Food of the Wall

Lichenloaf is the food every traveler carries: a dense, flat cake of dried lichen pressed with seeds. It keeps for weeks. Fresh, it tastes of almost nothing. Left a few days, it turns tough, then tasteless, and then, somewhere past both, it comes round to a faint nutty sweetness. Anyone who knows lichenloaf prefers it stale.

Spore dust is dried mushroom spores, ground fine and carried in a little pouch. Sprellen put it on everything. Sorrel says it tastes like dirt.

Grainmeal is what Murren eat: a porridge of tiny grass seeds, boiled over a small fire. It is filling and very plain, and a pinch of spore dust improves it enormously, whatever Sorrel says.

Some food is luck. Sweetmoss gives off a sticky, sweet syrup that children will climb anything to reach. Lira would. A flowering cloverhead has petals you can eat, mildly sweet, and finding one on the road makes for a good day.

In Highwall’s markets there is barkbread, made from the soft inner bark, richer and warmer than anything a traveler carries. Up in the Luminary, the Velouri drink nectar wine, sweet and heady and beautiful, and not much use to a hungry Sprellen.

To drink, there is water. In Briar it is gathered from the dew each morning. On the road it comes from rain caught in cracks, seeps in the stone, and moss wrung out by hand, and it is carried in hollow seed pods. When there is a fire, there might be moss tea: warm, a little bitter, and missed by everyone the moment it runs out.