The Broth That Melted the Ice
"Ishilla, good morning!"
"Nn... yeah."
Something was off.
"Ishilla, you haven't had lunch yet, have you? What do you feel like eating?"
"Ah, I don't really have an appetite..."
Something was off.
"You head back to the Academy tomorrow. The practicum was hard work. You did well, Ishilla."
"......Yeah."
Ishilla's manner was strange.
Kariel was the Aethernia Empire's one and only princess. She too had inherited the imperial blood in a direct line, and stood among the legitimate candidates for the throne. With two older brothers above her, however, she had long since given up any contest for the crown. Better a small, cozy life than one crushed beneath a weight of power and duty.
Lately, that cozy life had run into trouble. The cause was a rift she could not explain with her closest friend—Ishilla, white and soft as a cat.
When winter break ended and the new term began, the gears of their bond had started, slowly, to slip. The combat practicum wrenched them farther apart still. What had been a vague keeping of distance had turned into a coldness Ishilla no longer bothered to hide.
Even setting aside the way she treated Kariel, Ishilla had seemed drained of late. Set a costly dish in front of her and she only picked at it and left the rest; her mood stayed gray, and her answers grew fewer and fewer.
And then, in the midst of all that, someone made her brighten with a start and raise her voice in genuine delight.
It was the black-haired cook at a stall that had not been there before they left for the practicum. On the carriage carrying them back toward the Academy's main hall, Ishilla's lively voice had come drifting over, and the moment Kariel heard it she ordered an attendant to gather everything there was to know about the man.
In truth, a little digging would probably have told her why Ishilla had been drooping like a cat caught in the rain. But prying straight into a friend's private affairs—that was a little too underhanded, wasn't it?
The line Kariel drew between acceptable and not sat at some remove from the way ordinary people thought. By her own measure, looking into a black-haired cook running a stall at the Academy did not prick her conscience in the least. She was a princess, she had never once laid eyes on him, so he was surely a commoner, and his trade was the perfectly ordinary one of cooking. What was there to feel guilty about?
Were Kang Jinwoo ever to hear of it, he would have howled that this was a violation of his rights. It was the brute logic of class, against which there was no appeal.
The information that came back on the black-haired cook was more shocking than Kariel had expected.
"He was a cook running a small restaurant in Kalian Forest, and he appears to be on close terms with the Duke of Silbaerin. Also... there are rumors that he is a Cooking Master of the East."
"Hm? A Master? Of cooking?"
"Yes. During the Monster Wave he served as a temporary provisioner, and the Silbaerin hardtack that's been taking the markets by storm lately is said to be his recipe as well. The cook's name is Kang Jinwoo."
"Hoh. Capable, then. Anything else?"
"There seems to be more, but this is all I have for now. I apologize."
"No. You've done well."
For a mere common cook, the record was rather dazzling. Eastern or not, a Master was a Master. To think a Cooking Master—one who had never once appeared within the Empire—had been hiding in a backwater like that. There was clearly still more concealed beyond what she had been told, and that alone made him no ordinary man.
And so Kariel went with Ishilla. The situation stirred her interest in more ways than one, and it might also prove the chance to mend things between them.
As Ishilla's closest friend, she already knew precisely how long the girl needed to shower, change, and fuss over her appearance. She finished five minutes ahead and waited in front of the dormitory, and just as planned, she succeeded in falling in beside her. Ishilla stole glances the whole way, hesitant as a cat stuck beside a human she wasn't sure of. Kariel still had no idea why the girl was treating her so stiffly, but she had made up her mind that the stiffness would end today.
With that resolve, she came face to face with the Cooking Master, Kang Jinwoo.
He looked thoroughly thrown by a princess descending on him out of nowhere. Ishilla offered a small apology for it as well.
"M-Master, I'm sorry... it just sort of happened."
"Ishilla. Did you just call him Master?"
Kariel smoothed a lie over her lips and pretended she knew nothing of what she had already learned. The scheming world of noble politics was her every day; an act of this size was child's play.
But Kang Jinwoo made no attempt to dip so much as a toe into a princess's connections by claiming the title for himself.
"I am not a Master."
He denied it outright.
All she had needed from the meeting was an opening to talk with Ishilla, and yet the black-haired cook's attitude was considerably entertaining. Nor had she expected much of the food. No—she couldn't have. Raised a princess on every treasure of mountain and sea from chefs who styled themselves the finest in the land, her expectations had nowhere to settle but low.
And yet there was that humble manner of his, and the prior reports that proved his skill regardless. And this smell—spicy, sharp, stabbing at her nose even before she stepped into the residence. The pungent fragrance worked Kariel's feelings into a hot, restless scatter, and perhaps because of it, while they waited for the food, the quiet hurt she had been holding back slipped out.
"Ishilla. How did you come to know that cook, anyway?"
"Mm... I ran into him by chance, on the way home?"
"A little thin. Your reactions lately, too... Is there something I've done to upset you, Ishilla?"
"Nnh, it's not that. I'm just a little tired."
The spicy scent that had stolen in through her nose filled her skull until it seemed even her brain had broken into a sweat. Ishilla felt it too; face flushed red, she cut the conversation short.
Haa... it's hot. Why did it get so hot all of a sudden?
Nnh, this isn't the baeksuk Master usually makes, is it? Ugh, I'm sweating...
Body and heart both swam up into a hazy heat, and on that heat rose words she would never normally have let reach her throat—
Thud—!
The dish that had driven two girls' feelings to a reckless pitch was set down before them. Soup tteokbokki.
The broth was a red several times deeper than Kariel's crimson hair, a red that seemed to have no bottom. Floating in it were yellowish pieces. Gnocchi?
No. To call them gnocchi, the size was wrong, and so was the look of them. To the eye, it was a dish that refused to be named. The nose told another story entirely.
Thump—!
Every time that ruinous, almost violent smell reached her, her heart pounded like mad. She was certain she had never met this food before, and yet some girlish instinct in her was parched for it.
Apart from that, Ishilla, Kariel, and Eilenna, all seated at the table, wore the same doubt on their faces. No wonder. It was red enough to make a person wonder whether it was safe to eat at all.
"Please, try it first. It's soup tteokbokki."
Kang Jinwoo urged them to take a spoonful, perfectly calm. There was no mistake in his cooking—so said that boldness, the kind only a master who had truly arrived at his craft could carry. Perhaps it was his calm, and his certainty, that won them over. Kariel and Ishilla heaped their plates full.
Haaap—slurp!
Then, at the same moment, they squeezed their eyes shut and ate broth and yellowish pieces together.
Hhk?! S-spicy!
M-Master, this is even spicier than that kimchi...!
Kariel of the magic faculty, Ishilla of the combat track. Classes and sparring had led them to believe they had built a tolerance to pain that came from outside. Who could have imagined there was a way to inflict it even on the tongue—that sensitive part of the body no one else was ever meant to touch?
Hot, spicy lava crawled thick and sticky over their tongues, and along the path the broth traveled, the taste buds screamed as if they had been handed over to pain. This—this was food? Wasn't food, by every law that governed it, meant to fill a person happily and in comfort? No such common sense applied to the soup tteokbokki Kang Jinwoo had set before them. The more they ate, the more sweat beaded in the smooth groove of muscle down their backs, and they squirmed in their seats, unable to sit at ease.
And yet something was wrong. Plainly wrong.
"Haup, haa...!"
"Uuu, w-water. No. Just one more bite...!"
Mouth and stomach alike prickled with the pain of the heat, and still the spoons would not stop. A fierce spice struck the instant it touched the tongue. Behind it, though, came the sweetness of sugar and the broth's deep, clinging savor, coaxing the next mouthful, and the one after that.
Chewy—chewy—!
The pieces charged with filling them up were no different. A slick, bouncing chew unlike any pasta or any bread she had ever known. Simmered long enough to hold the broth's flavor in a quiet glow, they folded into the soup on her tongue the longer she chewed. A slime. Would chewing a slime, that low-grade monster, feel something like this? What was certain, in any case, was that they were like a well—savory moisture surging up out of them without end.
Kariel felt something suspicious in every element on the plate. These pieces cut into right triangles, smelling of fish—fritters? Thin pancakes?—were suspicious too. Fried once and then simmered, they carried both the savor born of high, fierce heat and the fantastic depth their oil gave off as it loosened into the broth. Two richnesses, running in opposite directions, and the dish had caught them both.
"Ah, the sweat. My hair keeps sticking..."
"Huu, my back is soaked. I don't even know anymore..."
Kariel's long crimson hair clung to the nape of her neck, damp with sweat. Ishilla's pure white blouse had drunk the sweat in until the cloth went half-transparent. None of which stopped Kariel from balancing a precarious spoonful of broth and drinking it down.
Sluuurp—!
Ishilla was no different.
Her sense of falling short of Kariel had swelled and swelled until nothing remained but inferiority and self-contempt, and she knew those bleak feelings had wound themselves around her. That was why she had asked for this dinner—to break free of them and soothe body and mind. She had hoped for the baeksuk of Kalian Forest, that gentle boiled chicken, but this soup tteokbokki suited the girl she was now in a different sense. If the baeksuk had healed her, then this tteokbokki...
Shaaaa—
Huuu. I can feel the broth going down, from my throat all the way to my stomach. Everything that was knotted up in me is coming loose...
This food helped by burning things away. Negative feeling, the cold yin coiled inside her, every stray thought—it killed them clean. The broth was so red it gave the illusion of gulping molten iron heated white-hot. And yet the act, and the dangerous sensation it brought, offered a thrill of catharsis she had never once felt.
Ishilla looked at Kariel through eyes gone soft and slack. A mind sold entirely to the delicacy in front of her, no different from Ishilla's own. Kariel had forgotten even a princess's dignity and was shoveling the tteokbokki down. And from that Kariel, Ishilla could no longer see the bold smile, the shoulders and the height that had always seemed steadier than her own, the formidable magic. Only a girl, happy because the food was good. The only person with whom she had shared memories and feelings through four years at the Academy. Her dearest friend, whose heart she could read from a look alone. Only Kariel, as she truly was.
Why did I... ever turn so cold toward Kariel?
Hazy with the heat, Ishilla traced back over the past. No matter how she turned it over, the jealousy toward Kariel would not come back to life. More precisely, it could not. Right in front of her, Kariel was inhaling tteokbokki no differently than she was. Looking at a girl who was, in this moment, exactly the same as herself, what jealousy was there left to call up?
Only then did Ishilla understand how long she had been looking at Kariel through tinted glass. And what had melted that glass was this soup tteokbokki, broth like lava.
"The boiled eggs, too. Crush them and eat them with the broth. It's the best part."
Into a table where, until then, only an inward realization and the clink of dishes had been sounding, Kang Jinwoo spoke. Kariel and Ishilla did as he said and portioned boiled eggs onto their plates.
Pook—!
A spoon split an egg in half, and snow-white and vivid gold mingled into the shallow pool of broth. They worked their spoons this way and that until it was well mixed, and the egg's purity vanished without a trace. What was born on the plate was only broth, scarlet and thickened, red liquid driven into every crumb of the crushed egg.
Faced with that bite, Kariel and Ishilla looked into each other's eyes for reasons they could not have named. Then, without a word, they put their spoons in their mouths.
Haap—!
From the first mouthful, it was as if the egg were apologizing for all the searing pain and heat the tteokbokki had dealt them until a moment ago. A nutty, gentle savor wrapped the spicy broth in kindness. Yolk and white loosened tenderly on the tongue, and the broth clung with them.
In truth, the food said nothing. No magic lay on it, either. What a person felt in this mouthful, and what they chose to do after, belonged entirely to them. And into the mind of Ishilla, who had tasted it, a meaning that was not quite words came down like a blow.
The jealousy that had risen in her, sharp and venomous, melted clean away in the heat, and the boiled egg's tender finish lingered in her mouth. A taste like Kariel's smile—the one that had brightened for her, always, wherever they were. Ishilla felt the tangle of her feelings drawing itself into order. At the same time a regret and a gratitude toward Kariel welled up past anything she could hold.
Gush—!
The dam of tears trembling in Ishilla's eyes broke and overflowed. Clear as her own silver-white hair, they rolled down her cheeks.
Kariel, keen as she was, caught the stir of those feelings at once. A princess could not let her tears show. Even so, the corners of her eyes had grown no less wet than Ishilla's.
"Hup. I-I'm sorry, Kariel. Hic—you didn't do anything wrong. It was all my jealousy. Hic!"
"Hehe. It's all right. It's all right, Ishilla. I understand."
"Really...? Even after I—nnh. Even after I was so cold to you...?"
"Of course. We're friends, aren't we?"
The gears that had slipped found one another again. Ishilla and Kariel took each other's hands, their eyes saying what words never quite could.
Rrrumble—!
And in the ear of Kang Jinwoo, who had been watching, there rose a sound that was not a sound: somewhere in the far north, a glacier melting, and coming down.