Chapter 7: Soup

The kitchen at Blackmere Keep was the warmest room I had ever stood in.

It had a hearth wide enough to roast a deer, a scrubbed table long enough for twenty, and a cook who sang while he chopped onions.

Hazel sat me down at the end of the table with a bowl of barley soup and a heel of bread.

"Eat," she said. "You look half starved."

"I'm not hungry."

"Your stomach says otherwise. I can hear it from here."

She was right, so I ate.

The cook sang something about a drowned miller.

Two kitchen boys carried in a basket of turnips, stared at me with wide eyes, and were shooed out by Hazel with a wooden spoon.

"Don't mind them," she said. "They've never seen a woman who wasn't cooking or complaining."

"I'm doing neither."

"Give it time. You'll be doing both by the end of the week."

I almost smiled.

It was an odd feeling.

I had not eaten at a table where people talked since my mother died, only at the end of my father's, where nobody looked up.

I was halfway through the second bowl when the door opened and the room changed.

The cook stopped singing.

Hazel put down her spoon.

Conrad stood in the doorway with no mask, no coat, and a white bandage wrapped around his right hand.

He looked at the table, at the soup, and then at me.

"Sit down, all of you," Hazel said briskly. "He's not going to bite."

He walked to the bench across from mine and sat.

"This is the first time in forty years," the cook whispered to no one, "that he's eaten with us."

"Mind your onions," Hazel told the cook.

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