Report to Lutz
Everything was awkward the day after the family meeting. Dad’s smile had a tinge of sadness to it, Mom hugged me out of nowhere multiple times, and Tuuli would randomly start crying. But as the days passed we slowly returned to the lifestyle we had before the meeting.
“You don’t have to do that, Myne. I’ll do it.”
“Bwuh? But I can do it just fine. Weren’t you the one who said I had to learn how to do this, Tuuli?”
Things were definitely the same as they used to be, except that Tuuli had become even more overprotective of me at the expense of encouraging my independence.
“Wow, it’s so bright! We need to get some parues!”
I was awakened by Tuuli’s voice. The sky was still murky and dark, but there weren’t any clouds. The dim light sneaking its way into our roomed hinted at the good weather and Tuuli threw the window open, allowing a burst of cold outside air to flood in.
“Tuuli, it’s cold.”
“Ah, whoopsies.” She closed the window and hurriedly got to work eating breakfast. I also went and nommed away at my food while everyone else rushed through theirs.
Mom and Dad finished quickly and began preparing the hearth and firewood. As Dad lined up wood next to the door, he turned to look at me chewing my bread. “What’re you gonna do, Myne? Want to wait at the gate?”
“Mmm, maybe I should go gather parues too?”
According to what Tuuli had told me, parue trees were weird fantasy plants but in a good, not-terrifying way. Her explanation of a spinny, shining tree or whatever didn’t exactly give me a clear mental image of it, so I wanted to see one for myself. But my innocent suggestion was met with angry glares from my whole family.
“No! You’re either staying at home or helping at the gate.”
“Gathering parues is very difficult, too much for you to handle. You’ll definitely get sick.”
“Yeah! You’re not good at climbing trees and you can’t walk through the snow, so you won’t be able to do anything.”
Everyone shot down the idea of me coming along to help them. They were right that I couldn’t even walk to the gate through all the snow and would basically be dead weight in a snowy forest.
“Okay. Parue-gathering ends at noon, right? I’ll help at the gate until then.”
I grabbed my tote bag and started packing for the gate. I thought that since Dad had today off that Otto might not be at work either, but it seemed that around this time of year Otto went to the gate basically every day.
We left once both I and the parue-gathering tools were on our slightly large sled. Dad pulled the sled in the direction of the southern gate where a crowd of other city goers were also heading, doubtlessly to gather parues as well. The air was so cold it felt like needles on my skin, but everyone was so excited to gather parues that I got excited too. It was like a festival.
“Sorry, but take care of Myne for me. She’s helping Otto out until noon.”
“Yes sir!”
Dad set me down gently by the gate. I waved goodbye to everyone and greeted the guard, who I now knew on sight, before heading to the night watch room like always with him.
“Good morning, Mr. Otto.”
“Huh? Myne? I thought the captain had today off.” Otto blinked in surprise and I nodded with a small smile.
“It’s sunny today, so everyone’s going to gather parues. I can help while waiting for them to get back.”
“Ah, I get it. Guess we’ve got until noon then.” Otto grinned, figuring out the situation right away, and started piling up paperwork that needed its math checked. Once he scooted aside to give me some space, I thanked him for giving me advice earlier.
“Mr. Otto, thank you for the other day. I talked to my family about my Devouring and we decided to search for a job I can do at home. I’m thinking about telling Mr. Benno when spring comes.”
“Makes sense, your health’s the most important thing here. I can assign you some work to do at home if Benno can’t think of any jobs for you, so just ask whenever you’re ready.”
“Okay! Thank you.” His pitch-black grin made me as nervous as always, but I felt so relieved in general that I got right to work with a smile on my face.
My family returned from the forest after noon passed, and I once again got on the sled as we returned home. Since all three of them had gone gathering, we got six whole parues this time. That was thanks in part to Mom working extra hard now that she knew even the wrung-out parue leftovers were useful for something.
We juiced the parues while Mom got lunch ready. Tuuli took the thinnest twig from the firewood pile and poked it into a parue. That was all it took for the parue peel to tear.
“Myne, here it comes!”
I caught the thick white fruit juice with a cup, making sure not to spill any. I waited for the juice to stop flowing out with my heart dancing at the sweet smell, upon which Tuuli handed over the fruit to Dad.
Dad crushed the fruit and got out the oil. It didn’t take long at all since he could use the pressure weights. We saved the leftovers of the first four fruits for ourselves and decided to bring the rest to Lutz’s to trade for eggs.
After eating, I brought both the parue leftovers and a new recipe to Lutz’s. If they at least had an oven I could make gratin or even pizza, but my options were limited by the fact they only had a pot and a metal pan.
“Hi, Lutz. Could you trade us some eggs for these? I thought up a new recipe we could try out.”
“Sounds good, but my brothers aren’t home. You’re gonna have to come inside and wait.”
“Where’d everybody go? Are they playing ’cause it’s bright out?”
“They’re shoveling snow to earn some pocket money.” I didn’t know how it worked since I had never participated, but apparently shoveling snow was a good way for kids to earn pocket money. Such was the value of hard labor.
“Why’d you stay behind, Lutz?”
“Parues just melt if you don’t squeeze’m dry, remember?”
It was true that parues were a high priority, but it felt like Lutz’s brothers had just pushed chores onto him so they could go make money. It was frustrating. But if Lutz himself wasn’t saying anything, it wasn’t my place to butt in where I didn’t belong.
I would have liked to at least help him juice and drain the parues, but that took strength, which I lacked. All I could do was watch Lutz swing the hammer and Karla collect the juices.
I watched them work in a daze and then remembered I hadn’t told Lutz how my family meeting went. I needed to tell him that I had decided not to join Benno’s store.
“Um, Lutz. I decided not to become Benno’s apprentice.”
“Huh?! Why?!” Lutz looked my way with his eyes open wide and the hammer still in the air. Karla looked at me with wide eyes of her own.
“Remember what Mom said? I would just be dead weight to you. There’s no way I can work there when I’m this weak and sickly. I talked about it with Otto and he pointed out that there were plenty of other problems with me working for Benno.”
“Like what?” Lutz urged me on with a glance as he got back to swinging the hammer.
“What would our coworkers think of a new apprentice who gets sick all the time and barely ever works?”
“Aaah,” replied Lutz as he swung the hammer.
Karla closed her eyes as she pressed weights against a parue. “You’d make things harder on them, plus yourself since you’d miss lessons and the like.”
“That’s right. And on top of that, I plan to make a lot of new products. Can you imagine how much money I’ll make from them? An apprentice that barely works and makes a ton of money would just make everyone mad.”
“...You’ve got a point.” Lutz nodded, but Karla’s eyes widened.
“Well,” I continued, “The high pay goes for you too, but I think you won’t have the same problem if you work hard enough and take your job seriously. It might be smart to talk to Benno about this.”
“Yeah, I’ll bring it up to him once spring comes.” At the very least, Benno could split his wages from his cut of the profit and mostly keep it a secret. He could pay us just by tapping his guild card against ours, for instance.
Then Lutz asked, “If you’re not gonna join Benno’s store, what’ll you do after your baptism?”
“I’m not sure what’s going to happen with my sickness, so for now I’m going to stick to doing paperwork and stuff at home, thinking up new products, helping at the gate... Basically, the same things I’ve been doing up until now.”
“Alright. That’s probably the best for keeping you healthy,” Lutz agreed, which made me sigh in relief.
Karla looked relieved too. “If Myne’s not going, that means you don’t have to either, Lutz. Now you can be a craftsman.”
Why did she think that Lutz would stop being a merchant because I had? I tilted my head in confusion and Lutz’s eyebrows shot up in anger at the thorough relief in his mother’s voice.
“What’re you talking about, Mom?!”
“What do you mean, what?” Karla sincerely didn’t understand and Lutz clicked his tongue before shouting.
“I want to be a merchant! Myne’s got nothing to do it! I’ve been dragging her into this, not the other way around!” said Lutz, surprising Karla so much that she stared at him in shock.
“You what?! Does that mean you’re still planning to be a merchant?”
“Duh! I really want to be a traveling merchant, but I heard about city citizenship from a former traveling merchant and decided to just be a merchant here in this city.”
“You never said anything about that before!”
“I did! You just didn’t listen or you didn’t care!”
It seemed that they really hadn’t understood each other. Karla looked shocked, like she had never heard any of this before. I kept silent, figuring that this was a conversation between family that I had no place in.
“...I remember you saying you wanted to be a traveling merchant, sure. But that’s just nonsense all kids say. It’s like telling someone what dream you had last night. I never thought for a second you were serious about it. I was just waiting for you to wake up and see reality,” said Karla, weakly shaking her head while looking nervously at Lutz and me. I could tell that she was thrown off by the fact that, contrary to her expectations, Lutz had been completely serious.
And I could understand that. Most people who lived in this city never left it, aside from going to the forest or some nearby farming villages. Traveling merchants were foreigners who came and went like the wind, they weren’t a goal to live one’s life working towards. Karla expecting Lutz to “wake up and see reality” was completely normal here.
“...I wanted to be a traveling merchant for real. I wanted to leave this town and go to places I’ve never been before. I wanted to see with my own eyes the places I’ve only ever heard about in stories before. And I still want all those things.”
“Lutz, you...” Karla started to stand up and say something. I could tell from her expression that it was going to be a harsh scolding. However, Lutz continued before she could say anything.
“But I talked to someone who used to be a traveling merchant. He said only an idiot would give up their city citizenship. He said traveling merchants don’t take apprentices and I wouldn’t get anywhere with them.”
“Well, he’s right.” Karla let out a tiny sigh of relief and sat back down. People really did hate the idea of their children becoming traveling merchants. I hadn’t taken it too seriously, considering it a fun job where you travel the world, but it seemed I still lacked knowledge of how this world worked.
“I was thinking of just becoming a traveling merchant on my own without any help, but Myne gave me a better idea. She said I could just become a normal city merchant. Normal merchants could probably go to other towns to buy things and stuff. I wouldn’t have to risk everything on somehow becoming a traveling merchant. She said it’d be much more realistic and likely for me to succeed as a city merchant.”
“Well, that’d definitely be better...”
“So I asked a merchant to make me his apprentice. He turned me down at first since I’m just the friend of a friend of a friend, though.”
“...Yeah, figures,” replied Karla with a tired voice and a shrug. It was clear she was in a state of disbelief. She hadn’t expected her son to be completely serious about becoming a traveling merchant.
Considering how apprenticeships worked in this city, there was an almost zero chance of Lutz becoming a merchant apprentice. Perhaps that was why Karla hadn’t taken him seriously when he mentioned wanting to become a merchant. It was even possible that she hadn’t entirely believed him when he said he could become a merchant apprentice.
“But he gave us a job and said he’d take us as his apprentices if we did it. Me and Myne already finished it and he’s promised to take us as apprentices. I’ll become one even if Myne doesn’t. I can and I will.”
Karla finally realized that Lutz had paved his own way through life with his own two hands. She looked at him with somewhat hard eyes, having listened to him seriously for the first time.
“...Lutz, are you really gonna ignore your parents and become a merchant against our will? You think that’ll work out?”
“I’ll be a merchant even if it means being a live-in apprentice. I worked hard with Myne to make this dream a reality. I’m not going to give up now.”
“A live-in apprentice...?”
Live-in apprentices lived in the worst conditions possible. First of all, apprentices only worked for half of the week, so they didn’t get paid much. To make matters worse, they didn’t have any family they could rely on. It was both physically taxing and time consuming for a single child to live all on their own, handling all the chores themselves. They tended to live in the attic, which meant hot summers and cold winters. Only the lucky ones had proper roofs that didn’t leak. Carrying their stuff around and getting water up the stairs were both physically draining. It may even stink something awful since it wasn’t unheard of for people to raise livestock like chickens in their attics.
There was no place to cook food, unlike a home rented to a whole family, so they would have to borrow a kitchen from their employer or eat out. Naturally, a lifestyle like that led to empty purses and most could only survive by getting advance pay at the cost of growing debt. The employer would look after them, but only to the extent of keeping them alive. Live-in apprentices were fated to live a life of constant work and suffering until adulthood.
“Lutz, think for just a second! You couldn’t survive a life like that!” No reasonable parent in the world would want such a hard life for their children. Karla basically screamed in fear at the idea. But Lutz just shrugged.
“I could survive. I’m already preparing for it.” Lutz was a special case in that he could save money this spring by selling paper. He could have a hefty sum ready by his baptism if we used the bark we saved in the storage building. The plan was for him to have money left over even after buying the clothes and whatnot he needed to become a merchant apprentice.
Not to mention that due to him having every other day off as an apprentice, he’d be able to keep helping me make and sell products. He’d profit from their sales and doubtlessly end up with much more money than an average apprentice. I could imagine that he still wouldn’t have a comfortable life per se, but at least he wouldn’t be experiencing crushing poverty. The main thing was that he probably wouldn’t be able to afford to rent a whole room, which meant living in a terrible location for some time.
“...You’re preparing for it? That means you’re serious, doesn’t it?”
“I’m serious.”
After a long moment of silence, Karla let out a heavy sigh. She shrugged with a complicated expression that looked both like she had and hadn’t given up after learning about how serious Lutz was.
“I still think it’d be safer and better for you to just have a stable craftsman job. Merchants have big highs but really hard lows.”
“...If I become a craftsman like Dad says, I’ll end up stuck like this forever. No thanks,” pouted Lutz with clear frustration.
Karla frowned. He had basically said he wasn’t happy with his current life, which upset her. “What do you mean, stuck like this?”
“My brothers do whatever they want and push chores onto me, they take stuff from me when they feel like it and I’m left with nothing.”
“Well... they’re your brothers. They take stuff from you, but they give you some stuff too, right?” Karla furrowed her brows, troubled. And Lutz shot her right down.
“What’re you talking about? The food they take never comes back, and the only things they ever give me are messed up hand-me-downs. Sometimes their hand-me-downs are so awful you guys buy me something new, but they steal those too.”
Just like me, everything Lutz had was a hand-me-down. But unlike how Tuuli always helped me out, Lutz’s brothers ruled him with iron fists. That made a big difference.
“I learned from working hard with Myne on our merchant work that stuff I do on my own sticks with me. I want to see how far I can keep going with my own strength. A craftsman? I’m not even thinking about becoming one at this point.”
Lutz had been held underwater by his family for his whole life and had broken free. He had secured a path to his dreams and escaped their rule.
Karla hung her head and whispered, “I didn’t know you were that serious about this. I thought she was just dragging you around...”
“I’ll be doing this job for my whole life. I wouldn’t take it if I didn’t want to.”
“I’ve been opposed to you being a merchant ’cause I thought you were just messing around, y’know.” Karla let out a heavy sigh and lowered her eyes. She thought for a while, then slowly raised her head and gave a resigned smile. “If you’ve thought it through this much and are even prepared to run away from home, well, I think you should do what you want. You should do your best and see how it goes. Your dad won’t like it, but I’ll be on your side.”
“Really?! Thanks, Mom!” Lutz’s expression lit up. He had given up on his family ever understanding him. After his eyes widened in disbelief, he jumped with joy. I couldn’t help but smile at Lutz finally acting like a kid his age instead of just worrying about work and his future. Having even just a single family member on your side meant a lot.
Lutz’s good mood didn’t falter, even after his brothers came home. We all worked together to make a new recipe.
“Warm up the metal pan, Zasha,” I instructed. “Lutz, you put lots of the grated cheese onto the parue leftovers. And Ralph, would you chop up the lage leaves for me?”
I doled out work while adding parue oil and salt to the bowl of leftovers that Lutz was putting the cheese into. After putting in the basil-esque herbs that Ralph chopped up for me, all we had to do was mix it well and cook it.
“The pan’s all heated up.”
“Okay, time for cooking. We can make it just like a parue cake.”
We cooked it all together and ate it after the melted cheese ended up crunchy. It looked like okonomiyaki, a popular kind of Japanese savory pancake, but the cheese made it taste like western food. This recipe had been inspired by all the times I’d chopped up leftover noodles after boiling what I needed for soumen or spaghetti.
“These’re simple to make, but they’re really filling.”
“They’re even better if you add super chopped-up ham and vegetables.”
“That would make this a real meal instead of just a snack like parue cakes are.”
Everyone smiled, enjoying the food as they ate. At some point Ralph reached out to steal one of Lutz’s extra pancakes, but Karla smacked his hand away.
“Don’t steal other people’s food. It’s greedy. If you want more, make it yourself.”
Ralph and Lutz were both shocked by Karla’s smack. She smiled warmly as she saw Ralph get to work cooking a new one for himself and Lutz eating his food peacefully. It seemed that Lutz’s home problems wouldn’t be so bad now that he had a powerful ally in his mother.
Meanwhile, I cycled through tutoring Lutz, helping at the gate, and getting stuck in bed with fever. Lutz brought the pin parts for hairpins over, studied here, and sometimes went to the Gilberta Company to sell the finished hairpins.
Over time, the blizzards weakened and foretold the end of both winter and my shut-in lifestyle.
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