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the best, but they used boiling water to keep the grease off of the counter surfaces and the stone floor, and strong lye produced locally from ashes kept the drain channels clean. The food was simple and hearty, though Meghan explained that he had arrived at the start of the harvest, which was the best season for eating.
    “So, what is it?” the girl asked, not taking her eyes off of the carving knife she was whetting on a well-worn stone. She never imagined when she had pulled Bryan over from Dark Earth a week earlier that she would be welcoming his help in the scullery. It turned out that working in the kitchen was the easiest way to keep him fed, not to mention earning some money so he could save for his own room. She was getting tired of sleeping on Hadrixia’s examination table.
    “It’s a surprise,” he replied smugly. “You’ll have to wait and see.”
    Meghan stopped sharpening the knife and looked around the scullery to make sure they were alone.
    “Don’t get cocky,” she warned him. “Thanks to Hadrixia you can speak the language like a native, but everything you say and do makes it clear to anybody who’s paying attention that you aren’t from around here. Just keep your head down and give me time to figure out why you aren’t transforming.”
    “First of all, I’m at least two years older than you, so I don’t see why you keep trying to tell me what to do,” Bryan replied calmly. “Second of all, I don’t understand why you think I would want to turn into a giant winged lizard.”
    “Dragons are not winged lizards. You just take on that form when you fight or fly, I think. According to the scrolls you’ll become a powerful mage, and wise too, though I wouldn’t know it from talking to you,” she concluded.
    “Just wait until the morning shift is over,” he told her with an infuriating smile.
    “Pot call,” Peter said, sticking his head into the scullery. “Going to give me a hand with the fillings?”
    “I’m there,” Bryan responded, happy to take a break from scrubbing. “But how come the bakers don’t just cut up the ingredients in the bakery?”
    Meghan shot him a look.
    “The cooks here would never allow it,” the baker’s assistant explained. “Meat and vegetables have to come from the kitchen. We get to buy our own fruits, flour, eggs, even lard. But my first week as an assistant, the bakers sent me to buy chicken and carrots for pies, just as a joke. The kitchen assistants found out and they hung me upside down in the stables over a mound of manure.”
    “Why?” Bryan asked.
    Meghan rolled her eyes and groaned.
    “Why do the cooks and the bakers protect their privileges?” Peter asked in surprise. “How could we all get along living in the same walls if bakers started cooking and boot makers started baking? You wouldn’t want anybody else coming in here and scrubbing pots, would you?”
    “Be my guest,” Bryan said, stepping back from the copper tub on a wooden stand that served as the soaking sink.
    “Stop it,” Meghan commanded, and gave him a push towards the exit. “I don’t know how you did things at Castle Trollsdatter but it must have been a disaster. Go with Peter, and then hurry back and help me with the wooden plates for the lower table. I wish they’d go back to using bread trenchers, but the bakers claimed they took too much time.”
    As Bryan followed Peter out of the scullery, she heard him ask the other young man, “What’s a trencher, dude?”
     

Chapter 9
     
    “You better not be doing anything stupid,” Meghan muttered under her breath after Bryan lost her. She couldn’t figure out how he had even known she was following him, much less how he’d turned the corner between the practice yard and the courtyard and suddenly disappeared. She looked around again, shaking her head in disbelief and causing one of the cooks who had left work right after them to stop and address her gruffly.
    “Lose something, girl?”
    “No, Cook,” she