Chapter 12: Chapter 12 – Of Blessings and Breakfasts

Not knowing what most of the kinds of food on offer were, and egged on by Kelly’s encouragement, I went for one of everything.

I’d had to go back for a tray, on which I balanced a second plate and two bowls. Nobody seemed to bat an eye at that, despite the immensity of what I’d taken, which suggested Kelly wasn’t playing a prank on me when she practically ordered me to get more food for myself.

“The adaptive magic and System integration is still at work,” she said by way of explanation as we walked towards the front of the hall. There were five smallish tables, three of them empty, each with space for six people—eight if they were willing to get cozy, which one family obviously was. “The books—I checked this morning, before you were awake—say that…

“Actually, I don’t remember, I didn’t understand anyway.” She shrugs, and I look over to see her looking distinctly embarrassed. “Something about the spells still eating your fuel, and also you can’t make as much fuel from the food you eat until something really small that lives in you finishes changing.”

“That’s… fascinating.” I blinked a few times, and then was distracted from my distraction by noticing that I recognized one of the two people at the table we were approaching. “Kan! Good morning!”

“If the Traveler says so.”

The gravity and gravitas he’d injected into his tone had me snickering as I sat down across from him, Kelly plopping inelegantly into her chair. “Something tells me that’s not the colloquialism here.”

“Is that what they say where you’re from, Scholar, Na… Nadesh?”

“Nadash, but really, call me Sophie, and yeah, it is.” I smiled down at the kid—seven years old, at a guess—who was at the head of the table, between me and Kan. “What do you say? And what’s your name?”

“Um.” He paused, body language sort of shrinking into himself. It took him a moment—and me switching my attention performatively to the food and giving him some space—to collect himself, and then words spilled out of him in a rush. “My name is Kanatan because that’s like my momma’s name and my daddy’s name, and we say morning’s joy but that’s short for may the morning be a joy and is it true that you were sent here by a God and you’re Godtouched—are you staying? Tana said that Kibosh is way too quiet for anyone to want to stay, but that’s just cause her momma—”

“Whoa, kiddo, slow down.” I grinned at him. “Hi, Kanatan. Morning’s joy; it’s nice to meet you. I was sent here by Lady Artemis, who’s a Goddess of hunting and a protector of women and girls, and her brother Hephaestus helped; he’s a God of craft, of making things.”

“Wow.”

“As for staying here?” I shrugged, and cut myself a slice of something that looked like sausage. “I think—” I popped it into my mouth, then closed my eyes and had to suppress a moan. Holy of holies, blessed is the name of the God Above Gods. I chewed, swallowed, and had to resist immediately shoving more food into my face in an uninhibited rush. “I don’t see why I would ever leave.”

“We are quite lucky indeed that Levali has chosen to reside here. Thesha, as well.” Kan smiled at me. “We have only just now sat down ourselves, and have yet to offer grace. Might you show us how it was done in your home?”

Silence roared in my ears as I flushed, shame fueling anger at myself. Stupid, stupid stupid, I can’t believe I forgot. “Yeah,” I managed, forcing myself not to slump or plant my face in my hands.

Didn’t quite keep my voice level, and it shook a little bit in time with my racing heart, but you can’t have everything.

I looked around the table at the three others, thinking rapidly. “Arguably,” I said pensively, “I have no reason to believe that the bread here contains the grains my religion of origin specified. But it’s bread, and the language supplantation gave me the same words; wheat, barley, oats, rye and—okay actually I don’t have a word for that one, but it was an old version of wheat, basically.

“But more to the point, I’m…” I’m having a crisis of faith seemed like both an exaggeration and an over-simplification. I hadn’t had a faith since my early twenties, I was just full of cultural detritus that was unable to cope with the idea… “I’m having trouble reconciling my upbringing with the whole grace given, grace returned thing.”

“You know,” started Kelly, and then she paused. When I raised an eyebrow at her, glad for the reprieve, she snorted and shook her head. “I can’t believe that I’m saying this to you, but you know, between what you said of those two, I doubt any of them has a domain that calls for meal-grace.”

I stared at her, boggling, until what she’d said sank in. “Well, shit. I just kind of had a panic attack over nothing, then, because yeah, grain and bread and both, separately, in the domains of different Gods. Well. Okay, then.” I took a deep breath, and grabbed my bread from my plate, fluffy and buttery and covered in honey and cheese. “So, there’s a lot of stuff on my plate, and blessings are pretty specific.

“There’s a blessing for fruit, and a blessing for root vegetables, and you get the idea. But conveniently, the blessing for bread is sort of a catchall; if there’s bread, you say the blessing on bread, and there you go. So!” I held the bread up in the air, and reached for a state of… if not the sublime belief that my father—may his memory be a blessing, and in a good hour—kept talking about, then a state of hoping that if there was some supreme sovereign, that hypothetical entity might not be a complete asshole.

I felt something, some tiny bit of connection, along that same bridge as the System, and sang. “Bless you, God, ruler of the universe, who brings forth bread from the soil.”

There was a bit of quiet when I was finished, in which I got a round of contemplative nods. I bit into my bread, eyes more or less rolling back in my head—the flavors were almost too powerful that early in the morning, just skating on the edge of being overwhelmingly strong. The System connection was starting to sort of mentally itch, but I pushed it aside, because my stomach had now gotten the message that it was mealtime, and I was absolutely not going to be dissuaded from filling it.

You are reading story Quill & Still at novel35.com

We all tore into our food, the others with not all that much less gusto than I was exhibiting. I had a dozen different foods that were passingly familiar, recognizably similar to the foods whose names from Earth they had occupied the semantic space of, and a half dozen that weren’t. I worked my way through the first category first—potatoes, eggs, something between oatmeal and porridge, the bread, sausage, and more—and then started more carefully tasting the novel ones.

While I filled my stomach with food, I alternated between the five different kinds of juice, the water, and the milk. I’d partially filled some glasses at Kelly’s urging—well, I’d poured a full glass of water; hydration was serious business—and got the absolute culinary surprise of my life when I sipped what looked like grape juice and had my entire mouth go dust-dry.

Amidst the raucous laughter of the rest of the table, I washed it down with a substantial amount of water, then started snickering, red in the face, saluting Kelly for the indignity she’d inflicted on me.

The other juices were far more palatable on their own, and, still giggling in that utterly infectious, totally unselfconscious way of hers, Kelly showed me the expected way to dilute it, at one part of what I was inclined to call cranberry juice—if cranberry juice had been maybe twice as acidic—to two parts each of an apple juice that tasted nothing like apples, a pear juice that for all I knew might have been Earth pears, and the juice of a fruit they called silphan. The resultant cocktail was sweet and tart in equal measure, and somehow reminded me of the taste of mango while tasting nothing like it.

That turned out to not be the only culinary trap on my plate, but I was forewarned of all the others by the fact that none of my three meal-mates could keep a straight face. Well, Kan probably could, but he wasn’t; Kelly, on the other hand, was visibly trying and utterly failing.

The others loosened up as we ate. Kanatan was excitable to the point of babbling, but—with the occasional reminder—was conscientious about letting others have a turn to talk. Mostly he wanted to hear from me, but he took time between questions to tell me about his cohort, which led to me asking questions. Hearing about the cultural mores around childbirth was fascinating; the Shemmai villages and towns had the custom of hundred-year marriages, after which if you wanted to stay together you’d get married again, and in each of those marriages you’d have two kids.

Those kids would be close together in age, and the whole village—or your greater social circle, in a larger town—would time their kids more or less together, so there was a single cohort that was within about ten years of each other. It didn’t work perfectly, since people came and left, so you’d generally have two cohorts in a century. Kibosh had twenty seven kids, which seemed both a lot and not very many to me. Kelly fell over herself explaining that the reason the ratio was so high was that adults tended to leave for somewhere more exciting, which meant basically anywhere, and from that I could infer that at least for Shem, a ratio of about fifteen percent was high.

Kan, in turn, told me a bunch of stuff about the Stone Team. They were governmental employees, working directly for the village. They maintained all of the buildings, roads, and defenses, other than three. The Hall of the Thousand I had already guessed maintained itself, but aside from that, the Tower was raised and maintained by the magic of those who lived and worked there and the Guild of Crafts was worked on by those who were members there as a sort of building-scale showcase of their skills. 

When I asked him if that wasn’t rather a lot of responsibility for one team of three people, he chuckled jovially and gave one of those not-smug not-smirks that was very much of a smirk and almost intolerably smug. Stone, he pointed out, was durable to work with even before you started getting magic involved; when they built a structure, it would be decades before it needed work.

By that time, I’d moved on from the familiar foods to tasting new things, things that I had absolutely no frame of reference for. There was a tremendously sour fruit that I nearly choked on, and which Kanatan happily ate the rest of when he was done laughing, and then immediately afterwards there was something that looked vaguely like a leafy green but tasted utterly bizarre, sticky and almost like a tart powder as I chewed it. I followed those two with another drink of the undiluted cranberry juice, just to see the delighted good humor on the kid’s face, and as the juice fizzed in my mouth I felt the pressure and itch of the System bridge redouble, spiking painfully.

Explaining the dramatic wince and hiss of pain I’d just given got me sidelong, confused looks as both Kelly and Kan fell over themselves explaining that if we weren’t in a critical situation, it was always appropriate to commune, as they put it, with my System.

Kelly wasn’t satisfied with my agreement and acceptance with that. With the implicit threat of her otherwise being pointedly disappointed, she extracted a promise from me to tell her immediately if I was suffering from any pains or discomfort.

If it weren’t for Hephaestus’s gift, that would be a joke; but as it was, it was quite possible that every ache and every pain was noteworthy, so I agreed, and reached out to that mental bridge.

 

Your Divine Flame Deepens In Hue!

In Your Heart, One Faith Rings True: Pantheism

To Him, Your Fathers Looked, And Their Fathers Before Them: YHVH

The Paths Before You Grow In Number: Class Unlocked (Apprentice Alchemist)

And Lo, Upon Your Boons Is This Added: Hearty Breakfast, Strong Foundation

These Maluses, Vanquished, Have Faded: Hunger (Moderate)

Behold, The Injuries Of Your Experimentation: Chemical Burn (Least) (Tongue)

You can find story with these keywords: Quill & Still, Read Quill & Still, Quill & Still novel, Quill & Still book, Quill & Still story, Quill & Still full, Quill & Still Latest Chapter