Marr groans on the fifth night of walking all day and taking watches all night. Only her and Delphi really care about the watch— Dite had given them an imperious look and said, "Paranoid, much? I can handle it."
Kaiyo, much less imperiously, had gasped. "Do you think they could still be after me??" The watch discussion ended soon after Delphi started asking questions; their ladyships tuned out of Marr's spiralling explanations for things like paranoia and who are "they" and what's a loan shark?
(Kaiyo had tuned back in for that one. Marr's almost scared to ask Delphi what she thinks a loan shark is.)
The point is, Marr's sick and tired of traveling, and even more tired of travel rations. She misses ghee so bad. It's harder to burn than butter, and better flavored than the corn oil. She never cherishes that properly until everything tastes like corn oil. "I should've sprung for olive," she grumbles. She's on cooking duty. Kaiyo summoned the water that's now soaking beans near the fire— she and Dite trade on cleaning duty depending on which one of them wants to show off their mastery of the elements first. Delphi's the one actually finding the food, preparing it to be eaten. It works a lot better than doing all of it by yourself, that's for sure. Even if the conversation is much, much stranger.
"Oh, here," says Kaiyo, passing her something.
Marr's a living, breathing person with tastebuds, of course she gets excited. It's been a week of oatmeal and beans, and even with little spots of real meat or vegetables, it's taken a toll. Dite laughs at her when she jumps to accept the olive oil from Kaiyo and discovers a handful of pretty rocks, instead. "Ah," Marr says, faltering. Serves her right for getting her hopes up. Kaiyo looks so hopeful that the harshest she can bring herself to is, "Thank you, Kaiyo. I'm cookin' right now, though. Could'ja hold onto these 'til after dinner?"
Kaiyo looks at her like Marr deserves pity for being a poor, deprived child. It's a look that Kaiyo gives people an awful lot for somebody who never has her purse. "Oh," she swoons, "you haven't heard about Stone Soup?"
And Marr… can't say she has.
Kaiyo launches into the tale, complete with elaborate voices and flowing hand gestures. Her storytelling is always riveting. As is her dancing, her playing, her spellcasting— she inspires Marr, constantly. Not because she's polished! Gods, no, perish the thought. But Kaiyo is so earnest, so bright and raw in all she does, and she's always at her best when performing. Even if she's performing a need for Marr's money.
Dite inches closer to listen to the weary travelers starving in the town square, even as she continues her bedtime beauty rituals. Delphi… well, Delphi stares off into the distance on either side of Kaiyo's head, but Marr's pretty sure her pupils are tracking.
Marr's figuring out how to portion the snakemeat. Delphi won't eat it despite being the one who caught it, and it's hard to tell what kind of food will trigger a bout of gushing about how much better the cuisine is in the Marina Hood. This'll probably do it, but everybody needs a protein. As Kaiyo describes the travelers and locals gathered around their town square's cauldron with only a stone inside, Marr waves a hand near Delphi's face. The ranger's eyes snap to hers, a much deeper purple than Marr's own. Sometimes Marr thinks she can't see her reflection in them, and most times she feels as if she's intruding just by being looked at straight-on. She clears her throat. "Sorry. Y'okay with beans again?"
"Beans are fine," Delphi intones, gravely.
"Well, that's just fine, then," Marr intones mildly, and lets Kaiyo's story wash over her as she adds the rice to the pot of now-soaked beans, sprinkling in a generous amount of salt and pepper to cover up the flavor of any dust.
Most folks gently push her away from the cooking fires after the first time she makes use of them, but most folks have other options. There are only so many ways to get everybody to eat trail rations. Nobody else in the Interlopers has the patience, the ability to be trusted around fire, or the desire to eat food, respectively, to take care of it. Being the defacto cook and peacekeeper is almost like being back at home. It's much more like getting a surprise promotion to captain of Exile's caravan escort.
But then, no-one in her caravan ever put as much effort into looks as Dite does. Maybe some of her mom's coworkers had? Marr hasn't spent every morning and night with her mom's coworkers for the past week and change, though, so it's hard to say. Dite could probably use a little more realism about her strengths, and a little less time convinced a bare face is a weakness. Maybe if Kaiyo has a morality play or some other parable on vanity, Dite'll listen and absorb some of the lesson. Dite's listening to the townsfolk pitching in with their own meager larders now, even if she's pretending to only be cleaning her face.
Marr flips the snake meat over in the pan, takes a dubious sniff, and digs through her backpack to see if she has any stronger-smelling spices to cover up the corn. "Dite, you like spicy food?"
Dite blinks over at her, startled at being addressed while in the middle of her… poultice application? Serum infusion? Moisturizing? Hell if Marr has any idea. Dite shrugs. "Yeah, whatever." Marr holds out a pepper in her general direction, and Dite looks at it kind of like she's being offered a cracked vial of poison. (Delphi insists the vial isn't unusable. Everybody else has doubts.) "Why's it look like that."
"Uh, it's dried."
"Is it even still spicy?"
"Should be!"
"Mmn." Dite leans back, lips pursed with disapproval. "Yeah, I'm like, the spice queen. So I don't even know if that'll do anything." Mar can't help but grin at her, even though she knows Dite doesn't mean to issue it as a friendly challenge. All of her snide commands are, at best, a boast to her superior intellect or beauty or strength or past extravagance. At usual, they're tests. Prying to see how far her godhood extends, and how hard someone will push themselves to win her unwinnable favor. Marr's always liked a challenge, is the problem. She knows she's gotten farther in her quest for Dite's friendship than most.
"Prolly not," she agrees cheerfully, "but I'll like it more with 'em in there." Dite leans back with a skeptical look, but doesn't object. She's the only one whose criticisms Marr's actually worried about. Kaiyo eats like she'll never see food again, and Delphi eats like it's a worn-in routine by now.
If Dite says Marr's cooking is bad, though, the other two will join in. It means more food for Marr, but it also means a hungry, pissy, and generally unwranglable group if they really don't eat until their next rest. If her ladyships and Delphi get any harder to wrangle towards Bazzoxan, Marr might call it quits and finish the trek herself. Maggie's the type of woman who Marr wants to be when she grows up, and– well. It's not that Marr plans on throwing herself at the genasi's feet or anything, but she can admit that Aiyo's easy on the eyes.
Sure, so are her current traveling companions, but they're so much less easy on the blood pressure.
Kaiyo's voice ripples with cheer as Marr crushes the peppers into flakes and dust over the pan, taking a cautious sniff of the resulting sizzle. Still very corn oil scented, but at least now it's the sort of corn oil that burns her nose a bit. Better than nothing. Not as good as the salmon-and-squash-and-everything-else stone soup that Kaiyo's townsfolk have worked together to build, but hopefully just thinking about how good it is to be surprised with food when you're hungry will make Marr's cooking seem alright. At the end of the story's telling, of course— with the passed-around bowls of rice, beans, and seared reptile, garnished heavily with the last of the chilies Marr had meant to save for whenever she went back to traveling by herself— Kaiyo smiles wide and concludes, "So next time, we can just find a big stone!"
Marr snorts. "I don't think that'll work so well without the add-ins." But then, if anybody could repeat a story of communal solidarity and think the moral is an exceptional individual, it would be a former princess. (Duchess? Influential merchant's daughter? Marr hasn't gotten any clear answers out of her about who exactly she used to be.)
Dite points out, "Salt is a kind of stone."
"What?" Kaiyo asks blankly, as if Dite's started speaking in tongues.
"It's a– they mine it. Like diamonds."
"But it's in the ocean?"
Delphi crushes a few dried leaves over her bowl of plain beans and rice. "There is also salt in the ground," she informs them. Not sure why she'd know the finer points of minable materials but not what paranoia is, but generally she knows things about the natural world that never occurred to Marr. Or to Kaiyo, who'd tried to eat most of the plants they'd seen while traveling. Sometimes, things outside are poisonous. What a world.
"But it's so little," Kaiyo argues, "how do they get it all into the ocean?"
"Maybe those're different kinds of salt," Marr offers, but Delphi shakes her head.
"Everything used to be underwater," she says solemnly. Kaiyo flips her hair over her shoulder, dramatic and smug. It's the sort of hairflip that suggests everything would still be underwater, if the world were a just place.
Dite scoffs, stirring her bowl. She jeers, "Everything's better down where it's wetter?"
Kaiyo's eyes narrow. "I told you I don't wanna hear about Ariel."
"She didn't even say that! That was the crab!"
"You would know about crabs," Kaiyo sniffs, looking Dite pointedly up-and-down.
Marr offers a silent prayer to her collection of gods that Delphi doesn't ask why crabs are an insult. Or any other inconvenient questions. The God of Many Small Changes in the World brushes an autumn favor over the beans, making them hearty and absorbant of the other flavors in the bowl. Mistress Woe exhales heavy, and Marr's shoulders unknot from their worried set. Delphi asks, "Would hot saltwater taste better than this?" Local gods don't usually have the miracles in stock for you once you've wandered too far afield of their domains, and exiled gods were usually lopped off of their prior pantheons because they weren't very useful. Serves Marr right for not serving any gods of etiquette.
Marr says, "Well—"
Dite and Kaiyo, in the same breath, say, "Yes."
Delphi agrees, "You should make stone soup next time."
Marr wonders why the thought of traveling by herself again seems so lonely, when traveling with others is a constant parade of nonsense. "Sure," she laughs, "I'll make us stone soup for dinner, tomorrow." Delphi nods once, a stern confirmation, and turns her gaze back to the bowl. Kaiyo, in between bites, prattles on about the foods she used to eat in the castle and the people who used to serve them to her. Dite watches them all with sharp blue eyes, taking in the best moments to reassert her superiority.
Marr imagines, almost wistfully, hearing stories from far-away places at every dinner. Fumbling for answers after every seemingly-contextualized conversation. Sidestepping challenges while proving herself worthy of accepting them, if she so cared. Arepo, god of comradery and love, shines golden firelight on their faces; Marr can take a hint. She settles in and listens to her new friends talk, hoping quietly that the four of them live to be very old friends, indeed.