A Special Day

The easiest way to do this job, Rosa had discovered, was to not think about where the ingredients came from. She couldn't, after all, forget what they were, not when everything required so much processing from start to finish of meal preparations. But unlike Uthrik's previous cooks, she didn't say a word about it. She wouldn't eat the same fare, knowing what it was, and she wasn't even going to make her own food on the same kitchen utensils. She had been there to see the last three cooks become the meal they refused to make and knew that silence was the only thing that would spare her life.

She had held too many human hearts, cracked open too many sets of ribs to believe she was worth saving, even though she didn't partake of the same food as the giant. At this point, Rosa was glad she didn't know most of the people left in her kitchen, their necks delicately broken and their bodies still warm. Well, she didn't know many of them anymore. The first meal she'd been told to prepare was made from the body of Sara; a fellow maid forced into the role of cook, which she would never have been able to complete to Uthrik's standards. Over time, the rest of the maids were also made into meals until only Rosa remained, the last servant in the castle of a giant.

There was a specific way she was supposed to process the bodies. Uthrik abhorred waste and insisted that every part of the body be used in some way. The parts that wouldn't or couldn't be eaten were turned into fertilizer in the gardens, where the spices, herbs, fruits, and vegetables were grown. Rosa, though she knew it would damn her, had this process down to an art form.

The first step was to drain the body of blood. Uthrik delivered the corpse of his next meal immediately after their death and she set to work completing the step before the blood could congeal. While the blood was draining, she cut their hair short. The delicate little hairs across the body would burn off in the cooking process or remain largely unnoticeable, but longer hair was a contaminant Uthrik hated, and not dealing with it had killed one of the cooks Rosa had known. Hair that was especially long could be spun into twine or rope while shorter hair ensured that she would never run out of kindling. She no longer remembered what burnt hair was supposed to smell like because it always surrounded her.

Once the blood was drained and the hair cut off, she started peeling off their skin. It and the muscle tissue underneath would go into the meat grinder to be made into sausages. The internal organs were dealt with carefully, as each one was a delicacy to Uthrik and required different preparation.

He ate the heart raw. It was the first thing he ate every time, and he ate it raw. He also insisted she watch, and Rosa was sure he imagined it was hers every single time. Uthrik never had a cook last as long as she had, and she knew he was waiting for an excuse to eat her, too, even if it would leave him to prepare the bodies on his own.

The brain was made into a paste that he would spread on toast like jam. The eyes were added to a jar of brine and other sets of eyes, saved for special occasions. The lungs and bone marrow became soup stock, the intestines were cleaned, sliced, and fried in fat to make something not entirely unlike bacon, according to Uthrik. The liver, kidneys, and stomach were prepared as she would have prepared the same organs from a lamb. If it were a woman on her table, the womb would be cooked and added to the soup. If it was a man, the cock and balls were to be added to the meat grinder to be made into sausages.

The most time-consuming part of the process, however, was dealing with the bones. She had heard from previous maids and cooks that Uthrik was most particular about their use. She was to crack them open and strip out the marrow, then grind the empty bones into a mealy powder to add to the bread flour. Every meal required fresh bread and this specific bone-flour mix.

Every day she did what was demanded of her, crushed her empathy as she turned human remains into Uthrik's meals. Every day he tried to drag a response out of her like he had the others, and she refused to give him the satisfaction.

Today was different. She knew this from the moment Uthrik delivered the corpse of the day. Most of the people brought to her these days were unfamiliar. Today, however, the cooling body she stood over was her younger brother.

Uthrik seemed disappointed when she didn't react outwardly, which meant that this was a test, more of one than every other day of her life. She had been working at the castle for ten years, had been his cook for seven, and she hadn't seen her family once in all that time. Now he had hunted down and killed Rafael to get a reaction out of her.

Experience was the only thing that helped her maintain her composure. Experience, and the sensation that her soul had been violently ejected from her body.

Today was different, but she had to make it feel like any other day. Her body mechanically went through the entire process of preparing Uthrik's meal. It was tedious, but he said the end result was worth it.

She would make it worth it this time. He had given her a reason to. Rosa prepared everything exactly as she always had, substituting only one ingredient in one dish. When it was done, she served the remains of her little brother to the giant at his table.

He picked up Rafael's heart first, raw and juicy. She had watched Uthrik eat thousands of hearts while staring her down. This time he smiled. "Would you like a bite?" he asked, holding it out to her. "Today is a special day, after all."

"Is it?" she asked mildly, inserting a touch of confusion into her tone. "Why?"

Uthrik bit into Rafael's heart and she was glad that she'd had years to get used to the sight. "Of course it is! It's not every day I find someone like me. Naturally, I had to test it, but you passed, little mouse. You passed beautifully."

There was a pause as he swallowed the heart and reached for his goblet of wine. "I killed my own mother, you know. And my sister," he confessed, a lazy sort of grin spreading across his face. "My fourth cook—you wouldn't have met him—said it took a special kind of monster to do that. He didn't last as long as you, obviously."

"Of course he wouldn't," she replied. "Few would."

Uthrik paused as he reached for the bread. "I imagine so."

Rosa was glad her soul had left her body to hover behind it and to the side. Her reactions were beginning to concern him, but it wasn't as though they had actually talked like this before.

"Is it in the sausages?" he asked suddenly. "Or maybe the liver? That would cover a strange taste well, wouldn't it?" Uthrik ripped off part of the loaf of bread and dipped it into the soup before shoving it in his mouth. "You must have done something."

"There's nothing wrong with the liver or sausages."

"No? You add fennel seeds to the sausages for flavor and texture. What's to stop you from adding something else?"

"You think I'm trying to kill you." Unlike before, Rosa didn't bother to put any emotion or inflection into her words. She was blank and soulless, exactly as he wanted her to be. Someone just as unfeeling as him. "Why would I try now and not before, not when my life was under threat simply by existing here? Why not at any other point in the seven years I've been cooking for you? I've lasted longer than any of your other cooks because I don't try anything."

"No, the pitiful little mouse wouldn't try to murder the cat." He smiled to himself as he reached for the sausages, still gauging her reaction as he did. "Seven years is a long time. But of course, a little mouse like you wouldn't do anything."

Rosa watched as he ate the meal she had prepared, every bit of it. The last thing he finished, as always, was the soup.

"Another excellent meal, my dear," Uthrik remarked, patting his belly. "You've learned much in seven years."

"I wish I could say the same of you. In seven years, you have only forgotten things, important things."

He frowned. "What things?"

"I was a maid before I was a cook. Do you remember the promises you gave to the girls who became your maids?" She paused, but not long enough for him to answer. "You promised you would not hunt or kill our families. We knew our lives were forfeit, but our families were meant to outlive us for our sacrifice."

"I made no such promises to the cooks," Uthrik argued. "And you said you didn't do anything to the liver or sausages. Did you lie to me?"

"I didn't stop being a maid when you forced me to cook your meals. We maids only stayed here because we had your promise for our families. We knew you would kill us. But you brought me my brother today. I didn't lie. The liver and sausages were exactly as I have always made them. The poison was in the soup."

"What?!" He tried to stand and lunge at her, but only managed to collapse onto the floor clutching his stomach, choking and gagging even as he reached for her.

Rosa stepped back, just beyond his reach.

"Seven years, little mouse. Seven years, and now you find teeth after you said you never tried anything! It seems you lied after all!" He vomited, the half-digested remains of his meal spilling messily across the floor. He still tried to crawl after her, scrabbling uselessly at the stone tiles in an effort to drag himself forward.

"I didn't lie. I never tried anything, not once, because I knew I would succeed if it came to it. It's not my fault you can't tell the difference between a mouse and a viper." She chuckled, but it was a dry humorless sound as his struggles slowly became weaker and weaker. "I suppose you were right, though. Today is a special day."

Uthrik abhorred waste and Rosa knew she'd developed a distaste for it as well. She had learned how to ensure that nothing was wasted, not even the corpse of a giant. And anything that couldn't or wouldn't be eaten...was fertilizer.