Page 82 of Chaos

Several army people stand along the worktops, knives moving as they slice.

A few of them glance curiously our way, but no one speaks.

“Why are we just standing here?” Shasta asks, her fingers curled around my forearm. “Tell me what you see.”

“People cutting squash.”

She wrinkles her nose. “It smells like tomato sauce.”

I look at the pile of uncut squash with their beige skins intact, another bowl of chopped orange chunks, and yet another full of seeds they’d better be saving to give to me. “They’re chopping up my butternuts.”

A man who I assume to be Plumberger turns away from the pizza oven against the rear wall. He’s a big guy, tall and broad, with pale white skin, a bald head, and a mustache.“Yourbutternuts?”

“Errr …”

“No one is allowed in my kitchens,” he says loudly.

Shasta’s fingers dig into my arm.

“I wanted to make cake.”

“Cake?”

“Yes. Cake. Thornewood is depressing … and … and I missed someone’s birthday.”

“You called themyours.Your butternuts?”He leaves the oven and approaches us. “You the gardener? The one they took? Got held prisoner by that swineherd Ben?”

“Yeah.” I add swineherd to my lexicon of insults.

He holds out his hand. “Plumberger.”

“I know. Frankie.”

“I know.” He lets go of my hand, then takes in Shasta for a second, and slowly reaches out awkwardly and takes her free hand in his. He lifts it slowly. “You’re the blind one.”

“That’s me,” she says.

He drops her hand and returns to the oven abruptly to tug on a pair of insulated mitts, reach deep inside, and pulls a massive vat to the edge.

When he lifts the top, steam billows out along with the sharp smell of tomato sauce.

There’s a jar of mustard on the worktop nearby that makes me vaguely uncomfortable. Admittedly, he was never going to win any awards as a cook, but putting mustard in pasta sauce seems like a bad idea. Especially since my hard-gardened butternut squashes are involved.

“You wanted to make a cake?” he says.

“Yes,” I answer, still trying to get a read on him.

“I don’t like people in my kitchen as a rule. But I’ll make a concession one time. Out of respect for what you both went through.”

“Oh.”

He keeps staring at me like he expects me to go do something. “You need help or something?”

“God, no,” Shasta says.

“Get at it then. You can have the oven for one hour. No eggs.” He barks, making me jump. “No goat butter!”

How do you bake a cake without eggs or butter?

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