Ch. 458 - Building a Life

The first thing that Simon did with Millie was walk the land the next afternoon. Given the amount of hectares involved, they actually weren’t quite finished until the sun was all but set, and they had to walk back to their room in the tiny hamlet of Burlwick in the dark.

That was Simon’s fault, though. He’d stopped partway through their trek and trimmed a small dowsing rod to search for water when Millie had chosen the area where she thought the lay of the land was nicest. Once he had a well picked out, he then made some rough stakes. Then he marked the approximate location of the cottage he planned to build, the well he’d use magic to dig once that was done, and the general flow of the fenced paddock for the herd of sheep they’d procure for her down the road.

By the time they were done, she complained playfully, “Now that we’ve finished, it’s too dark to see any of our work!” Simon could, of course. The outlines of the freshly hewed branches he’d marked the ground with lingered, lying like pale, dying glowsticks to his vision, but he said nothing. He didn’t need to see it. He could imagine it.

That night, they celebrated with mugs of hard cider, and then they spent the remainder of their evening discussing the outlines of her perfect dreamhouse. Simon had no paper on him at this moment, but a little charcoal and the whitewashed walls of their room became a fine canvas.

“I’ll clean it later,” Millie swore, but Simon wasn’t concerned.

He’d drawn half of his art pieces this way. The images he traced were ephemeral, but the ideas that they built up intensified with every detail. First, he rotated the whole building slightly to give it the best views. Then he extended the design for the thatched eaves so that they’d shield the building’s interior from the high summer sun while still letting in warming winter rays.

He moved the chimney so that the cookstove’s back wall would heat the bedroom, and still be able to share a single flue with the second fireplace in the living room. “Two fireplaces, Simon, really?” she asked skeptically. “I thought you said we weren’t going to build a palace. What happened to simple?”

“It gets cold in the winter,” he answered with a shrug. “It's not like…” he paused as he realized he’d been about to make a joke about how hot she was. Instead, he finished with, “I just don’t want to see you as cold as you were in the mountains ever again.”

Her gratitude for even that much overwhelmed her enough that she hugged him again, which somehow turned into an awkward moment of silence he was forced to paper over by discussing how he planned to make plaster, and how he’d much prefer to buy bricks rather than make them if it was possible, because it was backbreaking work.

Individually, the details didn’t matter, but in total, they were hugely important. By the time they were done that night, Simon had imagined the rest of Millie’s life into existence, and honestly, he was tempted by it. Saving lives and exploring mysteries still inspired Simon, but killing monsters as well as occasionally dying to them had grown a little old, and Simon would have loved nothing more than to see what a couple of decades of carding wool, tending flocks, and growing his own garden would feel like.

For the next few days, that was all they did. They planned and dreamed. Once that was done, and they had a good plan for the land that Millie would actually put to use, he returned to the count and drew up an agreement that gave away Castle Gravenstone and its immediate environs, along with the whole northern part of his new land for a song.

In this case, that song was worth hundreds of gold coins now, and a smaller annual payment to him or his heirs for the next twenty years. The castle itself was worth fifty times that, but Simon was keenly aware that any money he squeezed from the noble would be recouped twice over from its people, and he had no wish to rob them. This much was more than enough to set his little scullery maid up for life, and he made a note to build her a hidden floor safe to store it in when he’d left.

Count Viscaro used the opportunity for another chance to make it clear that his daughter could be made a part of the price as well. “I assure you,” he told Simon. “For a man of your bravery, your common birth will hardly be held against you.”

“That’s very kind, your Lordship,” Simon answered, trying to keep his sarcasm to a minimum. “And open-minded, too, but right now I must focus on constructing a home, not on building a family.”

The man waved him off, and Simon returned to their hamlet, where he purchased more supplies to build himself and Millie a more permanent camp amidst the stakes of what would become a proper home.

They talked through the plan there for a few more days, but before Simon could move the first stone, though, or even cut it, he needed the proper tools. Each of the castle stones was much too large for him to move, even with timbers and a mule. He needed something much smaller, and quartering each one three times until they were reduced to eight smaller blocks that were each a little bigger than one of his boots would be just about right.

Cutting that many blocks by himself would have taken him at least the rest of the year, though, even if they were only limestone instead of granite or basalt, so he needed something to speed that up, and he had a few ideas in mind.

So, he stopped by the blacksmith with a series of sketches for the crude implements he needed. The first was a scribe, which was a sharp, pointed steel tool with a fine point. It was too slender to inscribe, but the handle that he mounted it in wouldn’t be, and it was what he’d use to scribe everything else with a crystal-powered rune of lesser shaping, Celdura. He’d also need a chisel that would eventually bear the marks of breaking, Uuvellum Delzam, a talisman he’d use to fuse the pieces powered by Vosden, and a couple of other odds and ends.

If this were his home, and he was planning to stay, he would have built the forge first and made these himself. It would have saved the gold and the questions, especially about loose ends.

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When the smith asked Simon, “What sort of mallet will you be using on this chisel?” he’d been reminded that he didn’t actually own a hammer.

Still, ordering and paying for the tools was the easy part. After he had them, he couldn’t really use them until he made them magic, which was weeks more work since he wasn’t about to start flinging magic about for this part. First, he had to make the scribe, and then he had to use it to carve the rest of the tools.

It wasn’t hard work; Simon even enjoyed the detailed nature of it, but each time he had to send Millie away, and she never liked that. “It’s not like I don’t know what you do,” she told him once.

“It’s true,” he agreed, “but it’s important that you’re the only one with that knowledge. What if I should be working on an experiment into something forbidden, and someone unexpected arrives? Alone, I could flee, but if you were sitting there knitting, my only choice would be to strike them down.”

“We could flee together,” she volunteered, but he shook his head.

“I think after the troll we both know that there are paths that I must walk alone,” he answered, in a tone that made it clear the conversation was over.

She didn’t like Simon’s answers like that, but she did respect them, and took the opportunities to go into the hamlet to do research on the shopping list Simon had given her. She needed to find him the closest lumber mill, as well as a place where she could find a good spinning wheel, and all the other furniture she’d need later that year once he’d built her a house to put it in.

When Simon had all of that hard work complete, he finally bought a good working horse and fashioned a sledge for it to drag. By the time he was done with all of that and ready to cut the first stone, nearly three weeks had passed since their arrival.

That was longer than he planned. But to be fair, you didn’t originally plan to build her a fortress made of old fortress pieces, he reminded himself.

That was okay; it was an interesting project, and he had no one to blame but himself. Plus, these were all good experiments. It wasn’t like he’d regret refining a chisel of stone splitting in future lives if he wanted to build a golem or anything similar.

“Hell, a sword of flesh splitting would probably be just as effective,” Simon told himself as he lined up the tool for his first blow. The blow rang out with a crack that split the stone neatly in two along the line.

He gave a low whistle at that and then looked at the tool again, noting the minimal damage. “Where were you when I had to cut through the walls of the Broken Tower, huh?”

He smiled at that. Force had been the wrong word to use there. It was too brute-force. Using anti-connection to divide the block conceptually made far more sense. He could see it when he struck. An instant before the rock split, the aura did. Once it became two, the physical reality had no choice but to follow, as he’d suspected.

Once Simon started, he made quick work of the half a dozen broken stones he’d selected. Each one took exactly three blows to become eight pieces. Then all he had to do was load them onto his sledge and use his horse to pull the ugly vehicle forward.

Weeks spent on this project, and I haven’t even laid the first stone, Simon chastised himself to celebrate the sudden bout of progress.

He hadn’t expected things to move this fast. It certainly wasn’t the plan he’d told Millie when she’d left that morning, but really, he always doubted his new toys before he tested them thoroughly. He went back and forth about all of that and more as he pulled on the reins and clicked his tongue to start moving the load across the hundreds of yards that separated him from his construction site.

That didn’t take long. In fact, the horse made it look easy, but even with Simon’s artificially enhanced muscles, placing and aligning the stones on the bottom course was still back-breaking work. If he had to mortar them the old-fashioned way, he would have had to do it all again, too, but fortunately, he took out one of the other charms he’d created, and after checking to make sure the alignment was exactly right, he tapped the talisman against the stone with a sharp jingle and focused.

Visibly, nothing happened, but Simon saw a flash of invisible magic flare between the two otherwise-inert stones and felt a wave of cold as the word of lesser stone drained all the heat from the nearby air, and probably even him, to power the spell.

Visibly, neither of them changed. If they had, that would have been undesirable. He wasn’t building Millie a palace. He was building her a rude cottage, just one that happened to be built like a fortress.

Each of these stones would be bonded together, even the stone he would bury at the threshold. That limestone ring would be the foundation. He’d then cut some proper holes for the timber frame he planned to procure next, and it was only when all of that was done that he’d add the daub and wattle walls that were so common in the area. In the end, it would look only a little nicer than everyone else's house, but he’d strengthen it with so much earth magic that it might as well have been reinforced concrete.

Simon smiled at that. For some reason, it felt really good to know that even after he left, the girl would be taken care of.

She’s growing on you, he told himself. He didn’t even try to deny it. She’d bounced back better and faster than he’d hoped from the traumas he’d put her through in the portals, and hardly ever woke with nightmares now. Better, she was just so innocent, and unlike the other women of the area seemed to want nothing from him beyond his company.

In fact, when she finally returned with their dinner, and he’d finished erecting the footing of her small home, she complained. “Simon!” she scolded as much as she could with such a large smile. “I told you to take it easy! How did you move all of this? I thought you’d be cutting stones for days!”

He nodded, glad she didn’t notice that he was almost shivering from the cold he’d been using. “I was. Really, I can’t believe it took this long to do the first step. We can’t even start on the floor until the walls are done and the frame for the ceiling is in place.”

She swatted him playfully for his disagreement, even as she moved to their tent and started to unpack her picnic basket. “Why would we need a floor?” she asked, as she moved. “A little river sand to season the soil and a lot of walking, and before you know it, we’ll have—”

“Bugs,” Simon agreed. “Forever. I was thinking, instead of ants, you could try some terracotta tiles. If we built a simple kiln and used river clay…”

“Terawhatta tiles?” she asked, confused. “Simon, I am no countess. This is not a palace. We don’t need anything half so fancy!”

“That’s not fancy,” he told her with a shake of his head as he unwrapped the cloth-covered cheese she handed him and started slicing it. “Fancy would be a full-blown mosaic. I’d love to do something like a flower garden, so you have a little color, even in the winter, but I probably don’t have the time for that.”

“I—” Whatever she was going to say there died on her face as he reminded her he’d be gone soon. She was clearly growing less fond of that idea as he lingered. Still, she didn’t complain. Instead, she turned the conversation away from topics that might lead to more talk of tomorrow, and back to what it was they were eating tonight.

Simon said nothing else on the subject either. Instead, he wondered if lingering this long was hurting the poor girl more than it was helping her.