"Something appeared in her line of vision: the white lily on the tray.
'Take it, he said. 'I want to give it to you.'
She stared at him, She did not take the flower, but she felt her face rearrange itself in a very strange way and realized, as he smiled, she was smiling."
A singular meeting. A prince who is kind because he is kind and a kitchen drudge who scarcely knows she exists, only that the cauldron she scrubs pots in, day after day, dreams at night and is filled with visions she cannot tell because she is so lost she cannot even say her name, Saro.
The story is lavish in the sensory details of the vast palace kitchen, with its things simmering, roasting, and baking. There a constant bustle of food being prepared, served, stored and offered in new guise. Everything is seasoned with news and gossip from upstairs.
The young prince, his brother's heir, is just back from two year's study of magic, and has taken the blasted, haunted keep to study a mysterious book. A place too frightening to take dinner to, and so the tray-mistress sends the anonymous pot-washer who came from who-knows-where, for she is too insensible to be frightened.
Until the prince opens the door suddenly and she drops the tray.
Patrica A. McKillip, The Book of Atrix Wolfe, 1995.
