Chapter 364: The Taste Of Civilization
Anyways Stan ordered widely; a spread of small plates from several different traditions rather than a single meal, on the theory that letting Camilla graze across the map would produce more information for her than a single deep dive into any one cuisine. Sashimi. A small tasting of dim sum. A cured meat and cheese board. A shellfish preparation the restaurant was known for. A pasta. A small piece of dry-aged steak. A trio of desserts to close.
The waiter took the order with the practiced neutrality of a man who had long ago stopped being surprised by anything a guest wanted to spend money on.
The food arrived in slow, elegant waves.
Camilla ate.
She did not exclaim. She did not gasp. She did not perform the small theatrical reactions of a person who had never encountered good food before. Her face remained, for the most part, its usual composed and unhurried Royal Blood mask.
But she tried everything.
She lifted each dish with careful, focused attention. She took small measured portions. She let each preparation settle on her palate for a considered moment before proceeding to the next. Her red eyes narrowed, once or twice, in the small precise expression of a being processing new information and finding some of it, quietly, surprising.
"The raw fish," she said at one point, of the sashimi. "This is not preserved."
"It’s fresh. Prepared this morning."
"It carries no seasoning to speak of."
"None. That’s the point. You taste the fish."
"...Interesting."
She tried the dim sum. The cured meats surprised her less than she had expected. The pasta was unlike anything she remembered from her era. Through it all, her expression changed little.
Stan, who had ordered enough for three people, watched with quiet amusement as the small elegant vampire across from him worked her methodical way through the entire spread without once acknowledging that she was doing so.
At one point, halfway through the pasta, she set down her fork and looked out through the window at the sea for a long moment.
"Ancestors of this world’s old era, my ancestors," she said quietly, "claimed dominion over the skies through cultivation. We commanded the wind. We reshaped mountains. We built palaces of Qi that no mortal hand could have raised, we carried that culture to new terra."
"Yeah."
"And yet, in my years of walking that world, I do not recall ever eating a meal like this one."
Stan set down his wine glass.
"That’s because no one in your era was bored enough to invent it."
"Explain."
"Cultivators had bigger problems than dinner. Ordinary mortals had bigger problems than dinner. Nobody in your era had the time, the resources, or the collective patience to spend three hundred years figuring out how to age beef in a temperature-controlled room so it would taste exactly like this. It took the modern world, with all its supposed weakness, to produce a civilization where enough people had enough spare time to obsess over how to cook a piece of meat correctly."
Camilla was quiet.
"That is," she said finally, "a strange thing to admire."
"Is it?"
"Humanity’s greatest talent, apparently, is the endless capacity to invent and to improve." She lifted her wine glass. "Even when the thing being improved is dinner."
"Especially when it’s dinner."
She almost laughed.
Stan smiled and lifted his own glass.
"Humans," he said, "are exceptionally talented at making things unnecessarily complicated. Food is one of the areas we’ve applied the talent most vigorously."
"So I see."
She sipped the wine.
The desserts arrived.
Camilla, who, up to this point, had maintained her characteristic composure with the discipline of a Royal Blood who did not intend to give a mortal the satisfaction of a strong reaction, encountered the second of the three desserts and went, for a brief unguarded moment, entirely still.
It was a small, delicate thing. A layered construction of dark chocolate and something cold and something warm, the flavours moving across the palate in slow overlapping waves. Stan had ordered it on a whim.
Camilla ate it with the small careful attention of a person trying not to notice that she was enjoying it.
She finished it.
She set the small silver spoon down.
She looked at the empty plate for a moment.
She lifted one long pale finger toward the passing waiter, and, without meeting Stan’s eyes, quietly requested another serving.
Stan said nothing.
He did not smile. He did not comment. He simply lifted his wine glass and took a very small, very careful sip, on the general principle that visibly noticing a Royal Blood’s small vulnerabilities was the kind of thing that shortened one’s lifespan.
Camilla’s red eyes flicked toward him once.
She said nothing.
But the small twitch at the corner of her mouth was, unmistakably, the expression of a woman who knew exactly what he was not saying and was choosing, for the moment, to permit it.
The second serving arrived.
She ate that one too.
They stepped out of the restaurant into the late afternoon light.
The sun was lower now. The sea beyond the cliff had gone from its bright noon blue into the deeper, softer blue of an afternoon sliding toward evening. The breeze was gentler. The pavement was warm underfoot.
Antarctica, Stan realized, already felt strangely distant.
The ice. The werewolves. The pact. The inheritance beneath the frozen mountain. All of it remained, waiting, exactly where they had left it. None of it had gone anywhere. But standing here on a warm coastal promenade with a full stomach and a nine-hundred-year-old vampire beside him quietly refusing to admit she had liked a chocolate dessert, the memory of the polar wind felt further away than it had any right to be.
He glanced sideways at Camilla.
She was looking out at the sea.
Her expression was, as ever, composed. Unhurried. Regal.
But there was something in the small quiet set of her mouth that was, he thought, faintly satisfied.
They started walking.
The promenade curved along the cliff edge in a long gentle arc. The afternoon light lay across it in long warm bars. In the distance, the small ordinary sounds of Inksea’s coastal traffic rose and fell in the patient rhythm of a city on an unhurried afternoon.