The Vampire & Her Witch

”I’d like it very much...”

Ollie’s smile grew so wide it was almost bashful, and he ducked his head over the cutting board as if he needed something to do with his hands.

”Then we’d best get started,” he said.

The sausages went first. Ollie laid them into the larger of the two pans, and the iron greeted them with a fierce -HSSSSS- that filled the sitting room with the smell of pepper and sage and browning pork.

”Sausages take the longest,” he said, speaking to fill the silence that had begun to feel awkward. He nudged each one with the flat of his spatula until they sat in a neat row with plenty of space between them. ”If you leave them be and only turn them now and then, they’ll go crisp on the outside and stay juicy in the middle. Poke them too much, and all the good goes out into the pan,” he said, as though ruining fine sausages was a great tragedy.

Then again, the sausages had come from Georg’s kitchen. Wasting any of them wouldn’t just be tragic; it would border on criminal.

Then he untied the bundle of herbs and selected a knife from the leather roll. Its blade was nearly as long as his forearm, and the knife had a wide, sweeping belly. The curve wasn’t that different from the fighting knives preferred by Blackwell sailors, but a Blackwell knife would have been slender with a curved blade and spine, where Ollie’s knife had a straight spine and only a single, curved edge.

Jocelynn had watched cooks at work before, but she had never seen hands move like Ollie’s. The tip of his knife never left the board. The blade rocked back and forth in a steady -tak- -tak- -tak- -tak- while his other hand fed the herbs beneath it. His knuckles were curled so close to the edge of the blade that Jocelynn was certain he would lose a fingertip, but never did, no matter how fast he moved. In a matter of heartbeats, the herbs had become a fragrant green heap as fine as the grains of sand on the beach.

”Where did you learn to do that?” Jocelynn said, mesmerized by the effortless way the knife moved in his hand as he divided the pile into two unequal-sized piles at the edge of the cutting board. ”Is that something you learned from Master Georg?”

”I learned this in the kitchens in Lothian Manor,” Ollie said, being careful not to mention who he’d learned from specifically. Percivus had executed Master Baden before Ollie made it back to Lothian Manor, and that execution had been used to torment Jocelynn in ways that Ollie preferred not to think about.

”I learned most of what I know about cooking from the cooks in Lothian,” Ollie continued as he moved on to the mushrooms. This time, he held the knife steady in one hand, using the heel to pop the stems out of the mushrooms before quartering them and dropping them into a small bowl.

”Not just the masters cooking for the lords’ tables,” he continued as he scooped the smaller pile of herbs in with the mushrooms, giving them a quick toss before walking them over to the hearth. ”I cooked for plenty of soldiers at the Summer Villa every year, and the guardsmen at the manor.”

”This would have been a treat in the barracks,” he said as he carefully turned the sausages, then dropped the herbed mushrooms in between the plump, glistening sausages where they sizzled in the rendered sausage fat. ”If you have a scout or a hunting party with a good forager who can bring back a sack of mushrooms that are good to eat, half the barracks will bid for a share of his spoils.”

”They bid for mushrooms?” Jocelynn said, blinking in surprise. ”They’re really that hard to come by? How much would they pay for a meal of mushrooms?”

”It varied,” Ollie said as he returned to the table where he’d been working. ”A small jug of wine, or a pair of good socks... Sometimes, just trading bunks to give a man a spot by the window on a hot summer night, or covering a shift at the gate on a rainy day.”

”They’re soldiers,” Ollie said with a shrug. ”Common folk might not have much, but little treats can be worth something if it breaks up several days of boiled salt-pork and oat porridge,” he said as he moved onto the cheese.

Ollie cut the wedge into thin slices, laid the slices flat, cut them into strips, then turned the strips sideways and cut them again, until the board was covered in tiny, even cubes no bigger than barley grains.

”Why so small?” Jocelynn asked before she could stop herself. She found herself drawn into the world Ollie was creating with the smooth motions of his knife and stories of an everyday life the likes of which she’d only ever observed from a distance.

”So it melts,” Ollie said, as if it were obvious. ”Big pieces just sulk in the eggs and go rubbery. Little ones melt right through till you can’t even see the cheese, but your tongue knows it’s there. It helped to stretch things a bit at the villa when we were waiting for the next cart of supplies,” he added.

Once the cheese had been diced, he fetched a bowl and a small crock of butter from the cupboard, then cracked the eggs into the bowl one-handed, a dozen of them without a single fleck of shell, and beat them with a whisk until they were pale and frothy. Then he lifted the squat iron pot off its hook, dropped a generous knob of butter inside, and swirled it until it foamed. The eggs went into the pot with a soft sizzle, followed by the cheese and the herbs.

There was something calming about watching Ollie work, Jocelynn realized. Everything fell into place, exactly the way he wanted it to. There was nothing flashy or artistic about his cooking. The dishes he was preparing didn’t remotely resemble the edible art that Master Georg had put together for their family dinner two nights ago.

But it was... orderly. Each step followed from the last, executed with the competence of having done them hundreds or thousands of times before... Ollie was a knight, in nothing but a sleep shirt and trousers, but with a knife or a pan in his hand, he moved with the same confidence Jocelynn had seen from master swordsmen, and he was just as enchanting to watch...