5.1 — Where the Food Came From

"So," Vaelira said, eyeing the small collection of baskets and cloth-wrapped parcels that had begun accumulating near the hearth, "someone explain to me what, precisely, we're working with. I assume it's not conjured. That would be considerably less interesting."

"Nothing here is conjured," I said. "I don't do that with food. It feels like cheating, somehow, when the whole point of tonight is that we made it."

"Some of it's mine," Flora said, and there was a small, unmistakable note of pride in her voice — pride she still doesn't quite know how to wear comfortably, so it came out half-hidden, almost apologetic. She knelt beside one of the baskets and drew back the cloth, revealing a modest but careful arrangement of vegetables — pale gold roots, deep green leaves still faintly dew-damp, a handful of small, round fruit the color of the Fragment's own perpetual dusk. "I made these. On a mission. It's — it's part of what I can do now. I grow things. Real-looking things." A small hesitation. "They don't have anything alive in them, though. No soul. No — I don't know the right word for it. They look like food. They aren't quite food, the way food used to be food, before all of this."

"They cook the same," I said, gently, seeing the small flicker of doubt cross her face. "They taste the same. What they lack doesn't show up in a meal, Flora. It only shows up if you go looking for it, and none of us are going looking for it tonight."

She nodded, slowly, some of the tension easing out of her shoulders, and Ilyrisse, without seeming to make any particular effort of it, reached over and took one of the pale gold roots from the basket, turning it over in her hands with real, unhurried interest. "This is extraordinary," she said. "I've never seen a mission-ability quite like this. Most people bring back objects. Weapons. Coin. You bring back a harvest."

"It's the only thing I know how to make," Flora said. "I think that's why the world gave it to me. It already knew what I was, before I did."

Vesalia, meanwhile, had unwrapped a second parcel — a rougher one, tied with plain cord rather than cloth — revealing a cut of something dense and dark, clearly meat, alongside a handful of coarse grain still faintly dusted with the pale stone-grit of wherever it had been threshed. "Farm mission," she said, by way of explanation, setting it beside Flora's basket without ceremony. "Three days inside a pocket of Something built entirely around a single failing harvest. My objective was to save it before the season turned. I did. This is what was left over, after the mission closed and I was allowed to keep a portion of what I'd grown." She glanced, briefly, toward Flora's baskets, something unreadable crossing her face. "I didn't know there were souls who could do what you do without needing the mission to hand it to them fresh each time. That's — that's a rarer gift than you're giving yourself credit for."

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Flora ducked her head at that, pleased and visibly unused to praise from someone she barely knew, and I watched Vesalia notice the reaction and soften, just slightly, the careful composure she usually keeps around strangers.

"And this," Ilyrisse said, producing, from beneath her own arm, a neat, cloth-wrapped bundle I hadn't even seen her carrying, "is simply bought. From the market street two districts east of here. I have no talent for growing anything, mission-born or otherwise, and no farm mission has ever come my way that I recall. I paid above the assessed price for all of it, the way you're supposed to, if you want the seller to actually want to sell to you rather than simply surrender it to the world's flat number instead."

"You remembered that," I said, surprised, and a little warmed by it — a small detail from a story I'd told her once, months ago, about the market and the reasoning behind it, folded now quietly into an evening she hadn't needed to think twice about.

"I remember most things you tell me," she said, simply, without any particular emphasis, as though this were an obvious fact rather than a quiet, considerable devotion. "Even the ones that seem incidental at the time."

"And you," Vaelira said, turning her half-lidded gaze toward me, "brought what, exactly, besides the hearth and the mildly insufferable habit of hosting?"

"Bread," I said. "And whatever's left in the cellar from the last few missions I didn't spend entirely on other people. Some oil. A few bottles of something I've been saving." I nodded toward the low stone alcove at the base of the hearth, where several small clay jars sat waiting. "I wanted tonight to be built out of all of us. Not just one contribution carrying the meal. Everyone brought something. That felt like the point."

"It is the point," Ilyrisse said, quietly, glancing around at the small, mismatched collection of baskets and parcels now gathered together at the center of the clearing — grown, farmed, foraged, bought, saved — five very different origins arriving, without any of us quite planning it that way, at the same low stone hearth, in the same low gold light, for the same shared meal. "I don't think I've ever eaten a meal built quite like this before. Even in my centuries of rule, everything on my table came from somewhere I never had to think about. This is — " She paused, searching for the word, and settled, finally, on something simple. "This is nicer."

"It's about to get significantly less organized," Vaelira observed, eyeing the baskets with open skepticism, "given that none of us, as far as I can tell, actually knows how to cook."

"I know how to cook," Vesalia said, mildly offended. "I ran an empire. I fed armies."

"You commanded people who fed armies," Vaelira said. "There's a difference."

"There is not," Vesalia said, already rolling her sleeves higher, "and I intend to prove it, starting immediately."