Stories of Kings

Of Bread and New Friends

Kit had the most intense blue eyes Rini had ever seen.

To be honest, she hadn't expected to see him again after that absolutely awful trip they'd taken with his friends and her sister. She didn't regret going, of course. Helping all those people had been a good thing. But the trip itself had been exhausting and scary and her sister had been super annoying. Rini wouldn't have blamed him if he never tried to speak to her again.

But he was in town because the other man—Solomon, that was his name, the intense one—was leaving for a wedding soon and Kit was going with him. For some reason, that trip also involved him stopping by to just...say hello and stare at her while she worked.

The staring was a bit odd, but his motivations were the really confusing part. Rini had gotten the impression Kit didn't like her very much. He'd seemed nervous around her. She wasn't used to that. Between her and her twin, people were usually more nervous around Shika (though, to be fair, Kit hadn't liked her much either). If she'd done something to make him dislike her, she couldn't figure out what it was.

Hadn't Nimah said something about him not liking alchemists? She wasn't sure, but if that was the reason, it made sense. There were plenty of people who thought alchemists were, to put it mildly, a tad insane. They were more ambitious with their use of magic than standard mages, combining things, creating things, testing the bounds of what could be. That scared people. It might've been what scared Kit.

Regardless of why he was afraid, he seemed to be trying to push past it and be friendly. Rini appreciated the effort. It at least meant he was open-minded enough to try.

"So, uh..." Rini swallowed nervously. "You're from Sierdan?" Kit nodded. "Oh. That's neat. I've never really been. My family is from Uyeda and then we moved to the High City when I was a teenager and I never really left. What's it like?"

"Cold," he signed. Rini was immediately grateful she'd learned even a little hand speak. It'd be really awkward if she couldn't understand him. "Lots of fog. Lots of trees."

Rini tried to picture it. They got fog in Uyeda, but when she said a port city, she really meant a port city. She'd never lived anywhere rural, and Uyeda didn't really have thick forests. "Are you adjusting okay to living in cities?"

Kit's nose wrinkled in an expression she was pretty sure meant not really. "It's loud," he signed. Then, after a pause, "You make bread?"

Rini tried not to get too defensive. He did look genuinely curious, but sometimes people could get really condescending about her work. Just because she wasn't trying to find an alchemist's stone or do something more "ambitious", whatever that meant, they felt like that gave them the right to be smug. "Yeah," she sighed. "I know, it sounds silly."

Kit shook his head. "I like bread." His hands hesitated as he tried to think of the next thing to say. "How?"

It was a blunt way to put it, but again, he seemed genuinely curious, if a bit more wary now. Her sudden desire to explain overrode her curiosity about that wariness. "Do you know how alchemy works at all?" Kit shook his head. Okay, so she'd have to explain the basics. "So, with standard magic, you typically perform one action at a time or only handle one kind of matter at a time. I could use a spell to heat bread, or move a spoon to fix bread, but I don't usually do both at the same time. They are mages who can do two or three actions at a time, but it takes a lot of training and focus, so it's not too common. But..." She pulled a small notebook out of her belt and showed him one of the sigils. "...with alchemy, you can perform multiple actions in quick succession or simultaneously with less effort. You just have to make sure the runes are arranged correctly. That's the difficult part. There's a lot of trial and error." She started pointing to parts of the sigil. "See, that's for combining the raw components, and that's to speed up the rising time, and..."