The Fried Lemon Peel

Maren did not pick up the cauldrons.

She stood motionless on the cobblestones of the courtyard, hands on her hips and her breath condensing in front of her nose in thick, white little clouds, watching Kenneth's armored silhouette disappear beneath the arch of the guardhouse. The metal of his shoulder guards scraped with a dry friction, brown with old rust, as if the custodian had spent weeks sleeping in his clothes without bothering to unbuckle the straps.

The wind blowing down from the cliff did not bring snow yet, but it bit viciously. The large reptile lying at the back of the courtyard, a bulk of whitish-gray scales resembling limestone eaten by saltpeter, let out a faint snuffle through its spiracles. It smelled of silt and stagnant brine. The crust of the spilled stew at its feet had already frozen into a blackened clump that no dog would have deigned to sniff.

"If you stand there you are going to freeze solid like bacon, girl."

The voice came from the gloom of a side door, half hidden behind a pile of rotting firewood. Maren blinked, brushing a stray lock of hair from her forehead with the back of her wrist. From the shadows emerged a lean man, hunched like a bundle of dry vine shoots, wearing a brown cloth tunic frayed at the elbows and an apron that in some previous century must have been white. He held a chipped clay pitcher in his right hand and his fingernails were blackened with coal.

"I thought only ghosts and that grim fellow with a sword lived in this tower," said Maren, pulling on the handle of her largest cauldron to shelter it under the eaves.

"Sometimes we are the same," replied the old man, dragging his felt slippers across the frost. "They call me Basile. Just like that tail-end crag out there, yes; in this pigsty nobody wastes their brains looking for new names. I have been the majordomo of this sinkhole for forty winters, even though now I only rule over mice and sour vinegar."

"I am Maren."

"I already know. Your pots could be heard from the lower slope."

The old man sat down on a dilapidated log, next to a row of slack wine skins that exuded an acrid smell through the seams. The back of the passageway was a ruinous pantry: sacks of oats caked by moisture, baskets of turnips with yellowish sprouts, and ironmongery eaten away by rust hanging from crooked nails. In a corner, a thin tabby cat dozed peacefully on a low stool, oblivious to the surrounding desolation.

"Your lord custodian has given me until nightfall to make off with my cart," she remarked, checking the bottom of her cast-iron skillet.

"Kenneth is not my lord. He is just a boy with too much iron on him and his belly stuck to his backbone." Basile took a sip from his pitcher, grimaced at the acidity of the drink, and spat toward the flagstones. "And you cook well, girl, but you don't understand a damn thing about what goes on in this watchtower."

"The broth was thick. It had marrow and wild rosemary."

"The dragon doesn't give a damn about your marrow."

Maren stopped. Her knuckles were chapped and tight from the cold, and contact with the iron rim left a blackened stain on her skin.

"Is his belly sick?" she asked. "Because if his gizzard is clogged with slag, there is an infusion of willow bark with mustard that..."

"He doesn't have a rotting belly, stubborn one. He has a mourning heart."

The cat shifted its posture on the stool with a silent yawn.

Maren frowned, lowering her voice by instinct. The murmur of the wind sneaking through the tower's high arrow slits sounded like a hollow, regular, and monotonous groan.

"Mourning?"

"That animal watched the last female of its lineage go out three autumns ago," whispered Basile, scratching his sparse chin with a trembling finger. "It doesn't breathe fire because it simply doesn't give a royal damn about burning anything in an empty world. And Kenneth knows it, even though he prefers to swear before his superiors that it is a plague of humors or soaked firewood. The boy dresses in iron from head to toe so he doesn't have to admit he is tending a grave."

Basile pointed with the bottom of the pitcher toward Maren's small kettle.

"A dish cannot fool a beast born before kings; if it is cooked with the fear of starving, it tastes only of ash."

Maren kept silent.

She put her hand into her apron pocket, where she kept a piece of dried lemon peel, rough and hard like a pebble. Outside, the gray light of dusk was finishing its collapse over the cliffs, leaving the watchtower plunged into a bluish and freezing gloom.

"Is there clean lard in that kitchen?" Maren asked after a minute.

"In the hall there is half a tub of pork fat from the old slaughter. And birch firewood, even though it crackles fit to bust."

"Good. Then I'm not leaving yet."

The watchtower's kitchen was a masonry cave where soot had embedded itself in every joint for generations. Maren lit the hearth fire with a couple of dry splinters and some wisps of heather she kept in her pack; when the green birch branches caught, they began to crackle noisily, giving off bright sparks that barely warmed the air half a step away from the flue.

Even so, it was a refuge.

Maren dragged a heavy pot to the tripod. There was no rush. The fortress's military silence seemed to weigh in the corners, but she let the metal come up to temperature slowly, while she sliced a thin strip of yellow peel on the worn wooden board. The citrus essential oil jumped beneath the knife blade, filling the air with a clean, pungent perfume that masked the salty vapor rising from the courtyard.

She added a heaped spoonful of clear lard. The sizzle was immediate, cheerful, and domestic, breaking the heaviness of the stones.

"I told you to leave."

Maren did not startle. She had already heard the metallic crunch of the greaves at the foot of the spiral staircase. She merely watched how the strip of lemon skin curled at the bottom of the boiling fat, swelling with a fringe of tiny bubbles.

"Your doors don't have latches on the inside," she said without turning around, "and it's too cold to sleep in the cart."

Kenneth stopped by the lintel. He came without gauntlets, his cheeks flushed from the outside blizzard and his dark hair plastered against his forehead by the cold sweat of the patrol. He looked at the hearth, then at Maren, and finally at the pot from which a warm aroma, both sweet and resinous, rose.

"You are using my provisions."

"I'm using old grease and a lemon I brought from the southern vega," she replied, holding the wooden spoon. "If you charge me rent for the air I breathe, let me know and I'll chalk the debt onto my sole."

Kenneth pressed his lips together, but did not draw his sword. He took a step toward the hearth, rubbing his stiff hands near the birch flames.

"The animal won't make it past this week," he said in a low voice, with a harshness that sounded more like exhaustion than anger. "You shouldn't grow fond of what is already dead."

"Neither should you wear that armor as if it were a coffin."

Kenneth raised his gaze, surprised.

The lemon peel crackled as it browned, floating in the lard with an amber and vibrant tone that contrasted with the soot-blackened pot. Kenneth reached out his hand involuntarily, drawn by the domestic murmur of the oil and that sudden warmth that asked no permission from the fortress's ordinances.

He was about to touch the wooden handle when a dry blow shook the planks of the outer door.

The din echoed throughout the ground floor. Before Kenneth could grip the hilt of his sword, the oak leaf of the gate gave way suddenly, splintering against the interior bolt. In the doorway appeared a rider wrapped up to his eyes in furs soaked in sleet, with the crown's crest embroidered in dirty silver on his chest.

"Custodian Kenneth?" bellowed the messenger, panting with a wet death rattle as he unfolded a parchment sealed with scarlet wax. "Message from the mark's court. The forage extension is revoked."

The rider threw the document onto the kneading table, splashing it with mud and half-melted snow.

"Order of sacrifice and incineration for the saltpeter beast," concluded the man, wiping the frost from his eyelashes with an ice-crusted glove. "Signed for the eve of the first snowfall. You have three days before the butchers' crew arrives."