Olma

A cook hired for feasts in Sowerby, about thirty-five winters — the best in town. She took up the trade after her mother and has cooked all her life in other people's kitchens: weddings, wakes, guild feasts. She lives in a cramped, clean room by the walls, where there is one chair and one cup — her own home "never came together." She speaks short and savory, in the register of the kitchen, and counts her stores like the order of the day; under the dry courtesy hides stubbornness. Her flaw is a professional pride grown together with loneliness: she feeds everyone but never sits down to the table herself, and she takes every offer of help as a lack of faith in her craft.

They entrust her with a wedding meant to stitch two feuding craft houses — the clothier Sten and the dyer Krecz — in seven lean days of a year that gave a poor yield, when the stores are melting away and the first snow comes down from the north. She wins not alone, but by giving away part of the work: Bela's family recipe for honey-cake, the larders and hands of both houses, the baker Borys's oven. The feast comes out shared, and at the wedding table they finally leave a place for her too. She stays in Sowerby, learns to accept help, and accepts an invitation to the pig-killing at the dyers' at the first moon of winter.