A Thousand Recipes for Revenge (Chefs of the Five Gods, #1)

by Beth Cato

The Five Gods have graced people with dominion over land and sea, and designated that which we may eat and be empowered by. Magical powers are imbued through food alone. To scorn what the Five have granted us is to be a guest insulting the host.

Among Chefs, a select few have empathetic talents; they can perceive food as others would taste it and customize dishes to their preferences, whether they work with ingredients common or magical.

Overseer of fermentation, yeast, molds, even infections—things that often begin as or remain invisible or strangely small yet are powerful. Gyst feeds on secrets.

Hester is the warmth and coziness of home—but also an entity of crackling rage. After all, the same hearth fire that cooks meat to make it edible and delicious can also raze the building to the ground.

Loving and beloved matron of new mothers and infants, human and otherwise. Spring is her season, care and compassion her emphases. Around the world, Lait’s Houses care for orphaned and abandoned children, and Lait blesses those who donate food, especially milk and cheese, to help those in need at her Houses and to the temple-kitchens known as pentads.

Sugar beets, honey, ripe fruits, and even a loved one’s kisses are under Melissa’s regard.

A God fluid in nature, equally of the salty ocean and the briny wetland and the high-mountain cave crusted with crystalline deposits.

“There are a thousand recipes for revenge, and every one of them tastes like scat.”

Flavor was only one part of the equation. Digestion—that was what granted a person energy or illness, or endowed magic through epicurea.

“That’s what you thought you ate, but that’s what you’re becoming,” Ada said with patience. “When a person fully turns to stone—when they are dead—they are called ‘rupic.’ That statue, broken into pieces and ground down, is rupic powder. When that is ingested, the eater will gain temporary stonelike might without being killed outright.”

some people are burned at the stake, others do the burning, and far more watch.”