Nion took the bowl by the handle and swirled the contents, which was met with great anticipation on all sides. Then he raised it to his mouth and drank straight from the bowl. Everyone cheered — except Branwen, who, again, did not count.
“Seriously, what’s wrong with it?” Yu’s voice cracked. What’s wrong with you arseholes?
That only made them laugh harder. Branwen drew so fiercely on his pipe that it sent the embers flaring.
Ondahr and Kal spoke at once.
“Stew in a mug?”
“For drinking?”
“Not even a spoon?” Nion added, mock-aghast.
Yu’s stomach dropped.
There it was. The mistake. The wrong thing. The reason they all laughed about him. Of course — he had brought them a mug, not a bowl.
For a moment, Yu simply blanked.
WHY
did these things
keep
HAPPENING?
WHY
was he
SO.
FUCKING.
STUPID?
No. Not stupid. Or at least, not that kind of stupid. There had been a reason — a good, practical, perfectly plausible, reasonable reason. Habit. The mug made sense. It made sense if you went for what you always went for — as a fina, in a fina kitchen. Because to a fina, that thing was a bowl. Even Tria would say so. This was, most definitely, a vessel for food. Proper. Functional. Familiar. Like an ampat or a polla, the standard bowls found in every settlement household. They had a circular shape but were flattened at one side, with a broad opening and a thin lip that let the beak slip in neatly. They also had a handle, to tilt the bowl where it stood or lift it close to the face if you went for the last bits. Like that, fina could eat from start to finish without mess, whether beak to bowl or bowl to beak. They were common. Utterly ordinary. Every home and every tavern had them stacked in rows.
But this was not the estate.
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