The kitchen hatch is a square of heat. No tomatoes. No potatoes. Those are not guests at this century’s table. What you smell is pottage—grain, onion, a brave leaf—and bread, and fish that met salt last week and is hoping to meet it again.

A cook with forearms like mill-posts takes Hew’s sealed sack, checks the mark, and sniffs as if flour could lie. “Fine stuff. Keep eats like a town that forgot to be small. Michaelmas goose is hanging in the mind already. If the salt barge is late, the goose will have opinions, and so will Steward Aldith.”

A boy turns a spit that is only a stick and a hope. Someone counts loaves. A privy path is marked with a lime bucket, because a keep that ignores latrines becomes a keep that invents fever.

You wipe flour off the hatch-board. The cook jerks a thumb. “Solar is up. Aldith is numbers today. Storeroom is down, if you like bad news early. Salt crocks are looking shy.”

The millstone’s crack is still a thin song in your head. A keep is a hungry machine. You have fed it one sack. It wants a week.