Horizon (03) by Sophie Littlefield Read Free Book Online Page B

sound, an exhalation of breath.
    Earl stopped, put a hand on her shoulder to steady her. “Cass, are you all right?”
    She tried to evade his kind eyes. They were sharp and shining in their nest of wrinkles in his weathered face, but he had seen.
    “I’m fine.”
    His hand stayed heavy on her shoulder for a moment. “You need to take care, girl,” he said gruffly, and Cass knew it was reproach as well as concern, that he recognized the signs of her hangover. Well, she deserved it, didn’t she, and as they walked the rest of the way she redoubled her fierce silent promise that tonight would be different, that tonight she would abstain from everything that was wrong.
    The hardtack, spread with a bit of jam to sweeten it, did not go down easily and did not do well in her stomach afterward. Still, Cass got through the afternoon, keeping to her own row and painfully thinking up responses to the others’ cheerful greetings. The sky cleared by late afternoon, turning a brilliant sapphire suffused with unseasonable warmth, and Cass’s skin sheened with perspiration as they walked back together.
    They turned their baskets over to the kitchen staff, who would wash the leaves and pods and roots and turn them into a dozen different dishes. Today’s harvest was mostly tender leaves, succulent and pale from all the rains, so it would be salads, stir-fries and maybe even an exotic soufflé made with the precious eggs from the three chickens found in a creek wash a quarter mile from a farmhouse near Oakton. People joked that the chickens were New Eden’s VIPs and everyone was anxious for the day a rooster would be found and ensure future generations of poultry.
    The few pods they’d found were still young and tender enough to be eaten as is; though mature pods were edible they were tough and fibrous and usually reserved for the work studio, where they were dried and turned into a coirlike material that could be used for mats and scrubbers. But the shelled beans could be tasty if they weren’t allowed to get too large—at that point, the beans would be dried, oil pressed from them and the rest ground for flour.
    The meals would be prepared with care and presented with ceremony by the women and a few men who tended the kitchen. People needed to take pride in their work—Cass understood that. She even wished she could feel the same, and she envied the beaming servers who set out dishes garnished with lemon slices, the juice squeezed so that everyone could have a little in their boiled water.
    Cass lingered in the yard, pretending that she was caught up in a boccie game, in reality putting off the moment when she would have to face Suzanne. That was how she came to be among the first to hear the cry go up.
    “Blueleaf!”
    For a beat after the syllables hung in the clear warm air, there was silence. Cass whipped around and stared at the long table where the rinsed kaysev was laid out to dry, two of the kitchen staff—Rachael and Chevelle—frozen over a sorted pile, looks of horror on their faces.
    Cass leaped to her feet and ran to the table. Chevelle mutely handed over a bunch of leaves. Cass examined it with shaking fingers and yes— oh, yes, there it is —the cloudy blue tint at the base of the leaf, trailing up into the veining, which was almost azure before it shaded to green. The leaves were too young yet to have clearly ruffled edges and they lay cool and smooth in Cass’s hand.
    “Oh fuck,” Chevelle murmured, as Corryn hastened over, wiping her hands on her apron.
    “Is it?” she demanded in the booming voice that more than anything had sealed her position as head cook. She held out her hand for the leaves but Cass made no move to share them, only nodding.
    The worst of the discovery—the first in a month—was not that a rogue plant had grown on Garden Island, but that one of them had failed to identify it when they picked it. If it had been passed over by the kitchen staff—whose job was to cook, not inspect,