Once again, the kitchen froze. The blood didn’t trickle out: it arced, straight up in the air, right over all the already chopped vegetables, spraying across the brand-new factory-fresh whites.

“Faen!!” yelled Konstantin, even though the pain hadn’t kicked in yet, just the shock.

“Merde!” said Gaspard in disbelief, running his hands—themselves scarred and pitted, like all chefs’—through his thick dark hair.

“Obh, obh,” muttered Isla, but mostly to herself.

Then, seeing to her amazement that nobody was doing anything, least of all Konstantin himself, she got up and went to him.

“Come here,” she said.

The boy was white; his already pale skin had all the color drained out of it.

“It’s just a cut,” she said, glancing at it. He looked at her, still shaky, as she led him to the sink and started running the tap. “It looks worse than it is.”

Konstantin was still staring at his finger in disbelief.

“I didn’t realize we were serving finger food,” Isla surprised herself by saying, even as he blinked and put his finger under the running water, wincing as the cold touched the cut.

“That knife was really sharp,” he grumbled.

“Yeah,” said Isla, looking closely to see if he needed a stitch. “Like some kind of kitchen knife or something.”

Everything with blood on it was bundled into the bin just as Gala came in to see if they were ready to start taking food into the dining room. A single glower from Gaspard made it very clear to her that they were not, and she scurried out again, going to find some crisps behind the bar.

Isla examined the wound carefully. Konstantin had very long fingers on a large, strong hand that didn’t look like it had done a day’s work in its life, as indeed it had not. She frowned. “I think you’ll be okay. I can get Saif to put a stitch in it if you like.”

Saif was the local GP, who was just sitting down to dinner with his two sons, Ib and Ash, and wouldn’t have been best pleased to hear he was being called out in a howling gale to fix a ridiculous kid, but Gaspard came up and frowned.

“Non,” he said. Then he snapped his fingers for the word. “Gomme . . . glue . That is it. Glue.”

Gala immediately brought some superglue from behind her reception desk.

“Oui!” said Gaspard, brandishing it. Konstantin and Isla looked at each other anxiously.

“Let me just google that,” said Isla, getting Konstantin to hold his finger up in the air. “Well, the internet says it’s fine.”

“The internet says the royal family are lizards.” Konstantin grimaced.

Nonetheless, he held out his finger and let Gaspard stick the two edges of skin back together. Isla then wrapped it in a blue bandage she’d gotten out of the first aid kit. They were, she noted, running low.

“Do you need to sit down for a bit?” she said, feeling some sympathy for this ridiculous person, so far out of his depth.