Chapter 805: Kaelia’s Cooking Class [II]

She said it without an ounce of venom or a speck of mockery, with the honest devastating confusion of a little girl asking why a full-grown horse couldn’t step over a puddle.

"E-eh..."

The whole kitchen went dead silent as thirty girls held their breath.

Ther’Abella’s eyes went so wide they looked like cracked porcelain, and her whole body froze into a statue of pure cosmic humiliation.

Then, from the open arched window right behind Ther’Abella’s stove, the silence shattered.

"BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

A booming roar of helpless side-splitting laughter tore through the kitchen like a thunderclap.

Silas, who’d been leaning on the outside of the windowsill with his arms folded on the stone to watch the class, completely lost his footing.

He laughed so hard that his boots slid out from under him on the courtyard flagstones, and he fell flat on his back into a soft patch of clover under the window.

THUD!

"AHAHAHAHA! Oh, heavens!" Silas howled from the grass, his boots kicking at the air as his laughter rattled the windowpanes. "Seven hundred years! Seven hundred years of training and starlight magic... and she’s roasting an egg in a dry pot! I can’t breathe! Somebody help me, I can’t breathe!"

Outside in the courtyard, a few of Aki’s girls who’d stopped to listen burst into muffled helpless snickers and ducked behind the bushes, clutching their stomachs.

Inside the kitchen, half the room had their shoulders shaking with desperate choked giggles and were burying their red faces in their aprons to keep quiet.

...For Ther’Abella, seven hundred years of pride collapsing into one burnt egg was more than she could take.

Her eyes rolled straight back into her head and the wooden spoon slipped from her numb fingers and clattered against the stone counter.

KLATTER!

Her knees folded like cut bowstrings.

FWUMP!

She tipped over backward, and her breastplate clanged against the floor as she landed flat on her back across the granite.

Her boots twitched once in the air as her silver hair spilled across the floor in a tangled silky puddle, and a little ring of white froth started bubbling out of the corners of her twitching lips.

Kaelia’s eyes snapped wide with genuine panic.

"Ther’Abella!" Kaelia shrieked, dropping her towel and scurrying around the stove to kneel beside the fallen elf.

She waved her little hands frantically over Ther’Abella’s foaming mouth.

"Ther’Abella! Please wake up! I didn’t mean to upset you! The egg’s not ruined, we can still save the yolk! Please don’t die on the floor!"

At the next stove over, Elowynn stepped over and looked down at her fallen friend with a heavy long-suffering sigh.

She reached down and gently rubbed the elf’s tangled silver hair.

"Don’t worry about her, Chef," Elowynn drawled, rolling her eyes up toward the rafters. "She’s fine... Her pride just took a direct hit. She’ll lie there foaming for ten minutes, then she’ll wake up and say she was meditating. Just leave her."

Ther’Abella let out a faint gurgle of agreement.

Outside, Silas had managed to drag himself up onto his elbows.

He looked in through the window at Ther’Abella frothing on the floor, opened his mouth to say something, looked at the smoking pot, and collapsed back into the clover laughing all over again.

"Stop it!" one of the archers wheezed. "Lord Silas, please, I’m going to wet myself!"

Kaelia let out a long shaky breath of relief and wiped a bead of nervous sweat off her forehead.

"Oh... thank goodness... I thought I’d broken her..."

She stood up, smoothed down her white chef’s coat and turned to Elowynn’s stove.

"Well then, let’s see how you did, Elowynn," Kaelia said, stepping up to the pot. "I’m sure you were more careful with the water than—"

Kaelia reached out and lifted Elowynn’s lid.

SKREEEK!

Kaelia looked down into the pot. Her jaw dropped, and her eyes froze in speechless disbelief.

...There wasn’t any water in Elowynn’s pot either.

The pot was filled three inches deep with a thick shimmering bubbling pool of golden lard and cooking oil, hissing furiously over the open fire.

Floating dead center in the boiling grease was a raw cracked egg.

Its white had crisped up into a jagged greasy ring of blackened lace, and the raw yolk was bobbing half under the surface like a drowning yellow buoy in a storm of popping fat.

SPLAT! SIZZLE! SPLAT!

A stray bead of boiling oil leaped over the rim and sizzled against the counter.

Kaelia stayed completely silent.

Very slowly, she tilted her head up and locked her eyes onto Elowynn’s face with a flat terrifying hollow expression, the look of a priestess watching someone set fire to the holy scriptures.

Elowynn gave her an awkward lopsided grin and rubbed the back of her neck.

"Well, see, Chef..." Elowynn explained, waving her wooden tongs. "I figured... why use boring water when oil gets hotter faster? It’s basically the same thing, right? You’re just... boiling it in fat instead! It saves time!"

Kaelia looked down at the egg violently frying in a pool of grease then she looked back up at the tall confident ex-pirate standing in front of her.

A slow terrifying chill swept through the little chef’s mind, and her fingers curled into tight trembling fists at her sides.

’Even Brida knows how to cook...’ Kaelia thought, her mind reeling in pure horror as she pictured the loud rough brawler back in Blessed Land, who could at least roast a whole boar over a fire without burning it. ’Brida swings an axe around, drinks ale out of buckets and punches people for fun... and even she knows that water goes in a pot! What have they been doing all their lives?’

The thick, greasy stench of scorching lard hissed violently off Elowynn’s cooktop, sending tiny yellow droplets popping over the edge of the iron saucepan to sizzle against the scrubbed soapstone counter.

Kaelia stared into the swirling puddle of boiling swine fat, her delicate hands trembling as the white linen towel clenched in her fist creaked under the strain.

Behind her smooth brow, her thoughts were spinning in pure culinary agony.

She took one deep, grounding breath of the hot kitchen air, squeezed her eyes shut for half a second to steady her racing heart, and then snapped her eyes wide open, fixing Elowynn Embershade with the most severe glare her sweet face could muster.

"Elowynn!" Kaelia reprimanded, her voice dropping all its usual gentle timidity and ringing across the kitchen with the crisp cutting authority of a master craftsman inspecting shoddy ironwork. "Look at what’s happening inside that vessel right now...! Eggs get boiled in clean simmering water! That’s how you cook them properly, so the white sets soft and tender and the yolk doesn’t turn to chalk! Boiling oil isn’t basically the same thing... You don’t boil things in three inches of rendered pig fat! That’s deep-frying!"

Elowynn’s confident, easy posture wilted instantly under the blast of tiny furious chef energy.

The tall, curvy corsair flinched backward half a pace, her broad shoulders hunching as the color drained from her sun-kissed face until she looked nearly as pale as the flour sacks stacked against the eastern wall.

Her hands fluttered awkwardly over the handles of her iron tongs with her amethyst eyes darting to the floorboards as she bit her lower lip.

’Oh spirits of the salt...’ Elowynn thought, a sudden cold panic gripping her ribs as she swallowed hard. ’She looks so small and soft, but she scolds harder than an old quartermaster with an empty rum barrel! If Silas hears her dressing me down like a clumsy deckhand, he’s going to think I can’t even manage basic hearth chores... He’ll think I’m completely useless around the Keep!’

Nervously, almost desperately, Elowynn’s gaze flicked past Kaelia’s shoulder, darting through the wide arched window behind the stove.

Out in the lush clover patch beneath the stone sill, Silas was still lying flat on his back, his broad chest heaving beneath his dark leather riding jerkin as his boots kicked the grass in helpless, teary-eyed amusement.

He had his hands clamped over his stomach, his dark hair tangled with green stems, and then he caught her looking.

Silas raised one hand from his ribs, pointing a teasing finger right at her burning face, and mouthed three silent words up at her through the window.

"...Nice oil, pirate."

Elowynn’s panic evaporated in a heartbeat.

A rush of brilliant fiery warmth surged from the small mole under her left eye all the way down to her collarbones, setting her cheeks ablaze.

Even though he was laughing at her with zero mercy, even though he was rolling in the weeds at her absolute failure, his eyes were locked entirely onto her.

...That dazzling handsome smile was directed right at her face.

She puffed out her chest, tossed her ember-red braid over her shoulder, and grinned right back at him, thoroughly charmed and ready to conquer twenty more pans if it kept him looking.

Down on the cold granite flagstones between the stoves, a muffled, raspy groan scraped through the kitchen chatter.

Ther’Abella’s eyelids fluttered open, blinking against the bright afternoon light pouring through the rafters.

The silver-haired Viridian Guard officer slowly pushed herself up onto her elbows with her armor scraping against the stone.

She wiped a line of dried white froth from the corner of her lips with the back of her leather glove, her head swaying with sickening vertigo.

"Ah... ah..."

Her blue eyes were glassy, her silver constellation marks flickering with dim exhausted starlight as she stared blankly at the underside of the oak prep table.

’The shame...’ Ther’Abella thought in a faint groggy haze, her jaw aching where she’d clenched her teeth in mortification. ’The unbearable, suffocating dishonor... An officer of the Viridian Guard, seven hundred years of service, reduced to a laughingstock in front of common archers and that grinning usurper... My pride’s been ground into finer dust than winter flour... I must rise with dignity...’

Before Ther’Abella could even find her feet, Kaelia stepped over, planting her slippers firmly on the flagstones beside the elf’s hip.

Kaelia pointed a stern unyielding finger toward the two ruined pans.

"Both of you, on your feet this instant!" Kaelia ordered, her sweet voice brook-no-nonsense firm. "Take those pans off the heat! Ther’Abella, your egg is scorched to black carbon, and Elowynn, your pan is a grease fire waiting to ignite! Take them to the wash basin, throw out what’s in those pots, scrub the iron down with sand until there’s no soot or oil remaining, and prepare to start over!"

Ther’Abella flinched, scrambling to her knees with undignified haste, while Elowynn grabbed the handle of her oil pan with a pair of thick leather mitts.

"Right away, Chef!" both of them chorused in ragged sheepish unison.

They hurried toward the stone drainage trough along the western wall, head down, practically bumping shoulders in their rush to obey.

Kaelia let out a soft weary breath through her nose, turning on her heel to inspect the next station.

She walked up to the central stove, where Princess Aki stood watching with wide eager azure eyes.

Aki’s station was an island of pristine royal order amidst the chaos.

The soapstone counter was wiped completely clean, her wooden spoon rested neatly across a ceramic coaster, and beneath her cast-iron saucepan, the birch coals were glowing with a steady gentle ruby warmth.

A soft whisper of steam drifted from the brass vent in the lid, carrying the clean pure scent of boiling mineral water.

Kaelia draped her linen towel over her wrist, reached forward with steady fingers, and lifted Aki’s lid.

SQUEAK!

Kaelia peered inside.

The water was a clear shimmering mirror, bubbling with tiny delicate pearls of steam that rolled gently around the pale brown egg resting peacefully on the curved bottom of the pan.

The shell was intact, unblemished, and held in a perfect even convection current that kept it dancing without bumping the iron walls.

A brilliant radiant smile broke across Kaelia’s face, dispelling all the lingering tension in her shoulders.

"Oh, look at this!" Kaelia praised warmly, clapping her hands together with genuine delight. "Princess Aki, this is magnificent! Look at the draft control! The heat is distributed with flawless symmetry, the water level covers the shell by exactly two fingers, and the simmer is neither too violent nor too still... You’ve got an innate instinct for balance, Lady Aki! This egg is coming along perfectly!"

Aki gasped softly, her azure eyes lighting up like twin lanterns under the rafters.

"Truly?!" Aki cheered, pumping her small fists against the front of her steel breastplate with an adorable triumphant little hop.

A vivid, lovely pink dusted her high cheekbones, her royal composure melting into the pure sweet joy of a young girl receiving her first gold star from a beloved tutor.

’She praised me...’ Aki thought, her heart doing a frantic joyous flutter beneath her ribs as she looked toward the window to see if Silas had seen her triumph. ’She called it magnificent! The master chef of Blessed Land said I’ve got an innate instinct! I knew it... I knew I could do this! Silas is going to love my breakfast tomorrow! I’m going to boil him the most flawless, velvety eggs he has ever tasted in his entire life! Take that, Elowynn! Take that, Ther’Abella! The kitchen belongs to the princess!’