Chapter 52: Spin the wheel
Chapter 52: Spin the wheel
Both me and Rosha were much happier people when we finally went back into the storefront. Risha met us with a smile from the sitting place in a corner, one that widened when she took a longer look at Rosha’s face.
“You look much better now, Rosha,” Risha said, hopping down from the chair. “And I got an order for you! Auntie Illiana wanted you to sharpen her cooking knives. They are in the box, here, and I put the coins for the order in your money chest!”
“Thank you, Risha,” Rosha said, patting her sister’s head and grinning. “I will get to it later, but right now I have to craft something else. It’s going to be our meal ticket, I tell you.”
“Huh? What’s that?”
“You will see when I’m done.” Rosha hummed thoughtfully as she looked around the store. “Will you be alright there if I go to the workshop?..”
“Rosha, I’m not made of glass, I told you! And if you will have more orders, you will need me to man the counter all the time, anyway.” Risha pouted for a moment, but then beamed again. Her eyes turned to me. “Voren, did you actually come to order something?”
“I guess you can say that,” I muttered. “If I consider sex an item, then it fits.”
“Huh? What?” I watched with some fascination as Risha’s face turned deep red. “What do you mean, Voren? You can’t just order, order—”
“He didn’t!” Rosha shouted, grabbing me by the collar with one hand and threatening me with a fist with another. “He was just saying stuff he is never, ever supposed to be saying in front of my little sister!”
“Why?” I was the only who kept my cool in the room full of women turning red. I liked that colour on them, but I didn’t like the fact that I was clueless about the reason for it. Social stuff… I was really rusty about it, and sex, as I began to learn, was a touchy theme. “It’s not like she doesn’t know we planned to sleep together. Didn’t you, Risha?”
“W-well. I, well, yes, b-but—”
“But you can’t just talk about that aloud, Voren! And don’t ever, ever even imply that I’m a whore, understood?” Rosha snarled in my face. Her eyes really shone when she was angry.
“I wasn’t.” I scoffed. Enough was enough. I pried her fingers off my collar, took another second to enjoy the spark anger put in Rosha’s eyes, and asked, “So do you want that web or not?”
The fight left her with a long, tired breath, and the spark of anger became replaced by a spark of greed. “Of course I do. Risha… don’t listen to the bullshit Voren says, alright? He is a moron.”
“I’m not! But you, you all have to be so weird.” I shook my head. Was it a human thing or a woman thing? If I got stuck in the mortal realm for a few decades, would I learn eventually? I didn’t want to even begin. This certainly looked like something too convoluted to ever bother with.
Risha’s colouring returned to normal. She giggled in her fist and smiled again. “I like him more than your previous boyfriends already, Rosha.”
Risha flailed her hands in exasperation. “Anyway, he offered me a good deal on some materials, but I wanted that to be a surprise for now.”
“Web, right?”
“Right.”
“Then I want to be the first to see what you will do from it!” Risha beamed at Rosha again and patted on her arm.
“Sure.” Rosha beamed back. “And shout for me if anything is wrong here, okay?”
“Okay!”
⠀⠀
Rosha’s workshop, too, was a small and cluttered room, but instead of ready items it held of sorts of things used to make them. There were carving tools and working bench, a small forge and an anvil, cupboards and chests and racks of tools of all kinds. All of them were pushed to the walls, leaving some space to walk at in the middle.
She pushed a spinning wheel and a wooden seat in there and gestured for me at it. “It would be much easier if you spin the web straight there.”
“How much do you need?” I asked, measuring the contraption as I sat down.
“How much can you make?”
That was a good question. I thought about it. “A lot, but making webs makes me hungry.”
“Then make as much as you can for now. I will have to weave it into fabric first, anyway, though… I should start with knitting something quick first, just to gather people’s attention. Oh, right,” Rosha blinked and went to one of her many cupboards. “While you are spinning, Voren, I think it would only be fair if I made you some better clothes. You look like a thug who didn’t have much luck with his business, except for the cloak that is too clean and whole to fit with it.”
“It was Teren’s. I took a really nice shirt from him, too. Can you stitch it so it would fit me?”
“Yes, I guessed so.” Rosha huffed and pulled a roll of rope out of the cupboard. “Served him well. Alright, give me that shirt and let me take your measurements.”
She did so with the help of the rope, winding it around my torso, hips, measuring the length of my torso and making a lot of brushes with it and her hands as she examined the place where my wings grew from. These small touches began to make me feel excited again, and when Rosha pulled back and into her craft, I felt reluctance as I forced the feeling down and went back to the wheel.
Spinning the silk thread was a simple job that didn’t require a lot of thinking. It left my mind and mouth free to think and plan and converse with Rosha as she cut and stitched. It was a great time for me to think about what I was going to do next on my road of revenge.