“I mean, well, sorry.” Not sorry. “Can you please take the soup now — the stew.”
He held the bowl out toward her. It was getting increasingly hot and heavy, dangerously so, and there was no place to set it. There was no way to put it down it on the footbench, unless he wanted to squeeze and lean in between everyone, and then splash dump the bowl straight onto the map.
“Stew? What?” Nion jumped in, absurdly excited.
It was not only him. From one word to the next, everyone seemed way more engaged. The sudden shift creeped Yu out.
“Yes. I’ll bring out the food now. More, I mean.”
“Food! For us!” Harrow cried, adding a string of her many strange noises that had nothing in common with normal language, though they showed a disturbing level of euphoria. “Best man! Yesss!”
“Yes, here,” Yu forced himself normal, and now he really pushed the bowl onto her. “You want this or not? Take it, please.”
At last Harrow did take it. “For me? What?” She peered into the bowl. “Ha! This is stew! No, really! I thought it was your drink, but no!”
“What?” You did not follow. It took him too long to strip her noises from her words, to filter out all her nonesense sounds and put the rest of her utterances into sensible order.
The others were faster. Yu saw it on their faces, especially with Ondahr and Nion, who started grinning before she even finished. Harrow, meanwhile, grabbed the bowl by its handle, turned around on her chair and held it out for everyone to see inside. The gesture gave Yu absolutely nothing, but from the others’ expressions, he gathered that all of them got it. All of them got the joke, except him.
“You don’t want it?” Yu blurted. “What’s wrong with it?”
Harrow passed the bowl to Nion. He laughed, which rippled over to Ondahr and Kal. Fallem smirked. Branwen only gave a brief, throaty snort, but for him, that was practically a roar.
Harrow’s grin widened as she finally deigned to answer. “Nah, I don’t eat meats, yesss, no, and all these plants, oh no! But you know that, Yu! You saw me eat.”
“Oh. Yes, right, sorry. Uhm … then, what do you eat — want, I mean. What do you want?”
“From the cellar, yesss, like yesterday, thank you.”
“Uhm. All right.” Yu had no idea what that meant, but he could not focus.
Why is this so funny? Why the fuck are they still laughing?
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