Page 31 of Beds and Blades

For several seconds, I did not move. I lay on the narrow bed with one arm trapped beneath me, my hair somewhere across my face, and waited for my brain to provide a location.

Pennsylvania?

No.

Stone ceiling. Wool blanket. The faint smell of smoke in the walls.

Mytharo.

Right.

I had slept for what felt like either twelve minutes or three years. My body had selected the second option emotionally and the first option physiologically.

Every muscle I owned had opinions. My shoulders ached. My hands hurt.

I sat up slowly.

The room did not spin, which I chose to interpret as progress.

Someone had left a basin of water on the small table by the wall. I washed my face and hands, which improved my condition from battlefield-adjacent to merely alarming. My hair had reached a state I could only describe as post-siege academic. I attempted to smooth it down. It rejected the premise.

I was hungry.

This announced itself with enough force that all philosophical reflection stopped.

The cosmological implications of interstellar travel by energy drink would have to wait. Breakfast had just become the dominant priority.

I found my way down by following the sound.

The mess hall occupied a long room on the ground level of the keep, built with the same total disinterest in decoration that characterized the rest of the outpost. Long wooden tables ran the length of the space, scarred by years of knives, mugs, elbows, and whatever other abuse soldiers inflicted on furniture. Benches sat on either side.

A hearth occupied one wall, and iron pots hung over the coals, sending steam into the rafters.

The room smelled incredible.

This was inconvenient, because I had been prepared for medieval food to be historically interesting rather than good. My expectations had involved gray porridge, questionable sanitation, and bread dense enough to serve as siege equipment.

Instead, the air was full of warm bread, browned butter, onions, and herbs.

A woman near the hearth handed me a wooden bowl.

The bowl held a thick grain porridge, but not the sad institutional kind. Barley, I thought, or something close to it, cooked with broth until it was creamy and rich. There were pieces of roasted root vegetables in it, soft and sweet at the edges, and strips of salted meat that had been browned until the fat crisped. Someone had finished it with herbs and a sharp cheese that melted into the top in small, glorious streaks.

There was bread, too. Dark, crusty, still warm. Butter beside it. Actual butter, pale gold and soft enough to spread.

I sat at the nearest table and took a bite.

The food was good. Deeply, offensively good.

The barley had absorbed the broth. The cheese had bite. The vegetables were sweet from the fire. The salted meat contributed a level of practical, unpretentious excellence that suggested whoever ran this kitchen understood morale at a military level.

I had eaten enough continental breakfasts at conference hotels to understand that the word breakfast was often aspirational.

“This is excellent,” I said aloud.

The soldier across from me looked up.

She was young. Perhaps nineteen, perhaps twenty, though I was rapidly learning that life at a frontier garrison complicated the usual visual markers of age. She had olive skin, dark hair braided tightly back from her face, and a narrow scar along her chin that made her look more serious until she smiled, at which point the seriousness vanished entirely.