The smell reached them before the banner did. Browned fat and toasted grain rolled down the row of canopies on a current of warm air, and Aurelian changed direction in the middle of a sentence about the aerial society’s entrance trial, following it with the serene confidence of a man who had already lost interest in his own argument.
Selphine watched him go and lengthened her stride just enough to keep pace. Elara followed a step behind, letting the recruitment grounds slide past.
They had been walking for most of an hour, past the fencing circle and its cheering ring and a rune-research table where a student was explaining to no one in particular why her formation would not explode this time, and none of them had signed anything. The aerial society had come closest.
Its members made every applicant walk a painted beam before asking for a name, and the line had stretched halfway to the north wall.
The Culinary Expedition Society had claimed a corner where the grounds opened toward the old wall, and the heat of its braziers pushed back against the wind that had followed them all afternoon. Two long trestle tables stood beneath oiled canvas. One held iron pots and a cutting board scarred by years of knives. The other had been given over to maps, regional charts pinned flat with river stones and crossed by routes in colored thread, beside a row of wax-sealed jars tagged in a dozen different hands.
At the end of it a young man was lifting fish wrapped in wet leaves out of a squat case with a sigil-etched lid, and the fish came out looking as though it had spent the morning in a cellar.
"Cups are on the left, and you may take one before you decide anything," said the senior member at the largest pot, without looking up from it. Old burn scars ran along both her forearms, and she moved around the fire as if she had stopped noticing it years ago. "Everyone asks whether we only cook. We do, but mostly we go where the food comes from. Two or three parties a year, to whichever province has something worth learning. We buy in the markets, watch how it is prepared by the people who prepare it, and then work out how to carry it for two weeks without it spoiling or being flattened by the road."
Aurelian had a cup in hand before she finished. "A society that puts the food before the explanation understands its audience," he said. "Though I have to ask about the word expedition. It is very good at hiding things."
"Enough that we pack for it," the senior member said, and turned back to her pot.
Selphine asked how parties were chosen and what a member owed between trips, and the answer came in the same brisk tone: places went to whoever had prepared most, and everyone shared the packing and record-keeping whether or not they were traveling that season. She followed with a question about permits for the farther provinces and listened to the reply with the attention she gave to contracts.
The demonstration itself was simple enough to follow standing up. Over one fire a member broke a pressed cake of roasted barley and rendered fat into boiling water and added dried highland mushrooms that had the look of old leather. Over the next, another made the same dish the way the province itself would, with fresh mushrooms and butter and none of the hurry. Small clay cups went around, one of each. Elara tried the field version first. It was salty and dense, and the mushrooms softened slowly into something that tasted as though its designer had been cold and hungry and had decided to stop being either. The second cup was brighter and better in every way she could name.
"The point is not to make the first taste like the second," the burn-scarred woman said, watching their faces. "It is to make sure that on the tenth day it still tastes like food."
Aurelian was already on his second cup of the first version. "I would like it recorded," he said, "that I am a member in spirit."
Elara had come expecting a club for people who liked recipes, and the maps had corrected her before the soup did. The routes ran through three provinces she recognized and two she did not, and every jar along the table was tagged with the market it came from and the number of days it had traveled. She asked how long the sigil case kept its cold on the road.
"A week if we are careful," the young man said, "and none of us are ever careful. Orion Marchand can tell you the same, and he is only holding the presidency until the term elections." Elara looked at the lid while he laughed. The formation was crude and wasteful in its spacing, and it worked, the sort of thing a frost mage could improve in an afternoon. It occurred to her that a group who knew how to reach distant provinces, feed themselves on the way and come back without anyone remarking on it was worth more than she had guessed from the banner, and she found she wanted to hear the rest.
She was turning to hand back her empty cup when she saw the pale head at the far end of the maps.
Selphine was in the middle of a sentence about terms in writing, and Elara lost two clauses of it. Her fingers had closed around the clay hard enough that the cold rose into her palms, and she stopped it before it reached the cup. Her breath, which had caught halfway, finished slowly.
’Isolde.’ Nothing else arrived for a moment. Then she set the cup down at the table’s edge, found Selphine’s voice again at "—and I would want the terms of absence confirmed before I agreed to anything," and said, "Yes, confirmed," as though she had been following all along.
Isolde wore a plain gray academy coat with her hair pinned back, and she held a tasting cup in one hand, standing near enough to the pots to pass for a prospective member and far enough from the crowd that her conversation had a room of its own.
Beside her a broad-shouldered young man with ink on his cuff was talking with both hands, one of them pinning a chart down by its corner. The conversation reached Elara in pieces through the heat and the noise of the grounds.
"—the northern parties lose the most in the first week," the young man was saying. "The fish holds, but people get careless with the salt."
"You said earlier that was a matter of habit and not supply," Isolde said, her voice as even as it always was. "Do the parties choose their own routes, Senior Marchand, or does the society assign them?"
The answers were unremarkable. Routes were assigned, though members with family in a province could ask for it, and provisioning was arranged ahead where it could be, which Orion admitted was easier for him than for most, since his family moved a great deal of specialist stock between provinces and he could usually get a crate to a waypoint before a party reached it.
Isolde asked who kept the records at those waypoints and how often a party had changed its route on the road. After each answer she let a little quiet stand, and he filled it.
Elara had sat across dinner tables from that patience for most of her life. Nothing Isolde said would have troubled a chaperone.
Her questions stayed at the edges of whatever he had just told her, and she waited after each one. ’She does not spend this much attention on anyone for nothing.’ Orion was not being led, either.
He answered like someone who enjoyed being asked and knew precisely what it was worth to have a Lorian ducal heir asking, and he glanced once over the crowd to see who else had noticed.
Elara turned the possibilities over one time: contacts in the provinces, imported goods, routes, preservation, Orion himself. She had no evidence for any of them beyond her own history, and her history was not evidence. All she could say was that Isolde was giving a recruitment table more of herself than a recruitment table needed.
Selphine glanced toward the end of the table and back to Elara, and went on about permits without letting anything in her tone change. Aurelian had wandered down the maps to the sigil case and tapped its lid. "Elowyn, would that hold under a real frost? You would know."
"It would hold," Elara said, grateful for a question with an answer. "The spacing is wasteful, but it holds."
"Wasteful spacing," Aurelian told the table, and raised his voice. "Senior Marchand! Is it true you drew half of these maps?"
The young man looked up and lifted his chart like a banner. "Most of them, and I will defend every road on them. Come and argue with the coastline."
Aurelian was already going, and Selphine went after him with her cup still in hand. Stopping now would have been a decision in itself, and everyone at the table would have watched Elara make it, so she followed along the edge of the maps until two paces were all that remained between her and Isolde.
Isolde turned. Her face showed no surprise. Her pale lavender eyes settled on Elara for the length of one unhurried breath, long enough to pass for a woman finishing a thought before she spoke, and a courteous smile arrived at the same measured pace.
"Lady Elowyn," she said. "I did not realize this society had caught your attention as well."