Kingfisher(56)

Hal spoke then, smiling, welcoming the gathering to supper.

My father knows what all this means, Carrie thought coldly, as she carried the cauldron back into the kitchen to ladle out its contents. He won’t tell me.

Maybe, she thought later, bringing the cleaned and polished cauldron back to the bar to be locked away, Stillwater knows. Maybe he’ll tell me.

“It’s nothing,” Stillwater said, when she asked him about the ritual a few days later. “A family thing. You know how families are. Always looking back, doing things the way they were always done, acquiring habits, ceremonies over the years. Actually, if I were making that choice, I wouldn’t put that in there.”

Actually, Carrie didn’t say, I have no idea how families are, and neither do you. “That” was a lemon, and “there” was one of Stillwater’s many odd kitchen tools, machines of various sizes with no obvious ways of behaving.

“Sorry,” she said. “I thought it was the slicer.”

He opened a drawer, took out a paring knife. “This works.”

He had an extremely eccentric kitchen; the small stove and a blender were among the few things she recognized. He did nearly everything in his collection of machines. He showed her how to fry an egg in one, to roast a parsnip in another, to fashion a seven-layer cupcake, complete with a lovely ribbon of frosting tied in a bow on top, in something that looked like a martini shaker.

“Forget everything you know here,” he advised. “Experiment. Invent. Create. That’s why I built these.”

She spent the first working hours doing just that: tossing food at random into his inventions just to see what would happen. She turned a red onion into ice cream, a potato into sea foam, bread into what looked like curly shoe leather; she made sequins and stars out of radishes, frothed an egg yolk, then deep-fried the froth into a golden lace. She found herself eating constantly, licking a finger or a spoon handle, desperate for a taste of anything besides air. Sage wandered in occasionally to nibble Carrie’s experiments, give critical comments about how something looked, make suggestions about what to pair. Now and then, she said simply, warmly, “Yes. That’s good. Todd was right about you.”

“It’s nothing,” Carrie said helplessly.

“No, no. It’s wonderful.”

Maybe, she thought, lying beside Zed and listening to him breathe in rhythm with the sea, that’s what magic is. Believing that nothing is something.

“You haven’t been cooking the way you used to,” Ella commented wistfully as they prepped for the next day’s lunch. “I miss your tidbits. Your little bites.”

Carrie looked at her, surprised. She seemed to be inventing all the time, coming up with this and that, plate jewelry, edible ornaments. But that was for Todd Stillwater, she remembered; she had neglected them in this kitchen, where every tool and recipe was predictable.

“I forgot,” she said lamely. “I’ve been distracted, I guess.”

“Something worrying you?”

Carrie shook her head, speechless. Working two jobs, skulking to Stillwater’s three times a week, trying to find her father, deceiving Ella, hiding her thoughts from the scarily perceptive Lilith, had put her beyond worry. Maybe that was why she was hungry all the time, at least at Stillwater’s. Here, she barely remembered to eat.

“Not more than usual.” She whacked at celery for the soup of the day, the old workhorse chicken-veg. She never chopped vegetables in Stillwater’s kitchen, she realized. If he served soup at all, it would be in the form of a custard, maybe, or a cone of little frozen pearls. She made an effort, shoved his kitchen out of her mind. “I’ll come up with something today,” she promised, and later, she combined several things lying around in such a fashion that there were visible signs, on many plates, of bites that had been spat back out.

“You’ve got some serious weirdness going on here,” Jayne declared, eating Carrie’s creation. “I like anchovies. I just never knew I liked them with sweet pickles before.” She swallowed and added, “There are knights at one of my tables. Three of them, from Severluna. I had to explain what a shrimp basket is. What’s with these knights coming through Chimera Bay? Are they all lost?”

“Maybe someone’s making a movie,” Bek suggested, hefting a tray of plates to his shoulder.

“You’re probably right,” Jayne said, absently munching more anchovy bites. “Real knights can’t all be that gorgeous.”

They were that gorgeous in Carrie’s dream that night: they all had Stillwater’s face. The knights had gathered in the Kingfisher Inn to watch the solemn ritual Fish Fry. Women from an era of crimped hair, red lipstick, heart-shaped bodices, full skirts made of satin and chiffon accompanied the knights. The high-hatted chef led the ritual, holding a great platter of beautiful little bites. He carried it around the room, offering it to the richly dressed, smiling women, to the knights who all looked alike, to Hal and Merle, who wore their tuxedos, to Ella, even to Lilith, who had come down from her tower to join the merry gathering.

Everyone ate. The platter never emptied; more and more bites appeared and disappeared. Colors in the dream began to flicker, vanish, return. The rich hues of women’s gowns paled, melted into grays and whites and blacks of old photos. People kept talking, laughing, even as one by one lights in the chandelier went dark. Airy skirts began to tear, part into shreds; high-heeled sandals vanished, left the women barefoot. Their glittering diamonds winked out like the prisms above them. The knights’ beautiful faces became hollow, haggard, even as they kept eating. The walls of the prosperous inn grew thin; moonlight came through them, and the sound of the gulls. Here and there a rafter fell. Still the party, the celebration, continued, as if nothing were wrong, nothing at all, everyone talking, laughing, eating from the chef’s inexhaustible platter, even though shadows crept over the walls, and Lilith had vanished, and so had Hal, leaving a crippled old man in his place, leaning painfully on a staff, and beside him, Merle turned into a wolf.