1. Chapter 1
Chapter 1
T here was a lot one could do with cucumbers.
This was fortunate because, at the present moment, Cemre had a crate of them. She’d been past all her usual haunts – the grocer, the baker, the butcher, and the cafés and restaurants of First Avenue – but it had been slim pickings. Her meagre finds consisted of a smidgeon of butter, one stale bread roll, and a crate of softening cucumbers.
A little bit of butter, she thought, tasting the delicious consonance on her tongue. If only words could fill her tummy.
She trudged through the traffic of the early morning towards home, carts and horses and centaurs clattering along the cobblestones, pegasi landing here and there to deposit their passengers. It was best to get to the food places first thing, before they opened, as that was when yesterday’s scraps and perishing produce were cleared out in preparation for the fresh and new.
She passed a tearoom and caught a whiff of chocolate cake fresh out the oven, which made her flimsy membranous wings perk involuntarily. It had been years since she’d tasted any sort of cake, a decade at least since they’d had that kind of money. She tried to be content with what she was able to scrounge, to be proud of how she’d managed to feed herself and her stepmother and two stepsisters on no coin at all.
At least none of us are in danger of gout. She allowed herself a wry smile.
But she couldn’t prevent the angry, itchy feeling in her chest when a pair of silk-bedecked and jewel-adorned ladies entered the tearoom with a tinkle of the bell above the door. Why should they have cake? They’d probably leave most of it on their plates anyway, to be tossed carelessly into the bin along with their briefly-sipped cups of tea.
An urchin scampered across the street in front of her, a barefoot pixie boy with one arm cradled against his chest as though it hurt. Cemre’s legs ached at the sight, as they always did on encountering any kind of suffering. A moment later, the greasy hand of guilt wrapped around her heart and squeezed. Here she was grumbling to herself about a luxury that urchin had probably never tasted in his entire life, while she’d at least known such treats once upon a time.
She really had no reason to complain. She had, if not precisely a warm place to sleep, and perhaps not even an entirely dry one, at the very least a home that kept out the rain and wind, if you picked the right corner, and one that was far safer than a cardboard box at the end of an alley, which was likely all the pixie boy had. She had a herb garden, a small vegetable patch, and fruit trees, as well as a kitchen with a decent stove and a cold room, so she could play with the leftovers and morsels she salvaged and create something appetizing out of them. But street children and beggars didn’t even have roofs over their heads.
And yet, despite the shelter and the kitchen and the garden, despite the fact that she had a stepmother and two stepsisters who loved her, she couldn’t help feeling that day by day, she more closely resembled one of the soggy cucumbers in her crate than a half-fairy, half-human girl. The older the cucumber, the waterier the inside, the squishier the skin, until the whole thing slumped into an amorphous mush. Cemre’s insides felt just as watery, lacking any structure or spirit to hold them together, and she seemed to be losing all sense of her own shape. Whenever she caught sight of her reflection, she was almost shocked to see that she hadn’t melted away into a puddle of boneless slush.
A shout and a crash jerked Cemre from her musings. In the street, a Lug driver exchanged imaginative expletives with a troll in front of an overturned cart. A crowd quickly gathered to enjoy the show, but Cemre shook her head and hurried onwards.
She was being morose again, and she had to pull herself together. Who would take care of her family if she let herself fall apart? Xanthan, her stepmother, could barely move with her arthritis – such a tragic condition for one as beautiful as she. She came from a family of full-blooded Sídhe 1 , and the only expectation they had of her was to attract a great match with her beauty.
She had faithfully done so, borne two daughters, then lost her husband to the plague, only to discover that he’d also lost his fortune to Blague 2 .
Fortunately, her looks lasted long enough for her to gain a second excellent husband. He’d lost his fortune to an untrustworthy accountant, then lost his life to a sudden apoplexy.
Poor Xanthan was left with three daughters, a crumbling house in the fashionable part of town – entailed to an heir too young to claim it for some years – and nothing else.
So her mental anguish festered and spread to her bones.
Cemre’s own bones ached empathetically. Then her shin ached singularly, and she looked down at the pixie urchin who had kicked her. She rubbed her smarting leg and prepared to scold him, but her anger faded the moment she saw that one of his arms was pressed tightly to his chest. Had she hurt him?
“Watch where you going!” he yelled in the high-pitched squeak of a pre-pubescent boy, indigo eyes shooting daggers at her.
“Oh, pardon me,” she said quickly, dropping into a crouch to meet his eye level and, regrettably, his potent odour. “Did I bump into you?” She hadn’t felt anything jog her, but her mind had been far away.
“You nearly trod on him!” His grubby face scrunched into what he probably hoped was a threatening grimace.
Cemre glanced around the pavement, gathering her skirts closer, but she couldn’t see the ‘him’ the little boy referred to. “I’m sorry, but who do you mean?”
Carefully, the pixie lowered his arm the tiniest fraction. Cemre could just make out a little lizard-shaped head. A salamander, perhaps? A purple, forked tongue nipped from its lips and disappeared back inside.
“You could of squashed him with your great galumphing feet.”
Cemre was momentarily offended by this description, as she was rather proud of her tiny feet, but she swept the feeling away and ordered herself not to be so self-centred. “I truly am very sorry.” She took in the little boy’s gaunt frame. Though it pained her to do so, she reached into her bag and pulled out the stale bread roll from her scavenging. “Would this make him feel better?”
The boy eyed the bread with great suspicion. “Sparky hates being carried all the time. He likes to run around.”
A passing gnome jostled Cemre, nearly overbalancing her. “This is a terribly busy street,” she said with a sweeping glance that encompassed the mayhem on the road and the stream of foot traffic bifurcating around them. “Perhaps it would be safer to take Sparky somewhere quieter to run around? Like the park.”
Cemre sensed the immediate rage that emanated from the child, like heat radiating from a hot stove.
He took a deep breath and puffed up his chest. “Just ‘cos you’s a toff doesn’t mean you can scoot us off. Everyone’s always scooting us off, but we go wherever we blamming well want.” This last was punctuated by a stamped foot.
Cemre held up the roll in defence. “No, no, not at all! I wouldn’t dare scoot you anywhere.” Her bread-shield was proffered once more. “Please take this with my heartfelt apologies.”
The pixie snatched it and pressed it to his chest, all the while glaring at Cemre as though she meant to steal it back. The little lizard head popped up and flicked a tongue at the morsel. Then the boy shoved past her, nearly knocking her off her feet, and dashed into the crowd.
Cemre frowned after him, legs aching once more when she thought of where he must live, wondered whether he had anyone to love him beside his pet. She doubted any of the answers were happy ones.
The cloud that seemed to shroud her these days grew a little bit darker.
She had one more errand to run, so she urged her feet on towards the industrial quarter.
The open-fronted building she sought lay on Tweezers Street, between a carpenter’s workshop and a second-hand cart salesman. A wave of heat hit Cemre before she could enter the forge. Savvas – a satyr – kept his fire blazing all day and for the better part of the night, and for good reason: there were few blacksmiths in Wenn with a reputation like his, if any. For a start, no one else made or repaired the sort of tools Cemre needed for her culinary experiments: sliding graters with interchangeable blades for creating paper-thin vegetable slivers, cast iron frying pans so perfectly smooth nothing stuck to them, hand-cranked contraptions for whisking at lightning speed, miniature coal-heated griddles for grilling small pieces of meat or vegetables with the minimum amount of fuel.
Today, Cemre simply needed to collect the liquidizing device she’d left with him for repairs. She’d had an unfortunate accident involving a few dozen punnets of softening blueberries and a self-propelled crank. It had taken weeks to scrape them all off the ceiling.
The blacksmith was involved in an argument with a mermaid in a brass tub on wheels. That is to say, the mermaid flung short, sharp sentences at the satyr like daggers, while the satyr simply grunted back, dark brows low over his even darker eyes.
He clip-clopped across the smithy floor on cloven hooves. Lorelei, whom Cemre had met multiple times in Savvas’s workshop because her wheeled tub often needed repairs, probably due to the mermaid’s cavalier approach to road safety, glared at his back. With a huff, she turned her assassin eyes on Cemre. “He don’t listen,” she said. “I tell him he make a mistake, but he don’t listen.”
Failing to elucidate, she slapped her slender hands on top of her wheels and rolled herself out of the shop and onto the street, yelling at an unfortunate orc who didn’t get out of her path fast enough.
Cemre blinked as she glanced back into the smithy, eyes readjusting to the dim firelight.
Savvas was already walking toward her with her liquidizing machine. He shoved it into her hands and simply said, “No seeds,” then turned back to his forge.
“Wait,” called Cemre after him. “How do you want me to pay you this time?” She winced at the words, thinking of the trifling brass coin in her pocket, the last remaining proceeds from the sale of her father’s belongings. “I could clean your workshop, perhaps?” She gestured to the already spick and span room, every tool in its designated place, not a metal shaving on the pristine floor. It simply wasn’t true what they said about satyrs 3 .
Savvas halted for a long, uncomfortable minute, but Cemre was used to his mannerisms. His expression was unreadable beneath his thick but neatly trimmed beard and heavy eyebrows.
Finally, he turned back around, clopped over to Cemre, and studied the crate of cucumbers under her arm. He selected one – a horribly soft one, Cemre thought ashamedly – nodded with a quiet grunt, and trotted back into his shop.
He was being kind to her, she knew. He never asked anything in return for the machines he made her, the repairs, the tool-sharpening. Of course, she offered every time, but he’d take some trifle or ask a ridiculous favour of her, such as removing a small box of ‘scrap’, as he called it, though it usually held a number of items particularly useful to Cemre’s gastronomic pursuits.
Why he offered her such compassion while barely uttering two words together and seeming to want her out of his shop as quickly as possible was a mystery to her, but she relied too heavily on his exceptional skill to go elsewhere.
She placed the liquidizer in the sack she’d brought along for the purpose and hoisted it and her foraging bag over her shoulder. As she turned the corner, she thought she caught a glimpse of the pixie boy dodging behind a dustman’s cart, but it could just have easily been any of the thousands of other street urchins littering the city. She began the long trudge home.
Instead of allowing her thoughts to descend into gloom, she tried to occupy her mind with dreams for the future.
If only she could find reliable employment, some way to provide a better life for her family . . .
There were a lot of ‘if onlys’ in Cemre’s life.
If only her father hadn’t died without a direct male heir or a valid will, leaving the property entailed to a distant cousin and not a brass for Cemre and her stepfamily.
If only her oldest stepsister hadn’t lost her sense of smell and taste at the age of fifteen after a severe respiratory illness.
If only they hadn’t all four of them been raised as titled ladies with no skills or opportunities to earn their own living.
If only women could be chefs.
She may as well wish for a pet alicorn, she thought as she left the bustling streets of the shopping district for the quieter, cleaner part of Wenn where the rich and titled lived. It wasn’t a coincidence that the area was only a stone’s throw from the Palace.
She nodded demurely when two elf gentlemen tipped their hats at her, then she scuttered to the gate of her own abode, Hazelgrove House. Although Sickletide 4 had arrived, the garden was still bursting with vibrant greens and a rainbow of blossoms. Peppermint exploded from the Penny Royal she bruised with each footstep as she crossed the flagstones to the front door, lemon from the verbena leaves her elbow grazed. Everything she grew was edible, medicinal, or useful within the household, unlike the gardens of their neighbours which showcased only the prettiest or most exotic flowers.
It wasn’t the only thing that distinguished their residence from the others. With no money available for repairs, the once-stately red-brick dwelling had become a dilapidated ruin of smoke-stained facades, a crumbling pediment, and cracked windowpanes. Even the gargoyles had moved on out of sheer embarrassment. One had to maintain one’s professional pride.
Cemre slipped around the side of the house and entered through the kitchen door. The hinges of the heavy oak front door had long since rusted to dust. If she tried to push it open, it would simply fall over.
She deposited her collection on the smooth-worn wooden table. Her arms groaned in relief. But she wasn’t done for the day.
Cucumbers, she thought as she scrubbed the hall tiles on her hands and knees.
Cucumbers , as she swept out the fireplaces.
“Cucumbers?” asked her stepsister Rubella when she arrived home from school and found Cemre staring at the overflowing crate on the kitchen table.
“Cucumbers,” Cemre confirmed with crumpled brow. A picture was beginning to form in her mind: a dish. Some grilled slices, the softer ones liquidized with mint and the yoghurt from yesterday’s expedition, the crispest of them chopped into batons for a little crunch—
“I’ve decided to become a mudlark,” announced Rubella, plopping her fourteen-year-old self down on a rickety stool and pouring her top half across the table dramatically. Her glossy pink curls tumbled over her elbows, hiding the patches on the sleeves of her day dress.
“A mudlark,” repeated Cemre, drifting back reluctantly from her food dreams. She squinted at Rubella. “I thought you were going to be a leech catcher.”
“It’s good money,” Rubella sighed dejectedly, flinging her cheek into her hand, “but I’ve always been a bit prone to fainting, and leech catchers can get low on blood if they’re not careful. So it’ll have to be mudlark.”
Cemre tried to picture Rubella, with her perfect pearl-pink skin and gossamer wings 5 , daintily tiptoeing across the mud flats in search of valuables washed up by the Loo River. She could barely tolerate washing the dishes, one of the few chores Cemre insisted upon. Rubella needed to focus on her schoolwork – though Cemre wondered about the level of education at the Ragged school, which was free to the poor – so she was exempt from a lot of housework. Cemre hoped Rubella could learn some sort of skill that would enable her to earn a living, though few options were available to women, and a clearly noble-born one such as Rubella would be viewed with suspicion if she went seeking such an occupation.
But what else could they do? It was only a matter of time before their home was claimed by the heir, and though she’d stretched every brass of the diminutive sum her father had left as far as it would go, soon that would all be gone too. They had to find some way to survive, and poor Xanthan would never be able to work with her arthritis. As for Taurine, Cemre’s older stepsister . . .
Well, she was the whole reason Cemre had discovered a passion for cooking. When Taurine had fallen into a deep melancholy over the loss of her sense of taste and smell, Cemre had set herself the task of making food enjoyable for her again. She’d learned to cook with a variety of textures in each dish: silky smooth purees, crunchy greens or crisp-fried flatbreads that cracked with a satisfying echo off the palate, gooey melted cheese, fuzzy peach skins and pelargonium leaves. Then there were the flavours that Taurine could sense in other ways: tingling peppermint, burning chilli pepper, acrid char.
Dishes had come to her all the time then, inspiration round every corner of her herb garden. She’d been excited to go on her foraging expeditions, eager to see what new ingredients the day would bring her. Ideas had flowed like a burst spring.
But things had changed. Now, everything felt like a struggle, like drawing blood from stone. When had it become so hard?
The only inhabitant of the house who never seemed to run out of energy was Rubella, particularly when it came to thinking of preposterous occupations for herself. In the past month alone, she’d decided to be a chimney sweep, a matchstick maker, a grave robber, and a rat catcher.
She seemed to take morbid delight in seeking out the filthiest, most disgusting possibilities and then sharing them with her horrified family.
But Cemre had no intention of putting a damper on this joy. If the activity pleased Rubella and kept her in high spirits, no matter how it appalled the rest of them, then she was welcome to it.
“Very well, then,” she said, forcing an approving smile. “Perhaps you could get in some practice by digging up the parsnips and giving them a good wash.”
As expected, Rubella screwed up her face in disgust.
Cemre laughed. “How will you sift river mud if you can’t stomach a little garden dirt?”
Rubella shrugged, head still propped in one hand. “I’ll burn that bridge when I get there.”
“You mean cross that bridge.”
Another shrug. “What are you going to do with the cucumbers? Did you get any bread?”
Cemre’s legs ached. “Only a tiny bit, but I gave it away.”
Rubella snorted. “You’re far too nice. You should learn to be mean, like me.”
“You’re not in the least bit mean!”
“Am too. Gerty says so all the time.”
Cemre snorted. The two girls had been fast friends since the moment they’d laid eyes on each other Rubella’s very first day at the Ragged school. “You know Gerty likes to tease you, just as you tease her.”
“I put tar in her hair once. She had to cut it all off.”
“You were nine years old. And she forgave you long ago.” Cemre glanced up at the old cuckoo clock on the wall, the one that mostly kept the time if it was wound daily, which Cemre almost always remembered to do. She would have sold it by now if it wasn’t the only reliable timepiece in the house. Mostly reliable. “Did the teacher send any work home?”
“Yesh,” said Rubella, gnawing on a pink curl.
“Don’t chew your hair. Are you going to do it now?” Cemre knew what the answer would be – Rubella struggled to do her homework without external motivation. It wasn’t that she was stupid – she was actually surprisingly good at mathematics, even though she claimed to hate it. It was the sitting down and beginning that she couldn’t wrap her mind around. And sitting for more than five minutes in a row seemed to be the most excruciating torture for the girl.
Rubella dropped her forehead to the table. “I only just got home,” she whined into the wood.
“And you’re hungry,” guessed Cemre, which didn’t take much ingenuity on her part.
Rubella’s head popped up. “I’m always hungry.”
“Did they give you lunch today?”
“Potato soup.”
Good. The girl was growing so tall so fast, she needed the extra sustenance Cemre couldn’t provide. “Well, why don’t you bring your homework to the table while I start cooking.” Cemre had discovered a few tricks for helping Rubella concentrate. Having someone working in the same room made a difference, as well as competitions over who could get the most done in an allotted time.
“Oh!” exclaimed Rubella, shooting up from the table in a manner that left her stool clattering. “I almost forgot.” She hurtled out of the room.
A tiny giggle bubbled up in Cemre’s throat, and she got started with sorting and washing the cucumbers. She’d have to sit with Rubella after supper to make sure her homework got done. There was mending waiting for her, anyway.
She was halfway through the crate by the time Rubella scurried back in, wings fluttering frenetically behind her. A piece of paper was shoved under Cemre’s nose.
She jerked her head back but couldn’t read a word while Rubella flapped it about. “What is it?”
“A competition,” said Rubella gleefully.
“Well, I can’t look at it now – my hands are wet.”
Rubella shook the paper again. “No, you don’t understand. It’s a cooking competition.”
Cemre’s hands stilled beneath the water. “A cooking competition,” she repeated carefully.
“Yes, at the theatre next month, and the prize is 10,000 crunes 6 , and you can win it!”
Cemre’s chest tightened as if breathing might make the prize disappear.
“All you have to do is audition in the next two weeks,” Rubella chattered excitedly. “Then fifteen candidates are selected, and there’s a round every day, and everyone comes to watch it at the theatre, and whoever loses the round that day has to go home. If you make it through all fourteen rounds, you win the prize!”
Ten thousand crunes. What they could do with ten thousand crunes . . . purchase a small cottage for the four of them to live in, somewhere on the edge of town for the benefit of Xanthan and Taurine’s health, with plenty of space for a food garden. Send Rubella to a proper school that would give her the chance of a decent apprenticeship. With a little care and economy – in which Cemre had years of experience – they’d be set for life.
But an audition . . . and fourteen rounds. A wave of exhaustion washed over Cemre. She wasn’t a proper cook. She’d never been to a culinary school or apprenticed to a chef. Their old cook had taught her most of what she knew, and the rest she’d learned from trial and error. Mostly error.
“I don’t think I can—”
“And just look who their guest mentor chef is.” Rubella pointed to the captioned sketch at the bottom of the flyer.
Chef Santini. Cemre had read about him in the discarded newspapers she sometimes salvaged. He was the personal chef to the Royal House of Vitelli, but he’d become famous for inventing a number of pastry dishes which had delighted visiting dignitaries. Esteemed chefs from all over the world begged for a week in his kitchen to learn from him, and fortunately the royal family allowed it, so long as Chef Santini was willing, of course.
“The royal family is allowing him to leave them for two whole weeks?” Cemre asked.
“Well, that’s the other thing. The royal family will be here in Wenn. Queen Valeria has particularly invited them and arranged a ball for them, which Chef Santini will cater, of course. She’s invited all the eligible ladies in the city to attend. I think she wants Prince Umberto to choose a bride. And maybe his younger brother too, but . . .”
Chef Santini, here in Wenn. She’d give anything to see him cook, even from a distance. They said he’d made the ?aty-a of Eish weep over his chocolate mushroom tart. They said his roast duck soufflé melted on the tongue, like an asrai in sunlight 7 , and nobody got duck right. They said he could make a puff pastry so light it floated away on the veriest zephyr . . .
“. . . which is why I wish we could accept the invitation,” Rubella finished glumly, her wings drooping.
The words jerked Cemre back to the present. “W-what?”
“The invitation,” repeated Rubella. “All the nobility were invited, including us. But of course we can’t go.” She lifted a corner of her tattered skirt. “Not in these dustcloths.” A pink coil of hair was twisted around a finger. “This would be a good time for a long-lost godmother to turn up and buy us all ball gowns.”
They’d been invited to the palace. Where Chef Santini would be cooking up a feast. Cemre had been invited.
And she couldn’t go because she was too poor to buy clothes. Clothes.
A rage like nothing she’d felt before welled up inside her chest and threatened to explode from her skull.
She scrubbed furiously at a cucumber. Unfortunately, it was one of the softer ones and disintegrated into mush around her brown fingers.
“Well?” Rubella pushed up onto her tiptoes, wings perked.
“Well what?” Cemre flung a cucumber into the colander, one that had not been bruised before she scrubbed it.
“Are you going to audition? For the competition?”
“I can’t.” I can’t have anything I want. I can’t make our lives better. I can’t win .
“But you’re so good at cooking and you love it so—”
“I-I have to prepare supper,” blurted Cemre. “Go and see if your sister is awake. And make sure your mother took her borage seed oil.”
Rubella’s wings wilted, and that familiar ache hit Cemre’s calves. Rubella dragged her feet towards the door, head bowed.
She was being her usual dramatic self, but Cemre still felt awful for throwing a wet blanket on the girl’s excitement.
“I’ll . . . I’ll think about it,” she tossed over her shoulder.
Rubella looked back, smirked, and scampered out of the kitchen.
***
Supper was late. Cemre couldn’t seem to keep her mind from wandering to the upcoming ball and the fact that her cooking idol would be only streets away, working his gastronomic magick. And then there was the competition – a chance to get the money they so desperately needed.
If her household had been a wealthier one, she would have had brownies to help her cook, taking over the tasks when Cemre got distracted. But when the minimum wage rose, Cemre’s family could no longer afford the amounts of butter and milk brownies demanded in exchange for completing chores. Now it was all she could do to keep them out of the all-but-bare larder and stop them stealing her shoes.
Time and again, she found herself staring at the lime-washed wall, stirring the already thoroughly blended puree.
So it was no surprise that the candles had to be lit by the time she got the dishes to the kitchen table (she’d long since sold the large, smarter one from the dining room). Her stepfamily made no complaint, of course, grateful as they were for her ability to put any food at all on the table when none of them could.
“Everything all right, dear?” asked Xanthan as she shuffled across the cold tiles. The knuckles wrapped around the head of her cane were puffy and red; her once blushing rose hair had faded to silver with the faintest pink sheen, like the very last hint of sunset before dark. Yet her face was still so ethereally beautiful it hurt Cemre to look at her.
“I told her about the cooking competition,” said Rubella, flouncing past her mother to collapse theatrically on her preferred chair. “It made her come over all sullen. What’s this mushy stuff?” She dipped a finger in the yoghurt-cucumber mixture on her plate.
“Ruby, at least wait until we’re all seated before you start eating.” Taurine held her mother’s elbow so she could lower herself into her chair. Her knees had been particularly bad lately.
Rubella stuck out her tongue, which got her a scold from both her mother and Cemre. They might have been poor, but none of them were about to let the girl grow up without any manners.
Taurine settled into her own seat with practiced grace. She’d had a few more years of comportment lessons before the money had vanished. She took a moment to study her plate before softly rasping in her low, husky voice, “Thank you, Cemre. It looks lovely.” Her smile couldn’t help but be melancholy, but at least she was trying. Her hair was just as pink and glossy as her sister’s, but her wings barely ever moved, not even a shiver.
Cemre worried about her. She did her best to make up for the loss of taste and smell, but she couldn’t do anything about how Taurine seemed to have lost all sense of her identity. She’d never been as exuberant as her sister, but she’d gone from quietly mischievous and playful to simply quiet. Most days, she slept for hours or sat at her window staring at nothing.
It had been three years now, and nothing any of them could do seemed to help. Taurine had no interest in living, no energy to pull herself from the hole she’d sunk into. She didn’t try to end her existence; she just made no effort to put it to use.
Cemre was beginning to feel her own energy wane, few ideas left for helping either her stepmother or stepsister. The situation appeared hopeless.
“So?” asked Taurine after she’d swallowed her first bite. “Are you going to enter?”
Cemre speared a cucumber matchstick with her fork. “I won’t get in.”
“You won’t know unless you try,” mumbled Rubella. She was slumped over her food and held her hand in front of her mouth as if that would hide the fact that it was full.
Xanthan sighed as she regarded her youngest, and Rubella quickly sat up straight and chewed more sedately. Xanthan’s wings fluttered the tiniest fraction and then folded elegantly behind her. She turned her pale grey eyes to Cemre. “Do you want to take part in the cooking competition?”
Cemre’s fork stilled. What did she want? She wanted to meet Chef Santini more than anything. A pang of guilt stabbed her. What she should want more than anything was to win the competition so she could solve her family’s immediate predicament.
And if Chef Santini was a mentor for the contest, then she’d meet him anyway. She might not see him cooking, as she would if she snuck into the kitchens at the ball, but she’d at least get to cook near him.
“I do,” she said finally.
“Then why not audition?” Xanthan set down her cutlery and clasped her hands in her lap so she could focus her full attention on Cemre. Or perhaps her hands pained her too much to continue.
Cemre avoided Xanthan’s eyes. They may have been gentle, but they pierced far too deep. “I . . . I don’t know if I’m strong enough to keep up with the other chefs. I’ve been so tired lately, and . . .”
“Yes?” Xanthan prodded.
How could Cemre explain how difficult even thinking of food had become? How she struggled to pull herself from her bed every morning, pull on her clothes, force her feet down the stairs? Let alone get the cogs in her head turning well enough to assemble whatever ingredients she’d managed to scrounge into a dish that would nourish and please them.
How would she produce fifteen perfect dishes guaranteed to satisfy the greatest chefs on the continent?
When she didn’t respond, Xanthan said, “Perhaps this would be the push you need to get you excited about cooking again.” She lifted a hand from her lap to brush a pink-silver lock behind one ear. Her fingers tremored. “You have such clever ideas for saving food that would otherwise end up in the bin. This is your chance to show the world what you can do.”
“And you have such a way with creating dishes that go beyond taste,” added Taurine.
Eating long forgotten, Cemre stared at the whitewashed wall opposite her. It was the one that used to be lined with copper jelly moulds of all shapes and sizes, but those had been sold months ago. Now all the shelves were empty but for the most serviceable saucepans and pots, and Savvas’s inventions, of course.
But if she could win the competition . . .
They could give up this crumbling house and find their own home, one that belonged to them. She could take Xanthan and Taurine to see specialist doctors who might be able to help. Rubella could get a better education. And maybe Cemre could prove her worth as a chef and get work in a good restaurant. If she did really well, people might start to believe that women could be just as skilled as any male chef.
It all seemed like an impossible dream.
“No harm in trying,” piped up Rubella, who had scraped her plate clean and was regarding it with the longing of one who knows the forbidden joy of licking it. “Or we could prig some dresses and sneak into the ball and marry a prince instead.”
“Ruby, you know not to use such awful street cant,” Taurine chided.
Rubella sighed loudly. “It’s how people talk.”
“Which makes me worry what sort of people you are encountering that you know so many terms for ‘steal’,” said Xanthan sternly.
Rubella rolled her eyes and squared up to face Cemre, who was trying very hard not to laugh. “You’ve got to risk it for the biscuit,” she said defiantly, eliciting a huff from Taurine. “What have you got to lose?”
She had a point. Cemre could lose nothing by auditioning, except perhaps a few precious hours of sleep while she worried about it.
And look at all she could gain . . .
“All right.” She glanced around at the three questioning faces and felt her own diminutive wings – much smaller than average due to her mixed ancestry – give a barely perceptible flutter. “I’ll audition.”
Rubella nodded approvingly. “You should go tomorrow. Is there anything for dessert?”
1. Xanthan preferred the term Na Daoine Uaisle, or ‘gentry’, as Aes Sídhe literally meant ‘people of the mounds’, based on an ancient myth that the fairy folk lived in them. Full-blooded fairies outside the Angled Empire found the insinuation offensive, but it was the practice in Wenn to use the term to differentiate from the terrifying but largely unencountered Fae.
2. Blague, also known as Krabs or Hasard, involves the placing of complicated bets on the outcome of the roll of the dice. In proper gambling houses, it is played on a board covered in words, numbers, and symbols, for the specific purpose of creating as much confusion among players as possible, and it is generally extremely successful at accomplishing this.
3. Satyrs are stereotypically known to be uncouth, dissolute, and unhygienic, mostly due to the debauched behaviour of the gode Skillet, who commonly manifests in the form of a satyr or faun, drinks copious amounts of wine, frolics with scantily clad young ladies, and urinates in the nearest unfortunate homeowner’s pot plants. The term ‘muckpants’ is a vulgar slur referring to the belief that satyrs do not groom their leg pelts after relieving themselves.
4. The month when the harvest is brought in, before the month of Leafturn, when the leaves change colour.
5. Fairy wings were about as useful as those on ostriches – mostly decorative, sometimes indicative of mood or attraction.
6. The Crune is the official currency of the Anglish Empire. Smaller denominations include the brass, shiner, glint, twinkler, queen, skilling, groat, thruthing, fourthing, quathing, and nugget. It is beyond the mathematical skills of this author to explain how many of one another is worth. This is why she employs a bookkeeper.
7. Asrai – a type of water sprite that bathes in moonlight. If sunlight touches them, they immediately turn into a puddle of water. While they are able to reconstitute under suitable conditions, the weakness does rather put a damper on daytime activities.