Staying in Illgner
The ringing of a bell resounded through the air. It must have been designed so that the sound would travel far distances, because it was much louder than the one I was used to hearing at Ehrenfest’s temple. The bell at the farmers’ winter mansion rang in turn, as if responding to the giebe’s, and so my day in Illgner began with a distant and a nearby bell chiming together.
“Morning, Lutz. Is Damian up yet?” I asked. Damian was so used to being woken up by attendants that first bell wasn’t always enough to get him out of bed.
Lutz chuckled. “When’s the last time he overslept? He’s been getting up at first bell with us for days now.”
“It’s when you get too used to things that you let your guard down, and that’s when you’re most likely to mess up. Lady Rozemyne warned me about that herself.”
“Oh yes, Gil, she always did say something like that whenever you messed up,” Selim interjected. I shot him a glare in response, and with that, we headed for the river with our washbasins in hand.
A short climb down a hill beside the giebe’s mansion led us to a smallish river, where we washed our faces, cleaned ourselves, and overall got ready for the day. Despite it being summer, the sun had only just risen, so the water was pretty cold. Lutz was always like, “Why not just wait until the afternoon?” but in the temple it was an important tradition to take care of such matters in the morning.
“Alright, that’s done. Damian, you’ve still got bubbles on your stuff. You’ve gotta scrub harder.”
Once we were cleaned and ready, we used our washbasins as buckets for scooping up water. Just like in the temple, our first job of the morning was to fill the water jugs in the side building’s kitchen. Otherwise, we would need to walk all the way to the forest every time we wanted to wash our hands.
“Mornin’, outsiders. Seems like today’s fisha harvest is gonna be a good ’un. Hope you’re lookin’ forward to it,” one villager said to us. Residents of the nearby farming town were here drawing water as well, so we exchanged some idle chit-chat as we went about our work.
“Nice. I’ll ask the chef to hunt for some jour to go with ’em.”
“Sounds good, thanks. The giebe’s gonna love to hear that we’re havin’ jours tonight. Oh, and you. Big guy. You’re gonna spill half your water on the journey back if you keep waverin’ like that. Hah!”
The farmers all laughed as Damian wobbled around with his bucket of water. He had lived something close to the life of a noble with so many servants at his family home, which meant he had no experience when it came to cooking, cleaning, or washing clothes. He was having a harder time living in Illgner than anyone.
Initially, Damian’s plan had been to spend some of his own money to hire a servant in Illgner, but all the townsfolk turned him down; they had their hands full with their own jobs and now learning to make paper, so they didn’t have time to take care of someone else, too. On top of that, the trading of goods here was generally done through bartering, which meant the average citizen neither had nor needed such money in the first place.
Well, that’s what happens when there aren’t any stores here. I was real shocked when I heard that traveling merchants just do business with the giebe, who keeps everything stored in his mansion.
And so, Damian, unable to hire a servant due to how differently people viewed money here, had no choice but to care for himself. During his first three days, he was so incompetent that all the townsfolk started to wonder how he was even still alive. Sure, they were currently laughing at him for being all wobbly, but the fact they were doing that instead of just outwardly feeling sad for him was genuinely a huge improvement.
“Seems like we just need one more bucket,” I said. “Nolte, you know what to do. Selim, Damian—let’s go fill everyone’s flasks with drinking water.”
We used the river for a lot of things, but we didn’t drink from it. Instead, we filled our leather flasks that we brought to the workshop with the much sweeter mountain water from a spring behind the mansion.
Damian sighed with relief; the spring was closer than the river, and no amount of poor form could make water spill out of a capped flask. We grabbed enough flasks for everyone, then started making our way there with Selim.
Since it would be time for breakfast when we finished drawing water, I decided it would probably be smart to have someone start preparing the food. I went ahead and tossed out the orders.
“Volk, go slice some bread. Lutz, Bartz—could you grab some milk for us?”
Lutz, who had been filling water jugs with us, responded with a nod. He dropped his now-empty washbasin and ran off to the workshop, where some fresh milk should have just been delivered. There was no breakfast in Illgner without milk.
“O mighty King and Queen of the endless skies who doth grace us with thousands upon thousands of lives to consume, O mighty Eternal Five who rule the mortal realm, I offer thanks and prayers to thee, and do take part in the meal so graciously provided.”
The others followed my example and spoke their prayers before grabbing some hard bread. Breakfast was a quick meal consisting of any leftovers from the previous day’s supper, and that wasn’t just because we were visiting and hadn’t had any food prepared for us—even the giebe and his family usually ate leftovers for breakfast, since their servants had farm work to do as well.
Bleh... I miss Lady Rozemyne’s leftovers in the temple.
Illgner baked all its bread in batches once every ten days, which meant what we were having now was hard and dry to the point that it was completely inedible without first being soaked in a liquid of some kind. Every morning we spent here, I was struck with the urge to pray in thanks for the milk that came with it.
“This truly makes me yearn for Lady Rozemyne’s soup...” Nolte murmured. Since it was served everywhere back home—at the temple, the Plantin Company, and even the Othmar Company—everyone here was dreaming of the same delicious soup.
“Too bad we can’t just make it here. That’d mean leaking the recipe.”
“It’s unfortunate, yes, but we must be grateful that we can eat here rather than in the main building...” Volk added.
I gave a hard nod in agreement. We initially had our food in the mansion with the giebe’s servants so that it wouldn’t need to be brought out to us, but Lutz had managed to negotiate for us to eat in the side building by saying that we didn’t want to wrap the locals up in the temple’s eating customs.
During these negotiations, he had said that I needed to eat before anyone else as one of Lady Rozemyne’s attendants. That really annoyed me at first, since it came across like I was being selfish. I wasn’t going to demand that Illgner mimic divine gifts, and Lutz knew from our time gathering in the forest that I didn’t mind eating with everyone else, so I really hadn’t been able to understand it. But when he explained that he wanted to avoid us fighting over food with the townsfolk, everything made sense. In my eyes, Illgner’s way of eating kind of sucked, so I was really glad about not being dragged into it.
“Anyway, today we need to work on the inner bark. Volk, Bartz, and Selim can explain the process to everyone. Be sure to teach them to peel off the outer bark while the inner bark is boiling with the ash.”
“Understood.”
As we ate, we discussed who would be doing what today. Unlike in the temple workshop, here in Illgner, age was important when it came to giving orders; the adults wouldn’t listen to me or Lutz, since we were still young, so teaching the locals what to do was up to the gray priests. I would simply give them instructions ahead of time, then work with Lutz on developing new types of paper using wood local to the province. Changing the amount of tororo used and keeping it all recorded wasn’t possible for the illiterate townsfolk.
After finishing breakfast and washing the dishes, we cleaned the side building and workshop. They weren’t nearly as large as the temple, meaning the whole process was finished relatively quickly, and as second bell was now coming up, it was time for the person on food duty to head into the kitchen.
“Damian, you’re on food duty today, yeah? Seems like they’re harvesting some fisha today, and they want jours to go with it. Good luck,” I said, cheering him on.
But Damian just grimaced. He hated food duty more than anything else. “Why, oh why doesn’t Illgner have any stores? It would be so much easier to just buy ingredients at the Othmar Company,” he groaned.
The most important job of the person on food duty was gathering ingredients for that day’s meals, since there weren’t any stores around that they could be bought from. The mountain had plenty of vegetables and fruit since it was summer, and hunting animals would give more than enough meat. It was surprisingly easy to fish in the river, too, and unlike the fish that could be caught near Ehrenfest, they didn’t stink at all. The fact that it was so easy to get a full day’s worth of ingredients was shocking to us, since we were so used to buying most of ours with money.
Preparing food Illgner-style was also pretty simple—you just chopped whatever stuff you had and cooked it. This was then flavored with salt at most, and while that kind of made us want to scream since we had so many incredible recipes in our heads that we had to keep secret, it at least meant that the meals didn’t take much work to prepare.
“Would you shut up, Damian? We go through this every time you’re on food duty. I mean, we get it, your grandpa runs a huge food store, but he’s the one who forced us to take you here. If you’ve got time to complain, go out and start gathering already. You’ll be working like a gray priest in no time,” Lutz said, forcing a basket and knife into his hands. “This is gonna be a full day of work, alright? Be sure to look for anything that might make good tororo or paper, too.”
With that, Damian slumped his shoulders and sadly exited the workshop. He’d probably come back exhausted after getting mocked to death by Illgner’s children, but that too would be a good experience for him.
Well, not much he can do but try his hardest.
We were just as surprised about how different Illgner was from Ehrenfest, but we had at least spent the past two years gathering in the forest and making paper in the workshop. Damian had no such experience to draw from.
“We’re here! What’re we gonna do today?” Carya exclaimed, bringing several townsfolk with her to the workshop after third bell. She was a female servant working in the giebe’s mansion, having been assigned to take care of us by Giebe Illgner himself, but rather than being our maid or anything like that, she mainly served as a line of communication between us and the town, doing things like informing the giebe when we needed improvements in the workshop.
Damian had in fact tried to hire Carya to be his servant, but she shot him down hard: “The heck d’you think you are, commoner boy? You’re an adult. You can take care of yourself.” She did, at his request, ask the other townsfolk whether anyone would be willing to serve him, but the other responses he got weren’t much different.
“Today we’ll be boiling the inner bark in ash to bring out its whiteness. That’ll take about one bell, so in the meantime, we’re planning to peel off the black outer bark. Did you all bring knives?”
Volk and Bartz went to fetch the tools and ash, while Selim started explaining the process to the five townsfolk—Carya included. As this went on, Lutz, Nolte, and I made progress on the new paper, occasionally glancing their way.
“Lutz. Nolte. How’d it go?” I asked.
They grabbed the paper samples that had been drying outside and started lining them up on the table. We were experimenting with using degrova leaves in place of ediles and shram bugs, and it seemed to be working well. We touched the finished sheets and wrote on them with ink to see how they fared.
“This is a good mix for the volrin paper. Rinfin will need a bit more degrova added in. And schireis... No good, again. Looks like it just doesn’t work with degrova at all,” Lutz reported. Despite all the other types of wood turning into paper just fine, the schireis alone simply broke apart before it could solidify. Tweaking the recipe wouldn’t matter—the materials just weren’t mixing well.
As I poked at the slightly yellowed blob of transparent degrova, Nolte gathered it up alongside the bits of schireis. “Shall we give up on making it work with degrova and simply experiment with ediles and shram bugs once we return to Ehrenfest?”
“Using ediles and shram bugs might solve it, yeah, but didn’t Lady Rozemyne say the paper needed to be made using stuff we can find in Illgner? Pretty sure she did,” I said with a sharp frown. Given that we were setting up the workshops here, the materials needed to be found locally; we didn’t have the money to import them from other provinces.
Lutz crossed his arms. “I was talking to Damian about this earlier—the white bark can be preserved once it’s ready, and you can pack a ton of the stuff into a single crate. Making the paper’s easier in Ehrenfest, so the bark itself might end up a hotly traded commodity for Illgner.”
“So you’re planning to sell the schireis bark as a product on its own?”
“Yeah. It’ll naturally have to wait until we’ve made sure it works with ediles and shram bugs, but there’s a chance it’ll end up becoming a key product for provinces that don’t have suitable trees to make paper from.”
It might not have worked with degrova, but so long as it could successfully be mixed with other ingredients, schireis bark could become an important product for Illgner to sell. My eyes widened. I hadn’t considered it from that angle at all.
“Wow... So Damian can be useful at times, huh? After what we’ve seen, I never thought I’d see the day.”
“He’s hardly self-sufficient, but he is the son of a very successful store owner. He’s got a keen eye for new products and can spot ways to make a profit in no time at all. We could learn a lot from him,” Lutz said, glancing out the window. He almost sounded a little frustrated.
“Okay, we’ll take Damian’s advice here. For now, we’ll just use schireis wood for the newbies to practice with. Nolte, try and narrow down the rinfin-degrova ratio a little more. Could you do the same thing as yesterday, but gradually add some more degrova? Make sure to note down how much that changes things.”
“Understood.” At my request, Nolte stood up and made his way to the shelf with the degrova on it.
“Gil, how about we experiment with the trauperles next?” Lutz suggested. “That old guy brought us a bunch that were ripening early, right?”
The old man who had hiked the mountain with us when Lady Rozemyne was here had given us some white trauperles, which ripened at the end of summer and apparently weren’t edible. You could get a sticky juice by crushing them.
“I’m just looking forward to working with some new stuff,” I replied. “To think we’re gonna be one step closer to the new paper...”
“Yeah, but it’s not so fun when you think about how long it’ll take us to get the recipe right.”
Lutz and I continued talking as we crushed the trauperles. The process took a surprising amount of strength thanks to their tough outer layer of skin—enough that I realized we should have gotten Nolte to help out, since he was a lot stronger than us. But all we could do was regret our mistake while crushing one fruit after another. And with each one, we got stickier and stickier.
“Guess that should do it... These really are sticky though, huh? Get the cloth, Lutz.”
Lutz grabbed the cloth we filtered the juices through and picked out the tiny chunks of skin and fruit that were stuck in it. We then mixed our fiber water with volrin—the wood we were most used to working with—and swished it around in the smallest suketa, which we kept around for when we were doing these experiments with paper. We started off with a small amount of trauperle, using a big spoon to gradually add more until we had created five different sheets of varying thickness. We would select the best paper from among them and use that to narrow down the recipe even further, as we always did.
Fourth bell rang right as we finished laying the fifth kind of paper onto the drying bed. It was time for lunch.
“No eating until we’re done cleaning up!” I yelled. It was important to make that clear, otherwise the Illgner townsfolk would abandon their duties and rush out of the workshop on the spot.
“We know, we know! Enough with the shouting already. We get it,” Carya said, her cheeks puffed out unhappily. But it wasn’t that simple; she had been ordered by the giebe to come to the workshop each day to learn the paper-making process, but everyone else casually dropped in when they didn’t have any other work to do. They were the ones I was calling out to.
Once those who had practically tried to spring from the workshop finished cleaning up, I locked the door and we all headed to the giebe’s mansion. As it turned out, locking doors wasn’t something that was really done in Illgner. I’d asked Carya how else she was going to stop people from stealing things, but she just blinked at me in confusion and said, “There aren’t any thieves here. Like, what would they even do with the stuff they took?”
I couldn’t even argue back, since our perceptions of what was normal were just so different, but we still always locked the workshop door just in case. Plus, it might not have been an issue here, but getting ourselves into a habit of not locking doors would prove to be a big problem when we went back to Ehrenfest.
“Gil, may I have Volk carry my things so that I can go and assist Damian?” Nolte asked, sounding worried. I looked up and spotted Damian in the distance, wobbling over on shaky legs. Everyone’s lunch was in his hands, and his arms and legs looked as though they were about to give out. I instantly understood that Nolte was afraid he would drop all our food, so I gave a nod and permitted him to go and help.
“Hey, Lutz. You really think it’s a good idea to put Damian on food duty this evening, too?”
Up to this point, we’d put different people on food duty for lunch and dinner. This morning, Lutz had said that Damian would need to do both himself, but it was pretty clear from a glance that this might not have been possible for him.
Lutz raised an eyebrow. “Merchants are always scheming to make things go their way. He may look exhausted, but there’s more composure in his expression by the day. It’s proof that he’s got energy to spare. Don’t fall for his tricks; there’s no need to go soft on him.”
And so we had our lunch of salted vegetable soup with hard bread and fresh fruit from the mountains, then returned to the workshop after sending Damian back out for dinner.
“Hey, Gil. Come look at this. Aren’t these drying way too quickly?” Lutz asked, directing me to the drying bed. The paper laid out on the board to be squeezed dry was already going stiff.
“Let’s try taking them outside for a bit—like, not to stick them onto the board one by one to dry, but just taking the whole drying bed outside. I wanna see what happens if we leave it out there until the evening.”
Noticing that the paper made with trauperle dried unusually fast, Lutz and I took the drying bed with the experimental sheets on it outside. The paper started to whiten under the sun, and we could see it hardening before our very eyes, with the sheets made using more trauperle drying the fastest.
Lutz and I exchanged looks. “Seems like it won’t even take until the evening. We should probably keep our eyes on it, huh?”
“Yeah, we can’t even risk looking away. I’ve got a feeling the paper’ll turn into something else entirely if we just leave it here.”
We grabbed ink and some boards to write down any changes as they happened. The sheets started to turn all silky as they continued to dry, becoming so white that they even began reflecting the sunlight.
“Er, Lutz... Is it just me, or is this one shrinking? Looks like the first and last sheets are totally different sizes.”
Out of the five sheets of paper, the one with the most trauperle was visibly shrinking as it hardened. The others would all cave in slightly when poked, leaving a small indent, but this one didn’t warp in the slightest; its surface was already firm.
“If this is a quality exclusive to trauperle, then it’s gonna be an Illgner export for sure. Let’s try it out with some different types of wood tomorrow.”
Lutz and I continued to carefully watch the trauperle paper transform until fifth bell, by which point it seemed completely dried out.
“Hey, Lutz. Should we try peeling it off the drying bed?”
“Just be gentle. You felt how hard the surface is; it might break apart like messed-up volrin paper. Might not be dry underneath, either.”
Keeping Lutz’s warnings in mind, I took the sheet made with the most trauperle and delicately peeled it away. It was hard and smooth, but it came right off without snapping.
“It’s not breaking...” Lutz muttered, impressed. He attempted to bend the new type of paper, and it curved beautifully without signs of any breakage. We then tried writing on it with ink, which didn’t really stay on the paper with the most trauperle in it, but came out perfectly fine on all the other prototypes. There wasn’t any blotting on the sheets, either. It was paper—just paper that felt weird.
“Er, Gil... This stuff ended up pretty strange. You think it’ll be any good for books?” Lutz asked, filling the air with a strange fluttering noise as he flipped through the sheets. That wasn’t a question I could answer yet, so I simply shrugged.
“Who knows? Our job is just to make new paper. We can let Lady Rozemyne worry about how it’s gonna be used.”
“Good point,” Lutz said with a chuckle, continuing to leaf through the pages. “Let’s ask Giebe Illgner to get this to Lady Rozemyne as soon as possible, then. I wanna see what she ends up making with it, and I definitely want Heidi to find out what ink suits it best.”
I stretched out a sheet of paper, holding it over the setting sun. In that moment, I felt as though I could already hear Lady Rozemyne say, “Good job, Gil. You’re incredible!”
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