The other girl gave her a look. “Like I said: you do have a superior grasp of Italian.”
Porzia steered her toward a couple of boys who were talking together. One of them was the brass-haired boy she’d met in the lobby, Leo. The other boy was brown-skinned and black-haired, and could almost pass for Veldanese if he weren’t so very tall. Elsa was surprised at her own feeling of relief—there was something tiresome about being constantly surrounded by people who looked different—and she had to remind herself that, regardless of appearances, he was still one of them. Still from Earth.
“Elsa, this is Faraz Hannachi, and this is Leo Trovatelli.”
Elsa was unsure of the local customs, so she did not offer either of them her hand, but she gave a polite nod to Faraz. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise,” he replied.
Leo gave Porzia a look, some subtle communication flashing between them, but then he turned on a winning smile and swept right past the moment. “Actually, Elsa and I are old friends. We go way back—all of four hours or so.”
Porzia rolled her eyes skyward. “Lord spare us from Venetians who aren’t nearly as clever as they think they are.”
“Did you hear that?” Leo said to Faraz in a mock whisper. “She thinks I’m clever.”
“I think you have a problem with selective hearing,” Porzia harrumphed.
Casa’s voice interrupted, booming over the noise. “Sit, you mewling progeny! Sit, sit!”
The children all began to seat themselves. Elsa looked around anxiously, hoping to spot Signora Pisano, but she didn’t appear to be attending supper, and Porzia was already dragging Elsa with her to one end of the long table. They sat opposite Faraz and Leo, the younger children arrayed down the rest of the table’s length. There was no chair or place setting at the head, Elsa noticed, but perhaps that was simply the custom in Toscana. She glanced around, wondering how they were supposed to acquire food to fill their empty plates.
“No servants here, unless you count Casa. Everything’s automated,” Porzia explained.
“Automated…?” Elsa started to ask, but she was interrupted by a ratcheting click-click-click noise. A set of metal rails like miniature train tracks swung down from the wall and attached to the head of the table, while a section of the wall slid open to reveal a dark compartment. Elsa craned her neck to see inside but couldn’t make out anything.
Leo leaned across the table, his eyes alight. “You’re going to like this part, I think.”
A soft mechanical whirring began to emanate from the hole in the wall. The sound grew louder, and a tiny clockwork locomotive emerged from the wall as if from a tunnel, each flatbed train car behind it carrying a serving tray laden with food. The locomotive chugged down the length of the table, and when it reached the foot, it huffed to a halt, and the children descended on the serving plates like a pack of wolves.
“Manners!” Porzia shouted. “Sante, Olivia, and Burak are serving. Everyone else, I want to see hands off the table.” Then she stood from her own seat and began serving their end of the table.
Elsa found it somewhat disconcerting to have someone else shoveling food onto her plate, but the wonderful train provided enough of a distraction that she didn’t protest. Her fingers twitched against the corner of the table, wanting to disassemble the clockwork locomotive much more than her stomach wanted to eat the food it bore.
Once everyone was served and Porzia was seated again, Leo seemed eager to restart the conversation. “So … you’re not from Pisa, I take it?” he asked Elsa.
Faraz leaned over to mutter to him, but Elsa still caught the words: “It’s cheating if you ask her.”
Leo elbowed him but kept his gaze on Elsa, inviting a response.
“No,” she said slowly. “I’m not from Pisa. I was in Paris and Amsterdam, most recently.” She hoped that would be enough of an answer to put his questions to rest.
“Oh!” Porzia exclaimed. “Terribly rude of me, I should have mentioned it with the introductions: Leo’s a mechanist, Faraz is an alchemist, and I”—she pressed a hand to her chest—“am a scriptologist. So if you need help with anything, you know who to ask.”
“Right.” First de Vries and now Porzia—why did everyone think she wanted help?
Porzia blinked innocently at Elsa. “And which field is yours?”
Elsa stared back at her for a second, wishing for a way to smoothly escape such a direct question. She settled on saying, “Scriptology,” which was more than she wanted to admit but significantly less than the whole truth.
After that, Elsa picked up her fork and tried to look intent on her food, which turned out not to be a difficult thing at all to fake since the food was curious indeed. The first course was white rice prepared with cream and some kind of meat that—believe it or not—looked as if it might have come from the inside of a mollusk. The bits of seafood tasted pungent and a little fishy, but not entirely unpleasant.
“Finish your risotto, Aldo. There are people starving in Napoli,” Porzia admonished one of the younger children. Elsa’s cheeks warmed, and she stopped poking at her food and forked it into her mouth instead.
The idea of not having enough food was foreign to her; Jumi had never allowed the Veldanese to go hungry, not when new croplands could be scribed into the world to meet their needs. When Elsa finished chewing, she said, “Do people really starve in Napoli?”
Porzia raised her eyebrows in surprise at the question, but it was Leo who answered. “It’s a French dynasty that rules the Two Sicilies. They haven’t invested in industry and infrastructure the way we have here in the Kingdom of Sardinia. The common people are overtaxed, and with no industry in the cities there are no jobs, so yes—people starve.”
Porzia shot him a warning look, but her tone was light when she said, “I think that’s quite enough politics for the dinner table. Terribly dull business.”
Elsa didn’t understand why the other girl wanted the subject dropped, but she let it go anyway. She already felt like enough of an outsider, and the last thing she needed was to blunder into forbidden conversational territory.
When everyone had worked their way through the rice, Porzia lifted the next serving dish and doled out portions of fowl roasted with mushrooms and herbs, with salad on the side. This, at least, resembled something she might have eaten at home. Jumi had never shown much aptitude or interest in cooking beyond the strict necessities of nourishment, but Revan’s mother, Baninu, could work wonders with the wild herbs and fungi Elsa collected on her forays around Veldana.
Baninu bending over the hearth fire … little Elsa and Revan kneeling on the bench because the table was too high for them otherwise, ripping the juicy green tubes of wild onions into pieces with their fingers. Baninu never wasted her one steel knife—an Earth import—on anything that could be cut another way.