Chapter 17: The Cake Fight

Brynn's POV

Clara asked me in the morning, over toast, with her hand in mine.

"What flavor?" she said.

"What flavor of what?"

"If you could have anything. A cake."

I stopped chewing.

My mother, across the table, pretended to study her tea.

"You're not going to bake me a cake," I said.

"I'm not going to bake you anything. I can't hold a whisk for ten minutes. I'm asking what you want."

I thought about it.

Nobody had ever asked, so I had never needed an answer.

"Yellow," I said at last. "From a box. With chocolate frosting out of a can."

"A box?"

"Rowan brought me one every year. She hid it in the cabin and we ate it with a spoon." I shrugged. "It was the best cake I ever had."

Rowan, at the end of the bench, put down her fork very slowly.

"You remember that?" she said.

"Every year."

"I thought you were being polite."

"I was being polite about the Gathering Hall cake," I said. "That one was dry."

Rowan burst into tears and said it was the onions, there were no onions, and my mother passed her a napkin.

That was how we ended up in the packhouse kitchen at ten, with a crowd around the long counter.

The cook held up a recipe card.

"It has to be better than a box," the cook said. "It can't be a box."

"It can be better than a box," I said. "But it has to taste like one."

"Do you know how hard that is?"

"That's why you're the cook."

She grinned and pinned the card to the wall.

Clara sat on a stool at the end of the counter and bossed.

She had a long list: the frosting, the candles, the placement.

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