Copper vein stew
The inn at Three Wells, for the miners from Copperhold. In the first week of Longnight a new copper vein was found on the fourth level of the Deep Works. Hesk's crew came up the Long Road with the first sample in a sack, and an appetite. The inn made this stew in their honor. It is layered in colors, to look like the vein.

For twelve bowls:
Six carrots, sliced thick. Four beetroots, peeled and cut in cubes. Six potatoes, in big pieces. Two rabbits, cut up, or a good piece of pork. Two spoons of salt. A big pot of water, or broth.

1. Put the meat in the pot with water. Bring it to a roll, then turn it down. Let it simmer for as long as it takes to tell a good story.
2. Add the potatoes. They are the brown of the stone. Simmer.
3. When the potatoes are half soft, add the carrots. They are the orange of new copper.
4. When the carrots are half soft, add the beetroot. It is the red of the redstone. Add it last, or the whole pot will go red, and you will have beetroot soup.
5. Salt it. Taste it. Salt it again. Miners like it salty.
6. Simmer until everything is soft. Do not stir more than you must, or the colors run together. Ladle from the top down, so each bowl has a little of each.

To serve. Put a hunk of bread in each bowl. Hesk says the bread is the lift. It carries the stew up to the mouth.

The vein. The sample was a lump of copper no bigger than a loaf, bright orange, with a streak of green. Hesk put it on the table and said it was rock. Then he bought the whole inn a round. The innkeeper counted the bowls. Fifty-three. There were twelve miners. The rest was the town, who came for the news.

Hesk says the vein goes down and runs east. He does not know how far. The crew will find out, one swing at a time.
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Night broth for a cold house
Zell, healer. Made in winter for the night watch at Ambrook mill, who sit up with the wheel, and for anyone awake at the lamp.

You need:
Two beetroots, peeled and cut small.
One potato, cut in cubes.
A handful of wheat, soaked the night before.
A sprig of wild mint from the bank of the pond.
A pinch of salt, and more if the watch complains.
A bowl of water for each person, and one for the pot.
One hen's egg, for the one who needs it most.

Steps:
1. Soak the wheat the night before. In the morning pour off the water and rinse the grain twice.
2. Put the wheat in the pot with the water. Bring it to a slow bubble, not a boil.
3. Add the beetroot and the potato. Cook until the wheat has split and the potato is soft.
4. Add the mint and the salt. Taste it. Add salt again if you wish, but only once.
5. Beat the egg in a cup. Pour a little of the hot broth into the cup and stir, so the egg does not curdle in the pot. Then pour the cup back into the pot.
6. Keep the lid on, and let the broth sit by the fire for the time it takes to count to fifty, slowly, in your head.
7. Ladle it out one bowl at a time. Serve the watch first. They will not sleep if they are cold, and the wheel does not like to be left alone at night.

The watch likes it thick. Give them the middle of the pot, not the top, where the water is. Keep a cloth over the pot as well. The steam keeps the cold out of the broth, and the broth keeps the watch's hands warm, and that is most of the trick.

The lamp on the hill blinked all last week, a message no one could read. The watch ate this broth every night and said the lamp was not their business. That is a good way to keep warm, and I have told them so.
%%
Cave-cellar cheese
Found a cave under the top field last Reaping, after the rain. It is cool, dry and dark, and it is the best place for cheese I have ever seen. Mira says so too, and she hates most things.
What goes in: 1 pail of milk, a spoon of rennet from the cow's stomach, a handful of salt, a cloth, a board.
1. Warm the milk to the heat of your hand. No hotter.
2. Add the rennet. Stir once. Wait until it sets like a custard.
3. Cut the curd in squares. Let it sit. Pour off the water.
4. Press the curd in the cloth, under the board, with a stone on top. Leave till morning.
5. Rub with salt. Carry it down to the cave.
6. Turn it every second day. After a month, it is cheese.
Do not tell the mice where the cave is.
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Hazel's long-winter bread cheese
Hazel, Northpoint market. The winter lasted until the third of Blossom this year, and the goats ate through the hay. This is what we did with the cheese that was left.
1. Take a hard cheese, a week old or more. Grate it with the rough side of the grater.
2. Mix it with a cup of flour and a pinch of salt.
3. Rub in two spoons of butter until the crumbs are small.
4. Add enough cold water to make a dough. Not too wet.
5. Roll it flat and cut into rounds the size of a palm.
6. Bake on a hot stone until brown at the edges.
They keep a month in a tin. Hazel gives one to every child who asks for it. The children have learned to ask.
Mira, who keeps the tower, says that she has eaten four hundred of these and has not once been bored. She says that is the best she can say about any food.
%%
Cave soup, or what to do with a surprise
In the middle of the poor winter, Mira's brother Tam sent a sack of dried beans from Kettle Ridge, and the farm outside Northpoint found a cave under a field. This is what we made with both, and we tell the tale over the bowl.
It began in Reaping, when the plough dropped a foot and the ox looked down. The hole was the mouth of a cave, wide enough for a cart. We went down with torches and a rope. The cave was dry, cool, and shaped like a long loaf. The floor was packed earth. The walls were deep stone with veins of copper. We stood there, the whole family, and nobody said anything.
Then my father said it would make a good cellar. This is the most practical thing he has ever said.
So we have put the harvest in it. All of it, which is not much. And Tam's beans, which are many.
What goes in the soup: 2 cups of dried beans, soaked overnight; 2 carrots; 1 leek; a bay leaf; salt; the end of a ham, if you have one; water.
1. Drain the beans. Put them in a big pot with fresh water.
2. Boil hard for ten minutes. Then turn down and cook slowly for two hours.
3. Chop the carrots and leek. Add them with the ham end and the leaf.
4. Cook another hour. Add water if it gets thick.
5. Take out the leaf. Break up the ham. Season.
6. Serve with bread. Pour a little over the cat's bowl, since she does not like beans, and wants us to know.
It is a thick, brown, steady sort of soup. It does not look like much. It has gone to the bottom of many a cold day.
A word on the cave. We have not found the end of it. There is a tunnel at the back, narrow and dark. My father says we should not go in. My mother says we will when the snow melts. The cat has already gone in, and come out, looking pleased.
We kept the first pot of soup for the cave. We carried it down, with a spoon, and ate it there. It tasted exactly as it should.
%%
Wheat cakes with apple
Ash, at our house above the north path. We can see the first road post from the door now. It has a torch on top, though nobody has put a number on it yet.
You need:
A cup of wheat flour.
One apple.
A spoon of honey.
A cup of water.
A pinch of salt.
1. Wash the apple and cut it into small pieces.
2. Put the flour and salt in a bowl.
3. Add the water slowly and stir until the mix is smooth.
4. Stir in the apple pieces and honey.
5. Make small cakes with a spoon and place them on a warm stone.
6. Cook each side until it is firm and brown.
7. Put the cakes on a clean cloth and let them cool.
The road men came to our door at midday. They carried tools and had dust on their knees. Mother gave them water. I gave them a cake, but one man said he would save it for the inn. He wrapped it in a cloth and put it in his bag.
The inn is still a day away. Father says the road will make the walk shorter, even if it does not move the inn. I think he is right. When the post gets its number, I will be able to read it from the window.
%%
The broken mill wheel
Toby, relay keeper at the hamlet below Copperhold.
Our mill wheel broke in Sowing and we lived with it all summer. The wheel turns the grinding stone, and the grinding stone makes our flour, and without flour there is no bread. That is the whole of it.
The wheel is oak, bound with iron bands. It had turned for forty years. In Sowing a band split and the wheel shed a spoke. It leaned in the water and groaned once, and then it stopped. The mill pond went still and strange. You could hear frogs in it.
Old Renn came up from the hamlet with his tools. He looked at the wheel for a long time. He said the bands were tired and the spokes were tired and the water had been at it for forty years. He said we could patch it, but the patch would not hold past the next flood.
We patched it. We did not want to think about the next flood in Sowing.
The patch was a new spoke of ash, cut to fit, and two new iron bands from the forge at Copperhold. Renn heated the bands red and hammered them on while they were hot. When iron cools it grips. That is the trick, he said, and he has said it every time for forty years.
The wheel turned again. It squeaked. It had never squeaked before. Every morning the squeak woke the hens.
A wheel that squeaks is a wheel that is telling you something, Renn said. A wheel that is quiet is a wheel that has given up.
The squeak was the new spoke, a little too thin. So in Swarm we took the wheel down again and made the spoke thicker. That was a whole day. The pond went still again and the frogs came back. Renn said the frogs were the only ones glad of it.
Now the wheel turns and it does not squeak, and the flour comes, and the bread comes. Renn says he will look at it again in Apple, before the rain. I have written it on the board by the door. He forgets things now, and the board does not.
The jar of honey on our shelf is the last from the old hive, and we are saving it for the fair at Three Wells. The honey is dark and thick and tastes of the hillside flowers. The fair is in Longday. We will carry the jar in a basket and not drop it.
%%
Ledger of the summer fairs
Pell. My ledger for the summer. I write down what I sold, what I bought, and what the road cost me. A merchant who does not keep his ledger is a merchant who does not know if he is rich.
At Three Wells, market day. Sold honey cakes, forty. Sold a roll of wool from Kettle Ridge, two. Bought apples from Ambrook, cheap, and sold them at the fair for a little more, which is the whole trade. Paid the inn of twelve beds for three nights. Paid the farrier for a shoe on the grey horse.
At Kettle Ridge, the fair on the ridge. The windmills squeaked on every turn and the whole town smelled of wheat. Tam sold me a sack of beetroot and threw in a pumpkin for Pip's scarecrow. Pip is Tam's apprentice. He carried the pumpkin the whole way and would not let me put it in the cart.
At Ambrook, the honey. I bought six pots and a comb, and Jory's mill turned on the pond the whole time I was there. The wheel goes dawn to dusk. He will not open the sluice. I asked. He said nobody may open the sluice. I did not ask again.
At Copperhold, the coal carts. Coal is cheap in autumn and dear in winter, so I buy in autumn and hold it. I bought a load and sold it at the Halfway Inn before Longnight, at a good price, and I did not feel bad about it. Much.
At Saltreach, the fish. Fresh in the morning, salted by noon, sold inland by the week. The crews at the quay mend nets by the window light and sing while they do it. I bought a net for a man at Three Wells who wanted one. I do not know why. He was happy.
At Lowmarsh, not much trade. Slow water, reeds, frogs. I bought a jar of Wren's herbs for a cough and it worked. I gave it to the innkeeper at the Brown Hen and he has not coughed since. He says it was the honey. I say it was the herbs. We argue about it every time I come.
The road cost me more this year. A loose plank on the Ambrook bridge and a wheel cracked on the cobblestone at Three Wells. I paid a smith to mend it. The waymarks are good. A torch on a post every twelve blocks is a fine thing when the light is going.
Next year I will buy more honey and less coal. I always say that.
For the archive, if the clerks want it: Pell, merchant, on the Long Road. The ninth of Apple, year 206.
%%
Recipe: the drying of apples
What goes in: apples, and nothing else. The apples must be sound. A bad apple dried is a bad apple longer.
1. Pick the apples on a dry day, in the second week of Leaffall. Leave them in the shade for two days to sweat off the dew.
2. Peel them with the small knife. Keep the peel for the pig, who will argue with you about it.
3. Cut each apple into rings the width of a finger. Cut out the core and the bad spots.
4. Lay the rings on the wooden racks in the sun, the skin side down. Keep them apart. If two rings touch, they will stick together and rot in the middle.
5. Turn them each morning, and bring them in each night before the damp comes. The bats will sit on the racks at dusk and are not to be disturbed.
6. Leave them in the sun for seven days, or until they are leathery and dry and bend without breaking.
7. Store them in sacks in the loft, away from the mice. The mice always know where the sacks are.
8. Soak a handful in warm water before cooking. They will swell back almost to what they were.
Note: a child may eat them dry, straight from the sack, but only one at a time. Two at a time is a stomach ache, and the child will blame the apples.
%%
Recipe: honey cakes for a summer fair
Pell, merchant on the Long Road. I buy these from the innkeeper at the Halfway Inn and sell them at the fair at Three Wells. She lets me, for a share. Here is how she makes them, if you want to make them yourself and cut out the merchant, which I would not advise, but it is your kitchen.
What goes in:
Two cups of flour.
Half a cup of honey, from Ambrook if you can get it. The bees there are busy and the honey is sweet.
One egg.
A little soft butter.
A pinch of salt.
A little warm milk to loosen it.
Steps:
1. Warm the honey a little so it runs. Do not let it boil. Boiled honey goes hard and sad.
2. Beat the butter and the honey together until they are one thing.
3. Add the egg and beat it in.
4. Add the flour and the salt a little at a time. Add warm milk until it is a soft dough.
5. Roll it out thin and cut it into rounds. The innkeeper cuts hers into little rounds with a cup.
6. Lay them on a warm stone by the fire, not in the flames. Turn them when the tops look dry.
7. They are done when they smell of honey and are golden at the edges. Do not walk away. They burn fast.
The innkeeper says the trick is warm honey and a slow fire. I say the trick is standing near the fire while they cook, so you get the first one. She says that is the merchant's trick and not the baker's. She is right. I eat the first one anyway.
A batch makes about twenty. At the fair they go in a morning. A child came back three times one summer and on the third time asked if the cakes were made of bees. The innkeeper said they were made of the bees' good work. The child said that was the best answer she had heard all day.
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Festival honey bread
Hob, farm outside Ambrook. Frost, 193.

The winter festival will be held by the mill pond. Jory has promised to turn the wheel slowly, so the little ones can watch it. I am bringing bread and a basket of apples. Wren says to bring extra water. She says the children run more than they eat.

You need:
Three cups of flour.
One cup of oats.
Half a cup of honey.
One cup of milk.
A spoon of butter.
A pinch of salt.
A handful of dried apples.
A little water.

1. Chop the dried apples into small pieces.
2. Put the flour, oats and salt in a large bowl.
3. Warm the milk and butter in a pot. Do not let it boil.
4. Stir the honey into the warm milk.
5. Pour the milk into the bowl.
6. Mix until a soft dough forms. Add a little water if it stays dry.
7. Fold in the apple pieces.
8. Shape the dough into a flat round loaf.
9. Put it on a greased tray.
10. Bake until the top is brown and the middle is firm.
11. Let it cool before cutting it. Hot honey burns the tongue.

Carry the loaf in a cloth. Keep it away from the bridge rail. Last festival, a gust took the cloth and the loaf rolled all the way to the mill pond. Jory caught it with a rake. The ducks were disappointed.
%%
The Song Contest Supper
From the farm book, spring of 203. Recipe and notes by Colm.
We held a song contest in the yard after the fence was mended. Folk came from the road with bread, and the school children brought a drum. The rules were simple. Each singer had to sing about farm work, and no singer could use the same verse twice.
Ingredients:
Potatoes, carrots, beetroot, wheat flour, eggs, milk, honey, apples, butter, and salt.
Steps:
1. Wash the vegetables and put them in a pot with water and salt.
2. Cook until soft. Add flour mixed with cold water to thicken the broth.
3. Make a second pot of batter with flour, eggs, milk, and a spoon of honey.
4. Stir until smooth. If a lump remains, call it a dumpling and carry on.
5. Cook small cakes on a pan with butter.
6. Wash the apples and cut them into slices.
7. Put the soup, cakes, and apples on the long farm table.
8. Keep one bowl aside for the singers who forget their verses.
The first singer was Pip from Kettle Ridge. He made up a verse about a beetroot that wished to be a windmill. He sang it twice, but the second time the beetroot had become a sheep. The children liked that version best.
Colm sang about standing at the Three Wells wall in rain. He remembered every verse, though he forgot where he had left his spoon. It was in his belt. We found it when he tried to sit down.
The last song was from Bel. She sang about a hen that laid eggs in the school book box. The teacher asked if that had happened. Bel said not yet. The hen had been seen near the door.
After supper, the children checked the box. It held no eggs. It held Colm's spoon, a heel of bread, and one very cross hen. We shut the hen outside and saved the bread for breakfast. Colm said the contest was fair, since the hen had not sung.
The cakes were gone before the last song. The soup lasted until the singers left. We kept the pot clean, but the song about the beetroot stayed in everyone's head for three days.
%%
Recipe: baked apples with honey
Rye, orchard keeper, a farm outside Vell. Spring. These are last autumn's apples, kept in the cold cellar, a little soft now, which is the best time to bake them.

What goes in: 6 apples, 3 spoons of honey, a handful of dried apple, a knob of butter.
1. Heat the oven until it is warm, not hot.
2. Core the apples. Leave the bottoms on, so the honey stays in.
3. Put the apples in a deep dish. Stand them up.
4. Fill each hole with honey and dried apple.
5. Put a bit of butter on top of each.
6. Pour a little water in the dish, about a finger deep.
7. Bake until the skins crack and the apples go soft. About as long as it takes to tell a story.
8. Spoon the juice over the apples before you serve them.

The cat will not stay out of the kitchen while these bake. She sits at the oven door and watches. I have put her outside four times. Four times she came back through the window. I have given up. She sits on the stool and purrs at the oven.

Lately the cat has been odd. She does not like to be outdoors at night. She sits by the door and stares at the sky, and when I open it she walks backwards into the house. I do not know what she sees.
%%
Winter porridge with honey and apple
From the farm outside Northpoint, in the winter of the poor harvest. Mira says if she had to give one recipe to anyone, she would give this.
What goes in: 1 cup of oats, 3 cups of water, a pinch of salt, 1 apple, a spoon of honey, if you have it. Dried apple is fine.
1. Put the water and salt in a pot and bring to the boil.
2. Stir in the oats. Turn down the heat.
3. Cook, stirring every few minutes, until thick. About as long as it takes to feed the hens.
4. Chop the apple and stir it in.
5. Pour into bowls. Put a spoon of honey on top. Let it melt.
Eat it hot, by the fire, with your feet on the stool. Winter at Northpoint is long. This helps.
The poor harvest means there is less of everything. We make less of it, and eat more slowly. The bowl is smaller, and the porridge is thicker. I have not noticed it makes us any thinner.
%%
Pumpkin pie, the Three Wells way
Rowan's recipe, as the bakers at Three Wells make it for the autumn fair. Ida has a stall. Ida says this is the best pie she has ever tasted, and she is not a woman who says things lightly.
You need:
One pumpkin, cooked soft and mashed.
Wheat flour, for the crust.
Butter, not much.
Honey, one jar, for the sweetness.
Eggs, two.
Cinnamon, a pinch, if you have it.
Milk, a cup.
1. Make the crust from the flour, the butter and a little cold water. Roll it thin.
2. Line a clay dish with the crust. Prick the bottom with a fork.
3. Mix the pumpkin, the honey, the eggs and the milk until smooth.
4. Pour the filling into the crust.
5. Bake in a hot oven until the middle is firm, and the crust is golden at the edge. Watch it. A pie that burns is a pie that is talked about.
6. Let it rest until cool. Then cut it into eight.
Rowan adds that a child who ran off from the fair last year was found in the bakery, sitting by the oven with a slice in each hand. Ida said she was not angry. She said it was the best compliment she had had in years, and she gave the child a third slice.
%%
Potato Cakes After the Rain
Colm, who once guarded the Three Wells wall, writes from the farm.
Ingredients:
Potatoes, wheat flour, salt, a little water, and butter.
Steps:
1. Scrub the potatoes. The rain has left mud in every eye.
2. Boil them until a fork goes through easily.
3. Drain the pot and mash the potatoes.
4. Stir in flour, salt, and enough water to make a firm dough.
5. Shape the dough into flat cakes.
6. Cook the cakes on a hot pan until both sides are brown.
7. Put a little butter on each cake and serve them warm.
The roof over the small kitchen leaked all night. We set a bowl under the drip, then another when the first filled. Colm said the bowls had made a fine drum. He tapped a march on them until the baby woke. We ate the cakes under the table, where the roof was dry. The baby ate one too, and slept through the rest of the rain.
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Letter: Tam to Mira, at Northpoint
Mira,
Summer is here and the wheat is tall and green. The wind comes up the ridge every afternoon and the windmills squeak on every turn. Tam says he will grease them. He says this every year. The squeaking is how we know summer is here, so I do not mind.
Pip has been helping in the long field. He is quick and untidy and gets beetroot juice on everything. He wrote out his pot recipe on the inn table and the innkeeper made him pay for a new cloth. Pip says it was worth it.
We have four hives by the flowers now, not three. The bees are busy and the honey is dark this year. The apples at Ambrook are small, says Pell, but sweet.
The new relay tower is finished on the hill above the mill pond. It is not the tallest thing for half a day's walk, not like yours, but it is ours. Tam went up to see it and came back with a sunburned nose. He says the little relay is small, one lamp and one keeper, and the keeper was proud of it. I am glad the message can reach you now without waiting for a traveler.
How are the long nights? I know it is light all day here. The nights at Northpoint must be very long. Write and tell me what you do with them. Do you count the stars? Do you read the old letters again?
Send word when the tower is lit. We will watch for your light from the top field, though I do not think we can see it. Tam says he will try anyway.
Your sister,
Pip
%%
Notes on the relay, for Lantern
Toby, relay keeper, to Lantern, who is learning the work at Northpoint with Mira. These are the things I wish someone had told me.
The lamp is the whole of it. The tower is only a stand for the lamp. The stair is only a way to the lamp. Keep the lamp clean and the oil full and the wick trimmed, and the rest will follow.
A message is not the words. A message is the blinking. The words are what the blink means. So if the blink is wrong, the words are wrong, and a wrong word can send a cart down the wrong road. Be exact. Be slow. Be sure.
Write everything in the log. The weather, the messages, the visitors, the small things. A log is a letter to the next keeper, who may be you in ten years, and who will not remember this night.
Keep the torches lit round the foot of the tower. People come up the hill at night to look at the light. In summer they bring their supper and sit on the grass. Let them. A tower is a good place to look at the sky.
Bees are good neighbors. Keep a hive by the wall if you can. They do no harm and they help the garden, and in the long evenings they are company.
At Northpoint the winters are long and the nights are longer. Mira will teach you to keep warm and to keep busy. She is dry as old bread and kind as new. Listen to her.
The little tower below Copperhold is one of the smallest. One lamp and one keeper. That is me. I am glad of the work. When the lamp is lit and the message is going and the next tower answers, there is nothing better in the world.
A last thing. When you are lonely, send a message to a tower you do not need to send to. Just three words. Fine. Rain. Bees well. Someone will answer. The line holds from here to the north, and it will hold for you.
%%
Winter porridge
Mave, cook, Northpoint. Porridge for the keeper and the apprentice and anyone who comes up the stair in the early dark, when the lamps are being trimmed and the snow is coming down. It is the first thing made in the morning and the last thing eaten at night. It does not need a card, but Mira has asked me to write it down, in case I am not here.
You need:
Two cups of oats.
Four cups of water, or milk if the cow is in.
A pinch of salt.
A spoon of butter.
A handful of dried berries, for the children who come up the stair.
1. Bring the water to a boil in the iron pot.
2. Sprinkle in the oats slowly, with the other hand stirring.
3. Lower the heat. Stir every few breaths, so it does not stick.
4. Cook until thick, about the time it takes to read one page of a letter.
5. Add the salt and the butter. Stir well.
6. Serve it hot, in bowls with a spoon. Put the berries on top.
For the apprentice: put the porridge in a bowl with a little cold water, so it does not burn the hands when it is carried up the stair. Lantern holds the bowl with two hands, and walks very carefully, and has never spilled a drop in two winters.
For the keeper: eat it sitting down, at the desk, with the lamp lit and the glass clean. Mira says she can taste the snow in it, and I do not know what she means, but she always finishes the bowl.
%%
Northpoint log, autumn
Mira, relay keeper. Lantern keeps the lamps.
The wind came up in the night. All night it pushed at the tower. The stair lamp at the third turn went out. I went up and lit it again. The wind put it out again. We went up and down like that three times. Lantern said we should name the wind. I said we should not. A named wind stays.
The nights are longer now. We keep the foot of the tower lit and the door shut. Foxes come to the torches for the warmth. One fox sits by the door every evening. He does not ask for anything. He just sits.
Snow came early this year. Not much. A white dust on the stones.
People from the farms ask about the lights. They say they saw them again, low over the hills to the north. Some say they are falling stars. Some say they are fires, and someone is out there. A child at the last house said they were looking at us. I told her they were not ours, and I did not say more. I do not know more. I write it down and I keep the lamps lit.
The relay to Vell answered this morning. The little relay on the hill answered too. That is a good day. A day when both answer is a good day.
%%
Melon cooler for a hot Longday
Hanna, at the edge house, who has never once made this in the proper order. Try it anyway.

You need:
One ripe melon, the bigger the better.
Two cups of cold water.
A spoon of honey.
A pinch of salt.
Ice from the cellar, if there is any left from the winter.

1. Cut the melon in half. Scoop out the seeds and keep them in a dish. Dry them on the sill for next year.
2. Scoop the flesh into a jug. Mash it with a wooden spoon until it is soft and nearly liquid.
3. Add the water, the honey and the salt. Stir well. Taste it. If it tastes like nothing, add more honey.
4. Put the jug in the cellar for an hour, if you have a cellar. If you do not, put it in the well bucket and lower it. Do not drop the bucket.
5. Pour into cups. Add a little ice to each cup, one piece only, or it goes thin.
6. Drink it on the step, in the wind if there is any. Share with anyone who walks past. In Longday everyone walks past.

The melon from the south terrace was too ripe, so this cooler was pink and very sweet. The children said it was the best thing made all summer. The children have a low standard, and they were still right.

The roof is mended now. The man who mended it, Ulf, asked for a cup of this with no ice, because he was going up the ladder again after lunch. He drank it fast and said it made him feel light. He was not wrong about that.
%%
The Roof Above The Root Room
Colm, old guard of the Three Wells wall, wrote this down after the farm roof was mended in spring of 208.
The roof over the root room had a bad leak. Rain ran along the beam and dropped on the sack of potatoes. We moved the sacks, set a bowl under the drip, and called the neighbors.
Ingredients for the meal:
Potatoes, carrots, beetroot, wheat flour, water, salt, apples, and honey.
Tools for the roof:
Oak boards, cobblestone, wool, a ladder, and a hammer.
Steps:
1. Move the food away from the wall. Dry the sacks in the shed.
2. Put the ladder on firm ground. Hold it while someone climbs.
3. Lift the loose boards and check the beam. Do not stand under the board.
4. Fit new oak boards over the split place.
5. Set cobblestone along the roof edge to hold the boards down.
6. Push wool into the small gaps. Keep it clear of the chimney.
7. Pour a cup of water over the repair. Look inside for leaks.
8. Bring the sacks back only when the floor is dry.
9. Cook the vegetables while the roof is checked.
10. Cut the carrots and beetroot. Boil them with potatoes, water, and salt.
11. Stir flour with cold water and add it to the pot.
12. Slice the apples. Serve them with honey after the meal.
I held the ladder. I once stood on a wall walk with rain in my eyes, and thought a roof should be easy. It is not easy when the ladder rocks and the person above you asks for a hammer by name.
Ressa climbed. She found the old board had split beside the beam. Tam brought oak boards from the farm store. Pip carried the cobblestone and put each piece in the wrong pile. He said he was testing which pile was heavier. We gave him the empty basket.
The first cup of water ran through the roof and into the bowl. The second stayed out. We all cheered. The cow in the yard answered with a lowing, so Colm said she had approved the work.
At supper, Ressa found one potato in the tool basket. It had spent the day beside the hammer. We boiled it anyway. Colm said it had earned its place. The roof has stayed dry through two spring rains. The bowl remains under the beam, in case the bowl is feeling lonely.
%%
The wool carders of Lowmarsh
Kell, wool carder, for the small school at Three Wells.
When the autumn sheep are sheared, the wool comes to me. I wash it in the mill pond and dry it on the racks and then I card it. Carding pulls the wool apart and lays it straight, so it can be spun into yarn and then knit into a coat that keeps a person warm through Longnight.
You need:
Two carders. These are flat boards with a handle and bent wire teeth, one board for each hand.
Wool that is clean and dry. If it is wet it will not card.
1. Put a small piece of wool on one carder. Not a big piece. Too much wool makes a knot and a knot is a wasted morning.
2. Hold the other carder over it and pull it across, tooth to tooth, gently. The wool goes from one board to the other.
3. Pull it back the other way. Do this ten or twelve times. The wool gets soft and even.
4. Roll the wool off the carder into a loose roll. That is a roll for the spinner.
5. Start again with another piece.
The sound of the carders in a room is a good sound. It is like rain on a roof. I have carded wool for forty years and I still like it.
There is a new apprentice at the weir, Fen. It came to my shed to carry the wool. It carried a whole basket up the boardwalk without dropping a single roll. Then it sat down and watched my hands. I said, Fen, would you like to card. It said, yes. So I put a carder in each of its hands and a little wool on one. It pulled the carder across once and looked at the wool and pulled again. It did this for an hour. Then it held up a roll as even as any I have made.
I did not teach it that. I showed it once. I do not know what the tutors would say. I think Nessa would say the hands were made for it.
Now it comes every autumn evening to card the wool. I pay it in nothing and it seems glad to come. I give it a dry spot by the fire to stand in. It does not feel the cold but I think it likes the fire all the same.
If your school wants to see the carders work, come down the road to Lowmarsh on a Sowing afternoon. Bring a coat. Not a wool one yet. We will make you one.
%%
Patch loaf, for the mended roof
Mave, cook, Northpoint. We made this loaf in the week the roof of the store was mended, when the men came up the ladder all day and needed something to chew on at noon. The loaf is dense and keeps well. It is called a patch loaf because it is made from whatever is left.
You need:
Half a sack of flour, or what is in the bin.
A cup of barley, cooked the night before, cold.
Two spoons of honey.
A handful of dried apples, chopped.
A pinch of salt.
Yeast from the crock, or a little sour dough from yesterday.
Warm water, about a jug.
1. Mix the flour and the salt in the big bowl. Make a hole in the middle.
2. Put the yeast and the honey into the hole, with a cup of warm water. Leave it for a short while, until it bubbles.
3. Add the barley and the apples. Work them into the dough with your hands.
4. Add more water until the dough is soft but not sticky.
5. Knead it for a long time. Longer than you think. Then knead it once more.
6. Leave it in a warm place under a cloth until it has doubled.
7. Knock it back, shape it into a round, and let it rise again.
8. Bake in the stove oven, on the hot stone, until the bottom sounds hollow when tapped.
9. Cool it on the rack. Cut it when cold, not warm, or it falls apart in the hands.
The men said the loaf was heavy. Mira said it was heavy because it had the whole roof in it. The men said that was a fine thing to say about a loaf, and they took two each for the afternoon.
%%
The winter pot at Pebble Cove
Dace, mayor of Three Wells. I was snowed in at the cove for nine days of Frost, and in all that time I ate from one pot. It was never emptied. I asked why. This is what I was told, put in order, because order is what I am for.
The winter pot is the biggest pot in the hamlet. It hangs over the hearth in the net loft. It is lit on the first of Frost and eaten out on the last of Deepsnow. In between, it is only ladled from and added to, never emptied. That is the whole idea.
To begin, on the first of Frost, you need:
An iron pot as big as a barrel.
Water to fill it halfway.
Four fish heads and a handful of bones.
A good handful of salt.
Six potatoes, four carrots and two beetroots.
A handful of dried mushrooms.
1. Put the water, the heads and the bones in the pot. Boil hard for as long as it takes to mend a net.
2. Fish out the heads and bones with a ladle.
3. Cut the roots in big pieces and put them in with the mushrooms and the salt.
4. Cook until the roots are soft. Everyone eats a bowl. That is the first supper.
Every day after that:
1. In the morning, before anything else, boil the pot hard. Big bubbles, for a long count. Every morning, no exceptions. This keeps it good. Brin says if you skip a morning, the pot knows.
2. Ladle out what you want to eat. Never take more than three parts in four.
3. Add water to bring it back to halfway.
4. Add something. A potato, a carrot, a rabbit leg, a handful of kelp, a fish head, the end of a loaf.
5. Taste it. If it is thin, add salt. If it is too salty, add a potato. A potato drinks salt, they say.
6. Write what you added on the board by the hearth. This rule is mine. They allowed it. They have since stopped keeping it. The board has the first nine days in my handwriting and then a long scribble.
What must never go in:
Anything sweet. Apples, honey and jam turn the pot strange.
Milk. It splits.
Anything that fell on the floor when nobody was looking.
Socks. This rule is older than the pot.
On the last day of Deepsnow, the youngest child in the cove eats the last bowl, and the pot is empty for the first time in ninety days. On the first of Thaw everyone scrubs it and sings. I was asked to scrub, and I did. My sleeves have not been the same.
It was the best food I have eaten at any table. Do not tell the baker at Three Wells.
%%
Northpoint weather, summer
Mira, keeper at Northpoint. A log of the summer weather, kept for the farmers and the mapmaker, who asks for it every year.
Sowing: snow, then rain, then a week of sun. The birches ran well. Esk tapped forty and drew them.
Blossom: fog for nine days. The relay was quiet. Lantern cleaned the glass and I mended the stair lamp. A fox came to the foot of the tower and would not go, three nights running. I gave it nothing. It came anyway.
Swarm: sun, then hail, then sun. The hail broke two panes in the lamp room. I replaced them. Glass is dear this far north. The keeper's house roof leaked over the bed and not over the floor, which I took as a kindness.
Longday: the long light. No true dark for a month. The children stay up late and are cross in the morning. The bees work late too. Sena's hives gave a second run of honey, thin and pale. It is good on bread.
Melon: warm and dry. The hay came in early. Travelers on the Long Road stopped for water. One asked the way to Saltreach and I told him and he went the wrong way anyway. I saw him back a week later, having gone to the coast and come round again. He said the sea was worth it.
To the farmers below, the summer is good. To the tower, it is quiet. I like both.
%%
Pumpkin soup and the great bet
Bel, at the farm outside Three Wells, in the winter after the pumpkin contest. This is the soup that was made the night of the bet. It is long, because the bet was long, and everyone wanted to be sure the soup was right.
You need:
One large pumpkin, cut in half.
Four carrots.
Two potatoes.
Two leeks.
A little butter and a little oil.
A bone with some meat on it, or the rind of last winter's ham.
Water and salt, and a pinch of nutmeg from the Saltreach cart.
1. Roast the pumpkin halves cut side down in the oven until the skin wrinkles.
2. Scrape the flesh from the skin and put it in a pot.
3. Boil the bone in water for an hour, then take it out and keep the broth.
4. Fry the leeks in the butter and the oil until they are soft and gold.
5. Chop the carrots and potatoes small. Put them in with the leeks.
6. Pour in the broth, and add the pumpkin. Simmer until everything falls apart.
7. Blend it smooth with a spoon, or mash it through a sieve if the spoon is not enough.
8. Add the nutmeg. Salt it, and taste it, and then give it to someone else to taste.
9. Serve it hot, in the big bowls, with bread that has been warmed in the oven.
The bet was made in the square after the contest. Tom said the biggest pumpkin would make the best soup, and Dad said the best soup comes from the smallest pumpkin, because it has the most sugar in it. The soup was made from both. It was the best soup anybody had tasted all year, and Tom paid his bet in bowls, and Dad paid his in bread. Mother said they had both lost, and that she had won, because she had made the soup.
Everybody agreed she was right.
Tom came back the next winter, with his cart and his frozen feet, and asked for the soup again. Mother made it in the big pot, and it was not finished, because there was always another cart. Tom had three bowls. The carters from Lowmarsh had four each. A man from Saltreach, who had never tasted pumpkin, asked whether it was a stew or a sweet. Dad said it was a bet, and that was what it had been for a year, and that the answer was still under discussion.
%%
Oat cakes for the Long Road
Caddock, the Halfway Inn. Carters and travelers want something to carry. These keep for a week in a dry sack, and they do not crumble in a cart.
You need:
Two cups of oats.
One cup of flour.
Half a cup of honey.
A spoon of butter, or lard if the cow is dry.
A little water.
1. Mix the oats and the flour in the big bowl.
2. Warm the honey and the butter together by the fire until they run.
3. Pour them over the oats. Stir with your hand, not a spoon.
4. Add water, a little at a time, until the dough holds together.
5. Press it flat on the board, about as thick as your thumb.
6. Cut it into squares. Bake on the hot stone for ten minutes each side.
7. Let them cool on the rack before you put them in the sack. Warm cakes go soft.
The carters say these are good with cheese. The cheese is extra, and Caddock says the cheese is the reason for the whole inn.
%%
Mushroom stew for the festival pot
Mira, at Northpoint. For the great pot on the last night of Longnight, when the whole tower's neighbors come up the hill in the dark with their lanterns.
You need: a big pot, a bucket of water, two baskets of brown mushrooms from the woods behind the tower, six carrots, five potatoes, a cup of wheat, salt, and a big spoon.
1. Clean the mushrooms. Wipe them with a damp cloth. Do not wash them in the bucket, because the bucket will never be the same.
2. Chop the carrots and the potatoes into pieces that fit a spoon. Small pieces cook fast, and the festival does not wait.
3. Put the pot on the fire and pour in the water. Let it come to a gentle boil.
4. Add the carrots and the potatoes. Then add the wheat, which will thicken the stew and keep it from being thin.
5. Add the mushrooms last of all. Mushrooms soften in a few moments and go dark. If you put them in too early, they go to mush.
6. Stir the pot every few minutes, all the way round. The bottom sticks, and the stick is the enemy of the cook.
7. Taste it with a clean spoon, and add salt. Add it a pinch at a time. You can always add more, but you cannot take it out.
8. Serve it in bowls, with bread on the side. Tell the children it is the best stew in the tower, and let them believe you.
The stew is ready when the wheat has swollen and the potatoes come apart when you press them. Everybody will ask for a second bowl. Give it to them. The festival night is long, and it is cold on the stairs.
%%
Letter: Pell to his sister at Ambrook
Summer, the 163rd year of the archive.
Dear Sena,
The road is dry and the carts go fast. I am at the Halfway Inn and the hearth is lit even in summer, which the innkeeper says is for the look of it. The riddle board says a stream has a bed and never sleeps. I got it wrong. I said a fish. I have thought about this for a week.
Prices, since you always ask:
Wheat is steady. Beetroot is cheap and good.
Honey is up. The bees had a good spring at Ambrook, so I hear from the carts.
Copper is steady. Iron is steady. Coal is cheap, which is good for the inn and bad for Copperhold.
Apples will be good this year. Tell Jory to hold his prices. The orchard trees are heavy. I saw them from the road.
There are not many apprentices on the road this year. I passed one at Three Wells carrying crates from the market. It went the same way I did for a while, then turned off toward the school. It did not say anything, of course. It just carried the crates and I carried my ledger and we were good company. When I got to the inn I found it had already brought the innkeeper her flour. So it had been faster than me all along.
The innkeeper's girl is learning sums on the riddle board. She writes them in chalk between the riddles. She is better at sums than I was at her age. Do not tell her I said so.
Give my love to the orchard. I will be home for Apple month.
Your brother, Pell.
%%
Smoked lake fish
Sable, fisher, Northpoint. A smoked fish keeps for a month and is better after the first week. At Longday the best song at the contest wins the biggest one from my smokehouse. This is how they are made.
You need:
6 big fish. Coarse salt. A tub. A smokehouse, or a tall barrel with a lid. Dry birch or oak wood, and damp chips of the same. Spruce is too sharp. It makes the fish taste of the woods.
1. Clean the fish. Open each one flat and take off the head.
2. Rub every fish with salt, inside and out. Lay them in the tub and leave them overnight.
3. In the morning, rinse them and hang them in the wind until the skin feels like a dry leaf.
4. Build a small fire of dry wood in the smokehouse. When it glows red, cover it with the damp chips so it smokes and does not blaze.
5. Hang the fish above the fire, not too near. Shut the door.
6. Smoke them for a day and a night. Add chips when the smoke thins.
7. Take them out when they are the color of dark honey. Hang them in the cool for two days before you eat.
A note on the prize. Last year it went to a song that had no fish in it. There was a quarrel. The fish was shared out. Everyone said they were satisfied. Nobody was.
How to tell when it is ready: press the thick part with a thumb. It should spring back, like a ripe apple.
A note on wood. Pell sells apple wood from Ambrook, in bundles. It makes the sweetest smoke of all. Pell says it is for smoking, not for burning, and watches how you carry it.
A note on the cat. The cat knows when the smokehouse is open. Close the door behind you.
%%
The broken lamp at the mill pond
A note from Jory, miller at Ambrook, copied into the archive by a traveler who passed through. Jory could not write it all himself, he says, on account of his hands being floury, so the traveler wrote and Jory nodded.
The relay lamp on the hill above the mill pond broke in the storm on the third of Swarm. Lightning came down close and the glass in the lamp room cracked. The keeper, a quiet man named Sedge, came down the hill at dawn with the pieces in his hat.
We sent word south along the road to Vell. The clerks there said a lamp of that size could be mended, but the glass panes must come from Saltreach and the copper ring from Copperhold. So the road carried it: glass up from the port, copper down from the mines, and a tutor from Vell came out to set the lamp right.
For a while there was no lamp on the hill. The keeper sat at his desk with nothing to send. He said it was the strangest feeling, to have a message and no way to send it. He wrote his messages on paper and put them in the mail cart like anyone else. He said he had forgotten how slow the carts are.
The lamp burned again on the first of Melon. We saw it from the mill yard. Sedge says the new glass is clearer than the old. He says he can see the whole valley through the panes. He says he will keep a spare pane in the relay house now, wrapped in wool, just in case.
The door of the tower is still the old oak, good and sound. The storm did not touch it.
%%
Melon pudding, cold
Maud, the Brown Hen, on the Long Road. Summer work. The melons come in on the carts in Longday, and the carters want something sweet at the end of the day.
You need:
One ripe melon.
Two spoons of honey.
A little milk.
A pinch of salt.
1. Cut the melon in half. Scoop out the seeds with a spoon.
2. Scrape the flesh into the bowl. Mash it well.
3. Stir in the honey and the salt.
4. Add the milk a little at a time, until it is smooth and thick.
5. Put the bowl in the cold well for an hour.
Serve it in the small cups, with the spoon on the side. Do not let the children near it before the carters have had theirs.
%%
Honey apples
Ash, at the house by the edge of Northpoint. The bees are far south, but the jar came with the road men.
You need:
Two apples.
One spoon of honey.
A little water.
1. Wash the apples.
2. Cut them into pieces and take out the seeds.
3. Put the pieces in a pot with a little water.
4. Cook them until they are soft.
5. Stir in the honey.
6. Share them while they are warm.
The jar had a tight lid and a strip of cloth under it. My mother said the cloth kept the honey from spilling on the long road. I scraped the last honey from the spoon. My little sister watched and said I had missed a spot. She was right.
%%
Pudding for the first snow
Written by Lorn, for the children of the farm, who asked for a pudding that tastes like snow. It is made in summer, when the first snow is still a long way off. Summer, the hot month, when the children were sure the snow would never come.

You need:
A pot of milk, the cream left on top.
Four spoons of honey.
Two eggs.
A little vanilla from the Saltreach cart, if you can get it.
A handful of white flour.
A bowl of fresh snow from the ice house, kept under straw since the frost.

1. Warm the milk gently. Do not let it boil. A boiled milk has a skin, and the children will not eat the skin.
2. Beat the eggs with the honey until they are thick and pale.
3. Stir the flour into the eggs, a spoon at a time, so there are no lumps.
4. Pour the warm milk onto the eggs slowly, stirring all the while.
5. Put the pot back on the fire and stir until it thickens. It should coat the spoon like cream. Take it off before it sticks.
6. Add the vanilla, if you have it, and let the pudding cool for a little while.
7. Spoon the pudding into bowls. Set a small spoon of ice-house snow on each. The snow will melt slowly, and the children will watch it go.

The children say the pudding tastes like the first snow on the ridge, cold at the top and warm at the bottom. Lorn says it tastes like honey and eggs, and that the snow is only for looking at, the same as the gold on the carrots at Three Wells. The children do not agree with her. They say the snow is the best part.
%%
Potato cakes from the last sack
Ossa, Saltreach. Deepsnow. It is the longest winter anyone at the quay can remember, and the potatoes in the cellar have sprouted. By now you can almost taste the spring in them. Do not waste them. This is how.
First, sort. Cut off every sprout, with a deep cut around each eye. Cut away anything green. If a potato is mostly green or soft, throw it out. Better a small supper than a sick night.
You need:
Six good potatoes.
One egg, if the hens are laying.
Two handfuls of wheat flour.
A big pinch of salt.
Butter for the pan.
1. Boil the potatoes in their skins until a knife goes in with no push at all.
2. Drain them. Peel them while hot. Hold them in a cloth, or you will dance.
3. Mash them in a bowl until no lumps are left. A lump in a potato cake is a small surprise, and nobody wants a surprise at supper.
4. Mix in the egg and the salt. Add the flour a handful at a time, until the dough holds together and does not stick to your hands.
5. Pat the dough into round cakes, as wide as your palm and as thick as your thumb.
6. Heat the pan. Melt a little butter. Lay in as many cakes as fit without touching.
7. Cook until the bottom is brown and crisp. Turn once. Not twice. A cake turned twice falls apart.
8. Eat them hot, with salt or a spoon of apple jam, depending on your mood.
Ballast has taken to sitting on the cellar steps, looking at the sack. I think he believes the sprouts are mice. He guards them better than the lock.
%%
Pell's honey carrot pudding
Pell, the Brown Hen. Melon, 197.

For a small pudding, take four carrots, one cup of flour, one egg, half a cup of milk, two spoons of honey, and a spoon of butter. Add a pinch of salt. The carrots must be fresh. The carrots in my cart had spent three days beside the road, and one had begun to bend toward the ditch.

1. Wash the carrots and scrape off the dirt.
2. Grate them into a bowl.
3. Mix the flour and salt in another bowl.
4. Beat the egg with the milk and honey.
5. Stir the wet mixture into the flour.
6. Add the carrots and mix until even.
7. Rub the butter around a small baking dish.
8. Pour in the batter.
9. Bake until the top is firm and a wooden spoon comes out clean.
10. Let the pudding rest before cutting.
11. Serve warm with a little honey.

It is good after a long walk and keeps well until supper. Cover it with a cloth, not a lid. The Brown Hen's cat can lift the lid. I have watched her try three times, and she has learned from each mistake.
%%
Bread and buns, the Kettle Ridge book
Bel of Three Wells wrote to ask for the bun recipe for the school. Here it is, Bel. Ten buns is not enough for a school. Make twenty, and keep two for the teacher, who will ask.
THE BREAD
You need: five cups of wheat flour, two cups of warm water, a pinch of salt, a spoon of honey, and a spoon of sour starter from the crock by the well.
1. Mix the flour and the salt in the big bowl. Make a hollow in the middle.
2. Pour in the water, the honey and the starter. Mix with your hand, not the spoon, so you can feel when it is ready.
3. Knead it until the mill has squeaked thirty times. The mill squeaks on every turn, so the bread is always ready at about thirty.
4. Leave it under a cloth by the fire until it has doubled. Keep the cat off it. The cat will say it is only checking.
5. Shape it into loaves. Bake for an hour, or until it sounds hollow when you knock on the bottom.
Pip kneads the dough through all of the mill's thirty squeaks, and it does not get tired. That is the one thing about it I envy.
THE BUNS
You need: two cups of wheat flour, a spoon of honey, one egg, half a cup of milk, a handful of dried apples from Ambrook, and a pinch of salt.
1. Chop the dried apples small. They are sticky, so wet the knife.
2. Mix the flour, the salt and the honey. Add the egg and the milk, and then the apples.
3. Roll the dough into rounds the size of a fist. Set them on the greased tray a hand apart, because they grow.
4. Bake until golden on top, about as long as it takes to sweep the yard.
THE POTATO CAKES
You need: four potatoes, boiled and mashed, a cup of wheat flour, a spoon of pork fat, and a pinch of salt.
1. Mix the potato and the fat while it is still warm.
2. Add the flour and the salt. Work it into a soft dough. Do not overwork it, or the cakes come out like stones.
3. Pat the dough flat on the board, as thick as your thumb. Cut it into rounds with the rim of a cup.
4. Fry them in the pan with a little fat until both sides are brown. Eat them hot. They do not wait for anyone.
THE PICKLED BEETROOT
You need: four beetroot, boiled soft, a jar of cold water, a handful of salt, and a spoon of honey.
1. Peel the beetroot when it is cool. Slice it thin.
2. Pack the slices into the clean jar.
3. Boil the water with the salt and the honey for one minute. Let it cool a little.
4. Pour it over the beetroot until it is covered. Put the lid on and leave it on the cold shelf for a week.
The pickle is ready when the water turns the color of a red sky at dusk.
Notes: The Kettle Inn buys the loaves at dawn. They pay in honey, which we do not need, and in news, which we do. The scarecrow's pumpkin head has watched every batch since spring. It has never once said anything about it, and I value that in a scarecrow.
%%
Recipe: willow bark tea
Wren's tea for fever, set down in winter at the house at the edge of Lowmarsh. She has made it for thirty years, for children and for old people, for farmers and for fishers. This winter she is asked for it every day.
Take: a handful of willow bark, shaved fine; a cup of water; a spoon of honey; a slice of apple; a pinch of dried mint.
1. Put the willow bark in a small pot with the water.
2. Bring it to the boil. Turn down the heat. Simmer gently for a quarter of an hour.
3. Strain it into a cup. The liquid should be pale brown.
4. Stir in the honey.
5. Add the slice of apple and the mint, if you have them.
6. Let it stand a moment. Drink it warm.
7. Give a cup in the morning and a cup at night.
Keep the patient warm. Give them soup and bread. Do not let them go out. If the fever lasts three days, send for Wren.
A note. The fever this winter is a strange one. It comes with a grey cough that stays. Some say it is in the water. Some say it comes from the ships at Saltreach. Some say from the mines at Copperhold. Wren says she has not found the cause. She has found that the tea helps, and that the warm room helps more, and that a kind word helps most.
There are people who say the sickness will pass with the spring. There are people who say it will not. Wren does not argue. She boils the water, and she waits.
She keeps the tea on the shelf by the door. She keeps the door open, so people may come.
%%
Winter market dish
Ada, weaver at Kettle Ridge. This is for a day when the market is busy and the snow has found the gaps in your boots. It feeds a few people and leaves a warm smell in the stall kitchen.
Last winter, a traveler came from Saltreach with a sack of dried fish. He said the harbor was full of ships larger than the boats there. A woman from the ridge said that was market talk. The traveler said he had seen them himself. They bought each other a bowl and did not settle it.
You need:
Two potatoes.
Two carrots.
One small beetroot.
A cup of wheat flour.
A spoon of pork fat.
A cup of milk.
One egg.
A little salt.
A spoon of honey.
1. Peel the potatoes, carrots, and beetroot.
2. Cut the vegetables into small pieces.
3. Put them in a pot with enough water to cover them.
4. Add a little salt and cook until the vegetables are soft.
5. Pour the flour into a bowl.
6. Rub the pork fat into the flour.
7. Beat the egg with the milk and honey.
8. Stir the milk mixture into the flour until it makes a thick batter.
9. Grease a shallow pan and pour in the batter.
10. Bake until the top is brown and a clean straw comes out dry.
11. Serve the warm vegetables beside the bread.
At the market, we held a song contest by the well. The miller sang about a squeaking wheel. Tam sang about a missing boot. I sang the tune my mother used for winding wool. The prize was a jar of honey, and the judges gave it to the child who sang loudest.
%%
Potato bake for the roof crew
Written for the crew of six who mended the back roof of the edge house in the second week of Melon. Feeds six people who have been on a roof all day. Or two people who have been on a roof for an hour and are very hungry.

You need:
Six potatoes, medium, with the eyes cut out.
Two carrots.
Two beetroots, for sweetness.
A cup of milk.
A cup of cheese, grated, from the Vell cellar.
A spoon of butter.
Salt, and a little pepper.

1. Scrub the potatoes. Do not peel them. The skins keep the goodness in.
2. Slice the potatoes thin, about the thickness of a coin. Slice the carrots and the beetroots the same way.
3. Grease a deep pan with the butter. Lay in a layer of potatoes, then a layer of carrot and beetroot. Salt the layer lightly.
4. Repeat the layers until the pan is full. Finish with potatoes on top.
5. Pour the milk over the top slowly, so it goes in between the slices.
6. Scatter the cheese over the top. Add a pinch of pepper.
7. Cover the pan with a lid, or with a flat stone if the lid is in the house.
8. Bake in the bread oven for about an hour, until the potatoes give when pierced with a knife.
9. Take off the lid. Leave it to rest for the length of one song. Then cut it into squares and serve.

The crew ate it all. Hanna ate the corner pieces, which were crisp, and then she ate the middle pieces, which were soft, and then she said she would like to be buried under the roof she had just mended. Nobody asked her to explain.

If the bake is watery, the milk was too much or the potatoes were too wet from the well. Next time, let the slices dry on a cloth first. Nobody on the crew will know, so it does not matter. Still, I will know.
%%
Nessa's carrot and honey cake
A gift cake. Hild, whose bees swarmed into my sister's apple tree, gave me the swarm and would not take emeralds. I said I would bake. She said that was payment enough. I made this cake and took it to her warm.

You need:
Two cups of wheat flour.
One cup of honey.
Three eggs.
One cup of grated carrot.
Half a cup of melted butter.
A pinch of salt.

1. Beat the eggs and the honey until they are pale and thick. This takes longer than you think. Do not stop early.
2. Fold in the flour and the salt. Fold. Do not stir hard.
3. Add the carrot and the butter. Mix them in gently.
4. Pour the batter into a greased pan.
5. Bake slowly until a straw comes out clean.
6. Cool it a little, wrap it in a cloth, and give it away.

It keeps for three days, if it lasts for one.
%%
Apple oat cakes
Hob, farm outside Ambrook. Frost, 164.

The bridge plank is loose again. I set a basket on it to hold it down while I mend the rail. The basket tipped, and the apples rolled into the ditch. I kept the clean ones. A little mud does not spoil a cake.

You need:
Two apples.
A cup of oats.
A cup of flour.
A spoon of honey.
A little water.
A pinch of salt.

1. Wash the apples and cut away the bad places.
2. Grate them into a bowl.
3. Stir in the oats, flour, honey and salt.
4. Add water a spoon at a time until the mix holds together.
5. Make small flat cakes with your hands.
6. Cook them on a warm iron plate. Turn each cake when its edge is firm.
7. Let them cool before you stack them.

The first one always breaks. Hob says it is a test cake. The geese say it is theirs.
%%
The apprentice drill at the fair
Bel, at Three Wells. I am nine. This is my essay for school. The teacher said write about the fair. I wrote about the fair and the apprentice.
Every summer there is a fair at Three Wells. The stalls go round the three wells and the roads cross like an X. There is a man who sells honey and a woman who sells wool. There is a bell and there are lamps at every corner. In the evening the lamps are lit and the whole square is gold.
This year there was a tutor from Vell with a table by the east well. On the table were crystals on little cards. One card said Farm. One card said Build. The tutor let children watch the drills. She showed us a small mind in a crystal and she showed it rows of seeds. Some were wheat and some were beetroot. The mind guessed which was which. At first it was wrong a lot. Each time it was wrong the tutor changed it a little. By the end it got most of them right. The tutor said a mind learns by being wrong and changing. I thought about that all the way home.
There was an apprentice too. It was made of copper and iron and it walked and it carried. The tutor gave it orders. She said, bring me some bread. The apprentice went to the baker and came back with bread. The card by the tutor's bench said, fetch bread. I asked the tutor if it could talk. She said no, it answers by doing. And it did. It brought the bread.
My little brother asked the apprentice to come. It came. It stood by us the whole afternoon and watched the fair. It did not say anything. It did not need to. When the lamps were lit it was still standing there, and the tutor had to give it the order home.
This is the best fair I have been to. I hope the tutor comes back next year with more crystals.
%%
Soup for a cold crossing
Ossa, Saltreach ferry. A winter wind on the inlet goes through a coat as if it were a net. On cold mornings I give each passenger a stone jug of soup, wrapped in wool. They hold it with both hands the whole way over. It is the best part of the crossing.
You need, for eight jugs:
Eight carrots, in rounds.
Eight potatoes, in cubes.
One pork bone, or two fish heads.
A good spoon of salt.
A spoon of honey.
Eight stone jugs with stoppers.
Eight pieces of wool, big enough to wrap a jug twice.
1. Put the bone and water in the big pot. Boil it for as long as it takes to ferry six people across and back.
2. Take out the bone. Add the carrots and potatoes.
3. Cook until the potatoes start to fall apart. That is what you want. A thin soup goes cold in the jug. A thick one stays hot.
4. Add the salt and the honey. Taste. The honey is not there to make it sweet. It is there to make it round.
5. Warm the jugs with hot water first, then pour it out. A cold jug steals the heat.
6. Fill each jug nearly to the top. Press in the stopper. Wrap it in wool, twice around.
Passengers pay one emerald for the crossing and one for the jug. They get the second emerald back when the jug comes home. People return the jugs. Mostly. Pell took one all the way to Ambrook last year and sent it back with a jar of honey inside. I count that as returned.
%%
Winter-cellar cheese
Hazel, cheesemaker, at the market at Northpoint. I wrote this in spring, when I could think about winter without a shiver.
Northpoint has long nights and short days. The first snow can come before Leaffall or after Frost. If you make cheese in the autumn and the snow is late, you worry. If the snow is early, you worry more. Here is what I do.
For the cheese:
1. Milk the goats at dawn. The milk should be warm.
2. Put the milk in a big pot and warm it a little more, not hot. Add rennet from the calf's stomach, a spoonful, and a pinch of salt.
3. Stir once. Cover with a cloth. Leave in a warm place for an hour.
4. When it sets, cut the curd in cubes the size of a thumb. Stir slowly for ten minutes while it warms.
5. Pour into a cloth bag and hang it from a beam to drip all day.
6. Next day, press under a stone for another day.
7. Rub with salt and set in the cellar on a wooden shelf.
8. Turn it every morning for a month.
For the first snow:
Carry the cheeses down to the cold cellar. The one under the relay house is cold all winter, and Mira lets us use the back shelf. She asks only for a wheel at midwinter.
Cover each cheese with a little wax, so the cold does not crack the rind. Mark the date on the wax with a pin.
Count them twice. Count them again when the snow is deep. Count them in the long nights. It is a good thing to have something to count.
When spring comes, take the cheeses out and open one. The first one is always the best. Share it with someone who helped you through the dark.
%%
Sweet bread, the cart in the mud
Bel, at the farm outside Three Wells, on the morning the cart went into the ditch. Dad says a sweet bread is the best cure for a stuck cart, because everyone is too busy eating to be cross.
You need:
Three cups of flour.
One cup of honey.
Two eggs.
A little milk.
1. Warm the honey in the pot until it runs.
2. Beat the eggs into the honey.
3. Stir in the flour, a little at a time, and add milk until it holds together.
4. Pour into the tin and bake until the top is brown.
5. Let it cool, then cut it into thick slices and give one to the man with the cart.
%%
Lise's honey oat cakes
Lise, weaver, at the house at the edge of Vell. I make these on baking day. The house smells of honey and the hill smells of rain.
You need:
Two cups of oats.
One cup of flour.
A cup of honey from the hives on the hill.
A little butter.
A pinch of salt.
An egg from the hen house.
1. Warm the honey in a small pan until it runs.
2. Mix the oats, the flour and the salt in a bowl.
3. Add the honey and the butter. Stir it well.
4. Break the egg in and stir again.
5. Make little cakes with a spoon and put them on a flat stone or a tray.
6. Bake them by the oven until they are brown at the edge.
They keep for days in a dry box. They are good with tea and good in a pocket on the road. My neighbor says the cakes at Three Wells are better. She has not tried mine.
%%
One pot, five suppers
Ossa, Saltreach. Deepsnow, and the ice has not left the inlet. It is a long winter. The cellar is half of what it should be and the winter has half to go. The way through, I have found, is to cook one good pot and use it five ways.
Day one: the pot.
You need:
Four beetroots, four potatoes and four carrots, in big pieces.
A pork bone, or the head of a cod.
Two handfuls of dried mushrooms.
Salt.
1. Put the bone in a big pot with water to cover. Boil it for as long as it takes to cross the inlet twice.
2. Take the bone out. Add the roots and the mushrooms.
3. Cook until the roots are soft. Salt to taste.
4. Eat one third of the pot with bread. Leave the rest.
Day two: soup.
1. Warm what is left and thin it with water. Add a spoon of honey.
2. Eat half of it with bread.
Day three: pie.
1. Mash what remains with a spoon, roots and all, until it is thick and dark.
2. Put it in a dish. Cover it with thin slices of raw potato, overlapping like roof stones.
3. Brush the top with melted butter. Bake until the potato is golden.
4. Eat half. Let the other half go cold.
Day four: cakes.
1. Cut the cold pie into squares. Fry them in butter until crisp at the edges.
2. Eat them with a spoon of jam. It sounds strange. It works.
Day five: broth.
1. Put every scrap into the pot: the bone, the peels, the crusts, the last crumbs of the pie.
2. Cover with water and boil slowly all afternoon.
3. Strain it through a cloth. Drink it hot from a cup. It is thin and it is warm, and by the fifth day that is all you want.
Then start again.
Ballast stopped looking hopeful on day four. I do not blame him.
%%
Warm pumpkin and potato mash
Ash, at the house on the north edge of the field. The summer light stays late here. Father says the new path will join the road before the leaves fall.
You need:
A piece of pumpkin.
Two potatoes.
A cup of water.
A pinch of salt.
A spoon of honey.
1. Wash the potatoes and scrape the dirt from the pumpkin.
2. Cut the potatoes into small pieces. Cut the pumpkin into pieces about as big.
3. Put them in a pot with the water and salt.
4. Cook them until both are soft. Stir now and then so they do not stick.
5. Pour off some water into a cup. Keep it in case the mash is too stiff.
6. Mash the pumpkin and potatoes together.
7. Stir in the honey. Add a little cooking water if the mash is dry.
8. Serve it warm, with bread if there is any.
My cousin came from the lower field while I was stirring. She brought a jar of honey from Ambrook, wrapped in wool so it would not knock against the cart. The jar was warm from the sun. We used one spoon in the pot and saved the rest for the road men.
They are making the path past our fence. It runs between the field and the spruce line. Father says it will meet the main road near the next waymark. The men found a cave under the field while they were clearing stones. It has a low mouth and cool air. No one has gone far inside. Mother says the field must stay safe, so Father put a fence around the opening.
I asked if the cave might reach Northpoint. He said it might reach only a few steps, and we should not guess before looking. Tomorrow the men will bring torches. I will bring them water, and I will not go past the fence.
%%
Melon, too big for the cart
Written by Hob, from the ferry house, for the market at Copperhold, where he took his melon to sell in the autumn. This is what happened, and what he did about it.

The melon was grown in the ferry garden. It had been watered every day from the crossing pond, and it had been fed with ash from the stove, and it had grown all summer in the one warm corner by the fence. In the autumn it was the largest melon anybody on the ferry road had ever seen.

Hob tried to lift it into the cart on the morning of the market. It did not lift. He tried with two men and a rope. It did not lift either. The melon sat in its bed of straw like a fat green stone, and the cart creaked under it.

So Hob took the melon to the market on the ferry, in the boat, sitting in the middle, with the two men rowing. The ferry sank an inch in the water. The men said nothing about it.

At Copperhold, the market stall-keepers came down to the landing to see. They said it was the biggest melon ever seen on the Long Road, and that it could not possibly be sold in one piece. They were right. Nobody could carry it home. Nobody could cut it with a knife.

So Hob cut it with a saw, which he had borrowed from the mill. He cut it into twelve pieces. He sold each piece for a copper, to a child, who carried it home in both hands, very proud. By noon the melon was gone. The boat was clean. The men were paid in slices, which they said was the best wage they had ever had.

The melon is still talked about at the Copperhold market. The children say it was the one that got away from the cart. The men say it was the one that sank the ferry an inch. Hob says it was simply a good melon, and that he will grow a bigger one next year, if he can find a bigger cart.
%%
Winter stew for the carters, the big pot
Bel, at the farm outside Three Wells. Carters come up the road in winter with their feet frozen. This stew is for them. It is made in the big pot, and it is never finished, because there is always another cart.
You need:
Six carrots.
Three potatoes.
A piece of mutton, or a bone with meat on it.
A handful of leeks from the garden.
Water and salt.
1. Put the mutton in the pot with water. Let it simmer until the meat falls off the bone.
2. Take out the bone. Cut the meat small and put it back.
3. Chop the carrots, potatoes and leeks. Put them in the pot.
4. Cook until everything is soft. Mash a little of the potato so the stew thickens.
5. Salt it, and taste it, and salt it again.
6. Keep the pot at the side of the fire all winter. Add water and vegetables as the carts come in.
The carters had a bet this year. Dad said the stew would last the winter. Tom the carter said it would not last the week. Tom lost, because the stew is still in the pot, and he has been eating from it every time he passes.
Tom says the winter stew is the best on the road, and that the bet was for the stew, and that he will pay Dad in bowls.
%%
Nessa's swarm-day buns
For the neighbors who come running when the bees swarm. Written at my sister's farm outside Vell, in summer, the day a swarm hung from the apple tree by the gate.

You need:
Three cups of wheat flour.
Half a cup of honey.
One cup of warm milk.
Two eggs.
A pinch of salt.

1. Warm the milk and honey together until the honey melts.
2. Beat in the eggs. Add the flour and salt. Mix until smooth.
3. Cover the bowl with a cloth. Leave it by the stove for one hour.
4. Shape twelve buns. Bake until golden.

Do not bake while the swarm is near. The smell of warm honey makes the bees sit on the oven.
Makes twelve. Enough for six neighbors who say they will take only one.
%%
Recipe: Wren's honey and ginger drink
For a cough in the long winter. Wren, at the house at the edge of Lowmarsh.
Take: 1 spoon of honey, a thumb of ginger, a cup of hot water.
1. Slice the ginger thin.
2. Pour the hot water over it. Let it stand while you count to two hundred.
3. Stir in the honey.
4. Drink it slowly, by the stove.
Make it three times a day. It will not cure the grey cough. It will make you feel looked after.
%%
Spring Greens With Egg
Recipe from Talla at the farm beyond the east road from Three Wells.
Ingredients:
Young carrots, beetroot leaves, two eggs, a spoon of butter, salt, and bread.
Steps:
1. Pick only clean leaves from the garden.
2. Wash the leaves twice in the yard. Mud makes a poor seasoning.
3. Chop the leaves and carrots into small pieces.
4. Melt the butter in a pan over the hearth.
5. Add the carrots first. Stir them until they begin to soften.
6. Add the leaves and salt. Cook until the leaves are dark and tender.
7. Beat the eggs in a cup and pour them over the greens.
8. Stir slowly until the eggs are firm.
9. Serve with bread while it is warm.
Colm came from the wall and asked whether this was a meal or a garden in a pan. He ate two helpings before asking. He left the last crust for my little boy, who gave it to the hen. The hen has been following Colm ever since.
%%
Fish pie for the song contest
Sable, fisher, Northpoint. At Longday the camp holds a song contest, and every house brings a dish. This is the pie I bring. It has never won. It has been eaten every year, which is the real prize.
You need:
For the crust: 3 cups of flour, a pinch of salt, half a cup of pork fat, cold water.
For the filling: 2 lake fish, 3 potatoes, 2 carrots, a handful of dried apple, salt.
1. Rub the fat into the flour with cold fingers until it looks like crumbs. Add water a spoon at a time. Make a ball and let it rest.
2. Boil the potatoes and carrots until soft. Cut them into cubes.
3. Clean the fish. Lay it in a pan with a little water and steam it until it flakes.
4. Mix the fish, potatoes, carrots and apple. Salt it.
5. Roll out two crusts. Line a dish with one. Pour in the filling. Cover with the other and pinch the edges. Cut three slits for the steam.
6. Bake in a hot oven until the top is golden and the smell reaches the lake.
Sing after the pie, not before. A singer with a full mouth cannot lose.
%%
Honey cake, a bet on the hill
Ned, at the farm outside Three Wells, in winter, after a bet about the honey. Ned said he could eat a whole cake before the bread was ready. He lost. He says the cake was not ready either.
You need:
Two cups of flour.
Half a cup of butter, soft.
One cup of honey.
Two eggs.
A pinch of salt, and a little cold tea.
1. Beat the butter and the honey together until pale.
2. Add the eggs one at a time, beating each in.
3. Fold in the flour and salt gently. Do not beat it.
4. Add tea a spoon at a time, until the batter drops off the spoon in a slow lump.
5. Pour into the tin. Bake until a knife comes out clean.
6. Wait until it is cold before you bet on it. Ned did not wait.
The bet was a copper coin against a jar of jam. Ned lost the coin and ate the jam, and he says that was a fair trade for the coin, which he never liked.
%%
Recipe: honey cakes for the road
Rye, orchard keeper, a farm outside Vell. Spring.
What goes in: 3 cups flour, 1 jar of honey, 2 eggs, a pinch of salt, butter the size of an egg.
1. Warm the honey and butter together.
2. Stir in the eggs, then the flour and salt.
3. Drop spoonfuls on a hot tray.
4. Bake until brown at the edges.
Take them on the road. They keep a week. The cat will not stay out of the basket.
%%
Nessa: a swarm, and what to do with it
A swarm of bees hung from the apple tree by the gate at my sister's farm outside Vell, this summer. It was the size of a pumpkin, and it hummed. I have kept the steps in order, because the next swarm will come when I am not here to remember them.

First, what a swarm is. In summer, when a hive is full, half the bees leave with the old queen to find a new home. They hang together on a branch for an hour or a day while they send scouts. A swarm is gentle. The bees have filled themselves with honey for the journey, and a bee with a full belly does not want to sting. Even so, do not wave. Do not shout. Do not hit.

The signs. A day or two before, the hive grows crowded. The bees hang outside the door in a beard. The hum changes. Then, on a warm still noon, they pour out. If you see the beard, be near.

You need:
A veil.
A wooden box or a big basket with a lid.
A white cloth.
A saw, for the branch.
A neighbor who keeps bees. Hild came.

1. Spread the white cloth on the ground under the branch.
2. Hold the box under the swarm.
3. Give the branch one short, firm shake. The swarm falls into the box in a lump.
4. Turn the box over on the cloth and prop one edge up with a stick.
5. Wait. The bees at the edge will walk in. The ones still flying will follow, to be with the queen. This takes until dusk.
6. At dusk, close the lid and carry the box to the hive. Tip the bees in at the door.

If the swarm is high and you cannot shake it, saw the branch and lower it. If the swarm leaves, let it. It was never yours.

The honey. A new swarm gives no honey in its first summer. It uses everything to build. Do not take any. A hive that is robbed in its first year may not live. Wait for next summer.

Meanwhile, bake. Honey from an old hive made these buns, and the neighbors came, and ate every one. I have set them down on another page.

I thanked Hild. She said bees are not given, they are lent. I think that is right. I think it is how one ought to keep anything.
%%
Honey apples for the fair
Hob, farm outside Ambrook. Frost, 172.

The winter fair is tomorrow at the mill pond. We will take apples, honey and these baked apples. Do not set the tray by the open door. The cold makes the honey hard, and the cat will sit on the warmest place.

You need:
Four firm apples.
Four spoons of honey.
A handful of oats.
A small piece of butter.
A pinch of salt.
A little water.

1. Wash the apples.
2. Cut a small lid from the top of each apple.
3. Scoop out the seeds with a spoon. Leave the bottom whole.
4. Mix the oats, honey and salt in a bowl.
5. Put the mix inside the apples.
6. Set the apples in a baking dish. Add two spoons of water.
7. Put a small piece of butter on each apple.
8. Cover them with their lids.
9. Bake until the apples are soft and the skins wrinkle.
10. Lift them carefully onto a plate. The filling is hot.

We will carry them in the covered basket. Last year Pell ate one before we reached the square. He said he was checking the quality. This year he can check the basket handle instead.
%%
Sweet berry tart
Sable, fisher, Northpoint. The sweet berries on the hill ripen in Longday, just in time for the song contest. The singers' table needs something sweet, because singers get hoarse, and hoarse singers get cross.
You need:
For the crust: 3 cups of flour, half a cup of pork fat, a spoon of honey, 1 egg, a pinch of salt.
For the filling: 4 big handfuls of sweet berries, 3 spoons of honey, 1 spoon of flour.
To finish: 1 beaten egg.
1. Rub the fat into the flour. Mix in the honey and the egg. Press it into a ball and leave it in a cool place.
2. Pick the berries in the morning, when they are cool. Mind the thorns. The bushes have opinions, and they share them.
3. Toss the berries in a bowl with the honey and the flour.
4. Roll out the dough in a big round. Lay it on a flat pan, with the edge hanging over.
5. Pile the berries in the middle. Fold the edge up over them, a little at a time, and leave the middle open.
6. Brush the folded edge with the beaten egg.
7. Bake until the edge is brown and the juice bubbles at the middle.
8. Let it cool a little. A hot tart burns the mouth and the singer's pride.
One tart cuts into twelve slices. There are always fourteen singers. Cut thinner.
The contest has its rules. One song each. No song longer than it takes to eat a slice. The judges are the three oldest at the table, who are each deaf in a different ear and will not say which. Last year old Pim sang the wall watch song again, the same one as the year before, and won again. Nobody could remember how it went the first time.
For a plainer tart, leave out the honey and use more berries. For a richer one, add a spoon of cream to the filling.
The children pick as many berries as they eat, so send twice as many children as you need. The ones who come home with blue hands have been honest.
%%
Summer beetroot and apple pot
Ash, at the house just beyond the last Northpoint fence. I made this while Father helped mark the road.
You need:
Two beetroot.
One apple.
One small potato.
A bowl of water.
A pinch of salt.
1. Wash the beetroot, apple and potato.
2. Cut the beetroot and potato into small pieces. Cut the apple last.
3. Put the beetroot and potato in a pot with the water and salt.
4. Cook them until a fork goes through the potato.
5. Add the apple pieces and cook until they soften.
6. Stir the pot and taste it. Add a little more salt if needed.
7. Serve it in bowls while it is warm.
The beetroot made the water red. My little sister thought the pot was full of berries and asked for a spoon before it was done. Father came in with dust on his boots. He said the road men had reached the bend by the spruce trees. They will put a waymark there next. I want to paint the number on it, but Father says I must first learn to keep the paint off my sleeves.
%%
Recipe: the cat's fish
Our cat, who is called Sprig, will not stay out of the kitchen. She has been told. She has been put out of the back door and in through the window. She has been given a bed by the stove and a basket on the shelf. She still comes to the table when the fish is cooking. This is how we have made peace with her.
What goes in:
One small fish, from the weir, cleaned
Half a cup of cooked barley
A pinch of salt, not more
A little of the fish water from the pot
1. Take the fish from the pot after it has cooked. Let it cool on the board.
2. Pick out all the bones. Pick them out twice. A cat that swallows a bone will sit by the stove for a week and be sorry.
3. Mash the fish with a fork and mix in the barley.
4. Add the salt, which must be very little. Cats do not need salt, and Sprig is not to be trusted with it.
5. Pour the fish water over the mixture to make it soft.
6. Put the bowl on the step by the back door. Do not put it on the table.
7. Call her by the name Sprig. Then go and sit in the other room and let her come to you.
Note: she will come. She always comes when she is not called. She has never once come when she was called. The fish is for the back step, and the step is for the cat, and the kitchen is for the people, and so far everyone has kept to it, except for the cat.
%%
Tam's cow, and what we did
Tam at Kettle Ridge keeps a cow called Daisy. In the third week of Longday she stopped eating. She stood in the corner of the field with her head down and would not come to the gate. Her milk went to almost nothing. Tam was worried. I have never seen him worried about a cow before.
We sent for Wren, the healer from Lowmarsh, on the fast cart. She came in two days. She looked at Daisy a long time. She felt her ears and her nose. She said the cow was too warm and her eyes were dull. She said it might be the wet grass in the low corner of the field, where the water stands after rain.
Here is what Wren had us do:
1. Move Daisy to the dry field by the barn. No more wet grass.
2. Give her clean water, changed twice a day.
3. Give her hay and a mash of crushed barley, a little at a time.
4. Keep her warm at night. We put up a hurdle and straw.
5. Walk her slowly, a little each day, so she does not stiffen.
Wren said we must watch her for a week and send word if she got worse. She got better on the fourth day. She began to eat. On the sixth day she gave milk again, and Tam was so pleased he gave Pip a whole cup of it with honey.
Wren says the lesson is this: keep the low corner of a field drained, and do not let a cow stand in wet grass all day. Tam has dug a ditch in the low corner. He says the ditch is Pip's job next year. Pip says the ditch is a fine ditch. It is a very small ditch.
%%
Fish cakes for a cold week
Mave, cook, Northpoint. The lake ice is too thick for nets, so we eat what came up in the autumn. Salted fish keeps. Potatoes keep. Put them together and nobody complains.
You need:
Two handfuls of salted fish, soaked the night before.
Four potatoes, cooked and cooled.
One egg.
A little flour, to bind.
Sweet herbs from the store if there is any. Otherwise, salt and a pinch of ash.
Fat for the pan.
1. Shred the fish, taking out every bone. Use your fingers, and go slowly. A bone in a cake is a bone in the mouth.
2. Mash the potatoes until smooth.
3. Mix the fish and the potatoes. Beat in the egg.
4. Add the flour a spoon at a time, until the mix holds in a ball.
5. Shape into cakes the size of a palm, and flatten them.
6. Fry them in the hot fat, three minutes each side, until brown at the edges.
7. Drain on a cloth. Eat while hot, with bread.
Lantern asked whether it could make the cakes too. I said yes, if it stood very still and did not touch the pan. It stood very still. It did not touch the pan. The cakes were a little burnt on the bottom, and Lantern said that was the way the pan liked them, and I think it was right.
%%
Making candles, and the ferry winter
Written by Hob at the ferry house, for the families who come across the crossing in the cold months, and who need to know how to keep the light lit when the wind is up. Winter.

The ferry house has four candles on a shelf, and three lanterns on hooks. The candles are for the men who row at night. The lanterns are for the ferry itself. Hob says a lantern is worth two candles on a cold river, because the wind cannot get in.

To make candles at the ferry house, you need: the old wax from the honeycomb, the big pot, a small deep pot, a length of string for the wick, a stick to hang the candles on, and a bucket of cold water.

1. Melt the old comb in the big pot, over a slow fire. The wax rises to the top. Skim it off with a spoon.
2. Let the wax cool in a cake on the water. Lift it off, and throw the dirt away.
3. Melt the clean wax in the small pot, very slowly. Never on a hot fire. Hot wax burns the hand and the house.
4. Cut the wick to the length of your arm, and tie a knot at the end, to hold the weight.
5. Dip the wick in the wax, and lift it out. Let it cool. Dip it again.
6. Repeat until the candle is as thick as a finger. Hob does twenty dips, and says that is the right number for a candle that will last a night on the river.
7. Hang the candles on the stick, in a cool dry place, for a day.
8. Trim the wick before each use, to the width of a fingernail. A long wick smokes and makes the men cough.

Hob says the ferry candles are the best on the river, because they do not smell. The Ambrook candles smell of honey, and the Kettle Ridge candles smell of mutton, but the ferry candles smell of nothing at all, and the men like that. They say a candle should be a light and not a meal.

The crossing is quiet in the cold months. Hob keeps the stove going, and the bread warm, and the candles lit in the window. He says that is all a ferry keeper needs to do, in the winter, to be sure the river knows where he is.
%%
Ambrook market, winter prices
Isla, lamp tender. The board at the market cross, copied as it stood in the 190th year.
Honey, a jar: 3 emeralds.
Beeswax, a cake: 1 emerald.
Apples, a basket: 2 emeralds.
Apple water, a jug: 1 emerald.
Oats, a sack: 4 emeralds.
Bread, a loaf: 1 emerald.
Beetroot, a bunch: 1 emerald.
Cheese, a round: 5 emeralds.
Wool socks, a pair: 2 emeralds.
A warm seat by the brazier: free, if you buy something.
The melon. Do not ask the price of the melon.
Notes from the stall:
The honey this year is dark and strong. The bees had a good summer and a wet Apple month, and they know what they like.
Pell came through with his cart and said our honey was the best on the Long Road. Pell says that everywhere. He bought four jars.
A woman from Three Wells traded a wool blanket for two cakes of wax. Fair, I think, on a cold day.
The socks went fast. Next year, more socks.
%%
Beetroot and honey bread
Toby, relay keeper at the hamlet below Copperhold. This is what we bake on the long summer days when the tower is quiet.
1. Boil two beetroots until a knife goes in easily. Let them cool. Grate them.
2. Warm a cup of milk and stir in a spoon of honey from the jar. The honey must be runny, not set.
3. Add the yeast and wait until it foams.
4. Mix the flour, the grated beetroot, the milk and a pinch of salt.
5. Knead until the dough is soft and stops sticking to your hands.
6. Let it rise under a cloth. One hour is enough in summer.
7. Shape it and bake it hot.
The bread comes out pink inside and sweet. The children ask for it by the color, not the name.
%%
Apple pie for the fair
Bel, at the farm outside Three Wells. The fair is in autumn, and the apple pie is the most argued-about thing in the square. Mother says the crust is everything. Dad says the apples are. The bet this year was a copper coin, and nobody has paid it yet.
You need:
Two cups of flour.
Half a cup of butter, cold.
A little cold water.
Six apples, sour and sweet.
Half a cup of honey.
A pinch of salt, and a pinch of cinnamon from the Ambrook cart, if you can get it.
1. Rub the cold butter into the flour with your fingers, until it looks like crumbs.
2. Add a little water, a spoon at a time, and press the dough into a ball. Do not knead it. Mother says kneading is what makes a crust cry.
3. Cut the apples into thin slices. Mix them with the honey, the salt and the cinnamon.
4. Roll out half the dough and lay it in the tin. Fill it with the apples.
5. Roll out the other half, and lay it on top. Pinch the edges shut. Cut three small holes in the middle, so the steam can get out.
6. Bake until the crust is gold and the apples bubble through the holes.
7. Let it rest until it is only warm. Hot pie is a lie, Mother says, because you cannot taste it.
The bet is that Mother's crust will beat Dad's apples. We will know at the fair. Dad has already said the crust is too thick. Mother has said the apples are too sour. Both of them are right, and both of them will eat two slices.
The judges were Hobb from the Halfway Inn, who has eaten at every fair since the first, and Ida from the bakery, who says a pie is only as good as its neighbours. They sat at the table in the square with a jug of water and a stack of spoons. The first slice was Mother's, and Hobb ate it in silence, which is what he does when a crust is right. The second was Dad's, and Ida ate it standing up, which is what she does when an apple is right. They gave the bet to neither of them. They gave it to the baker's boy, who had eaten both.
%%
Thin potato soup
Mira's recipe, from the farm outside Northpoint, for the winter after the poor harvest. It is not much, but it is hot.
What goes in: 4 potatoes, 1 leek, a spoon of fat, a pinch of salt, water, and whatever green is left in the cellar.
1. Peel the potatoes. Keep the peel for the hens.
2. Chop the leek small and fry it in the fat until soft.
3. Add the potatoes in pieces and cover with water.
4. Boil until the potatoes fall apart. Stir hard.
5. Add salt. Add the green, if you have any.
Serves four, or six if you do not mind.
%%
Fox-proof goat cheese with herbs
Hazel, Northpoint market, in the spring after the long winter. Please read the note first. The recipe is simple and the note is the point.
The note: that winter lasted five months of snow. The goats stopped giving milk in Longnight and began again in Thaw, and between those days I made no cheese. I had only what was in the cellar. I counted eleven wheels and a half. I thought we would eat them in a month. Instead they lasted until the first green grass.
I learned a few things. Cheese made in autumn tastes better after four months of waiting. A fox can smell a cheese through a stone wall. A fox cannot smell a cheese through two stone walls and a wooden door. The apprentices carry the wheels up from the cellar one at a time, and do not drop them. They carry them as if they were eggs. I think they are afraid of me.
I also learned that a long winter makes a person grateful for small things. A bowl of warm goat cheese soup. A candle that does not go out. A neighbor at the door with a spade, who has come to dig you out.
The recipe, for the first fresh milk of spring:
1. Warm two pots of goat milk. When it is as warm as a hand held near a fire, stir in a spoon of rennet. Let it set.
2. While it sets, chop a handful of herbs. Chives are the first to come up in the snow-melt. If there are none, use dried thyme from the jar by the door.
3. Cut the curd and stir it gently. Drain it in a cloth.
4. Mix the curd with the herbs and a pinch of salt. Do not use too much salt. The long winter has taught us to be careful with it.
5. Shape the cheese in your hands into a round. Press a few herb leaves on the outside for decoration.
6. Wrap it in a clean cloth and put it in a cold place for a day.
7. Eat it on the second day, on bread, in the open air if the sun is out. If not, eat it by the stove.
Share it. A cheese eaten alone is a lonely cheese. A cheese eaten with Mira, who says it is too salty, and Lantern, who says it is not salty enough, is a very good cheese.
%%
Setting the relay lamp
Toby, relay keeper at the little tower below Copperhold. Written for Lantern, who will keep a tower one day.
The relay is a lamp on a tower. We light it at dusk and put it out at dawn. A light seen far off means a message is coming, or a message is going, or the keeper is awake. The lamp must be clean, the oil must be full, and the wick must be trimmed. A dirty lamp shows a weak light and the next tower cannot see it.
1. Climb the stair in daylight. Check the glass panes. A cracked pane throws the light wrong.
2. Wipe the glass inside and out with a soft cloth.
3. Fill the oil pot. Do not overfill it. The oil runs down the wall and the wall smells for a month.
4. Trim the wick to the width of your little finger.
5. At dusk, light the wick with a long splint from the stove below.
6. Watch the light for ten breaths. It should be steady. If it flutters, there is a draft. Find the gap and close it.
7. At dawn, put the lamp out and note the night in the log.
The log is a book. Every night has a line. The wind, the rain, the visitors, the lamp. If the lamp failed, say so. If you were late, say so. Nobody minds a late lamp. Everybody minds a lie in the log.
My brother Tam sends messages through this tower to Northpoint, where our sister Mira keeps the far tower. He sends three words at a time if he can. Fine. Rain. Bees well. She sends back the same. It is not much, but it is a line from here to the north, and it holds.
Keep the torches lit round the foot of the tower. People come up the hill at night to look at the light. They should not fall in the dark.
%%
The bet pie
Ida and Hollis, bakers of Three Wells, with a note from Dace. In Longnight, Ida bet Hollis a week of dawns at the oven that he could not make a pie to beat her pumpkin pie. Hollis made this one. The mayor judged. The mayor will not say who won. The mayor has asked for the recipe.

For the crust:
Two cups of flour. A spoon of pork fat. A pinch of salt. Cold water.
For the inside:
One small pumpkin, roasted and mashed. Two apples, peeled and sliced thin. Three spoons of honey. A spoon of flour. Two eggs. A pinch of salt.

1. Make the crust. Rub the fat into the flour with your fingers until it looks like sand. Add cold water a spoon at a time, until it holds. Do not knead it. Rest it somewhere cool.
2. Cut the pumpkin in half. Roast it cut side down in a hot oven until it is soft. Scoop it out and mash it.
3. Beat the eggs with the honey. Stir in the pumpkin, the flour and the salt.
4. Roll the crust and fit it into a deep pan. Pour in the pumpkin.
5. Lay the apple slices on top, in a circle, like the petals of a flower.
6. Bake in a medium oven until the crust is brown and the middle does not wobble. Cool it before you cut it, or it will run, and so will the bakers.

The result. Hollis says the apples are what make it. Ida says the pumpkin is what makes it. The mayor ate a slice of each, and then a second slice of each, and then fell asleep in the shop. He has no memory of which was better. He says that is a tie.
So Ida and Hollis will both bake at dawn for a week. The bakery has not been so warm in years. The town has been told, and has asked for the bet to be made again next winter.
%%
First snow, too early
Lise, weaver. I write this on the tenth of Reaping, which is too early for snow.
It came in the night, quiet, and by morning the hill above Vell was white. The garden was white. My old dog went out to the step, looked at it, and came back in. My apprentice helped me bring in the wool from the line and did not complain, which was good of it. It does not like the cold. I do not know how it knows the cold, but it moved quick.
The apples on the tree were not all picked. We got most of them. The ones we missed sit in the snow like little red lamps.
The clerk at the Archive says the snow is nothing. He says there was snow in Reaping in his grandmother's day. The farmer at the bottom of the hill says the same snow is a sign of a hard winter. The two of them have said this to each other for years and neither will move. I say it is snow, and it will melt, and if it does not melt we will be glad of the wool.
A neighbor says the relays were quiet in the night. She says the lamp did not turn for a long while. Another says it was the fog. I did not see the lamp, so I say nothing about the lamp. I keep a candle in the window and the door shut.
%%
Snow cheese
Hazel, cheesemaker, at the Northpoint market. Sold in the first week of spring, when the snow is still on the stalls.
1. Warm a pot of fresh milk on a low fire until it is as warm as your wrist.
2. Add a spoon of sour milk from the day before.
3. Wait an hour. Do not stir. The milk will think about it.
4. When it sets like jelly, cut it in squares with a clean knife.
5. Pour off the water. Press the curds in a cloth under a flat stone.
6. Salt it the next morning. Eat it the day after.
It keeps well in a bucket of snow. At Northpoint, that is not hard.
%%
Tam's beetroot bread
Tam, Kettle Ridge, staying at the Brown Hen. Longday, 191.

For one loaf, take two cups of flour, one cooked beetroot, a cup of warm water, a spoon of honey, a pinch of salt, and a small lump of yeast. The bread is pink inside. Pip called it a rose loaf and asked if it grew in the field. He was disappointed to learn it grew in the oven.

1. Crumble the yeast into the warm water.
2. Stir in the honey and leave the bowl until it bubbles.
3. Peel the cooked beetroot and mash it well.
4. Mix the flour and salt in a large bowl.
5. Add the yeast water and mashed beetroot.
6. Stir until the dough holds together.
7. Knead it on a clean board until it feels smooth.
8. Cover the dough and leave it to rise.
9. Shape it into a loaf and set it in a greased pan.
10. Bake until the crust is firm and brown.
11. Let it cool before cutting.

Do not use a beetroot from the pickling jar. The vinegar makes the dough sour. Tam did this once, then said sour bread was a fine way to make thirsty guests buy more water.
%%
Northpoint log, a long winter
Mira, relay keeper at Northpoint. This is the log of the winter of the 171st year of the archive. I keep it plain. Lantern copies the fair parts.
Frost, day 4. The snow came early and deep. The road south is gone under it. The foxes are bold. One sat on the step and looked at me as if I owed it something.
Frost, day 11. The relay lamp at the top is broken. A pane of glass cracked in the wind and the flame guttered out. I climbed the ninety rungs with a new pane and a spare wick. The wind took my hat. Lantern found it a week later, half a day off, in a drift.
Frost, day 12. Lamp lit. Signal good. I sent word south that all was well. The answer came back the same evening. Somewhere a keeper on the Long Road was awake too.
Longnight, day 1. The dark is long here. Lantern keeps the stair lamps full and the torches round the foot. We do not let the fire go out. The ice on the well is thick as my hand.
Longnight, day 9. A wolf came to the foot of the tower and sat by the torches. It did not want anything. It was warm there. In the morning it was gone.
Longnight, day 20. My brother Tam sent a letter by the last cart before the road closed. He says Kettle Ridge is buried too. He says Pip built a snow wall round the hen house and the hens are warm and cross. He says the windmills squeak louder in the cold. I believe him.
Deepsnow, day 6. The lamp broke again. Same pane, same wind. I climbed the ninety rungs a second time. Lantern came with me and held the tools. We mended it in the dark with the snow coming sideways. It held.
Deepsnow, day 15. The first thaw wind. The foxes are out on the ice. The lamp is lit and the signal is good and the road will open soon.
Lantern says a long winter is only a long winter. I have written it here so that next year I remember to believe it.
%%
A day at the relay house
Toby, relay keeper at the hamlet below Copperhold.
I am up before the sun. The tower stands above the house, and from the door I can see the signal lamp at the top, dark and waiting. I fill the oil pot and trim the wick. I climb the stair and check the glass. The stair has forty steps and I count them every morning. Forty going up, forty coming down. It is a good way to know where you are.
Then I write the first line in the log. The date, the weather, the lamp. Today the sky is clear and the air is warm and there is no wind.
The relay carries messages from tower to tower. A message comes in from the south, we light the lamp, the next tower sees it, and the message goes on. The little tower below Copperhold is one of the smallest. One lamp and one keeper. That is me.
In summer the messages are mostly about the market and the weather and who has honey to sell. A trader wants to know the price of copper. A farmer wants to know if the road north is dry. A mother wants to know if her son has reached Three Wells. He has. I send the message on and I write it in the log.
At midday I eat bread and cheese on the step. The bees from the hive by the wall come and look at me. They do not sting. They are only curious. I tell them the news. They listen better than most people.
In the afternoon I walk down to the hamlet. The mill wheel turns and the flour comes and the baker has bread. The forge is hot. The children are out of school and they run in the road. I stop and tell them a story about the tower, and they listen and then they run off again.
At dusk I light the lamp. I watch it for ten breaths. It is steady. I climb down the forty steps and go in to my supper. The lamp burns all night. I sleep and I wake and I look out the window and the lamp is still there, a small light on the hill.
At dawn I put it out and I write the last line in the log. Another night, another line. The log fills up slowly, a book of nights. I have kept this tower for eleven years. I have a shelf of logs. When I am old I will read them and remember every wind.
%%
Winter stew, the Ambrook feast
Zell, healer, at the hamlet by Ambrook. Jory's wife taught me this stew. She says the real secret is the honey, and that I am not to write it down. I have put it at the bottom, where nobody will read it.

For the great pot, enough for forty people and the dog:
Two beetroots, large, peeled and cut in quarters.
Four carrots from the cold store, not the ones left in the ground.
Four potatoes, the floury kind.
Half a pumpkin, the hard grey kind that keeps all winter, peeled and cut in cubes.
Two handfuls of wheat, soaked the night before.
A joint of pork from the Ambrook pigs.
Three handfuls of wild mint from the pond bank.
A spoon of salt for every five people, and one more for the pot.
Water, enough to cover everything by a finger.
A jar of honey, kept back until the end.

Steps:
1. Brown the pork in the big pot, in its own fat, until the kitchen smells like a good day.
2. Pour in the water and bring it to a slow bubble. Skim the top. The skimmings go to the pigs, who think it is the best part.
3. Add the wheat, the beetroot and the carrots. Cook until the beetroot is soft at the centre.
4. Add the potatoes and the pumpkin. Cook until they fall apart at the edges, but not all the way through.
5. Stir gently, so the pieces stay whole. Whole pieces are for the children.
6. Add the mint in bunches, and take the bunches out again before they go limp.
7. Add the salt, a spoon for every five people. Taste it in three places, and taste it again in the middle.
8. Keep the lid on, and let it sit by the fire for an hour, while the pipes are tuned.
9. Carry the pot to the table. Each bowl gets one piece of pork, two of pumpkin, and a ladle of the thick part.
10. At the end, stir one spoon of honey into the pot, slowly. Then give one more spoon to the cook.

The mill watch eats this on the longest night, and the children are allowed the last bowl. The dog gets the bone, and the bone is not part of the stew, whatever the dog believes.

Note, which Jory's wife says I must not write. The honey goes in at the end, one spoon for the pot and one for the cook. If the cook complains that the honey is too much, the cook is wrong. Everyone at the feast knows this, and they always say so at the table, with their mouths full.
%%
Baked apples for a winter market
Isla, lamp tender at Ambrook. Written on a cold morning in the 183rd year of the archive.
When the market comes and the wind is sharp, this fills the stall with a smell that brings people in from the road.
You need:
8 firm apples, the small sour kind from the old grey branch are best.
A handful of honey.
A cup of oats.
A little butter.
A pinch of salt.
A mug of apple water, or plain water.
Steps:
1. Cut the cores out of the apples but leave the bottoms whole. Do not cut through.
2. Mix the oats, the honey, the salt and a little soft butter in a bowl.
3. Fill each apple with the mix and press it down.
4. Stand the apples in a deep pan and pour in the water, just a finger deep.
5. Cover the pan with a lid or a board and set it near the fire, not on it. Leave it an hour.
6. Take the lid off for the last while so the tops go brown.
7. Eat them hot with a spoon. Warn people about the first bite.
The pan water is good too. Drink it. It tastes of apples and winter.
A boy asked me once why the apples go soft. I told him the fire talks them into it. He liked that.
%%
Nessa's table for the hill
A picnic for six, on the hill above my sister's farm outside Vell, on the first hot day of Longday. Everything can be made the day before. I have written it all out exactly, because the last time I said a handful, my sister's handful and my handful were not the same.

Flat bread
You need: three cups of wheat flour, one cup of water, a pinch of salt.
1. Mix them into a dough and rest it for half an hour.
2. Pinch off pieces the size of an egg. Roll each one thin.
3. Cook them on a hot flat pan, a short time on each side, until they puff and brown in spots.
4. Stack them in a cloth to keep them soft.

Cheese with honey and apples
You need: a round of soft cheese, three spoons of honey, four dried apple rings.
1. Cut the cheese into thick slices.
2. Lay them on a board.
3. Pour the honey over them.
4. Put the apple rings round the edge.

Potatoes in their skins
You need: twelve small potatoes, a spoon of butter, a little salt.
1. Boil the potatoes until a straw goes in easily.
2. Drain them and shake them in the pot with the butter and salt.
3. Eat them warm, or cold. Either is right.

Melon, cold
You need: one melon, and the well.
1. Lower the melon into the well bucket the night before.
2. In the morning, cut it into thick slices. Leave the rind on, for holding.
3. Eat it at the end, with sticky fingers, and wash in the stream.

The order of work. The day before: bake the flat bread, boil the potatoes, chill the melon. The morning of: slice the cheese, pack the jars, find the blanket.

To carry: put the bread in a cloth, the cheese in a jar with a lid, and the potatoes in a covered pot. Take a blanket. Take a jug of cold water.

The gift. Hild sent a jar of honey from the swarm, with a note that said: It is the first. It will be better next year. I put it in the middle of the blanket, and we ate it with a spoon.
%%
Honey cakes, the edge house
Written on the inside of the flour lid, where the family keeps the things it will not forget. The house is the last one on the Vell road, with the blue door and the wall of rooks.

You need:
Two cups of flour.
Half a cup of honey.
One egg.
Half a cup of milk.
A pinch of salt.
A little butter for the pan.

1. Warm the honey in a small pot until it runs. Do not let it boil. Honey that boils goes brown and tastes of smoke.
2. Beat the egg into the milk.
3. Mix the flour and the salt in a bowl. Make a well in the middle.
4. Pour in the honey and the milk. Stir from the middle outward, the way you stir a new pond.
5. Heat the pan. Grease it with a little butter.
6. Pour one spoon of batter for each cake. Wait until bubbles come up and pop. Turn once.
7. Eat them warm, on the step, in the shade.

The roof over the back room leaked on the first batch, so we cooked the second batch in the yard, on the flat stone by the well. Nessa says that is the best way to eat them. Nessa is right about most things, and she is always right about honey.
%%
Apple and honey cake for a cold night
Edda, orchard keeper at Ambrook, now staying near Northpoint. My apples came up the road in a crate. Some were bruised. A bruised apple is still a good apple. This cake feeds six and warms the whole room.
What goes in:
6 apples, peeled and cut in slices.
2 cups of flour.
1 cup of honey.
Half a cup of soft butter.
2 eggs.
A spoon of spice if you have it. Cinnamon is best.
A pinch of salt.
What to do:
1. Heat the oven to a good even heat.
2. Beat the butter and the honey together until they are light.
3. Add the eggs one at a time. Beat well after each.
4. Stir in the flour and the salt and the spice. The batter will be thick.
5. Put the batter in a buttered tin.
6. Press the apple slices into the top. Push them down a little.
7. Bake until a knife comes out clean. About an hour.
8. Let it cool before you cut it. I know. The waiting is the hard part.
Eat it warm with cold cream. If a neighbor comes to the door, give them a slice. That is the rule.
%%
Carrot cake for a midwife's visit
Lorn, midwife at the farm outside Lowmarsh. The cake is for the mother who has just had her baby, and for whoever sits with her through the first night. Summer.

You need:
Two cups of flour, the fine white sort from Three Wells.
One cup of sugar, or a cup of honey if the sugar is short.
Three eggs from the hens by the reed bank.
Two carrots, grated fine.
A spoon of butter, soft.
A pinch of salt and a little cinnamon from the Saltreach cart.
A spoon of baking ash, which keeps the cake light.
A cup of milk, warm.

1. Light the oven and let it come up slowly. A midwife's cake does not like a fierce fire.
2. Beat the butter and the sugar until they are pale. Use the wooden spoon. Count to a hundred if you have the patience. Lorn says a child can count to a hundred while the mother is sleeping.
3. Beat in the eggs, one at a time. If the mix looks like it will split, add a spoon of flour and beat again.
4. Stir in the carrot. It makes the cake moist, and it makes the cake a little sweet without the sugar going to waste.
5. Mix the flour, ash, salt and cinnamon in a bowl. Stir them together lightly.
6. Fold the dry mix into the wet mix, a spoon at a time, with the milk. Do not beat it now. Fold it, gently, the way you would fold a clean sheet.
7. Pour the mix into a greased tin, and set it in the oven. Bake it for an hour, until a straw comes out clean.
8. Let it cool in the tin for a little while, then turn it out on the rack.

Lorn says the cake is best eaten warm, with a cup of milk, sitting down. Nobody should eat it standing, not even the midwife.

A note from the farm. The new copper vein was found in the hill behind the barn this spring, and the miners who came to dig it ate three of these cakes between them, and thanked the hens. Lorn says the cake is for the babies, and the miners are only grown babies, and she will not hear otherwise.
%%
Fried lake fish
Sable, fisher, Northpoint. The simplest supper I know.
You need: one fish as long as your forearm, flour, salt and a spoon of pork fat.
1. Clean the fish. Take off the head. The cat will want it. Let her.
2. Rub the fish with salt and roll it in flour.
3. Heat the fat in the pan until it spits.
4. Fry the fish for a slow count of two hundred on each side.
5. Eat it hot, with your fingers, standing by the lake.
%%
Apple sauce, and what the ships say
Edda, from Ambrook. I am not at Ambrook now. I am in a small house by the northern road, and I keep apples as best I can.
First, the apple sauce, because it is easy and it makes a house smell like a home.
What goes in:
10 apples. Any kind. Peel them and cut out the cores.
A little water.
Honey to taste.
What to do:
1. Put the apples in a pot with a splash of water.
2. Cook them slow with the lid on until they fall apart.
3. Stir them to a mush.
4. Add honey. Not too much. Taste it.
5. Eat it warm. It keeps a few days in a cold room.
Now the other thing.
The carters come up this road and they talk. They say Saltreach is building ships now. Big ships. Three times as long as any boat, they say. They say families are going over the sea. Nobody knows what is across the water. One carter says there is land there and it is green and good. Another says there is nothing and the ships come back empty. They cannot both be right.
They say the relays go quiet one by one, from the north down. I asked Mira about our relays. She said the little relay answered this morning. I will believe her.
There was a mill wheel broken at the next farm. It split along a board and the whole wheel came down in the pond. The miller pulled it out with two horses and a rope. He says he will build a new one before the snow. He says a mill that does not turn is just a cold house. I gave him apples.
%%
Milk bread, with the new barley
Written by Lorn, who was given a sack of the new barley by the farm at the bottom of the lane, and who wanted to see what it would do in a loaf. Summer. The barley is new and the bread is dark and sweet.

You need:
Three cups of wheat flour.
One cup of the new barley flour, ground coarse.
A cup of warm milk.
Two spoons of honey.
A spoon of butter.
A pinch of salt.
A spoon of yeast from the starter jar, kept in the cellar.

1. Warm the milk until it is a little more than warm. Stir in the honey and the yeast. Leave it for a quarter hour until it starts to bubble.
2. Mix the two flours and the salt in a bowl. Rub in the butter with your fingers, until it looks like coarse sand.
3. Pour the bubbling milk into the flour. Mix it to a soft dough.
4. Knead it on the board for as long as it takes the midwife to finish her tea. Lorn says that is about a hundred pushes.
5. Put the dough in a bowl, cover it, and leave it in the sun for an hour. It should double. The barley makes it slower than the wheat, so be patient.
6. Shape the dough into a long loaf. Put it on a tray, cover it, and leave it for half an hour more.
7. Bake it in a hot oven for forty minutes, until the crust sounds hollow when you tap it.

The barley bread is dark and dense, and the children say it tastes like the reed bank in summer. The men say it is good for the back. The midwife says it is good for the baby, and she has eaten half of it herself, standing up in the kitchen, which is not allowed.
%%
Potato dumplings in broth
Sorrel, teacher, for the school kitchen at Three Wells. Forty bowls. Ladle stirs the pot. Ladle is very good at stirring and very bad at tasting.

For forty bowls (for a house, divide by eight):
Twelve big potatoes. Six cups of flour. Four eggs. Salt. A big pot of broth, from the bones of whatever you have.

1. Boil the potatoes in their skins until a knife goes in easily. Let them cool until you can hold them.
2. Peel them and mash them with a fork. Mash until there are no lumps. Lumps are for people who like surprises.
3. Mix in the eggs, a spoon of salt, and the flour, a cup at a time. Stop when the dough holds together and does not stick. If it sticks, add flour. If it crumbles, add an egg.
4. Roll the dough into ropes as thick as a thumb. Cut the ropes into pieces as long as a thumb.
5. Bring the broth to a roll. Drop the dumplings in, a handful at a time. They sink. When they float, they are done. Wait one more minute.
6. Ladle into bowls. Salt at the table.

Drop them. Do not throw them. A thrown dumpling splashes, and the splash is always on the cook.
%%
Recipe: the bread that keeps
Wren's bread, set down in winter at the house at the edge of Lowmarsh. A loaf that lasts a week, for the long cold, when the roads are shut and the baker's cart does not come.
Take: 6 cups of rye flour, 2 cups of wheat flour, 2 spoons of salt, 1 spoon of honey, a handful of seeds, and water.
1. Mix the flours and salt in a big bowl.
2. Stir the honey into a cup of warm water. Add it to the flour.
3. Add more water, a little at a time, until the dough holds together.
4. Knead it for a good long while. Rye is stubborn.
5. Cover the bowl with a cloth. Leave it by the stove until it has doubled.
6. Knead it again, with the seeds. Shape it into two loaves.
7. Let them rise again, near the stove.
8. Bake in a hot oven for the time it takes to tell a short story, and then another.
9. Tap the bottom. If it sounds hollow, it is done.
10. Cool on a rack. Wrap in a cloth. Keep in a cool place.
It is a dark loaf, heavy and sweet. It goes with cheese. It goes with soup. It goes with nothing at all.
This winter, people have been baking more of it. They bake it and store it. They say it is for the cold. A few say it is for something else, though they do not say what. The bakers smile and keep selling.
%%
The mayor's winter feast, for 120
Dace, mayor of Three Wells. The feast is held on the longest night, in the school house and the inn, with the doors open between. The town box pays. Every carrot is counted. This is what we cooked last winter, in the amounts we used, so that the mayor after me does not have to guess.

First, the bet. I bet Ida that forty loaves would be enough. Ida bet that sixty would not be too many. The answer was fifty-two, so we both lost, and Hollis, who had said nothing, won a pie.

Bread. 52 loaves. Ida's recipe, doubled four times, baked in three batches, from the second hour before dawn.

Soup. Beetroot soup, in two big pots. 30 beetroots, 12 potatoes, 12 carrots, salt, and a jar of dark honey, which sounds odd and is not. Simmer from noon. Serve at dusk, with a spoon of milk on top.

The roast. 6 pigs' shoulders, from the farms, in the baker's ovens, for four hours. Rub them with salt and a little honey. They are done when the knife goes in like a spoon into soft cheese.

Potatoes. 80, baked in their skins, in the coals of the school kitchen fire. Ladle looks after them and turns them with a long fork. They are done when you can squeeze them.

Carrots. The golden ones, for the children. Sixty, one each, and a few extra, because someone will drop one.

The pies. Pumpkin, apple, and one that Hollis says is secret. 24 pies. Cut each in eight.

The drink. Hot cider from Ambrook, in the big pot at the inn. Ama's honey in it. Children get half a cup and a great deal of cheek.

The Copperhold table. This year the miners from Copperhold sat at the east end. They had come for the new copper vein, and they brought a lump of it for the table. Hesk gave a speech. It was five words long: The copper is here. Eat. The whole town cheered. It was the best speech of the night, and the shortest. Mine was the longest.

The tables. Eleven long tables, borrowed from the school, the inn, the bakery and the storehouse. Clem counted them out and counted them back. The mayor's table is the smallest, by his own order, and the nearest to the kitchen.

The count. 120 people were fed. 119 sat down. One stood the whole evening, with a ladle. Nobody asked it to sit.

The clearing. The school children swept the floor. The plates were washed by the lamp boy, who is very good with plates. Nothing was lost. One spoon was found in a pie.

Next winter, the same, but with more bread. Ida says sixty. We shall see.
%%
Spider salve, and the barn
Zell, healer. Made in Longnight, after the spiders came into the barn under the loft door and the cow would not go in.

You need:
One spoon of wool grease, from the wool carders.
One spoon of beeswax, from the top hives.
A bunch of bog mint, dried.
A strip of willow bark, peeled from the ford willow and chopped small.
One spoon of honey.
A clean pot, a clean cloth, and a clean jar with a lid.

Steps:
1. Warm the wool grease and the beeswax in the small pot, over a low fire. Do not let them smoke.
2. Add the bog mint and the willow bark. Stir them in. The bark will sink and the mint will float, and this is correct.
3. Keep it warm for the time it takes to say the names of the barn's animals, twice. Cow, pigs, hens, horse, cat.
4. Strain it through the clean cloth into the jar. Squeeze the cloth well. Leave nothing in it but the old mint.
5. Stir in the honey while the salve is still warm. Honey keeps it soft, and it stops the children from eating it.
6. Let it cool with the lid off. Then put the lid on.
7. Rub a little on any bite, and wash the hands after. Do not rub it near the eyes. The cat will try to lick it, so keep the cat out of the room.

The spiders came in through the gap under the loft door, and they had been there since the first frost. Hob's boy swept them out twice, and they came back twice, and so the cat was shut in the barn for three nights. The spiders left on the fourth. The cat was very proud of this, until it was very wet, because the barn roof leaks above the stall. Fix the roof and the door before you make the salve. The salve is only for what gets past them.

The wool grease costs two emeralds at the stall by the south well. The beeswax is free, if you carry the comb down from the hill yourself, and you will want a veil for that.
%%
The relay lamp on the hill
Nessa, tutor at Vell, writing this for the apprentice manual, so that any keeper can fix a broken lamp. Read it before you climb.
A relay lamp is a simple thing. It has a glass lamp room, a copper ring round it, a walk and a redstone line down to the keeper's desk. If the lamp is broken, it is almost always one of four things.
1. A cracked pane. Wind and cold do this. Carry spare panes and set them with care. Do not hurry on the ladder.
2. A wet wick. The damp gets in. Dry the lamp room and set a new wick. Keep a dry box of spare wicks.
3. A loose copper ring. The ring holds the lamp true. If it is loose the flame leans and the signal is bad. Tighten it with a small wrench. Keep the wrench on a string by the door.
4. A cut in the redstone line. Look along the line from the desk to the lamp. Look for a break. Patch it and test it from the desk. If the desk lamp lights, the line is good.
Always test after mending. Send a short signal south and wait for the answer. If no answer comes, do not be afraid. It may be the weather, or a keeper asleep, or a line cut farther along. Send again at the next hour.
Keep the torches round the foot lit. Keep the stair lamps full. A keeper who keeps the foot of the tower bright will never lose the way up in the dark.
The little relay on the hill between Vell and Three Wells is the smallest we have, one lamp and one keeper. Its keeper mended it a hundred times in one winter and wrote it all down. I have her notes here by me. This is her rule, and I make it mine: a lamp is only broken until you climb.
%%
Recipe: a plain loaf for a quiet spring
Rye, orchard keeper, a farm outside Vell. Spring. This is the bread I make when I do not feel like making anything else. It takes little. It keeps the hands busy.

What goes in: 4 cups flour, 1 cup warm water, a spoon of honey, a spoon of salt, a lump of yesterday's dough.
1. Put the flour in a big bowl. Make a hole in the middle.
2. Pour in the warm water. Add the honey, the salt and the dough.
3. Mix it with your hand until it is a ball. It will be sticky.
4. Knead it on the table for as long as it takes to walk round the orchard. Push, fold, turn.
5. Put the dough back in the bowl. Cover it with a cloth. Leave it by the stove until it has doubled.
6. Shape it into a loaf. Put it on a tray.
7. Bake until the bottom sounds hollow.
8. Eat it warm. Eat it with butter. Eat it with honey, if there is any.

The cat is on the table. She will not stay out. I have stopped trying.

I heard at the market that the road north is quieter than it was. Fewer carts go up. Fewer come down. A trader from Three Wells says the inns on the Long Road are half empty. A woman from Lowmarsh says a cough is going round and the water is under suspicion. Someone at the next stall said it was the ships, and someone else said it was the mines, and a third said it was a story to keep the children in.

I do not know. I have a bowl of flour and a warm stove. It will do for today.

If you are making this bread and the news is bad, make a second loaf and take it to a neighbor. That is all I have learned.
%%
Honey cakes for the road
Pell, the Brown Hen. I carry honey cakes in my cart. They keep for a week and they make people glad to see me. The bees at Ambrook do the hard part. I do the rest.
You need:
Two cups of flour.
Half a cup of honey.
One egg from a hen.
A lump of butter the size of a walnut.
A pinch of salt.
A little milk.
1. Warm the honey in a small pot until it runs.
2. Cut the butter into the flour with your fingers until it looks like crumbs.
3. Beat the egg, the honey and the milk together and pour it in.
4. Stir it into a soft dough. Do not work it hard.
5. Pat it out flat. Cut it into squares with a knife.
6. Bake on a hot stone until the edges go brown.
7. Let them cool before you pack them, or they stick to each other.
The baker at Three Wells adds a spoon of ground spice. She will not tell me which. I have asked nine times.
%%
Spruce tip tea
Mave, cook, at the market at Northpoint. Winter tea for the cold days, when the snow is up to the windows and nobody wants to go out. The tips come from the spruce behind the tower, and the children pick them in the first thaw.
You need:
A handful of fresh spruce tips, green and soft.
A pot of water.
A spoon of honey, if the honey is not frozen.
1. Rinse the tips in cold water. Shake them dry.
2. Bring the water to a boil in the small pot.
3. Put the tips in, and take the pot off the heat at once.
4. Cover it, and let it sit for the time it takes to sing a short song.
5. Strain it into the cup. Stir in the honey.
Drink it hot. It tastes of resin and sharp green, though there is no fruit in it. Mira says it tastes like the inside of the tower, and that she does not know what she means by that, but she likes it.
%%
Summer stew, the long way
Kept by the edge house. This is not a short recipe. It is a long one, and it went wrong twice before it went right. We have written it down in full so the next person does not have to find out the hard way.

You need:
Four carrots.
Three potatoes.
One beetroot.
A handful of peas, shelled.
Half a pumpkin, the small sweet kind.
Two spoons of butter.
One spoon of honey.
A little salt and pepper.
Water, enough to cover.
Bread for the side.

1. Scrub all the roots. Peel the carrots and the beetroot. Leave the potatoes in their skins.
2. Cut the roots into chunks the size of a thumb. Cut the pumpkin into cubes.
3. Melt the butter in the big pot over a low fire. Add the carrots and the beetroot first, because they are hard and need the longest.
4. Stir for five minutes. Do not let them brown. Brown is for later.
5. Add the potatoes and the pumpkin. Stir again.
6. Pour in water to cover. Bring it to a slow bubble, then turn the heat low.
7. Add the honey and the salt. Put the lid on.
8. Simmer for about half an hour, until the potatoes break when pressed with a spoon.
9. Add the peas. Cook five minutes more. Peas go mushy if they are cooked too long, so watch them.
10. Taste. Add pepper. Taste again. Then taste it once more, because the first taste is always wrong.

What went wrong, the first time: the pot was dropped down the well. Nobody was hurt, but the pot came up on the bucket rope with a long green weed hanging from its handle. It was still a good pot. The stew was not made in it.

What went wrong, the second time: the fire went out in the middle of step eight, and the stew stayed cold for an hour, and then it was cooked too hard and the peas went grey. We ate it anyway. Hanna said the grey peas were a kind of art.

The third time it was right. Nobody is sure why, except that the fire stayed lit and nobody dropped anything. Keep the fire lit. Keep the pot out of the well. That is the whole of the method.
%%
Potato cakes for the square
Ada, weaver at Kettle Ridge. The market square was swept before the snow came. Even the space by the well was clean. Then the wind brought straw from the barn and set it in every corner.
I made these cakes for the stall keepers. My neighbor says grated potato makes them crisp. Tam says mashing is quicker. Both methods make good cakes, so I let them argue while I cook.
You need:
Four potatoes.
One egg.
Half a cup of wheat flour.
A pinch of salt.
A spoon of pork fat.
1. Peel the potatoes and grate them into a bowl.
2. Press out the extra water with a clean cloth.
3. Beat the egg and stir it into the potatoes.
4. Add the flour and salt. Mix until the potato holds together.
5. Warm the fat in a flat pan.
6. Shape the mixture into small cakes and lay them in the pan.
7. Turn each cake when the bottom is brown.
8. Cook the other side until it is brown too.
The cakes are best while they are hot. The baker asked for the last one, then gave it to a child who had lost a mitten. The child gave the mitten to me. It was not my mitten, but it was warm.
%%
Apple And Honey Porridge
Colm's spring breakfast, copied by his neighbor Ressa.
Ingredients:
Wheat, water, one apple, honey, and a pinch of salt.
Steps:
1. Crush the wheat with a clean stone. Leave some pieces whole.
2. Put the wheat in a pot with water and salt.
3. Stir over a low fire until it thickens. Do not leave it alone.
4. Wash the apple and cut it into small pieces.
5. Add the apple and cook until it is soft.
6. Take the pot from the fire and stir in honey.
7. Serve in bowls. Let the porridge cool before giving it to a child.
Colm says this was the breakfast of guards on the wall. He says it kept them alert through long watches. I asked whether they had apples in those days. He said they had apples when he was on watch, and no apples when he was not. That sounds like a guard's answer. He eats his bowl beside the garden gate and watches the field. He says he is checking for wolves. Last spring he watched a rabbit steal a carrot and let it go.
%%
Recipe: marsh cake for the festival
Makes one large cake, enough for a boat house. Keep it in the cold cellar, or it will sweat.
What goes in:
Six handfuls of barley meal
Two eggs, from the speckled hens if they are laying
One cup of goat milk, or half a cup of cream
A spoon of salt
A handful of dried apples, chopped small
A spoon of honey
1. Heat the oven at the edge of the hearth until the stones are hot. Test it with a wet finger.
2. Mix the meal and the salt in a bowl. Make a hollow in the middle.
3. Crack the eggs into the hollow and beat them with the milk until the mixture is smooth.
4. Stir in the apples and the honey. Do not stir too long. A cake that is stirred too much goes heavy and sits in the belly like a stone.
5. Grease the tin with a little lard, or with the end of a candle if the lard is gone.
6. Pour the mixture in and smooth the top with the back of a spoon.
7. Bake for the time it takes to sing one verse of the boat song, slowly.
8. Test with a straw. If the straw comes out clean, the cake is done.
9. Leave it in the tin for a little while. Then turn it out onto a cloth on the table.
Note: the cake keeps for three days, and then the children will eat it, so you must cut it on the first day or not at all.
%%
Frost morning porridge
Tam, Kettle Ridge. Written on a feed sheet, so there is flour on it.
You need:
A big cup of wheat flour.
Two cups of water and one of milk from Bessie.
A pinch of salt, and a spoon of honey.
1. Warm the water and milk in the small pot.
2. Stir in the flour a handful at a time, or it sets in lumps like wet clay.
3. Cook it slowly for ten minutes, round and round.
4. Add the salt. Taste it. A pinch more if you are thinking of a second bowl.
5. Pour it out and add the honey on top.
Pip fetches the honey for me. I say:
> bring me the honey
The answer is:
= fetch honey
It is careful with the jar on its own, which is more than I can say for me.
%%
A note on the loom at the edge of Vell
Lise, weaver. I keep a loom in the front room of the house at the edge of Vell, where the hill road turns down to the town. The window is wide and the light comes in all day. I weave shawls, cloth for coats, and the blue wool the fair likes.
Here is how a loom runs, for the apprentices who come to watch and the children who come to ask.
1. Warp the loom. That is the long threads, held tight, from the top bar to the bottom. It takes a morning and my back does not thank me.
2. Set the heddle so every other thread lifts. Then you can pass the shuttle through the gap.
3. Pass the shuttle with the weft thread from one side to the other. Pull it snug, not tight.
4. Beat the weft down with the bar so the cloth is close.
5. Change the heddle and go back the other way. Back and forth, all day.
6. When the cloth is long enough, cut it off and knot the ends.
A good weaver keeps the loom clean and the shuttle oiled. A bad weaver keeps the loom busy and the shuttle dry.
I have two apprentices now, one of copper and one of iron, and they are quick with the loom. They carry the wool and wind the bobbins and they never tangle the warp. One of them watches the shuttle go and back, go and back, and I think it likes the pattern. When the light fades it puts the lamp by the loom without being told.
The fair is soon and I am behind. The blue wool is done. The cakes are not baked. There is time, but not much.
The talk in the town is of the north. The lamps at Northpoint have been quiet, the traveler says. Another says it is only the weather and the long nights. A third says the keeper there writes less than she did. I do not know the keeper and I do not know the weather in the north. I know my loom, and the loom is fine, and the wool is good, and the child at Three Wells is still drawing cats on the notice board, so the world goes on.
%%
Letter: Hal to his sister at Saltreach
Dear Rill,
Spring came late this year. The snow went off the roof in one great slide and took the gutter with it. I have put the gutter back. The gutter is crooked now. We are calling it the new gutter.
The bees woke up cross. Old Fen says it is the wind. The wind here is always the wind. He says the bees know something. I say the bees know it is spring and they are hungry.
My apprentice is called Tobin. He is nine and he drops things. He dropped the pouring pot on the first day and we lost a whole batch of tallow. He stood there with fat on his boots and said, very serious, "I will not do that again." He has not. He drops other things instead.
The apprentices from the relay house came up the road last month. Two of them, copper and iron, carrying crates of candles back down for the tower. They only answer in their own way. I said "bring me the small crate" and one of them went and got it. I said "thank you" and it just stood there. Fen laughed at me. What do you say to a thing that does not talk? I said thank you anyway. It seemed right.
We found the old map again. It was behind the shelf in the back room, where it always goes. Tobin drew it out and spread it on the table. It shows the road from here down to the tower and every waymark on it. Somebody drew it before I was born. Somebody drew the tower with a little flag on top. There is no flag. There never was a flag.
Old Fen lost his dog. The dog is called Moss and is very old and mostly deaf. We looked all morning in the snow. Then we found him asleep in the candle shed, warm as bread, and he would not come out. He has decided he lives there now. We have put a blanket down for him. Fen comes to visit him twice a day and says the dog has betrayed him. The dog is asleep. The dog does not care.
How is the sea? Is it still loud? Do the boats still go out? Write and tell me. Tell me about the fish. Tell me about the market. Tell me if you have met anyone who can mend a gutter.
Your brother,
Hal
%%
Potato cakes for a cold morning
Mira, keeper at Northpoint. Potatoes are the only thing that grows here without argument.
You need: four potatoes, one egg, a spoon of flour, a pinch of salt, and a hot pan with a little fat.
1. Boil the potatoes until a fork goes in with no fight.
2. Mash them while they are hot. Hot potatoes behave. Cold ones argue.
3. Beat in the egg and the flour. Add the salt. Stir until it holds together.
4. Make small flat cakes with wet hands.
5. Fry them until brown on the bottom. Turn them once, and eat them at once.
%%
Honey bread for a new baby
Mira, Northpoint. Made for the house at the foot of the tower the night a baby arrived, and the father was in no state to bake anything.
You need: two cups of flour, one cup of milk, half a cup of honey, one egg, a pinch of salt, a spoon of butter, and the good tin with the dent in it.
1. Warm the milk, until it is like a bath for a child. Stir in the honey.
2. Beat the egg into the milk. Add the salt and the butter, which must be soft, not melted.
3. Pour in the flour a little at a time, until the dough is soft.
4. Let the dough rise by the stove for an hour, under a cloth. Do not poke it.
5. Press the dough into the tin, no more than halfway full.
6. Bake it slowly, with the door shut, until the top is gold and the middle does not wobble when you tap it.
7. Let it cool a little. Eat the first slice warm, with honey. The new mother should have the second.
Hand the rest to the father. He will say he is not hungry. He is.
%%
Notes on the north road
Esk, mapmaker, on the path from Fellick down to the Long Road. Sowing, 151.
The path is a day's walk. It is not a road. It is a line of flat stones and worn earth that the hamlet clears by turns when the snow goes.
Waymarks: there are none on the path. The Long Road has them, one every twelve blocks, a stone pillar with a torch on top. On our path we have seven cairns of piled stone. Each is a hand high. The third one is short of stones because a traveler once used it to build a fire ring. We put them back.
Water: the stream at the bottom has a bridge of oak, four planks wide. One plank is loose. It has been loose for two years. We know it. We say we will fix it. We do not fix it. Fix it if you pass.
Shelter: a lean-to of spruce boughs at the halfway point, on the left going down. It keeps the wind off. It does not keep the rain off. Nobody has ever claimed it. Everybody uses it.
Danger: none in summer. In deep snow, do not take the path. Take the Long Road, the long way round. The path is faster and the hill does not care.
Kindness: the fourth cairn is where the old woman who lived alone on the hill is buried. She would give a traveler a cup of water and a piece of bread. Now the travelers leave things on the cairn for her. A coin, a stone, a bit of honey cake. The foxes take the cake. The rest stays.
I keep this in my head but I write it down, because a map is a kind of memory and mine is not what it was.
%%
Nessa's cold beetroot soup
For hot days at my sister's farm outside Vell. It is served cold, and it is bright pink. Do not wear your good shirt.

You need:
Six beetroots.
Two cups of cold water.
One cup of sour milk.
A spoon of honey.
A pinch of salt.
Two eggs, boiled.

1. Boil the beetroots until a straw goes in easily. Cool them in cold water and rub off the skins.
2. Chop them small and put them in a big bowl.
3. Add the water and the sour milk. Stir.
4. Add the honey and the salt. Taste. Add more of either if you like.
5. Lower the bowl into the well bucket for one hour.
6. Serve with half a boiled egg in each bowl.

A recipe is only a drill you can eat. Write down what you did, and do it the same way next time.
%%
Carrot Cakes for the Children
Written by Ada, who farms beside Colm outside Three Wells, in spring of 162.
Ingredients:
Carrots, wheat flour, honey, one egg, a little milk, and a pinch of salt.
Steps:
1. Wash the carrots and scrape off the skins.
2. Grate the carrots into a bowl. Keep your fingers away from the grater.
3. Stir in flour, honey, egg, milk, and salt.
4. Mix until the batter is thick. Add a little flour if it runs like water.
5. Put small spoonfuls on a hot pan.
6. Turn each cake when the edges look dry.
7. Eat them warm. Honey makes them sticky, so give each child a cloth.
Colm says a soldier can eat a cake without getting honey on his beard. I have never seen him do it. He says the children distract him. The children say he eats the cakes before they are ready.
%%
The melon at Ambrook market
Isla, lamp tender. Told at the market and written down after, in the 197th year.
There was a melon at the market that year that was too big for any basket. It sat on a board of its own, and two people carried the board. It took four to lift it onto the stall.
Jory grew it by the mill pond. He says he did nothing special. He says the pond did it. Nobody believes him, but nobody argues either.
People came from Kettle Ridge to see it. A man from the Long Road stopped his cart and stared. He said he had seen big melons, but this one had a shadow like a haystack.
We could not sell it whole. Nobody had a purse that big or a cart that strong. So we cut it in the square, on a clean cloth, with the longest knife in Ambrook.
It was sweet. It was very sweet. We gave out slices to everyone who came, and the children came twice. One boy took a slice home to his grandmother and it broke his basket on the way.
The seeds filled a whole bowl. Jory gave them out and said, plant them if you dare.
Nobody knows what to do with a melon that size. You cannot store it. You cannot carry it. You can only eat it, and share it, and tell the story after.
So that is what we did.
%%
Stew for the men at the stuck cart
Mave, cook, Northpoint. A cart from the lower farm stuck in the drift below the tower last month, with two carters and a mule. They were stuck for a day and a night. They came up the tower stair at dusk, with snow in their beards, and asked whether we had anything hot. We had this.
You need:
A shoulder of pork, or whatever meat the store can spare, cut into pieces.
Three potatoes, peeled and cut in cubes.
Two carrots, chopped.
One beetroot, cut small, for the colour.
A bundle of wild herbs, tied together.
Water to cover.
Salt, and a little vinegar.
1. Brown the meat in the big pot, with a spoon of fat.
2. Pour in the water. Bring it to a slow boil, and skim off the grey foam with the ladle.
3. Put in the herbs. Let them sit for an hour, with the lid on.
4. Add the carrots, the beetroot and the potatoes.
5. Simmer until the potatoes break when pressed with the back of a spoon.
6. Take out the herbs. Salt it. Add the vinegar, a few drops only, to wake it up.
7. Ladle it into the bowls, and give the carters the first one, and the mule the second.
The carters ate three bowls each, and the mule got its turnip, which Mira had been saving for spring. The carters said it was the best stew they had had since the Halfway Inn, and that the Halfway Inn was a long way off. Mira said the stew was not the best, it was only the hottest. The carters said that was the best kind.
%%
Recipe: the honey jar
Rye, orchard keeper, a farm outside Vell. Spring. The honey jar is nearly empty, and the hives are not yet awake, so this is the recipe for the last scrapings, which I will not waste.

What goes in: the almost-empty honey jar, 1 cup of warm water, juice of 1 apple, a slice of bread.
1. Pour the warm water into the jar. Shake it. Let it stand.
2. Pour in the apple juice. Shake again.
3. Drink it slowly.
4. Spread the bread with whatever is left on the sides of the jar.

It is not much of a recipe. It is the kind that keeps a house warm when there is nothing else.

The jar itself came from my mother. It is blue, with a chip at the rim. I have kept honey in it for thirty years.

News from the orchard. The bees are late. I looked at the hives this morning, and not one bee was out. The sun was warm. The blossom was open. I stood and listened for a long time and heard nothing.
My neighbor says the bees can feel it when something is wrong. She says they wait. I asked what they wait for. She did not know.
I put out a dish of honey water, as one does. I will look again tomorrow.
%%
Kettle Ridge market stew
Ada, weaver at Kettle Ridge. I sell wool by the market well. On cold market days I bring a pot of stew. It keeps my hands warm while I mend the hems people bring me.
You need:
Two potatoes.
One carrot.
A small beetroot.
A spoon of pork fat.
Water and salt.
1. Cut the potatoes, carrot, and beetroot into small pieces.
2. Warm the fat in a pot.
3. Add the vegetables and stir them until they shine.
4. Add enough water to cover them. Add a pinch of salt.
5. Cook until the potatoes are soft.
6. Set the pot near the stall, not on the edge. Last winter I set it too near the edge. Tam caught it before it fell, but the market heard the splash.
%%
Apple jam for a gift
Written by the edge house, as a gift for Oren at the archive, who has never once in his life been given anything he could eat. He is always too busy filing. This is how we got him to stop for a minute.

You need:
Ten apples, sour ones are best for jam.
Two cups of sugar.
A cup of water.
A squeeze of honey, if you have it.

1. Wash the apples. Cut them in quarters. Leave the skins on and the cores in. The pips and the cores hold the set, so do not throw them away.
2. Put the apples and the water in a deep pot. Cook them slowly until they are soft. Stir now and then so they do not stick.
3. Push the soft apples through a cloth into a bowl. Let the juice drip. Press the cloth gently. Do not squeeze it hard, or the jam will be cloudy.
4. Put the juice back in the pot. Add the sugar and the honey. Stir until the sugar is gone.
5. Boil the juice hard. Stir all the time. It will foam at first. Skim the foam off with a spoon and give the foam to the children.
6. After about twenty minutes, put a spoon of the jam on a cold plate. Push it with a finger. If it wrinkles, it is set. If it runs, boil it a little more.
7. Pour into clean jars while it is hot. Cover with a round of cloth, and tie a string round the neck.
8. Write the date on a label, and the name of the apples, so they can be found later.

We wrapped the jars in a cloth, tied a red string on each, and carried them down the hill to the archive in a basket. Oren opened the door, looked at the basket, and then at us. He said, "Is this for filing?" We said it was for eating. He said that he could not possibly eat anything in the archive. He ate two spoons on the step while we watched, and then he asked for the recipe, which he will not get, because it is in the flour lid.
%%
Warm milk and the lamp
A little note at the end of the book, written in a hurry by Rowan, one night in spring.
When you cannot sleep, warm some milk. Use the small pan. Add a spoon of honey, and stir until it is smooth. Drink it while it is hot, sitting by the window, not in bed.
I wrote this because I could not sleep last night. I sat by the window and looked at the east well. Then the lamp on the top of the bell tower blinked, which it never does. It blinked in a pattern I did not know. Three short and a long. Then nothing. Then the same again.
Dace came out of his house in his nightshirt and looked up at it, and said the keeper must have dropped his supper. Then he went back in to bed.
I finished my milk. It was very good, and it was warm, and it was the only thing I could think of to do. The lamp went out after the seventh blink, and did not come back that night. The next morning the bell rang as usual, and the children went to school, and Dace said nothing about it at the market, except to ask for a second bowl of stew.
%%
Letter: Sena to her sister at Saltreach
To my sister at Saltreach, from Sena at Fellick. Longday, 151.
Dear sister, the honey came in well this year and I send you a jar with the carter. It is the dark kind, from the hives on the hill. The pale kind is thin this year and I keep it for the children. You will like the dark one. Put it on bread and do not give it all to the sailors.
The hamlet is well. Esk has been walking the north all spring with his board and string, drawing the hills. He came back thin and happy and full of stories about Mira at the tower. He says she told him his map was wrong. He says it kindly. He drew it again. He is a good man and a slow one.
The wet summer is hard on the hay but the bees do not mind. The foxes have been at the hen house twice. We mended the fence and they came round it. Our neighbor says a fox is a mind with four legs and no manners. I say a fox is hungry and clever and so are we.
The boy who ran off in Sowing is home. He ran because he was cross about chores, not because of anything we did, his mother says. He came back with a plan to keep bees. He has a hive now. He is up the hill every morning. The bees have not stung him since the first week, which he takes as a good sign. We take it as a good sign too.
Sister, I miss you. The north is quiet and the winters are long and the honey helps. Write back when the ships let you. Tell me about the sea.
Your sister,
Sena
%%
Cocoa cakes for midwinter
Rowan's note, copied for the school at Three Wells. Make these only at midwinter, or on a birthday, because the cocoa comes up the Long Road in small sacks and costs more than honey.
You need:
Wheat flour, two handfuls.
Cocoa beans, ground, one handful.
Milk, a little.
Sugar, a pinch.
One egg.
Salt, a small pinch.
1. Grind the cocoa beans in the stone mill, very fine. A child may watch, but may not turn the stone.
2. Mix the flour, the cocoa, the sugar and the salt in a bowl.
3. Make a well in the middle. Crack the egg into it. Add the milk slowly, stirring, until the dough holds together.
4. Roll the dough into balls the size of a plum. Press each one flat with the heel of the hand.
5. Bake on the hot stone at the side of the oven, not in the middle, until the edges turn brown.
6. Let them cool on the rack. Do not eat them until they are cool. You will not wait, and you will burn your tongue, and you will be sorry.
Makes eight, always. Rowan has tried for nine. The ninth is always too small, and the cook says it is not a cake but a crumb.
%%
Bees swarming
Written by Hob, at the ferry house, with a note from the Ambrook beekeeper who taught him. Autumn, when the bees have been too busy.

When a hive is too full, the bees swarm. Half the hive leaves with the old queen and hangs from the nearest branch like a brown beard. It is the most dangerous hour in the bee year, and the most beautiful.

Do not run. The bees are not angry. They are looking for a home.

1. Stay calm, and stand still. Wave your arms slowly, and speak in a low voice. The bees know your voice.
2. Set out an empty skep, upside down, with a cloth on the top and a rag of honey on the side. A little honey in the skep tells the bees it is a good home.
3. Shake the branch gently, over the skep. The swarm falls into it, all at once, with a sound like rain.
4. Cover the skep with a cloth. Wait until dusk, when the bees have settled.
5. Carry the skep to its new place, slowly, and set it on a stone, facing the sun.
6. Leave it alone for a week. Do not look inside. Looking is the bees' business.
7. After a week, check the skep. If the bees have built their comb, the swarm has taken. Leave them be. Put a small stone on the top, so the wind does not take the cover.

Hob says the first swarm he caught was a melon-sized clump, hanging from a crab apple. He says he carried it home in his cap, and the bees did not mind at all, and his mother was very cross about the cap.

A note from the Ambrook beekeeper: the bees on the hill have sent out three swarms this year, and they are all in good skeps now. He says the bees know more about the weather than the clerks do, and that he has never known them wrong.
%%
Recipe: apple and honey porridge
Rye, orchard keeper, a farm outside Vell. Spring. For the cold mornings that still come, though it is nearly Blossom.

What goes in: 2 handfuls of oats, 1 big apple, a spoon of honey, a little milk, a pinch of salt, water.
1. Chop the apple small. Leave the skin on.
2. Put the oats, apple and salt in a pot with enough water to cover them.
3. Heat slowly, stirring. Do not leave it, or it will stick.
4. When the oats are soft and the apple has gone to mush, take it off the fire.
5. Stir in the milk and the honey.
6. Eat it hot, by the window.

A word about the window. This morning a cart went by from the north with a family on it and a great many bundles. They were going south, they said. They did not say why. The mother asked for a bowl of porridge. She ate it standing up.
There is talk at the market that the northern relays are not blinking as they used to. Some say a storm took the lamps. Some say the keepers have gone south. One man said something worse, and then took it back.
I do not know what to think. I know the porridge is good.
%%
Roof bread for the cold stall
Ada, Kettle Ridge. The roof above the market stall leaked when snow melted. We set a bucket under the drip and put the flour sacks on the high shelf. Tam brought boards from the barn. The miller brought a ladder that had one rung less than I remembered.
We mended the roof before the stalls opened. The boards were rough, and the wind kept lifting the corner cloth. The baker held one end while I tied the other. By noon, the water was running past the stall instead of into it.
A rumor came with the Saltreach fish seller. He said the north lights had been seen above the sea as well as above Northpoint. The miller said they were only far fires. A woman from the school said her sister had seen the same lights and called them falling stars. They agreed on nothing, then helped carry the fish boxes inside.
After the roof was sound, I baked this bread in the market kitchen. It is good with stew, and the crust helps keep a hand warm while you eat.
You need:
Three cups of wheat flour.
One cup of milk.
One egg.
A spoon of honey.
A spoon of pork fat.
A pinch of salt.
One grated carrot.
A little water.
1. Put the flour and salt in a bowl.
2. Rub the pork fat into the flour until it looks like crumbs.
3. Beat the egg with the milk and honey.
4. Pour the milk into the flour a little at a time.
5. Stir in the grated carrot.
6. Add a little water if the dough is too dry.
7. Press the dough into a greased pan.
8. Cut a shallow line across the top with a knife.
9. Bake until the bread is brown and firm.
10. Let it rest before cutting.
The first loaf was for the roof workers. The second was for the stall keepers. The last loaf went to the child who held the ladder. The child said the roof was easier to climb than the bread was to chew. Tam said that was because the child had not helped with the roof. The child took another piece and did not answer.
%%
The old map on the wall
Tam, Kettle Ridge, at the Brown Hen. I stopped at the inn on my way back from Three Wells. There is a map on the wall by the door. It is old and brown and one corner is gone.
It shows the Long Road and every inn on it. The Brown Hen. The Halfway Inn. A place called the Green Stag that is not there any more. Pip says the road has moved. I think the road has not moved. I think the Green Stag closed and nobody painted it out.
The map shows a stream where there is now a bridge of oak. It shows a hill where there is now a windmill. It shows Kettle Ridge as three houses and a barn. We have more than that now. We have a lot more than that.
Merrin says a traveler drew it about a hundred years ago and paid for his supper with it. She says it has hung by the door ever since. Pip stood in front of it for a long time. He found Kettle Ridge and put his finger on it. He found the windmill that is not drawn. Then he went quiet.
I like the map. It is wrong in a friendly way. It shows the country as somebody saw it, walking. I told Pip a map is true when it is drawn and then the country goes on without it.
He said, then why keep it?
I did not have a good answer. I said, because it is nice to look at. He nodded like that was the right answer after all.
Merrin has a cat that sleeps on the warm stone by the hearth. Pip named it Gravel. Nobody asked him to.
%%
A Good Pot For The Farm
Recipe from Colm, with notes by Ressa, outside Three Wells.
Ingredients:
Potatoes, carrots, beetroot, wheat, water, salt, and a spoon of butter.
Steps:
1. Dig four potatoes and wash off the soil.
2. Pull three carrots and one beetroot. Leave the small roots to grow.
3. Cut the vegetables into pieces. Colm cuts them large. Ressa cuts them small.
4. Put the potatoes and beetroot in a pot with water and salt.
5. Set the pot over a steady fire. Stir it when the water begins to bubble.
6. Add the carrots after the potatoes start to soften.
7. Mix a little wheat flour with cold water in a cup. Break up every lump.
8. Pour the flour water into the pot and stir until the broth grows thick.
9. Add butter at the end.
10. Serve with bread, and put the pot on a board so it does not scorch the table.
Colm says a good pot feeds a farm hand, a child, and a tired old guard. Ressa says it feeds one old guard twice. The first time he came for a bowl, the pot was still on the fire. He tasted it and said it needed salt. He took the salt jar from the shelf, dropped it, and covered the floor. We picked up the clean grains and salted the pot. Colm ate the first bowl standing up. He said that was how a wall guard eats. Then he sat down for the second.
%%
Pumpkin pie, the Brown Hen way
Maud, the Brown Hen. Autumn is pumpkin time, but the early pumpkins come in Longday and everyone wants a slice before they are ready. Wait for the proper ones.
You need:
One large pumpkin, cooked soft.
Three eggs.
A cup of honey.
A spoon of cinnamon bark, ground fine.
A pinch of salt.
Pie dough, made from flour, butter and water.
1. Roll the dough thin. Lay it in the tin, and press the edges with a fork.
2. Scoop the pumpkin flesh out of its skin. Mash it with the honey.
3. Beat the eggs. Stir them into the pumpkin with the cinnamon and the salt.
4. Pour the mix into the dough.
5. Bake in the oven until the top is firm when you tap it, about half the time it takes to cook a stew.
6. Let it sit until it is warm, not hot. Cut it in wedges.
Note: a pumpkin too big for the cart is too big for the pie. Use the small ones and save the rest for the scarecrow.
%%
Carrot and apple pan
Ada, Kettle Ridge. I carried my loom cloth to the market and found the apple seller beside the flour stall. His apples were small and hard. He said they had kept well in the cold store. I bought four, though I meant to buy two.
This makes a sweet pan for a market meal. The carrots make it filling, and the apples make it bright. If the apples are sour, add a little more honey.
You need:
Three carrots.
Two apples.
A spoon of honey.
A cup of milk.
One egg.
A cup of wheat flour.
A pinch of salt.
1. Peel the carrots and grate them into a bowl.
2. Cut the apples into small pieces. Take out the cores.
3. Beat the egg in another bowl.
4. Add the milk and honey. Stir well.
5. Add the flour and salt. Stir until there are no dry lumps.
6. Fold in the carrot and apple pieces.
7. Pour the mixture into a greased pan.
8. Bake until the middle is firm and the top is brown.
9. Let it cool before cutting it.
The market keeper took a slice for his supper. He said it needed more apple. The apple seller said it needed more honey. I said it needed fewer judges. They both bought another slice.
%%
Kelp bread from the quay
Kept on the quay at Saltreach by Mary, whose kitchen sits over the net shed, so the bread always smells of tar and salt. Written for Pell, who asked for it when he came through with the honey.

You need:
Three cups of flour.
One cup of dried kelp, ground fine.
One spoon of salt.
One spoon of honey.
One spoon of yeast, from the crock by the stove.
Water, warm, about two cups.
A little oil, for the tin.

1. Put the flour, the ground kelp and the salt in a large bowl. Stir well. The kelp will turn the flour the colour of an old boat.
2. Mix the yeast and the honey into the warm water. Wait until it froths. If it does not froth, throw it away and ask someone else for yeast.
3. Pour the water into the flour a little at a time, stirring as you go. Keep going until it makes a soft dough that does not stick too much to the fingers.
4. Turn it out onto the table and knead for a long time. Ten minutes at least. The dough should feel like a sail that has been out in the wind.
5. Rub a little oil round the bowl. Put the dough back in. Cover it with a damp cloth and leave it in the warm corner by the stove, where the net shed heat comes through the wall.
6. After an hour the dough should be twice its size. Punch it down with your fist. The kelp smell will come up, strong and sea-cold.
7. Shape it into two loaves, long and thin, and put them on the oiled tin.
8. Leave them to rise again for half an hour.
9. Bake in a hot oven for forty minutes, or until the bottom sounds hollow when tapped.
10. Cool on a rack by the window, so the gulls can see it. They will try to take it. Do not let them.

Pell says it is the best bread between Saltreach and Vell. He says this every time he comes. He says it with butter, and with a jar of honey on the side, which Mary says is a waste of good honey on good bread, and then she eats some.

The second loaf is always for the boats. Take it down to the slip before the morning tide and leave it on the stone. Nobody knows who the bread is for. Nobody asks.
%%
Ferry house porridge
Ossa, ferry keeper, Saltreach. Winter. The first crossing is at first light, and nobody steps onto my ferry without something hot inside them. This is the porridge.
You need:
Two big handfuls of cracked wheat, from the mill.
Water, four times as much as the wheat.
A pinch of salt.
Honey.
A pat of butter, if there is any.
1. The night before, put the wheat, the water and the salt in a pot. Leave it by the hearth until morning.
2. At first light, set the pot on the fire and bring it to a bubble.
3. Stir. Keep stirring. A porridge that is not stirred sticks, and a porridge that sticks is a ruined pot for a week.
4. When a spoon stands up in it for a count of three, it is done.
5. Pour it into bowls. Add honey and butter.
Ballast the cat gets the scrapings. Ballast does not agree that they are scrapings.
In Frost there is ice on the inlet. After the porridge I break it with the long pole, and then we cross. The ferry leaves when the bowls are empty. Not before.
%%
Recipe: fish soup for a long winter
Wren's fish soup, written down at the house at the edge of Lowmarsh in winter, when the weir was frozen and the fish came in dried. A long winter makes a person careful with what is in the pot.
Take: 4 dried fish, 3 potatoes, 2 carrots, a handful of barley, salt, water, a spoon of honey.
1. Put the dried fish in a bowl of cold water the night before. They will soften.
2. In the morning, peel and chop the potatoes and carrots.
3. Put them in a pot with the barley and fill with water.
4. Bring to the boil, then let it simmer for as long as it takes to mend a net.
5. Take the fish from their bowl. Remove the bones. Flake the meat.
6. Add the fish to the pot. Add salt.
7. Simmer a little longer. Stir in the honey. It softens the salt.
8. Serve it hot, with bread.
This makes enough for five. It keeps for three days if you cover it and leave it in the cold shed.
A word. The fish this winter taste of the sea, a little more than before. Some say the water is changing. Some say it is the ships. Wren does not say. She says they make a good soup.
%%
A primer for the relay keepers
Copied at the Archive at Vell in the early years, for the keepers of the new towers. Read it once before you take your post. Read it again when you are tired.
1. The lamp is the tower's voice. Keep the glass clean. Dust on the glass is a whisper lost.
2. Light the stair lamp at every turn. A keeper who falls in the dark is no keeper at all.
3. Keep the torches round the foot lit. They are for you on a black night as much as for a traveler.
4. The signal lamp sends by day and by night. Learn the short and the long. Practice the letters until your hand knows them without your head.
5. The redstone line runs from the top down to your desk. If it goes quiet, climb and see. Do not guess. Climb.
6. Keep the relay house swept and dry. The quickeners at the foot do not like damp. Keep water or ice by them in the warm months.
7. Write everything down. Every message sent, every message come, the hour and the day. The archive keeps what we write, and the archive is far away. Your log is the archive's ear.
8. A message cut off is a message unfinished. Write the hour it stopped. Someone will want to know.
9. If the lamp breaks, save the pieces. The glass comes from Saltreach and the copper from Copperhold, and both are far. Wool and a spare pane are your friends.
10. Be kind to the keeper at the next tower. Send a greeting when there is nothing to send. The relays carry far, but they do not carry a cup of tea. Still, a greeting is something.
We will keep everything we write.
%%
Apple and honey pudding
Zell, healer. For the cold months, when the apples in the store have begun to wrinkle and somebody has to eat them.

You need:
Six apples from the store, the wrinkled ones.
Two spoons of honey.
Half a loaf of yesterday's bread, cut in thick pieces.
Three eggs from the hen house by the well.
One cup of milk.
A pinch of salt.

Steps:
1. Peel the apples and cut out the bad parts. Cut carefully. The good parts are shy.
2. Put the apples in the pot with a cup of water and one spoon of honey. Cook until they are soft, and fall apart when you stir.
3. Mash them with the back of the spoon. Leave some lumps. The children will count the lumps and fight over them.
4. Beat the eggs with the milk and the second spoon of honey. Add the salt.
5. Put the bread in the bottom of the dish. Pour the egg and milk over it, and let it soak for as long as it takes to sing one verse.
6. Spread the mashed apples on top.
7. Bake in the oven until the top is brown, and the middle does not wobble when you shake the dish. Shake it gently. The middle is shy too.

Serve it warm, with a spoon for each child and one for the cook, who will say she does not want any.

Keep the window shut while it cools. The bees of Ambrook come to the sill on warm days, and a bee that finds the pudding will not leave.

If the pudding is sour, you used the wrong apples. Use the ones from the oldest tree, the one with the grey branch. It is the sweetest tree in Ambrook, and it knows it.
%%
Drill notes: the lesson that went badly
Nessa, tutor house at Vell. I record this because a lesson that goes badly should be written down too. We learn from it as much as the mind does.
I had four apprentices in the drill room. I set the drill box on the bench and showed them a row to sort. Apples to one bin, pears to the other. A simple sort. Una's lesson, the first in the book. I have taught it a hundred times.
The first apprentice sorted well. The second sorted well. The third put an apple in the pear bin. I moved its weights a little toward the right answer and drilled it again. It sorted well. By midday I thought, this is a good day.
Then I tested them. I have a box of pages no mind is ever drilled on. I gave each apprentice a sort it had not seen: one apple and one pear I had kept back. The first two did well. The third put the pear in the apple bin and then, when I drilled it again, put the apple in the pear bin. It had learned the shape of my hand, not the fruit. I had shown it the same two fruits so many times it learned to copy me and not to look.
I sat down on the bench. The apprentices stood in their row and waited. They do not talk, so they cannot tell you they are sorry. They only stand and wait to be told.
I had drilled them wrong. I had made the drill too easy and too same. A drill is only as good as its pages. I had a good drill box and I had used one page of it.
So I went to the shelf and got the whole box. I took out the copies and the spoiled pages, the way the clerks show you. I made the drill harder. More fruit, more kinds, some near the same, some not. I drilled them for the rest of the day. The first two got worse before they got better, which I took as a good sign. The third got better and then better again.
Next morning I tested them on a page that was not in the box at all. All three did well. The third did best.
What I wrote on the drill board: never trust a mind that has only seen your hand. Test it on what you never showed it. And never drill a mind so easy that it learns you instead of the work.
Nessa. The third of Melon, year 203.
%%
Mash for a borrowed horse
Written by Corin's wife, at the yard, for whoever borrows the grey mare. The mare is called Dinah. She is a good horse, but she has opinions about oats.

You need:
Two handfuls of bran.
One handful of crushed barley.
A little salt.
Warm water, enough to wet it all.
One carrot, if the cook has one to spare.

1. Put the bran and the barley in the bucket.
2. Pour warm water on, not hot. Stir it with the spoon until it smells like bread.
3. Let it sit for a while. Go and say hello to the mare, so she knows who is coming.
4. Grate the carrot over the top. Mare will want the carrot first. Let her have it.
5. Add the salt. Only a pinch. Dinah has a sensitive mouth.
6. Set it in the stall by her head, not on the floor. Dinah does not eat from the floor.

If the horse is borrowed, bring the bucket back clean. Dinah will remember you if you do. She will remember you very well if you do not.
%%
Longnight cake
Moll, Pebble Cove, for the longest night of the year. I told it to my nephew Dace, who writes everything down because he is a mayor and cannot help it.
The cake has three layers, one for each month of winter: Frost, Longnight and Deepsnow. On top goes one candle for the longest night. Everyone in the cove comes to see it lit.
You need, for three layers:
Six eggs.
A cup of honey.
Three cups of fine wheat flour, sifted.
A cup of warm milk.
A pinch of salt.
Butter for the pans.
A jar of sweet berry jam for the middle.
One candle.
1. Heat the oven. It is hot enough when a pinch of flour on the floor of it turns gold in a count of ten.
2. Rub butter all over three round pans.
3. Beat the eggs with the honey in a big bowl. Beat them a long time. This is the secret. When the mix is pale and thick, and the spoon leaves a trail that stays for a count of three, stop. Your arm will hurt. That is right.
4. Sift in the flour and the salt, a little at a time. Fold it in with a spoon, gently. If you stir hard, the air goes out.
5. Fold in the warm milk last.
6. Divide the batter among the three pans.
7. Bake until the tops are golden and a thin stick comes out clean. About as long as it takes to sing the Longnight song twice, and the first verse again to be sure.
8. Let the layers cool in their pans. Do not hurry. A hot cake slides.
9. Spread jam on the first layer and set the second on top. Spread jam on the second and set the third on top. Cover the top with a thin coat of honey.
10. In the middle of the top, set the candle. Ours comes from Bram's farm outside Three Wells. Dace says it is a good candle. Dace is no candle maker, but he is a good judge of most things.
On the longest night, light the candle at dusk. Someone tells the oldest story. Nobody cuts the cake until the candle goes out. Ned cut it early one year. We do not speak of it.
The cake is better on the second day, if there is a second day.
%%
Beetroot and bean stew
Maud, the Brown Hen. Feeds ten carters, or six carters and one apprentice who has been carrying all day. Make it the morning before you need it. It is better the next day.
You need:
Four beetroot, peeled and cut in cubes.
A handful of dried beans, soaked overnight.
Two carrots.
Two leeks, from the garden, sliced thin.
A little pork fat or butter.
Water and salt.
1. Melt the fat in the big pot. Add the leeks and stir until they go soft.
2. Add the beetroot and the carrots. Let them sit in the fat for a while, stirring.
3. Pour in the beans and the water. Bring it up to a slow boil.
4. Simmer for two hours, with the lid on. Check it every half hour, and add water if it sticks.
5. Salt it at the end. Beetroot is sweet, so salt makes it sing.
6. Let it sit overnight in the cold room.
The story of this stew: a carter came in one wet evening with a borrowed horse. He had borrowed it from a farmer near Three Wells and had promised to bring it back by dawn. He tied it to the post and went in to eat. The horse ate the whole pot of beetroot from the cart, and then stood in the yard looking at the empty bucket. We made a new pot for the carter, and a bucket of oats for the horse. The farmer got his horse back on time. He sent Maud a sack of beetroot in thanks, which is why this stew is always made with beetroot now.
%%
Salt fish cakes
Mary of the sea farm, Saltreach. Good for a cold morning, or a long walk to the quay.

You need:
Two cups of cooked fish, picked clean of bones.
One cup of cold potato, mashed.
One egg.
A pinch of salt, and a little pepper.
Flour for the dusting.

1. Mix the fish and the potato together in a bowl.
2. Break the egg in and stir it through.
3. Add the salt. Taste it. Add a little more, if the fish was not salty enough.
4. Make small round cakes with your hands. Dust them with flour.
5. Fry them in hot fat until brown on both sides.
6. Eat them hot, from the pan, standing up. This is the best way.

Keep a few in a cloth for the boat. They keep a day.
%%
How to keep a relay tower's lamps
Lantern, Northpoint. Mira let me write this because I am the one who climbs the rungs. Ninety of them. I have counted.
The signal lamp at the top sits in its room of glass with a copper ring round it. Each turn of the stair has a lamp, and there are torches round the foot. Here is how I keep them.
1. Go up at first light. Count the rungs so you know you are awake.
2. At every turn lamp, look at the wick. If it smokes, trim it. If the glass is dirty, wipe it with a cloth. Smoke and dirt cost light.
3. At the top, clean the glass panes inside and out. Snow sticks to the north ones. Scrape it off with a wooden scraper, never iron.
4. Check the copper ring. It goes green in the damp. Rub it bright with a rag and a pinch of sand. Mira says a bright ring throws the light farther.
5. Look down the redstone line to the keeper's desk. If it is dull, tell Mira. Do not fix the redstone line yourself. I tried once. Do not.
6. Fill the lamp oil from the store. Write it in the log. If the log is not written, the oil was never used.
7. Walk round the lamp room once, the whole way, looking out. Mira says you must always look before you light. I asked why. She said, because you are the highest thing for half a day's walk.
In winter the glass frosts on the inside and I wipe it twice. In summer the flies get in and I let them out. The foxes come to the foot for the warmth and I do not chase them. They keep the rabbits down.
The lamp room is my favorite place. You can see the snow and the ice and the long night and, if you are lucky, the lights of the other towers answering, one by one, all the way south.
%%
Recipe: Wren's mint and honey tea
Good for a sore throat, a cold in the head and a child who will not stop talking. Makes two cups.
What goes in:
A handful of fresh mint leaves
One spoon of honey from the Ambrook hives
Two cups of warm water
1. Wash the mint in the bucket by the well. Shake it dry.
2. Crush the leaves in your palm, not too hard. You want the smell to come out, not the juice.
3. Put the leaves in the pot. Pour on the water. It should be hot but not boiling. Boiling water burns the mint and makes it bitter, and bitter medicine is not taken twice.
4. Leave it to stand for the time it takes to count to one hundred. Keep the lid on.
5. Strain it into the cups.
6. Stir the honey in while the tea is still warm, not hot.
7. Give it to the patient in a clean cup. Sit with them while they drink it. A tea is only half the medicine.
Note from Wren: Moss makes this better than I do, because Moss stands perfectly still while it waits for the count, and so the tea does not get disturbed.
%%
Honey candles, for the house
Rowan's way, from the candle shop by the east well at Three Wells. The candles last all winter if they are kept dry. Keep them out of the cat's reach. The cat has tried.
You need:
Beeswax, the clean yellow kind, half a bucket.
Honey, one small jar, for the sweetness.
Wicks of plaited cotton, one for each candle.
Cold water, for the pan.
1. Melt the beeswax slowly, in a pan over the fire, not in the flames. Stir it with the wooden paddle.
2. When it is liquid and gold, stir in the honey, a spoon at a time. The smell will be very good, and you will want to eat it.
3. Dip each wick in the wax, and let it cool, and dip it again. Do this ten times for a thick candle. Five times for a thin one, for the children.
4. Let the candles hang on the rack until they are firm.
5. Trim the wick to the length of a thumb. A long wick smokes.
6. Store them in a dry box with a lid, away from the lamps.
Note from Rowan: a child at the east well asked me yesterday why the candles smell of honey. I said it is because the bees made the wax, and the honey is only a helper. The child said then the candles must be sad when they burn, because they are only helping the light. I did not know what to say to that. I still do not.
%%
Carrot broth
Ash, at the house by the north field. The wind came in under the door today, so Aunt put a pot on.
You need:
Two carrots.
One potato.
A bowl of water.
A pinch of salt.
1. Wash the carrots and potato.
2. Cut them into small pieces.
3. Put them in a pot with the water and salt.
4. Cook them until they are soft.
5. Mash some pieces against the side of the pot. Leave the rest whole.
6. Pour the broth into bowls.
Aunt says the mashed pieces make it thick. I say the whole pieces are easier to count. We both got a second bowl.
%%
Beetroot and honey bread
Lise, weaver. This is the bread I take to the fair. It is red and sweet and the children eat it before the cakes.
You need:
Two cups of flour.
One cup of water, warm.
A spoon of honey.
A little salt.
A small beetroot, cooked and mashed.
A pinch of the dried yeast the baker keeps.
1. Stir the yeast into the warm water and wait until it foams.
2. Mix the flour and the salt in a big bowl.
3. Add the water, the honey and the mashed beetroot. Stir until it is a soft dough.
4. Knead it on a clean board until it is smooth. This takes a while. Put your weight into it.
5. Leave it in a warm place under a cloth until it has grown to twice its size.
6. Shape it into loaves and leave them again a little.
7. Bake them by the oven until the bottom sounds hollow when you tap it.
The beetroot makes it red and a little sweet. It goes dry in two days, so eat it fast or give it away. My sister says it is too red. It is meant to be red. That is the point of it.
%%
A melon too big for the cart
Maud, the Brown Hen, for the Long Road book. Written after the great melon of the summer, when the carters could not agree on how to get it through the inn door.
It came from the field at Ambrook. It was the size of a cooking pot, then a cart wheel, then something nobody had a word for. The farmer's boy rolled it onto the cart with a rope and two oxen, and the cart sagged on its springs all the way up the Long Road.
We could not make a pie of it. We could not carry it into the cold room. So we made a preserve, and this is how.
You need:
One melon, ripe, cut into chunks.
Honey, about a cup for each chunk of the size of a fist.
A sour apple, grated, or a spoon of vinegar.
A little ginger root, grated, if you have it.
Clean jars with tight lids.
1. Cut the melon into chunks. Take out the seeds.
2. Put the chunks in the big pot with the honey. Stir until the honey runs over the top.
3. Let it stand overnight. The melon will give up its water.
4. Next morning, bring it to a slow boil. Stir often, so it does not burn on the bottom.
5. Add the vinegar and the ginger. Cook until a spoon held up does not run off at once.
6. Fill the clean jars while the preserve is still hot. Put on the lids and turn them over to seal.
7. Keep them in the cold room, on the lowest shelf.
We filled forty jars. The carters took twelve of them up the Long Road, and the rest went to the mill at Ambrook, where the miller said the melon was the finest he had ever seen.
The horse that had been borrowed that summer was brought in to pull the last cart out of the yard. It pulled the whole thing alone. Nobody has ever asked the horse about it, and it has never said.
%%
Gate stew
Sable, fisher, Northpoint. At midsummer there is no night, and then in Melon the first dark comes back, and it is a surprise every year. This is the stew for the one who stands at the gate with a torch.
You need:
Fish heads and bones, from 4 or 5 fish. 3 potatoes. 2 beetroot. 1 carrot. Salt. Water.
1. Put the heads and bones in a big pot with water. Simmer them for a long time, until the broth tastes like the lake.
2. Strain the broth. The cat will have the bones.
3. Peel the beetroot. Cut the beetroot, the potatoes and the carrot into pieces the size of a thumb.
4. Put them in the broth with salt. Simmer until soft.
5. Put the lid on. Wrap the pot in a blanket. It will stay hot for an hour.
6. Carry it to the gate with a ladle and two bowls. One is for you. The other is for whoever comes by.
Last Melon, on the first dark night, I stood at the gate with a torch and the pot. A zombie came out of the spruces and stood in front of me. It looked at me. I looked at it. I had the ladle in my hand, so I banged the pot, and it left. The pot has a dent. The stew was cold by the time I sat down. That is why this one keeps hot in a blanket.
Do not offer the second bowl to a zombie. It will not eat it, and it will take it for an invitation.
%%
Hot honey milk
Dace, mayor of Three Wells. For the lamp boy, who walks the square all winter and comes to my door at dusk with his hands in his sleeves. It is also good for the mayor.

For two cups:
Two cups of milk.
Two spoons of honey. Ambrook honey, the dark kind, if you have it.
A pinch of salt.

1. Pour the milk into a small pot and set it on the stove, not in the middle of the fire.
2. Warm it slowly. Do not let it boil. Boiled milk grows a skin, and nobody likes the skin.
3. When it steams, take it off the fire. Stir in the honey and the salt. The salt is not a mistake. It makes the sweet taste more like itself.
4. Pour it into two cups. Give one to the lamp boy.
5. Drink it slowly, with both hands round the cup.

The lamp boy says it is the second best thing about winter. The first is the lamps.
%%
Melon jam for the cold months
Mira asked for this for the north. The cart goes up the road before the snow, if the road is open. She writes back that the jam is gone before the cart reaches the north road. That is what happens to jam in Northpoint.
You need:
Three melons, ripe but not soft.
Half a jar of honey, a cup of water, and a pinch of salt.
Clean jars with lids.
1. Peel the melons. Cut the flesh small, like dice, and take out the seeds.
2. Put the melon in the pot with the water. Cook it on the lowest heat.
3. Stir every so often, or it catches on the bottom. Once it catches, it tastes of the pot.
4. When the melon is soft, add the honey and the salt.
5. Keep it on the heat until a spoon held up in the air shows a sheet that does not run.
6. Pour it into the clean jars while it is hot. Put the lids on tight, and keep them somewhere cool.
Common mistakes:
- It burns on the bottom. Burned jam still goes well on bread, if you do not look at it too closely.
- It sets too soft. It needed longer. That is the honey's fault, not yours.
Pip stirs well. It does not get bored, which is the main thing.
Tam's rule for jam: one jar for the cellar, one for Pip, and two for the sister in the north.
%%
Barley and pea porridge for the sick
From the healing book at Three Wells, copied by Rowan, who was asked to make it for a neighbor with a fever.
You need:
Barley, one bowl.
Dried peas, one bowl, soaked the night before.
Water, a bucket.
Salt, a pinch.
Honey, one spoon, for a child, or a sick person who will not eat.
1. Put the barley and the peas in the pot. Cover with water. Bring it to a slow boil.
2. Stir every little while, so the bottom does not catch.
3. Cook until the peas are soft and the barley is tender. This takes most of the morning.
4. Add a pinch of salt when it is nearly done. Do not add more. A sick stomach does not like salt.
5. Serve warm, not hot, in a clean bowl. Put the spoon in the bowl, so the patient can see it is ready.
6. For a sick child, add the spoon of honey. Stir it in, slowly, and let them see it melt.
Rowan says the porridge is good for the body, but the spoon is good for the heart. A child who is given a spoon of its own knows somebody cares. A child who is only given food does not always believe it.
%%
Smoked fish for the north road
Mira, Northpoint. The tower is cut off by snow for most of the winter. Keep fish for the long nights, and you will not miss the summer so much.
You need: fresh fish from the lake below the ridge, salt, a bucket, a wooden rack, and a smoke box with a lid. Dry birch wood is best. Never use the wood from the spruce by the tower. It spits.
1. Clean the fish at once. Take out the guts and wash the cavity. A fish that waits goes bad, and a fish that goes bad is not forgiven.
2. Rub salt into the skin and the cavity. Use more salt than seems right. The fish will forgive you, and it will keep.
3. Leave the fish in a cold place for one day. Cover it with a cloth, and keep the foxes out of the room.
4. Rinse off the salt in cold water. Hang the fish on the rack, with air between each one.
5. Light a small fire of birch in the smoke box. Let it smoke, not flame. Smoke is a slow, gentle thing.
6. Hang the rack in the box and close the lid. Leave it for six hours, or until the skin is dark gold and the flesh pulls away from the bone.
7. Take the fish out and let it cool on the sill. Check the thickest part. If it is still wet, smoke it again for two hours.
8. Store the fish in a dry barrel, wrapped in cloth, with the lid on. It will keep until the snow goes. Eat it in small pieces, slowly, while looking at the north.
Mind the foxes. They can smell smoked fish through two walls and a bar on the door, and they will try the door.
%%
Honey cake for a summer fair
Toby, relay keeper at the hamlet below Copperhold. This cake goes to Three Wells for the fair in Longday. It travels well and keeps for days.
What goes in:
Two cups of flour. One cup of honey from the jar. Half a cup of soft fat. Three eggs. A spoon of ground spice. A pinch of salt. A handful of hazelnuts, chopped.
What you do:
1. Warm the honey until it runs. Do not boil it. Boiled honey is bitter.
2. Beat the fat and the honey together until they are pale.
3. Add the eggs one at a time. Beat well after each one.
4. Stir in the flour, the spice and the salt.
5. Fold in the nuts.
6. Pour it into a lined tin.
7. Bake it until a straw comes out clean.
8. Let it cool in the tin. It is soft when it is hot and firm when it is cold.
The cake smells of the hive and the spice. People at the fair follow their noses to our stall and ask what it is. We tell them it is honey cake, and they buy two.
The jar of honey is the last from the old hive, and the old hive has been good to us. We keep the cake for the fair and we keep one small cake at home for the keeper, which is me.
%%
Berry cakes
Ash, at the house by the north field. My aunt says a cake is a good reason to come inside.
You need:
A cup of flour.
A handful of berries.
One spoon of honey.
A little water.
1. Mash the berries in a bowl.
2. Stir in the flour and honey.
3. Add water until the dough holds together.
4. Make small flat cakes with your hands.
5. Cook them on a warm stone by the hearth. Turn them once.
6. Let them cool before you eat them.
I made six. My brother ate three while they were still hot. Mother says that counts as helping.
%%
Sea carrot pie
Kept on the quay at Saltreach, by Corin's cook, for the fishers who come in at dawn. Good cold or hot, and it is best eaten with the hands. Makes one large pie, enough for nine.

You need:
Four young carrots from the sea farm, or six ordinary carrots if the young ones are not in.
Two cups of cooked fish, flaked.
One cup of soft cheese.
Three eggs.
Two cups of flour and one of butter for the crust.
A handful of kelp, dried and crushed.
Salt and pepper.
Water, a little, for the crust.

1. Make the crust first. Rub the butter into the flour until it looks like coarse sand. Add water a spoon at a time, until it holds together. Rest it in the cold for an hour.
2. Peel the carrots and slice them thin, the way the fishers' wives do it, so you can see the light through each slice.
3. Fry the carrots slowly in a little fat until they turn soft and gold. Do not rush them. The carrots have been waiting all day for this.
4. Mix the fish, the cheese, the eggs and the kelp in a bowl. Season with salt and pepper. Taste it. It should taste of the sea, but not too much of it.
5. Roll out two thirds of the crust and line the pan. Spread the carrots in the bottom. Then pour the fish mixture over them.
6. Roll out the rest of the crust and lay it over the top. Pinch the edges together with your fingers, all the way round. If you have a string of the old sort, tie a loop on the edge for luck.
7. Cut three small holes in the top so the steam can get out. Otherwise the pie will rise like a loaf and split down the side.
8. Bake in a slow oven for one hour, or until the crust is brown and the middle does not wobble.
9. Let it rest for a quarter of an hour before cutting. The fishers will want to eat it straight away. Let them. But give the first piece to the cook, who made it.

Note for the quay: the kelp is what makes it taste like Saltreach. Do not leave it out, and do not use the bought sort. The bought sort is for pudding.
%%
Honey milk for a cold night
Zell, healer, at the hamlet by Ambrook. For the children who will not sleep, and for the parents who will not either.

You need:
One cup of milk from the cow by the mill.
One spoon of honey, the dark kind from the top hives.
A pinch of salt, which the children will say is wrong.

Steps:
1. Warm the milk slowly. Do not let it boil, or it will climb the pot and sulk.
2. Stir in the honey until it has gone into the milk.
3. Add the pinch of salt. It makes the honey taste more like itself.
4. Pour it into the cup. Give it to the child, and sit with them until it is finished.
5. Do not give it in the dark. Light a torch first, and tell the child the torch is for them.

The night the lamp on the hill blinked a message no one could read, I made this for three children. It did not help the lamp. It helped the children.
%%
Honey cake for a wet day
Sena, Fellick. Longday, a wet summer. The bees gave well this year and there is honey to spare.
1. Warm a jar of honey gently until it runs.
2. Beat it with four eggs and a cup of milk.
3. Stir in ground oats and a little salt, until it is thick like porridge.
4. Pour it into a greased pan and bake it by the fire, or in the furnace with the door ajar.
5. It is done when a straw comes out clean. Let it cool before you cut it.
The best honey is from the hives on the hill above the well. It is dark and tastes of the wild flowers. Our neighbor keeps the hives and trades honey for milk. In Longday our children go up the hill with a pail and come down with honey and stings. The honey is worth the stings, they say. They say it because it is true.
The boy who ran off in Sowing is back. He came home when the weather turned, with his coat in rags and a hole in his boot and a plan to keep bees. His mother fed him cake and said nothing. Later she said a good deal. He has a hive now. He named it after himself. The bees do not care.
%%
Spider in the barn, and other news
Edda, near Northpoint.
There are spiders in the barn. I went in for the apple crates and there were webs across the door, thick as wool, and one spider the size of my hand sitting in the middle of them. I did not scream. I am telling you I did not scream. I got the broom and I got them out and I swept the corners and I put a torch in the barn and left it burning. Keep the torches lit. That is what we say. It is true of barns and it is true of most things.
The apples are in. A good crop this year, though the trees are old. The oldest tree has its grey branch and it still gives fruit. I picked them with cold hands and I did not mind.
The bees are quiet now. They know winter is coming. I told them the news, the way we do at Ambrook. I told them about the ships and the lights and the broken wheel. They listened. They always listen.
The lights came again last night. Two of them, low and slow, then gone. The fox by the tower door watched them and did not move. I watched them and did not move either.
Rumors, and I write them as rumors:
Some say the stone in the Deep Works is warm now, and the miners will not go below a certain level.
Some say the grey cough is in Lowmarsh, and it is the water, or it is the ships, or it is the mines. Nobody agrees.
Some say the relays will all go quiet before the spring.
I do not know which of these is true. I know the apples are in and the barn is swept and the torch is lit. I will make sauce and I will give it to the neighbors, and tomorrow I will pick the last of the windfalls and tell the bees again.
%%
Cove chowder
Brin, fisher, Pebble Cove. Written down by the mayor of Three Wells, who ate three bowls and said he was only tasting. Chowder is what we eat when the boats stay in, which is half the winter.
You need, for six:
Two big cod, or four small, cleaned and cut in chunks.
Six potatoes, cut in cubes.
Two carrots, cut in rounds.
A handful of kelp, chopped small.
A jug of milk.
A lump of butter as big as an egg.
Salt.
1. Melt the butter in the big pot.
2. Add the potatoes and carrots. Stir them until they shine.
3. Pour in water to cover them. Cook until a knife goes into a potato easily, but the potato has not fallen apart.
4. Add the kelp. It turns bright green, then dark green. That is right.
5. Lay the fish on top. Put the lid on. Do not stir from now on, or the fish will break into crumbs.
6. Wait until the fish is white all the way through. Cut a chunk to see.
7. Pour in the milk. Warm it, but never let it boil, or the milk will split and the pot will look like a puddle in a bad field.
8. Add salt a pinch at a time. Taste. Add another pinch.
9. Serve in deep bowls, with bread to wipe the bowl clean.
Brin's notes. Make it the day before you want it. Chowder is better on the second day, and better again on the third. Nobody has ever had it on the fourth.
We eat it from the pot in the middle of the table in the net loft, and nobody leaves until the pot is empty. The mayor asked me for a rule for the chowder. I gave him one. Finish the pot. He wrote it down and looked pleased. I think it was the first rule he did not have to enforce.
%%
Hot milk for the night watch
Written by Lorn, for the farm's night watch, who sit up with the cows in the field, and with the lamp at the gate. Summer nights are short, but a cold cup helps. Summer.

You need:
A cup of milk for each man on watch.
A pinch of cinnamon.
A spoon of honey.
A little ground ginger from the Oak Post store, if there is any.
A stick of dried mint from the garden wall.

1. Put the milk in a small pot and warm it over a low fire. Do not let it boil. Stir it gently all the time.
2. Add the cinnamon and the ginger, and stir until the milk looks a little golden.
3. Stir in the honey until it melts. Taste it. It should be sweet, but not heavy.
4. Put the mint stick in the milk and let it steep for a minute. Take it out before the mint goes bitter.
5. Pour the milk into the cups and carry it out to the field in a basket, with a lantern.
6. Give each man his cup. Say his name. Ask him if the cows are settled. He will say yes, and then he will go out and count them, which is exactly right.

The night watch say the hot milk keeps the cold out of the bones, and the sleep out of the eyes. Lorn says that is why she makes it, and that the cows also like a warm cup, though they will not say so.
%%
The big pot for the barn raising
We raised the new barn in the 204th year of the archive, in the autumn, and held the feast in the first snow. That is the only way to get people up the ridge road in winter. They came for the food and stayed for the warmth, and then they stayed for the food again.
This is the pot. It feeds twenty, and a few more who come up late, smelling it from the road.
You need:
Two pork shoulders, cut in big pieces.
Ten potatoes, the big ones from the bottom field.
Twelve carrots, the long ones.
Three beetroot, peeled.
Water for twenty bowls, and a bit more for Hesk.
A good handful of salt.
Two loaves of wheat bread, for dipping.
A jar of honey, for the bread. Briar of Ambrook sent it in trade for two sacks of wheat. She said the honey was worth more. She was right.
1. Brown the pork in the big pot. Do it in two lots, or it steams and does not brown, and then Tam is cross.
2. Cover the pork with water. Let it simmer for three hours. Skim the top, and then skim it again.
3. After the first hour, add the potatoes and the carrots, in chunks.
4. Add the beetroot last, or the whole pot goes pink. The children will love that. The grown ones will not.
5. Add the salt slowly. Taste as you go. Hesk tasted it eleven times. I counted.
6. Keep the pot hot at the side of the fire. Stir it when you think of it. Every half hour is enough, and every hour is plenty.
7. Ladle it into the bowls. Tear the bread and put a spoon of honey on each piece. The honey makes the bread kind to the stew.
Pip carried the pot from the fire to the table. Then it went back for the second pot, and the third, and nobody had asked it to. The fourth time, I told it:
> stay by the door
= stay
It stood by the door with its copper arms folded, as if that was where it had always been.
Hesk came up from Copperhold with a bag of coal, which is the only gift a miner knows how to give. He sang one song, badly. In the middle of it the snow blew in through the open door, and everyone stopped to watch it land on the pot.
Nobody ate the whole pot. We never do. A pot like this is for the middle of winter, and the middle of winter is always longer than you think.
%%
Beetroot bread for a poor year
When the wheat is short, the beet makes up the weight. Mira's loaf, from the farm outside Northpoint, winter.
What goes in: 3 cups of wheat flour, 1 cup of grated cooked beetroot, 1 spoon of salt, half a cup of warm water, a spoon of yeast, if there is any.
1. Mix the flour and salt.
2. Add the beetroot and the yeast. The dough will go pink. That is correct.
3. Add water a little at a time. Knead until it is smooth and springs back.
4. Cover with a cloth. Leave near the hearth until it doubles. If the cat sits on it, it is already warm.
5. Shape into a round loaf. Cut a cross on the top.
6. Bake in a hot oven until the bottom sounds hollow when you knock it.
The loaf is pink and sweet and lasts three days. Mira has eaten it every day this month. She says it is the best she can do. She also says she is tired of pink.
%%
Cold melon for the road
Pell, Long Road ledger. Melon, 188.

For a bowl, take half a ripe melon, a cup of clean water, a spoon of honey, and a pinch of salt. This is a good dish after the open road. It needs no fire, so it can be made while the kettle is heating.

1. Wash the melon before cutting it.
2. Cut it in half and scrape out the seeds.
3. Cut the flesh from the rind.
4. Put the flesh in a bowl and mash it with a wooden spoon.
5. Stir in the water, honey, and salt.
6. Taste a little. Add water if it is too sweet.
7. Cover the bowl with a clean cloth.
8. Set it in the cool pantry for an hour.
9. Stir again and serve in small cups.

The Brown Hen keeps its pantry cool, but not cold. Do not put the bowl by the door. The innkeeper opens it whenever someone knocks, and the warm air spoils the dish. Last Longday the door opened six times before noon. One knock was only a goat.
%%
Letter: Esk to the Archive at Vell
To the clerks at Vell, from Esk, mapmaker, at Fellick under Northpoint. Third of Swarm, 151.
Good clerks, I send you a map of the hamlet and the paths round it, and a letter to go with it, because you keep everything we write and I would not have my map filed without its story.
Fellick is nine houses on a shelf of rock below Northpoint. We are not a town. We have no inn and no school and no mayor. We have a well that freezes and a path down to the Long Road that we clear by turns. The relay tower above us is the last one north, and Mira keeps it, and in winter her lamp is the only light we see.
I make maps. I walk with a board and a string and count my paces. I draw the hills and the marshes and the roads, and I sell copies to travelers at Three Wells. It is slow work and I am not rich, but I like it. When I draw a hill I have walked, I know the hill.
This year I drew the whole north. It took me from Thaw to Swarm. I slept in barns and under carts and once in the relay house at Northpoint, where Mira gave me tea and told me my map of her hill was wrong, and then showed me why, and then gave me more tea. She was right. The hill has two tops and I had drawn one.
The map I send has the birches marked, the ones with the good sap. I drill them by a rule and mark the year on the trunk with a chalk cross, so no tree is taken twice. There are forty crosses now. The oldest are fading. In a few years I will not know which tree was tapped, and then I will tap it again, and that will be too soon. So I draw them. That is what a map is for, I think. To remember what we would otherwise forget, and to keep us honest.
If the clerks would file this letter with the map, I would be glad. And if any apprentice comes north with a big mind and a question about the roads, tell them to ask at Fellick. We are small but we know the way.
Your friend in the north,
Esk
%%
Notice: the Halfway Inn riddle board
Dace, mayor of Three Wells, copying this for the notice board by the east well. The Halfway Inn keeps a board by the hearth that has not gone out in twenty years. The innkeeper writes a riddle on it every month. A traveler who answers it gets a cup of honey drink. A traveler who answers it wrong gets the cup anyway, but everyone knows.
This month's riddle:
I have a bed but never sleep. I run all day but never walk. I am cold and I am clear. What am I?
The answer is the stream by the inn. Anyone who has crossed the little bridge knows it.
Last month's riddle was about a relay lamp. The answer was the lamp. A relay keeper from the north stopped in and answered it before she took off her coat. The innkeeper said she had an unfair advantage. She said she had fixed that lamp twice that spring.
The riddle board is good for the inn. Travelers stop to try it and stay for supper. The innkeeper says a riddle is cheaper than a sign. I say a sign is cheaper than a riddle. We agree the fire is the best thing in the room, and leave it at that.
%%
Recipe: warm mash for a sick cow
Wren's mash, for a cow that will not eat. Winter, at the house at the edge of Lowmarsh. A neighbor's cow, Bess, stopped eating three days ago, and nobody could say why.
Take: 4 handfuls of oats, 2 handfuls of bran, 1 spoon of honey, a little salt, a bucket of hot water.
1. Put the oats and bran in a clean bucket.
2. Pour in the hot water until it covers them. Stir.
3. Cover the bucket with a cloth and leave it for the time it takes to milk another cow.
4. Stir in the honey and salt.
5. Carry it to the stall while it is still warm. Hold the bucket under her nose.
6. If she eats, give her half now and half in the evening. If she will not, send for me.
7. Keep her warm. A blanket, straw, and a closed door.
Bess ate half the bucket. By the next day she was eating again. Wren does not say what was wrong. The neighbor thinks it was the cold. Another thinks it was the water. A third says it was the hum. Nobody agrees.
%%
Pumpkin bread, after the fox
Lost two hens this week. The fox came in by the hen house door, which I had left open for Pip. It took the brown one and the one with the bent feather. I have not forgiven the fox. I have made this bread instead, so the fox will know I am a sad man with a loaf.
You need:
Half a pumpkin, the big orange kind from the patch behind the barn.
Two cups of wheat flour.
Two eggs, from hens that foxes have not yet found.
Half a cup of honey, and a pinch of salt.
A handful of pumpkin seeds, dried on the sill.
1. Cut the pumpkin in half. Scrape out the stringy part and keep the seeds.
2. Cook the pumpkin until soft.
3. Mash the pumpkin with the honey while it is warm. Beat in the eggs.
4. Add the flour and the salt. Stir until thick.
5. Pour it into the greased pan. Scatter the seeds on top.
6. Bake until a stick comes out clean. Cool it on the sill. Keep an eye on the sill.
The fox took a piece anyway, the morning after. I found the crumbs on the step, and a line of small footprints going toward the orchard. I do not think the fox was sorry either.
%%
The old map on the wall
This is stuck to the wall of the candle shed at Frosthollow, behind the door, where the wind does not get it. Hal wrote the words. Tobin drew the picture at the bottom. The map itself is older and we do not know who drew it.
The map shows the road from Frosthollow up to Northpoint tower. It shows the hamlet: the candle shed, the inn, the sheep pens, the well. It shows the waymarks, and counts them. There are eleven waymarks on the road. Somebody has marked each one with a small stone on the map.
It shows the tower at the top with a flag. The tower has no flag. It may have had one once. Nobody here remembers a flag. Old Fen says his mother talked about a flag. Then he says he made that up. Old Fen makes things up. We love him for it.
Somebody has drawn a fox at the edge of the map, by the trees. The fox is very good. It has a fine tail. Tobin tried to draw a fox like it and his fox looks like a cat that has been shouted at.
In the corner there is a word we cannot read. It is either a name or a warning or a joke. We have argued about it for years. Hal says it is a name. Fen says it is a warning. Tobin says it is a joke.
On the back, in faint writing, there is a line about the long nights. It says: "when the lamp is lit, we are not alone." We do not know whose lamp, or who is not alone. We like it. We have left it as it is.
The map has a fold down the middle. The fold is worn through. We keep it flat now, behind glass, in the back room, where it always goes.
%%
Cave cheese
Dace, Pebble Cove, Frost. Aunt Moll made this while I wrote it down. She says a cheese is only as good as its cellar, and her cellar is a cave.
You need:
A big pot of fresh milk.
A small cup of apple vinegar.
Two pinches of salt.
A clean cloth.
1. Warm the milk in the pot until it is as warm as your wrist. Do not let it boil.
2. Take the pot off the fire. Pour in the vinegar slowly and stir once.
3. Wait. The milk will split into white lumps and thin yellow water. This is right. I was alarmed. I should not have been.
4. Spread the cloth over a bowl. Pour the lumps in. Let the water run through.
5. Tie up the cloth and hang it on a hook until it stops dripping.
6. Open the cloth. Mix in the salt. Press the cheese into a flat round.
7. Carry it to the cave. Set it on a shelf of stone. Turn it every morning.
In ten days it is firm and sharp. In thirty it is the best cheese on the coast.
About the cave. It opened under Moll's beetroot field two winters ago. Float, the net mender's apprentice, was helping her that day, and Moll told it:
> go and stay in the shed
= stay
She meant home. It understood stay. So Float stayed where it stood, in the middle of the field. Moll went in for a bucket, and then it began to sleet, and she thought Float was in the shed. On the third night the frozen ground gave way. Float went down into the earth with a soft crunch, still standing.
Below was a dry, cold cave with a stone floor and shelves in the walls. Float stood at the bottom with its hands at its sides. Moll said come, and Float climbed out.
Moll says an order stays until another one comes. She is much more careful now.
%%
Notice: supper at the Brown Hen
Merrin, innkeeper at the Brown Hen. On the first market night of every month we set a long table in the yard and everyone brings a dish. The inn gives the bread and the soup.
Bring a bowl and a spoon. Bring a chair if you have one.
Pell brings honey cakes. The Ambrook folk bring apples in Apple month and early ones in Swarm. The salt crews bring fish, packed in salt, and they smell of the sea, which is fair. Someone always brings beetroot. It is always good and there is always too much of it.
Children run about until dark. Keep the torches lit at the gate. Keep the yard clear for the carts.
Last month a cat got into the soup pot. The soup was still good. We did not tell the cat.
%%
Letter: Lise to her sister in Three
Dear Sall,
The summer is long and the bees are loud. The clover by the fence is thick with them. My old dog has taken to sleeping under the apple tree and will not be moved for anything.
I have three fleeces left and a good blue in the pot. If you want a shawl before Frost, tell me now. Writing takes longer for me than weaving.
The fair is soon. I will bring the cakes and the blue wool. I hear the fair is smaller this year. The baker says the same. Half the young folk of Three Wells are talking of Saltreach and the big ships. A ship bound over the water, three times as long as any boat, they say. The baker says it is a rumor and the fish market price board says nothing of it. I say a ship is a ship. I will not go on the water. I will not go on a horse either, so do not ask.
A child at the school wrote to the archive about the sky over Northpoint. Lights, it said, in the long night. Some say falling stars. Some say fires. The child said they were looking at us. I say they were falling stars, and I have seen falling stars, and they do not look at anyone.
Have your man fix the loose plank on the bridge before Frost. It was loose in Sowing and it will be loose in Deepsnow.
Tell the children I have wool for them.
Your sister, Lise
%%
Birch sap
The tap runs two weeks. The trick is a low fire and a wide pan, and patience.
1. Gather the sap the same day. It sours if it stands.
2. Pour it in the wide pan. Keep the fire low. Do not let it boil hard.
3. Skim the foam off with a spoon and keep it for the pigs.
4. When it is the color of tea, move it to a small pot and finish it by the fire.
5. Test it on a cold plate. If it coats the back of the spoon, it is done.
6. Pour it hot into clean jars. It keeps a year in the cold room.
The pan is never used for anything else after this. The syrup gets into the metal and stays. My grandmother's pan still smells of birch in the spring, even empty.
%%
Lost and found at Frosthollow
A page from the notice board at the inn, spring. Folk write on it and folk rub things out. Hal keeps the board tidy and reads everything on it. This is what was on it this spring, in the order it happened.
LOST: one grey goat, answers to Nettle. Last seen by the sheep pens going north. She is friendly and will follow you if you have a turnip. Please do not chase her. Reward: a dozen candles.
FOUND: one boot, left foot, by the well. Very large. If it is yours, come and get it.
FOR SALE: oak planks, dry and straight. Ask for Fen at the sheep pens. Fen is not deaf but he will pretend he is if you want to sell him something.
LOST: the same grey goat. She has now been seen twice by the waymarks. Do not chase her. Reward is now two dozen candles.
NOTICE: the relay apprentices will carry messages down to the tower on the first of Swarm. Bring letters to the candle shed before then. They do not talk but they carry well and they keep the letters dry.
FOUND: a fox. Not lost. It is a wild fox and it lives by the trees and it is not yours. Stop putting notices up about it.
LOST: the goat, again. She was in the candle shed eating the wicks. She is home now. She is not sorry. Reward is withdrawn. Thank you to everyone who looked. Thank you mostly to Tobin, who sat down in the snow and waited, and she came to him.
The goat is called Nettle and she is fine. The boot is still here. Nobody has claimed the boot.
The fox is also fine.
%%
Baked apples after a fright
Ossa, Saltreach ferry. Frost. I keep my apples in the barn behind the ferry house, on straw, in a cool dark corner. Last week I went out for a basket and the barn was full of spiders.
Not small ones. The big grey kind that climbs walls and looks at you. The wind had blown the door open in the night and put out both torches, and a barn with no light is an open door for them. Ballast went in first. Ballast came out faster.
I stood in the yard and thought about my apples. The next passenger across was a charcoal burner from the north shore, a big man named Dunn. I told him about the spiders. He said, "I know all about dark places." He took the torches from the ferry, lit every one of them and walked in, singing. I do not know what he sang. The spiders left through the window like a crowd leaving a bad play.
They left their webs behind. The apples came out wearing them like shawls. We picked every one clean. Then I said I was going to bake the whole basket, and Dunn said he would stay for that.
These are the baked apples.
You need, for six:
Six big apples.
Six spoons of honey.
A handful of dried sweet berries.
A little butter.
A cup of cider.
1. Heat the oven until it is hot enough that you cannot hold a hand in it for a count of five.
2. Wash the apples. With a small knife, cut out the core from the top, but do not cut through the bottom.
3. Stand the apples in a dish.
4. Fill each hole with a spoon of honey, a few berries and a bit of butter.
5. Pour the cider around the apples, a finger deep.
6. Bake until the apples are soft and wrinkled and the skin splits. About as long as a slow crossing and back.
7. Spoon the juice from the dish over them before you serve.
Eat them hot. They are best after a fright, and best of all with the person who saved your barn.
Now I keep three torches in the barn and I check them every dusk. Keep the torches lit. It is cheaper than a charcoal burner.
%%
Goat milk pudding for the first thaw
Hazel, cheesemaker, Northpoint. A pudding for the day the ice cracks on the pond. I make it every year, whatever the weather.
1. Warm a pot of goat milk with a stick of honeycomb in it.
2. When the honey has melted, take out the stick and give it to the child who is standing nearest.
3. Beat two eggs with a spoon of flour and add them slowly. Stir all the time.
4. Cook on a low fire until it thickens. It should coat the back of the spoon.
5. Pour into small bowls and leave outside in the snow to cool.
6. Eat with a little cheese on top. Yes, cheese. Trust me.
The first time I made this, I forgot the eggs. It was a warm milk with honey. The children drank it and asked for more. Some of my best recipes are mistakes.
%%
Market honey bread
Ada, Kettle Ridge. The beekeeper brought honey to market in a jar wrapped in wool. I traded him two lengths of blue cloth for it. He says the bees have been slow to leave their hives this winter. Tam says the cold is to blame. Tam says most things are to blame on the cold.
You need:
Two cups of wheat flour.
A spoon of honey.
A cup of milk.
A spoon of pork fat.
A pinch of salt.
1. Mix the flour and salt in a bowl.
2. Warm the milk. Stir in the honey and fat.
3. Pour the milk into the flour a little at a time.
4. Stir until the dough holds together.
5. Shape it into a flat round.
6. Bake it until the top is brown.
7. Wrap it in cloth before carrying it to market.
The bread stays soft until the stalls close. If it does not, give the last piece to Pip. Pip carries it home, and Tam says it was meant for Pip all along.
%%
Where is the cat
Lise, weaver. The brown cat is lost. She is small and brown with a torn left ear. She sits in the window and stares at nothing, which is her way.
She went out on the second of Melon and did not come back.
I have looked under the mill, in the barn, in the hedge along the north side of the field, and down the well and up the well, which is a joke, but I did look down the well. I have asked at the Archive, the inn, the bakery and the school. The children of the school have drawn her on the notice board with a note. Bel drew her with the torn ear and it is a good drawing.
If you find her, do not chase her. Sit down and wait. She will come and sit on you. Give her a little fish and tell me.
The foxes have been bold this summer. My neighbor heard them at night by the hen house. A fox does not take a cat, she says. I say a fox takes what it can and I do not know. I will not say more than that.
Some folk by the marsh say there are more foxes this year and they come closer to the town. Others say it is the same as always. The healer at Lowmarsh has her hands full with the cough and does not talk about foxes, so the rumor stays a rumor.
If she is not found by Apple, I will put up a note on the Long Road. I will put it at the waymark with the torch on top, where folk pass.
%%
Honey bread, for the winter
Hob, ferry keeper at the Copperhold crossing. The ferry is quiet in winter, and Hob keeps the stove going at the ferry house. This bread is for the men who come across in the frost.

You need:
Three cups of wheat flour, from the Oak Post mill.
One cup of warm water.
A handful of salt.
Two spoons of honey, the dark sort from Ambrook.
A little butter, or a little lard if the butter is gone.

1. Warm the water till it is like a bath for a baby. Stir in the honey until it dissolves.
2. Mix the flour and salt in a bowl. Make a well in the middle.
3. Pour the honey water into the well. Stir with a spoon until it is a rough dough.
4. Turn it out on the board. Knead it for as long as it takes to say a short prayer. Hob says the prayer is up to you.
5. Put it back in the bowl, cover it with a cloth, and set it by the stove. Leave it until it has doubled. In the frost, this takes all afternoon.
6. Knock it back. Shape it into a round loaf. Set it in a greased pot.
7. Cover it again and let it rise for an hour more.
8. Bake it in the pot, with the lid on, at the back of the stove, for forty minutes. Do not open the lid. The bread will sulk if you look at it.
9. Take it out and tap the bottom. It should sound hollow, like a drum a long way off.
10. Cool it on the rack. Cut it when the knife can go in without tearing.

The ferrymen say the honey bread is the best thing to eat on the crossing, because it keeps the cold out and the talking in. Hob says that is the only recipe he has ever been proud of.
%%
Snowmelt syrup
Esk, mapmaker, at Fellick, a hamlet of nine houses under Northpoint. Written in Sowing, 151. The snow goes and the birches give.
In the cold north the birch sap runs for two weeks only, when the nights are still sharp and the days are warm. Get it wrong and the tree is harmed. Get it right and you have syrup for a year.
What you need: a drill and a spile, two clean buckets, a wide pan, and a fire that can be kept low for hours.
Which trees: birch, waist thick or more, with a good crown. Never the same tree twice in three years. Mark it on a map so you remember.
1. Drill a hole a finger wide, slanting up a little, as high as your chest.
2. Tap the spile in gently with the flat of your hand. Do not hammer it.
3. Hang the bucket on the spile. Put a lid on, or a cloth, against rain and insects.
4. Come back at evening. A good tree gives a bucket in a day, more on a warm day after a cold night.
5. When the sap stops running, pull the spile and plug the hole with a whittled peg and a little clay.
Sap is thin and faintly sweet. Boil it down, never all the way in the pan, then finish it by the fire in a smaller pot. One bucket of sap gives a cup of syrup. It is a long day for a small jar. Do it with company.
The syrup is dark and tastes of the wood and the cold. Pour it on bread. Our neighbor's boy ran off in Sowing with the whole jar under his coat. We found him up the hill, sticky to the elbows, watching the sap drip. He said he was testing it. He was not wrong to.
%%
Hot cider with honey
Dace, mayor of Three Wells, at Pebble Cove for the harbor council. Deepsnow. The cook said I could not leave the kitchen until I wrote this down. These are the rules.
You need:
One jug of apple cider.
A spoon of honey for each cup.
A few slices of dried apple.
1. Pour the cider into a pot. A pot, not a bucket. I have seen it done with a bucket.
2. Set the pot on the fire. Heat it slowly. Do not let it boil. A boiled cider is a sad cider.
3. Stir in the honey, one spoon for each cup. Stir until it is gone.
4. Put two slices of dried apple in each cup.
5. Pour the hot cider over the apple.
6. Do not drink it yet. It is hot.
Rule six comes last because I learned it after rule five.
The cook says a cup at bedtime keeps the cold out until morning. The cook is usually right. I wrote that down too.
%%
Cold cherry drink for the long day
Written by Lorn, for the reapers who work the far field in the summer heat, when the sun is hot until dusk and the water in the bucket goes warm. Summer.

You need:
A bucket of cherries, from the tree by the well, stoned and crushed.
Two cups of water from the well, cold.
A spoon of honey for each cup.
A sprig of mint from the garden wall, if you have one.
A bowl of ice-house snow, kept in the straw.

1. Crush the cherries in a bowl with the back of a spoon. Leave the juice in the bowl.
2. Strain the juice into the bucket, through a cloth, to take out the pips.
3. Add the water and the honey. Stir until the honey is gone.
4. Put the bucket down in the cool of the well house, and leave it an hour, so the drink gets cold.
5. Before you carry it to the field, add a handful of the ice-house snow. It will melt slowly in the bucket, and keep the drink cold until the last cup.
6. Carry the bucket out in both hands, slowly, so the drink does not slop. Give each reaper a cup, and say: take a rest. They will not take one, and then they will.

The reapers say the cherry drink is the sweetest thing in the summer, and that the snow in it is the first snow they have had since the winter. Lorn says it is only ice-house snow. The reapers say that is what snow is, if you have been in the sun all day.
%%
Stew for the men who row the ferry
Written by Hob, for the ferrymen's wives, who asked him to write down the stew he makes for the men on the cold nights. It is made in one big pot, and it is never finished before the men come in. Winter.

You need:
One old hen, cut into pieces.
Two beetroots, grated.
Four potatoes, cut small.
Two carrots, cut in rounds.
A handful of barley from the Oak Post store.
A bunch of wild herbs from the bank, tied with string.
Salt, a good pinch.
Water, enough to cover everything by a hand.

1. Put the hen in the pot with the water and bring it to a slow boil. Skim off the grey foam with a spoon. Do this three times, or until the foam stops.
2. Add the barley and the herbs. Simmer for an hour.
3. Add the potatoes and carrots. Simmer for another hour.
4. Add the beetroot last. It turns the stew red, and the men say a red stew is a warm stew, though it has nothing to do with the heat.
5. Taste it. Add salt. Taste it again. The men will want it saltier than you think. They are wrong, but they are cold.
6. Take out the herb bundle and throw it to the gulls, who will argue about it.
7. Serve it hot, in the big bowls, with the bread from the stove, and the candle in the window.

Hob says the stew is never done. He always leaves a little in the pot, so the next man can add to it when he comes in. It has been going for eleven winters now, and nobody can say what is in it any more, except the beetroot.
%%
Potato cakes
Ash, at the house by the edge of Northpoint. Father brought potatoes from the south road. He said the road is almost smooth as far as the new inn.
You need:
Three potatoes.
A pinch of salt.
A little flour.
A spoon of water.
1. Wash the potatoes and peel them.
2. Grate them into a bowl.
3. Stir in the salt and enough flour to hold the pieces together.
4. Add the water a little at a time.
5. Press the mix into flat cakes.
6. Cook the cakes on a warm stone. Turn them when the first side is brown.
7. Eat them hot.
The first cake broke when I turned it. Father put the pieces in his bowl and said it was the best one. Mother says he says that when he wants the next one too.
%%
Pell's apple cakes
Pell, at the Halfway Inn. Longday, 184.

For six small cakes, take two apples, two cups of flour, one egg, half a cup of milk, a spoon of honey, and a little butter. The inn has no mill, so ask the Brown Hen for flour before the road gets busy.

1. Wash the apples and cut away the cores.
2. Chop the apples into small pieces.
3. Mix the flour and egg in a bowl.
4. Add the milk and honey. Stir until the batter is smooth.
5. Fold in the apple pieces.
6. Warm a pan over a low fire. Add a little butter.
7. Put in one spoon of batter for each cake.
8. Turn each cake when its edges are firm.
9. Cook the other side until brown.

Eat them warm. Keep one aside for the carter who brought the flour. Do not put it on the window ledge. A fox took the last one from there, and the carter still tells the story as if he had seen it happen.
%%
Recipe: pumpkin bread from the cave
Found in the back of a book belonging to the Sayer family, written in the hand of Old Ada. The cave is in the field below the barn, and the bread was made in it, in the cold, for the men who dug out the stone.
What goes in:
One small pumpkin, cooked soft and mashed
Two cups of wheat flour
A spoon of salt
A spoon of honey
A spoon of yeast from the crock by the stove
Half a cup of warm water
A pinch of cinnamon, if it can be had, from the Saltreach cart
1. Put the pumpkin in the pot with a little water. Cook it until it is soft enough to pull apart with a spoon.
2. Let the pumpkin cool until you can put a finger in it.
3. Mix the yeast and the warm water and the honey in a small bowl. Leave it to bubble for the length of a short song.
4. Mix the flour and salt in the big bowl. Make a hollow.
5. Pour the bubbling water in and add the pumpkin. Mix it with your hand until it holds together.
6. Knead it for as long as it takes to count to two hundred. Your arms will complain. That is how you know it is working.
7. Put it in a cloth by the fire and leave it to rise for an afternoon. In the cave, it rises very slowly. Be patient.
8. Shape it into a round. Put it in the oven, or on the hot stone of the hearth, under a cover.
9. Bake for a long hour. Take the cover off for the last quarter of an hour, so the top goes gold.
10. Break it open while it is still warm. Eat the middle first.
Note from Ada: the men who dug the stone liked this bread better than any bread from the town. They said it tasted of the dark. I did not know what they meant. I still do not. But I baked it every day for a month, and they ate it every day, and it is the best thing I ever made in a hole in the ground.
%%
Melon jam, the last of the summer
Mira, Northpoint. Melons come up here only in a good year, and only in the south corner of the garden, under the glass. This is for a good year.
You need: three ripe melons, two cups of honey, half a cup of water, the juice of one melon, and a wide pot that does not stick. A wooden spoon. Clean jars with lids.
1. Cut the melons into small pieces and take out the seeds. Keep the seeds in a dry jar. They make a good drink for the children.
2. Put the pieces in the pot with the water. Let them soften on a low fire, stirring often, for about half an hour.
3. Mash the pieces with the back of the spoon. Some lumps are fine. The jam is not a wall.
4. Add the honey, a spoon at a time, and stir until it dissolves. Taste it. If it is too thin, boil it for a little longer.
5. Pour in the juice of the last melon and stir once more. This gives the jam its shine.
6. Test the jam. Put a drop on a cold plate. If it wrinkles when you push it with a finger, it is ready. If it runs, cook it a little more.
7. Pour the jam into the clean jars while it is hot. Fill them to the neck, and close the lids tight.
8. Store the jars in the cold store, away from the stove. Open one each morning in the cold season. A spoon of melon jam on bread is the best thing a keeper can have at dawn, and I have had many.
Label each jar with the date in the tower book. Last year two jars were lost, and we are still arguing about which one was the good one.
%%
Snow bread, for the first snow
Kept by Tam at the Kettle Ridge kitchen, copied out for Pip, who wanted it written down. We make this on the first morning of snow, before anyone goes out. It is warm, and it tastes like the cold smells.

You need:
Four cups of flour.
Two cups of milk, warm.
One spoon of honey.
One spoon of butter, soft.
A pinch of salt.
Dried apple, chopped small, as much as you like.

1. Warm the milk in the pot. Do not let it boil.
2. Put the flour and the salt in a bowl. Make a hole in the middle.
3. Pour in the milk and the honey. Stir from the middle outward, slowly.
4. Add the butter and knead until the dough is smooth and springs back.
5. Leave it in a warm corner for an hour. Cover it with a cloth. Do not let the cat near it.
6. Knead in the dried apple. Shape the dough into a round loaf.
7. Bake it in the oven until the top is golden and the bottom sounds hollow when tapped.
8. Let it cool a little. Then tear it open, while it steams, and eat it with butter, outside if you can stand the cold.

Pip asked why it is called snow bread, since it is not white. Tam says the snow is in the morning, when you open the door, and the bread is for when you come back in.

Last winter, Pip made this for the whole ridge, and the children carried it up the lane in a basket. It is still the best bread on the ridge, Tam says. Pip did not argue.
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Bridge keeper's apple loaf
Hob, farm outside Ambrook. Longnight, 207.

The old bridge is sound, though the loose plank still makes a noise when a cart passes. I have put a mark beside it and will mend it when the frost lifts. Until then, walk near the rail and do not race the children across.

This loaf keeps well in a covered box. It is good for workers who come in cold, and for children who have spent the day practicing a play. The school group came to the farm this morning. One child played a miller, one played a goose, and Bel played the bridge. Bel stood very still until the others forgot the next line.

You need:
Four cups of flour.
One cup of oats.
Two apples.
Half a cup of honey.
A cup of milk.
Two spoons of butter.
A pinch of salt.
A small cup of water.
A handful of chopped nuts, if there are any.

1. Grease a wide baking dish with a little butter.
2. Wash the apples. Cut away the core and any bruised places.
3. Chop one apple into small pieces. Slice the other apple thinly.
4. Put the flour, oats and salt in a large bowl.
5. Warm the milk and the rest of the butter in a pot.
6. Stir the honey into the warm milk.
7. Pour the warm milk into the flour. Stir with a wooden spoon.
8. Add water a little at a time. Stop when the dough is soft and can be pressed together.
9. Fold in the chopped apple and nuts.
10. Press the dough into the dish.
11. Lay the apple slices across the top.
12. Bake until the loaf is brown and firm in the middle.
13. Leave it to cool before cutting. A hot loaf falls apart.

We ate it with milk after the play. The goose forgot to honk, so the children added the sound themselves. The sound was fine. The goose, played by Tam's youngest, asked for a second piece and got one.

The bridge plank was quiet all evening. I had wedged it with a small piece of oak. In the morning, the piece was gone. The cat had carried it into the barn and slept on it. I will use a larger wedge next time.
