Defi and the youth's sister, who he learned was called Adtra, had to talk fast so that Haral wouldn't rush to the northern farm half-frozen and garbed in damp mud-caked clothes.
"Why was he in the river though?" He asked the question to the more sensible older sister once Haral had been convinced to at least wash up.
"Amary cannot use her legs. A problem since birth." Adtra accepted another cup of spiced wine from him and determinedly sipped.
Defi didn't think she even noticed the taste.
Her voice was almost mechanical.
"When we moved in with Grandfather, he had a special wheeled chair made by an artificer in Agamarl, one where she could move the wheels by rotating cranks with her hands." She smiled gently, and her face was lightened by emotion to considerable beauty. "Amary is not one to feel low too long, but I had never seen her so happy as when she could move under her own power."
"I see." Defi wanted to see such a chair himself.
"When I got home and heard…" Adtra's lips firmed. "I think Haral saw it being washed down the river and so recklessly…" She stopped again. "He nearly succumbed to the river himself."
Anger and grief swelled in her last words.
Defi had no lasting connections to his younger siblings other than shared blood. Even then if he heard that two of them might die on the same night, he would be troubled and feel loss.
How much more for a family who was closer together?
"Let's go!" Haral was still pulling on a coat.
"Shoes." His sister stopped him with one word.
"I don't need them!"
So energetic.
Friend, were you not half-dead less than an hour ago?
By the time they got to the door of the neighboring farm, both his unexpected guests looked like they'd sloughed off their exhaustion, their eyes bright, all but buzzing with anticipation and energy at seeing their sister.
In contrast, Defi, who had been reassuring them nonstop compared how he felt to how a refugee looked. Only the familiar soft weight of Turq on his head prevented him from leaning his forehead against the wall and sighing at the mental fatigue he had incurred in the last half-hour.
He'd never been good at comforting others on things like this.
The moment the door opened, he foisted the two siblings off on the nearest person.
"Allise, this is Miss Adtra and her younger brother Haral. Your patient's siblings. I'll leave you to explain their sister's prevailing good health."
He took the cask of still-hot mulled wine off Haral's shoulder and strode in. He paused, looked at Barham who was lurking behind his wife's shoulder. "By the way, her name is Amary."
Barham only laughed. "Sagry, Saben, Amary, I was close."
"It was not one syllable close."
Haral blinked, still faintly numb, disbelief and hope warring in him, latched onto the inane topic. "My other older sister's name is Sigrene."
Barham smiled at him brightly, then said to Defi. "In the same family is close."
Allise ushered the two into the receiving hall, sighing. "Believe it or not, for him, it's really close."
Defi suddenly felt he should just be thankful the other remembered his name. A thought occurring to him, he stopped on his way to the kitchen, curious. "What's the baby's name?"
Ascharon gave their children names three days after they were born, so they could accumulate fortune as early as possible. It was different from Ontrea, where parents gave names once the baby survived the first year.
"Hah, of course I remember her name. You think I should forget something so important?"
Allise paused in her soothing words towards Haral and Adtra, lifting her head to give her husband a rather significant look.
Barham pretended not to see it, but Defi could see the sweat shine on his brow under the lanterns set up on the house beams. "It's…Coreine."
"That's a lovely name." Adtra dispelled the tension with sincere words.
Allise smiled at her, returned to reiterating that the two now less worried siblings had nothing to worry about while chivvying them gently toward the room their sister was in.
Barham blew out a long breath of relief.
Defi peered into the kitchen. Unlike the Garge homestead, there was no separate dining room in the northern farmhouse. The kitchen was directly accessible through the receiving hall.
Within, Sarel was slowly stirring a pot on the stove with one hand while de-hulling some sort of bean with the other and flicking the seeds into the pot. Her hands glowed with orange-colored Shade.
Defi still couldn't understand how the sorcery of Ascharon would be used to cook. It was something that separated mystic chefs from ordinary cooks. Defi had attempted it with the Current one lazy day, to no success.
Seated at the kitchen table, Farbar was deftly chopping herbs with a hunting knife.
His grandson Dari was peeling small blue-colored fruit beside him, cracking the fruit skins on the table to reveal pale yellowish flesh within. Dari's face scrunched when he saw Defi, then his eyes widened and shone when he saw Turq on Defi's head.
It was undeniable; slimes were irresistible.
Defi felt smug.
"What are you standing there for, boy? Come help with this." Farbar huffed at seeing Defi, waving at the table of strange plants and ingredients. "Did you eat yet?"
It was generally polite for non-family to seek permission before entering another's kitchen. With the old man's invitation, Defi easily stepped forward.
"I have. Is that snake-skin?" He put the wine cask on the table and looked into the large bowl that was distinctly separated from the rest of the food on the table. It was filled with faintly scaly green-tinged translucent strips.
"Don't touch it." Sarel glanced at him.
"I did once live with you," he assured her.
She hummed.
Dari left his bowl of fruit to round the table, stopped a short distance away, and peered up at Defi.
Or rather, at Turq.
"Isn't it time for you to go to sleep?" Defi took the smaller knife Old Farbar offered him, and seated himself at the table.
Dari wrinkled his nose, former shyness now relatively cured around Defi. The wariness was another thing entirely. "Not a baby."
"Do you want to feed Turq, then? It's a grown-up job."
The boy looked at him suspiciously, but nodded.
He lifted Turq off his head and plopped the slime into Dari's arms. Turq and Dari were familiar with each other anyway. Bree still visited the northern farm when he could get his siblings to agree to bring him with them. Renne and Markar could only concentrate if Turq was with Bree when out of their sight.
The visits had been when the weather was better though.
Recently, Defi held combat classes were held in the large yard of the orphanage so Dari had not seen Bree for several weeks now.
Dari returned to his seat and started gently pushing pieces of blue peel into Turq, watching in fascination as the peel slowly dissolved inside the slime's body.
"Don't feed it too much."
Curious, Defi dropped for a brief moment into the Current. As expected, the fruit with blue peel had uncommon vitality, as had several other ingredients on the table.
If Turq ate the discards from the table, would it split again?
Defi had already found that because of the regular 'milking' for slime extract, the production slimes were less likely to do a splitting.
It was disappointing, but he really couldn't afford to stop production just to get the slimes to split. Split slimes were already similar to their parents so it would be less work getting the extract quality up to par.
Not that summoned slimes were bad.
"Peel these." Sarel set a plate of vegetable stalks of some kind before him, breaking his train of thought. "You remember how?"
"Of course." How could he forget?
Just one morning and he hit a hundred and one ways not to peel vegetable stalks in Sarel's kitchen. He hadn't thought there were even ten ways to peel something.
He shook his head and started, tapping the knife edge slightly into the stalk, then ripping a piece of skin right off. It was very fragrant, the fresh scent spreading as he pulled the tough peel from the tender insides.
"This is?"
"I made some spiced wine this evening."
Old Farbar looked interested. "Ho?"
Sarel flicked of the leaf strip that Defi used to seal the cask, only lifting a brow as the glyph paper blackened before her eyes, her attention on the wine.
She inhaled the scent carefully. "This is Bluzand's?"
"Vesia sent me a cookery book."
"Hm." She ladled samples for all of them, milk for Dari.
Defi sipped the steaming wine, letting the flavors invade his nostrils as he drank, the gentle bite of alcohol was tingling within him. He kept his gaze on Farbar and Sarel, wanting their opinion.
"Needs work," was Sarel's verdict.
Defi wasn't offended by the lukewarm reception. It was his first time making it after all, and he had not fully comprehended the instructions. There were several words that he was certain he'd translated incorrectly.
"Not bad." Farbar ladled up another cup for himself. Defi grinned at him.
He downed his wine.
Tipping his head back to get to the last drops, he caught a glimpse of the two siblings with Allise.
He leaned back on the bench to better see outside the kitchen doorway.The gloom that hovered over the brother and sister, the grief that he could not completely dispel, was now gone.
Defi nodded, satisfied, and turned to ask Sarel a question on one of the terms in the spiced wine recipe.