Chapter 20: 20: In Which Food Continues To Be A Prominent Thing

Juniper and Wren emerged from a hillside thicket and into the cow fields Wren had passed through only two days earlier. Most of the cows were huddled in large groups at the edges of the fields, nibbling on bushes.

“Watch out,” Juniper warned, pointing. “It’ll catch you out.”

Wren looked in the direction of Juniper’s finger. Most of the surface of the field was thick grass in bumpy tufts, but between the clumps were thinner parts that glistened slightly. Juniper demonstrated by extending a foot and gently poking the ground with a toe, upon which that little patch of earth simply sank away and water flooded over, like squeezing a sponge.

“Stick to the thick-looking bits and you’ll be alright,” said Juniper, starting to find a path, “but unless you’ve got the kind of boots where you can stand knee-deep in an actual river and not get wet, I wouldn’t suggest just going in a straight line.”

Somewhere around the middle of one of the fields, they ran up against a wide patch with absolutely no visible safe patches of grass, and even a visible shallow stream running through the centre, so Juniper found a fallen branch and plonked it down as a makeshift bridge. She tiptoed across deftly, then turned.

“I absolutely can’t do that without falling off,” Wren told her.

Juniper gave her a thumbs-up, grinning. “Secret is to go fast.”

Wren sighed and, without thinking about it any further, threw herself out and sprinted, as light-footedly as possible, across the branch. To her astonishment, she was on the other side within seconds, safe and dry.

Juniper held up her hand. “Told you.”

Wren, slightly reluctantly, gave her a high five. “I really didn’t think that was going to work.”

“Well, you learned from the best.”

“You just ran across and said to go fast.”

“You learned from the best,” Juniper insisted.

Wren let her have it. “Course I did.”

A few minutes later, they reached the River Marten, and the brightly painted red and blue bridge Wren had passed on her way in.

“Cross the bridge over there and you’ll be in Luteway in ten minutes or so,” Juniper said. “It’s a little hamlet, maybe a dozen people living in there. Uphill from that is Luteway Woods. Nice place, but absolutely full of squarrels.” She scratched her nose. “Hey, do you get squarrels in Din?”

“They exterminate them pretty quickly if we do,” Wren muttered. She’d never actually seen a squarrel, though she’d heard plenty about them: creatures two or three times the size of a regular squirrel and a hundred times angrier. They were a common example in school books about ecosystems: long ago, there had been only red squirrels. Then grey squirrels had come over from somewhere or other and thrived, driving a lot of the red squirrels out of their homes and quickly overtaking them in numbers. Then some of the red squirrels, deeply upset by the whole thing (and understandably so, really), had run afoul of some sort of mildly mutative magic or other and been turned into the avenging squarrel, taking it upon themselves to return to their previous homes in their new and rather scarier forms and taking out their pent-up aggression on the grey squirrels in turn.

They were a controlled species, what with being at least slightly magical in nature, but in some places - especially those not looked after as closely by the government, which naturally tended to mean rural ones - it was easy for a small group of rampaging squarrels to turn into a very large one with concerning promptitude, with frequently devastating impacts on the plants and creatures that had lived there before.

“Anyway,” said Juniper, “Luteway’s that way, Cotton Mossford’s this way, and back in that direction -” she pointed north, upstream, the direction from which Wren had come, “is a little village, even smaller than Cotton Mossford, called Capcot Saint Tack. Pub’s supposed to be good - the Silver Fox, I think?”

“I went past it when I got here,” Wren said, nodding.

“The bridge over the river here, incidentally,” said Juniper, “is called Mummers’ Bridge because it’s where the mummers usually do their show at the end of spring, around the same time as the Blossoming.”

“Sorry,” said Wren, “mummers?”

“Oh, you don’t have those?”

A shake of the head.

Juniper put a finger on her chin, humming thoughtfully. After a few moments’ consideration, she said, “They’re like… stage actors, but terrible, but somehow quite good.”

Wren accepted that as a sufficient explanation for the time being.

“Not everyone’s a fan,” Juniper confided. “Someone vandalised the bridge a while back, in protest of bad performances or something. But, you know, we just repainted it.”

Wren had to ask. “When you say ‘someone’...?”

“We don’t know who,” said Juniper, “although if you ask some of the mummers, they’re pretty certain. Each individually certain about someone, and none of them the same people, but still.”

They headed along the river and back into Cotton Mossford, emerging at the bottom of the main street. A few minutes of uphill walking and they were at the town hall: a modest building, but one for which someone had bothered to build an impressive façade with a stone-carved archway and pillars. Wren could already hear the noise of chatter wafting out from behind the slightly open door; her nose caught the subtle scent of… no, not the scent; in fact, there were dozens of different scents, all intermingling in a way that might have been muddled and overwhelming but that for some reason she found almost comforting.

“You’ll like this, I reckon,” said Juniper with a grin, and she pushed open the door to the town hall.

~~~

All faces turned in the direction of Juniper and Wren as they entered before going back to what they’d been doing, most sending a smile or wave in their direction.

Some Wren knew - there was Dewidh the undertaker from the bellringers’ group, once again in a tweed waistcoat and cravat (in a deep wine colour this time), with a girl in her early teens and a boy who must have been a year or two shy of ten; Tim was there, surrounded by a group of five or six others who looked as if they’d all been in deep and intense conversation before the door opened; Marjia from the tearoom and a man about the same age were standing behind a table, upon which a man Wren didn’t know was adjusting the layout of a huge array of dishes; Angelica, Juniper’s mother, was holding a plate stacked with small samples of a good fifteen different items of food.

Stolen novel; please report.

And the food.

The foooooooooood.

Wren had never been to a community café before, so she hadn’t known quite what to expect. She’d imagined something like the kind of café that could be found in Din, except perhaps a bit smaller. Probably not very well put together, if it were a community thing rather than… whatever she’d been thinking the other option was, a professional one perhaps. But this was no amateur collection. This was a curated gallery of masterpieces.

Wren looked at Juniper the way a toddler might look at a parent for permission to enter a sweetshop.

“Don’t look at me,” said Juniper.

So Wren rubbed her hands together and made her rounds of the place, trying not to stare with too slack a jaw at the goods on display. Near the door were ten different kinds of cider in barrels, each with a different person’s name stamped on it - as Karrhael had said, everyone seemed to make their own. She circled the room and saw a variety of pasties and sausage rolls, sweet pastries, even a bowl of little crisp treats made from fried and seasoned vegetables. Quiches! Flans! Pies!

There were cakes: sponge cakes, fruit cakes, cakes made with tea or coffee, cakes layered with jam or cream, syrupy oat cakes. Pancakes - were those cakes? Wren didn’t know, but neither did she much care.

There were bread rolls filled with sausage or bacon, or sausage and bacon; sticks of vibrant, fresh vegetables to be dipped in a dazzling assortment of dips, spreads, and sauces; soups of every combination of meat and flavour; huge truckles of cheese, with thin slices laid out on platters; sandwiches with inch-thick fillings slapped between two enormous slices of bread, or even entire loaves simply cut in half and filled; samples of Gallinesque and Kachirandiran and Picandian dishes with dressed tomatoes or spiced rice or creamy mushrooms.

“I’m dead,” Wren muttered. “I’m dead and I’m in heaven. I died on the road and everything since meeting Dachran has been one big hallucination and now I’m in delicious heaven.”

“Nope,” said Tim, as Wren - browsing single-mindedly, paying no attention to her surroundings except for the deliciousness before her - came within a few inches of bumping right into him. “Cotton Mossford, actually. And I don’t think you’re dead. Dead people are usually…”

“How many dead people do you know?” Wren challenged around a mouthful of cheese, bread, and meat.

Tim’s eyes flicked up as if he were counting. “Just the one,” he said after a moment.

“Right.” Wren noticed that some of the gathered people had their own tables in front of them, stacked with food; others were milling about, some of them holding plates or little forks. Tim and his group were in the latter category, although they were standing around a large barrel as if they were the ones who had brought it. “So this community café thing, how does it work?”

“Well,” said Tim, “first weekend of the month, we come here and… er, eat. If you can spare something to bring, you do. If you can’t, you’re very welcome to come and share what everyone’s brought.”

Wren tapped the barrel with her foot. “Is this your contribution?”

Tim patted it fondly. “It’s moonshine,” he said. “It’s kind of horrible, but we put a lot of love into it.”

With a little jump, as if remembering they were there, he indicated the rest of his group.

“Introducing the Cotton Mossford Dungeoneers,” he said, sweeping his arm around in the direction of his companions. “Dungeoneers, this is Wren.”

There were varied nods and waves from the dungeoneers; Wren gave a little wave back. There were six of them: three women, one of whom was a good foot and a half taller than the rest of them and had a crooked grin that radiated genuine joy at simply being there, and three men including Tim. Each of them wore at least one item of armour somewhere on their bodies, presumably to indicate their status as adventurers, although none of them would have been very well protected had a fight broken out at that moment.

“We can introduce ourselves individually later,” said one of the women, who was perhaps nineteen or twenty and had enviable waves of ash-blonde hair framing a face with determined (almost fierce) features. Wren had never been quite sure what the word willowy meant, as used to describe a person rather than a tree, but she thought it probably applied to this woman.

Tim nodded. “Too many names, you’ll never remember them.”

“I don’t even know how many people I’ve met since… like, yesterday, never mind their names,” Wren admitted.

“Can you fight?” asked the very tall woman, giving Wren a wide smile that was both extraordinarily friendly and slightly wicked.

Tim gave a loud tut. “What did we decide about trying to recruit everyone we come across?”

The woman shrugged, still beaming.

“Sorry about that,” Tim said, turning to Wren. Then he squinted at her. “Can you fight, though?”

“Um,” said Wren. “Not as far as I know.”

“Ah, we can teach you,” said the woman.

“If you want, that is,” Tim said firmly. “But, look, if you do want to try your hand in the dungeon, it helps the village and it's just a lot of fun. And, you know, there’s a ten-person limit, so we can still squeeze a few more in.”

“I'll let you know,” Wren promised.

Then, with a polite wave, she excused herself from the circle and made a second round of the room, this time sampling things as she went.

Marjia introduced Wren to her husband, Arneld, who was the other proprietor of the Twin Cob, and a Kachirandiran man by the name of Am Karan who was apparently one of their biggest suppliers of deliciousness but entirely unwilling to do it as a full-time job.

“Some people should do what they love as a career,” he said, “but for others, it's the fact that they don't have to do it that makes it precious. That's why I try to do at least one thing every week that I'm absolutely terrible at. Keeps things interesting.”

Wren found herself mulling over that notion as she continued her sweep around the bounty of delights on offer. It was only when she'd made another full circuit of the room that she realised she was still wearing the heavy rucksack Juniper had given her earlier in the day. She looked around, wondering why she hadn't spotted Juniper or either of her parents since entering the room, and quickly realised the reason.

One part of the space was full to bursting with a throng of people, all holding small glasses and having what sounded like immensely amusing conversations, based on how happy they all seemed. Peering through the crowd, Wren realised that she'd simply gone around them on her rounds; behind them, pressed between a wall and the mass of people, was a table bearing a number of familiar bottles. Behind the table, Juniper and both of her parents were doing their best to keep up with demand, pouring each of their supplicants a measure of drink… and then refilling it, and so on.

Juniper let out a yelp when she noticed Wren. “Hey!” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder to indicate her back. “The pack, please?”

Wren sidled through the crowd and hefted her rucksack, handing it over the table to Barley.

“Not a moment too soon,” Angelica commented, her eyes twinkling with amusement.

“Your table’s popular,” said Wren, for sometimes, pointing out the obvious is the only thing for it.

“The people love to drink,” Barley said. “Specifically, to drink our stuff.”

Wren raised an eyebrow. That seemed like an understatement. “I see that.”

She almost noted that drinking alcohol - especially spirits - was, in her view, considered somewhat gauche at best and outright improper (in that awful way that means something so much worse than any more direct condemnation) at worst where she came from. But she thought better of it. She was, after all, no longer in the place from which she came. From which she had come. She was elsewhere, where things were not the same, and she had no complaints about that.

Working quickly, Juniper pulled several more bottles from the bag Wren had brought and placed them on the table, replacing the empty ones.

There were more than just clear gin bottles, Wren realised; as Karrhael had mentioned, there were spirits of various flavours and strengths. The standard gin was the most popular, sometimes garnished with leaves or berries from a little pouch. The Clairs had brought a few bottles of sparkling tonic water to serve with the alcohol too, but very few people seemed interested in that particular offer.

The next half an hour or so passed in a pleasant buzz of conversation and extremely good food.

Then the door swung open, and someone most unwelcome entered.