Page 91 of The Merciless Laird
"Aye. Thank ye, Beira. I’ve watched ye before, and I think I’ve got the general idea. If ye dinnae mind, I’d like tae give it a try meself."
Beira returned to her kneading while she found the oats and measured them into the bowl, or attempted to, using the wooden cup Beira had pointed at. She poured what was decisively too much and decided to commit to it.
Salt. Water.
She mixed it with her bare hands, the gritty texture cold against her skin, working it until it came together into something that held its shape when she pressed it.
The first problem was the thickness.
She pressed the first round onto the hearthstone, and it was clearly too thick, a clumsy, heavy thing. She pressed it down more firmly with the heel of her hand, but it spread unevenly at the edges and held a stubborn ridge in the center that she didn't think was meant to be there.
She put it on the iron pan anyway and sat back on her heels to wait.
"The griddle’s nae heated," one of the younger lasses started.
"I ken," Matilda said.
Because she had just realized the griddle was not hot enough, and there was nothing to be done about it now except wait for the heat to build.
She waited. The cake sat on the pan in its imperfect shape and did nothing for some time, and then it began to cook. She forgot to watch it because she was already pressing the second round, trying to get the thickness right, and by the time she remembered the first one, the edges had gone a color that was decisively past golden.
She took it off and looked at it.
The edges were black and the center was pale in a way that suggested it had not cooked through, which she understood was the worst possible outcome. It was not entirely ruined, because entirely ruined could be thrown out, but ruined in the way that required a decision about whether to serve it anyway and hope.
She set it aside and started the second round.
The second batch went better in the sense that she watched it like a hawk this time and did not let the edges go black.
They went a deep, committed brown instead. The centers were thinner, but one cracked down the middle when she turned it, and the other stuck slightly to the pan and lost a jagged piece of its edge.
She arranged them on the wooden board and looked at them critically.
They looked like something a person had made who had been told about oatcakes in a distant story rather than taught to make them.
They are edible. Probably.
She had tried two batches and the second was better than the first. That would have to be sufficient, for she could hear the keep waking up around her and she did not want him to come down and find her in a state of active failure.
She put the least damaged three on the front of the board and angled the cracked one toward the back.
"Those are braw," said one of the younger lasses, in a tone of voice that indicated she was a kind person and a terrible liar.
"I think that they’re kind of terrible, especially compared to Beira’s," Matilda said and laughed. "But thank ye, lass."
Matilda set the last of the oatcakes on the board, looking at them critically. She could already feel the weight of her own expectations on them, especially with Ivar's usual love for the things.
A small sigh escaped her as she rearranged them, trying to hide the worst ones at the back. Maybe he'd only notice the ones that were slightly… better.
She stepped back, arms crossed, trying to come up with a plan of action to hide the results of her experiment, but before she could decide, she heard footsteps in the corridor.
Her stomach dropped. Ivar was coming. And there was no way to make the oatcakes magically improve in the following two seconds.
In a moment of sheer impulse, she grabbed the worst one, the one with the burnt edges, and moved it to the far side of the table.
And there he was, stepping into the doorway. He had dressed. His hair was not fully ordered, giving him a rakish, unsettled look. The wound pulled at his movement. She could see it in the slight brace of his right side, but he was upright and his eyes were clear, and the grey residue of the last four days was finally gone from his face.
"Ye’re up early," she said quickly, a little too brightly.
