The Vampire & Her Witch-Chapter 1472: A Meager Market (Part Two)

The selection at the remaining stalls was as thin as Morwen had ever seen, though she had to admit that her experience with fish markets was limited to the occasional visit to the village square in Thorne, where her mother’s cook picked over the catch while Morwen tried not to wrinkle her nose.

This was something else entirely. The few merchants who remained were packing up around them, dumping unsold scraps into buckets and folding their stained canvas covers with the weary efficiency of men and women who wanted nothing more than to retreat behind closed doors before the cold and the guards drove them off the quay.

At the last stand with a merchant still holding out hope to sell the remains of his catch, a few small panfish lay in a wooden tray, their scales dull in the fading torchlight. A bucket of yellow perch, none longer than a man’s hand, sat beside a second bucket filled with heads, tails, and spines that the day’s butchering had left behind.

At the very end of the counter, a handful of steelhead trout had been laid out on a bed of river ice, but they were so small that Morwen thought they should have been tossed back in the river instead of kept... Her brother, Cadeyrn, could likely have eaten two of them in a sitting, but then, he seemed like he’d gained a second stomach in the past year or so, and he never really stopped eating.

Lady Ashlynn, however, approached the remaining stock as if she were selecting ingredients for a feast at the high table. She even seemed excited about it as she leaned over a bucket of fish heads, pressing her thumb into the gills of a perch with the focused concentration of a cook who had done this so many times that her hands moved on their own.

"These are still fresh," Ashlynn murmured, sorting through the perch with quick, practiced fingers. She set aside two that had gone soft around the belly, then moved to the panfish, rejecting one whose eyes had started to cloud but accepting the rest. The steelhead she examined one at a time, shaking her head at their size but adding three of them to the pile anyway.

Morwen watched in quiet fascination. She had known, in an abstract way, that Lady Ashlynn had some experience cooking. When they arrived in Maeril, everyone said that Lady Ashlynn had been the one to prepare many of the dishes they’d been served. When she learned that Miss Samira had been the one assembling the hand pies, however, she’d assumed that Lady Ashlynn had mostly supervised the kitchens or perhaps provided the recipes while others did the chopping and the mixing.

She’d never expected that the high-born daughter of one of the wealthiest counts in the Kingdom of Gall would be humble enough to wander through a fish market, inspecting raw fish with her own hands.

"The heads and tails," Ashlynn said to the fishmonger, a grizzled man who had been watching them with the resigned patience of someone who had given up on the day’s profits. "How much for the bucket?"

"A strip and a snip, miss," the man said. "Ain’t nobody wanted ’em all day, and the gulls’ll have ’em by morning if you don’t."

"I’ll take the bucket, the good perch, the panfish, and three of the steelhead," Ashlynn said, and then the negotiation began in earnest.

"You’ve missed the best of the perch, little miss," the man said, pulling over the largest of the fish that Ashlynn had rejected. "Your lord will want a fine fish for his plate, won’t he? Three snips as a favor to you and your lord for the centerpiece of his table," the man said, placing the fish on top of Ashlynn’s pile. "And for the rest..."

"My lord will be dining with Lord Owain at his Stag Feast tonight," Ashlynn interrupted, reaching out with two fingers to retrieve the cloudy-eyed perch and flinging it back to the place it had been resting on the bed of crushed river ice before giving the fishmonger a pointed stare. "And that one’s gone off, don’t think I don’t know it."

"I’m just cooking up something for the carters and the maids to have tonight," Ashlynn told the man in a sharp tone. "If we sick up over a bad dinner and embarrass his lordship, you think Lord Loghlan won’t leave us behind when he goes back to Dunn? Don’t go getting me in trouble with his lordship," she scolded.

"I don’t think it’s off," the man said, unwilling to admit what he’d done. "But seeing as you’re not fixing a dinner for his lordship, we can leave it aside," he added, retreating as gracefully as he could under the circumstances. "A strip for the rest of the perch, and a snip each for the steelhead."

"Two snips for all three steelhead, and you’re making twice what you should from fish my father would use for bait," Ashlynn countered, remembering the one time she’d managed to convince her father to let her accompany him when he went out with the Linemen of Blackwell to fish for yellowfin or marlin.

The fishmonger gave her a skeptical look at what he was certain was an exaggeration. The fish might be small, but they were still half again as long as his hand. What kind of river monster could eat a fish that large as bait? But she wasn’t entirely wrong about the price either, and if she’d pressed him, he’d have taken a single snip for all three. It was a better price than he’d get for selling them to a smokehouse after all.

"Done," he said firmly, offering a hand that smelled of fish guts and worse, but the sharp-eyed young woman took it without complaint, shaking his hand with surprising firmness before she turned to the younger girl next to her.

"Wendy," Ashlynn said, turning to her younger companion. "Pay the man, please..."