Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Sunday arrived grey and quiet, the storm still holding off somewhere north of the mountains. The kitchen had been Brian’s idea.
Margaret's reply had come at first light.
Come now, come immediately, come before the mountain passes freeze, and I will not forgive ye if ye daenae.
Alba had read it twice, folded it into her sleeve, and spent the better part of the morning turning over the list of everything that still needed doing before a carriage could carry her North.
Alba had been passing the dim corridor outside the Great Hall when he materialized beside her, his blunt wooden sword tucked securely under one arm and a serious expression that she had learned, in three short days, to treat with extreme caution.
“I want to help with supper,” he announced, matching her stride.
“Ye want to help Cook with supper?”
“Nay.” He fell into step beside her. “I want to help ye.”
Alba looked down at him with a playful smile. “Do ye ken how to cook?”
“Nay.” A pause landed, entirely unbothered. “But I am a fast learner. Uncle Sebastian says so.”
“Yer uncle says many things.”
“He says ye’re the most capable woman he’s ever met.”
Alba stopped dead in her tracks.
Brian looked up at her with those dark, serious eyes. Then he continued padding toward the kitchen door as though he had not just said anything of consequence at all.
She stood frozen in the corridor for one long moment. Then she followed him.
The first casualty was the bread dough.
Brian had approached it with aggression. The result was a flattened, aggressively worked mass that Cook regarded with grief, then quietly set aside and began anew, from scratch.
“That’s nae how ye do it,” Alba said, stepping in.
“I was bein’ thorough.”
“Ye were punishin’ it,” she laughed.
“It needed firmness.” He looked down at the ruined dough, apparently satisfied with his labor. “Uncle Sebastian says most problems respond well to firmness.”
“Yer uncle,” Alba said, taking the second ball of dough and demonstrating the correct motion, her palms pressing and folding in a steady, even rhythm, “applies that specific principle somewhat broadly.”
Brian watched her hands intently. Then he tried to copy the smooth motion, achieving something slightly closer to an edible bread dough.
Cook pressed her lips together with great feeling and looked directly at the stone ceiling.
The carrots came next.
Alba set him at the far end of the heavy worktable with a small knife, a pile of carrots, and what she considered very clear, explicit instructions about the appropriate size of the pieces.
She turned away to speak with Cook in low tones about the salt situation—still entirely unresolved, the Northern Store having proved far less full than anticipated—and turned back to find Brian holding a carrot piece that was approximately the width of her thumb. He looked immensely proud of it.
She looked down at the pile. The pieces ranged wildly from that thumb-width to something approaching a full, jagged inch, with two that appeared to have been more broken by brute force than cut, and one that was inexplicably triangular.
“Brian.”
“They’re rustic,” he said immediately.
“They’re architectural.”
“They’ll taste the same.”
“They will nae cook the same.” She reached across the table and demonstrated the correct width, the knife moving in the clean, even strokes she had learned in this very kitchen at an age not so different from his.
“Like this. Even pieces cook evenly. Uneven pieces give ye some that are mush and some that are still completely raw, and a supper that pleases no one.”
Brian considered this with apparent seriousness. “Uncle Sebastian would eat them anyway.”
“That,” Cook chimed in from the far end of the kitchen, “I believe entirely.”
Brian grinned broadly at her. Then he picked up the knife again with renewed determination and instantly produced a carrot piece that was, objectively, worse than any of the previous ones.
“Careful,” Alba caught the knife handle half a second before the blade angled sharply toward his tiny fingers, redirecting it back toward the wood. Her heart had jumped clean into her throat. “Give me that.” She said, worried but gently.
“I was helpin’.”
“Ye were attemptin’ murder.” She teased him and set the knife firmly on her side of the table, well out of his reach. “On yerself, which is the least useful kind. We need ye to stay alive and healthy, young man,” she said and poked his nose gently.
Brian looked at the knife. Then at her. Then he pressed his mouth tight together in an expression that was trying very hard not to be a smile and failing comprehensively. “I said I was a fast learner.”
“Ye said yer uncle said that. I have formed me own opinion.”
He grabbed a messy fistful of the poorly cut carrots, slid off the wooden stool, and immediately attached himself to her skirts. He was not seeking comfort, simply repositioning his defensive line. He stood there holding the mangled carrots in one fist and her wool skirt in the other.
Cook made a strangled sound that was absolutely a laugh, poorly disguised as a cough. The kitchen girl beside her made no attempt at disguise whatsoever.
Alba looked at the dusting of flour she could feel clinging to her cheek, at the aggressive bread dough resting in its bowl, at the pile of geometrically inconsistent carrots on the worktable, and at the six-year-old clinging to her skirts.
The heavy kitchen door swung open as Sebastian entered and came to an abrupt halt.
He took in the chaotic scene. The full sweep of it, missing nothing.
The flour stuck on her cheek. The sad bread bowl.
The worktable scattered with carrot pieces of creative, dangerous variety.
Cook and the kitchen girl in various stages of suppressed laughter.
Brian attached firmly to Alba’s skirts with his fist full of badly cut carrots, looking up at his uncle.
Sebastian examined everything silently, saying nothing. The silence was so prolonged that Alba felt compelled to break it.
Before she could, Brian let go of her skirts and marched the short distance to plant himself in front of Sebastian, holding up his fistful of mangled carrots with the solemn gravity of a soldier presenting spoils.
"I cut these," he announced.
Sebastian crouched down, bringing himself level with the boy, and studied the carrots. He turned one triangular piece over in his large fingers.
"Ye did," he said finally. "This one's got a corner."
"It's rustic."
"Is that what ye're calling it?"
"Alba's word." Brian jerked a thumb over his shoulder without turning around. "She said mine were architectural."
A ghost of a smile moved at the corner of Sebastian's mouth, there and gone. "Architectural," he repeated, weighing the word. "That's generous of her."
"I nearly cut me finger off."
"Did ye?"
"She took the knife away."
"Good," Sebastian said, with no room for argument in it. He closed Brian's small fist back around the carrots and straightened to his full height. "Ye keep yer fingers. I need ye whole for sword drills come spring."
Brian's whole face lit, the carrots momentarily forgotten. "Ye said we'd start in spring?"
"I said it once. I'll nae be saying it twice, so daenae make me regret it standin' in a kitchen."
Brian, sufficiently warned, clamped his mouth shut over what was clearly a great deal more he wanted to say, and instead beamed up at his uncle.
“Yer nephew,” she said, keeping her voice entirely level and practical but gentle, “tried to kill the potatoes.”
“I was practicin’,” Brian shot back immediately. He released her skirts and proudly held up the carrots in one dramatic, outstretched fist. “And I did the carrots.”
“Aye.” Alba looked down at the orange shards. “We can see that.”
“And who won?” Sebastian asked.
His voice was careful. She could hear the distinct, strained carefulness of it. “Me,” Alba answered immediately.
“Unclear,” Brian muttered, looking down at his carrots.
Cook abandoned the pretense entirely. The deep laugh that had been building since the knife incident came out fully, warm and genuine, filling the kitchen.
Alba looked up. Sebastian was looking directly at her.
Not at Brian, not at the mangled carrots, not at the flour on her cheek that she was becoming increasingly, intensely aware of.
At her. He wore an expression she had not witnessed in him before, unguarded in a way that had nothing calculated in it, nothing strategic.
The genuine amusement moved openly across his rugged face because he had not had time to decide whether to let it show.
It softened him entirely.
She had seen him tightly controlled, furious, strategically pleasant, and deliberately unreadable. She had not once seen him look like this. It was considerably worse than any of the other versions.
She looked away first. She snapped her gaze back to the carrots, to the worktable, to the entirely manageable task of deciding what to do with the architectural remains of Brian’s contribution. She was not going to follow that look into any danger.
She was leaving tomorrow.
“If ye’re stayin’,” she said, reaching for the knife and turning her back to the carrots, her voice brisk, practical, and betraying nothing, “ye can make yerself useful. The bread needs a second knead, and Cook’s patience has already been tested far beyond its natural limits.”
Brian immediately transferred his fistful of carrots toward Sebastian. “Uncle Sebastian kneads things very well. He’s very firm.”
“I have heard,” Alba said.
She did not look at Sebastian when she said it.
But she heard him. The low, quiet exhale of a man standing in a crowded kitchen doorway with flour hanging in the air, his nephew at his feet, and something raw in his expression that he had not, this time, managed to put away before she saw could recognise it in his tone.
She kept her eyes locked on the carrots.
I am leavin’ tomorrow.
She was almost certain she was leaving tomorrow.
* * *
The morning had slipped well past noon, and the carriage was not going to ready itself.