Chapter 171: A Perfectly Ordinary Day
Hild had somehow managed to occupy both beds. Mod hadn’t seen it happen, and when she tried to figure out how, she couldn’t. The room suggested the outcome had occurred gradually and become irreversible sometime during the night.
The facts were straightforward.
Her bed was a mess. Hild’s bed was a mess. And she was partially dropped in the floor between the two. Nearby, crumbs covered the pillow near Beadu’s face. At the same time, a cloth-wrapped parcel bulged beneath the left side of Beadu’s blanket. On the windowsill sat a box of match packets with two missing.
Beadu had been carrying those matches everywhere since she got then. Her reasoning was simple, reliable fire was important.
Mod considered that difficult to argue with. Beadu was normally right about things involving food or heat.
Mod dressed without lighting the lamp.
She tapped Hild once on the shoulder.
Hild snapped upright in a beat. Her eyes swept the room immediately. Mod first. Then Beadu. Then the door.
Only after confirming all three did her attention leave them.
"Morning," Hild yawned.
"It is," Mod snorted.
"Lets go get breakfast."
By then Beadu was already sitting up. The parcel was open in her hands.
Two bread rolls from yesterday. Apparently she had planned for this.
She finished one before she was fully on her feet.
"Morning." She greeted with a mouthful of bread.
Hild looked at the remaining roll.
"Seriously? How much of a glutton can you be?"
"Eh? I’m just having a morning snack."
"We call that a breakfast."
Beadu finished the first roll.
"Hild, there’s also the pre-breakfast. I’m just being thorough."
She slipped the second roll into her coat pocket.
A reserve for later.
Hild looked as though she might continue the argument.
She didn’t.
The morning continued.
Leof was already in the corridor when they stepped out. Mab stood beside her.
The right pocket of Mab’s coat radiated faint warmth. The iron stone she had adopted as a handwarmer during the first hard frost was still there. She had never returned it to the windowsill where it had originally belonged.
"Is it the good bread today?" Beadu asked.
"We haven’t been to the kitchen," Leof said.
"But you talk with the cook sometimes."
"Isn’t every bread good...?" Mab tilted her head.
She seemed genuinely confused.
By then, they arrived at the kitchen. Mod looked toward the door and light showed beneath it.
Then she glanced back toward the girls.
"Normally," she told Mab. "As long as it isn’t hard as a stone."
Hild was already moving.
Beadu immediately fell into step beside her.
Tam was at the table when they arrived. She already had her apron on.
Beside her bowl sat the spring-wound timer from the workshop. It ticked steadily.
She had started using it in the foundry. Since then, the timer had acquired a growing list of responsibilities.
Tam looked up as they entered. "The furnace is doing the draft thing again. I need to check the inlet before the morning shift. I think Mod’s thingy is compensating, but I want to confirm before the pour because last week-"
The timer rang.
Tam picked it up, emptied the rest of her bowl in a single motion, and stood.
"Good morning."
She was already heading for the door.
The kitchen continued without interruption.
Beadu ate with complete concentration. That often happened when she ate good food.
While Beadu was pouring water, Mab stole a piece of bread.
Nothing happened.
Mod realized why a moment later.
Beadu had already cut another piece before the theft occurred.
She had planned for it.
Mab warmed her soup slightly faster than the bowl should have allowed. Once the temperature reached whatever warmth she wanted, she stopped.
Hild and Leof ate without incident.
Mod ate and observed.
Aestrith appeared in the doorway. Her gaze moved across the table.
"Everyone fed?"
Five different versions of yes answered her.
She crossed to the counter and collected a plate. The amount of food on it exceeded what one person reasonably needed for breakfast.
Then she headed toward the administrative corridor.
That was where she went every morning.
No one commented on the plate.
Mod returned to her bowl.
Breakfast eventually was over, and Mod accompanied the girls together to the storage that had become their classroom of sorts.
Their tutor, Wenne, arrived three minutes before the session. She always arrived three minutes before the session.
The study room contained a chalk practice wall and a long table covered with printed texts.
Months of daily use showed everywhere.
Several repaired book spines sat stacked near one end. Chalk dust gathered in the corners.
One chair remained empty because one leg was slightly shorter than the others. A person wouldn’t discover the problem until sitting, and then falling down.
Mab had already completed her assigned reading and found another text.
Her heel bounced against the chair leg in a rhythm unrelated to anything around her.
Meanwhile, the passive warmth she constantly leaked into nearby objects had reached her pen. The ink now flowed faster than the nib could properly control. Blots marked the end of every line.
"The blots," Wenne said.
"I know."
"The previous two pages also had blots."
"Those ones are dry now."
Wenne looked at her.
It was the look she reserved for problems that technically complied with instructions while completely missing the point.
After a moment, she moved on.
Leof was copying from her printed text.
The mechanical calculator sat beside her page.
Rather than solving the math exercises herself, she used the device to verify them.
Wenne had stopped addressing this a couple days earlier. Truthfully, she barely understood the trinket.
Leof raised a hand.
"This word."
She pointed to a passage discussing an old stone foundation in marsh ground.
Wenne examined it. "Deterioration. Things do not always break at once. A stone may seem strong, but water finds its way into the smallest crack. The water stays there, and the crack grows wider. Year after year the stone weakens until it is no longer what it once was. This is how things wear away, little by little, until ruin comes."
Leof seriously paid attention to the explanation.
"Hmm. I see."
Wenne moved on.
Beadu was reading her assignment aloud.
That was not the assignment.
"Beadu."
"I read better this way."
"Read the next section silently."
Beadu turned the page.
For approximately four words, silence prevailed.
Then the sound returned.
Very quiet.
In the volume of who sincerely believed this qualified as silent reading.
Wenne placed both hands flat on the table.
She stared at the far wall.
Many seconds passed.
Then she stood and continued to the next student.
Hild’s letters were readable.
Each mark looked less written than pressed into the page. Every letter appeared to receive exactly the amount of force Hild applied to everything else in life.
When she completed a line, she read it back.
If it met her standard, she moved to the next.
She had been meeting that standard consistently for roughly six weeks. So far, she had shown no sign of realizing this counted as improvement.
Mod worked through her own text without difficulty.
Time passed. Eventually their lessons were done, and they moved to the kitchen again, for lunch.
Today they would have meat soup.
"This is the good soup!" Beadu announced.
Mab finished a third of her bowl before Hild even picked up her spoon.
All the while, she had been watching Beadu’s bowl with what she apparently considered subtlety.
"No," Beadu said.
"I haven’t said anything."
"You were about to."
Mab redirected her attention toward her own remaining soup.
After studying it, she appeared to conclude more soup would not mysteriously appear.
Twenty seconds passed.
"What if there’s a lot left at the end..."
"Mab."
"Fine."
Water spilled near Mod.
A cup had been left too close to the edge of the table.
Mod moved her bowl out of the way.
The cook took out a cloth without even looking up.
"We should leave in twenty minutes," Hild said.
Beadu looked from her bowl to the available time.
She thought very hard.
"That’s enough."
They left the citadel by two different routes.
Hild and Beadu headed toward the city main gate.
Beadu carried seeds in her left pocket and match packets in her right. Experience suggested either might become of use without warning. Most worthwhile tools worked that way.
Hild set the pace.
Beadu matched it.
Mod and Mab went to the industrial district.
The streets of the miners’ quarter had been paved since autumn. Their shoes didn’t got so dirty now by simply walking.
Mab adjusted the strap of her bag once without slowing.
Ahead, foundry noise was already building toward the rhythm of the afternoon shift.
Then they started to hear shouts.
A woman’s voice came first, sharp, carrying the edge of something that had been building longer than a single afternoon.
Then came one vendor’s reply from behind a food cart on the corner. His voice had flat certainty. He made a decision, and wouldn’t go back on it.
The woman stood her ground.
Her coat looked worn by a long journey and many more days afterward.
The dispute seemed to concern food, as it often happened in Ashmark, and was only heating up.
