The muscles in Kiela’s shoulders unknotted, at least a little. “Thanks.”
“Do you like talking about other people?” Bryn asked. “I know just about everything about anyone. I can tell you all their secrets as an apology for my trying to pry into yours.”
Kiela laughed in spite of herself. “No, thank you. I don’t need to know.”
“Hmm . . . All right then. I think I know what you do need.”
I highly doubt that.
“What you need is a savory pastry.”
Well, maybe . . .Her stomach let out a gurgle, and Kiela felt herself blush. She polished off the rest of the cinnamon bun.
Bryn bustled behind the counter. “Starting over is difficult work. You need fuel. Protein. Salt. Nourishing fat.” Humming to herself, she pulled out another pastry, arranged it on a dish, and sprinkled sea salt on top.
As she worked, Kiela noticed that the array of baked goods was decidedly different from what was available in the city. If this were Alyssium, at least half the items would have been baked with jam and sugar-drenched fruit: cherry tarts, raspberry swirls, apple turnovers. But Bryn’s bakery had none of that. Lots of sugar and cinnamon and whatever it was she was preparing for Kiela. But no splash of color from any kind of fruit. She wondered why. Jam was such an integral part of every bakery that Kiela had ever visited.
“It’s my own recipe,” Bryn said, carrying it over to Kiela. “Go on, try it—my treat.”
“You aren’t going to stay in business if you keep offering free food.”
“You’ll upset me if you refuse.” She paused. “Unless you don’t want it, or are allergic to seafood, or aren’t in the mood for more food, and if so, I absolutely would not want—”
Kiela bit into the pastry and was surprised by the burst of salt that prickled her tongue, the garlic that filled her sinuses, and the wonderful sweetness of . . . “What is that?” she asked as she chewed.
“It’s a kind of fish that used to be plentiful around Caltrey, the silver swift fish. I’ve been working on ways to highlight the flavor. Do you like it?”
She’d tasted swift fish before, and it never tasted likethis.The fish itself melted into the butter of the pastry, and when she swallowed . . . she felt as if she were inhaling the bright vividness of the sea itself. “It’s incredible.”
With a modest shrug, Bryn said, “It’s ingredients and a recipe. Anyone could do it.”
“But you chose to do it.” She took another bite, and it was just as good as the first.
“Glad you like it,” Bryn said. “We so seldom have new arrivals that I have forgotten how to make a new friend without scaring her off. I’ve known everyone on Caltrey for ages. Know everything about them, and I meaneverything:who snores, who eats with their mouth open, whose feet smell . . . but I’d hoped . . . that is, I believe that a proper pastry can make up for a wealth of social blunders.”
A new friend. The words were such a surprise that Kiela nearly dropped the fish pastry, which would have been tragic.I’m not looking for a friend.I have Caz. And my books.
Traitorously, a part of her whispered,But I would like one.
“I would like to know one thing about Caltrey,” Kiela found herself saying. “What’s changed here? I don’t remember it being so . . .” She searched for a word that wouldn’t be offensive.
“Desperate?” Bryn supplied.
It wasn’t the word that Kiela would have chosen, but it would do. She nodded.
Bryn sighed. “Politics in the capital.”
Kiela felt a prickle on her scalp. “Oh?”
“It used to be that the emperor would send his sorcerers on a regular rotation to tend to the outer islands, and they’d cast spells that balanced out whatever nonsense they’d done in the capital city to throw the weather out of whack, but then they stopped coming. Fish began to get scarce, and the merhorses—you’ll notice our local herd has dwindled, which makes the fishing even worse. All our weather patterns have changed, due to city-magic nonsense, and without a sorcerer to correct for that, our farms don’t produce what they used to.” Pausing her breathless speed for a moment, Bryn nodded at the shelves of baked goods, and Kiela noticed for the first time that not only were they lacking in jam, they were only half full. She would have guessed the other half had been bought already, but perhaps not. “It’s not that we’re starving, but everyone worries that if the sorcerers in the south don’t decide to pay attention to the empire’s citizens again . . .”
Kiela had heard a little about that, but she hadn’t paid much attention since it wasn’t library-related. Over time, the emperor had withdrawn his sorcerers from the other islands and canceled their circuits of the outlying farms and villages.A waste of magic,he’d called it. There had been arguments—she’d read some of the discourse in the pamphlets written by the revolutionaries. The empire was hoarding magic, and the outer islands, whose economies had become dependent on the renewal of particular spells and on reliable weather patterns, were suffering because of it. She hadn’t thought of what that meant on a practical day-to-day level.
While the elite used magic to build their palaces and fuel their lavish lives, ordinary people suffered. That was the crux of the argument for the revolution. The world and its resources belonged to everyone, they said—which included everything kept locked up inside the Great Library. All that knowledge, the power to make lives better, was shelved away. Reserved for use by only the wealthy, when it should belong to everyone.And that’s why I never really believed they’d hurt the library—and why I don’t understand why they did.They knew books were power.
Kiela wondered what Bryn would say if she knew that a sliver of that power was currently sitting in crates in a run-down cottage beyond the cliffs.
She also wondered what the emperor would say.
