More Guests
Roan stood in his kitchen, the caravan’s torches a string of distant fireflies through the window, and did the math.
Thirty people, maybe more. He had no prep done for a crowd — tonight was supposed to be a quiet evening, mushroom experiments and menu planning. Instead, he had forty minutes to build a dinner service from scratch.
Three centuries of muscle memory took over.
“Milo, inventory.”
“Cream mushrooms: fourteen heads, harvested this morning. Black deepcaps: sufficient for garnish. Fish: twelve mature specimens in the fishery. Fowl: one full bird from the wolf, plus leftover roasted breast from yesterday. Grain flour: abundant. Tomatoes: eight large. Garlic: plentiful. Wild onion, herbs, berries: moderate supply. Eggs: none. Dairy: none. Rice: none.”
No dairy. No rice. No eggs. Limited protein for thirty people. But extraordinary ingredients and techniques that didn’t exist a week ago.
“It’s enough,” Roan said. “Here’s what we’re doing.”
He moved through the kitchen with the decisive speed of a man who had run emergency services on stations running low on supplies. Prioritise. Simplify. Maximise impact.
“Rin.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to — she was already in the doorway, apron on, hair tied back, grey eyes alert. She’d heard the commotion and come down without being called. “Mushrooms. Clean and slice the cream caps — thick slices, finger-width. Set aside six deepcaps for shaving. Then start on the tomatoes — rough dice, keep the juice.”
“Yes, chef.” She’d started calling him that during kitchen work. It had happened naturally, and neither of them had commented on it.
Roan ignited three mana flames simultaneously — the first time he’d done it under real pressure. One beneath the large stockpot, one under the heavy pan, one under the bread oven. Each flame held steady at a different temperature: low simmer, high sear, baking heat. His morning practice with the shield and pulse had taught him control that transferred directly to this moment. The flames didn’t flicker.
He started the soup first — it needed the most time. Fish oil in the stockpot, then a fistful of sliced garlic and wild onion. The aroma that rose when they hit the hot oil was sharp and golden. He stirred until they softened, then added the rough-diced tomatoes, letting them break down into a thick, fragrant base. While that simmered, he began cleaning fish with one hand and kneading pasta dough with telekinesis with the other — the grain flour mixing with water in a floating bowl beside him, folding and stretching in midair without his hands touching it.
Rin worked beside him in focused silence, her knife moving with the steady rhythm he’d taught her. The cream mushrooms fell into clean, even slices. The deepcaps were set aside, dark and precious. She glanced up once and saw the pasta dough kneading itself in midair, glowing faintly gold as the mana braided through it, and smiled without breaking her rhythm.
Lyra appeared from the dining room. “Tables are set. Water is drawn. The things you call ‘warm lights’ have been turned on.” She paused, watching Roan simultaneously tend three flames, levitate pasta dough, clean fish, and direct Rin’s prep work. “Is there anything I should do in the kitchen?”
“Stay out of the kitchen,” Roan said, not unkindly. “You’re front of house. Greet them, seat them, take the heat on pricing.”
“I do not take heat. I state facts.”
“That’s what worries me. What are you charging tonight?”
“One gold sovereign per person. Multiple courses.”
Roan had long since accepted that he had no frame of reference for local currency. “Fine. Just don’t start a fight.”
“I have never started a fight.”
From the counter, Milo sneezed.
“That was not a comment,” Lyra said to the cat, and went to take her position by the door.
Orion appeared at the kitchen’s back entrance, drawn by the smell of garlic and hot oil the way iron filings follow a magnet.
“Company tonight,” he observed, looking toward the approaching torches.
“Larger group than last time. You’re welcome to eat, but I’ll need you at your own table — I can’t have the dining room looking empty in some corners and crowded in others.”
“I shall be the picture of a contented regular.” Orion paused. “The girl should stay in the kitchen.”
Their eyes met. It was the first time Orion had said anything directly about keeping Rin out of public view. Roan didn’t know the full reason — he didn’t know about the Imperial Succession Seal in her satchel or the assassins tracing her path. But he understood the old man’s protectiveness, and he’d already reached the same conclusion on practical grounds.
“She’s my sous chef tonight. She stays with me.”
Orion nodded, satisfied, and went to choose his table.
The caravan arrived in a wash of torchlight and road dust.
Harsk was first through the door, broader and louder than Roan remembered, his round face split by a grin that suggested he’d been looking forward to this for two weeks.
“Roan!” He crossed the dining room in three strides and clasped Roan’s hand with both of his. “I told you I’d be back. And I brought friends.”
“I can see that.” Through the window, Roan counted wagons — eight, loaded heavy, with draft horses that looked ready to sleep standing up. “How many?”
“Twenty-two merchants and drivers. Plus our escort.” Harsk leaned closer. “Guild party. Ironveil. Their leader came personally.”
The merchants filed in — weathered men and women in travel cloaks, stamping road dirt from their boots, eyes widening as the warmth and the smell of cooking hit them. They’d been eating dried rations and camp food for two days. The aroma of garlic and simmering tomatoes and toasting grain was, for several of them, almost enough to bring tears.
The guild party entered separately, moving with the coordinated awareness of people accustomed to watching each other’s backs.
Mira came first, scanning the room with a smile she was trying to contain. She caught Roan’s eye through the service window and nodded — a small, private acknowledgment. I told them. Now show them.
Behind her, a lean knight with a skeptical mouth and watchful eyes — Dren, by Mira’s description from the guild hall. He looked at the restaurant the way a man looks at a card trick, waiting to spot the mechanism.
Then a younger knight, barely twenty, with the nervous energy of someone carrying too much hope into a room — Torren. His eyes went straight to the kitchen, to the soup pot, to the bread oven. He looked like a man arriving at a temple.
A woman with dark hair and ink-stained fingers took a seat near the window and immediately began unpacking instruments from a leather satchel — Sera Vane, the wizard researcher. She placed a small crystalline device on the table and watched it pulse with ambient mana readings, her eyes already calculating.
And last, unhurried, the woman who mattered most tonight.
Caelen Hest entered the restaurant the way she probably entered every room — with a single sweeping glance that catalogued exits, sightlines, structural integrity, and the relative threat level of every person present. She was tall, iron-grey hair cropped to her jawline, wearing travel-worn armour with the Ironveil sigil on the shoulder. Her face had the weathered composure of someone who had been making difficult decisions for a very long time and had stopped apologising for them.
She looked at the dining room. She looked at the garden through the side window — the unnaturally lush vegetation, the faint glow of the mushroom beds in the darkness. She looked at the wolf, visible as a massive grey shadow at the treeline. She looked at Orion’s cottage with its subtle ward perimeter. She looked at Lyra, and her eyes lingered there a beat longer than anywhere else — something about the tall woman with gold eyes didn’t add up, and Caelen’s instincts were very good.
Then she looked through the service window at Roan, who was simultaneously managing three mana flames, and levitating pasta dough.
She sat down without comment and folded her hands on the table.
“Welcome to Milo’s Restaurant,” Lyra said, addressing the full room with a voice that carried without effort. “Tonight’s menu is the chef’s selection — multiple courses. The price is one gold sovereign per person.”
The silence that followed was not as dramatic as the first time — Harsk had warned them. But it still landed.
“One gold,” Dren said flatly. “For dinner.”
“For an experience,” Lyra corrected.
“I’ve had experiences that cost less.”
“Not like this one.”
Mira put a hand on Dren’s arm. “Trust me.”
Dren looked at her — at the woman who’d walked out of this restaurant a Fifth Circle knight — and closed his mouth.
Harsk was already counting coins for his merchant party. “Twenty-two sovereigns, and worth every one. You’ll see.” He said this to the room at large, with the confidence of a man who had bet his commercial reputation on tonight.
Caelen placed a small purse on the table. “Five. For the guild party.” She said it without inflection — neither endorsing nor questioning the price. An expense filed under operational assessment.
Sera counted out her own coin with the resigned expression of a researcher whose funding didn’t cover magical restaurant visits.
Lyra collected the payment with a speed that had improved markedly since her first attempt, and disappeared into the kitchen to inform Roan that he was now cooking for twenty-seven paying guests.
“Twenty-seven,” Roan repeated. He looked at his prep station. The soup was simmering. The pasta dough was nearly ready. The fish were cleaned. The mushrooms were sliced. The bread was in the oven.
He picked up his knife.
The soup arrived first.
Wide ceramic bowls — the good ones — carried to each table by Lyra, who navigated the full dining room with only two near-collisions and no actual breakage, which she considered a personal triumph. The broth was deep amber-gold, rich with cream mushrooms that had been simmered until they released their extraordinary depth. Wild onion and garlic formed the aromatic base, with a thread of heat from the ginger-pepper root that warmed the throat on the way down. Beside each bowl, a thick slice of grain bread, still warm from the oven, its crust golden-brown and faintly luminous.
The merchants ate first.
The sound that Harsk made on his first spoonful was somewhere between a groan and a prayer. He looked at the merchant beside him — a thin woman named Vella who traded in alchemical reagents — and saw her eyes had closed, her spoon suspended halfway to her mouth, her expression suggesting she had briefly left her body.
At the guild table, reactions cascaded.
Dren took a spoonful with deliberate skepticism. He chewed. He stopped chewing. He looked at the spoon. He looked at the bowl. He took another spoonful with notably less skepticism. By the third spoonful, the skepticism had been replaced by the careful attention of a man revising a firmly held opinion in real time.
Torren’s hands were trembling slightly. Not from the cold — from anticipation. He lifted the spoon and drank. The soup entered his system and he felt the mana in it immediately — warm, smooth, flowing through his knight-conditioned channels with a purity that made his usual mana circulation feel like sludge through a clogged pipe. His Second Circle bottleneck — a stubborn constriction in the channels along his lower back that had resisted months of meditation and combat training — didn’t break. But it loosened. Like a rusted hinge receiving its first drop of oil in years.
He set down the spoon and breathed.
Mira watched him from across the table and recognised the expression. She’d worn it herself, three weeks ago.
Caelen ate slowly, methodically. She was Sixth Circle — her mana channels were deep, well-developed, and she knew them the way a cartographer knows their own maps. The soup’s mana entered her system and she tracked it with clinical precision: how it moved, where it went, what it did. It didn’t push through barriers the way combat mana did. It nourished. Smoothed the channel walls. Widened them fractionally. Repaired micro-damage she hadn’t known she’d accumulated over decades of high-level knight training.
She set down her spoon and looked at the kitchen with an expression that was no longer casual assessment.
Sera Vane had her crystalline instrument on the table beside her bowl. Its readings had spiked the moment the soup arrived and hadn’t come down. She was eating with one hand and taking notes with the other, her handwriting growing increasingly erratic as the data continued to contradict everything she’d been taught about ambient mana density in prepared food. At one point she stopped writing entirely, stared at the instrument, tapped it twice to make sure it wasn’t malfunctioning, and then took another spoonful of soup with the expression of someone whose academic career had just changed direction.
The second course was a salad — and it surprised everyone who expected the meal to escalate in intensity.
Sliced tomatoes, bright red and glistening, each piece dense with flavour. Shredded greens from the garden. Wild herbs torn by hand — the coriander-like fronds, the mint-like leaves. A dressing of fish oil whisked with crushed garlic and the citrus herb, sharp and bright.
It was simple. It was clean. And after the richness of the mushroom soup, it was exactly right — a cool breath between warm rooms. Several merchants who had been leaning back in their chairs, overwhelmed by the soup, sat forward again. The salad reset them. Opened space for what came next.
Caelen noticed this. A chef who could make a transcendent soup was impressive. A chef who followed it with a deliberately simple course to manage his diners’ palates — that was mastery. That was someone who understood not just food but people.
She revised her assessment upward again.
The third course arrived on wide platters: seared fish alongside roasted fowl, both served with grain noodle pasta in garlic-tomato sauce.
The fish had been seared over high mana flame — a technique Roan had perfected over the past week. The skin was crisp, almost crackling, while the flesh inside was pearlescent and tender. The mana-enhanced fish had a clean, deep flavour that carried a faint iridescence on the tongue — brightness without fishiness, depth without heaviness.
The fowl was roasted with garlic, wild onion, and the herbs he’d foraged — the coriander-like leaves and the ginger-pepper root providing warmth and complexity. Without a full spice shelf, Roan had built the flavour through technique — browning the meat in stages, building a sauce from the rendered fat and tomatoes, layering the herbs at different points in the cooking so each one contributed its own note. It was a gravy built on patience and precision rather than abundance, and it was extraordinary.
The pasta was the course within the course — golden grain noodles tossed in garlic-tomato sauce, each strand carrying the mana-braided structure Rin had observed that morning. Roan had made enough for every table, and the noodles were unlike anything the Greymist road had ever seen. Several merchants examined them closely before eating, unsure what they were looking at.
Dren ate the fish first. Then the fowl. Then the pasta. Then he looked at his empty plate, looked at the kitchen where Roan was already plating the next course, and said to Mira, very quietly: “You undersold it.”
Mira grinned.
The fourth course was mushrooms.
Just mushrooms. Seared cream caps, golden-brown and caramelised, served on a small plate with paper-thin shavings of the black deepcap scattered over the top. A drop of garlic oil. A pinch of salt. Nothing else.
Roan had debated this course. A single-ingredient plate was a risk — it demanded that the ingredient carry the entire experience. In a normal kitchen, with normal mushrooms, it would be a mistake. But these were not normal mushrooms.
The first bite silenced the room for the second time that evening.
The cream mushrooms had a richness that went beyond flavour into something almost architectural — layer upon layer of earthy, nutty, buttery depth, each one building on the last. The deepcap shavings added a musky intensity that threaded through the cream mushroom’s warmth like a dark bass note under a melody. Together, they produced a dish that was simultaneously simple and impossibly complex.
And the mana effect was different from the soup.
Where the soup nourished and smoothed, the mushrooms harmonised. Knights felt their entire mana system tune itself — not just the channels but the connections between them, the junctions where energy transferred from one pathway to another. Wizards felt their reserves deepen and clarify, as if murky water had been filtered clean. Even the merchants, who had no formal mana training, felt something — a settling, a rightness, as if their bodies had been carrying a tension they’d never noticed until it released.
Torren felt the bottleneck in his lower back melt. The constriction that had held him at Second Circle for months dissolved like frost in morning sunlight. Mana flowed through the opened channel, gentle and steady, filling pathways that had been empty. Third Circle. He was Third Circle.
He didn’t make a scene. His eyes went bright and wet, and he looked down at his plate — at the remaining mushroom slices, golden and gleaming — and he took another bite with the careful reverence of a man who understood that food had just changed his life.
Across the table, Mira saw. She’d been watching for it — hoping for it. She didn’t say anything. She just nodded, once, when Torren’s eyes met hers.
Dren saw it too. He looked at Torren, looked at the mushrooms, and very deliberately ate every remaining piece on his own plate.
Caelen felt the harmonisation in her Sixth Circle system and understood, with the clarity of someone who had studied mana theory for three decades, that this was not a temporary buff. This was structural improvement. The mushrooms had permanently — permanently — optimised her channel junction efficiency by a small but measurable degree. One meal. One plate of mushrooms.
She looked at the kitchen, where a man in a plain cotton shirt was plating the dessert course with the unhurried focus of someone who didn’t know he’d just done something that the greatest alchemists in Astermere Tower had been trying to achieve for four hundred years.
She needed to rethink everything she’d planned to say to him after dinner.
The final course was warm grain pudding — grain flour cooked slowly in fish oil until golden, sweetened with honey and folded with the reduced wild berries. It was simple, sweet, and deeply comforting. The berries provided a tartness that balanced the honey, and the grain flour had a toasted, nutty warmth that lingered.
It was not a dramatic course. It was not meant to be. It was meant to be the last thing you tasted — the memory you carried out the door. Warm, sweet, gentle. The culinary equivalent of a hand on the shoulder saying you’re welcome here.
The room settled into the particular quiet of people who have been well fed and don’t quite know what to say about it. Conversations resumed at a murmur. Chairs creaked as bodies relaxed. Someone laughed softly at something, and the sound was loose and easy in a way it hadn’t been when the caravan had arrived, road-worn and tense from two days in the Greymist.
Roan emerged from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a cloth. He looked at the dining room — every table occupied, every plate clean, every face carrying some version of the same expression: the quiet, stunned satisfaction of people who had just eaten the best meal of their lives and were still processing it.
He allowed himself a moment. Just a moment. Then he started clearing plates.
Harsk caught him at the kitchen door.
“I brought you something.” The merchant was practically vibrating. “I’ve been planning this since the day I left.”
He led Roan to his lead wagon, parked beside the restaurant, and pulled back the canvas covering. Crates, barrels, sealed containers — more supplies than Roan had seen since leaving Helios Station.
“Butter, fresh — kept cool in a mana-chilled box I borrowed from an alchemist friend. Clarified butter, two jars. Cream, sealed. Hard cheese — aged three months, from the Silvergate dairy farm. Cooking oil — pressed from a nut that grows near the southern coast, clean flavour, high smoke point.” Harsk was pulling items out and presenting them like a man unveiling treasure. “Beans, three varities. Salt in quantity. And—”
He reached into the wagon and produced a wooden chest, ornately simple, about the size of a bread loaf. He set it on the tailgate and opened the lid.
Inside, nestled in cloth-lined compartments, were spices.
Cumin seeds, dark and fragrant. Dried red chillies, their skins deep crimson and waxy. Turmeric root, dense and golden, its colour already staining the cloth around it. Black peppercorns, hard and sharp-smelling. Mustard seeds, tiny and dark. Whole cardamom pods, pale green, their shells cracked just enough to release a whisper of their aroma. Cinnamon bark, curled into tight scrolls, warm and sweet.
Roan stood very still.
He reached into the chest and picked up the cumin seeds. He held them to his nose, closed his eyes, and breathed.
The smell hit him somewhere deeper than memory. It was the smell of every stock pot he’d ever started, every spice blend he’d ever built, every meal that had ever meant something. Cumin was the foundation. The first note in a chord that required a dozen instruments. He’d been cooking without it for weeks, and he hadn’t fully realised how much he’d been compensating until the absence was filled.
“Where did you find these?” he asked, his voice slightly rough.
“Silvergate trade center. A Solvaine spice merchant — she imports from the southern coast. I told her I needed the best she had.” Harsk looked nervous for the first time. “Is it… are they right?”
Roan opened his eyes. “They’re perfect.”
He picked up each spice in turn — the chillies, the turmeric, the peppercorns, the cardamom, the cinnamon — holding each one, smelling it, feeling its weight. Rin, who had followed him outside, watched the mana in each spice through her perception: every one carried its own signature, bright and distinct, like individual voices waiting to be composed into song.
“Tomorrow,” Roan said, half to Harsk and half to the spice chest, “everything changes.”
“Then let me propose something.” Harsk leaned against his wagon, merchant instincts fully engaged. “I’ll make this run every two weeks. Supplies tailored to your specifications — whatever you need, I’ll source it. Exclusive arrangement. In return, I get first supplier rights and a guaranteed meal for my party on each visit.”
“Done.”
“That was fast.”
“You brought me cumin, Harsk. I’d agree to considerably worse terms.” Roan closed the spice chest with the care of a man handling something irreplaceable. “Send me a list of what you can source reliably. I’ll send you back a standing order.”
They shook hands in the torchlight beside the wagon, and something clicked into place — the supply chain Roan had been building toward since day one, finally real, finally reliable.
Caelen found him in the kitchen twenty minutes later.
The dining room had emptied gradually — merchants drifting to their wagons to set up camp, guild members settling around a fire in the clearing. Rin was washing dishes with the focused diligence she brought to everything. Lyra was wiping down tables, a task she now performed with the smooth efficiency of someone who had been doing it for weeks rather than the careful tension of someone who might shatter the furniture.
Caelen sat at the kitchen table without being invited. This was not rudeness — it was the habit of a woman who operated in spaces where invitation was a formality.
“I’m Caelen Hest,” she said. “Guild Leader of the Ironveil Guild, Silvergate. Sixth Circle knight.”
“Roan.” He set a cup of tea in front of her — the herb blend from Orion’s identification, the best he had. “I know why you’re here. Mira’s breakthrough.”
“Mira’s breakthrough was my reason for investigating. What I found is considerably more than I expected.” She wrapped her hands around the cup. “I’ll be direct. Your food has measurable, lasting effects on mana channels. Not temporary enhancement — structural improvement. What I experienced tonight in my own system would typically require months of advanced breathing techniques. You did it in five courses.”
Roan dried a pan and hung it on its hook. “I just cook food.” He smiled.
“That’s a generous interpretation.” Caelen studied him. “A more strategic interpretation is that you’re operating the most valuable training resource on this continent, and you’re doing it from an undefended clearing in the Greymist Expanse.”
“The wolf keeps danger at bay”
“The wolf is a single demonic wolf. I’m talking about what happens when this becomes widely known — and it will. Mira talked. Harsk talked. Within a month, every guild hall between Thornhaven and Silvergate will know about this place. Within three months, the Tower will send someone.” Her voice was level but her eyes were serious. “People will come here wanting your food. Some of them will try to take it — or you — by force.”
Roan finished hanging the pan and turned to face her. “What are you proposing?”
“The Ironveil Guild posts regular patrols on the road section nearest your restaurant. We maintain a visible presence. In exchange, guild members have standing access to dine here on a regular basis — at a rate we negotiate, not whatever your waitress decides on the day.”
“Will your guild try to control what I cook or who I serve?”
“No.”
“Will you try to make this place exclusive to Ironveil?”
“No. We want to try to stop other people from doing that.”
Roan considered this. It was a reasonable offer from a practical woman. And she was right — he couldn’t defend this place alone. The wolf and the Spider were capable, but against a determined group with real power, they weren’t enough. At worst, he will have to deploy the emergency weapons of the ship. Or fly away somewhere else.
“Agreed,” he said. “But the pricing stays between me and my front of house.”
Caelen’s mouth twitched — the closest thing to a smile Roan had seen from her. “Your front of house charged me two gold sovereigns for a meal that would be priceless at any price. I think we’ll manage.”
She stood, collected her tea, and paused at the door. “One more thing. The man in the cottage — the old wizard. How well do you know him?”
“Well enough. We dine regularly.”
“His wards are exceptional. Whoever he is, he’s significantly more than retired.”
Roan looked outside. “Most people are more than they appear.”
Caelen looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded and walked out into the night.
Sera Vane caught him next, hovering near the kitchen door with her satchel of instruments and the anxious energy of someone who had eighteen questions and wasn’t sure which one to ask first.
“The mana readings,” she started, then stopped, reorganised her thoughts, and tried again. “Mr. Roan, the ambient mana density in this clearing exceeds any non-nexus reading in my training. The food you served tonight contained mana at concentrations that should be impossible in organic material. My instrument registered a permanent shift in the mana topology of the guests who ate the mushroom course.” She took a breath. “I would like to stay around here and conduct a thorough field study. Extended observation — the soil, the water, the plants, the cooking process. I can schedule around your operations and I won’t interfere with service.”
“You’re welcome to stay. You can ask the old man to build a house for you. He can fo it in twenty minutes,” Roan said. “And it’s just Roan. No mister.”
“Thank you.” She clutched her satchel. “I should mention — I’ll be filing a report with the Astermere annex in Silvergate. I want you to know that directly. I won’t write anything I wouldn’t say to your face.”
Roan appreciated that — the directness, the professional courtesy. She reminded him of the best researchers he’d known at Helios Station, the ones who cared more about understanding than publishing.
“Write what you observed,” he said. “If Astermere has questions, they know where to find me.”
Sera nodded, already mentally composing the report that would, within weeks, bring considerably more attention to a clearing in the Greymist than anyone currently present could predict.
The night settled.
Campfires flickered in the clearing — merchants bedding down in their wagons, guild members taking watch shifts by habit. The wolf patrolled the perimeter in slow, silent circuits, and the travelers who noticed it gave it a wide berth. Harsk’s horses had been unhitched and were grazing on grass that was noticeably greener and taller than anything they’d found on the road.
Orion sat on his cottage porch, smoking a pipe he’d conjured from somewhere, watching the firelit clearing with the quiet contentment of a man who found other people endlessly interesting.
He’d observed everything tonight. The food’s effects on the knights — he’d felt the mana signatures shift from across the room. Caelen’s assessment — he recognised a fellow strategist at work. And Roan, moving through his kitchen with the unselfconscious mastery of someone who didn’t know he was extraordinary.
The old wizard blew a smoke ring and watched it drift toward the three moons.
Tomorrow would bring new things. It always did, in places like this — places where the world was bending around a single point, slowly and irrevocably.
Inside, the kitchen was clean. Every surface wiped, every tool in its place, every leftover stored. Rin had gone to bed an hour ago, exhausted and quietly proud, Milo draped over her shoulder as she climbed the stairs.
Roan sat at the kitchen table with the spice chest open before him.
He picked up the cardamom pod and cracked it between his fingers. The seeds inside were dark and aromatic, and the smell that rose from them filled the kitchen with a warmth that had nothing to do with temperature.
“I can probably plant some of these.”
The clearing outside was quiet. The campfires were burning low. The wolf had settled into its usual spot. And in the distance, on the road that led back to Thornhaven and beyond, the story of tonight’s meal was already taking shape in the minds of twenty-seven people who would carry it with them when they left.
Roan closed the spice chest. He turned down the kitchen lamp, and the restaurant settled into darkness, its warm walls holding the ghost of tonight’s aromas — while outside, the world continued to rearrange itself around a clearing in the Greymist that grew a little more extraordinary with each passing day.