The palace never looked the same twice from her window.
Midday stood straight overhead, and the rooftops lay flat and bright under it, slate throwing back the glare, shadows pulled in close to the walls. The city beyond went on with its business in a haze of smoke and bells. Somewhere below, a cart was losing an argument with a gate.
Blaze stood at the window with her hands loosely folded and watched it.
She had changed.
Crimson. Not the deep wine-red she wore to court, but the other one. Silk the color of a fresh cut, falling to the floor in a long unbroken line, the hem edged in a thread that caught the light like a coal. The flower sat in her hair, dark and bright against the black. She wore no crown.
Maze stood three paces back, and she had been looking at the dress for some time.
Red, she thought.
Years spent beside her. Not nearly long enough to call it expertise. But Maze had learned to read the wardrobe the way sailors read the sky. And crimson meant she had stopped deciding something and begun doing it.
She's about to do something strange again.
It wasn't a complaint. It was weather.
She kept her hands at her sides, her face quiet, and waited.
"Little flames."
"Master."
"Come here."
Maze crossed the floor. Soft steps, no sound at all. She stopped at Blaze's shoulder, a hand's breadth away, and kept her eyes lowered.
Blaze didn't turn from the window.
She leaned in.
Close, the way one leans to share a secret in a crowded room, her mouth near Maze's ear and her gaze still on the rooftops. She said something. A few words, low and unhurried, in a voice Maze had heard only a handful of times in three years.
Maze's eyes widened, just slightly.
Oh, she thought. It is that kind of red.
Then it passed.
She drew back and bowed her head. "As you wish, Master."
"Quietly."
"Of course."
"And not a feather out of place."
"No, Master."
Maze went to the window. She opened it with one hand, and the noon air came in, warm and smelling of chimney smoke and sun on slate. Then she wasn't a girl any more. Gold ran up her arms and over her shoulders and broke wide, wings and ember and heat, and the room filled with a soft low roar like a fire taking breath.
She dropped over the sill.
Banked once, wide and unhurried, over the stable roofs. Caught the sun. And was a spark above the eastern towers, and then nothing at all.
Blaze watched until the sky was empty.
She smoothed one crimson sleeve, unhurried, and turned from the window. She crossed to the table, and lifted the mirror.
The glass woke like water settling.
An eastern estate, one of the grey stone ones that sat back from the road behind a screen of poplars. A long room with the shutters half drawn, the noon sun cutting a single hard bar across the floorboards. A table in the middle, with a wooden box on it, dark and plain, the kind a jeweler might send a ring in.
She had chosen the box herself.
Inside, on a bed of dry salt, lay Yven's head. The Commander had closed the eyes. The mouth was set the way it had been at the very end, in the shape of a word he'd never said.
The lid was shut now.
Nobody had touched it since it came.
Maren Soldt sat in a high-backed chair beside the table with his broken leg propped on a stool, bound from knee to ankle. His right hand lay in its splint across his lap. A faint pink shine still ran along his cheek where the physician's solution had met his skin. He had not shaved. He wasn't looking at the road. He was looking at the box, and his good hand had been opening and closing on the arm of the chair for some time.
Blaze held the mirror at a comfortable distance and watched, with the patience of someone watching a pot she had put on herself.
Not eating, she thought. Not sleeping. The servants have left the house.
A thin bright line ran from his left wrist across the room and out of the mirror's frame, fine as spider silk, humming softly. Hers. She'd put it there herself, in his tent, with two fingers.
Carry it home.
He was doing exactly that.
The door opened.
Soldt jerked in the chair, an ugly jolt of the whole body, and the stool shot out from under his leg. He caught his breath on a hiss. His stick, propped against the table, clattered to the boards.
A man stood in the doorway.
Lean. Plain brown traveling coat, dusty to the knee. A face you would have forgotten the moment you looked away, not handsome, not homely, set in the careful lack of expression of someone who had spent years practicing being nobody. He closed the door behind him, quietly, and stood with his back to it.
Blaze's eyes narrowed.
Ah.
Three names she had underlined. One was in a box on a table. One sat in a chair with his leg on a stool. And the last one had just walked in through the garden.
The final one is here.
"Cassen," Soldt said. His voice cracked on the second syllable. "Thank God."
"Quietly."
"Nobody's here. They've all run. I sent them off the first night."
"I know. I came in by the garden."
Cassen crossed the floor.
He didn't look at Soldt. He looked at the box. He stopped in front of the table and stood there for a long moment, hands loose, gaze steady, and nothing in his face moved at all.
"It came this morning," Soldt said. "Before dawn. A courier I didn't know. No note. No seal." He swallowed. "I opened it."
"And."
"And I shut it again."
"You knew him?"
"I knew him." Soldt's good hand tightened on the chair. "By his face. That's all."
Cassen put out one hand, lifted the lid an inch, and looked.
A muscle moved in his jaw, once.
He let the lid fall. The sound was soft.
He turned away from the table.
"She sent it," Soldt said. "The princess. It has to be."
"Yes."
"Then she knows."
"She knows something." Cassen drew a breath through his nose, and for the first time his voice had weight in it. "She wants you to think it's everything."
"And if it is?"
"Then you'd be dead."
Soldt stopped.
It was a simple thing to say. Cassen said it the way a man says it will rain. He walked past the chair, past the wounded man and his splinted hand, and stopped at the window. He stood there with his back to the room and the noon light behind him, looking out at the empty road.
"Say nothing in this house you wouldn't say in front of her," he murmured.
"You think she's—"
"I think she's put you somewhere I'd come to."
Soldt's breath went out of him.
His good hand shot out and closed around Cassen's sleeve, tight, the grip of a man in a river. Cassen let him.
And in the mirror the thin bright line, humming, ran from Soldt's wrist, across the cloth, and slipped quietly into the other man's cuff.
It didn't snap or flare. It simply took, the way a root takes, and ran on.
Blaze smiled.
Not the thin cold one she used on ministers. Something with more teeth in it, slow and unhurried, curling at one corner of her mouth.
"There you are," she said softly.
She held the mirror a moment longer, watching one man sit and one man stand and look out at an empty road.
Then she set it down on the table, face up, and went to find her father's kitchen.
The kitchen smelled of onions, honey, and something on the edge of burning.
Blaze stopped in the doorway.
Midday light fell through the high windows in long clean bars, striking the copper pots, the floured counters, the great black range where a stockpot muttered to itself. Without Maze, it was ordinary fire. Good, steady, honest fire. It smelled like a kitchen and nothing more.
Alden and Aleric stood at the central table with their heads bent together over a card.
It was an old card. Yellowed, soft at the corners, the ink gone brown with age. Alden held it flat under one big hand. Aleric leaned in at his elbow with his own notebook open beside it, brush tucked behind his ear, and the two of them had the look of men reading a map to somewhere they weren't sure existed.
"It says a pinch," Alden said.
"A pinch of what, though."
"It doesn't say."
"It says a pinch."
"Of something." Alden tilted the card toward the window. "My mother wrote it in a hurry. She never wrote down the part she thought she'd remember."
"Then it's the one thing she assumed you knew."
"That's the one thing I don't know."
Aleric considered the card. He considered the shelf of spices. He pulled the brush from behind his ear and tapped it against his lip, and tasted something that wasn't there.
"Ginger," he said. "Not fresh. Dried, and toasted first."
"Why?"
"Because it says to close." He pointed at a faded line near the bottom. "It's the last thing in the dish, so it can't be sharp. It has to be warm. Something that sits at the back of the mouth and doesn't leave."
Alden stared at him.
Then at the card.
Then, slowly, he reached for the jar.
"I thought it was cardamom," he said.
"It might be cardamom."
"It might be both."
"It might be—" Aleric started, and they reached for the same spoon at the same moment.
Hands stopped in the air above it.
Neither of them said anything. Alden gave it a courteous half-inch of room. Aleric took it, dipped it, tasted, and wrinkled his nose.
"Too much."
"Too much what?"
"All of it."
"That's not a note, that's a verdict."
"It's a note," said Aleric. "It's just a short one."
Alden laughed. The warm, unguarded one, the sound that came out of him when he'd stopped being Emperor and become a man at a stove. He took the spoon, tasted it himself, and nodded slowly.
"Short. Accurate. Brutal."
"I learned from the best."
"Who?"
Aleric, who had been about to say you, seemed to remember that it wasn't entirely a compliment, and ducked his head over his notebook.
Blaze stood in the doorway and said nothing.
A sweet to close, she thought. In the middle of the day. In the middle of a war.
She leaned one shoulder against the frame.
She had been standing there for some time. Neither of them had noticed. Alden's back was to her, and Aleric, who always noticed, was absorbed in a card from a dead woman's hand, with a look on his face she had seen on very few people in her life. Not hunger. Not ambition. Something plainer and more dangerous.
Wanting it to come out right.
They moved alike.
She had noted it before, on her counter, in her kitchen, in the doorway of a tavern two provinces back. The way each reached for things without looking. The way each tasted with his whole face, quiet at first, then sudden. The same economy of motion. The same small, private flinch at an error neither would ever have admitted to.
Alike, she thought.
She turned it over, once, and set it down again where she kept the things that did not yet have a place.
Alden's head lifted.
He turned. Saw her. Saw the crimson. His smile arrived a half second ahead of his thought, and then the thought arrived, and his eyebrows rose.
"You're in red."
Blaze didn't answer.
"It's very fine," he added quickly. "You look like a flag."
Aleric turned round.
His whole face lit, the way it always did, as if someone had opened a shutter. He didn't see the dress. He saw her, and nothing else, and in that moment he looked about eleven.
"Sis!"
He was already halfway across the kitchen.
He stopped in front of her, a little out of breath, notebook clutched to his chest, a smear of flour along one cheekbone. He looked up at the crimson silk, the flower, the black hair falling straight to the floor, and his smile didn't change, though his eyes moved once over the dress and filed it somewhere.
"You're in red," he said, quietly, to her alone.
"Yes."
"Is that good or bad?"
"It means come."
"Where?"
"Training."
"Now?"
"Now."
Aleric turned and looked back at the table.
At the old card. The spice jars. The spoon, still sitting where the two of them had left it. A great many unanswered questions about ginger.
"Sis," he said carefully. "We're in the middle of something."
"I can see that."
"It's the closing note. It's the whole dish."
"It's a pinch."
"It's a very specific pinch."
"Aleric."
"Yes."
"Now."
He sighed. A small, put-upon sigh from somewhere around his shoes, and then he turned and began gathering his things. The notebook went under his arm. The brush went behind his ear. He wiped his hands on his apron, glanced at the stove, and told it, with great seriousness, "Don't let anything happen."
"Blaze."
Alden had come round the table.
He stood a little behind Aleric's shoulder with the card in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other, the picture of a man who has been about to say something sensible and knows it's already lost.
"Just ten minutes. He's the only one who can tell me what the ginger wants."
"No."
"A quarter of an hour."
"No."
"It's a dish for—" He stopped, and something in his face went soft and a little foolish. "It's for a festival, if I can get it right. I was hoping—"
"Father."
"Yes."
"The ginger will survive."
"You don't know that."
"I do." She looked at him, very level. "It has survived Grandmother, her notes, and your cooking. It will survive an hour."
Alden opened his mouth.
Closed it.
He looked at the card in his hand, and at Aleric, and at his daughter in crimson, standing in a doorway with the sun behind her like a thing painted on a wall.
"One hour," he said.
"Two."
"One and a half."
"Done."
"That wasn't a negotiation, that was a robbery."
"Yes," Blaze said. "Aleric. Come."
She turned. Aleric trotted after her, and over his shoulder he called, brightly, "Toasted! Don't forget! Toast it first!"
"I heard you!"
The door swung shut.
In the quiet of the kitchen, the stock muttered on the range. Alden stood alone with a spoon in one hand and a dead woman's card in the other, and after a moment, for no particular reason, he lifted the spoon and tasted the air.
"Toasted," he said, to nobody.
He reached for the ginger.
Blaze had already crossed several steps by the time Alden set the ginger aside and wiped his hands on a towel.
Aleric walked beside her, notebook under one arm, brush behind his ear.
"Where are we training?" he asked.
"The inner yard."
"Is it far?"
"No."
"Will there be a dummy? I'd like to apologise to it first."
"It does not require an apology."
"It exploded."
"It was made to."
"That's a very sad thing to be made for."
Blaze stopped walking.
He took two more steps before he noticed, then turned. "Sis?"
He is going to lose a limb in the first real fight, she thought, perfectly calmly. Or his head. Whichever the opponent reaches first.
His foundation holds. His output is clean. The seal is gone, and what sat beneath it is awake.
And he is not yet taught how to fight.
This is an inefficiency.
I do not tolerate inefficiency in things I have already paid for.
"Come here," she said.
He came.
"Stand still."
He stood still.
He did it well, which was irritating. Shoulders level. Weight centered. Hands loose. Three weeks ago he would have fidgeted. Now he waited, brown eyes steady, trusting her entirely, which was either wisdom or stupidity and so far had not been disproved.
She lifted her hand.
Two fingers.
Pressed lightly between his brows.
"Oh," Aleric said. "Again."
"Quiet."
"Sorry."
She reached.
Not into his mind. She never reached into his mind. Into the space she had once taught it to keep clear. A room, swept and empty, waiting to be furnished.
She furnished it.
Not much. Not everything. She was not interested in giving him what he could not yet hold.
Three moves, three clean ones, chosen with the care of someone selecting knives for a child who has just learned to hold a spoon.
A pivot. Weight dropping through the left heel, hip turning before the shoulder.
A deflection. Wrist relaxed. The force taken in and carried past, like water around a stone.
A step. Short. Almost nothing. The kind that put you exactly where the other person was no longer looking.
She set them down gently, one after the other, and withdrew.
Aleric did not move.
His eyes had unfocused. His mouth was very slightly open. A man listening to a song he had never heard and already knew the words to.
"Sis," he breathed.
"Yes."
"That's..."
"Do not say cool."
"I was going to say a lot."
"Acceptable."
He blinked. Came back to himself slowly, the way you surface from warm water.
"I can see them," he said. "All three. They're just there."
"They are not yet yours."
"No?"
"They are loaned. You must make them yours."
"How?"
"By doing them wrong," Blaze said, "until you stop."
Aleric looked at his hands. Then at the carpet. Then, with the air of a man about to announce a great undertaking, at the corridor ahead.
Oh no, she thought.
"Sis," he said. "Can I try the step?"
"No."
"Just the small one."
"Not in the corridor."
"It's a very empty corridor."
"It's a very long corridor," Blaze said, "with a window at the end of it."
Aleric considered this with great seriousness.
"That's a no with a reason," he said, "and I respect it."
"Good."
"So I'll try it while we walk."
A pause.
"Whatever."
"Thanks, sis."
She looked at him.
He gave her the face. The one from the kitchen, with no defense in it and no attack either, only a boy and a hope.
Ridiculous creature, she thought.
She started walking.
He fell into step a pace behind her shoulder, and she did not need to look to know that his left foot had already begun, very softly, to try.
He did not announce the first one.
He simply walked, and halfway through a stride his left heel took the weight and his hip turned before his shoulder. The pivot ran through him clean and quiet. His shoulder was late to it, so he wobbled once and kept walking.
Blaze did not look at him.
One, she thought.
The second was the deflection. His wrist lifted, loose, and an imaginary force slid past it like water around a stone. He followed it two steps down the carpet, arm trailing, then dragged himself back into line without a word.
Two.
The window at the end of the corridor was growing larger. Tall. Old glass. The casement stood latched open to let the morning in, and the drop beyond it was long.
She was aware of this in the calm, exact way she was aware of most things that could ruin a morning.
Aleric's eyes were on the carpet. His lips had gone slightly pinched. He was not looking at the window, or at her, or at anything at all.
The third was the step.
Short. Almost nothing. The left foot slid to the place where an opponent would no longer be looking, and for one half second the whole movement sat inside him like a sentence he had finally learned to say.
Then it kept going.
It was supposed to stop. The picture in his head said stop. His body, delighted to have finally arrived somewhere, did not.
He slid sideways across the carpet. The sill met his hip. His arms went up. His weight went over, and the floor left him all at once.
Both feet were in the air.
Boots toward the ceiling. Chest out over the courtyard, the cobbles a very long way down, a boy folded over a stone sill like a coat on a rail.
He did not scream.
He made one small sound, somewhere between oh and a hiccup.
Blaze's hand was already closed.
She had not decided it. Her fingers had taken the back of his collar the moment his heel lifted, and the whole of him stopped there, suspended, a breath from the long gold air.
The notebook went out of his elbow and fell.
It fell for a very long time.
It hit the cobbles with a small flat sound, and somewhere below a sparrow complained.
Silence.
Aleric hung there, upside down in all the ways that mattered, looking at the paving stones.
"Ah," he said, faintly.
"Yes."
She pulled.
He came back over the sill in one piece and landed on the carpet on his knees. He was pink, breathless, his hair a ruin, and his whole body shook in the quiet, thorough way of a body that has just been very close to something and been given back.
A breath, Blaze thought. Less than a breath.
My silk is intact. The window is still a window.
It is acceptable.
Her hand was still on his collar.
She noticed this. She did not move it.
The collar had not come back with him. The cloth where her fingers had closed was twisted to one side, and the neckline had slid down over his left shoulder in one long clumsy drag.
Aleric was still on his knees, breathing hard, glaring at the window. Then the cool air found his shoulder and he glanced down.
"Oh. Sorry."
He reached up to fix it.
Blaze's hand moved first. She did not let go. She pulled the cloth down, two fingers hooked in the hem, and the neckline slid back over the shoulder as if it had never left.
Aleric froze. "Sis?"
"Hold still."
He held still.
Low on the shoulder, near where it met the arm, there was a mark. It was palm-sized, orange deepening to red at the heart, with soft pale edges like pigment touched with water. It rose in one tall tongue, bending a little to the left, with smaller flames curling off it as though the wind had caught them mid-leap.
The morning light lay across it in a flat gold bar.
She looked at it the way she looked at nothing else.
Not a scar. Not a stain. Not a seal.
I would have felt a seal.
"Where did you get it?"
Aleric tilted his head, trying to see his own shoulder. He couldn't. He never could.
"It's my birthmark. I've always had it."
"Always."
"Since forever. The teacher's wife said it was there when they found me." He shrugged, and the shoulder moved under her fingers. "She thought it looked like a candle. The teacher said a leaf. I never knew what to say."
A candle. A leaf.
Nobody was looking.
"Does it hurt?"
"No."
"Does it warm?"
"Sometimes," Aleric said, a little embarrassed. "When I'm near you. Or Maze. Only a bit. I thought it was the weather."
Blaze said nothing.
The corridor was very quiet. Her eyes stayed on the mark for half a second longer than they needed to. It was a heartbeat, the time a candle takes to bend in a draft and straighten again, but she did not do things by accident, and half a second was long enough to count.
She let go of the collar.
Aleric fixed it himself, smoothing the cloth over his shoulder with the faintly guilty care of someone tidying a room after company.
She straightened. Smoothed one sleeve.
"Let's go," she said.
He blinked up at her. "To the yard?"
"Go. Train."
"Alone?"
"You have three moves. Make them yours."
"By doing them wrong?"
"Until you stop."
He got to his feet, a little lost and a little pleased.
"Sis. Thank you for catching me."
"You are an investment."
"I know." He smiled, small and unbothered, the way he smiled at fire and soup and things he did not intend to question. "Thank you anyway."
She looked at the window. At the long gold drop. At the courtyard below, where a notebook sat on the stones.
"Aleric."
"Yes?"
"Don't get yourself killed."
Aleric ran.
He did not run well. The first three strides were a pivot, a deflection and something that was almost a step, all attempted at speed down a red carpet in a good shirt. He caught himself on a pillar, said nothing, and kept going.
At the end of the corridor he turned the corner, and stopped.
Another corridor. Long. Red carpet. And along its whole left side, window after tall window, each one laying its gold bar across the floor.
He looked at them for a long moment.
No.
Corridors with windows are dangerous, he thought, with great firmness. That's a rule now. Underlined.
That goes in the diary.
He turned around so fast he nearly met a maid.
She had a stack of folded towels in both arms and had clearly been about to pass him in silence. Instead she saw his face, went rigid, and dipped so low the stack tilted.
"Young Master."
"Good morning." Aleric bowed to her, small and quick and entirely sincere. "Sorry. Is there any way down to the inner yard without windows? Any passage at all?"
"Windows, Young Master?"
"Lots of windows. Tall ones." He lowered his voice. "I've had a bad experience."
The maid looked at the corridor. Looked at him. Seemed to arrive, with visible effort, at the decision not to ask.
"There is the servants' stair," she said slowly. "Through the low door behind me. It has no windows, but..."
"Thank you!"
He was already moving.
"Young Master, wait. It is not proper for you to use it."
"It doesn't have any windows," Aleric said, pulling the door open. "That's proper enough for me."
"The family stair is just beyond the—"
"It has windows," he said, with deep and terrible certainty. "Thank you!"
The door closed behind him.
The maid stood very still in the corridor with the towels in her arms. After a moment she looked at the family stair, then at the door.
"He thanked me twice," she said, to nobody.
The stair was narrow and smelled of lamp oil. He took it two steps at a time, missed the third, found it again, and passed a footman coming up. The footman flattened himself against the wall and bowed so quickly his forehead nearly met the stone.
"Young Master!"
"Sorry! Excuse me! Thank you!"
A scullion on the next landing dropped a bucket.
"Young Master," she whispered, to the bucket.
"It's fine, I didn't see anything," Aleric said kindly, and kept going, and heard a small bewildered voice somewhere above him say, "He said thank you."
He came out through a low door into the open air of the inner yard.
It was exactly as promised. Wide. Flat. Packed earth, a few worn training posts, and the long pale wall of the palace rising along one side, with a single tall window high up near the roof.
Aleric looked up at it.
Then at the ground a little way from the wall, where his notebook lay face down in the dust.
"Hello," he said to it.
He picked it up, checked the spine, and brushed the cover with his sleeve like something that had been through a great deal. Then he carried it to the farthest post, well away from the wall and in plain view of nothing.
Two gardeners at the edge of the yard had stopped what they were doing. They bowed as one.
"Young Master."
"Good morning," Aleric said. "Don't mind me. I'm going to do some things wrong."
The gardeners looked at each other.
He set his feet. Dropped his weight through the left heel.
And began, properly, to do them wrong.
Blaze stood where he had left her.
She did not watch him go. She had no need to. She could hear the corner, the pause, the long silent moment in which he had apparently looked at something and disagreed with it. Then the maid, the stair, the small oof when he missed the third step and the quieter ah when he found it again.
The yard, she thought. The notebook. The spine checked, the cover brushed.
She filed it beside the other things she had not corrected.
Her left hand had closed.
She noticed this.
She opened it.
Then she walked.
One step. Two. Crimson silk moving around her ankles, a slow tide against the pale stone.
Three.
On the fourth, she was not there.
There was no flicker, no sound, no ripple in the air. The corridor simply held a gold bar of morning light across a stretch of red carpet where a moment before a woman had been walking.
The smell reached the kitchen door before she did.
Stock. Bread. Something sweet underneath, and something sharper beneath that.
The door stood open a hand's width. Through it came the mutter of the range, the clink of a spoon against a pot, and a man's voice, low and tuneless, humming something he was not aware he was humming.
Blaze stood on the threshold.
There had been no approach. There was only the doorway, and the quiet fact of her in it, one hand resting lightly on the frame.
She did not go in.
Not yet.
Ginger, she thought.
He is not toasting it first.
She knew this the way she knew most things, without being told, and without the faintest wish to be right.
This is not concern, she told the narrow gold line of the room. A stock that does not behave reflects on the palace.
It is an administrative matter.
Alden had his back to her. Flour on his sleeves. The card propped against a jar of spice. The ginger, whole and pale, waiting in a bowl at his elbow.
Untoasted.
Of course, Blaze thought.
Blaze stepped through the door.
She made no sound. The floorboards, which had complained under every servant who crossed them since dawn, kept quiet for her. She crossed the kitchen in six unhurried paces and stopped directly behind her father's shoulder.
Alden was bent over the pot, ladle in hand, frowning at something only he could see. He had not noticed her. He was humming again.
"Hm," he said, to the stock. "Not yet."
Blaze looked at the bowl at his elbow.
The ginger lay there, pale and whole, exactly as she'd left it.
Untouched, she thought. He has been standing over it for the better part of an hour.
She said nothing.
Alden dipped the ladle, tasted, and made a small, unhappy sound.
"Blaze," he said, without turning around.
She blinked, very slightly.
"I didn't say anything."
"You didn't have to. You stand differently when you're behind me." He lifted the ladle over his shoulder, still not looking, as a man holds out a cup to a child he has known all her life. "Taste."
She considered refusing.
She took the ladle.
The stock was good. It was clear and deep, with a long quiet sweetness at the bottom of it that had clearly taken hours, and every part of it was exactly where it should be.
Except one.
"It's lacking," she said.
Alden went still.
"Lacking what?"
"I would have said warmth, but that isn't the word." She tasted it again, slowly, and put the ladle back in his hand. "The thing the card keeps telling you to do."
"I haven't forgotten the toasting."
"You have not done the toasting."
"I was getting to it."
"You were getting to it," Blaze said, "for an hour."
He opened his mouth. Shut it. His shoulders, which had been carrying all the morning's small anxieties, began to shake.
"Grandmother," she added, "wrote it twice and underlined it. She would have been very patient with you."
"She would not."
"She would have been patient at you."
Alden laughed.
It was the real one, the warm unguarded one, and it came out of him in a great breath that rattled the spoons on the rack. He had to put the ladle down and hold on to the counter. He wiped his eye with the back of a floury wrist and left a streak on his cheek.
"You should practise more," Blaze said.
"I should practise—"
"Yes."
"I have been cooking for thirty years."
"It has not helped."
He laughed harder.
She looked at the back of his head. At the flour on his shoulders. At the card propped against its jar, with the margin note in a slanted, impatient hand.
Toast it first.
Her face did not change.
But something in the set of her shoulders eased by the width of a single breath, and had there been anyone to see it, they might have called it a smile.
There was only her father, and he wasn't looking.
He wiped his face, picked up the ginger at last, and set a pan on the flame.
"Toasted," he said.
"Finally," said Blaze.
She stayed where she was, one pace behind his shoulder, and watched the pale root begin to turn gold.