Chapter 14: 14: Lunch

The air had that strange quality that sometimes comes around the transition from winter to spring: when it still wants to be cold but can’t manage to be quite so chilly as to bring a frost, the morning dew persists for most of the day, and the sun does its best to make itself felt through an overcast sky (typical at all times of year for Gradia, to be fair), resulting in a not unpleasant but slightly tepid, damp sort of atmosphere. Beneath Wren’s boots (exceptionally comfy, she discovered), the paving stones were just a little bit slick; when she stepped into grass, her boots came out visibly wet. Most of her body felt almost too warm if the sun shone on her for too long or she walked too fast, then borderline chilled when the clouds came over or she passed through shade and the breeze blew.

But Wren was a Gradian, and used to the peculiarities of its weather. She unbuttoned her coat and wandered to the main street, the one via which she’d entered the town the evening before. She hadn’t really looked around much on her way to the Hilarious Misunderstanding, but she remembered her exhausted and twilit impression of Cotton Mossford as… quaint, perhaps: a classic country village, the kind where they probably had maypole dances and perhaps where well-off people might come to retire from city life.

In the daylight, though, she saw that it was in need of some attention. Some of the buildings looked abandoned - a few windows were broken, a few roofs were marred with holes. That wasn’t that unusual. Buildings were difficult and expensive to make, and repairing them was both of those things again on top of being deeply inconvenient. It simply wasn’t always worth it, she knew, and she’d heard that people who’d grown up in villages like this often tended to stay there for their entire lives and simply make do with whatever wear and tear the place might suffer.

What was a little more concerning was the noticeboard on the side of the main street, and the sign beside it.

The sign was a list of businesses, establishments, and services currently running in Cotton Mossford. The Hilarious Misunderstanding was on there with its street address, as was the distillery and the Twin Cob Tearoom mentioned by Myrinna. Three or four other names were there too, including a cobbler that Wren surmised was probably the one who’d supplied her new boots. Then there was a lot of empty space, but empty space that clearly hadn’t always been that way. It was obvious from the patterns of discolouration in the wood that there had been many more names there until relatively recently, and the noticeboard bore out the idea: several flyers advertising businesses had been either half torn off or haphazardly painted over, indicating a significant number of closures and shutdowns.

Wren studied the board for a minute or two before the increasingly insistent grumbling of her stomach drove her up the road again. On her left, she passed a good-sized inn, the roof of which looked as if it had been recently replaced, whose sign bore a huge catapult and the name of the establishment: The Trebuchet Inn. It was, however, definitely a catapult on the sign and not a trebuchet.

She thought about going in to see whether there might be food, as would reasonably be expected from an inn, but as the place was pretty clearly shut (whether it might only open in the evenings, as some places did, or was closed longer-term, she couldn’t say), she continued to trundle up the road until she came to a fork. The left-hand path went on for a few hundred feet before morphing into an unpaved stretch of mud and grass bordered by squat, untrimmed trees on either side; the one that went off to the right was paved as far as she could see and headed sharply uphill. A sign with peeling paint told her that the uphill road was the way to Ellinton.

Wren glanced around briefly, spotting another sign indicating that a street off the main path was the way to both Vyel’s Apothecary (the one at which Alacrity worked, she assumed from her recollection of briefly meeting the young woman in the bell tower) and something called RAMEL, but she didn’t stop to wonder about either of those. More important things were afoot, namely lunch. If Myrinna’s directions had been accurate, then, there should have been food nearby - and indeed Wren’s nose told her that there was, for the smell of freshly baked somethings wafted up from behind the brick walls nestled into the junction of the two paths.

She wandered around and found a gate that opened into a beautiful courtyard, its edges lined with blossoming bushes and climbing vines. Two adjoining single-story buildings sat on the other side, each with thatched roofs; the walls were white, the wooden frames of the windows and doors black. From a high metal archway covered in thin vines with large pink blossoms hung a sign depicting two large loaves of bread and announcing that this establishment was the Twin Cob Tearoom.

Pristinely clean tables woven wicker- or rattan-style sat on well-maintained patio stones, each bearing a menu with a list of options in careful, flourishing penmanship. Three women in their mid- to late-thirties sat around one of the tables, quietly enjoying cups of tea and scones piled high with cream and jams in various vibrant colours. One of them raised her cup to Wren as she entered; Wren nodded in reply.

Inside the boundaries of the courtyard, Wren noticed, it was just slightly warmer than the rest of the town. She wondered whether they had a green mage controlling the temperature, as she’d sometimes seen restaurants in Din do when they wanted people to be able to sit outside whatever the season.

“Good morning,” came a voice from beside Wren.

Wren just about managed not to jump. “Hello,” she said, the word coming out as a pathetic squeak.

“Oh, I’m sorry if I snuck up on you,” said the woman standing next to her. She was in her late middle age and wore her years gracefully; her hair was a rich auburn, her eyes bright. She was small, both in height and frame, with features that reminded Wren of an otter or perhaps a small deer. “People do tell me I shouldn’t be so quiet, but… well, what am I going to do, walk around talking at the top of my voice about nothing? Or perhaps I should wear a bell.” Her eyes unfocused momentarily as if she were giving the idea serious consideration. Then she shook her head, blinked, and gave a broad, genuine smile. “Can I help you?”

“Well,” said Wren, “I was hoping to get something to eat.”

“Ah,” said the woman, nodding wide-eyed. “Well, we can certainly help with that.”

She beckoned Wren to a table and passed her the menu with a flourish. The selection was impressive for a small tearoom: plain scones, fruit scones, cheese scones, apple scones, a variety of cakes, sandwiches, a range of things on toast (eggs, meats, even fish), baked potatoes, baked sweet potatoes, the surprising options of crab cakes and steak (separately, of course, not as a single meal, although it wouldn’t have surprised Wren if the tearoom would happily bring out both together if she asked), and more blends of tea than Wren had ever seen listed in one place.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

“This is a lot of stuff,” she said, mostly to buy herself time to read it all.

“Oh, yes,” said the woman. “We like to ensure there’ll be something for everyone, and all of it the best.”

Wren glanced over her menu at the three women sitting at the other table. “What are they having?” she asked.

“Selection of scones, selection of jams, selection of teas,” said the proprietor. “For when there are a few of you and you all want a cream tea but with a little variety.”

“Hm. Not really a one-person thing, then.”

“I can do you four halves of a scone, all different kinds, and a couple of scoops of each type of jam?”

Wren shrugged. “Why not?”

The woman nodded. “What kind of tea do you like?”

Wren winced. “I… don’t know. I’ve only ever had, I don’t know, whatever the most standard, boring kind of tea is.”

“Well,” said the woman brightly, leaning in - although she stopped short of actually doing it, Wren had the very strong sense that she’d been about to give her a friendly, teasing elbowing, “let me get you one breakfast tea - the normal, boring kind - and one blend with a little apple and berry. Goes well with the scones, see.”

Wren nodded in agreement, realising belatedly that she wasn’t sure how much this was going to cost. Well, Myrinna supposedly gave me enough for a meal at this place, and I’m pretty sure I have at least a couple of crowns in a pocket somewhere, so… why not splash out? Spent the last week eating stuff that’d been wrapped up and stuffed in a backpack, after all.

“Back shortly,” said the woman, and she disappeared into one of the buildings.

Wren leaned back in her chair and took a deep breath. The air was fresh, cold but not too cold. And there was quiet. The kind of quiet that was hard to come by in a big city like Din. She hadn’t really appreciated it on her journey, what with focusing mostly on the actual travelling - now she thought about it, she really hadn’t appreciated the places through which she’d been, both their grandeur and their simplicity. She hadn’t stopped to listen to the water or the birds or the wind. All the things that were so different from what she knew in Din, she’d ignored, because she’d seen the journey as a difficult and inconvenient ordeal, and everything that was part of it was just more Different, Unlikeable, Reminds-Me-I’m-Doing-A-Stupid-Thing stuff.

She’d just been pressing onwards because… because… because that seemed like the thing she ought to do, even with no real sense of what she would do when she got where she was going.

I left Din because I felt like I’d screwed it up there. Or - no, not even that, just because I didn’t feel I could stay there. It wasn’t for me. And then, as soon as I was gone, I couldn’t help but think of all the places I went through as not being for me either. But… somewhere has to be. Doesn’t it?

The gentle chlink of a teaspoon in a cup stirred her, and she glanced again at the three women sharing a meal. Sisters, she thought: all had the same features (slightly severe when they were thinking, but far softer and more open when they spoke to one another and smiled) and the same shade of deep red in their hair. Not the orange-red of what Wren’s mother would have called a redhead, but a dark richness somewhere at the intersection of black and brown and red, like - she couldn’t remember the name, but there was a stone of which she was reminded, a smooth and pretty thing, one that plenty of shops in Din sold by the bucket as a decorative trinket or for apparent wellness properties (endorsed, of course, by neither physicians nor red mages). Jasper? Carnelian? One of those.

As she watched the three women (with passing looks and out of the corner of her eye, never staring), a sensation she couldn’t quite place bubbled up. They were talking quietly together - not hushed, not whispering, just comfortably quiet - and lapsed into stretches of silence that they all seemed perfectly happy with. There was no pressure between them; they enjoyed simply being with each other. Wren made herself look away before she started to look as if she were snooping - and before whatever she was feeling intensified too much, because she had the strangest certainty that she might cry if she thought too hard about the relationship between the sisters and her response to seeing it.

Fortunately, she was saved by the reappearance of the proprietor, who put a tray down in front of Wren and carefully moved each one of the items on it onto the table. She was delicate, precise; even when she picked a cup and saucer, complete with teaspoon, off the tray and put it back down on the surface of the table, Wren heard barely the tiniest chk of china and metal.

“Here we are,” she said. “Half each of a plain scone, fruit scone, cheese scone, wholemeal apple scone, bowl of clotted cream, a sample of jams including blackcurrant, mixed berry, spiced strawberry and orange, and rhubarb. One breakfast tea, one apple and berry blend.”

Wren stared at it for a moment. “That’s half a scone?” she said eventually.

The woman chuckled. “Am makes them big,” she said. “We do keep telling him, but he won’t do them small. Says he won’t risk them being heavy, but if you ask me they’re heavy enough the way he does them. In a good way, of course. Heavy ‘cos they’re big, not ‘cos they’re dense. You get it.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Wren, not entirely getting it.

“Now, it’s nice to see a face I haven’t seen before,” the woman said, in a way that Wren was sure was perfectly friendly and well-intentioned but that nevertheless made her feel more of an outsider than she already did. “Whereabouts are you from?”

“Din.”

“Oh, the Big Noise! Never been, but I hear it’s… I hear a lot.”

“It’s a lot,” Wren agreed.

“I don’t know how they do it in Din,” said the proprietor, “but here it’s jam first, then cream. Down in Ruddanwell it’s the other way around, of course - and I even heard in Cragcliff they do butter, then jam, then cream! Can you believe that?”

It was clear from the woman’s tone and posture (“utterly bewildered” with a healthy dose of “righteously appalled”) what the expected answer was. “Nope,” said Wren very seriously. “Can’t believe that.”

“Oh!” said the woman, suddenly holding out a hand. “I’m Marjia Southcross. My husband Arneld and I run this place.”

“Wren,” said Wren, shaking it.

“Can’t take credit for most of the baking, though,” Marjia went on. “That’s all Am - Am Karan, he’s never agreed to work for us full-time, wants to focus on practicing to be one of those fancy… what is it the Galinique call it, patisserie, something like that? A fancy baker, anyway, but as long as he’s happy to keep making us some nice, simple, hearty scones and cakes, we’ll keep buying them off him.”

Marjia paused; Wren got the distinct impression that she was waiting for Wren to try the food. So she did, quickly and not at all neatly blobbing a heap of cream on the fruit scone, followed by a dollop of rhubarb jam, and took a bite.

“That,” she said after a few seconds of chewing, “is one of the best things I’ve ever tasted in my whole life ever.”

She meant it, too.

“Oh!” exclaimed Marjia with delight. “Well, that’s wonderful, and I’ll just -”

“What I’m gonna do,” said Wren, “is eat all of this, and then if you don’t mind, I think I’d really also like two sausages, two scrambled eggs, some toast, erm, a slice of whatever cake you’ve got, maybe some orange juice, and if you could do me a small-ish steak in a bread roll or something, that’d be brilliant.”

Marjia blinked. “All at once?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah,” said Wren. “All at once.”