Chapter 63: I Cooked Dinner for Five Assassins and the Junk Skill Was the One That Mattered

He was gone before the eleven got down the stair, which I had expected, and he had left a folded paper on the fourth step, which I had also expected.

I did not read it that morning.

I went back to the palace, slept eleven hours for the first time since January, woke at six in the evening, and went down to the west kitchen.

The cooks got out of the way. Bren Olvar came and stood in the doorway with his arms folded because somebody had told him where I was, and he watched me put a pot on and did not say anything for a long time.

"Majesty."

"Master Olvar."

"There are nine people in this house who cook for a living."

"There are." I put the onions in. "None of them have Cocina de Campaña at D."

"Is that high?"

"It’s four ranks off the floor and it’s the only skill I got in January that I ever called garbage out loud." I did not look up. "Turns out it was being paid at four percent."

He came in and sat on the flour bin, which is not a thing a master of arms does.

"What does it do at D?"

"It tells me what a person will actually eat."

"Everyone eats."

"No." I turned the onions over. "Everyone is served. That’s a different verb and this house has been doing the wrong one for twenty years."

I cooked for two hours and I did not let anybody help me, and at eight o’clock I had five plates on the long table in the small hall, which is the room where a year ago the tyrant used to eat alone at a table set for six.

They came in one at a time because I had asked them to come at different minutes.

Lunara sat first. She looked at her plate for a while.

"This is barracks food."

"It’s the third pot at the eastern garrison, twenty second of the month, when the good meat is gone and the cook has to make a decision." I sat down. "You ate it for nine years before you were sworn."

"How do you know that?"

"I didn’t. It told me." I pushed the salt toward her. "It told me you’d eat this and leave the bread, so I made more of the first thing and less of the second."

Lunara Marr picked up her spoon and put it down again.

"I want to say something and I want to say it once."

"Go ahead."

"Line three," she said. "Fourteenth of January. You gave my oath sword back hilt first."

"I remember."

"You do not." She looked at me. "You gave it back hilt first because that is how you hand somebody a knife in a kitchen. You did not know what it means to a sworn sword and you did it anyway and it has been the only thing I have thought about at every guard change for eighty days."

"Lunara..."

"I’m not finished." She picked the spoon back up. "Somebody was collecting on that. For eighty days, somebody in a river house was being paid for a thing you did without knowing you did it."

"Yes."

"Then I would like to meet him." She started eating. "That’s all. Sit down, the rest of them are coming."

Zelina came second and stood behind her chair without sitting.

"You cooked."

"I did."

"For five people who married you at swordpoint."

"For five people who signed a succession act with my name on it in January." I nodded at the chair. "Sit down and tell me what’s in it."

She sat. She went through the plate the way she goes through everything, and she found it in under a minute, because she is the best in the empire and I had put it there for her to find.

"There’s honey in this."

"There is."

"You put the honey from line eleven in my food."

"I put honey in your food." I ate some of mine. "Line eleven was Calista’s windowsill. This is a different jar and it cost four coppers and I paid for it out of my own hand this afternoon at the market, and the man who sold it to me had no idea who I was."

Zelina Flintstone sat back.

"That’s the first thing you’ve ever bought."

"It’s the first thing anyone in this body has bought in ten years." I put my spoon down. "Which is why I want it noted that I overpaid by one copper and I knew I was overpaying while I did it."

"Why?"

"Because Ojo de Tasador at B told me the price and I ignored it." I looked at her. "You told me once that the winner isn’t the one who adds better. It’s the one willing to write down things the other man won’t."

"I said that about him."

"I know what you said it about."

Calista came in third and stopped in the doorway because Miralys was behind her and neither of them wanted to be the one to go first.

"Both of you," I said. "There’s a chair each."

Calista sat and looked at her plate and did not touch it.

"There’s no meat in mine."

"There isn’t."

"I didn’t tell anybody that."

"You didn’t." I passed her the bread. "You’ve eaten around it at nine dinners since the legate came and nobody’s noticed because nobody was looking at your plate. The Church takes it off you when they take the office. I didn’t know that this morning."

Calista Bloom put both hands in her lap.

"Say the rest of it," she said.

"There is no rest of it. It’s a plate."

"That is not..." She stopped. She started again, quieter. "Six weeks. Six weeks and three hundred people watched them do it, and the thing that has actually been hard is that no one has once served me a plate without meat in it."

Miralys sat down beside her without being asked, which is the first time in eighty days she has sat next to anybody.

"Mine’s southern," Miralys said.

"It is."

"It’s wrong."

"It is." I ate some. "It’s wrong because I’ve never been south and I made it off a description Saoirse got out of a book, and I want you to tell me every single thing that’s wrong with it, in order, starting with the worst."

Miralys Fae looked at the plate for a long moment.

"The rice," she said.

"Go on."

"You washed it." She picked up her fork. "You don’t wash it. You wash it if you want it to behave. Nobody in my country wants rice to behave."

"Then teach me the other way."

"That would take four evenings."

"I have four evenings."

The window opened over the table without being asked, low and small, turned so that four people could read it at once.

[INVESTMENT PORTFOLIO. Hero System v0.7]

[Lunara Marr ....... Capital: 5 · Return: x1,840 · Position: OPEN]

[Zelina Flintstone .... Capital: 3 · Return: x1,100 · Position: OPEN]

[Calista Bloom ..... Capital: 2 · Return: no record · Position: UNOPENED]

[Miralys Fae ....... Capital: 4 · Return: x1,000 · Position: OPEN]

[Saoirse Wynne ..... Capital: 4 · Return: x100 · Position: OPEN]

[Integrity: 47%]

Zelina put her fork down and read it twice.

"Every capital went up," she said.

[Every capital went up.]

"Why?"

[Because he cooked for five people and did not calculate one of them.]

Calista had not looked away from the third line.

"Mine still says unopened."

[Yes.]

"He served me a plate tonight. That isn’t nothing."

[It is not nothing. Your capital went from one to two.] The letters came slower than usual. [Bloom, your position opens the day he does something for you and works out what it is worth first. He has now had two chances and taken neither.]

"Then leave it closed," Calista said.

[That is what I intend.]

Miralys was counting the lines with her finger, the way she counts everything, and she stopped at the bottom of the list.

"Vaelion."

"I see it."

There was a sixth line under Saoirse’s, and it had not been there when the window opened.

[Roderic Alden ..... Capital: 1 · Return: no record · Position: UNOPENED]

[HERO.]

[I did not write that line.]

Saoirse came in last, at nine, with oil smoke still on her sleeve and the copper spine from the second container under her arm because she has not put it down since the workshop.

She sat, ate two mouthfuls standing up, then sat down properly and ate the rest without saying anything at all, which for her is a review.

Then she pushed the plate away and put the spine on the table between the five plates.

"I read it," she said.

"And?"

"It’s a receiver, and it was built for one delivery, and it’s been sitting warm since Thursday." She turned it so the etched face was up. "Vaelion, it isn’t tuned to you."

Everything at that table stopped.

"Say it plainly," Zelina said.

"It’s tuned to a carrier." Saoirse put her finger on the etching without touching it. "A module has to be loose to move, and a module comes loose at zero, and there are two accounts in this world with a number that can be driven to zero."

"Mine," I said.

"Yours is at forty seven and climbing, and every point you gain costs him a week." She looked up. "The other one is at sixty one and falling, and it has been falling since the day the legate read the bull, and it does not belong to you."

I unfolded the paper from the fourth step for the first time, there, at a table with five plates on it.

Four lines, in the fast ugly script.

Majesty.

You have proved the module moves while installed. I no longer require your zero.

I require a zero. Any zero on the ledger will serve.

Your portfolio carried six positions tonight, Majesty, and a man can only stand in front of one door at a time.

Choose which of them you would like to defend, and I will begin with one of the others on Friday.