Chapter 11: The Pantry

By noon the pack house kitchen had gone to war.

Hester stood on an upturned crate in the middle of it.

She had a ladle in one hand and a roasting pan in the other.

"Listen up," she said. "Rose is in the cells because somebody wanted her there. We have eleven hours and two hundred plates."

Nine cooks and six dishwashers looked up at her.

"We feed this pack the best banquet it has ever had," Hester said. "And we do it so well that nobody in the room can say a word against the kitchen."

"That's the plan?" said the bread cook.

"That's the cover." She pointed the ladle at me. "Orla has the other half."

I did not have the other half. I had a headache and a bruised heart and a mother in a cell.

"I'm pouring the head table," I said. "That's all I know."

"Then you'll hear this."

Hester came down off the crate and lowered her voice until only the cooks near the stove could hear.

"Anyone who can lower an eye at the right moment does it tonight when I give the sign."

"Lower it to who?" a dishwasher asked.

"To the person it's owed to."

Nobody asked her what she meant.

Nine cooks went back to their pots, and I stood there with my mouth open.

"Hester."

"Not yet."

She turned me by the shoulders toward the pantry door.

"There's a boy in there who's been pacing for an hour. Go and fix him before he wears out the floor."

He was in the pantry between the flour bins and the potato sacks.

He had been pacing. I could tell by the tracks in the flour dust.

"I'm not kneeling," Cade said when I came in. "I've decided. I'll say no in front of the pack and let him do what he wants."

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