4. Always a Lion in Traferia

Chef had always found Amor busy and overwhelming, for her snout suddenly had to process a hundred different scents. All around her, stalls baked and boiled and roasted food. Up ahead, the Main Road was littered with stalls and shops that displayed their wealth of breads and fruit. And even if this didn’t upset your nose, you’d meet the smell of wet cloth and sweat. Mostly because of the rows of clothing that hung from washing lines overhead.

But she loved it.

Time and again, she wanted to leave her wagon to talk with somebody cooking a tasty recipe. Learn their recipes. Chat with that parrot she once helped roast his nuts for easier digestion.

But she didn’t want to upset Minneka even more. And now that she knew it was about the King of Lions, she also knew how little time they had to reach the point furthest south in Traferia.

She found Minneka in a grim alley, negotiating with a skunk about the price.

“Fifty Soliduri? For a wheel that is clearly second-paw!?”

“Minneka!”

Her startled jump into the wall revealed she hadn’t heard Chef approach at all.

“You …” Minneka sighed. “Of course you already have a wheel. Let me guess, you just happened to know a dragon in the neighborhood who happened to have a wheel lying around for you?”

Chef giggled. “You’re funnier than I thought. Buy the wheel anyway, as a reserve. I assume,” she said in-between giggles, “that the advisor of the King of Lions has no trouble paying fifty golden pieces.”

“Stop saying that name!” Minneka hissed. She nonchalantly threw roughly fifty Soliduri at the skunk and took the wheel.

Chef was glad to leave the dark alley and return to the decorated and colorfully lit Main Road. There was something beautiful about living among trees and plants, but also something wondrous about being in such a lively city. Perhaps that was why she traveled: she liked all locations equally much and wouldn’t want to stay at just one of them.

“And now?” Minneka said gruffly.

“My book does not sketch an image for what the Dinodear looks like. Only that it shapeshifts and adapts to whoever tries to pluck it. So I’m following my instinct.”

“Great.”

“May I ask how you even acquired this ancient recipe?”

Minneka narrowed her eyes. “You may ask. I will not satisfy you with a response.”

They had to go up a hill. Chef grabbed a second wheel and had to keep turning, turning, turning, to make the wagon move forward. It took immense effort, but she was used to it. She refused to let other animals pull her wagon, even though she knew this was normal in other cultures. She’d built the car herself, when she was still young and living among the apes. Although she had a lot of help in designing the thing from the best Primas inventors.

“Who so secretive? If everyone knows, then everyone can help find the ingredients for the medicine.”

Minneka gritted her teeth. “You are naïve, Chef. Kings make enemies. If enemies knew everything about the king, they could more easily harm him. We must keep secrets. If we discover something new, we must not tell everyone. Otherwise we lose our favorable position.”

“Not the King of Lions. Everyone loves him. He brings peace and solidarity!”

“Because you are banished if you say something else.”

Chef didn’t believe her; she didn’t dare say it to Minneka’s grumpy face.

They left Amor. The terrain sloped downward again as they rode down the Seventh Hill. Chef could stop turning the wheels herself: gravity would pull the wagon along for some time.

“I was just a tiny baby, I was,” Chef started, cautiously, “when Anniwe disappeared. My family lived in Traferia. Happy, healthy, well-fed. But with his disappearance the Companionship was pretty much over—and so was our peace. Without our King of Lions, it took no more than a month before all the food ran out and everyone attacked each other.”

Chef held up her short arms. Half the length they were supposed to be. Her hands were stumps; she had trained for years to be able to prepare any recipes with those malformed fingers.

“Because I couldn’t eat enough, my body never grew as it should have. You have no idea of the pain I endured, all those years. You have no idea how many animals, across all of Somnia, suffer from food shortage, they do.”

She looked to the side. Minneka looked away.

Chef’s voice grew in volume and emotion.

“I’ve been everywhere, and everywhere there were too many animals who had to live in pain. Because they couldn’t find enough food, or enough water. Because a few animals hoarded all the food and let the others die. I will make enough food for everyone, whatever it takes. So that nobody has to experience wat my sister … my young little sister …”

Tears appeared in her eyes. Minneka sunk further into her cloak.

“That’s why I help everyone, I do. And that’s why there should always be a King of Lions in Traferia. I swear I will not let the last one die, not if I can help it, I can.”

“I know,” said Minneka softly. “I chose you for a reason—the Good Chef.”

She stayed silent while Chef’s thoughts couldn’t help returning to her sweet little sister who had not survived the food shortages.

Minneka was the first to speak. “How did you survive all that time?”

“A few years later, the Primas came and took us back to their territory, near Baroke. They had more food for me. They taught me how to cook and collect plants. They taught me how to build wagons like these.”

Minneka nodded and took off her cloak for the first time. She nudged Chef aside and took over the steering wheel.

Chef fell asleep at once.

Chef immediately knew she had slept for too long. She woke up surrounded by completely different smells than before. A kind of freshness in the air, as if she could taste Spring approaching. The scent of wet earth mixed with the sound of tall ferns tapping against the wagon as it passes.

“Ferns!” she yelled.

Chef’s sudden cry startled Minneka again, causing her to almost veer off the road again.

“I understand your interest in plants, but ferns are not exactly—”

“The Dinodear is a fern that was kissed by demigoddess Nisah.”

“Hold your breath—all these ferns are Dinodears? And you said it would be hard.”

“No, no. We must figure out which are normal ferns and which are—”

Chef stopped talking. She intensely enjoyed the rays of sunlight on her skin, then grabbed a rope that Minneka had never even noticed.

She pulled on the rope, and the roof of her wagon opened up. Like a pirate who eagerly throws the lid off a treasure chest.

“You can take off the roof? Why did we not do this before?”

“The Strawberry Forest is too overgrown. It barely lets any sunlight through, but it does produce a lot of garbage, like twigs falling down.” Chef pointed at the clear blue sky, without either a cloud or foliage. “Here we have clear sun and nothing else. Or, well, if we’re lucky, maybe some bread from the sky.”

“Bread from the—you know what, I will not even ask.” Minneka put on her cloak, but didn’t notice that several objects fell out of it. She stepped outside the wagon. “How do I differentiate the Dinodear from a regular fern?”

“Erm, well, if it feels … godly?”

To her surprise, this was enough instruction for Minneka. She walked through the endless fields of ferns as if she had dropped something and wanted to find it. Sometimes she suddenly dove onto a fern and sniffed it for a minute.

Chef looked on with satisfaction. With some more training, this royal fox could become a great cook!

Repeatedly, the desert fox looked back and shook her head. Chef wanted to search the other side, but stumbled over the objects that Minneka had dropped.

Her passport.

Thousand Branchburgers, she was naïve!

She should have asked Minneka for proof that she worked for the King of Lions. She shouldn’t have accepted any mission before verifying her identity!

But fortune seemed to favor good chefs. Or maybe she was rewarded with it. She had once visited Schola, briefly, where they believed in Karma: if you unselfishly helped others, the universe would reward you one way or another. If you did terrible things, the universe would punish you somehow.

So maybe Chef just had good Karma.

The passport was made of parchment that felt expensive and held the pawprint of the King of Lions. Besides it was a sketched face, scratched into it with a nail and then filled with black ink, which looked exactly like Minneka. Although in the sketch, she was laughing. It made her seem younger and more energetic.

She had been honest about her name too … although a part had been scratched out. Her real name was slightly longer. It was hard to read, but fortunately, Chef’s eyes had fully grown.

Her real name was Minnekeria.

Screaming reached her. She immediately jumped through her window and saw Minneka—or whatever her name was—being eaten by a glowing red fern as large as an elephant.