Page 33 of Orc'd & Loaded
"You are categorically not a lesser thing."
She turns her head. Studies me. The blue light catches one eye, dark and sharp.
"Your turn."
I stretch my legs out. My boots are still waterlogged and they squelch when I flex my toes. Disgusting. Perfect distraction from the fact that my throat has gone tight.
"My father was a soldier. Career military. Spent thirty years in the Border Wars and came home with half a left hand and no taste for conversation." The words come out rough. Unpracticed. I don't tell this story. "My mother fed him back to life. Every night. Same seat at the table. Same massive portions. Roasted boar. Smoked root stews. Black bread with rendered fat. She didn't ask how he was. She just put food in front of him and sat close enough that their elbows touched."
Solene's arms loosen around her knees.
"He never talked about the wars. Never talked about the hand. But he'd eat, and somewhere around the third plate his shoulders would drop two inches and he'd look at her. Just look. And that was enough."
The rain fills the gap where I stop. My hands hang between my knees and I stare at them. Big hands. Scarred from grills and cleavers and the sharp edges of a life built around heat. My father's hands, minus the missing fingers.
"Food is the bridge," I say. "That's all I know. You put something real on the table and people cross it. They sit with strangers. They share plates. They stop being alone for twenty minutes and that's..." I shake my head. "That's the whole thing. That's the tavern. It's not complicated."
"It's not complicated," she repeats. But the way she says it strips the simplicity right off the words and leaves something raw underneath. Something that recognizes itself.
"We're going to destroy each other at this festival," she says. Soft.
"Absolutely."
"I'm going to win."
"You're going to lose so beautifully that Reginald Vance writes a sonnet about it."
The laugh comes again. Longer this time. She lets it live, lets it fill the dark space between us, and her head drops forward onto her knees and her shoulders shake with it. When she lifts her face the blue light catches her fully. Flushed. Eyes bright. Hair wrecked. Chef coat beyond salvation.
And there, on her left cheekbone, high on the ridge where the bone catches light, a pale smear. Ivory-white against her skin. Not frost. Not condensation.
Buttercream. Vegan buttercream, from the batch she must have been piping before the storm hit. It's been there this entire time, through the rain, through the hauling, through the desperate furniture-rearranging negotiation with my grandmother's homicidal icebox.
I lean forward.
Not far. Six inches. Enough to halve the distance between us. Enough that my shadow falls across her face and the blue light outlines the shape of my shoulder above hers. Her breathing stops. Not a gasp. Not a catch. A complete cessation, like someone hit pause on a recording.
"You've got something. Right here."
I don't touch her. My finger hovers a quarter inch from her cheekbone. Close enough to feel her skin radiating heat against my knuckle.
"Can I taste it?"
CHAPTER 9
SOLENE
The word leaves my mouth before my brain grants permission.
"Yes."
One syllable. Barely a whisper. More exhale than language.
Boris doesn't move fast. An big orc could close the gap between us in a fraction of a heartbeat, but he doesn't. He moves like he's approaching something sacred, something that might spook and bolt if he breathes wrong. His hand comes up. Rough fingers, thick as bratwurst, calloused from years of cast iron and cleaver handles. They hover at my jaw. Not touching.
Then his thumb lands on my cheekbone.
The pad of it covers half my face. Warm. Almost burning, which makes no sense because we've been sitting in a freezing cellar for the better part of an hour and his hands should be blocks of ice, but they're not. They're furnaces. His thumb drags across the smear of buttercream with a deliberateness that liquefies something at my spine.
