"I... will need to confirm this with my office."
"You do that."
She straightens her blazer. She tucks the tablet under her arm. She turns on her sensible heel and walks briskly through the crowd, which parts for her the way water parts for a rock, closing immediately behind her in a wash of whispers.
Blood wells from the split knuckle on my right hand. I press it against my apron, leaving a small red crescent on the white cotton, right next to the barbecue sauce stain I never fully got out.
The crowd erupts. Applause. Actual applause. Someone whistles. The kid with the pork sandwich bangs his fist on Boris's counter in approval.
Boris has not moved.
He stands behind his cutting block, cleaver still dangling, staring at me with an expression I cannot categorize. His amber eyes are wide. His tusks frame lips that are slightly parted. He looks like someone just hit him in the sternum with a two-by-four.
"You know municipal code."
"I knoweverycode that applies to my business."
"You just saved my smoker."
"I saved the integrity of the farmer's market charter. Your smoker was incidental."
His mouth twitches. A grin starts at one corner, tugs the scar tissue on his jaw, spreads until both tusks are fully visible.
"Incidental," he repeats.
"Don't read into it, Cleaver."
He sets down his cleaver. He reaches under his counter and pulls out a jar. Heavy glass, sealed with black wax, packed tight with coarse crimson crystals that catch the sunlight and throw tiny red sparks across the cobblestones.
Another jar of that Orcish spice.
He places it on his counter, right at the boundary between his booth and mine.
"For your knuckle," he says. "It is also good for cuts."
I take the jar.
I take the jar because my knuckle is bleeding onto my cutting board and because the first jar of this spice transformed a simple beet consommé into something that made my sous chef weep openly into his station towel. I take the jar because refusing it would be petty, and I am not petty.
I amstrategic.
The crowd disperses back to their respective lines. Boris's side swells immediately, the rubberneckers drawn by drama and smoke and the promise of a story to tell at dinner. My side thins. Three customers drift away to join his queue, pulled by gravity and the scent of rendered fat.
I set the jar on my prep station, crack the wax seal with my thumbnail, and pinch a few crystals directly onto the split knuckle. The burn is immediate, sharp, almost electric. Then the pain folds in on itself, collapses, and a tingling warmth spreads across the broken skin. When I wipe the blood away with a clean towel, the cut has already closed to a thin pink line.
Orcish medicine. Absurd.
Boris resumes his chopping. His cleaver falls in a rhythm I can hear through the ambient noise, a metronome of steelon hardwood, steady and confident, as if a county inspector hadn't just tried to strangle his entire operation with enchanted bureaucracy. He hums. Some low, rumbling melody in a language I don't recognize. The sound carries across the narrow gap.
I seal the jar and stow it beneath my counter.
His line grows longer. He loads plates with obscene portions. Pulled pork heaped in glistening mounds, charred corn slathered in some kind of herbed butter that smells aggressively of garlic and something deeper, earthier, something that doesn't exist in any human spice rack. People groan when they bite into it. Actual, audible, borderline-indecent groaning.
My line has six people. His has twenty-three. I count.
I plate a deconstructed mushroom tartare with pickled radish and a black garlic emulsion that took me four hours to prepare. The woman who receives it photographs it from seven angles before taking a single bite. When she does, her eyebrows lift. She nods. She moves on.
No groaning.