#au week

It was snowing. The weather had not changed for many moons now, far past when the people had expected spring to come. Livestock had their infants which was a sign that time had not stopped. But the seasons had come to a standstill and many believed that it was punishment from the Gods. No matter how much they prayed or what they sacrificed, winter refused to end.

Deep in the woods, a soldier tucked herself in a make-shift hut made from leather and fibre gathered prior to the winter. It had wilted and hardened to straw, impossible to manipulate without it snapping off and turning to dust at her feet. But it was all Kaida had been left with when she was shunned from her army.

Years of her life -including her childhood- given to a system that didn’t accept mistakes and a god that no longer believed in her. A god that had spoken sweet promises of turning her into a hero, one that would be remembered for generations. A victor with the status equivalent to the pantheon.

Lies. All of it.

Because this god had underestimated their soldier. They believed Kaida’s ambition was to succeed and would do anything to reach the peak of her life. But she couldn’t kill the baby that she heard crying from within the burning camp. Burning herself to save the child, Kaida held him in her arms and swore to protect. Despite the knowledge she would bring down the wrath of the heavens, Kaida carried the baby boy to the next town over for safety. Warning the civilians of the incoming raid as well, to protect the child the best she could.

As she sprinted over the rolling, snow covered hills Kaida could feel something in her changing. The burns on her skin no longer stung. She wasn’t sure if it was cold or the adrenaline that had numbed her. She didn’t understand the widening wounds that no longer bled, and why her vision developed dark spots.

An unknown curse rolled over her, and instead of a hero Kaida became a cautionary tale. Mouths and eyes had formed from her burns, turning her into an outcast. A monster. Something that people mistook for a creature that crawled out of the underworld to feast on the young. Gasps echoed from the townsfolk, and people fled from view. Waiting on a legend to come and slay the best.

A hero never came. But the monster did flee into the deep, wet woods. She set up shelter there and although Kaida was no longer the praying kind, she hoped she would survive the harsh winds of a neverending winter.

Food became scarce early on, but Kaida survived on the few animals that dared to leave their territory in search to end their hunger as well. As the days went on, Kaida was sure she would perish in this climate. She fought the elements the best she could, coating her shelter with hide she had skinned off her prey.

It still wasn’t enough to hold off the cold. All of her teeth across her body chattered as her nerves began to freeze. Kaida, unsure of what else to do besides keep her small fire going, succumbed to the deep slumber calling to her. Her last thought was that she would awake in the River Styx.

She, by someone’s intervention, opened her eyes the next day. Her fire was still going strong. But the first thing she noticed was the fibre that regained its colour and density. Outside her tent, berries had flourished despite the snow that covered them. Their small little campsite had warmed entirely. Not enough to melt away the winter, but she no longer feared the risk of frostbite. If she nurtured the campfire, Kaida would get by.

She quickly gathered the berries off the brush before they withered in the snow and began rationing the berries in case the miracle didn’t show up again. But the next day it did. And the day after as well. Due to the warmth and the food that would appear every morning, wildlife began approaching the campsite. Like a moth to a flame as Kaida would strike them down for meat.

The only clue ever left behind was bare footprints in the snow around her tent.

Once weeks had past, and Kaida no longer feared starvation, she decided to attempt to trap the entity that was aiding her. She couldn’t trust whatever creature greeted her with such generosity. Nothing in life was free after all.

Kaida pretended to sleep in her tent, like clockwork and waited for the sharp sound of the trap triggering. It was a long night. Paranoid, she would check close to every hour to find nothing. No one. She feared she had scared the stranger off somehow but stayed vigilant.

Close to sunrise was when she heard it. The sticks under the brush snapped in unison. She had never ran so fast in her life only to find a woman standing there, stabbing a stick into the trap with a neutral expression on her perfect face.

She was a tall woman, with long pointed ears that poked out from beneath her long, wavy blue hair that softly billowed in the cold wind. Her skin was white as snow, no imperfections that Kaida could see. She wore purple robes that tied around her chest that wavered into a dress which was made out of thin, airy material. She had a long grey robe, with a large hood wrapped around her shoulders and just like the footprints suggested - no shoes.

She turned to Kaida, a soft smile forming on her face. “I suppose you wanted to speak with me?” In front of Kaida’s very eyes, the woman touched the bush and grew the bountiful berries.

Kaida went to speak, but she hadn’t had the opportunity to in so long. Her voice was hoarse and when it finally breached it the sound came from everywhere around her. “Are you a nymph?”

The woman chuckled, moving around the site to tend to the fire behind Kaida. “One would think you would’ve known better than to insult the gods.”

“I do not trust the gods.” Kaida’s voices echoed in unison. “Take whatever gifts you wish to give me and use them on someone who believes in the facade of your generosity.”

The goddess shushed her gently, standing back up to her full height. “Now why would I do that when I’m not looking for worshippers. I’m searching for crusaders.” She took Kaida’s hand in hers and brushed her thumb alongside of the mouth that had taken root there. “And you have more reason than most to be one.”

Kaida’s head tilted in confusion, “Why would a god wish for someone to rise against Olympus?”

The woman made of ice responded with a smile, “Well, how about a Mistress of the Wind?”

“The Lady of Bloom?” She retorted.

“Queen of the Seasons?”

“Goddess of Nature.” Kaida finished, venom leaking in her tone.

The goddess nodded in response, “But you can call me Imogen.”

“That didn’t answer my question.” Kaida added. “I’m assuming this eternal winter is a part of it? Your rebellion? Getting tired of sitting on a cloud and doing your job?”

Imogen shrugged, “Those are all part of it I suppose. I was feeling inspired. After all,” her cold stare held Kaida’s, “hasn’t the world made you cold as well?”

She appeared to stare right through Kaida. But it wasn't a punishing or cruel gaze that she had grown accustomed to from the pantheon. It was the first true warmth Kaida had felt in weeks. If she didn't know better, Kaida would believe Imogen was trying to empathize with her.

How could an omnipotent being even try to understand a mortal's pain?

As if she could hear Kaida's true concerns, Imogen continued, "Your god-"

"No longer." She stopped Imogen in her tracks, only to be gifted with a smile.

"Right." She took a deep breath, "they took something from me. Something irreplaceable. And unfortunately I can’t just bring him back with a wave of my hand. He no longer belongs to me.” Another deep breath as her gaze breaks away to restore the wilting fibre.

“But as they took from me, I shall take from them. The cold is only centered around their worshippers, your old army. I have been restoring what I can in other areas, trying to minimize the damage to the innocents. And it won’t be much longer anyways.” She blew air from between her grey lips gently, blowing away the freezing air. “Your brother in arms have already begun to feed on one another.”

“Why would you not punish me?” Kaida asked, tone still bitter despite the fear Imogen’s one phrase sent into her spine.

Imogen gave another, almost innocent smile, “You’ve been punished enough for something undeserving. And besides, what better way to get revenge than to keep alive the one mortal he wants dead?”

“I’m a means to an end.” Kaida stated, knowing it instinctively.

“You always have been.” Imogen sighed, turning to leave. “A reckoning is coming, Kaida. I will not make the decision for you. And whatever you end up deciding, I will not stop supporting you.”

Kaida scoffed, “Because of spite, not of generosity.”

Imogen stepped into the air, beginning to levitate away. “Wars have been fought for less.”

Her ego, meanwhile, noticed that Chef Artie wasn’t having to decide fast. He’d done nothing, even as Myka, Helena, and Chef Walter, his attitude notwithstanding, had filled their stations. His indecision prompted a producer huddle around him, and Myka heard snatches of phrases: “you could use,” “or maybe try,” “okay, we’ve got.”

****

Myka’s departure from Apples had happened quickly: two days after the Christmas party, she interviewed for the job at Secret Service, getting the offer on the spot, and that evening she gave her notice to her direct supervisor on the line. Not to Helena—Chef Wells—for the chef hadn’t been present in the kitchen.

That was unusual... did it have something to do with strings being pulled? Myka told herself she didn’t need to know. She told herself, equally untruthfully, that she didn’t need to care.

Not that Helena—Chef Wells—was even going to notice Myka’s absence. People came and went all the time in restaurants. What did one line cook matter?

After leaving, Myka tried not to ruminate on how much she had wanted to matter.

She tried also to evict Helena Wells from the top of her mind. She didn’t give in to the temptation to walk by Apples; that would have been another of those teenage-reminiscent impulses she needed to prevent her presumably adult self from indulging.

The setting of a Google alert, however, she justified as professional. Practical. Keeping track of a former employer.

Which was how she learned that Helena Wells would be appearing on This Without That.

Which she tried to convince herself she did not need (need...) to watch.

Which attempt was, she had even then acknowledged, doomed to failure, because watching the show meant she would at least be able to look at Helena, a thrill of which she’d been deprived for what felt like forever. Need... need. She could—and did—replay her memories, but she was starving for new images.

The show didn’t disappoint on that score. Myka was captivated anew from the first shot of Helena in talking-head closeup: her hair was down, lusciously so, and if Myka hadn’t been anxious to see how the competition would unfold, she might have stopped the show there, just to savor the sight.

When asked to describe her style in the kitchen in one word, talking-head Helena said, “Take no prisoners.”

“One word,” an off-camera voice said.

“It’s hyphenated,” Helena responded.

Myka added the hyphens in her head, retrospectively.

She paid little attention to the introductory attributes of the other contests—Chefs Marcus, Leena, and Hugo—because: not for one instant did it occur to her that Helena might not win.

She was well aware that she knew nothing about television production but clichés; nevertheless, she found herself stuck on one in particular as far as Helena was concerned: “The camera loves her.” And Myka found a similar lover’s elation, if tinged with a lurker’s shame, in her surreptitious alignment with that camera and its gaze.

The dish for the first round, the appetizer, was clams casino without the clams. “Mushrooms,” Myka said aloud the minute Steve Jinks announced the challenge. The rest of the dish was traditionally pretty simple—breadcrumbs, butter, bacon, bell pepper, lemon—with the only even vaguely difficult part getting the proportions right. But mushrooms stood out as the clearest substitute, texturally, as long as they were cooked with great precision so as to simulate the clams’ chewy-but-not-rubbery distinctiveness, and that would be, she thought, the real challenge. That and choosing an appropriate variety of mushroom, one that could be coaxed to a sufficiently correct mimic.

Myka was thus unsurprised, if gratified, when talking-head Helena said, “I thought immediately of oyster mushrooms. But then I discerned that Chef Marcus might be aiming for them... so I moved quickly.”

The next shot of the kitchen depicted Helena darting in front of Marcus, a tall and somewhat sinister figure, and appropriating all the oyster mushrooms. Then, as if just realizing the other chef’s presence, she said, “Oh, did you want these as well? Surely there are enough for two.”

That struck Myka as pretty magnanimous.

She revised that down a bit after the next talking-head Helena said, “Had I kept them all for myself, how could I have demonstrated my superiority?” Then she smiled: wolfish, with the edges of her teeth. “Not to mention, I had a trick up my sleeve.”

****

As Myka began her preparations for her cranberry sauce without cranberries and candied yams without yams, she felt herself moving with extraordinarily swift precision... had she been dosed with performance-enhancing lightning? Or some other quantity granting an efficient-motion superpower? Then she realized: she was showing off. For the camera? No. For Helena. Who was most likely focusing far too closely on her own cooking to look over and be impressed by Myka’s ability to prep beets for the oven at speed.

While the sauce-pickle simmered and the beets roasted—she would soon peel and purée those—she sought the finishing flourishes for the latter dish. In her search for sweet, she thought of molasses, but then she noticed Helena had that bottle at her station. Casting about, she found her eye caught by a jar, very small, of manuka honey, and its likely kiss of bitterness seemed instantly correct. To provide additional interest, she saturated figs in that honey in a sous-vide bath, with an aim of creating a soft-yet-chunky topping for the beets, texture balancing taste.

Cream, now: maybe yogurt? The tang of plain Greek yogurt rhyming with the pickle’s bite? But she needed depth... she toasted a vanilla bean, ground it, then mixed it into the yogurt; tasted; yes. A dab of honey, then, to match what it topped, and that element was complete.

She allowed herself a breather, while the pickle matured and beets reached peak melt-in-mouth texture, to assess the other competitors’ approaches.

(Not Helena’s, though. Helena’s presence was distracting enough; attending to her cooking was likely to render Myka entirely incapable.)

Chef Artie was doing something with red beets—she’d heard those mentioned by someone (not Chef Artie) in that prior huddle—and something else with butternut squash. Chef Walter, like Myka, was working with raspberries.

Myka felt a flicker of Helena’s “demonstrate my superiority” bravado. She hoped it would prove out.

****

The trick Helena had up her sleeve turned out to be an innovation to replace the clam shell in which the clams casino was traditionally served: she scraped the ribs from a portobello mushroom cap, then dropped it in the deep fryer. She pulled the fryer basket out as the round’s final milliseconds ticked away, then plated her entire oyster-mushroom casino with speed that Myka wouldn’t have imagined possible.

But: This is Helena Wells, Myka reminded herself.

Anything was possible.

Helena was, unsurprisingly, right about demonstrating her superiority. Myka watched her smile as the judge charged with delivering the first-round verdict sent Marcus to his doom, telling him, “We couldn’t overlook that fact that the texture of your mushrooms was no match for that of Chef Helena’s.”

“She tricked me,” Marcus said into the camera as he exited the kitchen.

“She outcooked you,” Myka corrected, a bare instant before talking-head Helena said, smugly but equally accurately, “I outcooked him.”

Myka would have reveled in their consonance but Steve Jinks then announced the entree challenge: beef Wellington without beef.

Now that was a challenge, and Myka was gifted a commercial break to ponder what she might produce. She came up with nothing more than “something else Wellington”—some other protein encased in pâté-slathered pastry. But what protein? And this is why you aren’t on the show, she told herself.

So she paid attention, if a bit begrudgingly, to the choices the other contestants made. Chef Hugo chose venison, which Myka had no trouble imagining would pair well with that expected pâté. Chef Leena chose chicken, but instead of pâté, she used a butter-herb mixture that Myka immediately recognized as intended to bring a cordon-bleu sense to the dish. It seemed nothing like beef Wellington, but it did seem special, invented just for this competition.

Helena was up to something special too, but Myka didn’t fully understand it. She was wielding a mallet on a flank steak, rendering it thin, thin, thinner, and bringing the same thin-thin-thinner energy with a rolling pin to pastry. Myka couldn’t see where the Wellington—its richness—resided... maybe in the duxelles she was making, the sauté of mushrooms that was sometimes paired with the Wellington’s pâté, sometimes substituted for it. Helena had pâté on her station, but she didn’t touch it.

Myka waited impatiently through Chef Hugo’s venison and Chef Leena’s chicken, until it was finally time for Helena to be judged. She cut into her Wellington.

Somehow she had managed to roll pastry, steak, and duxelles into... a pinwheel? Yes, a beautiful swirling pinwheel, with seemingly infinite layers.

Surely she’d been saved for last because her dish was astonishing.

However: “You seem to be attempting to subvert the rules,” a member of the panel, a Chef Kosan, told her. He looked down at his portion disapprovingly, then up at Helena the same way.

What was that about?

“Do I?” Helena was calm, the picture of confidence. Myka was reasonably sure she herself would have been dissolving in anticipatory terror...

“Chef Leena and Chef Hugo both managed to make beef Wellingtons without the beef. You, however—”

“Have as well,” Helena interrupted. “Without the beef tenderloin, ‘tenderloin’ being implied, even if not explicitly stated. Or has the constituent ‘beef’ element changed since I was in culinary school?”

She was obviously right. The “beef” in the name didn’t cover all beef. Myka would have made the same argument.

When the program returned from that commercial break, Steve Jinks rendered the verdict, drawing out the suspense, saying a long and lingering “Chef....”

Myka idly wondered whether venison or chicken would lose.

“Helena,” Steve finished. “Unfortunately, this competition will continue without you.”

Myka blinked. Surely she’d heard that wrong?

But Helena’s incredulous expression suggested she’d heard exactly the same thing.

Chef Kosan was charged with explaining the panel’s reasoning. He began, “In your Wellington, we did find the lean flank steak well-balanced by the richness of the duxelles, even more so than Chef Hugo’s venison was by his pâté—he needed more of that richness.” Myka saw that as a point given to Helena. How had she lost it? He went on, “But his failure in that arena was your fault. You appropriated all the pâté, then gave only a limited portion of it to Chef Hugo, despite the fact that you clearly had no intention of using it the remainder yourself.”

“He was entirely free to ask for more,” Helena said. She didn’t say anything about her intentions.

Chef Hugo, meanwhile, looked bereft. Myka felt something like sympathy for him, for certainly interrupting Helena at work was a frightening prospect. Then again, he was supposed to be competing.

Chef Kosan narrowed his eyes. “The ingredients are not yours to dispense. That struck us as inappropriate gamesmanship.”

“And yet this is a game, is it not?” Helena asked. Myka chalked up another point for her—not that this tally in her head would do anything other than torment her.

Chef Kosan continued, “Nevertheless, in the end the substitution of one type of beef for another struck us as insufficiently creative, if not actually against the rules. Of the game. As did your use of the rather obvious mushrooms in the clams casino.”

If she squinted, Myka could maybe see his point with regard to the mushrooms. But wasn’t changing the Wellington into a pinwheel a creative change? Why hadn’t that outweighed the beef issue?

Helena’s thought process seemed similar: “A puff-pastry pinwheel Wellington was insufficiently creative,” she said with heavy sarcasm. “And both were beautiful dishes, worthy of the Apples menu.” Did she now sound petulant? Myka couldn’t honestly blame her.

“Pursuant to that,” Chef Kosan said, “we’re genuinely curious: how did you manage to get the pastry entirely cooked?”

“Skill,” Helena said. That was a full sneer.

Myka had been curious about the same thing, but she was also imagining getting access to that skill, were she still at Apples and had the dishes made it to the menu... imagining what it would be like to cook those dishes on the line... imagining getting those mushrooms’ texture exactly right for the casino... imagining balancing the Wellington’s fat and lean, while seeing to it that the pastry was indeed entirely cooked. And all right, yes: she was imagining Helena leaning over her shoulder, breathing near her ear, insisting on all of that.

As Helena performed the apparently obligatory walkout of defeat, she pronounced, “I’m far more skilled than this result indicates.” Her tone situated scornful quotation marks around “result.”

That had sounded very Helena. And very true.

Helena then said, “This won’t be the last you see of me.”

Myka had at that point cut off the television and prayed—yes, prayed—for that also to be true.

****

She did not recall the memory of that prayer in its specificity until she was competing alongside Helena in a Christmas-decorated studio in August.

Mysterious ways.