Page 31 of Orc'd & Loaded
"Cellar could be empty." I gesture toward the icebox. The runework casts enough glow to illuminate the heavy crates we've been hauling for the last hour. Her produce. My ale kegs. Wheels of aged cheese wrapped in cloth. "We have food. We have drink. Temperature's stable. Dry floor, once you get past the stairs."
"I have a restaurant to open in eleven hours."
"I have a tavern to open in ten. We'll be fine."
"We will not be fine. My sourdough starter needs its midnight feeding. If I miss the feeding window, two weeks of cultivation collapses and I start from scratch."
The way she says it. Like the sourdough is a living creature with emotional needs and a rigid schedule. Like we're not standing in a dark cellar with rain hammering the world above us and the memory of her body against mine still radiating heat through my shirt. She's worried about bread.
I bite the inside of my cheek to keep the grin off my face.
"I'll pay for the flour."
"You cannot pay for two weeks of bacterial development."
"I'll pay for the bacteria."
"That's not how fermentation works and you know it."
I don't, actually. My bread comes from a stone oven and involves punching dough until it behaves. She's still angry, stillclipped, but animated now. Teaching-angry instead of murder-angry. The difference is survivable.
"So educate me." I lower myself to sit on the step. The stone is cold through my soaked trousers and I’m not concerned even slightly. "We've got nine hours and a cellar full of food. Worse classrooms exist."
She stares up at me. The blue light catches the sauce stain still visible on her chef coat from our first meeting, never fully scrubbed out, a ghost of brown against the white. Her wet hair has escaped its pins completely now, plastered against her neck in dark ribbons that make her look younger. Less armored.
Her arms stay crossed. Her weight shifts to one hip. She is calculating something behind those dark eyes, running numbers I'll never see.
"Fine," she says. "Grab two of those squash before they bruise. And find me a knife."
The first shiver catches her mid-sentence. She's explaining something about the cellular structure of butternut squash, her hands moving through the blue light like a conductor's, when her whole body contracts. A single, involuntary tremor that snaps her jaw shut.
The temperature is falling.
Not the cellar. The cellar was always cool, sixty degrees, stable. The icebox is the problem. My grandmother's wardwork keeps it cold without electricity, yes. What I neglected to mention is that the runes compensate for power loss by pulling ambient heat from the surrounding air. The more produce we packed inside it, the harder the enchantment works. The harder it works, the colder this cellar gets.
The blue pulse along the icebox's iron bands has shifted from a gentle glow to something aggressive. Hungry. Each pulse draws warmth from the room like breath through a straw. Frostcrystals are already forming on the stone floor nearest the box, spreading in delicate white tendrils toward our feet.
"Boris. Why is the wall sweating."
Condensation. The moisture from the storm is hitting the rapidly cooling stone and beading up in fat droplets that run down the walls like rain on a windowpane. I touch the nearest wall. My fingers come away numb.
"The icebox is overcompensating. We packed too much inside it."
"Overcompensating."
"It's pulling heat from the cellar to keep the contents frozen. The more we stored, the more energy it needs, the more heat it pulls." I stand. My wet shirt, which was merely uncomfortable five minutes ago, now clings to my skin like a cold hand. "We need to insulate it. Create a barrier between the runes and the open air."
"With what?"
"The crates."
She understands immediately. No wasted time, no argument. She's already moving toward the nearest stack, a tower of three heavy wooden boxes packed with root vegetables. She wraps both hands around the top crate and pulls. Her boots slide on the frosted stone. The crate doesn't budge.
"Move."
I don't say it rudely. I say it practically, stepping past her and gripping the bottom crate with both hands. Eighty pounds. Oak construction. Densely packed with turnips and parsnips and the heavy clay pots she uses for fermenting. I hoist it chest-high and carry it to the icebox, setting it flush against the north side where the runes pulse brightest.
Solene is already dragging the second crate across the floor behind me. She's using her whole body, legs driving, her ruined chef coat bunching at the shoulders. The wood screams againstthe stone. She gets it to the icebox and shoves it against the east side with her hip.
