In the morning, all the villagers went to work. The hunters, the grain collectors and the glena collectors all spread out in the forest. The doctor, the treasurer, the cook and his little helpers remained. Blas was the village cook, which was more complicated than it sounded. Blas wasn’t only cooking the food, he was preparing it from the moment it was served in a plate back to the moment the raw materials were brought in to the village. He didn’t kill game, he didn’t collect grains, but he did everything else. He was the miller who transformed wheat into flour. He was the trapper who skinned hares and forest lions. He was the sauce maker. He was the butcher who cut up loins, steaks and shanks. It was an enormous amount of work, and for that reason he was allowed some help. He had three little helpers, his three daughters: Krinis, Ferris and Lanys.

Blas was an outsider too. Although, unlike Pheren and their newest arrival, Mallory, he didn’t run away from a life he could not stand. It was the opposite. He fell in love with a runaway: Enissis. She was a child of the village who longed for adventure. When she became of age, Enissis left Cozy Forest. She didn’t go far, because she headed east where Cozy Forest ended on a bay loosely populated by fishermen and merchants. That was where she met Blas. They fell in love. She became pregnant. But life on the bay was too hard to raise a family. So, satisfied that she had seen enough of the world, Enissis brought her unborn child and her husband to the village in Cozy Forest. The other villagers welcomed both her and her new partner, although he was an outsider. Blas was as likeable as any person could be. He didn’t look much, physically, he was short and round, with a big nose and no neck. He seldom spoke but his resting face was a smile. The man exhibited kindness. Everyone adopted him like one of their own.

Blas and Enissis had three children together. The eldest, Krinis, was twelve years old. Ferris was ten. Lanys, the youngest one, was eight. Eight years was also the amount of time Blas and Enissis had been separated. Due to a lack of medical knowledge amongst the village, Enissis suffered heavy bleeding during the delivery of Lanys. She did not survive. Blas and his two eldest girls were heartbroken for years. Lanys grew with an inherent sense of guilt she could not part with. Nobody ever blamed her for Enissis’ passing, but she did. Ever since her father has told her what had happened, Lanys blamed herself. No words of reconfort or wisdom could make her sway. In her eyes, she was guilty. Guilty of homicide on her own mother. This was called matricide, and this was saddly what Lanys identified with. She saw herself as a criminal. A born criminal. Even as young as eight years old, her dark thoughts were aplenty.

Blas didn’t have the words or the sensibility to ease his daughter’s suffering, so he stopped trying. Whenever Lanys was hit by a fit of anger or that she lost patience with a task, Blas looked away and let her expressed her frustration; often leaving Krinis and Ferris the heavy burden of easing down their younger sibling.

Due to the Parran celebrations, the next day, today was to be a dry day. Dry days implied no alcohol would be served over lunch or diner, and no warm food either. Dry days were designed to be easier on Blas and his three helpers so that he could prepare the festive food and drinks.

Today’s lunch was very simple: cold cuts and bread with pickled onions and gherkins. All Blas had to do for this particular meal was to slice off the cold cuts from a slab of forest lion he had smoked the previous week. The first cuts were always the hardest, but once he reached the softest part of the slab, Blas handed over the slicing duties to Krinis. She had been taught knife handling a number of years now and she rarely cut herself. Krinis was very careful in anything she did. For that reason, slicing off enough cold cuts for sixteen people, seventeen with Mallory, took her a very long time. But the slices were neat, but of unequal sizes. Ferris was in charge of the pickles whilst Lanys dressed the plates. She liked dressing plates and she was good at it. As young as she was, she had a fine attention for details that could be mistaken for a neurotic obsession. Lanys would often get angry if two plates didn’t look the same. She believed firmly that everyone should be served the same amount of food, no matter if they were young or old, hunters who chased a forest lion or a hare all day, or an accountant who sat on her butt all day, munching on walnuts. She was small but Lanys had her ideas and she had the backbone to impose her views. For that reason, she was almost always solely in charge of dressing the plates. She took the task very seriously.

“What is this?” She pointed at the discrepancy in the thickness of the various slices of cold cuts and directly accused her sister.

Lanys might have been younger, she had some authority, and Krinis could not ignore it, because she knew her kid sister had a point. “I hit a nerve, or something hard in the middle, maybe some fat. I tried to keep the knife straight but… it’s not that easy, Lanys.”

Lanys ran her eyes from the mountain of cold cuts on a plate to her sister. She could see how genuinely sorry she was. She took a deep breath and tamed her anger. “Ah… I don’t know what it’s like to hold a knife so I’ll let it go. It’s probably very hard. You did well. It’s okay, I can work it out. Some people will have four slices, others will only have two thick ones.”

From the jars and sauce station, Ferris had missed nothing of the conversation. “Most people don’t like thick slices. But that’s okay, we’ll just serve the biggest ugliest cuts to the new boy. We don’t know what he doesn’t like. Would he dare to complain? Dad! Is it okay if we serve the bad cuts to the new boy?”

Blas was busy making pastries for the festivities. His head was filled with custard and icing sugar. He had not heard a single word of his daughter’s conversation. He didn’t hear Ferris addressing him. But Ferris insisted. “Dad? Can we give the bad cuts to Mallory?”

“Huh?” He twisted his neck toward his daughters but his eyes remained fixed on the pasty bag in his hands. He was pouring cream over the eclairs. A very delicate procedure. Time was of the essence before the cream solidified inside the pastry bag and got stuck in the nozzle.

Lanys saw that lost look on her father’s face, so she made the call. “I’ll deal with it. That prince will eat whatever I serve him. He dares not complain.”