Wolfless Luna's Royal Return novel · Chapter 6 of 24
Chapter 6: Kitchen at Midnight
The palace kitchen had forty cooks and not one of them wanted me there.
They stood in a row along the long scrubbed table with their arms folded.
The head cook was a squat man with a scar through his eyebrow.
He looked at my iron pot.
"We have copper," he said. "Eleven pans. Real ones."
"I use this one."
"You'll use what you're given."
"Then the prince will starve," I said, "and I'll go home. It's all the same to me."
His eyebrow twitched.
Nobody moved for a long moment.
Then a young scullion at the end of the table said very quietly, "He drank every drop of her market broth this morning. The prince. I saw the bowl come back."
The head cook turned his scarred face and stared at him.
Then he jerked his chin at the corner stove.
"The back range is yours," he said. "Don't touch my knives."
I did not touch his knives.
They gave Jory and me a narrow room off the kitchen with a feather bed.
Jory bounced on it until the cooks stopped pretending not to smile.
By midnight he was asleep with his thumb in his mouth, and I was back at the range by myself.
I had a little leftover bone stock, a bit of cream, a few roasted leeks.
I stirred it low, slow, and I let my hands do whatever they were doing.
The glow came up gold again off the surface.
I was starting to get used to it.
"I wondered whether you'd be here."
I did not jump.
Alaric stood in the arch of the kitchen door in shirtsleeves with his collar open.
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