Page 30 of Elvenbred

Triana laughed. “So, you pay with food to get food? How does that work?”

“You’ll see,” Nora replied.

She led Triana down a side street to a small establishment with several tables, and where a male elf greeted Nora happily. More hugs. No wonder they get sick, Triana thought caustically. Nora sat down and gestured for Triana to sit. Nora took the paper-wrapped brick out of her satchel, along with a sharp knife. She unwrapped the brick to reveal a brownish-white loaf.

“This is what you eat?” Triana said, looking skeptically at the brick. “This is food?” I thought what they were giving me for meals was bland. This is worse than bland.

“Yes,” Nora replied, “It’s spell-wrought. Most food is these days.” She gave Triana a half smile. “You look like a bug crawled into your tea. You’re eating it too. Every day, usually broken into a powder, dried, and then reconstituted with flavorings.”

Triana looked skeptically at it, recalling her lessons from home. “You can’t Make food. It’s impossible. You can make an illusion, but ashes and water are still ashes and water. You can transform things, like flowers and grass, into something that looks and tastes better, but it still has the same value to your gut as flowers and grass.” Hmm … maybe that’s not right. I do seem to recall that someone I knew could make things taste sweeter. Was that an illusion, or did she really transform things?

Nora shrugged. “And yet, here we are.” She broke a tiny piece off and offered it to Triana. “Bland, yes. Illusion, no.” She laughed as Triana took it, clearly expecting it to turn to ash in her fingers. “I don’t know the precise workings of it, but I know it’s a form of transmutation … taking one thing that is almost like it, and turning it into another thing almost like the first.” She laughed a bit. “And that represents most of what I remember about the magic types from school. I don’t have that ability.”

She shrugged. “Most of the Great Houses are taxed in food. They have rooms full of the people who would probably be farming if there weren’t Predators outside the walls. So, they make these bricks instead, and this is what most people live on.”

An elf approached the table and exchanged a few words with Nora. This was a different dialect, more sibilant and smooth, and Triana had trouble with it. Their smiles told her that they were either friends, or Nora was a long and favored customer here. The elf bent down and took a good, deep sniff of the brick before going to fetch a small scale. Triana watched with amusement as first one, then the other, pointed to different shares of the brick, dickering back and forth.

After a time, they agreed on a share, and Nora cut about a fifth off of the brick, which the male elf weighted carefully, returning a few crumbs to Nora who pressed them back into the brick. Satisfied, he brought them a small brazier with lit coals, a selection of sauces, a tiny copper dish with some kind of oil, and a pair of plain, very straight sticks. Nora cut a wafer thin slice, dribbled a bit of oil on the brazier, and with the sticks set the slice onto the brazier where it popped and sizzled for a few moments. She made a deft movement to flip it over, then slid it, now golden-brown and piping hot, onto a tiny plate for Triana.

“The sauces range from sweet over there on your right, to the more sour and savory on the left. Little dab of sauce, just enough to get the flavor. You might want to skip the green one, furthest on the left. Definitely an acquired taste. Hot enough to melt bronze, if you take my meaning.”

Triana followed her lead and dabbed a bit of sauce, and lifted the small plate up to her mouth, as she saw Nora do. The wafer, fried in oil to a delicate crunch, mixed with a sauce that combined sweet and savory. “That is really good!” she declared. “The first thing I’ve eaten here that tastes like real food!”

Nora smiled. “Most of the vendors along here had eating establishments. Now, you have to bring your own rations, and they take a share, in exchange for the sauces, the cooking oil, the charcoal, and the rest. All of that kit costs rations—or effort. You can grow the herbs and spices to make the sauces, but that takes skill and time. When they are done for the day, they keep what’s left over. Some days they eat well, others … less so. But this is all they have in the way of a skill to make their ration.”

The elf brought a pot of fragrant tea, and filled mismatched cups. They sipped gratefully for a moment, inhaling the floral scents. For just a moment, Triana smelled the gardens outside her estate. Homesickness rose up and she sniffled back a tear.

“Hot?” Nora asked. Triana suspected Nora deliberately misinterpreted the gesture.

“Yes,” Triana replied. She tipped her head to one side a bit, “but good.” She studied Nora, whose mood seemed pensive, a bit off from her usual self. “Is there a problem?”

Nora shook her head, brightening. “No, just having a memory.”

Triana, schooled in the arts of lying, saw through that one at once. Something had happened. Triana could see the small quirk, the little pause before Nora told an untruth. Triana, raised in the company of elven lords whose relationship with the truth was always courting, never marrying, found Nora’s “tell” as obvious as a banner. The stakes had gone up, and Triana still didn’t know whether she was a player, a game piece, or a prize.

“What shall we talk about?” Triana asked, hoping to draw her out. “The lesson.”

“Ah,” Nora answered. “How does it work? Where you come from, I mean? Your king?”

“Oh,” Triana paused for a moment, gathering her thoughts. “Well, we don’t really have one. We have a Council of all of the Great Lords. The Lesser Lords have to swear fealty to one of the Great Lords and obey their decrees. V’kel Lyon Lord Kyndrath is the most powerful, and has the backing of most of the Council.”

“V’kel?” Nora interrupted.

“Yes, it’s one of his titles. Mine’s V’dann. I’ll admit they can be quite a mouthful.” She started working through honorifics from home and translating them for Nora, but got lost in the thread. “Oh, what’s the skiving word for …?”

Nora smiled. “Profanity isn’t punctuation, dear. Remember, upper birth names have a slightly trilled second syllable, it denotes rights of blood … born lordly … rather than rights of marriage … bedded lordly. Do as I do.”

Triana copied her as Nora made the soft trilling sound. She laughed a bit.

“What’s funny” Triana asked.

“Oh, here it’s the opposite,” Nora replied. “The shorter the title, the better … if you are explaining, you’re losing.”

Triana’s puzzlement must have been obvious to Nora.

“So,” Nora said, slicing another layer of wafer from the ration bar and setting it to sizzle. She dabbed a bit of sauce on it and slid it to Triana. “King. Says all it needs to say. One king. Each city has one. The cities get there by different routes … right mother and father for some, get voted in by your peers, cut cards for it, get stuck with it because no one else wants it. Paths differ, but destination is the same. Top of the heap, nice house, good rations, shiny hat, even grown food. They all come from the most powerful families … magic powerful, not just politically powerful. Last stop for the ambitious.”

“It’s not all grace and glory, though. It’s easy to king it when times are good. A lot harder when things are tough.” She sighed. “Something goes wrong, you are the first to fall. Literally, sometimes. If a Predator attack is serious enough, then the king goes to the front of the attack and is expected to wield his magic until he is utterly spent. Or dead. Often dead. Usually dead. A few years back, one of the cities went through four kings in a year. I think they stopped giving them numbers after a while, or it’d be Ardbeg the Twenty-Sixth or something like that.”