting the difference pleases neither and angers both, so the trick is to take turns.
One night hot, the next mild. Run too many of one in a row and somebody grumbles, but switch them off and they bear it fine.
Pay no mind to whatever Kain says. He'll eat anything. "
Kain stopped on that last line. "I won't eat anything," he told the empty kitchen, and crossed his arms over it.
The baked cattail roots he had lived on his first while in Tillamore came back to him then, and he let the matter drop.
Mark had his taste and Sarah had hers, and a man who held no preference at all, who would put down whatever was set in front of him, must have been a small insult to everything Darien believed about food.
He turned the page. "Sorry, Darien. Didn't mean it as an insult." He turned another, and found what he had come looking for. "Here."
The page was headed A Guide to Field Medicine, and there was nothing on this one about flavor, or about pleasing one man over another.
There was a plain accounting of how to make poultices, a few simple draughts, and an insect repellent. Reading down through them, he found the wound salve was the same one he had bought at the festival, yarrow and honey, and the repellent citronella and clove oil.
At the foot of the page was a recipe that brought him up short.
"Muscle Relaxant. Not for use on people.
" He read it through. "Wolfsbane root. Nightcap mushroom.
Any bittersweet berry. Work it into bait, or put it straight into a wound.
Will take a large predator's quickness down by half inside a day.
Use great care. The fumes alone will turn a man's head, and swallowing it can kill. "
He read on. "The dose is the whole of it.
One ounce to every ten pounds of the beast. More than that will still do the work.
Less will not, and a beast that takes too little will only harden itself against the next dose.
If you bait it, see when the bait is gone that enough went down with it.
" He came to the last line. "And I would not advise eating the beast afterward. "
Kain let out a low breath, for he had known Darien kept a poison of some kind, and he had never known the half of what it was.
Darien would have wanted to carve up the gryphon for no reason but to learn how it tasted, and that alone might have talked him into the work.
Even so, not one of the Silver Hands would have gone at a thing like this without a long argument first.
"All right, then." Kain dug a receipt out and took up a pen, and the smell of the ink met him as he began to write.
"Wolfsbane. That grows wild hereabouts, I've seen it.
Nightcap mushroom, that'll be the hard one.
Too dangerous for anyone to sell, and I don't think it grows wild near here.
I'll have to learn where it does." He tapped the pen against the paper.
"Berries are easy. I could use some of Carol's jam if it came to it.
A sweet berry ought to serve as well as a bittersweet one.
Less honest, maybe, but it ought to serve. "
He had no real notion whether it would or not, but he was sure enough that he could turn up berries of some kind.
He copied down the bones of the method as well, in case he was away from the farm when the time came to mix it, and tucked the folded paper into his pocket.
He had a plan. Now he needed to scout.