“You’re also very modest, I’ve noticed.”
She found herself speechless again. Because was it her imagination, or had his tone turned almost…playful?
My imagination,she told herself, stubbornly.
But as he headed to his room to dress, he glanced back at her one last time.
And she thought she saw the beginning of a smile cross his face.
An hour later,Sephia had washed and dressed, and she was standing in the main kitchen of Solturne Hall.
It was such a massive space that she spent several minutes simply wandering from one end of it to the next, marveling at the vast assortment of pots and pans, at the seemingly endless amount of fully-stocked shelves, at the ovens that numbered so many she kept losing count.
It connected to an outdoor section that featured evenmoreovens, these ones made of brick and surrounded by various types of neatly-stacked wood. Fresh fruits and vegetables hung in rows of baskets along two edges of this outer section. There was an entire raised garden along the third edge, and she had never seen such beautiful, fresh-looking herbs as the ones growing in that garden.
A chef is only as good asher ingredients, Chef Talos—her cooking tutor back in Middlemage—used to say.
And these ingredients looked good enough that they could have made a decent chef out of just about anybody.
In short, she was in heaven.
Even if shewassharing the pristine space with a still sleepy and grumpy-faced fae.
“So, um, first things first,” she began in response to Tarron’s impatient staring. “We need to gather our ingredients, and our tools…” She bounced from one basket and drawer to the next, collecting things. She hummed to herself as she went, growing increasingly happier in spite of Tarron’s grumpiness, and in spite of the overall mess she was in.
She was always happy when she was cooking.
Tarron continued to watch her. She didn’t pay him much attention, but his gaze was slowly softening, she thought, as she kept humming. And when she pulled a pair of tongs out and absently snapped them together, he cleared his throat and asked: “Why did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Click those…whatever they are… together?”
“They’re tongs.” Sephia looked at the utensil in her hand, feeling suddenly mystified herself. “And I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “It’s one of the rules of cooking, though—you have to give tongs a few test clicks whenever you pull them out of the drawer.”
He gave her a dubious look. “Should I be writing these rules down?”
She almost laughed, but caught herself and switched back to her head chef voice. “No— just pay attention.”
She found a cutting board and started to dice up vegetables.
“What are we making, precisely?” He sounded genuinely curious now, which for some reason made her nervous.
“Um…some sort of egg scramble, maybe? Are those pygmy hen eggs over there?”
He nodded.
“Hand them here.”
He did, still watching her uncertainly, as if he thought she might be concocting a deadly potion of some sort.
“What? I’m just making it up as I go, that’s all.”
He looked mortified again, but he recovered more quickly this time. He dutifully went back to handing her ingredients and tools. “Do you need these?”
“Maybe,” she said, taking a ring of measuring spoons from him only to toss them aside.
She worked out how to light the smallest and least-intimidating looking oven first, and then she found a cooling barrel full of something that at leastlookedlike butter. She scooped some of it out and plopped it into a saucepan.
