Watch Me Eat It

Apart from being far too large, it was unmistakably the potato Dong-hui knew. Thrilled, she forgot all about the dark coming on and hauled up the potato stem beside it as well.

“Awesome!”

Calling the tubers fat did not begin to cover it.

They’ve been starving half to death with stuff like this just lying around?

“My lady! If you go laying hands on a plant that full of demonic energy, something terrible will happen!”

Scrooge came pelting over like a man whose soul had been knocked clean out of him, dead pale, even his voice shaking. At his wits’ end, the butler screwed his eyes shut and flung the Dural out of Dong-hui’s hands straight down onto the ground.

“What do you think you’re doing!”
“It is dangerous! This plant must not be handled carelessly!”
“Why? Is it poisonous or something?”

Dong-hui frowned as she watched the potato roll away across the ground. She had pulled it up in such good spirits, and the sight of it tumbling through the dirt put her out of temper.

“It is not poisonous, but—!”
“Then why?”
“It is a plant full of demonic energy!”
“So it’s a plant full of demonic energy, so what? Does eating it kill you?”
“No, that it does not, but…”

Confusion never left Scrooge’s face as he answered. Never once in his life had he thought of Dural as something a person could eat, and on top of that there was the rumor that touching one brought three years of bad luck.

“Butler, you said this plant is called Dural?”
“Yes, and so I beg you, put that ghastly thing down at once! Honestly! If my lady had done a little studying now and then, she would never have gone touching anything so unholy!”

The words came out pitched as though he were muttering to himself, and they scolded her all the same. Dong-hui narrowed her eyes and glared at him as though she found him insufferable. Scrooge, meanwhile, had backed off again in great strides and stood shifting from foot to foot some two meters away.

“No. I’m taking it with me.”
“Whaaat? Are you telling me you mean to bring Dural onto the estate!”

Judging by Scrooge’s reaction alone, she might have been proposing to move a serial killer onto the estate.

“Why? Can’t I?”
“As I told you a moment ago, it is brimming with demonic ener—!”
“Look, I’m handling the thing brimming with demonic energy and I’m perfectly fine. It’s all right. Nothing happens even while I’m holding it. So stop standing there staring and come take this.”

Since she had pulled one up anyway, Dong-hui crouched down again, meaning to harvest a few more before she went.

So the reason these potatoes have been left standing all this time is that it’s a plant brimming with demonic energy and nobody could even come near it.

She lifted her head and looked out over the potato field. It ran on with no end in sight.

With this many potatoes there shouldn’t be any trouble feeding the estate’s residents for a good while.

The real problem was the estate residents’ vague dread of the potato. Of Dural, rather. Until she dealt with that, people would plainly go on starving with food sitting right in front of their eyes.

“Y— you want me to hold it?”

Scrooge’s eyes wavered uneasily. He wore the pitiful, wretched look of a man whose lord had set him to something no man could bring himself to do, but Dong-hui was not swayed in the slightest.

“So should I carry the whole lot myself? It’s heavy. No more backchat — get over here and take it.”

Feigning ignorance, Dong-hui lobbed one of the Durals lightly over to where Scrooge stood. She had expected him to swat it away rather than catch it, but perhaps because the order came from his lord, he caught it in both hands, screwing his whole face up as he did. From a distance came the sound of the watching estate residents sucking in their breath.

“Eep.”

Gripping the stem and nothing else, Scrooge held his arms straight out in front of him to keep the tuber as far from his body as it would go. The sight was funny enough that Dong-hui laughed out loud a few times before going back to her harvesting.

Watching the potatoes come up out of the rich soil in dangling clusters, she lost all track of time. Only when everything around them had gone pitch dark did she leave the rise, all but dragged away by Scrooge.

“However much you hated it, we ought to have made you study. Then you would never have done this… sort of thing.”
“The bit he left out in the middle sounded an awful lot like a swearword — that’s just me imagining it, right?”

She said it as she was hauled out of the Dural field. Scrooge looked out at the Black Forest and spoke in a grave voice.

“The Black Forest has turned quite black now.”
“So you did swear.”

“Th— that is Dural, is it not!”

The head cook caught sight of Dong-hui coming in with an armful of potatoes, recoiled in horror and backed away. Lumpy and thick with soil, the potatoes were as ugly as an orc’s face.

“Mm. It’s a potato.”

Dong-hui watched the head cook carry on like that and answered in a deliberately unconcerned voice.

“Sorry? It is not Dural?”

At that one word from Dong-hui, the terror and wariness that had spread across the head cook’s whole face quietly melted away. But…

“It’s Dural, all right. And it’s a potato.”
“Eep!”

The head cook recoiled in horror all over again and stepped back, then looked wildly back and forth between the butler and Delma behind them. Scrooge, standing behind the pair of them, already wore the look of a man worn to shreds.

Backing up another step, the head cook bumped into Scrooge, saw that the butler’s clothes were covered in dirt and dust too, and sprang away from him in fright.

“Yes. That’s right. I carried Dural all the way here.”

There was something utterly empty about Scrooge’s eyes as he answered. The head cook and Delma turned back toward Chloe with a look that demanded an explanation, but nobody in the room could have explained the situation accurately.

Nothing for it but to show them outright that this Dural — or Dural-my-ass, or whatever it’s called — is unbelievably good food.

“Just wait. I’ll show you.”
“Show us what?”
“Something killer good.”

As befitted a dirt-poor estate, the kitchen staff came to exactly two: the head cook and one assistant. The assistant could not quite manage to flee the kitchen, and stayed pressed as far back against the wall as they could, watching to see how things would go. Between them they handled the food Chloe ate and the cooking for the guests who turned up once in a blue moon.

— Thunk!

When she set the great potato down on the chopping board, she heard the head cook suck in a sharp gasp. The assistant clapped a hand over their mouth.

The defiled thing had been let into the kitchen, and the head cook could see nothing but blackness ahead.

Dong-hui let the whimpering go by as though she had not heard it and set to stripping the skins off the potatoes with brisk, practiced strokes. To judge by the writhing alone, it was the head cook being skinned and not the Dural.

“Whatever is her ladyship doing that for?”

Delma patted the back of the head cook, who was squirming like an earthworm, and asked Scrooge.

“Haah. And I had thought everything was finally going to get better…”
“Even so, would it not be better to wait a little and see? She has changed, and that much is true.”

Delma said it without letting go of her hope. The head cook, who had stopped squirming by now, stared blankly around the kitchen and muttered.

“It will take a whole day to disinfect the board and the knife, won’t it?”
“Then how are we to disinfect her ladyship?”

That last was Delma’s question.

“She will have been badly defiled by the demonic energy, will she not? Would a bath be enough, do you think?”

Delma shook her head from side to side.

“Then how about taking her ladyship out for a walk in the middle of the day, when the sun is good and strong?”
“She hates walking.”
“Haah. This is a difficult business and no mistake.”

The sound of the head cook, the butler and Delma putting their heads together and murmuring carried all the way to Dong-hui. Left to themselves, they looked entirely capable of scrubbing her clean and pegging her out on the washing line.

Thank goodness there’s no bleach in this era.

— Chop-chop, chop-chop!

Under Dong-hui’s dazzling knifework the round potatoes had become long thin sticks before anyone quite noticed. Faint curiosity began to creep into the eyes of the three anxious watchers.

In truth, they had expected black demonic energy to come curling up like smoke the moment the Dural was cut. But through the peeling and the cutting into hundreds of pieces, not only was there no black smoke, there was not a strange breath of anything to be felt anywhere in the kitchen.

The head cook and Delma, who had barely a foot inside the kitchen doorway, edged their heads in through it. Scrooge, though, still held the exact spot where he had first stood.

The lord was pouring oil into a pot now.

“Ack! That precious oil!”

The head cook was fit to go out of his mind. That oil cost a fortune and came out only when an honored guest arrived or the estate held some important occasion. On estates with full storehouses and money behind them, cooking with oil was ordinary enough; on a dirt-poor one it was not, and for the head cook of Grace it had been something like a pleasure to be tasted now and then. Now even that much was being taken away by a lord with no sense at all.

In the end the tears came rolling down the head cook’s cheeks.

Delma, sorry for him, could not bring herself to look the head cook in the face, and only patted his shoulder with a smile she had to work at.

It’s all right.
Everything is going to be all right.
They say time is the best medicine.

But Delma too, watching what the lord was doing now, could not feel certain of any of it. She only stood by and watched in silence, because a lord throwing herself into something and moving about that diligently was a fine thing to see.

Dong-hui poured oil into the pot and set potatoes to steam on the side. The murmuring voices reached her again, but this was no time to pay them any attention.

Steamed potatoes and French fries. Just thinking about it set her mouth watering.

— Shhwaaah!

The julienned Dural went down into the bubbling oil, and up came the delicious sound of frying. Pale as they had been, the sticks took on a coat of oil, turned a golden yellow and sent a rich, nutty smell out in every direction. Dong-hui lifted the fried Dural out into a basket and dropped in more, over and over again.

To think my old part-time job at a burger franchise would come in useful like this.

Thinking that you really never could tell how things would turn out, Dong-hui put all the care she had into her French fries. Her Dural fries, rather.

A little while later.

“Wh— what is this?”
“What do you think? It’s good food.”
“Made from D— Dural?”
“Mm. Try it. Which do you want to start with?”

She had set the plates out on the kitchen table, piled with golden, crisply fried Dural and fluffy steamed Dural, and put the question to them. The tubers ran so thick that the steamed pieces had to be quartered to fit the tray.

The smell was killer. The Dural had been in such fine condition to begin with, and they were right when they said every dish starts with good ingredients.

The rich smell had all three of them swallowing hard, and not one of them put out a hand first.

Fries have to be eaten before they go cold — that’s the law!

“Have you ever seen such cowards. Watch closely! Watch me eat it!”
“You must not!”

All three of them reached out at once, but Dong-hui was faster. The crisp-fried Dural was already in her mouth.

“Ah—!”

Dong-hui clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes going round, and Delma ran over in alarm and tried to force her lord’s mouth open.

“My lady! Spit it out! Quickly!”