Chapter 6 — Flour and Forgotten Things
665 Words
The herb garden became mine by default.
Otto, relieved of the duty he despised, compensated me with unfettered access to the castle's pantry — which turned out to be the size of a small house and stocked with ingredients I had never heard of and some I was fairly certain did not exist in the human world. There was a flour that shimmered faintly silver. A honey so dark it was nearly black, with a smell like rain on stone. Vanilla pods longer than my forearm, exhaling something that made the air feel like a memory.
"What is this?" I asked Otto on my fifth morning, holding up a jar of crystallized something that caught the light like stained glass.
"Moonspice," he said. "From the northern territories. It only blooms once every thirty years."
"What does it taste like?"
He considered. "Like the moment just before something wonderful happens."
I opened the jar and took the smallest possible taste.
He was exactly right.
I spent the next three hours trying to figure out what to make with it, the way I always lost time in a new kitchen — completely, happily, without noticing the hours dissolve. When I finally looked up, Damien was in the doorway.
He'd been there a while, I suspected. He had the look of someone who had been watching something and hadn't decided yet whether to announce himself.
"How long have you been standing there?" I asked.
"Not long."
"That's not a number."
"Twenty minutes," he said, with the faint air of someone confessing to something minor. "You were —" He paused. "You were talking to the dough."
I felt my face go warm. "I do that. It helps me think."
"What were you telling it?"
"That it needed to relax." I turned back to my work. "It was overworked. Tense dough makes tough bread."
Silence. Then, quietly, from behind me:
"I find that relatable."
I stopped kneading. Turned around slowly. He was already looking elsewhere — at the window, at the silver flour jar, anywhere but at me — with the careful blankness of someone who had said more than they intended.
I turned back to the dough.
"You can come in, you know," I said. "This is technically your kitchen."
"It is technically yours. We established that."
"Then sit down. You look like you've been standing at doors all morning."
A beat. The sound of a stool being pulled out. Then he was at the counter across from me, his long hands folded in front of him, watching me work with an expression I couldn't quite name — something between curiosity and a hunger that had nothing to do with food.
"Tell me what you're making," he said.
"I don't know yet. I'm listening to the ingredients first."
"You listen to ingredients."
"Don't you listen to things before you decide what to do with them?"
He was quiet for a moment. "I used to," he said. "I became less patient with the practice after a while."
"Why?"
The fire in the hearth shifted. Outside, the silver ivy moved against the window.
"Because listening to things means letting them matter," he said. "And I stopped allowing myself that particular risk."
I looked at him across the flour-dusted counter. He looked back, and I thought: there it is. The thing under the cold. The thing that had been there all along, patient as geology, waiting for someone to notice it.
"Well," I said gently, "you're in my kitchen now. Things matter here. That's the rule."
He didn't argue.
And when I finally figured out what to make — a moonspice tart with the black honey and a pastry shell so delicate it practically dissolved — I made two.
He ate his without a word, looking out the window at the garden I had started to reclaim.
But when he left, he took the recipe card I'd written and tucked it inside his jacket.
I pretended not to notice.
I noticed.
- Writer
