Wizard of Jatte by Rowan Erlking (librera reader txt) 📕

With a mild smile, her father continued to trim the stems, gently dropping each one into a bucket. “She should help. All your aunts should, actually.”

Not looking at all reassured, Alania even grimaced. “Do they have to?”

“You have objections?” Her father chuckled.

Looking up at him Alania nodded. “Yes. Aunty Millerswife gets so pushy. This morning when she came by she told me I put too much salt in the oatcakes. Dad, I was doing exactly what Mommy does.”

He nodded with a knowing smile. “I saw nothing wrong with them.”

Lifting her chest with more courage, Alania added, “But Aunty Bakerswife said I cooked them at too high of a heat. She says Mommy cooks her ovens way too hot and she had taught me all wrong.”

To that, her father lifted his eyebrows. The expert baker always had to criticize his wife’s cooking every time she came around. Her petty criticism even annoyed him at times. Normally he kept himself as far out of the kitchen as his wife did from the carpenter’s shop. 

“And you should have heard what Aunty Millerswife said to—”

But a loud screech interrupted her, coming from the house.

The carpenter jumped to his feet dropping all the flowers off of his lap, scrambling out the door, into the courtyard and through the house door into the front room.

The door to his bedroom was wide open. Standing inside next to his wife’s bed was Aunty Bakerswife with the midwife. Both looked alarmed, staring at his wife and newborn, though Aunty Bakerswife stood drenched, the water basin knocked at her feet though her fluffy bun and blouse were nearly saturated. The midwife was holding up a towel as if trying to catch something.

“What happened?” He stopped at the door, glad no one looked seriously hurt.

Turning to look back at him both women stared with wide-open eyes as if they were unable to close them. His wife held an amused expression on her lips, rocking her baby in her arms. His baby reached out, much more alert than any newborn he had ever seen, making sounds that almost sounded like laughter.

“Aunty got wet,” Tolbetan said, clinging first to his father’s pant leg.

All his children had followed him in.

Kinnerlin covered his mouth to stop a laugh. Dalance was doing the same, glancing over at Alania who stared not at either aunt but at her youngest brother.

“Daddy! Look!” She pointed at her mother.

But it wasn’t her mother she was really pointing at. It was the small puff of a cloud that gathered over her lap where the little baby reached out. It got larger and larger, clumping together from the very water that had fallen all over their aunt, until it was about the size of an enormous pillow. Then it began to rain right there on the bed.

The baby cried out first. The cold wetness drenched both he and his mother.

The midwife rescued the baby. The carpenter rescued his wife. Aunty Bakerswife fell back against the wall as the little storm cloud dispersed, floating out the window.

“What was that?” Dalance said.

Alania shrugged but then found her baby brother suddenly shoved into her arms, the midwife tromping out in haste. She stopped only once at the door.

“That is the last I will take of that!” she pointed at the baby. “That child is not normal!”

She was gone.

Their mother broke into laughter. She kept laughing, even with tears forming in her eyes.

“Momma?” Kinnerlin took a step closer to her.

Slapping the wet bed with her hand, the carpenter’s wife continued to giggle. “That was the funniest—”

The carpenter gave her a wry look, but also glanced at the wet bed and then his son. Alania rocked the baby, his cries already gone and his tiny eyes focusing on her face with a curious stare. Her hair pulled from her braids, soon into his fists and pulled to his mouth.

“What did happen?” Dalance asked again.

“It…he…I…” Aunty Bakerswife stepped once towards the door and then back to the bed, waffling indecisively on where she wanted to go. Her eyes fixed on the new baby at last. She pointed one of her fat fingers at him. “He did it!”

“Pardon?” The carpenter looked bewildered.

His wife was still laughing. “He sure did! My precious Theissen Darol Mukumar!”

“Mom!” her two older boys called out, making faces. “You weren’t supposed to tell us his name yet!”

“Not until tonight,” Alania said with a firm nod.

But their mother kept laughing, shaking her head. “Forget the ceremony. Look at him. I knew he was special.”

And they all did look. The baby was now tugging on Alania’s lace collar. The ends of her apron strings seemed to have untied themselves, now clasped in the baby’s tiny fists, shoved into his mouth.

Tugging them out from his hands, Alania rolled her eyes. But right after she tossed them back over her shoulders to be tied they flew back into her youngest brother’s fingers, and he chomped down on them again. She lifted her gaze at both her parents immediately.

“Did you see that?”

They all nodded.

Her mother calmed down her laughter then waved over to her bed. “We will need to clean this up.”

“Yes.” The carpenter immediately nodded to the aunt. “Please, clear off the blankets.”

Auntie Bakerswife stared at him, immovable. “I…you…. Are you just going to ignore what just happened?”

Without even a blink to express misunderstanding, he replied, “My wife needs a dry bed. You said you had come here to help her out as she recovers.”

“But what about what we just saw?” Auntie Bakerswife gestured over to the baby again.

Alania cooed to him, grinning in spite of herself as she held her brother. The others circled around him to get a good look also. Tolbetan stood on his tiptoes.

“That can wait for later. Dry bed first.” He turned towards his children. “Dalance, go and get your mother a dry nightdress. Kinnerlin, find the mop and have Tolbetan carry the bucket.”

“I can do that!” Tolbetan shouted, and he ran from the room faster than the others.

Aunty Bakerswife sighed and did as asked, watching the others scatter to help out. The room was nearly cleared, almost private enough for the carpenter to ask his wife the question all the others had held. “Do you know how our son did that?”

The carpenter’s wife shook her head with a grin. “Not at all, though I am sure the village magician could probably tell us.”

“Magic?” Alania said, her eyes growing wider. She looked from her mother to her baby brother.

Her mother smiled and shrugged, accepting the nightdress Dalance brought, walking straight behind the dressing screen to change out of her wet gown. “I suppose so.”

The carpenter followed her, scratching his forehead between the wrinkles in his brow. “But how can a baby do magic? Doesn’t that kind of thing require an incantation or spell? He can’t even talk.”

His wife shrugged again. “I don’t know. All I know is from the day our son was conceived, I knew he was special.”

Her other sons returned with the mop and bucket, quickly wiping up the spilled water while their aunt carried back in new blankets and sheets. She frowned as she tugged each over the down mattress that had somehow avoided getting too wet, casting wary glances up at the baby in Alania’s arms.

“Magic….” The woman muttered. “He’s probably a demon.”

The entire carpenter household turned. The children pulled from their aunt, horrified. Alania clutched her baby brother closer to herself, protecting him with her arm. Their father’s face grew cold and hard though their mother peered around the changing screen at her sister.

“What did you say?”

Aunty Bakerswife drew back, dropping the end of the blankets. “Uh…. Don’t look at me like that! It is a possibility! You have to see that!”

“My brother is not a demon!” Alania shouted back.

“Yeah!” the brothers chorused, one stomping his foot.

The baby started to cry.

Throwing her nightgown over herself, their mother came around and plucked her newborn from her eldest child’s arms. Lifting her chin she said, “Bakerswife, if you talk like that again, you will not be allowed in my home ever again.”

“She can leave now.” The carpenter immediately opened the door, pointing out.

Aunty Bakerswife pulled back another step then raised her chest, turned and stomped out of the room. The carpenter only stopped her once before she departed the home entirely.

Grabbing her arm, he hissed in her ear. “If you ever suggest that I would sire a demon again, I will have you thrown out.”

From there she ran.

But word had spread that the Carpenter’s newborn child was unusual. More than the regular fare showed up along the outer fence at the naming ceremony that evening.

The torches on pegs and candles lit with arching flower chains over the tables and benches gathered for family and close friends. The village doctor stood on the raised platform they brought from the church for such ceremonies waiting for the mother and child to be brought out to the existing family. The father helped her along, their baby covered in a sheer white veil with his mother under it also, him cooing and clawing the cloth, pulling it into his mouth so that it was damp on one corner. Nearly all the family was smiling as they approached, though Aunty Bakerswife was somehow out of sorts, staring at her knees rather than at her sister.

“Sarton Lubanar Scolderan Carpenter, do you present your newest born to be inspected?” the doctor asked as per ceremonial tradition.

“I do,” the carpenter said, glancing at his wife. He removed the veil off her face so she could speak.

“Malana Rosepetal Brisina Tristeen Carpenterwife, do you present your newest born to be inspected?” the doctor said to her with a smile.

Her smile beamed with a great deal of pleasure. “I most certainly do.”

“Then reveal your child to me.”

The carpenter’s wife lifted off the veil, letting it flutter to the ground. The baby cooed when he saw her face, delighted to see he again, but the family’s eyes were not on the child but on the veil that floated for a moment longer than normal on the air before dropping as it should. Dalance nudged Alania, but she shushed him.

The doctor had not seen it at all and continued with the ceremony. The parents unwrapped the blankets around the baby as the doctor performed a simple physical on the child, counting fingers, toes, checking other appendages for infection, and inspecting the navel most specifically to make sure it had healed. Several times the baby shivered and the blankets pulled up to cover him as if by invisible hands. The doctor tugged them down several times before the baby started to cry. That only made the doctor smile more, listening to the newborn’s healthy lungs.

He wrapped up the baby as soon as he had finished the examination. Nodding to the parents, he took the child from his mother’s arms and lifted him up for all to see. “I now introduce—” he paused for the mother to whisper the baby’s name to him. “Theissen Darol Mukumar Carpenterson. Younger brother to Tolbetan Scolderan Dulusiarnet Carpenterson, Kinnerlin Morgetan Lubanar Carpenterson, Dalance Sarton Mikumberick Carpenterson, and the firstborn Alania Tristeen Honeydew Carpenterdotter. All welcome the boy!”

The family rose to their feet, opening their mouths in a cheer.

“Stop!”

The doctor and all others stared over the crowd at the group behind the fence. A man in red silk robes with ancient black writing on them came running into the yard, puffing for breath. It was obvious he had run there. The midwife was panting right behind him.

“Oh, Magician.” The doctor blinked at him with mild surprise.

“You must not name him!” the magician said at last, waving towards the baby.

“And why not?” The carpenter stepped forward, heaving his