Ylawes and Falene sat as Erin hovered over their table. Erin smiled as Lyonette hurried out with bowls of freshly chopped fruit and oatmeal for all three and began heating up Dawil’s steak on the pan. It was so easy to serve food! All you had to do was heat up something Erin had cooked twelve days ago and bam! Ready to eat! The only thing that didn’t last with her [Field of Preservation] Skill was soufflés.
“What, this? I have [Field of Preservation], remember? All my food in the pantries is good! Heck, the dead moths are probably still preserved too. Which is sort of a problem because it turns out there are things living in them.”
The trick to using her [Field of Preservation] Skill was to know if the food she was making needed to be rewarmed or if it was going to be okay cold. Because if it needed to be warmed up, it wasn’t a good idea to toast it ahead of time. Then you’d just burn the bread. Without a microwave and with only a fire, Erin had learned a lot about which foods could be reheated without drying out or catching on fire.
“I’m not having dead bodies in my inn. They’ll rot. Okay, maybe they won’t with the [Field of Preservation] but—rats will eat them! If I had rats. I—I’m just not having them here! No way!”
The orchard was bigger than Erin remembered. Or rather, looking at it now and all the budding fruits hanging off the tall limbs, Erin was sure that it could provide the inn with enough fruits all year if the trees kept producing into the fall. Especially with her [Field of Preservation] Skill. The only thing was that Erin didn’t remember there being nearly so many fruits when she’d first found this place.
…Probably himself. He knew where the food was. But Erin went and got a fish anyways. She had a fresh one, preserved from the rainy season thanks to her [Field of Preservation] Skill. It was a hearty meal for breakfast, but Numbtongue ate like a Hobgoblin still. And he had virtually no fat! Then again, his idea of a relaxing day was mining for eight hours after picking a hundred blue fruits after breakfast to warm up. So Erin laid the fish on the counter and eyed it.
“…Ours are actually pre-cooked. This entire inn has a [Field of Preservation] on it, Mister Hexel. But we could—Drassi, get one of the uncooked steaks, would you?”
“Lots. If it works, we need lots. Octavia’s growing more on bread and stuff, but we’re going to have to do it outside my inn. Because uh, the [Field of Preservation].”
Erin frowned at her loaf. It wasn’t even the finished product. If you opened a window and put things right on the edge, the [Field of Preservation] didn’t quite work.
The…semi-solid matter that was slightly crumbly, but was lightweight, kept for over a month, and which even rodents wouldn’t eat. Erin still had to worry about pests, even with her [Field of Preservation]. The Children of the Grain Sack had taught her that, so she did arm her traps.
