minstrel-girl walked ten paces behind them, keeping her distance, but able to run and catch up to them if she wished to.
“Was that magic?” Syresh whispered.
Andiene’s smile was more human and youthful than it had been before. “No magic, or even the threat of it. I acted more confident than I felt. You with your sword and look of a mighty warrior were more of a threat.”
Syresh glanced at his sea-worn finery, still all that he had, and knew that she mocked him, though it was gentle mockery. And for all that she could say, he thought that there had been more magic in her facing-down of the townspeople than she was willing to acknowledge.
An hour before nightfall, they stopped and gathered blaggorn grain that grew by the roadside. It had not been harvested by the townspeople, for they had kept well to the law. “We will not gather the grain that lies within five paces of the roadside, for it belongs to the wayfarer.” In some places, they measured their paces with a short-legged child, but here they had left plenty for all who might pass.
Syresh killed a grasskit with a lucky stone-throw. He and Andiene stripped off a good meal’s worth of the flinty sea-coast blaggorn, though he did not know how they could cook it. Too hard to chew, and he could find no stones to grind it. The minstrel stood and watched them as if waiting to be invited closer. Syresh was careful not to glance in her direction. Finally, she stepped forward, grown weary of waiting.
“I have a kettle in my pack, if you would want to cook a stew?”
Syresh looked directly at her for the first time. “Was it one that none of the villagers could recognize as their own?”
She did not take offense. Indeed, her face lit up with amusement. “No, no, they took everything I had. What they did not recognize, they blamed on their own memories. As for the kettle, you almost tripped over it on the way out of town. Some careful housewife had set it outside to be scrubbed with sand.” She saw his look of annoyance, and laughed. “My name is Lenane.” Syresh looked at her and turned away.
“We would be glad to have you share our meal,” Andiene said, with courtesy enough for the two of them.
Lenane turned to her eagerly. “I can cook.”
“That is good,” Andiene said, though Syresh frowned.
Lenane took charge of the cooking with a sure hand, spreading the blaggorn kernels to parch in the bottom of the kettle, stirring them carefully. When they were done, she poured them out on a pile of clean leaves, and set the grasskit to stewing. While it simmered, she picked leaves and seeds from the wayside plants, huge handfuls of fleshy skyglass leaves, tiny torn-up bits of wise-man’s herb, the little triangular seed-pods of star’s line, all she could find. She talked as she worked, naming the herbs, not seeming to care if any listened or not. When the grasskit was done, she added her gleanings to the stew, and stirred the half-popped and expanded blaggorn into it.
It smelled more wonderful than anything Syresh could imagine, but he managed to say sourly, “I suppose you have serving bowls in your pack, too?”
Her grin of achievement widened. “Of course.” She delved in her pack, then brought out a nest of wooden bowls. “One, two, three, four … The fourth one would be for the unexpected guest.”
Syresh was wise enough to know that he was beaten. He ate in silence, the best meal he had ever tasted.
“There’s only one way to praise a cook, and you’ve said it already,” Lenane said as he turned the kettle upside down to pour the last drops of soup into his bowl. “But you two had the look of ones who had walked long on short rations. I have some thornfruit cakes, if you would like a sweet.” Her eyes danced with mischief, and she did not wait for questioning. The joke was too good to save. “Some good housewife had left them cooling on the windowsill.”
“I thank you for the gift,” Andiene said graciously.
Syresh looked at her in outrage. She might plan to be queen, but she had no wisdom to choose her companions, no more than a child not yet at her first Naming. “When I said that you should surround yourself with warriors and counselors, this was not what I meant,” he said in a biting undertone that easily reached