Frontier Chef: My Cooking Skills Are Broken-Chapter 29: Famous

Neve’s voice hung in the air and the commons filled with whispers.

Harkenians leaned into each other, mouths moving behind hands.

"Is it true?" the smith said. He was running a hand through his beard.

The commander gestured towards Leyla who was flipping backwards through the ledger.

The sound of turning pages was the loudest thing in the commons. She went past entries she’d written herself, past her predecessor’s handwriting, and even past pages that turned yellow and then brown at the edges.

Her quill hand stopped on something written in ink so faded it was barely there.

"Two hundred and fourteen years." Her voice carried further than she probably intended. "The last Frontier Chef registered in the outer rim was two hundred and fourteen years ago."

The whispers got louder.

The commander seemed pleased. "Thank you, daughter." She cleared her throat and talked loud enough so everyone could hear. "The Centrum has three on record." She looked Ezra up and down. "Well, had. You’re the first one alive in centuries."

Ezra wiped the blood off his jaw with the back of his hand.

"What the hell is a ’Centrum’?"

Leyla and her mother exchanged glances and shrugged in the same cadence.

"The most powerful dynasty in Pangaea Prima?" Leyla said it like Ezra was supposed to know, like it was fact for everyone who lived here. Which it probably was. "How do you not know that?"

"Frontier Chefs walk different paths, that is a fact as old as the Primal Beasts," her mother said, loud enough so only Ezra could hear, "only this one seems to be large and stubborn. Shame."

She turned to the kitchen.

The symbols on the counter were brighter than they’d been all morning.

"Clear the commons. Guards to stations." The commander snapped her fingers twice. "I want the perimeter road walked twice before sundown."

The Harkenians dispersed slowly.

"Theron."

Theron put his fist to his breastplate.

"Wall duty. South gate. Now."

He turned and walked toward the gate without protest.

On his way past Neve, he stopped.

They exchanged words that Ezra couldn’t make out. He could’ve sworn he saw her smile. Theron nodded once, bowed for a moment, and walked on.

Leyla followed after the commander and the guards who were already leaving. Even now she was scribbling in her ledger like her life depended on it.

The commons emptied until it was just Ezra, Neve, and the mess.

Patches was nowhere to be seen. Like he’d know the first thing about what Ossalakas do when they get bored.

’It’s only been a day but Neve seems totally different.’

Neve walked to the kitchen, avoiding the counter and instead leaning against the side wall. She crossed her arms and waited for Ezra to follow suit.

He didn’t make her wait long.

"It would have helped if you told me you were a famous woman."

He winced as he came down on his bottom, his back still sore from Theron’s attempted execution.

"How about telling me you were a Frontier Chef from the very beginning?"

"You paralyzed me."

"That was after you reached for your weapon."

Neve uncrossed her arms and plopped next to him, their thighs touching briefly.

"I sent a courier west."

"What’s west besides a beach and a jungle and more condom monsters?"

She looked up at him. He had almost forgotten how green her eyes really were, especially when she wore bland clothes that didn’t match her intensity one bit.

"I had a contract with a village. One near the jungle we met in." Neve raised two fingers. Her nails were painted with three red marks, slanted sharply. "’Retrieve the bones of young men from an invading Gynoscylla.’"

Ezra let a breath out through his nose.

"I’ve been meaning to ask." He was looking at the road, not at her. "That thing on the summit. The one with the violet eyes. What was that?"

Neve didn’t answer right away.

Her hand found the pendant.

"I’ll be briefing the Harkenian ruling positions tomorrow. I want you there."

"That’s not really an answer."

"It will be, tomorrow."

"Why do I need to be there?"

"Because I said so."

"If I say no?"

"You won’t."

’You’re not wrong about that.’

She got up and patted her butt from dust and soot residue from his morning meals.

"Brute."

"What now?"

"In Harken, when a man touches an unmarried woman, he owes her a debt." She didn’t wait for him to respond. "You should talk to the registrar about that."

She walked on without looking back.

’Fuck.’

The thought of talking to the registrar brought a knot in his stomach. What kind of debt could absolve something that technically didn’t happen? Then again, he did touch her.

He didn’t even get to ask her about what she spoke about with Theron, or how—

Wait, why was he thinking about that?

He didn’t get to finish the thought.

A fist hit the side of the kitchen wall hard enough to rattle the hanging pots. The fist pounded again, harder this time.

Ezra sighed again and looked up.

The little girl was standing outside the kitchen with her arms at her sides. The iron cuffs were gone and she was standing in the open air for the first time since he’d seen her.

Same purple eyes, and her feet were still bare too.

Being barefoot in the heat was a pain in the ass for Ezra. How the girl was handling it, Ezra wasn’t too keen on finding out.

Her brows were doing something funny that he could only describe as absolute resolve.

Patches was at her feet, tail swinging, bone spear dragging behind it on the stone. The Ossalaka looked up at Ezra with yellow moon eyes and barked.

"Ossa!"

’Hold on, did you switch sides?!’

The girl put her hand on top of Patches’ head, and it let her.

Patches definitely switched sides.

"I’m hungry!" she said, banging against the wall again.

Ezra looked at the scorched remains of his cooking on the counter. At the stores in the back room. At the knife still impaled to a helmet to the wall.

’I’m going to need that back.’