Flesh and Fire by Laura Anne Gilman

Detta and her kitchen children, one eve-meal he came to join them, sitting on the wooden bench next to Detta, eating off a wooden trencher and passing bread and a pitcher of ordinaire as though they were all of equal status. Michel, Geordie, and Roan were struck dumb, but Lil and Detta kept up with their discussion of the meats they would need to put away for the winter, and what spices Detta should order when the traders passed through town next. As though reminded by that thought, Malech reached into his pocket and removed three small green fruit. Jerzy had never seen anything like them before. They were shaped like hen’s eggs, although the exterior was rough, but when Master Malech sliced one open, the inside was pink and juicy.
    “They’re called pieot,” the Vineart told him, taking a slice and eating it with obvious satisfaction. Jerzy took a slice as well, watching to see how to eat it without getting juice all over his face. The moment the fruit hit his tongue, however, he forgot to worry about eating cleanly, as Cai had taught him, and instead gaped in wonder.
    Master Malech laughed, while the others at the table busied themselves with their own plates and pretended not to notice. None of them took any of the fruit themselves.
    “It tastes like. . .” Words failed him. It tasted like sunshine and straw, like bitter anjas traded from Leiur to the west, those meaty nuts that looked like the knuckles of a man’s hand, but this carried a sweetness to it that Jerzy could not identify.
    “It tastes like bonegrape,” he said, almost in a whisper, as though suddenly afraid to identify it. How could a table fruit taste like one of the most essential of all healwines, second only to bloodgrape?
    “There is a similarity, yes.” Master Malech was openly pleased. “A Vineart must be able to identify flavors and scents, which means opening himself to new experiences. Good ones, and occasionally bad ones. This—” and he took another slice of the fruit “—is one of the better ones. They’re from Iaja, a land warmer than our own. Like limon, with a harder, greener finish.”
    Jerzy had no idea what a limon was, but if it tasted like this, he thought, it must be wonderful.
    STRANGE NEW FOODS and experiences, a comfortable bed, and only the occasional clip to the head when he made a mistake: Jerzy was not fool enough to doubt his good fortune now. You did not come under the slavers’ hands without learning what would be expected of you the rest of your life: food and care, yes, but work, endless work, until your back broke and your arms failed. To have that suddenly, magically change. . .
    And yet, it was difficult. Harvest might have been backbreaking as a slave, but now Jerzy crawled into bed every night, his arms aching from the seemingly endless vat-work, often sore across the legs and ribs from Cai’s ongoing lessons, and his head whirling from letters and numbers that would not disappear even when he closed his eyes and slept like a dead thing until the morning chime woke him, and the now almost-boring cycle began again. In that, at least, the five weeks since the spill had passed very much like his life before, in a constant repetition of meals and chores. Worse, because after the promise of that first day in Malech’s study, despite the constant exposure to the mustus, feeling that nascent power constantly pressing underneath his breastbone, there was no spellwine. No crafted magic.
    Every day he thought that today might be the day he asked, and every night he fell into bed, the words unspoken.
    One night, however, he woke quietly, immediately, the way a slave learned to, and realized that it had not been sunrise that alerted him. He lay on his back, arms holding the blanket to his body. The pillow lay on the floor; he had pushed it off the bed at some point during the night, as usual.
    The single window was open. He had closed it the night before, against the lashings of rain coming down off the ridge.