Fic: A Place at the Table [5,100 words | T | Lucanis/Rook, ensemble]
Huge thanks to @loquaciousquark for the beta on this one!!
Title: A Place at the Table
Fandom: Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Characters/Pairings: Lucanis/Rook, Spite, Taash, Davrin, Bellara, Harding, Neve, Emmrich
Rating: T
Summary:
Over the weeks and months at the Lighthouse, Lucanis finds his place on the team through food. Or: five times Lucanis Dellamorte cooks for his team, and one time they have to return the favor.
Read on AO3
---
i. Threshold
The first meal demands the stretching of sinew in unaccustomed ways, the ache of muscles that would have gone soft had they not been flexed in agony for a year. He turns a knife in his hand, heavy and cleaving, feels the temptation in the edge, then presses it flat instead to the yielding flesh of a tomato, slightly overripe and all too ready to burst. Smells are muted in his nostrils, accustomed as they are to the tactlessly overpowering aroma of blood.
The demon in his spine signals that they’re being watched, singing along his nerves. There are eyes at his back and they know him for what he is. Free, destroyed, walking in the skin of someone who once knew the meaning of the word alone.
The sauce simmers, and he wonders, watching the pot, whether this place will change the taste in the same way his coffee had once boiled too soon, ruining it entirely, during a job in the Anderfels. If elevation could affect taste, why not the realm of dreams?
The demon’s attention snags on that thought, unfamiliar memories and sensations blooming along his nerves. Nightmares, he knows now, can be bitter or sweet, tart or spicy. But dreams are still more complex—heavy, yearning things that splinter and fracture under the tongue. The flavoring the Fade might impart could have whole histories in it, rises and falls and the agony of uncompromising mortality.
He tastes the sauce. It needs more salt.
With the pasta water to thicken and bind it, the sauce comes together in the end, making up for the shocking paucity of ingredients in their meager storeroom, and he tries not to flinch as the others file in beside him to fill their plates, murmuring in hushed tones like the kitchen is a place of worship or mourning. He leans against a counter with arms crossed, attempting to conceal with his casual mien the heaviness in his limbs, in his eyelids.
“It smells really good,” Bellara says, the first to address him directly since he’d bustled in and started cooking. She seems inclined to fill every silence like it’s a personal affront.
“It’s a simple thing,” he says. “Warm and filling.”
“Wasn’t expecting you to cook,” Neve says, and the gentle teasing in her voice is an invitation, an outstretched hand.
The craven thing he’s become doesn’t know what to do with that, so he shrugs and drawls, “It’s a hobby.”
“An assassin who cooks,” murmurs Harding. The others avoid his eyes, but she stares him down every chance she gets. He likes that honesty, appreciates the reassuring guarantee of her arrows in his back. “Why do I feel like this is a bad idea?”
“I think a little light poisoning and a slow death might just be a fair trade-off for fresh pasta, personally,” says Rook. She flashes him a smile that effortlessly floods her eyes with warmth. “We’ll get a little cheese next time we’re out.”
His smile in return feels like a creaking stair underfoot, an unwanted and unwelcome exposure. “Trust me, I’ll have a list.”
“Then grab a plate and come sit down,” she says, and it’s easier to tell himself it’s an order.
He sits. His stomach is still adjusting to food that isn’t an assault, so he mostly moves the pasta around on his plate, trying to convince himself not to flinch with every bite. It gets easier as the conversation meanders, cautiously, into a comfortable patter: Neve tells stories about a truly bizarre mystery on the streets of Minrathous, and Bellara slips into the role of wide-eyed devotee, prodding the detective with questions until they’re all following her lead.
“But how,” Lucanis says, gesturing at her with a fork wound tight with pasta, “did the Venatori know about the trained nug?”
Neve grins, her eyes sparkling, and rests the palms of her hands on the table with perfect dramatic timing. “He didn’t! There was never a nug at all!”
Bellara gasps audibly and Harding actually jumps to her feet in excitement, pointing. “I said it! You all heard me! I called it!”
“But who could it have been?” Bellara murmurs, taking three bites of her food in rapid succession as though the extra fuel will lend her insight. “The librarian? No, no, that’s no good. He had an alibi.”
The surge of Spite in his consciousness is like the wave of adrenaline in the moment before a sudden drop. “It was. The urchin,” Spite says, and then the eyes are on him again, demanding, vultures picking over his carcass, and the food turns in his stomach. “Sorry,” Lucanis says, staring down at his plate. “Spite has opinions, sometimes.”
“No, no,” Bellara says. “It’s fine. It’s fine, right?”
“Well, it was the urchin, as it happens,” Neve says slowly. “Good eye, Spite.”
Something strange and new shivers through his bones: a quiet, borrowed contentment that recoils from itself, curious and disgusted and fascinated by turns. He tears his gaze from his plate to see Rook staring at him outright, her brow wrinkled with confused contemplation. He drags one corner of his mouth up in an expression that’s more of a shrug, and the conversation creaks and groans away from him and back to safer topics.
He lets himself slip, just a little, and the warm haze of the room blurs and shifts until the shadows in the corners of his eyes feel more real than he does. But his body remembers the flow of conversation, and the soft, satisfied clatter of cutlery on empty plates is a signal that bypasses his conscious mind. He smiles and says goodnight, waves Rook away when she makes to start cleaning the dishes, and eventually the others leave.
Then he stands for a long time in an empty room—but not alone—staring at the remains of a thoroughly pleasant meal, concrete evidence of having bettered this small room and the people in it.
Spite says, without malice, “They see you. They see us.”
Lucanis feels his mouth settle, against all odds, into a fond smile.
---
ii. Residuum
After Weisshaupt, they stagger through the eluvian into the echoing bowels of the Lighthouse, their ragged breathing becoming something profane in the wake of so much death.
“Failed your contract,” Spite snarls, glee and terror ratcheting his heartbeat into his ears. “What use are you? What. Is. Left?”
Lucanis feels Rook’s hand on his arm, her touch obscene in its gentleness, and tears himself away, puts all of them at his back. As he strides up the stairs, out the door and across the courtyard, he feels the muscles in his shoulders twitching with the desperate expectation of a blade, an arrow. The part of Spite that remembers Determination tangles in his mind, casting that guilty yearning as the betrayal it is.
Caterina’s cooks would make huevos rotos when he asked, as a child, and would even let him peel and slice the potatoes when they realized the speed with which his clever fingers could work. He’d never let the knife slip, and they’d praised him for it, showering compliments on his thin shoulders that had leached through to muscle and bone.
Today, the Wardens died badly, he thinks, skimming the thin potato slices into a large skillet. Run through, torn from inside by Blight. And for nothing. An old commander’s stubbornness. His wrist aches and tingles with the remembered impacts of blade on bone; he stares at the thin scars on his forearms, older memories buried beneath the skin. Then he offers up parsley and peppers and garlic to the skillet and watches the potatoes slowly brown. More oil. More heat.
A face in the sky, impossibly large. An Archdemon snapping at him, the hot reality of its breath. Divinity splitting under his knife, appallingly and mercifully tangible. The mere Demon he’d once been couldn’t aspire to such nightmares.
He breaks eggs over the potatoes, watches them cook and fry. Tears a few strips of jamón to cover only half the dish. “My thanks,” Emmrich says, looming over him, absently turning his hands over and over as though trying to grasp something streaming away between his fingers. “Lucanis, this looks exceptionally good. We could all use a warm meal.”
Neve, so recently returned to them, nudges his shoulder with hers and says, “Thanks for taking care of us.”
He backs away wordlessly, lets them carve into the meal, then takes his own plate and sits. Spite is resonating with his inward-directed fury, a burr rolling and catching in his pulse and his breathing, so it takes him a moment to realize one seat stands empty.
Davrin meets his eyes across the table, an uncomfortable mirror. “Rook wasn’t feeling well.”
“Threw up in the eluvian room and went to bed,” Taash adds, softening their tone with a worried glance around the table.
They eat, exhaustion smearing out all attempts at conversation, but the empty chair is a restless ember in the base of his spine. Lucanis turns over blurred, frantic glimpses of the fight in his mind. “Was she hurt?”
“Rook... hasn’t always been a fighter,” Harding says. There’s a smear of blood on her forehead. “Sometimes she takes things hard.”
“She should still eat something,” Bellara says.
“I’ll bring her some,” Lucanis says, rising to fill a second plate. The lack of objections feels like another half-desired arrow missing its mark.
He strides across the courtyard, the magic of the place tearing itself a space behind his eyes, and mounts the steps in the library to her room. But he hesitates on the threshold and strains his hearing, always exceptional, to its limits. Quick breathing. Boiled leather creaking. Awake, then. He clears his throat, staring down at the two plates in his hands, and says, “Rook?”
He hears her sharp inhale, counts heartbeats in her hesitation. “I heard you were feeling unwell. I brought you some dinner,” he adds. “I can leave it at the door, if you’d like.”
Now she exhales, slowly, and he listens to the slow tread of her footfalls. When the door opens, he sees his mistake in the puffiness around her eyes, the fresh streaks of tears down her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have intruded, Rook.”
“It’s fine,” she says, and he hates the steel his presence has put in her spine. Her eyes flick down to the plate, lingering on the second one, and she sighs. “That does look amazing. Come in.”
She’s still wearing her leathers from the fight, and Spite murmurs, “Blood. And flowers.” Lucanis glances down, following the unnerving scent, and frowns at the small spatters of red on the fine flooring.
When he looks up, Rook is watching him, chin raised, the muscles in her jaw jumping. Defiant. Daring him to break down one more wall.
He is singularly unintimidated. “You’re hurt.”
She blows out an exasperated breath, sinking onto her chaise lounge. He drags the coffee table closer, laying out the plates, then hesitates. She has a hand splayed across her face, and she watches him from between her fingers like he’s some sort of wild animal. A halla. A wolf.
Spite’s sneer pushes him to sit, finally, at the very edge of the chaise beside her.
As though his movement is a signal, she lowers her hand from her face to gesture to a bloodied slice along her side, its presence easily concealed by the reds of her armor. “It’s not serious,” she says. “Caught a claw across the ribs from a hurlock. Potion took care of it already. It’s done bleeding and I’m not blighted.” She presses the heel of a hand to her forehead. “Damn elfroot always gives me a headache, though. Makes me queasy.”
Lucanis nudges the coffee table with the toe of his boot. “Then may I suggest potatoes?”
That drags a laugh from Rook; she hunches over to dig in to her plate. “You absolutely may.”
He follows suit, carving into his own plate with an enthusiasm driven half by his own hunger and half by his desperate desire not to dig his way out of a pleasant silence by having to think about—
“Lucanis,” Rook says. “About Ghilan’nain.”
He clenches a hand around his fork, force and potential transforming it from tool to weapon. Twisting its purpose. “Rook, I can’t—I can’t talk about it yet. Can we—” He closes his eyes. “Can we pretend for a moment we’re just—”
“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I’d like that.”
They sit a while longer in a god’s stronghold in the Fade, and eat the meal his grandmother’s cooks taught him, and don’t talk about anything at all.
---
iii. Unity
Joy is a taut string finally plucked, vibration and resonance in every muscle and sinew. He’s light, weightless, reckless with the knowledge that the task set before him is one to which he is equal.
Caterina. Alive.
“We save her,” Spite rumbles, amplifying and redoubling his exhilaration. In his wavering voice is the relief of a barrier, once thought impenetrable, finally giving way. “Together.”
“You look happy,” Rook says, a laugh in her own voice. At some point in the stroll across the courtyard, he’d scooped up her hand in his, and he can’t bring himself to worry about the ease with which he’d done it. Not now.
“We have a way forward,” Lucanis says. “We have a deal.”
Spite adds, “Rook. Opens. Doors,” and Lucanis chooses to indulge, lets himself appreciate the way her cheeks redden in a blush, the way the Fade’s not-sunlight reflects in her shining eyes.
“All right,” she says, and raises their joined hands in a playful shake. “So where are you taking me now?”
“I have to bake something sweet for the team,” he says, drawing her onward to the kitchen. The imperative is a thrumming in his veins, a desperate need that Spite sings along like a current. He shoulders open the door and only releases her hand to start digging for a cooking tray. “Have you ever tried polvorones?”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” Rook says, helplessly, and sinks into a chair behind him.
“Good,” he says. “Because I think I remember the recipe but I’m not entirely certain. If anyone asks, I’ve done this exactly right. They’re little almond cookies.” He pauses, staring into space, then sighs and lights the oven. “Viago hates them because he says it’s too easy to hide poisons in them.”
“That’s tragic,” Rook says. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: poison is a risk I’m willing to take for good food.”
“Remind me never to take you to a Crow dinner party. At least not one where we don’t have antidotes on hand.” He digs through the pantry for the almonds he’d toasted earlier, then lets Spite inhale the scent of them and pick at the memory that wavers to the surface: reclining on the roof of the villa with an espresso in one hand and a cookie in another, the sun warming his face even as the cool tile beneath his back threatens to draw him back and back and back. “Another cage,” Spite muses, and Lucanis swats that thought aside as unworthy of his current good mood, focusing instead on crushing the toasted almonds with mortar and pestle.
“There you are,” says Davrin, striding in. The surge of defensiveness in Spite crumbles and collapses beneath Lucanis’s ebullience; he smiles at Davrin, and the Warden gives him a nervous look. “What was it Teia and Viago wanted to talk about?”
“Caterina’s alive,” Lucanis says, going back to pulverizing the almonds. “We can save her. We will save her.” His voice doubles, just a little.
“Lucanis and Spite worked some things out,” Rook offers.
“Uh-huh,” Davrin says, and adds, sotto voce, “I have never seen that smile on him before. It’s... kind of terrifying.” At that, Spite encourages Lucanis to bare his teeth a little more.
“Aw,” Rook says. “I think it’s sweet.”
Davrin snorts, but his smile is warm and teasing. “You would.”
“Be nice,” Rook says. “He’s making cookies, and as your fearless leader I reserve the right to eat everyone else’s share.”
“Wow. You really did take a shortcut to tyranny.”
“I’m just highly motivated by treats.”
“No wonder you and Assan get along so well.”
Letting their banter wash over him, Lucanis moves to mix the fat and sugar, adding in a sprinkle of the cinnamon that Neve had managed to negotiate in exchange for a favor in Dock Town—the complexities of that smell send Spite into a reverie of mostly incoherent thoughts about a prisoner’s nightmare—then starts mixing the dough. “They’ll take some time to bake,” he says.
“I’ve got nowhere to be,” says Davrin.
Rook makes a show of cracking her knuckles, then taps her fingers on the table. “The game—”
“No,” Davrin says.
“Absolutely not,” adds Lucanis. “We said last time was the last time. It’s getting cruel.”
“The game!” Rook says, her voice cutting over both of them with the practice born of many shouts across a battlefield. “The game, gentlemen, is Wicked Grace. The bet is a week of washing dishes.”
“You only have that bet to offer up because you’re responsible for the next three months of dishes,” Davrin says.
“It’s uncanny, Rook. I have never seen someone lose twelve games in a row.” Cookies safely in the oven, Lucanis settles into a chair across from them, dusting off the almond residue on his trousers.
“That’s because you’re all filthy cheaters.” Rook produces, as though from thin air, a deck that she shuffles rapidly and proficiently. “I play a clean game.”
“You can’t play a clean game of Wicked Grace,” Davrin says. “The whole point of it is to get away with cheating!”
“There are rules,” Rook says, glaring over the cards at them both. “Cheating is the last resort of someone who doesn’t have the skills to back up their bragging.”
“So catch us,” Lucanis says, folding his arms and smirking at her. “If you’re so convinced our cheating is the product of incompetence, prove it.” Spite skims along his words, delighted, and his spectral form leans in across the table.
Rook wrinkles her nose at Lucanis, and Davrin goes over to crack a bottle of wine, and for a time the only things that matter are the soft laughter, the gentle gibes, and the warm smell of toasted almonds slowly permeating the room.
---
iv. Void
“I’m not hungry,” Taash says, when he comes to their door with a plate of cold meats and cheeses.
“You’re lying,” Lucanis says, but the heat in his voice flickers and breaks like a fever under another wave of Spite’s confusion, anger, distress, and he slumps against the wall for balance. “She’s not here,” he whispers under his breath. He’d dreamed about Rook again, last night. “She’s gone, Spite.”
“That’s vashedan,” Taash says, and he jumps; for such a tall person, Taash’s ability to move silently when it suits them is downright unnerving. Rather than invite him in, Taash sighs and leans into the wall beside him like a fallen tree propped up only temporarily by the rest of the forest. “We’ll get her back. You know we will.”
“It’s been two weeks,” Lucanis says, and forces the words out. “She is dead. Or gone forever. Outside our reach.” If nothing else, Caterina always taught him how to wield the difficult truth to crush the tempting lies. But when he looks up at Taash, their eyes weigh him down with shame, twin millstones around his neck. “I’m sorry. I know I should hold out hope, but—”
They groan, slumping down to sit on the floor, and after a moment’s hesitation, Lucanis joins them, balancing the plate of meats and cheeses on his lap. “We can’t just give up. First my mother, then Lace, and now—” They snarl, a sound that echoes through the empty spaces of the library. “Not Rook, too. We can’t lose them all.”
“It happens all the time,” Lucanis says. The words come out reedy, thinning and diluting emotion to plain facts. Spite shudders at the lack of depth, of contrast. “People dying. It can happen all at once like that.”
“You lost your family,” Taash says, reaching across to loop a slice of ham around a chunk of hard cheese. “Right? Long time ago, but that messes you up forever.”
Lucanis exhales. “Long time ago,” he echoes, and more echoes pick up within him, Spite sifting through nightmare and desperation to replay the cold, quiet certainty settling around him.
“So how do you go on after something like that?” Taash’s voice breaks, and he glances up to see them staring at their clenched fists. “How do you lose that many people all at once and just... keep going?”
“You don’t,” Lucanis says, and starts mechanically shredding a large piece of jambón. “You make a list of all the people who are gone that you must take the time to mourn, and then you realize that the last name on the list is your own. And when you have finished mourning yourself, you accept that you will never be that person again. And you hope that whatever you become next is strong enough to survive the change.”
Taash blows out their breath. “And are you? Strong enough?”
“For this? I hope I’m not,” he says, and feels Spite snarl and thrash denial along his nerves. “But I fear that I am.”
“Yeah,” Taash says. “I get that.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and the words choke in his throat, catching around the wound that hadn’t killed Ghilan’nain, back at Weisshaupt. The missed shot without which none of this—
Spite tears a headache through his skull; he snaps out of it, setting the remains of the platter in front of Taash. “I’m sorry about Lace.”
“Me too,” says Taash. “Thanks for the food.” They grab his arm as he starts to stand. “We’re going to find Rook, though. We really are.”
Lucanis stares down at them and knows he should agree, but he’s never had a stomach for the easy lie.
“Don’t give up on her,” Taash says. Pleads, in a tone that Spite echoes and amplifies until it rings in his ears and threatens to shatter him.
He yanks his arm free and stalks off to Rook’s room to sit and wait for the next job. To mourn and, against all hope, survive.
---
v. Closure
When Elgar’nan finally falls, they feast.
Lucanis has always loved breading and frying food. It’s one of the few warm memories he has from early childhood: his mother and father standing with him in a line at the kitchen counter, each responsible for their station, pressing the meat or the eggplant or the ball of rice into a plate of flour, then passing it to the next person to coat it in a bath of egg, then to the third to cover it in crumbs of stale bread and lower it slowly into the oil. Done properly, it can be an oddly profound experience, the simple joy of watching a series of small acts compound into something warm and delicious and filling.
This team, of course, has to make things a little more complicated.
“I thought I was on flour-dredging duty,” Rook grumbles, staring with some dismay at a slice of eggplant covered with unappetizing bubbles of half-congealed flour and egg. “Someone got to this one before me.”
“Your role,” Emmrich says, “is to dredge the chicken in flour.”
“I thought I was doing chicken,” Taash says, squinting at the lump of food in their hand. “What even is this?”
“You’re doing breadcrumbs for chicken,” Bellara says. “I’m dredging the eggplant in rice. Um. No, wait.”
“It really isn’t that complicated,” Lucanis says, pressing fingers to the bridge of his nose to try to stave off a headache. Spite’s glee drags up the corners of his mouth despite himself.
“Ow,” Neve says. “Damn oil spattered me.”
“You have to make sure the breadcrumbs are evenly distributed so they provide enough barrier against the liquid,” Lucanis says. “And make sure the flour keeps any water off, especially from the eggplant. And anyway, the worst it might do is sting for a moment. How are you all so frightened of a little hot oil?”
“I’ve seen it poured over battlements to stop attacks on a tower,” Davrin offers, and they all pause for a moment, wincing.
“All right,” Lucanis says. “I think we have enough of a start to call this teamwork. Now get out of here and let me salvage what I can.”
“You heard the man,” Rook says. “And in the meantime—”
“No, Rook,” Bellara says. “You have no money left, and I think you’re still going to be doing chores for our children’s children at this rate.”
Neve chuckles. “Sorry, Rook. Mercy rules come into play.”
Rook gestures grandly; Lucanis, distracted by the way she moves with grace even in this absurd moment, nearly drops the bowl of egg directly into the hot oil. “In the meantime, we will play Wicked Grace, and the totality of my cunning stratagem will be made clear to you all.”
“Oh, a new strategy?” Emmrich asks, sitting at the table and steepling his hands. “Do tell, Rook.”
“It’s a good one. You won’t see it coming. Watch this.” She sits at the table, shuffling the cards, and Lucanis glances over his shoulder at her in time to see her face fall into a wide-eyed pout that she directs at each person around the table in turn. “Please let me win? Please? Just this once?”
The oil sizzles as the laughter grows, sparking like a forest fire in the quiet room, and Lucanis, laughing with his family, feels the blaze inside him growing, growing, until it reaches far beyond what any prison could ever hope to contain.
---
(Threshold, Redux)
He comes to the Lighthouse for the first time with a hastily thrown-together bag over his shoulder, a combination of the essentials Viago had scrounged up and what he’d managed to forage during a brief and confusing detour to the villa. Weapons, poisons, antidotes, potions, armor. Some clothes, likely too large on his half-starved frame. Soaps.
He steps through a mirror and leaves Antiva behind. The demon coiled around his throat unwinds to sniff the air with fresh curiosity, but Lucanis’s head is throbbing, his eyes itching with the wrongness of the place. People stand ready to escort him, saviors and jailers and victims, through the Crossroads. They sit on a boat steered by something spectral and impossible, and Lucanis drifts into nightmares, into vivid memories of abominations tearing themselves apart, into job after job after job killing mages who’d saddled themselves with demons, made themselves conduits for evil.
The demon curls around his heart, tightening, and he gasps awake with a start as the boat docks. Averts his eyes from a worried look. He can do this. The work is carved into every one of his oft-broken bones.
Another mirror. Another impossible place, beyond.
“—a cot set up in the pantry,” Rook is saying. “Temporary for now, but it seems like the Lighthouse provides when people need somewhere to stay.”
He stares at the little room. One way out. Childishly simple to trap someone inside. “Thank you,” he hears himself say, and then he is alone.
Not alone.
“They all seem nice,” Spite sneers. “Easy marks. Targets.”
“Not targets,” he says, sitting on the cot, feeling the muscles in his legs twitch and shake under the strain of movement. “They hold our contract.”
“Ugh. Employers,” Spite says.
“Don’t hurt them,” Lucanis says, and is surprised when the words come out pleading, uncertain.
“Weak,” Spite says. “They’ll hurt you. They’ll find out and they’ll kill you. Kill us.”
“I intend to tell them everything,” Lucanis says. “All of them. They deserve to know.”
“Stupid Crow,” Spite grumbles. “Tells the truth except. To. Me.”
He drops back onto the cot, lying flat on something that isn’t a hard surface for the first time in a year, and feels Spite’s glee growing even as his consciousness starts to fade. “No,” Lucanis says, and pushes back up to sit with his head in his hands. “No.”
The knock at the door to the pantry is such an alien sound—no need for knocking in a prison—that he stares at the door in mute horror, trying desperately to unearth the correct response from the memories spilling away from him as though caught in a landslide. “Come in,” he says, finally, with the feeling of a long-tensed muscle relaxing.
The four women who live here are huddled in the doorway, staring at him. The one in front—Rook—holds up a bowl. “We brought you something to eat.”
“Oh,” he says, revulsion a stone in his gut. But he must eat to work. And he must work. “Thank you.”
He takes the bowl from her, staring down into it.
“We, um, have a rotation,” Bellara says. “For cooking. You could be on it, if you, um. If you want.”
“Of course,” Lucanis says, still staring at his bowl. “Ah. What exactly is—”
“A Harding special,” Neve says, and Spite hooks on something ironic in her tone that Lucanis doesn’t understand.
The archer who’d eyed him with such distrust now cracks a smile. “Apple cheesy butter noodles.”
“Apple—”
“Apple cheesy butter noodles,” she says, again. He stares at her and thinks, in a day of murdering blood mages, escaping an underwater prison, learning of the First Talon’s death, and stepping into the land of dreams, that these four words might be what undo him.
They’re all watching. He takes a bite and sees nervous smiles flit across their faces. “Ah,” he says. “Thank you. I am happy to cook tomorrow.”
“No rush,” Rook says. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Over her shoulder, Bellara points to the bowl and mouths, Some rush.
“Anyway,” Rook says. “Welcome to the team, Lucanis.”
Then they leave him to his silent vigil, standing guard against the demon inside him. “Apple cheesy butter noodles,” Spite murmurs, as though the words are some ancient incantation.
This, Lucanis thinks, is a job he can do. A contract he can fulfill. Let the rest fall where it may.
He glances down at the bowl again, then rises, shakily, and goes to take an inventory of the pantry’s stores. The room is small and cramped and dusty, and he feels on the point of collapse, but for the first time in a year, in longer, a shard of hope begins to saw against the cage of his ribs.
