Chapter 462 - Staying Warm

That special day was spent with drinking, feasting, and dancing, and their night together was nearly as vigorous, if a bit more private. Their home, by design, was more than a mile outside of Burlwick, so they didn’t quite make it all the way to that mostly finished cottage before they celebrated their blessed day with a blessed night on the wet grass underneath the stars.

The weeks that followed were some of Simon’s least productive, and he was glad for that. He split some wood and made a trip into the hamlet to retrieve their wedding presents, but mostly he just basked in Millie’s undemanding presence and spent time enjoying life, as they learned to cook in their rustic kitchen instead of over the fire. He didn’t really get back to work in any serious way until after the first snows started to fall.

Even then, though, Simon didn’t start any new construction projects or do anything but make notes about future magical ones. He just focused on little things, like reducing drafts that came from their shutters and continuing to stock up on firewood.

His mind was bursting with new ideas. He was torn between building a root cellar by shifting most of the ground beneath their home with earth magic, and using the hot flue gases to power a sort of ice chest that would keep their food cool all year long. In the end, Simon decided that a hybrid approach where he cooled the root cellar would be best, but only because it would arouse the least suspicion from guests. He didn’t actually do any work on it, though, because he was too busy spending time with his new wife.

On the days when they were all but snowed in, he would pass the time just talking to her or drawing her portrait. It felt very indulgent, but he couldn’t make himself worry too much about that. Not with an eternity stretching before him. Working on runic projects and long-term plans would have been more productive. So would spending time at the inn listening to rumors and trying to get a better handle on the current political situation of Brin. Instead, he spent nearly a week sketching out a loom that he hoped to build for Millie next year.

She’d been gifted a lovely spinning wheel for their wedding by a family she frequently helped with their washing. So, come the spring, she’d have thread and yarn, but no easy way to turn them into cloth.

“We don’t even have sheep yet to give you wool,” he teased her now and then, but they’d be able to buy as much as they could reasonably use without issue. Starting a herd was a next-year problem, along with a garden and any number of other projects that would make their lives better. While the count’s money would buy them bread for a long time to come, Simon would much prefer to grow the wheat and mill it himself.

Well, maybe not mill it, he reflected. While it would be a cool project, it was a long way from his priority.

The only indulgence that he allowed himself during all of this was to read through the book that the count had gifted him. While he’d been initially excited to see that his work had spread far and wide, that excitement soured as he read through the volume.

He did his best to keep that reaction from his face, but it was impossible not to feel like a knife through the heart as he read what the nobles had done to his project. He’d tried to inspire the unity of a people, and they’d replaced loyalty and brotherhood with obedience. It was painful.

The fables were still there, but they’d all been changed to be about the thane’s illustrious ancestors. Likewise, the sections on the clans now had a huge bit about how some clans were more equal than others.

“Well, now I know why I went to war with them,” Simon mumbled as the vein at his temple started to throb.

“Did you say something, dear?” Millie asked, misinterpreting the statement.

“Just talking to myself,” he answered as he suppressed a sigh. Still, that outburst, along with the woodcut of a fearsome wolf he’d carved in another life, attracted her attention, and they spent the next little while talking about the book.

Simon didn’t tell her he wrote it, but he didn’t deny it either. He just kept that part out, and answered her questions like, “How did they keep their handwriting so pretty?” and “Don’t all these words start to look the same after a while?”

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Simon explained the basics of printing to her while their puppy sat in his lap and he petted it. After that, he delved deeper into topics like letters and grammar. While she’d long known that words in Brinish and Charian could sound completely different for the same thing, that was the day she learned that both languages had different letters that made up those words. They spent the rest of the day examining both alphabets and why not every letter had an equivalent in the other tongue.

That topic unraveled like a tangled ball of yarn, which resulted in him spending several months that winter teaching Millie to write her own name in the language of Brin. While both tongues were spoken by the commoners of the area, given the recent conquest of the region, it was rare to find many who could read or write either, unless they were merchants or nobles.

While Simon had no plans to fix that more broadly, any children they had would obviously be taught such things, so it only made sense that their mother would learn them as well. While reading was far beyond Millie in either language for now, she did practice her newfound knowledge of letters to write out baby names on their wall in ash. Some of them had very creative spellings, which made him laugh, even though he tried his best not to, but it was still a fine activity.

She advocated for Mirah if it was a girl, which was apparently her mother's name, and Simon if it was a boy, for obvious reasons. While he didn't object to the former, since he could no longer remember his own mother's name, when it came to the latter, he remarked, “There’s enough Simons in the world, I think." He refused to elaborate when she insisted, "Why, I've never even heard of another Simon before!"

After that, she tried Seoid and Semon, but Simon rejected both of those, too, because they were too close to Seyom, and he had no wish to obscure that painful memory. Eventually, he had her abandon S names altogether, insisting that he “didn’t need to immortalize himself in such a way.”

Eventually, after much back and forth, they settled on Mirah and Nolin. He could have used divination to tell her which one it would be as her belly swelled, but Simon resisted that temptation. Instead, he just watched her aura to make sure that whoever it was growing inside there was healthy and developing normally.

For midwinter, he used earth magic to draw a gold coin into thin wire, which he then twisted and fashioned into a thin chain as a present for her. It was only slightly fancier than the gold bands he’d made for both of them for their wedding, but Millie was grateful just the same.

“My friends will give me such abuse when they see me bedecked in so much gold,” she insisted.

Simon merely shrugged. “Maybe, but I don’t expect you to be washing clothes by the river much longer. Soon you’ll be focusing on your own hobbies, and when I build you your loom, you can hire someone else to do that chore.”

The idea of having a single servant, let alone the idea that they might someday have several, was too much for her, and Millie insisted, “We could never afford such grandeur, and even if we could, how would I explain that state of things to my parents?”

“You would tell them that you married well,” Simon answered, “though to do that, you’d have to visit and let them know you’re still alive.”

That was a sore spot between them. She had no desire to do that. Something about being sent to slave away for a vampire had soured that relationship, and Simon didn’t see it as his job to fix it, though he’d keep working on it slowly as opportunities presented themselves.

In response to his efforts to make her jewelry, she responded by buying some wool that was dyed a blotchy, vibrant blue and knitting him a fine cap. He would never get over the fact that blue paint was incredibly expensive, but blue dye was relatively cheap. More interesting, though, was studying the way she moved with her needles as she made the small garment.

Simon could almost, but not quite, make out the gestures for Meiren as she did so. Creation is a hell of a word to mimic the gesture of knitting, he thought as he watched her move. Before, he’d imagined the gestures as a sort of calligraphy, but now, weaving was nearly as good a metaphor, he decided.

Even days and countless mundane chores later, the thought stuck with him. The crazed mind behind Castle Gravenstone’s dark history had insisted that words of power fit together in strange ways, too, but what if Simon had been looking at it wrong? What if instead of pieces of a puzzle, they were strands of a weave?

Did the differing metaphors really matter, or was it just a question of semantics? Simon had a feeling that they did. He also had a feeling that he’d find out which one was the right answer if he went down to level 40 and asked Helades about her reality knot. Still, that wasn’t an option for a few decades.

So, instead, he contented himself with musing and trying to understand the shape of reality as he worked on other things. Other than Millie, it was what he thought about most in those dark months as the weather slowly turned toward spring.

Sometimes, Simon hated himself for how lazy he felt in all this. The hardest thing he did was ride occasionally to Burlwick in cold weather. Mostly, though, he felt profoundly grateful for the moment of respite. His whole life was in a peaceful little snowglobe at that moment, and the fact that it was so fragile that anything might pop it just made him cherish it more.