Half-way into the rainy season, Brunnhold's infirmary was plagued by the sound of coughing, moreso than usual for that time of year. The rains had been particularly heavy, and the residents had kept themselves indoors, breathing right next to each other and exchanging a fascinating variety of germs. The most prevalent of germs, of course, belonged to the group generally referred to as the common cold-- and it was a very common cold, indeed.

As such, the infirmary was low on the traditional remedies. The healers and nurses could not magically immunize everyone against a minor cough; they needed to reserve their monic energy in case of real emergencies.

Healer Ixbridge was long a proponent of the pharmaceutical approach, and she would often proscribe some unorthodox treatment to a hapless and sniveling student simply to see if it worked.

She had good luck with Fennelwort thus far; so much good luck, in fact, that she'd run out.


"Hello?" Abe called, peering into the darkness of the neglected Banquet Kitchen.

In need of the plant, she had tried the main kitchen first. The lemon flavor of Fennelwort might make it a cheap substitute for Lemon Thyme, she supposed, but, alas, they didn't have any. The Matron had directed her to the Banquet Kitchen, alluding to a stockpile of dried herbs. However, Abe was beginning to wonder if the matron sent her there solely to rid the primary kitchen of a learned pest.

She lifted a guttering candle as she descended the worn stone steps. "Is anyone down here?"

Again, again with the banquet kitchen. Aurelie was coming to loathe the banquet kitchen, full as it was with the misfortunes of her life. If she had never gone down there, she reasoned, they would never have met Harold and really nothing that had happened to her or Triston in the past few weeks would ever have happened.

It was irrational, but she still resented the kitchen for it. Luckily, this time she was there entirely voluntarily, and not at the behest of irritated matrons or mysterious, twitchy men. No, this afternoon Aurelie was rooting around looking for something that would boil down thick and dark to use as ink. She'd neglected her recipes, lately, in favour of the whirlwind of activity her life had become ever since Triston had wandered into her-- their, theirs now --bunk. As such, that precious reserve of ink she'd made so secretly had run out.

Down as she was among the dust and the store of herbs, some past usefulness for any purpose other than hers, she almost didn't hear Abeline's voice when she called out. As it was, Aurelie didn't recognize the sound of it, just the tone and the rise and fall of words.

Probably someone called to clean. There was really little else to do down here besides that at the moment. Unless, of course, you were filching supplies. "Oh, yes, hello!" She tried to make her voice as cheerful-- and innocent --as possible.

"Oh." Her reply was so quiet it might have disappeared into the cracks in the walls. She'd hoped to snatch a few moments of peace.. some time to think on everything.. on how the world was falling apart around her... If she could only figure out what to do...

Wary and disappointed, she breathed, "Say, you wouldn't happen to know where the er.. herbs... are?"

Healer Ixbridge found herself staring at the bottoms of a pair of threadbare slippers. Better than staring a few inches up-- My, her feet must get cold in the winter.

Now wait one moment, that hesitant mode of inquiry was no passive girl, come to dust out this old kitchen. Aurelie got suddenly still and pale. A golly, there was a golly here how could she have missed the field she was in so much trouble if she was caught stealing from the school-- stupid, stupid Aurelie.

She crawled backwards on her hands and knees for a moment until she was far enough away from the shelf she was looking on to turn her head around. All the thoughts in her head tumbled round and round, trying to think of something to say.

So as it was, she was quite astonished to see a face she knew.

"Healer Ixbridge!" Aurelie's jaw hung open until she thought to close it. How extraordinarily rare, to see faculty down here where there really was nothing for them to be doing. "Herbs? Oh, oh yes of course." She attempted to spring to her feet, her efforts somewhat thwarted by how little purchase her slippers really afforded her on the stone of the floor at this point in their lifetime of service to her. Poor slippers. One day she would really have to put new soles on them, though she supposed that was easier said than done.

Abe took a step back, holding the candle well away from the activity. "Oh! It's you! M-miss Steerpike, was it?"

After realizing the passive was fighting the good fight against gravity, and not in fact in the midst of some arcane cleaning ritual, Abe stole a glance up at the empty stairway. Seeing no one, she set the candleholder down.

"Sorry to have disturbed you." She shrugged apologetically.

The guilt she felt at bothering poor Aurelie was a welcome distraction from the other associations that particular passive called to mind. The healer remembered kneeling in a small, dark room.. the promises she still intended to keep.. and.. and evidence she didn't have the courage to collect. Not yet.

With a lost, pensive look, she reached out a soft galdori hand, "I'll help you up?"

"Oh!" Aurelie found herself staring at that hand. Golly hands, she thought, were so smooth and unblemished-- not at all like passive hands. Though she could remember a time, vague as though a dream, when she had hands like that, too.

"Oh," she said again, and this time she extended her hands to fold around Abeline's, accepting her offer of assistance. Strange as it seemed, a golly healer woman holding her hand out to a grubby little passive.

With a guilty start, she realized her apron pockets were full of herbs, various and sundry and most assuredly not looking at all legitimate. She flushed, twisted away and tried to angle herself better so that maybe it couldn't been seen. Not, of course, that this idea had occurred to her soon enough-- if Abe were going to notice that Aura had stuffed her pockets with stolen goods, she'd had ample time to do so.

Calm down now, Aurelie, she chided herself. She has no reason to think passives don't stuff their pockets with herbs all the time-- it's not as if anyone actually pays attention to what passives do. To Abe, she smiled. It was a bit forced, tight around the edges, but since Abeline was being so polite herself...

"No bother," she assured her with a slight incline of her head. Her gaze remained fixed somewhere around her toes. "I was just..." A useless flap of the wrist. What could she say? Besides, the healer had every right to be there. Every right to be everywhere, if she wanted.

As the kitchen girl fumbled for excuses, the healer's countenance darkened, but it was clear her mind was elsewhere. Aurelie might as well have left already for all the attention she was given.

Abe felt-- what didn't she feel? So many thoughts, so many emotions pulled at her. As a healer, she had to go where she was needed, but she was needed in multiple places at once. Brunnhold-- Triston-- Horation-- Alisoina-- Har-- Vienda! Vienda, her home, might have pulled the strongest (though perhaps that was a lie); she thought of her father in his workshop and her aunts in their modest manse. They weren't safe--

Internally, she was spinning, spinning... a confisalto dancer twirling on vapor. Her stage was a void, and her audience was silence.. and her partner...?

What words could describe that empty space? It was immaterial and ineffable. What trailed along her arm as she dipped? Not flesh and blood; not light, not warmth, not air. What supported her hand as she spun? No resistance, no pressure, no weight. What held her aloft? Nothing.

And what caught her when she fell?

Nothing...

A sensation insinuated itself into her awareness. It was very strange, because it wasn't quite like anything at all. Aurelie's nexus! I can feel it!

She looked up and beamed at the passive. Aurelie wouldn't understand, of course, but how could she? As far as Abe knew, the oddly fretful-looking girl before her didn't know a thing about nexuses. But-- why was she so fretful, anyway?

The galdor glanced down to see pockets full of dried plant matter. Recognizable plant matter, even. "Oh, Fennelwort! Just what I needed. And parsley.. sage.. rosemary.. thyme. Why, one could make a fine chicken soup with these." She visually weighed the bulging pockets, realizing the passive probably wasn't assigned to the role of a walking herb canister. "Quite a lot of soup, in fact."

Peering skeptically at Aurelie, she leaned close to whisper in the passive's ear. "When you skim off the top, it's best to take very little. They're less likely to notice."

Then, the healer smirked, twirling a filched sprig of rosemary between her fingers. "Now put most of that back."

The whisper of words slide across her ears and they turned red, a fire of embarrassment that started with Abeline's voice and spread to the roots of her hair and down to her neck. She'd been caught, and now Abeline was going to turn her in and she was going to be beaten and they would search her bunk, she knew they would, and they'd find her book and--

And then Abeline pulled back and the expression on her face was not that of a galdori woman looking to get a passive punished. Puzzled yet relieved, Aurelie nodded and shuffled back to put most of it away. No walnuts, anyway-- she liked those for ink best.

Wrapped up as she was in her concern for her own skin, it took a moment for it to filter through to her consciousness that Abeline actually knew what all these herbs were for. Now she expected, in general, for a healer to know what herbs did-- in a medicinal context. This was a bit different though. Abeline... cooked?

"You cook?" She hadn't meant to voice the thought, or at least not to sound so very surprised, but it tripped off her tongue before she could pull it back. She hoped her sort of pathetic expression conveyed that adequately.

She saw Aurelie's embarrassment and instantly mirrored the blush. Toying with the girl like that... Even when trying to be lenient, she was just another galdor taking her power for granted. It wasn't right of her, nor was it fair to Miss Steerpike.

The passives... In the past few weeks, she'd thought more about them than she had in whole years. What were they? Well, they weren't cursed, that much she knew. What prompted the Everine to describe their brethren with such theatrical language? Just an appeal to emotion-- oh, it rankled her so!

They weren't inferior. Not by her standards. They were raised as galdori, and they had the same exact access to education as children.. like her uncle, a prodigy in astronomy. When he failed the test, he didn't suddenly become stupid... or so she'd gathered from what little snippets she'd overheard. She only learned of his existence on the eve of her tenth birthday; eavesdropping was so easy, even behind closed doors, when familial voices were raised.

When Aurelie spoke, Abe snapped back to the present, feeling like her ear was still pressed to oak. The tip of the stolen rosemary was in her mouth; it was slightly chewed, apparently.

"Cook? Erm, yes.. but only rarely. I don't have a kitchen of my own." Absently, she chewed the rosemary again. "Haven't had a chance in.. years?"

First she was polite, then she kept their secrets and was kind, and now she cooked? Would wonders never cease? Galdori like the good Healer Ixbridge threw Aurelie off her balance. Galdori were cruel, even when they seemed kind-- betrayers of the lowest sort.

But they also didn't usually cook for themselves. That, of course, is what servants are for. Servants like Aurelie. Still, it was endearing. The best sorts of people were the sorts who understood the importance of cooking, either as cooks themselves or in the role of the one being cooked for.

"They would make nice soup." A blatant attempt at a coverup. No matter, her interest in the subject was genuine. "Conventional and lovely. I have a recipe that I--" Jaw clamped shut, tongue scolded for the betrayal. Why had she said that? Those were her secret, she only told friends about those. Maybe Abeline wouldn't notice? Aurelie sincerely hoped so. The way the healer's attentions kept drifting, this wasn't the most outlandish of wishes, surely.

"A recipe?" For all that her attentions had wandered, the healer's flint-brown eyes sparked merrily. "How delightful! I adore innovation, and the field of cooking is no exception."

Her arms crossed, she stood a little closer to the passive, like a vagrant inching toward a bonfire (never mind the inconvenient fact that she'd never slept outside in her life). Abeline needed a conversation like this.. frivolous, trivial, and unlikely to affect the course of history through some convoluted chain of events. No one got sent to jail over a soup recipe.

She smiled warmly to Aura, then scratched her head as something occurred to her. "Only, I haven't detected any change in the school menu since hatchers colonized Roannah. Actually, no, I may be off by a few years-- I'm sure it's written somewhere that Ro himself was told by the glorious mythic beasts: 'Thou Shalt Consume Overcooked Pot Roast on the Sevens.'"

The smile that spread over her face was unintentional and entirely unpreventable. She even laughed. It was true, even she knew it. Brunnhold's menu was somewhat lacking in variety, though this was not due to lack of trying. The kitchen staff didn't want to be making the same thing week after week any more than the students and faculty wanted to eat it. If they had to make one more hingle stew the way the kitchen matrons wanted, those kitchen drudges said with startling regularity, they would all go insane and throw themselves in one of the garden ponds.

Somehow, this never came to pass.

"Oh I never-- they're just for me." And for any stray who happened to wander into the kitchen looking like they needed to be fed. Briefly she thought of Jessyd, but she hadn't seen him in a long time and it wouldn't do her any good to think about how she felt about that.

Abe wasn't the only one enjoying a turn of conversation that didn't twist her insides into knots.

Her eyes dropped to the floor, intensely concentrating on trying to dig one of her toes through a hole in her slippers. Difficult work, that was-- the hole wasn't fully formed, so she really had to push to make it bigger. "I uhm." Healer Ixbridge had been trusted with much heavier secrets than this. What harm could telling her about her recipe book do? "I've been, uhm, writing them down."

"Excellent! I'd like a look at them," she breathed, her eyes dancing like excited ferrets. Her posture curled and froze, and she peered over her willowy shoulder. The stairway was still empty; no shadow of law fell on the red stone, and no echo of derision pattered in the hall-- not yet. "But not now."

An innate compulsion to preserve information lit up in her genes. Her mother had been a librarian, after all, and this kitchen was now as hallowed as any library.

Her hand fluttered erratically upward, and a single finger landed on her pursed lips. "Shh," Abeline sibilated, her pert expression not quite ruining the supremely bookish visage.

Drifting to Aura again, the healer whispered, "How often is this under-kitchen utilized...?"

The good healer, Aura decided, was possibly one of the stranger women Aurelie Steerpike had met in her short life. Odd for anyone, but especially so for a galdor. Keeper of secrets, befriender of passives. Definitely not the usual sort of lady. 'Unusual' was becoming one of Aura's more favorite qualities in a person.

"This kitchen, in particular?" The pale, faint lines of her eyebrows knit together as she thought. As far as the passive was aware, this kitchen was mostly reserved for storage and emergencies, like the one the other week. (Remembering that brought to mind other, even less pleasant thoughts, ones of secret meetings and maps. These she carefully set aside-- they had no place in this perfectly nice conversation.) "It isn't often used," she ventured. Not, of course, that she knew this for a certainty. She was no matron, after all, to be aware of all comings and goings of the passives behind Brunnhold's walls. That was her best guess.

Her gaze, too, drifted to the stairs, expecting to see some figure of castigating authority come thundering down. Conspiring with a galdori woman, no food for a week. She relaxed only slightly when it became evident that none was forthcoming, ever suspicious. Just because she hadn't been caught yet, didn't mean she would never be.

The healer smiled a wobbly, uncertain, calculating smile; it rose and fell with each scheme, counter-scheme and contingency that shot through her mind like a herd of startled rabbits. We could come back later to trade recipes-- perhaps I could bring her some dried Muluku peppers to add to the six's corn mush-- wouldn't that make the kiddies jump, heh heh-- but she'd get the blame-- but it would clear their sinuses-- do rabbits even come in herds?-- waitwait, better yet--

"I'd be delighted to try one of your recipes. W-we could make it here, possibly? Some day when you're sure this place won't be used by anyone else." Her precarious smile finally made a decision and fell quite conclusively. "Oh, but you cook all day.. I'm sure you wouldn't want to..." ..feed yet another demanding galdor? ..clean the inevitable dishes? ..risk a beating simply for my entertainment?

Abe fiddled with the hem of her vest, unable to find an end to her sentence that didn't make her sound like a horrible person. So she just stood there, frowning at the squalid floor.

Aurelie was oblivious to Abe's distress, hearing only the request to try one of her recipes. To find someone who wanted to eat them was easy enough, but to find someone who might be able to talk about it with her... That was somewhat more rare, despite working in a kitchen. Most other passives didn't want to talk about cooking. It was something they did because they had to, because this was the task they were assigned, not because they enjoyed it. For Aurelie, it was different. Even if no one made her, she liked to think, she'd still be in a kitchen.

Admittedly, when she imagined it, the kitchen was her own and any cooking she did was to delight patrons or family. Not to make bland food the same way it had been made for centuries, to feed the ungrateful brats of people she had at one time thought of as kin.

"No, no, I'd-- I'd love to." Simple girl that she was, her affections were somewhat easy to win. Though, of course, Abeline was a galdor. Kind, it seemed, and strange-- but kind and strange could easily turn into betrayal. Aurelie's acceptance of the offer was genuine, and she had no real suspicion of Abe's motives. Still, she couldn't help but feel like somewhere along the line trying to make this friend in particular was going to cost her.

"Oh! But..." Aura's expression fell just a little. "How will I let you know when I think there's a good day for it...?"

Still staring at the floor, Abe's eyes widened. "You would?"

She looked up, but not at her co-conspirator. Biting her lip, she appraised the somewhat forgotten space. Now that her eyes were adjusted to the dimness, the kitchen was larger than she'd thought. In the gloom she could spot a trove of pots and pans, some left on the expansive stovetop. Tongs and forks and knives glinted in the candle light. They'd have anything they wanted-- even her aunts' mansion lacked the veritable playground of cookware this kitchen provided.

All they'd need is the food.

"--Oh? I suppose you can't write a note, can you?" She tapped her chin to a syncopated beat. "I'll, erm, be--" checking on? No, no need to embitter this conversation with a pinch of reality "--visiting Triston from time to time. You can tell me then."

The chin tapping stopped, and she whispered, "I'll need a list, too. For the ingredients. Can't have a whole meal's worth of stuff go missing."

Checking in--? For a moment Aurelie couldn't think to what the healer was referring. Then it dawned on her, the pervasive sinking feeling in her stomach returning. Triston's condition, of course. She'd almost forgotten, she'd been so wrapped up in the thought of all this clandestine cooking.

"Ah, yes, of course. A list!" Aurelie hesitated. It was difficult to come up with a list when you weren't quite sure what you'd be cooking in the first place. "Do you..." Her brow furrowed, thinking. She knew what she liked, and she knew what Triston liked, and she knew that Jess had seemed to like anything she made, but... Abeline was different. She was a healer and a galdor and probably knew much more about food than she did. After all, Aurelie really only got to cook what the school deemed adviseable. Any experimental forays were conducted entirely on the sly, and as such happened somewhat infrequently, mostly by accident.

It would probably be easiest to just ask. "What-- is there anything you'd like to--?" She made an expansive gesture with her hand towards the ovens. "So I can figure out what... you know."

Though they were in a hole in the ground, sheltered by a honeycomb of red stone above, Abe could look up and feel the grey, overcast skies of early Hamis. The weather had been so damp and dreary for so long that the cold had seeped into every part of her body and mind. By the end of Loshis, it had sapped almost all of her already floundering energy.. and they were only half-way through the rainy season.

"After a Loshis like we just had, something comforting.. like soup?" She blinked hard, the only outward expression of an internal cascade. Then, with a tilt of her over-privileged head, she added, "Only, I can get whatever I want at a restaurant. I'm sure Triston needs more comfort than I do. We could make her favorite?"

Aura had to bite her tongue, hard, before her absurd pride reared its head and informed Abeline, under no uncertain terms, that she very well could not get anything Aurelie was likely to make in a restaurant. After all, the hands that would make them were here, in front of her. But perhaps the good healer didn't understand things like that, after all. How very disappointing.

Aurelie pondered for a moment what would be best comfort for Triston. She liked spicy things, and pickles, Aurelie knew that much. Recently she'd come across a recipe for spiced and pickled vegetables in the library when she was supposed to be dusting-- perhaps she would try that. "Chili peppers," she said suddenly and without preamble. "Chili peppers and any vegetables that pickle well." Aurelie was relying on Abeline to know what those might be-- or at least to have the sense to ask someone else.