Chapter 215 — New Recipes, New Letters

Chapter 215: Chapter 215 — New Recipes, New Letters

The letter found him at the Foxglove on an otherwise unremarkable morning, delivered by the same guild courier who handled most of his correspondence these days, and Arlen recognized Eldrin’s cramped, slanting hand before he’d even broken the seal.

He read it over breakfast, Pella setting a plate down beside him without asking.

Arlen —

I hope Aurenholt continues treating you well, and that whatever dangers the capital’s dungeon offers haven’t gotten the better of you. I’d have written sooner, but I’ve been considerably occupied these past weeks, and I suspect I’ll be occupied a good while longer yet.

You’ll remember, I hope, the two additional sites my colleague at the capital archive once mentioned — the ones carrying markings similar to what we found together, all those months ago. One of them has finally been properly surveyed. It sits near the southern border, not far from where Valcrest’s territory gives way to Doraleth’s.

I won’t pretend the timing is convenient. Doraleth’s own troubles — the succession dispute you may have heard mentioned, back when we traveled together — have made the region considerably less stable than scholarship usually prefers. But the capital archive has requested I join the survey personally, given my prior work, and I find I can’t quite bring myself to decline.

I don’t know yet what we’ll find there, or whether it connects properly to what we uncovered near Millbrook. I suspect it does. I’ll write again once I know more, though I can’t promise when that will be — correspondence from the border moves slowly these days, for reasons that have nothing to do with scholarship.

Eat something interesting for me, if you find the time.

— E. Vale

Arlen read it twice, the easy warmth of the letter sitting alongside a quieter unease he couldn’t quite name. He remembered Sarai’s mention of Doraleth’s troubles, months back now, in Ashford’s Crossing — a succession dispute, distant and unconfirmed, the kind of rumor that had drifted past him without sticking. He remembered, too, Eldrin’s own carving, the one neither of them had ever properly understood, and the professor’s careful, scholarly unease at finding something he didn’t recognize.

Two sites. Now one of them’s being surveyed, and it happens to sit right where a civil war’s quietly simmering.

He folded the letter and set it aside, turning the thought over a while longer than he probably needed to, before deciding there wasn’t much he could actually do about any of it from here. It wasn’t his mystery to chase. It was Eldrin’s, same as it had always been, and the professor had never once asked him to carry more of it than a shared memory and an occasional letter.

He wrote a short reply that evening, mostly just wishing Eldrin well and asking him to be careful, and let the matter settle.

The rest of his week went considerably more ordinary.

He found a new vendor near the guild district’s outer edge, an older orc woman who sold skewered river fish glazed in something dark and faintly sweet, and spent the better part of an afternoon trying to talk her into sharing the recipe.

"Why would I give that away," she said, not unkindly, turning a skewer over the coals. "Took me twenty years to get it right."

"I’d credit you properly. The guild keeps records of who things come from."

"Records don’t pay rent." She studied him a moment, weighing something. "Tell you what. You bring me something worth trading — a technique, a spice, something I haven’t got — and we’ll talk."

He took that as a genuine offer rather than a dismissal, and spent the next several days turning over what he actually had worth trading. He settled, eventually, on the vinegar-and-herb method he’d worked out long time ago for ember-tailed lizard, a trick he suspected wouldn’t have crossed paths with her own cooking before.

She tried it on a cut of ordinary pork first, skeptical, and her expression shifted somewhere around the second bite.

"That’s clever," she admitted. "Cuts the richness properly." She wiped her hands and gestured him closer. "Fine. Glaze first. Dark syrup, reduced slow, a pinch of something bitter at the end to balance it — I use a root that only grows this close to the river, you won’t find it easy elsewhere."

He wrote the whole thing down carefully that evening, the method and the substitutions both, and brought a portion of it to the Foxglove’s kitchen to test properly.

"This is good," Rilla said, trying it without much ceremony. "Better than good."

"Traded for it."

"You trade for everything."

"Most things are worth more traded than bought."

She considered that, chewing slowly, and didn’t argue.

Pella ate an entire skewer standing at the counter and declared, around a full mouth, that it belonged on the inn’s own menu, which led to a longer conversation with Yveth about whether the kitchen could reasonably source the bitter root the orc woman had mentioned.

"Depends on the price," Yveth said, flipping through her ledger. "I’m not paying river-root prices for something that’s mostly novelty."

"It’s not novelty. It’s good."

"Everything’s good the first week. Ask me again in a month." She said it dryly, though she tried the dish herself before dismissing it, and ate rather more of it than her skepticism seemed to warrant.

He spent the following days collecting a few smaller recipes besides — a simple method for drying mushrooms that a Floor Three gathering contract had introduced him to, a trick for keeping bread soft longer that a baker near the market square shared freely over a slow afternoon. None of it was dramatic. All of it went carefully into the same growing collection he’d been building since Greyhaven, page after page of small, hard-won knowledge that mattered more to him, some days, than anything he carried into the Depths.

He thought, more than once that week, about Eldrin’s letter — about ruins surfacing near a border already unsettled by its own troubles, about the quiet, patient mystery that had first started with a single carved symbol and had never quite let him go since.

He didn’t let it occupy him past what was reasonable. It was distant, uncertain, and not presently his to carry.

But he found himself, writing a second letter before the week was out, asking Eldrin to be careful in a way he hadn’t quite managed the first time, and meaning it rather more than the words on their own let on.