“Can’t be picky about when you’re getting your food when on the field, really. Even ate while soaked head to toe in blood and guts, once. I dunno if it was just the chef being bad or some of it got into ma mouth, but the slop tasted kinda bloody that day.” - Nakur As-Waleen, Mercenary from Ur-Teros.

Cooking for over seventy people took time, as well as plenty of preparations. Not long after the bones were handed to her, Erycea had cracked them, revealing the marrow within, and evenly divided the bones between four large cauldrons filled most of the way with water that already simmered, each with a bouquet of wild and dried herbs as well as other tidbits like minced onions and garlic floating around.

Meanwhile, under Aurora’s direction the group who helped her with the cooking had sliced the rump meat into thin, even slices each roughly a finger’s length, half as thick, and thrice as wide. After the slices were lightly salted and peppered, another then started to cook them in batches over a cleaned, flat stone placed directly on one of the fires, the heat of the stone quickly cooking the slices of meat.

Once the horse meat was done cooking, they were then set aside in a large wooden bowl that was already half-filled with a mixture of sweet mead and freshly squeezed citrus juice from citrus trees that grew nearby. Another member of the group then mixed the meat well and left it to marinade for a bit until the next batch was finished grilling, at which point she transferred the already-marinated meats to another bowl and repeated the process with the fresh batch.

While some members of the group busied themselves with the rump meat, Aurora busily mixed the roughly minced leg meat with the other ingredients she asked for, the mass mixed thoroughly until it ended up like a lumpy, mushy mess. Once the bowl was done mixing she then worked on another bowl as she handed out the first one to another of her assistants.

The assistant then brought the bowl and used a pair of wooden spoons to create crudely shaped meatballs roughly the size of a small chicken egg, which he then plunged into the now-boiling soup in the cauldrons. He repeated the process until all the mixture in the bowl had been used up, around which time Aurora had finished another bowl. Then her assistant moved to the next cauldron and dropped dozens of meatballs into it as well, changing cauldrons with each bowl until all the meat had been used up.

After a while the soup began to take on an aromatic, meaty scent as the meatballs started to cook and float to the top. Aurora told them to allow the soup to simmer another quarter hour more, before they added some old, stale bread - a normal part of their rations, since none of their storage artifacts had the more expensive stasis enchantment on them - that was crumbled into tiny pieces into the soup to thicken it.

Enough bread was added into each cauldron to turn the soup into a stew the consistency of a porridge, and they stirred and cooked it for a while more, before Aurora took a sip to taste and declared it done. Only then did the young mercenaries ladled large helpings of the stew into their wooden bowls and started to eat, the previously grilled and marinated slices of horse rump added on top of the stew in copious amounts.

Even as they ate, the young mercenaries kept up the duty rotation. Erycea’s group was the one who cooked the meal, so they also ate first, while the other three groups kept at their respective duties, be it keeping an eye on the captives, standing guard, or resting after they properly cleaned themselves. Only after Ery’s group was done eating would another group do the same while Ery’s group temporarily took over their responsibilities.

Given the copious amounts of meat in it, the stew was savory and meaty, with a slightly gamey flavor, and some pleasant pungency from the onions and garlic used to flavor it. The stale bread had absorbed the liquids and thickened the stew properly, while the meatballs were chewy and slightly tough, but yielded to the bite with a pleasant bounce and strong flavor.

The slices of grilled meat added a hit of sweet-sour flavor to the meaty taste as they had absorbed a good bit of the marinade, a little bit of which had been drizzled on the stew to be mixed in as well. The young mercenaries ate with gusto, each group - seventeen to eighteen of them - easily finishing off a large cauldron that held enough stew to potentially feed up to fifty people on their own.

Granted, some large eaters like the large therians amongst them partly accounted for that.

Naturally the meaty aromas reached their captives as well, at which point one of them - probably driven by hunger, as they had after all ridden for half of the day and been made to walk the other half of the day without any real time to eat - to ask for some, only to be answered by a thrown leather full of water to the face by their guards, with obvious implications.

Even when they already finished their meals and tidied up, the young mercenaries kept their vigilance. They applied the same rotating groups as before as shifts of the night watch, with the group on shift to stand guard at night while the others slept. The group would then awaken those of the next shift after a couple hours before they went to sleep themselves, and the process repeated itself until dawn.

Erycea’s group happened to draw the final shift that night, so they got a good six hours of uninterrupted sleep in their tents before those from the third shift woke them up when it was their turn to stand watch. They then took watch for the final two hours, the captives and horses fast asleep as well, until dawn arrived and the first rays of sunlight came from the distant horizon.