My knees do the liquid thing again. Maren catches me by the elbows.
"Don't you dare faint. I won’t carry you. You're all bones and spite."
"I'm not fainting. My legs are just having a moment."
"Well tell your legs to get it together because Boris's people have beer."
They do have beer. Kettle produces an enormous wooden keg from somewhere, no one questions where, and suddenly there are heavy clay mugs being passed hand to hand through the crowd. Boris's staff and my staff, orc and human, standing together in the town square clinking mugs that weigh different amounts and spilling foam on each other's shoes.
Tomás and Kettle discover a mutual obsession with fermentation techniques and disappear into a corner for what will apparently be a four-hour conversation. Maren perches on the judges' table with Jun, splitting a massive smoked parsnip between them, gesturing with her half while explainingthe structural integrity of vegan meringue to a fascinated orc dishwasher.
The sun drops lower. The square glows amber and gold. Someone produces a fiddle.
I stand at the celebration with a mug of dark ale that smells like burnt honey and observe as my staff laughs with people they didn't know three weeks ago. I see the tables pushed together. And Jun shares his celery.
The review will run Thursday. National syndication. Every food editor in the country will see it. Every restaurateur who told me plant-based fine dining was a vanity project. Every culinary school professor who called my thesis "niche."
The catering contract means Verdure survives the winter.
The review means Verdure becomes a destination.
My hand throbs under the bandage. The burn is a dull, persistent heat that matches the heat behind my sternum. Both marks from the same kitchen. Both marks I earned standing next to a six-foot-five orc who punched a hawk out of the sky for a handful of spice.
A hand closes around my wrist.
Not gently. Not the careful touch from the cellar or the tender bandaging at the sink. A firm, deliberate grip that pulls my arm taut before I can register who it belongs to.
Boris. His face has changed. The grin is gone. The wet-eyed pride from the kitchen is gone. What's left is something stripped bare, serious in a way that rearranges the geography of his features. His jaw is set. His brow is low. The tusks catch no light.
"Come with me."
"Boris, what-"
He pulls. My feet leave the cobblestones in a stumble and then I'm moving, dragged by the wrist through the thinning crowd, past the fiddle player, past the keg, past the cornerwhere Tomás and Kettle are still deep in fermentation discourse. Nobody notices. The party has its own momentum now.
We round the corner of the town hall. Cut through the narrow gap between the bakery and the hardware store. Boris's shoulders nearly brush both walls.
The back alley opens up behind our restaurants. Verdure's loading dock on the left. The Hearthstone's service entrance on the right. Dumpsters. Stacked pallets. A single buzzing street lamp that casts everything in sick yellow.
Boris stops. Drops my wrist. Turns.
His face is granite.
CHAPTER 18
BORIS
The yellow light carves her face into something half-shadow, half-gold. She stands with her back against the loading dock railing, her injured hand cradled against her sternum, her white coat a Jackson Pollock of stains from the day. Sauce. Soot. A thumbprint of Orcish spice near her collar that glows faintly copper in the dim.
She stares up at me. Waiting.
My mouth is dry. My mouth is never dry. I have talked my way through bar brawls in three languages, bellowed orders across kitchens during a dinner rush for two hundred, and once convinced a customs agent to let me transport forty pounds of live fire beetles across an international border. Words are my medium the same way steel is my medium the same way flame is my medium.
But this.
My hand goes to my apron. The weight is there, strapped against me where it's been all day, heavy and warm from my body heat. The leather wrapping is soft from where I've touched it a hundred times since I finished it three nights ago, sitting alone at the forge behind the tavern at two in the morning, hammering while the coals spat orange sparks into the dark.
"You're scaring me," Solene says. "You look like someone died."