It was another three days of the same agenda. After breakfast, the company handled a few camp chores, to include setting up some leftover meat to smoke, baking some trail bread, and exercising the horses. Despite Talimar’s orders, they traded jobs to help alleviate the boredom of camp life. Kre had looked forward to his horse chores, so he was less thrilled with the swapping, but he didn’t bother to argue.
The bread making, he had to admit, was actually pretty fun. The first time he did it was with Snagger, who proved to be a very adept cook even though he used very few words to impart that knowledge to Kre. Snagger guided his hands with gestures and grunts for the most part, and Kre’s bread ended up slightly uneven and tougher than trail bread usually is.
The second baking session was with Beleg who spent the entire time telling stories.
“The smell of flour has always reminded me of Arleine,” he said with a smile. “She was the baker’s daughter and was always covered in flour from hauling bags all over their shop. Her arms were almost as thick as mine too, from all those heavy bags and the kneading.
“She gave the best massages though. She could spend hours just working out the knots from my shoulders while I sampled her honey buns.” He paused there and winked at Kre, who grinned dutifully even though he didn’t find it as humorous as Beleg did. “Her brother farmed the honey himself and when slathered on the buttery rolls she baked just for me… well, I tell you that there aren’t many meals I’ve had in my life that put me into instant ecstasy, but those buns are top of that list.”
Beleg’s hands worked independently of his mouth, and the bread he was making was almost perfectly uniform and portioned out exactly. He added some salt to one side of each mini-loaf and some dried and crushed rosemary herbs to the other. That was the other part about the baking that Kre enjoyed, and that was that each member got to flavor their own trail rations.
Kre opted for copying Beleg’s salt on one side, which the huge warrior had said was helpful for both preservation purposes and for water retention, whatever that was. On the other side, Kre had found some wild garlic that he chopped up finely. When his bread was baking on the campfire, the garlic roasted nicely and gave off a strong, pungent aroma. Garlic was one of those flavors that he had always loved and he always tried to find a way to add it to every meal, despite his friends hating how it made his breath smell.
“Now Rosemary,” Beleg sighed wistfully. “There was a lady that could take your breath away. Mostly because she could choke the life out of you with one hand while she worked the laundry with the other, but still… there’s something to be said about a lady that can handle herself in a fight.”
Kre assumed that every woman Beleg remembered fondly was the type that could match him in a hand-to-hand scuffle. As soon as the obvious image of Beleg wrestling his lady love hit his mind, however, he made a face and tried to wipe it from his mental image bank lest it haunt his nightmares later.