Transmigrated Into The Body Of The Cursed Prince Wife
Chapter 185: The Royals In The Kitchen

Chapter 185: The Royals In The Kitchen

After taking the men to wait for them outside the kitchen, the ladies left to get ready. Harry, whom Ave had sent for and called into the palace to be of help, was standing with Zane and Orion, who he felt intimidated by and stood at a distance from them. Prince Orion had regarded him like a piece of dirt when he first entered and didn’t even bother to acknowledge his greetings as he turned his attention to Zane, filling his ears with pointless conversations.

Meanwhile, Ave had taken the girls to her room to remove their corsets so they would be able to work comfortably in the kitchen without suffocating from the tightness. They were happy to remove the corsets without any argument, and Ave also made them pack their hair in a bun and tie scarves on their heads.

"What’s the point of all this?" Isolde asked in confusion after they finished getting ready and were making their way towards the kitchen, as she looked at herself through a reflection on a mirrored window. She looked like an ordinary girl when she was far from ordinary. Though she felt comfortable in her dress without the corset, she wouldn’t want to look plain to the servants.

Ave smiled as she placed her arm around the girl. "It’s so we can cook without our dresses getting in the way, and the scarf is so no hair would end up in what we cook. Don’t worry, I promise you will all have fun today," she assured as they reached the kitchen entrance where the three men were waiting for them. She noticed how Isolde’s face turned red when she set eyes on Harry, who wore a more presentable attire than the shabby old ones she had seen on him twice before. Even his ginger curls were done differently.

The clothes he wore had been given by Zane at Ave’s request. It was some of his old clothes from when he was younger, and Ave had told him to give them to Harry the night after she had sat with the girls under the oak tree to listen to the boy’s singing. She had been sad at the fact that he only seemed to have three sets of attire which had faded from constant washing, so she had told Zane to gather his and Lucian’s old clothes and give them to the lad, and he wore one from those given to him as he stood to the side, staring back at the blushing Isolde.

"I didn’t know he would be joining us as well in the kitchen," Isolde whispered shyly as she tried to fix her dress and school her embarrassment. She didn’t know why she wanted to please the young man whenever she saw him, and she couldn’t help her happiness at the fact that they would be in the same space again today.

Ave smiled as she noticed how the two were blushing at each other’s presence and shook her head. Teenagers, she thought in fascinated amusement as she walked forward to step into the kitchen for the first time ever since she came into this world. The kitchen had always been a no-go zone for her after it was discovered that Selene had gone there to poison Lucian in the past, and when she woke up in Selene’s body, she hadn’t been welcomed in this territory until recently when Lucian had come to trust her. However, even then she had been taken to the main palace before she had the chance to be here.

Now, however, she stepped into the kitchen where the kitchen servants moved around, working and cleaning the space, but they all stopped mid-action to turn towards the entrance, where not only Selene stood but also all the Pendragon Royals, and two other men who had no reason to be there.

Ave noticed the shock in their eyes as they watched them. The servants in the kitchen were enough to be of help to her to cook everything she needed, but she preferred to indulge the girls, who had become her friends, in it. The head kitchen cook, an elderly man, didn’t look pleased that the royals had come to invade his space, and his sour expression said it all.

He approached Ave and bowed curtly as he said, "My Lady, I have heard from Lord Zane that you need to use the kitchen for the day. If you can tell us what you want to cook, I and the other servants would be pleased to get it done for you." He made sure she heard in his voice that he wasn’t ready to let the royals or her destroy his workspace. It was unheard of for noble women to be found in the kitchen of their household, not to mention the royal ladies the prince’s disposed wife had brought along with her to do whatever the devil knows she wanted to do in here.

Ave sighed. She had never liked this particular head kitchen cook, even before she met him, for the reason that he had never failed to feed her tasteless grain soup every day and night when she first came here. Now that she had finally met him face-to-face and saw he was an elderly man with a hunchback, a stern face, and an unwelcoming demeanor, she realized she wasn’t about to get along with him, even though she had hoped she would. He didn’t seem to like her with the way he regarded her and the rest.

"It’s not something you can cook, chief. It’s something only I can make, and I’d appreciate it if you and the other servants would give us the chance to use the kitchen," she said politely, not wanting to disrespect him as he was an elderly man. However, her words were a form of disrespect in itself as the servants around the kitchen gasped and looked at her with shock, like she had hit the man.

They all couldn’t believe she would insult the elder chief by saying it was something he couldn’t cook. There was nothing the head cook couldn’t make, and he had earned his position in the royal kitchen for his cooking skills. Now a woman who had been brought up as a royal would dare say she could make something he couldn’t? What did she think of herself?

None of the servants had ever liked Selene, and the only reason they weren’t showing their contempt was because the second prince had warned them that whoever disrespected her or said anything bad about her shall bid farewell to their heads and lives. It was a clear warning that had forced every one of them to be respectful to her despite the fact that she was no longer royal nor their master’s wife.

However, that warning didn’t include the head cook, who wasn’t even there when the servants were summoned by the prince a day ago. And now that she dared step into his workspace to tell him what she was about to cook was something he couldn’t do, his face went red with anger, as her words were no less than an insult to him.

"Young lady, the only reason I am not sending you and your members away is because of my respect for the second prince. But I will not take your insult to my skills lightly. Write down whatever you want cooked, and I shall get it done for you, but I cannot allow you into this kitchen. It’s not for women like you, who I am sure cannot even make use of a knife, not to say more of the cooking fire." He glared at her, unwilling to believe that a woman who had grown up in the palace would know how to cook more than he, who had worked his way to the position of head cook.

"If you insist, I will tell you what I want done," Ave said with a smirk, taking his words as a challenge. A servant walked forward and handed her ink and a sheet of paper used to write down kitchen ingredients that needed restocking at the same time Zane stepped forward to talk to the head cook, but Ave held out her hand to stop him.

"Let me handle this," she told him as she leaned down on the wooden counter and began to write down dishes from the modern time. Done writing, she handed the paper to him and smiled. "I hope you know how to make this, Sir."

He took the paper and squinted his eyes to read what she wrote. A frown settled on his face as he couldn’t seem to recognize a single meal from what she wrote on the paper. He looked up and regarded her in displeasure, "Are you trying to play with my head, Milady? Where did you get all these absurd names of food? There’s no such thing as what you wrote down here, unless you made them up."

"Why would I make them up? I told you it’s not something you know how to make, and_" she began to say, but his displeased voice cut her off, as whenever she said it was something he couldn’t make, it hurt his pride.

"And you can make them?" he countered with a sneer and a glare.

"Of course, I can. But only if you give me the chance to prove it to you," she told him with a shrug.

The man believed she was lying and thought the only way to prove that no such things existed as what she wrote, and that no matter how much she believed she was good at cooking she could never reach his skills, was by allowing her to disgrace herself in the kitchen. Nodding his head, he stepped aside. "Very well, I would like to see what the lady can cook. But if you fail to meet up to what I can do, Milady, I would like your agreement that you will never step foot into the kitchen and will be fed grain soups until His Highness returns."

Ave grimaced at the thought of eating that bland soup, but then she nodded in agreement as that was the only way to get the man out of their way. "Sure. I agree to whatever you say, master chef," she bowed to him in respect, and he looked taken aback by the way she addressed him and her respectful bow.

The Selene he knew would never have bowed to him and would instead have looked down her nose at him. He recalled when she used to come to the kitchen every day with the excuse of inspecting what they were doing, but in truth, she had her hidden intentions. He had disliked the young woman from the day she called him a disgusting old man who shouldn’t be cooking anymore; she was so disrespectful that when the prince told him to feed her grain soups, he made sure it was as bland and tasteless as it could be.

The fact that she had even come to the kitchen to cook was surprising in itself, not to mention her respectful bow to him for the first time. She was even smiling at him, something she would never have done in the past.

Clearing his throat, he moved aside and said, "I will be resting in the backyard," and then left the kitchen to them, praying they wouldn’t destroy it before they were done doing whatever they intended to do.

Once the man left, Ave beamed and turned to the silent people behind her who hadn’t uttered a word when she was making the agreement with the head cook. "We have the kitchen to ourselves now, guys!" she announced, but they didn’t match her excitement as none of them also believed she could cook.

"Selene, I hope you know what you are doing?" Thalia asked with a concerned look for her.

"Of course, I know, now let’s get to business. Where is the cooking fire or whatever you use here?" she asked a servant who was standing at the side, and the servant gestured to the cooking fire and other cooking items that made Ave’s eyes round as nothing looked like what she had imagined they used here. No way in hell!