“If you had let me know you were hungry earlier, I could have made you something,” Erryc said, sounding surprised.
“I said I wanted festival food, didn’t I?”
“They’re not making anything complicated, I’m just saying, I could have made you the same thing and not robbed you half a silver for it.”
“But then it wouldn’t be festival food,” Fawn insisted. Fair food was always oily and crunchy, or soft and sticky. Whether it was vegetables fried in a flour and herbs batter, or the blackberry-syrup drenched hotcakes right off the griddle, it was deliciously indulgent in a way no other food was.
The sweet smell of simmered and spiced fruit entranced her in a haze until one sticky hot cake wrapped in a large dried out leaf was in her hands, almost too hot to hold.
“I didn’t know you had a wife,” the hotcake vendor said, eyeing Fawn as she took a bite of one.
She nearly choked on the sweet confection trying to speak and swallow at the same time, her words lost against the mouthful.
“Not his wife,” she repeated after a painful swallow.
“Not yet,” Erryc chuckled, tugging her against his side. How many people were they trying to deceive?
“Just how many favors am I doing you?” Fawn half laughed, if only to conceal what those words did to her.
The vendor spared the two of them a skeptical glance. “How long have you known each other? I haven’t seen you two together before.”
“Oh, years. She’s a little quiet. I’m afraid I overshadow her sometimes,” Erryc said with a bashful chuckle, running a hand through his hair.
“I don’t mind,” she replied. She couldn’t help herself, or all this giddy energy. She found herself looking up at Erryc with stars in her eyes. It lasted a moment too long, before she remembered herself, clearing her throat and repeating herself for the sake of clarity.
“He can talk and talk. I don’t have quite so many things to say,” she added cheekily, both elated and nervous from participating. “I’ll be right back.”
She turned the corner of the little maze of stalls and games, and found the carrot dumpling cart she had smelled from afar. She held up two fingers for the seller as he counted up orders from the people standing around his cart, taking a number of skewered carrots out of one bowl of batter and dunking them in a fired pot of oil, the surface roiling with bubbles instantly.
“You two are a strange match,” the man selling the hotcakes remarked, apparently not realizing she wasn’t out of earshot. Fawn’s shoulders tensed, and she stopped behind one of the banners to listen.
The carrot dumpling seller took the coin out of her hand and gave her two dumplings on a stick with brisk efficiency, moving immediately onto the next round of orders.
“He might not have picked her purposefully,” another villager replied before Erryc could say anything. “Don’t orcs have some sort of mating frenzy?”
“Yes, the Blood Fever. I’ve seen the games in the spring, the hill camp, all the young people participate in roughing each other up,” the hotcakes vendor laughed loud, boisterously. “I didn’t realize it extended to the rest of us–”
“You can go a whole lifetime without cutting someone,” Erryc responded rather curtly, cutting him off. “And I left the hill camp. I have no desire to make anyone bleed.”
There was a moment of awkward silence, before the hotcake vendor gave a skeptical laugh, adding with a leering tone, “Well, I wouldn’t mind a bloody fever if it meant I could snag the baker’s daughter with it.”
4
“He called this a hotcake? It’s barely even warm,” Erryc grumbled, rolling his eyes as he took a bite, consuming half the cake in a single bite.
Its light, spongy crumb squeezed out a rivulet of melted butter, running immediately down his thumb, his hand. He rolled his eyes at the mess, holding his elbow up to keep it from running into his sleeve. “Yeesh. Whose idea was it to soak these in syrup? Was it because they’re so dry?”
Fawn frowned. She’d never heard him so immediately annoyed with someone. “Everything alright?”
“Oona keeps catching my eye. She’s been staring at us,” he said with a huff. “She’s so persistent. I don’t know what it’s going to take to get her to stop. I’ve made myself clear with her on this.”
Fawn rolled her eyes and nearly laughed. No, he hadn’t. She’d bet a lot of money he’d inched his way around actually saying a direct ‘no’.
“Maybe she ought to hear how critical you are about other people’s baked goods,” she teased softly.
“I’ve never said a bad word about Oona’s baked goods. They’re perfectly respectable, she knows what she’s doing. Simmons, on the other hand, the scoundrel–”
“C’mon. We can still enjoy the festival, can’t we?”
