“No, I would not begrudge anyone their relationship,” I told Grafton as calmly as I could, very carefully not gritting my teeth in anger. Then I turned to Ferlis. “To reiterate: I do believe I can help your husband.”

  Grafton sent me an annoyed glare, but I felt a little smug when he said nothing in protest, just as I had expected he wouldn’t. He obviously felt guilty that Ferlis blamed herself for his condition.

  “I never dreamed anything could be done about the hunger.” Ferlis tilted her head at me. “Do you truly think you can help?”

  The wendigo’s question pulsed with a fragile hope that I was going to have to crush before I built it back up.

  “I am afraid you are correct,” I said. “There is nothing to be done about the actual hunger. From what I remember reading about your species, the wendigos bear a curse from The World itself. Anyone who has tried to break the curse has been met with a backlash that left them nearly as miserable as the wendigo they were trying to help.”

  Frankly, in spite of how much I disliked him, what Grafton had achieved was genuinely impressive. He hadn’t tried to break the curse, since he had probably known how that would go. Instead, he had simply shifted it around a little. He carried a fragment of Ferlis’ burden so she wouldn’t have to.

  I had a suspicion that the flesh of sentient creatures still strongly appealed to the wendigo, but at least she no longer experienced the overwhelming craving that would inevitably force her to give into her appetite eventually.

  Meanwhile, my words had caused Ferlis’ shoulders to slump. While I still couldn’t read her ‘expressions’, if a skull-like face could even be said to have those, her despair was easy to recognize.

  Grafton’s livid fury, of course, was all too clear. He opened his mouth, but I wasn’t about to humor him.

  “However,” I went on, keeping my attention on Ferlis, “that doesn’t mean I can’t help with the side effects of the hunger.”

  The wendigo’s milky-white eyes seemed to brighten a little.

  Leaning across the table, I continued, “I don’t know enough about a wendigo’s physiology to ascertain what’s normal, but I do know a human isn’t supposed to be that gaunt.”

  “Yeah, say something else obvious,” Grafton spat, no longer willing to keep his mouth shut.

  I loved that his scowl just kept deepening as I ignored him.

  “While I don’t know how he was affected by previous occasions of enforced fasting, and how much he was able to recover from them, I know I’ve never seen him this gaunt before.”

  “Yes, and what of it?”

  Grafton was still trying to engage. I had to hold back a smirk when Ferlis just ignored him as well.

  “He’s always been able to bounce back somewhat,” the wendigo explained. “But it gets harder for him to do so every time. He never quite reaches his previous prime, either.”

  I had been keeping my tongue in check rather nicely thus far. This time, though, I couldn’t help myself.

  “Well, that might be due to the fact that he’s an aging human and getting frail in his dotage.”

  Both Ferlis and I ignored Grafton’s incensed shout and colorful curses, but I swear the wendigo’s skull face seemed to be grinning harder.

  In fact, the longer we talked, the more I found myself able to recognize her method of emoting. Since she couldn’t use facial expressions to convey her emotions, she relied on slightly exaggerated body language. A tilt of the head that was a bit too deep. A deliberate gesture with her fingers. Her shoulders lifting or slumping to an almost theatrical degree.

  It was fascinating to see a wendigo navigate the social hurdle of conversation so deftly.

  Refocusing my attention on the matter at hand, I smiled at Ferlis. “But the fact that he can bounce back at all is a very good sign.”

  “Yes? How so?”

  “If his body can, indeed, recover from this type of ‘starvation’, then that implies the curse only claims a certain portion of the nutrients when he eats. Regular food is clearly not potent enough to get past the amount siphoned away by the curse. The level of siphoned nutrients could be as high as ninety-nine percent of whatever he ingests, but that still gives us some room to work with…”

  I tapped my chin as I trailed off, turning options over in my head. I had never attempted something like this before. It hadn’t even been mentioned in my training. Even so, I was confident that I could concoct some kind of extremely nourishing alchemical product. A nutrient paste, perhaps? A pill? A potion?

  My eyes lit up as I considered the implications of my new beetle for a project like this. I could potentially condense a truly staggering amount of calories into a small portion of food. Granted, I would need to test how the beetle’s flames affected proteins, fats, and such, but that was easy enough.

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  “You’ve thought of something?”

  Ferlis broke into my thoughts, surprising me with the question. Then again, as a wendigo entering regular society, she had probably grown quite adept at reading people’s expressions.

  “Yes. I do think I can craft some extremely nourishing food that would supply his body with everything it needs to recover quickly. Possibly even allow him to begin improving his physical condition.”

  Grafton snorted dismissively. “I’ll believe it when I see it, brat.”

  Alys had stayed silent thus far, letting me do my work, but now she growled. The sound was deeply threatening. I even felt a hint of Dragon Fear lance through the air.

  The annoying elder didn’t even acknowledge her.

  My eye twitched. My recently acquired, already withering respect for the man got a bit thinner still.

  That’s it, I fumed internally. I tried. I really tried. I even considered setting aside my plans to mess with his food sometime in the future, whenever I had time to make a nonlethal yet highly unpleasant poison. But if he’s going to be this much of an ass, AND if I’m going to be making food for him anyway…

  The opportunity was too perfect to refuse.

  I wasn’t going to tamper with all of the food I made for him. Maybe every thirtieth portion or so. Still, we would see how he liked scarfing down a seemingly innocuous serving of paste and then suddenly having an explosion in his mouth of something more volatile on the taste buds than Alys’ torture juice.

  My immediate annoyance was somewhat mitigated when Ferlis reached over and smacked her husband on the back of his head, making the big bad grouchy elder pout.

  “Thank you. Truly. That would mean more to me than I can properly express.”

  Ferlis spoke with such sincerity that I couldn’t find it in me to delay the project somewhat, like I had just been tempted to do.

  “It’s fine,” I assured her. Then I sighed, shook my head, and turned to the rest of the table. “Now! To change the subject a bit, we didn’t visit solely so we could enjoy your company.” My voice was only slightly sarcastic as I glanced at Grafton. “I need you to keep a promise you made some time ago.”

  They hadn’t explicitly promised me anything, actually, but my fae nature compelled me to frame it as such. Promises mattered to us.

  And I really, really wanted those ingredients.

  “Hmm?” Hyel jumped back into the conversation, having stayed quiet while Ferlis and I talked. “How can we help you?”

  “You once expressed that you don’t appreciate me risking my safety by looking for ingredients myself. You have tasked the gatherers to supply the town with certain ingredients I pointed out, and I have benefitted from this. However, now I need a few specific ingredients, and I have no time to hunt them down myself.”

  Hyel, thankfully, seemed intrigued rather than put-upon. “What sort of ingredients do you need?”

  “Kappa livers and kidneys,” I said bluntly. “Of course, I wouldn’t say no to any other useful ingredients you can get off their corpses, either.”

  Shifting in his seat, Hyel glanced at the other elders before looking back at me. “Is there a reason you cannot use something else? A plant of some kind, perhaps?”

  A part of me understood his discomfort. This wasn’t simply killing kappa that had attacked us and then harvesting ingredients to prevent them from going to waste. This was ordering a hunt for a sentient species, no matter how vile and unpleasant, for the express purpose of acquiring their parts.

  The problem was that I didn’t particularly care. I would hesitate to harvest a fae, a beastkin, or even an elf, but kappa were simply some of the most unpleasant creatures one could ever encounter. I had no compassion to spare for the horrid things.

  “No,” I replied. “You don’t understand how potent kappa ingredients are. For my current project, they are almost irreplaceable.”

  “What is your current project?” Yora cut in, her keen eyes boring into me.

  “I am trying to make a powder which will boost people’s immune system significantly. If this works, and I am convinced it will, then illness will become practically nonexistent in Swiftband. Even if someone did get sick, their symptoms would be mild, and they would recover much faster than usual.”

  All of the elders sat up straighter, their eyes almost hungry as they stared at me. For good reason, too. Sickness was one of the main causes of frontier towns failing, on par with starvation and the whole population getting massacred by local creatures.

  “You are certain of this?” Hyel pressed.

  “Yes. The theory is sound, and what work I’ve already done towards crafting a recipe is quite encouraging.”

  “Very well, then. We will get you all the kappa ingredients you could possibly need,” Hyel stated firmly.

  The other elders, even Grafton, nodded along with the elf’s promise.

  I knew it would be disturbing for anyone to guess just how thrilled I was about the upcoming slaughter of lesser water spirits. Even so, I couldn’t keep a grin off my lips.

  “Is there anything else you’ll need?” Yora asked, taking a sip of some steaming drink she had in front of her. This, I noted, was mildly odd. Her cup had been steaming throughout our entire conversation, with no signs of cooling off.

  “Nothing immediately comes to mind,” I replied. “More ginger is always nice, but I’ve been getting a steady influx of that and other materials, thanks to the gatherers.”

  The instructions I’d given the elders so long ago about beneficial local plants had borne fruit many times over. I’d received several small deliveries of certain herbs and roots to replenish my stock. Ginger, mostly, which was why I had so much of it.

  And I wasn’t even the primary beneficiary from the arrangement. The real winner was Arandel, who’d been receiving a myriad of ingredients to enrich everyone’s meals.

  Speaking of…

  Briefly distracted, I glanced around for the elf. She usually would have served us something to eat by now. I could only assume she had noticed the mood of the table when we started discussing Grafton’s little problem, and had steered clear to give us a chance to settle things.

  “Well, if you think of any other ingredients you might need, let us know,” the hawk beastkin urged me. “For now, how about some food? I think you will enjoy what we have to offer this evening, thanks to our… guest.”

  There was an unusual amount of amusement coloring that word. Before I could ask her what she meant, the answer came in the form of a vaguely familiar voice speaking right behind me. It almost startled me enough to make violent use of my daggers.

  “Dear customers, it is very good to see you again!” purred the deceptively mellow voice. The next instant, two plates were placed on the table in front of Alys and me, each containing some kind of meat that had been positively drowned in sauce.

  Tilting my head slightly, I encountered a pair of glowing golden eyes attached to a certain foxy chef.