"You'll never wake him up that way."
I straightened and turned toward the voice.
A boy stood behind me, grinning with the particular unself-conscious mischief of someone who has not yet learned to moderate his expressions for public consumption. He was perhaps fifteen or sixteen, with the same vivid red hair and green eyes as the woman at the counter, and the same scattering of freckles across fair skin — clearly her son, or close enough to it. He wore a loose shirt that had given up on being properly fastened, dark trousers, and boots, and his hair had the disordered quality of someone who had woken up recently and considered that sufficient preparation for the day.
"Let me show you how it's done, brother!" he announced cheerfully, and went behind the counter before I could respond.
He selected a jug from one of the hooks with the ease of someone who knows exactly where everything is, filled it from the nearby beer barrel to the absolute brim, and then — with complete calm, as though this were a perfectly standard approach to waking a person — upended it directly onto the face of the man sleeping on the floor.
I made an involuntary sound.
The sleeping man came awake with the explosive violence of someone convinced they were drowning, which, in a limited sense, he was. He thrashed, made sounds that could charitably be described as animalistic, and flailed with arms and legs in the general direction of whatever was killing him. The jug emptied. The boy vaulted the high counter in one fluid motion — the movement of someone who had performed this particular exit many times — and sprinted for the door. Three seconds later he was gone, the inn door swinging shut behind him.
"You absolute lunatic! Are you trying to finish off this old man?!" The shout followed him into the street, approximately five seconds too late to have any effect whatsoever. The man behind the counter groaned, pressed both hands to the counter's edge, and hauled himself upright with the laboured dignity of someone refusing to let a beer-related incident be the end of him.
"Olga!" He turned toward the counter woman, wringing beer from his beard. "I have told you, repeatedly, to keep that boy in order! How exactly are you raising him? He is a menace!"
"The menace you created," the woman — Olga — replied, without looking up from her ledger. Her pen kept moving. "You were the one who took Ivan on your expeditions and taught him everything he knows. You bullied Masha so relentlessly that she left the guild entirely and started her own. Don't come to me about how children turn out, Benedict." A brief pause. "And if you insist on drinking yourself insensible every night, do it in your own room. Your snoring carries through three floors."
She turned a page.
The man stared at the back of her head for a moment, appeared to decide that no response available to him would improve his situation, and turned to me instead.
The man blinked the beer from his eyes, pressed both palms flat on the counter, and hauled himself upright with the strained dignity of someone determined not to let this particular morning defeat him. He stood for a moment, water dripping from his beard, and surveyed the world with the expression of a man taking stock of his grievances.
Then his eyes landed on me.
"And who the hell are you?" he demanded, his voice still carrying the rough edges of interrupted sleep and an involuntary bath. "We aren't open yet."
Before I could draw breath to answer, Olga spoke from across the room — still without lifting her eyes from the ledger, her pen still moving.
"He's here to apply for the job, Benedict. The notice on the board." A beat. "The one you put up yourself, three days ago, which you have apparently forgotten entirely."
Benedict stared at her for a moment with the expression of a man reassembling recent history.
"Right," he said, with a curtness that suggested he was not going to give her the satisfaction of confirming she was correct, despite clearly having no argument to offer. He wrung the last of the beer from his beard and turned back to me, conducting a swift and thoroughly unsentimental appraisal from boots to hairline.
"You wanna have a job, young man? Then follow me."
He set off toward a door in the far corner without waiting for confirmation.
Now that he was upright and moving, I could gauge him properly. He was short — two full heads shorter than me, which was not inconsiderable given that I hadn't made myself particularly tall in this form. What he lacked in height he more than compensated for in build: broad through the shoulders and chest, with the kind of forearms that develop not in training yards but through decades of actual physical work. His soaked tunic, clinging after the morning's unwanted bath, left no ambiguity about this. He was strong in the specific way of someone who has never thought about being strong but simply is, as a consequence of how he has spent his years.
"Damn this headache," he muttered to himself, pressing two fingers against his temple as he walked.
The door opened into a kitchen that was already fully operational despite the early hour. Two cooks worked the main stations with the focused efficiency of a well-established rhythm, three assistants moving around them in the supporting pattern of people who know their roles without needing to be told. The smell that hit me on entering was extraordinary — bread fresh from the oven, stock simmering, something spiced and warm that I couldn't immediately identify.
"Good morning, Mister Benedict!" The greeting came from several directions at once, cheerful and genuine.
He returned it with a gruff nod that somehow communicated both acknowledgement and affection, then turned to me.
"Have you eaten?"
"Not yet, but I'm perfectly—"
"That's a no." He pulled out a chair at one of the kitchen tables and dropped into it. "Sit down. You don't work on an empty stomach — not for me, not for anyone. Eat first. We'll recover whatever it costs from your wages by this evening." He said it as though this were a matter of basic operational logic rather than generosity, and pulled the nearest bread basket toward him.
I sat.
Within minutes, food arrived — a deep bowl of chicken soup, thick with broth and generously loaded with chunks of meat and four or five whole quail eggs. Alongside it, a round of bread still warm from the oven, soft in a way that came from being very recently baked rather than simply not yet stale. Hot tea followed.
"Eat properly," Benedict said, already working on his own portion. "Don't hold back. We won't see a break until around two in the afternoon, so you need everything you can put away now."
I tore a piece of bread and brought it to my mouth.
The warmth reached me before the taste did — and then the taste arrived, and I found myself genuinely surprised. It was exceptional. Not merely adequate for a working kitchen at eight in the morning, but actually, carefully, delicious — the bread yielding and faintly sweet, the soup rich and well-seasoned in a way that required either talent or very long practice, most likely both.
I had not, I realised with some surprise, been genuinely hungry in a long time. The dragon's constitution had made food largely academic. But something about the smell and the warmth and the complete absence of ceremony in this kitchen reached something that was still human in me, and I ate with an appetite I hadn't expected to find.
"Good, isn't it?" Benedict observed, watching me with the satisfied expression of someone whose point has been made without needing to be stated.
"Remarkably so," I said honestly.
"Boss's doing." He broke another piece of bread and dunked it in the soup without ceremony. "Picky man, our boss. Wouldn't accept anything less than the best when it came to the kitchen, so he hired the best when it came to the kitchen. Simple as that. You can trust his taste in this, at least." Something in his voice suggested that the boss's taste in other matters was occasionally more debatable.
"Now — what do I call you, young man? I can't keep saying 'young man' all morning, it gets tiresome for both of us."
"Henry Delgon," I said. "From the west, originally. I've been living here for some time, trying to save enough to make the journey back. This seemed like a reasonable way to do that."
He pointed a piece of bread at me. "You're not here illegally, are you?"
"No, I have proper documentation — I can show you if—"
He waved it off. "I'm pulling your leg, Henry. Honestly, at this point, as long as you have all your limbs attached and you're breathing, you're hired. Four of our crew are down with heat sickness and we are genuinely desperate." He finished his soup bowl, and it was immediately refilled by one of the assistants before he had set it down. Fresh bread appeared alongside it.
"Benedict Ferenriarth," he said, by way of introduction, settling in with the ease of a man entirely at home in this kitchen. "Now eat your fill, every last bit of it. Because once we start, we don't stop until the afternoon, and I'll work every ounce of what you've just eaten right back out of you."
He said it without apology, dipping bread into soup and eating with complete contentment, and I found, somewhat to my own surprise, that I believed every word of it.