Apprentice Shrine Maiden Volume 4 Read online

  “I’m back. Is Kamil awake?”

  “Hi, Tuuli. He’s drinking milk right now,” I said in the direction of the door as Tuuli, having returned from the celebration downstairs, poked her head through the door.

  She walked over, sat on the side of the bed, and said “He really is tiny” while looking at Kamil.

  “You and Myne were both this small too once,” Mom replied with a smile. I really didn’t know how to respond since I didn’t remember that.

  Kamil moved his head away as if satisfied, and Mom patted his back gently. He let out a tiny burp.

  “Not only were you slow and bad at drinking milk, Myne, it always dribbled out of the corner of your mouth. And when you finally got it down, you’d suddenly throw up out of nowhere,” Mom continued, her face crinkling up in a nostalgic smile as she looked at me.

  She was basically saying that I was a handful from day one, so I pursed my lips in a pout. “I don’t know what you expect me to say about that. I was just a baby.”

  “Well,” began Tuuli, “you still eat really slowly, and when you eat too much you groan about your stomach hurting, so I think you’re basically the same way now.”

  “Tuuli, that’s so mean!”

  “Oh, but she’s right,” Mom chimed in.

  If she was going there then I had something to say too. The bread we ate here was just way too hard. It was actually too hard to bite into normally, so I always had to soak it in my soup or drink first. Waiting for it to soften slowed me down whether I liked it or not, that’s all. I only ate slow because the bread was hard. It wasn’t my fault.

  “How can you blame the bread when you’re the only one who eats slow, Myne? It takes you so long because you leave it in the soup ’til it goes all soggy.”

  “Well, that’s ’cause it’s too hard to eat otherwise!”

  It felt like I was even worse at chewing now that I had gotten used to the fluffy bread we had in the temple, but now that I was back at home, I fought each day to appreciate the unique experience of eating rock-hard bread.

  As Tuuli and I kept up our back-and-forth, Mom waved us away with a wry smile. “I think I need to change Kamil’s diaper now, so...”

  “Let me do it! I want to try!” Tuuli said with shining eyes before beginning her attempt to change his diaper. I watched closely, hoping to learn how it was done so I could help one day too, like a proper older sister.

  She removed the cloth wrapped around him, wiped his butt clean using the clean part, and then wrapped a new cloth around him. Done.

  Tuuli let out a satisfied “Finished!” and beamed a smile. She had done it without much issue, and it sure seemed pretty easy to do.

  I’ll try to do it next time.

  Tuuli speedily tossed the balled-up dirty cloth into a basket before looking out of the window at the blue sky. “So, Mom... Was that the last diaper we have for Kamil? It’s a little late in the day, but we’ll get caught up in the rain if we don’t wash them soon.”

  “Oh, you’re right. We should hurry. Could you take care of what we have for me? I had Gunther put up some strings in the kitchen to dry diapers, but they’re a little high up. You’ll have to ask him to hang them.”

  As Mom and Tuuli moved things along, I peered out of the window myself, my head cocked to the side. There were some clouds out, but the sky was perfectly blue. I couldn’t see any signs that the weather would be getting worse soon, other than the sun setting like always.

  “...How can you both tell the weather’s going to get worse?”

  “How can you not, Myne? If we couldn’t tell when the weather would be bad, it’d be too dangerous for us to go to the forest. Oh, but anyway, we need to hurry and get the laundry started! Let’s go, Myne,” Tuuli said while pulling me out the front door. It was at that point that it hit me—

  “Sir Damuel told me not to go outside...”

  I did kind of feel that I would be fine just going to the well, but I had been firmly told that going outside would bring danger to everyone around me. And considering the recent death of the head of the Ink Guild and me being attacked during Spring Prayer, going outside wasn’t something I could take lightly.

  Tuuli, having heard Damuel firmly tell me to stay inside until he came to get me, slumped her shoulders as she remembered. “We shouldn’t disobey a noble, right? Well, I’ll go do the laundry then. You can start dinner, Myne. Dad and I aren’t that hungry since we ate a lot at the celebration, so just soup should be fine. Our neighbors gave us some spring veggies and sausage.”

  As I looked at the vegetables I was going to make soup with, I remembered that I had only eaten soup and bread for lunch. I put a hand on my stomach. “Well... I’m a little hungry, since I only had a little soup for lunch too. I haven’t eaten any of the meat everyone from the temple gave us, and we need to get Mom fed well so she can make lots of healthy milk...”

  In other words, I was asking to eat meat. Tuuli pointed to the storage room in response and said I could use the bird meat in there.

  “Okay. I should just rub salt and herbs onto it, right?”

  Tuuli shook her head. “Some herbs aren’t good for people who’ve just given birth. Just use the salt,” she said before heading downstairs with our laundry-filled tub and some soap.

  I preferred herb-seasoned meat to plain salted meat, which was a shame, but if Mom couldn’t eat it there was no point in me making it.

  “...If herbs are out of the question, I should at least use a little bit of Dad’s wine,” I said to myself after seeing Tuuli off at the door. I went back inside and headed to our winter storage room for the meat, and then went to fetch Dad’s wine from the kitchen shelf.

  He would always desperately try to stop me whenever he saw me getting the wine to use for cooking. He said my food tasted more than good enough even without the wine, but I knew he just wanted to keep as much wine for himself as possible.

  ...I don’t care how much Dad hates it; I’m using this wine! There’s a huge difference between meat prepared with wine and meat that isn’t.

  After massaging the meat with wine and salt for a bit, I started chopping the usual vegetables. There were still a lot of dangerous ones that I found hard to prepare, but naturally by this point even I could tell the difference between safe and dangerous vegetables.

  “...Hm? Wait, am I worse at this because I’ve been in the temple so long?!” I exclaimed. My cutting rhythm was shaky and off since I had spent so many months living the life of an excessively pampered rich girl in the temple. My hand was shaking just from holding the knife.

  “Aww, this sucks. I was at rock-bottom before when it came to doing chores, and now I’m below even that. I need to make a habit of doing chores every day,” I said, bemoaning my drop in skills while taking care not to cut my fingers along with the vegetables.

  “Oh, this is vargel. Sautéing these with butter is better than putting them in soup.”

  Vargel looked like white asparagus on the surface, but flavor-wise it was more like baby corn. It tasted great and reminiscent of spring when boiled and cooked with butter, or just mixed with cream.

  “I’m back!” Dad declared in a jovial, drunken mood, Tuuli following closely behind him. She had finished the laundry while I was cutting veggies.

  “You go hang these, Dad. We’ll get supper ready,” said Tuuli as she handed the newly washed diapers to Dad and went to put the tub back in the storage room.

  Dad spread out the diapers and hung them on the multiple strings stretched high in the air across the kitchen, close to the ceiling. I was a little bothered by the fact he was doing that while I was cooking, but I had to suck it up since Kamil needed dry diapers.

  “If only it were sunny so we could hang them outside.”

  “Yeah, the rain sucks. It really gets in the way when we’ve gotta dry these every day.”

  Having a ton of diapers swaying all over the room was incredibly distracting. It just wasn’t a sight I was used to, and only when they were sprea
d out like this did I appreciate how invaluable disposable diapers really were. Not to mention that these weren’t the white diapers I was used to from my Urano days—they were long strips of cloth made from sewn-together rags, and had gotten soft and thin due to repeated washings, which was about the only good thing about them. I wanted to push for us to use something more hygienic, but we were just using what we had. Besides, I already knew they’d say they didn’t want to waste new cloth on diapers that would end up getting just as filthy in no time at all.

  “How far did you get, Myne?”

  “I finished cutting all the vegetables I can cut. Looks like the season for vargels is almost over. They’re pretty hard now,” I said, showing Tuuli the out-of-season vargels.

  “That’s ’cause we’re almost halfway through spring now. Vargels last a long time when spring stays cold for longer, but I care more about being warm. There’s more stuff to gather in the forest when it’s warm!”

  Tuuli cooked the meat with salt and dressed it with the butter-sautéed vargels. I used that time to make the spring vegetable soup.

  “Myne, go call Mom,” Tuuli said.

  I stealthily slipped into the bedroom, trying my best not to wake Kamil. Mom was sleeping next to him. Maybe it was due to the dark room making it hard to see, but she looked exhausted and kinda sick. I didn’t really want to disturb her, so I silently stepped back into the kitchen.

  “Tuuli, it looks like Mom’s asleep...”

  “That’s okay, you don’t need to wake her. Mrs. Karla was talking about this; she said it’s really important to give a mother as much rest as possible after a birth,” Tuuli explained as she set the table. It seemed the neighborhood wives had told her about a lot of stuff while she was helping with the birth. Mom looked like she would be out of commission for a decent while, which meant we would need to cover for her as a family.

  “You may not realize this since you weren’t there, Myne, but Mom really had it rough when she was giving birth. She was bleeding a lot and it sounded like it hurt really bad,” Tuuli murmured, anxiously looking at the bedroom where Mom was sleeping.

  I had been sent away for this birth and hadn’t witnessed any back in my Urano days either. I had read about them and heard about plenty, but I didn’t know what a real birth was like. I could only imagine how Mom felt, and it probably wasn’t a big leap to say she wasn’t in a great spot.

  “We need to work hard enough that Mom doesn’t need to do any chores herself. She’ll be sick for a long time if we let her push herself too soon. Myne, we’ll be needing your help.”

  “Okay.”

  That night, I woke up each time Kamil began crying. It was just really hard to sleep through a baby crying in the same room as you. In the end, I was sure I had seen Mom breastfeeding Kamil through blurry eyes on four separate occasions that night. Suffice it to say, I was sleep deprived. My head felt fuzzy when I finally woke up for real.

  “I think it’ll only take a few days for you to get used to sleeping through the crying,” Mom said while stroking my head with a worried smile. I replied that I definitely wouldn’t get used to it that easily, but by the second night I managed to make it to morning while barely even registering the crying in the corner of my mind.

  “...Mmm. I feel like I’m way better at adjusting to things than I thought.”

  “You’re just like Dad,” said Tuuli while glaring at me through narrowed, sleep-deprived eyes. She pointed at Dad, who was still sound asleep.

  The Abandoned Child

  With all the special celebratory events in the neighborhood over, everybody’s daily lives returned to normal. I myself would be going back to the temple starting today. Once Damuel and Fran came to get me, I first made my way to the Gilberta Company; I needed to thank them for the gift and inform Benno about how cute Kamil was. If time permitted, I could talk about the printing business too.

  “He really is super tiny because he was just born. He gets all red when he cries, he’s all wrinkly, and he’s really just super cute. I never expected my own little brother would be so cute,” I doted, telling Benno exactly what I had told Lutz, Fran, and Damuel on the way here.

  Benno was grimacing and rubbing his temples. “Enough already. I’ve already heard what feels like a lifetime of this junk from Otto. Get to the printing business already.”

  “Wha? Corinna gave birth too? I didn’t hear about this! When did that happen?!” I exclaimed with wide eyes.

  Benno furrowed his brows. “I didn’t mention it? I probably forgot to since it happened while you were stuck in the temple. Otto’s been raving about his kid for so long I figured you would’ve heard about it from your dad, Lutz, or maybe Leon,” Benno explained as his dark-red eyes shifted to Lutz, who offered a shrug in response.

  “Leon said it wasn’t our place to break the news in your stead, so I decided not to mention it.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s true. I did meet with Myne after the baby was born but, well... there was never a good time to bring it up. There was the finished metal types, and then the blue priest’s tour...” Benno said, a distant look in his eyes. He had been pretty occupied on both occasions, and neither really presented a good opportunity for him to say that Corinna had given birth.

  “Guess it’s better late than never. The baby was born at the end of winter. Her name’s Renate and she’ll be inheriting the Gilberta Company. Be nice to her and all that,” Benno said, his tone so flat that I couldn’t help but tilt my head in confusion. He was like the exact opposite of Dad here.

  “You don’t seem very excited about this, Benno. Didn’t you really want a successor?”

  “Yeah. Otto’s being more than excited enough for the both of us. He’s going to spoil the girl like a complete idiot; if I don’t whip her into shape, the Gilberta Company will fall apart the day I leave,” muttered Benno with a derisive grin. It was easy for me to imagine that he would spoil her too, even while claiming to be whipping her into shape.

  “What’s with that look?”

  “Oh, nothing. I was just thinking you’ll spoil her just as much as he will.”

  “Careful now,” Benno said with a glare.

  But I just shrugged. “Renate will be fine with Corinna raising her. She’ll grow up to be a businesswoman that keeps a calm, gentle look on her face while securing as much profit as she can in any given situation.”

  It was easy to be fooled by Corinna’s gentle demeanor, but thinking back there had been a lot of times where she’d led me to spill valuable information without me realizing it. Benno would point out when I was being naive and dropped hints to help me realize when I was being tricked, but Corinna did nothing of the sort. She wrung me dry with a disarming smile. When it came to business, Freida was forward to the point of being kind of off-putting, but Corinna got her information through casual chats.

  ...In terms of business, she’s actually scarier than Freida.

  Honestly, when it came to merchants, Benno was definitely the softest one of them all. The parental sense of responsibility he had developed when training me as his apprentice was probably still lingering in the back of his mind and encouraging him to be kinder with me.

  “I’m the one who raised Corinna, y’know?”

  “Then the Gilberta Company will be safe for a long time yet.”

  “Of course,” replied Benno with a nod before cutting to the chase. “But anyway, you said you had some news about the printing business?”

  “The High Priest told me to hold off on movable type printing for now. If we charge forward, we’ll end up clashing with the vested interests—the nobility. It’s a fight we have no chance of winning.”

  “...The vested interests are nobles? Yeah, the winning move here is to not play.”

  Benno loved to pick fights with vested interests, but even he had no intention of going toe to toe with nobles. Feeling relieved, I told him what the High Priest had told me.

  “Most book copying is actually done by nobles, so it’s importa
nt that I don’t try to make thick, adult-oriented books packed with words. But the High Priest said they won’t interfere so long as I just keep making kids’ books, so for the next couple of years I’ll be putting my all into making picture books for children.”

  Benno shot me a glare. “Putting your all into it...? Alright, I need to hear more about this.”

  I gave a big nod and announced my plans for the Myne Workshop. “To be specific, I’ll be developing colored ink to color the pictures. I’d then like to develop wax stencils to further improve stencil printing. We really need to hurry if we want to have it done in time.”

  “...Have it done in time for what?” asked Benno, confused.

  I proudly puffed out my chest. “I need to make books to match the growth of my cute little Kamil. I’ll be putting my all into this for him, so I would appreciate you introducing me to a wax workshop soon.”

  “Do you have the High Priest’s permission to do that?” Benno asked with a grimace that was absolutely dripping with skepticism. But I would never do anything crazy when both Benno and the High Priest were always yelling at me to get permission for everything and report every little detail.

  “The High Priest said picture books wouldn’t clash with the vested interests, and he was the one to tell me to add color to my picture books in the first place. He was all like, ‘Wilma’s art is wasted in black and white, books should have color, blah blah blah...’”

  “I’m happy as long as you’ve got permission. I’ll set up a meeting between you and the foreman of a wax workshop.”

  And so, when my business with Benno was done, I left the Gilberta Company having secured a future trip to a wax workshop.

  “Good morning. I have returned.”

  “Welcome back, Sister Myne.”

  Delia and Rosina greeted me at my chambers and changed me into my blue robes. I told them about Kamil while I waited for them to finish.