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

He slept in the barn that night also, though midway through he went missing conveniently when the mistress had decided to take a night stroll to visit the horses. The carpenter’s son was later found hanging in the hay nets just above the loft, murmuring for a warm piece of bread and some soup. The cook delivered both at lunch, patting him heartily on the back. Theissen finished the cabinet legs and set in the glass windows into the front doors. He pieced the cabinet together before nightfall. He was nowhere to be found by dinner: not in shop nor in the barn. No one in the manor could find him though this bag and traveling cloak where still in his room. His work belt hung on the chair in his shop.

“Have you seen him at all?” The lady’s voice had gone shrill.

The steward shook his head and glance at the head of household. The head maid frowned, trying not to visibly flinch though both of them could feel the fury of their mistress glare down on them like firebrands.

“Perhaps he is in the village?” the housemaid suggested.

Huffing, the lady nodded to her. “If he is, and if he is seeing someone there, I will be very put out.”

But he wasn’t. Theissen had gone for a walk. Glue had to dry and he had no inclination of using his spare time to try and save broken furniture. Besides, he knew the lady would come around to the shop and there were only so many natural phenomena he could call on in a row to distract her that would not look like he was using magic.

Behind the house was a garden full of trees and bushes, cut and arranged. Beyond that he found a brook. It was the freshest smelling thing in the area, and he really wanted to breathe clean pure air that had a clean pure flow. The stench of the woman’s hormones raging was somehow worse than the stink of boils and sicknesses. It was sickly sweet and disgustingly so. True, if he had been a man with similar inclinations, he would have loved it and jumped right in to her invitations. But, he wasn’t. His inclinations were less hormonal and more out of the rightness of the thing. Besides not even liking her as a person let alone a woman, her advances were entirely unwanted because she was married. He never forgot Yuld Scribeson’s lessons. He knew adulterers ended up castrated. The lady probably would have gotten away without punishment, her husband the landowner and lawgiver, but he would definitely end up on the worse end.

Finding a clean patch of grass along the bank, he sat down. There were boys playing not far off, tossing rocks into the brook at small fish. It brought his thoughts back to when he and his brothers played in the river near their home. Being a kid was so much easier. No girl ever thought to throw herself at him back then. Adult emotions were way too complicated.

“Hey. Aren’t you the carpenter?”

Theissen looked up with a slight jerk. However, all he saw was a young boy perhaps barely past his budding ceremony. “Why do you need to know?”

The kid smirked, thumbing back towards the manor. “Because, they’re looking for you. The mistress sounds mad.”

Making a face, Theissen slid further down the bank towards the brook. “That’s why I’m here.”

The boy laughed and hopped down next to him. “I heard you rejected her. Is that true?”

“I will neither verify nor deny—”

“You know, the smithy? His son was her last victim,” the boy said.

Theissen looked up. The kid nodded to him with a mischievous grin.

“That’s why the old man is back in the shop. His son ran off when the mistress tried to seduce him. He’s the only other man that wouldn’t give in to her,” he said.

“Ran off?” Theissen looked around the area. “Are you saying that nearly every man around here has—?”

The boy shook his head. “No. She likes young meat. Fresh strapping men. The master even knows of her habits, but he has yet to catch her in them. You’d better leave before he gets back. She’ll blame you even if you didn’t sleep with her, just out of spite.”

Theissen stood up. Looking to the manor house, he now knew he had to make a change of plans.

No one had found the journeyman carpenter that evening. He was not in at dinner, and he had not gone back to his room to sleep. Someone said they had seen him in the carpentry shop late that night finishing work on the cabinet, but the only sign that he had been there was the cabinet itself, finished and perfectly dry.

His things were gone and no one had seen him depart.

Theissen walked into Pepersin Town looking for the silversmith’s shop, dusty, footsore and tired. He rested on one stoop just for a few moments, only to be shooed off by a sheriff the next. Walking about on the cobblestone road, glancing at the carriages, horses and gas lamps hanging over the hilly town, it was like he had stepped into yet another world.

Here the people were finely dressed, though not as crisp and clean as at the manor house. It was all like his brothers had said in their letters home, bustling, busy and way too complicated for a common villager. Theissen rested near a china shop for just another moment, keeping his eyes out for sheriffs this time, though wishing his food pack had not run out because his stomach gurgled loudly heralding his arrival.

“You! Get off my step!” A shopkeeper shoved his broom at his backside to urge him on.

“I’m sorry,” Theissen said, clenching his grumbling stomach and staggering backward.

“Be careful!” a woman shouted out.

He turned to look, giving another tired bow. “Pardon me. I’m only—”

“Theissen, is that you? You look so dirty!”

Blinking his eyes and trying to focus, he barely recognized her face. Shaking his head, he moved to sit down again. He really didn’t have much rest since escaping the manor. Theissen had walked all night and all morning, and it was hard to stand up straight.

“Goodness sakes! Don’t you recognize me?” It was girl. That, he recognized. It wasn’t Alania. He’d know her voice better than anyone’s excepting his mother’s, Doreen’s, and Milrina’s.

“If you feed me, I might,” he said, wishing to rest just a little bit longer.

“Oh, get up. I’ll take you to your sister’s.”

He obeyed, still not sure who it was, but then he didn’t care since he knew it wasn’t the mistress of that manor who only called him you or carpenter, he figured it was as good a person as any to be with.

“Look at you,” the girl murmured. “You looked fine at your adulthood ceremony, but I have never seen such a dusty vagabond before in my life. If your mother saw you, she would be ashamed. Why don’t you do some of your magic and shake it off?”

“Oh, please be quiet.” He covered his head with his hands, rubbing his eyes. “You sound like Auntie Millerswife.”

“That’s my mom, you are talking about!” The girl sounded shrill, and she dropped his arm. He slipped and fell to the cobblestone again.

Looking up, he squinted. “Oh, Trinsina. It’s you.”

The girl made a face. She was a married woman now, one of Alania’s close friends and his cousin. Her pregnant belly was still nothing more than a lump on her usually flat stomach. She married a leather worker, but she often spent time at his sister’s enjoying the life a silversmith could offer. However, her look on him told him that he was behaving too poorly for her to be seen with him in public. Her face was going red from embarrassment.

Rising shakily onto his feet, Theissen dusted himself off. “Sorry. I’ve been on my feet all night.”

She gave him a forgiving smile and hooked her arm in his again. “Don’t you stop to rest?”

“Last night I couldn’t,” he said, still feeling too tired to stand though he had to. “I had to run for my life.”

Startled, she was about to inquire why. But with a glance towards the road, they saw a carriage rumble in and through back towards the highway. Theissen had cringed and quickened his pace.

“Something happen back there?” she asked.

Theissen just shook his head. “You’d be surprised what exists just between Pepersin and Lumen.”

To that his cousin laughed, walking on without another word on the subject.

They arrived at the silversmith’s home after the hour. Alania greeted them at the door and then practically caught Theissen as he slumped against the doorjamb for support. Ten minutes and they had him under the covers of the best bed in the spare room, sleeping soundly with not one question answered.

“Ah! You are at last awake!” Alania turned from her tea table. Besides being all spread out with cake and confections of all shapes and sizes on silver trays with petite two tined forks and the most lacy white table cloth he had ever seen, except quite possibly in that manor house, there were two equally frilly looking dowagers sitting across from her with equally startled looks on their wrinkled and somewhat disapproving faces. Theissen was standing in the doorway with nothing but the silversmith’s second nightshirt on.

Rubbing the sleepiness out of his eyes, he gave a small nod to the ladies. “Sorry to interrupt you, Alania, but I don’t know this house well and I can’t find your wash room.”

She gave him a sisterly smile, one that still saw him a toddler tugging on her skirts for some attention and a little mischievous color changing affect on her clothes. Back then she never got away without some handprints on her skirts. “Go back down the hall. Pass three doors. You will see it on your right.”

He nodded and turned.

“Oh, and Theissen?”

Rubbing one more eye, he glanced back. “Yeah?”

“Don’t come back out until you are dressed. You may be too sleepy to notice it, but I do have company.”

He immediately blushed and ducked back into the hall. He could hear his sister apologize with a good-humored laugh to the ladies and then continue on with her conversation.

Theissen found the washroom, noticed his clothes all hung out and dripping from a good washing, and proceeded to use it, listening to the echoes of the town outside the walls. The sound of bustling and moving had a friendly busy ring to it. Despite how beautiful the manor house had been and how peaceful his cousin’s village was, there was something familiar about the busy-bodied motion of a town. Undoubtedly it was why Alania liked it so much.

Returning back toward the guest bedroom, he noticed the crying of his nephew coming from an upstairs room. The cooing of its nursemaid attempting to calm