10.7
Nighzmarquls
The Endless Hunger
- Location
- United States
10.7
As she made her way down the frigid streets of Kaeketeh on its first day of 'spring' Slavomíra wished her mother was alive to see this. She wanted to scream to the pale overcast sky and its slushy downpour that could not quite seem to settle on if it should be rain or snow.
"Look at me now Mother! Is this enough glory for you?!"
Slavomíra's mother named her for their supposed noble roots. Some king or queen who once ruled lands in the north eastern valley of the Ridgetail Mountain's vault.
Glory of the land indeed.
She wanted to leap into the slushy puddles of muck and shit like she had not since she was a child too young for anything but a simple infant's smock.
But well intentioned or ambitious as her mother might have been, the Spinstress somehow managed to disappoint the woman until the day the old bat had died. Slavomíra had at the only thing the matriarch of her family wanted.
The Spinstress had not taken up a beau despite her mother's urgings.
She had produced no grandchildren.
That business seemed plenty handled by her younger sisters, Slavomíra instead concerned herself with the business of keeping food on the table, wood in their hearth and a roof solidly over their heads.
Still she wondered if this is what it felt like to have a new life growing in your belly. Was this wondrous joy what her sisters knew as their children grew? Ofcourse she loved her nieces and nephews.
She doted on them even more than she had her sisters growing up.
But was this fresh joy as light as that? The way it made her want to dance despite all decorum and hard earned respect of her station?
Was a feeling like this what drove so many women to be mothers?
Was this triumphant future opening before her mind's eye like a breaking dawn filling her up with a fiery joy what she had been named for? Was there some patron star in the heavens above that had been waiting until this ordained time for Slavomíra to rise at last?
Not that mother seemed as concerned about that as she should have been.
The poor woman had worked such hours that the only reason her fingers didn't bleed from the spinning was because the tips were tougher than leather from their calluses.
Why it was only okay for her mother to work so hard for her family? the Spinstress never understood. She was the eldest, Father had died on the street when she was four. Which was the only reason Mother was in the Weaver and Spinners guild to begin with.
But what had been a defeat and a failure for her mother was a triumph for her daughter.
And said daughter now strode with purpose, pace fluid, shoulders back and resisting with every fiber of her being the bubbling joy that made her want to spin in the street and swish out her skirt like a debutante at a noble's feast. She could not of course, the Spinstress was a respected elder of her guild, one of her station did not spin in the street like a child.
She was no longer a little girl following her mother into guild work after all,
Slavomíra suspected she had only been allowed to apprentice with the guild because her mother had thought perhaps one of the clerks or other male guild members would get her pregnant and force a marriage in a moment of youthful passion.
Now a mistress of the very institution her mother had turned too out of tragedy. She swept open the door of the guild house for the Spinner and Weavers Guild.
No such passion had ever come and Slavomíra had remained in the guild, working first as a simple assistant carrying wool, flax or making twine and rope. Then as a proper spinner, and at last a full weaver. By the time she was twenty five and her mother had just about given up on Slavomíra ever taking a man and they had moved into a fine house in midtown on the money she made as one of the heads of the guild.
And shouldn't it have been enough?!
Her sisters had grown to adulthood with clothes so fine they were courted by men above their station and little Jarka even was taken on as the wife of a fourth son of a baron!
Those two occasionally had to travel south to the Light's End port where the Vah spilled out into the great underlake beneath the southmost Ridgetails. But most of the time business with the Countess and her court had kept them in Kaeketeh.
Slavomíra grinned in the warmth of the guildhall's entry.
Ultha the novice clerk that had the looping letters of a noble upbringing but the hands and build of a mason shivered at the bite of the freezing wind let in from the outside. But he was bright eyed when he saw her face.
Chort, one of the apprentices who was just about trust worthy enough to spin the good wool, turned from where she had probably been trying to flirt with the block headed scribe.
Of the two of them the eleven year old girl was first to get the words out.
"Head Spinstress Slavomíra! What news of the Countess?! Did you secure the deal?"
Slavomíra sighed at the girl, what she saw in the oaf that was nearly half again her own age and four times her weight in over built muscle she would never understand but a surprising number of the members of the apprentices and full Spinstresses of the guild were smitten with the boy.
Still this was the guild, her guild! The apprentice and clerk, Slavomíra had known both of them since they were practically babes.
Her voice was sharp with authority and threat.
"If either of you spread word of this your time in the guild is over, I will see you thrown to the streets to starve. Do you understand? Not a word."
Properly mollified both of them nodded hard, and the warning drew a curious face leaning in to see what the commotion was. Slavomíra let the joy of the moment fill her voice then, the way it was threatening to crack open her face with how wide she wanted to smile.
"We've got it! She won't spin it in our halls but the hags and buffoons that thought we would ever get the countess herself into our guild were fools. I've secured the production of Wyrmspun wool this year. As long as we get our partners in the Merchant's guild to get it out of Valasect we are going to be drowning in silver!"
Chort blinked at that, her wide green eyes seeming to grow even larger. The slits of her pupils widening in the way that disquieted some.
The apprentice had seemed a poor fit for the guild at first.
Until they realized that she just needed to know how to hold the spindle for her build, once the girl got going she could bring even the poorest quality fiber into a fine thread. When Chort was older with the speed of her hands and eyes like that she would be a fiend with the loom.
"How'd you secure that Head Spinstress?!"
Slavomíra finally let loose the joy that had been bubbling inside since she got out of the meeting that would define her very life. The laughter punctuated her words.
"That's the best part, All we have to do is get this fetid city out of her way!"
That seemed to confuse the two youths, really practically children.
But then again their new Countess was younger than Ultha.
It was really simplicity itself.
"Our new Countess would love nothing better than to go home and spin a fortune for the guilds."
Slavomíra had managed to pull through in Kaeketeh under the fear of the bloody countess. She had grown into a woman when other girls went missing.
And now the new countess was a giant speaking serpent who could defeat armies and spin admittedly fine Rochford wool into thread and cloth that was cool in summer, warm in winter and shed mud and grease like the filth was terrified it would offend the thread's creator.
Her own dress had only underclothes of the fabulous wyrmspun wool and it barely even needed to be beaten in the wash to come away clean and fresh!
Over the years every scrap of wyrmspun wool in Viznove had eventually come through Kaeketeh and her guild.
Slavomíra had known what they had as soon as she felt it in her fingers.
But such magic was a fluke normally.
You got one or two enchanted skeins of wool, or flax, or some one brought in a treasured scrap of an elf-silk heirloom older than the foundations of the city.
Slavomíra and any guild or merchant treasured, hoarded and rarely parceled such things out when they came. Selling to lords and kings for exorbitant prices only.
Yet the sorcerous wyrmspun wool kept coming.
It might not be as perfect as a faewoven cloak. But unlike those astounding artifacts it was consistent. It was workable by mere mortal hands, and it kept its properties even when you cut and portioned it out.
The threads could be used to make a stitch stronger than anything that had ever passed Slavomíra's fingers before.
And there was enough of it for minor nobles and rich tradesmen to afford it.
The peasants in Rochford all were clothed in the stuff!
Slavomíra was close with the Merchant's guild. And she had a good head for sums. A single commission to the countess for yards of the richest cloth might be enough money to eat for years.
But selling to the commoners and lower nobles was the kind of silver that had let Slavomíra drag her family out of the filth of gate town and into the auspices of their fine midtown house.
And then there was how the fabric and thread traveled down the River Vah and to the realms beyond.
Silver soon flowed back up the river.
There had already been a full year where that flow had been interrupted.
The world beyond Viznove had gotten a taste of truly accessible magic.
And now it was left hungering for its next bite.
Ravenously starving for the blessing to return.
Slavomíra grinend so wide.
Countess Jewel of house Rochford was practically spinning wool into gold and didn't yet realize it.
Even one year with it taxed as it had been would be all Slavomíra ever needed.
