Chapter 27: The First Dinner

Chapter 27: Chapter 27: The First Dinner

Tobin had been cooking since noon, and he wouldn’t let anyone into the kitchen until it was ready.

When he finally threw the door open, the scarred oak table was set for four. Mismatched plates he’d found in the cupboards that came with the fragment. A roast haunch of the Rat King, glazed dark and glistening. A bowl of roasted roots. And in the middle, carefully sliced, the round loaf from Halden’s that Elias had set on the rooftop as an offering, slightly squashed and very much still edible.

"Waste not," Tobin said, catching Elias’s look. "It brought me here. Least I can do is eat it."

They sat. The hearth crackled. For a moment, nobody quite knew what to do with their hands.

Tobin poured four cups of something from a dusty bottle he’d found under the counter, and then he didn’t reach for his fork. He folded his hands on the table instead.

"In Bellwick," he said, "when you sit down with people you don’t know, the host tells his story first. That way, the guests don’t feel like they’re the only ones standing there with their trousers down." He looked around the table. "So. I’ll start."

"I kept a tavern," Tobin said. "Forty years, the Crooked Kettle. My mother kept it before me. When the blight came over the hills, everybody ran for the town walls, and when the walls started to go, they ran to the Kettle, because it was the biggest room in Bellwick and it always smelled like supper."

He turned his cup slowly on the table.

"So I fed them. That’s all. Barley stew, my mother’s recipe. I walked around that room with the pot and filled every bowl I could find, and I told them to eat while it was hot. And then the roof came down." He was quiet for a moment. "I didn’t save them. I want to be honest about that. The roof came down on all of us. But they didn’t die hungry, and they didn’t die alone, and they didn’t die in the dark. That’s what I could give them, so that’s what I gave."

Nobody said anything. Tobin nodded to himself, satisfied, and looked at Marcus.

Marcus took a long breath.

"Ridge Seventeen," he said. "Tamsk valley. Nine hours holding a hill against three armored columns. I had eleven people left and one way off the ridge, and they couldn’t take it with the enemy shooting at their backs." He shrugged one shoulder, a small, tight movement. "So I gave the enemy something else to shoot at. Called the airstrike on my own position. Ninety seconds out. I made every one of them count."

"Did they get off?" Tobin asked.

"He says they did." Marcus nodded at Elias. "Past the trees. Going for the creek." He picked up his fork and put it down again. "My corporal, Reyes. She carved her initials into the post on my range. Twice. I keep thinking she’d have hated that I’m the one who got a second go."

Aveline went last.

She told it the way she’d told Elias the first night, plainly and in order. The Ashen Legion. King Oswin, who wept when he left his dogs. Forty knights at dawn, and Sir Brannic falling an hour before the end with his hand on her shoulder, telling her to hold. Three spears: thigh, ribs, shoulder. Then the horn, three notes rising, and the wagons clearing the ridge.

"I had one breath left," she said. "I’d decided to spend it on the next man up the road. Then there was light, and a dying boy, and a king of bones."

The hearth popped. A log settled.

It was Tobin who asked the question. He asked it gently, the way you’d ask a guest whether they wanted more bread.

"And why’d you stay?"

Marcus answered first. "Because my war ended," he said, "and his didn’t."

Aveline looked at the fire. "Because his world still stands."

Tobin nodded slowly, as if they had both said exactly what he’d expected.

"Same as me, then," he said. "I lost Bellwick. You lost your ridge, and you lost your king." He looked around the table, at each of them, and finally at Elias. "We’ve all watched a world go. I’m not watching another one."

It wasn’t a speech. He said it like a man setting down a plate. But Elias felt it land on the table between all four of them and stay there, heavy and solid, like something none of them would ever pick back up.

Then all three of them looked at him.

"I didn’t die," Elias said. "So I don’t think I’m—"

"Host’s rules," Tobin said. "Everyone at the table."

So Elias told them.

He told them about the Crimson Break, ten years ago, when the sky over his neighborhood split open in the middle of an ordinary afternoon. About being twelve and running home from school against a crowd that was running the other way. About the building on Ashby Street, the one that came down, and how long it took the rescue crews to dig through it. His parents had been on the second floor. Mira had been on the first, six years old, pinned under a collapsed ceiling for four hours, breathing raw mana while the city burned.

"They got her out," he said. "But the mana didn’t come out with her. It’s been growing in her ever since. Little by little." He looked at his hands. "That’s why I carried bags. That’s why I took the Ironfang job. That’s why I’m doing two gates a night. Everything I’ve done for ten years has been for her."

Nobody spoke for a while.

Then Tobin leaned forward on his elbows.

"Tell me about her," he said. "Not the sickness. Her."

Elias blinked. Nobody had ever asked him that.

"She’s sixteen," he said slowly. "She’s mean about my haircuts. She’s smarter than me and she knows it. She peels oranges in one long spiral and says it’s the only thing she can still do perfectly." His throat tightened a little. "She dreams about the ocean. She’s never seen it."

"What does she like to eat?"

"Custard buns from Halden’s. Oranges. That’s about it. She can’t keep much down most days, and the hospital food is—" He shrugged.

"Terrible," Tobin said, with deep professional disgust. "Hospital food is always terrible. In every world, I’d bet my kettle on it." He sat back. "Well. When she’s well enough, I’ll cook for her. Something with no monster in it at all, I promise. Something that tastes like the sea."

"You’ve never seen our sea."

"Then you’ll take me to see it," Tobin said. "Both of us. And she’ll tell me if I got it right."

Elias laughed. It surprised him. It was the first time he’d laughed at this table, and he hadn’t expected to.

"Deal," he said.

They ate. The haunch was rich and dark and tender, and the bread from Halden’s was squashed but good, and Marcus told a story about Kowalski and a goat that made Aveline choke on her drink. The hearth burned gold. Somewhere outside the kitchen windows, the grey plain stretched away into the starless dark, but it didn’t feel empty anymore.

A knight, a soldier, a cook, and a summoner, at one table.

Elias looked around at them and thought, very clearly, for the first time: This is my family now.

He didn’t say it. He didn’t need to. Tobin passed him the bread.