Page 37 of The Orc’s Comfort

The broth boils over.

We hear it at the same moment. He pulls back. We look at each other. Then he’s at the stove in one long stride, adjusting the heat and stirring with practiced efficiency, and I am watching from the table with my fingers pressed to my lips, thinking that if the broth hadn’t boiled over, I would not have been the one to stop. There had been a sound just before he pulled back, low and unfamiliar, different from the growl I knew.

“Crisis averted,” he says, returning.

“Was it a crisis?”

“The broth requires attention.” He looks at the pot. Looks at me. “It should be consumed while still hot.”

“I know,” I say. “I read the recipe.”

Not all of it was written on the page.

Chapter Sixteen

Rhazgar

She serves it herself. Two bowls, ladled with the same deliberate attention she gave every stage of the preparation. I watch her carry them to the table and then take her seat across from me.

There is flour on her temple that she missed when she washed up. The condo smells exactly right. Not close, not almost. Exactly.

I pick up the bowl.

I know this broth. I have made it more times than I can count, adapted it across eight years of Earth ingredients and imperfect substitutions, learned to find the volcanic salt at the specialty importer three neighborhoods over and the firm, pale parsnips at the Tuesday market and the seventh spice, the difficult one, through a trading network of displaced orcs who preserved what they could and share what they have.

I know what this broth smells like and what it tastes like, and what it feels like when it’s right. The warmth of it. The mineral undercurrent. The way the seven herbs resolve into something unified about thirty seconds after you swallow, the way my grandmother described it as tasting like the mountain deciding to take care of you.

I take a sip.

It tastes exactly right.

Perfect.

The proportions are exact, the timing evident in the depth of flavor. The spices are added in the correct order because she read the recipe and understood it isn’t decorative. My grandmother taught it that way for a reason: eight hundred years of accumulated knowledge about how these elements interact with each other and with the body receiving them.

I set my spoon down.

My hands are not steady. I put them flat on the table.

I’m aware I’m not speaking. Julia is watching me with that attentive expression she uses when something matters enormously to her and she’s trying not to show it.

I need a moment. I will speak in a moment. First, I need to be here with what just happened.

My grandmother spent her last two years teaching me everything she knew. Faster than was comfortable. With an urgency I understood only later, after she was gone, when I thought back on those two years and saw them clearly for what they were: she was making sure. She knew something about her own health that she didn’t share with me until near the end, and in the time between knowing and telling, she taught me everything. Every recipe. Every blessing. Every measurement and timing and intention, the whole of it, everything she carried.

She was afraid it would die with me.

She made me promise it wouldn’t. I promised. And then I spent six years honoring that promise as diligently as I knew how, cooking for the community, teaching what I could, keeping the knowledge moving. Carrying it forward into a future I could not picture clearly. Into a next generation that felt, sometimes, in the worst moments, theoretical.

Julia made this broth.

Julia, who has never set foot on another world, who learned this recipe today from a piece of paper in two languages, who tracked down the volcanic salt substitute and paid too much for it and read the recipe four times and then memorized it and managed all three stages correctly and said the blessing in my language until she got the inflection right.

The knowledge moved.

It found another pair of hands.

I look up. Julia is watching me with concerned eyes, and I realize the silence has gone on long enough that she is beginning to wonder if something is wrong.