Echoes of a Fallen Kingdom (The Stalwart Link Book 1) by B.T. Narro

Author:B.T. Narro
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Published: 2018-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

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When a week had passed, it was finally time. But it didn’t take long after Leo started working on his first pelt to miss waiting by the river all day. He had to use a wooden paddle to remove all the hair from the pelt, then take it to the river briefly to be rinsed of lime. It was to be set out in the sun to dry before Leo eventually had to spread some sort of dust paste all over it. He thought he heard Gartel speaking about “chalk” to someone one day. Leo figured this was the paste he had to use, but he couldn’t be sure.

Gartel took no time to teach Leo anything. He simply told Leo what to do to prepare the pelt, and Leo had to do it without question. When all was done, the nearly finished pelt was to be put in some sort of stretching device and scraped with a blunt knife. It was impossible to do all of this while staying by the river, but Gartel told Leo to leave the new pelts in the river alone. Leo just had to keep track of them and collect them when they were ready to be put into barrels. Leo wanted to ask what would happen if he went to the river and one or more were missing, but he knew such an unfortunate event would not be his fault. Bringing it up would only give Gartel a reason to put blame on Leo, as the guild master seemed to do with everything else.

“If you break, cut, or scratch the pelt too deeply, you will ruin it,” Gartel had told Leo. “And you will have shown me that you do not have the ability to be a bookbinder.”

Leo spoke with Rygen every day now. He knew much more about what she did at the guild, and it had nothing to do with cleaning pelts. In fact, no one in the guild was cleaning pelts except for Leo. He’d asked Rygen who used to do it before him, but she didn’t know.

“The parchments were delivered to us by someone who does not work in the guild,” she’d said. “Gartel pays for them.”

“So they aren’t made here?”

“Not for a long time.”

That made Leo curious to ask his brother, who had worked there more than a year before Rygen began.

“I cleaned pelts at first,” Andar told Leo. “Then Gartel made Lester do it when he saw how good I was at binding books. But Lester didn’t do it for long. I don’t know what he told Gartel, but eventually Gartel started paying for parchments.”

It made something even more clear to Leo. This was not a job anyone wanted, yet Gartel gave no hints as to how long Leo would have to do it.

His spirits had improved, though, simply because he had begun earning coin. He was paid eleven coppers a day. It was one more than he made per day as a farmer, but it also seemed to thicken the invisible wall between him and Andar, and Leo didn’t know why.

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