Beoreg smiled, but his gaze was fixed somewhere around my shins. He offered an object wrapped in a scratchy kitchen towel. It was a ceramic crock, about as big as a family-size jar of peanut butter, dark green with a matching lid, the glaze shimmering iridescent. “What is it?” It looked like the kind of vessel that might contain an ancestor’s ashes, which I definitely did not want. “It’s our culture,” Beoreg said softly. Nope, I definitely did not— “I mean ‘starter,’” Beoreg corrected himself.
