For the coming days, Seloniel decides to bake the bread before each meal, believing it to be a better idea to use a little bit of fire magic to bake a small amount of bread three times per day than to cook a larger amount of bread at once. After the villagers have finished eating their breakfast, the two witches are together in the baker's shop:
"I think I will need another puncheon to sell magical wine away from this town, since my old puncheon is already in use for flour" Janick voices her concern.
"We have enough money to last us for a few weeks, surely you can wait a day or two for a new puncheon!" Seloniel points out to Janick. "Today, we are building a hand cart to help carry the logs away from the woods for milling"
As they go to the lumber mill to buy some planks of wood as they go, they realize the easy part is the cart's bed, and then the axle. With the previous day's output, the lumber mill has enough planks on hand to build a hand cart with it. Of course, since making nails doesn't take a large amount of iron, Seloniel can make them with fire magic without making her hands burn.
She's much handier than I am, Janick muses, while she yearns to go back to the sale of alcohol; with the first seven 8-feet planks of 2x6, the two witches make a serviceable cart box, three feet by six feet, and, with the eighth plank, two shafts, a crossbar and an axle.
This is where the hard part begins for them: making the cart's two wheels. Sure, Janick could cut down the spokes without complication, but what makes the wheels the hard part are the wooden rims. Which are assembled in segments, called felloes, requiring a little heating. For this part, however, Janick is the one using a little bit of fire magic underneath each 2-foot segment of a plank that's to become a felly.
All told, the two witches spent an entire morning building their very first hand cart, with Seloniel using more fire magic, both to give the felloes their curvature and to make the strake, i.e. the metallic part of the wheel. and Janick seemingly holding the planks in place for Seloniel to hammer nails into them.
"You used more fire magic to make this hand cart you wanted. I think I will have to use more fire magic to make this puncheon this afternoon. If we can make wheels for this hand cart, surely we can make barrels!" Janick tries to conjure from memory the size of the hoops of the puncheon she wants to ensure that it will contain the amount of magical wine she desires out of a puncheon.
Only, unlike Janick's previous puncheon, this one will be made of spruce, as opposed to white oak, and hence will be lighter. She wastes no time accumulating the necessary iron ore, and, to ensure she won't get burned much, she decides to make the puncheon's hoops one by one, rather than making all the hoops at once. By the time she's done making the hoops, the time to eat has arrived for them, and Seloniel is back from a round of distributing bread to the lumberjacks chopping down trees in the woods to build a road. And, hopefully, repair their homes with the resulting lumber.
Speaking of lumber, the village's lumber millers have their hands full when Seloniel's hand cart arrives, laden with several tree logs that are to become planks of wood.
"I think we're going to need more hand carts! One cart for the whole village is not going to be enough to make sure we can get the wood flowing from the road working site to the lumber mill" Janick wonders how many carts will be needed to transport all these trees from the wilderness to the village's lumber mill. "However, the faster we work, the more fire magic we will end up using"
"I don't think we will be able to make more than two hand carts per day, but I believe the village will benefit more from us making additional hand carts than from you selling more alcohol in distant marketplaces!" Seloniel retorts. "We want to make this work, but to avoid another uprising, we need to provide as much as possible so the villagers can work properly!"
Thank God for Seloniel's handiness! She's a life saver here, where we need to get the road built, and, of course, more carts means more wood gets to the mill, and milled faster, too, Janick, sweating, starts drawing from her own barrel of magical wine, and dilutes it with water from the local well. However, her train of thought shifts when she starts pouring the water into her bucket of wine, left behind by the previous lord of the mine. I knew since I started selling magical wine that people who could afford it would often dilute it with water so that it could quench their thirst in a pinch, but I rarely did the same myself, because I could use fire magic to heat whatever quantity I needed, she starts thinking while she drinks the diluted magical wine.
The puncheon appears to be faster to make than a hand cart, but as they keep building the second cart, the two witches start getting more tired and thirsty. And maybe hungry, too.
"I think we need to take a break and eat cheese, and drink some of the diluted magical wine I made" Janick starts sweating more as a result of not only using fire magic, but also the physical labor that goes into building a second hand cart.
"Sure, this village lacks a lot of the equipment needed to heal the wounds left behind by the uprising, but we just can't go on like this forever. However, rest assured that it's going to be temporary, and it will continue for a month or two" Seloniel tries to reassure her as Janick is about to break down.
"It feels a little hard for me to get used to frontier life. In my previous life, I was an alcohol merchant, all I had to do is travel, cast alcohol magic here and there, and sleep. But now I feel like the Supreme Council is slapping me with burdens I wasn't prepared to shoulder!" Janick laments about the sudden changes living on the frontier induced in her.
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Yet, a few days from now, it will be payday for the people in the village. Then and only then will I know how much the villagers' lives have changed with our arrival. Now we provide them with food, with equipment such as hand carts and tools, and they don't have to pay for that, they can always say it's the Supreme Council's goodwill, Janick, consumed by her own thoughts, then proceeds to cast a rubbing alcohol spell on her hands, showing signs of first-degree burns since she used fire magic to get the puncheon hoops and the strakes done.
"Don't give up on this village! You wouldn't want to cause another uprising, do you?"
"Of course not. I guess we have no choice but to build more hand carts for two or three more days, and then we shall make other items if and once more settlers arrive through the woods" Janick sighs, and then returns to fitting the axle on the hand cart.
"It will be a while until you can go back to your life as an alcohol merchant, so better get used to hard work"
After drinking the diluted magical wine and eating cheese, Janick lies flat on the ground, her body straining under the weight of the cart box. Which she holds with her arms extended while Seloniel is putting the wheels on the axle.
"It's all in a day's work; I guess you should pull the cart to bring it to the villagers cutting trees in the forest. After all, while faster, we can't always have the carpet used for hauling fallen trees to the lumber mill" a tired Janick realizes, reminded of how the food is getting hauled into the village.
"Don't forget about buying some ropes next time you go out selling magical wine!" Seloniel reminds her.
"Ah yes, the need to securely fasten the logs to the carpet..." Janick sighs while Seloniel carries the cart out into the forest, where it's promptly loaded with logs.
Once the second hand cart is handed over to the villagers, it's Janick's turn to bake bread for the villagers' dinner using fire magic. Since her body feels tired, naturally, she can't seem to muster as much magical energy as she would have on the marketplace, where, normally, her body would be fresh.
Once she has finished baking the bread, she can barely use rubbing alcohol magic on her hands showing signs of burns. Which she does, but she needs some rest before she can eat.
Around the dinner table at the manor house, the two witches eat apart from the rest of the village. For some reason, Janick still feels the need to confide in the other witch.
"What did the Supreme Council see in us that made them think we can bring the village back on track? Did the Supreme Council see in me the person who could do it at the lowest cost?" Janick keeps lamenting, questioning herself and crying. "Did the Supreme Council think that I could bankroll the entire village with the sale of magical wine?"
"Speaking of magical wine, why is it that you kept selling it when you can be selling rubbing alcohol at the same marketplaces?" Seloniel asks her a question that wasn't answered the previous night.
"There are several reasons: first, rubbing alcohol magic is intended for use on surface injuries, and, because of that, people don't need it nearly as often as one would wine. One gallon of magical wine, if properly diluted, can last you for weeks" Janick starts explaining, while her mood shifts to something more... euphoric.
"Diluted the way you talk about it, it amounts to small beer, just with an aftertaste of wine as opposed to beer"
What Seloniel calls small beer might either be weak beer or diluted beer. For Janick's magical wine to amount to small beer, however, one would need to pour about six or seven parts water to one part of wine. And then it can actually last a household for weeks depending on household size, she ponders the implications of drinking diluted magical wine.
"One last thing: casting rubbing alcohol spells makes my blood content go up way faster than wine per unit of volume conjured. I would get drunk the same by conjuring a pint of rubbing alcohol as if I conjured a tun of magical wine!" Janick's face turns red hot.
"And how much do you think a pint of rubbing alcohol would fetch on the market?" Seloniel asks, a little unfamiliar with the various segments of the alcoholic market.
"Certainly not ten thousand gold, which is more or less what I earn from a batch of magical wine!" Janick proves a little evasive in her answer to Seloniel.
"Why ten thousand gold?" Seloniel keeps asking her fellow witch.
"By now you know that, if left to my own devices, I can conjure a tun of magical wine every other day, which I determined was the optimal drink for me to earn money using alcohol magic!" the alcohol witch's tone of voice becomes more unpleasant.
"Why that specific amount of wine?"
"It's the limit of what I can safely conjure and only get hung over!" Janick's tone of voice turns to anger.
Sure, as wizards use more magic, they get stronger as wizards, but there may be subtleties I might not know about long-term implications of using alcohol magic, Janick attempts to calm herself down.
"I wonder for how long I will need to be doing woodworking before I can go back to selling magical wine! Magical wine is going to be, at least until the road is completed, the only source of income for the village..."
"Not if you sell lumber by carpet freight!" Seloniel retorts.
"Right now, lumber would be better used for our local construction needs! Also, lumber is best transported in wagons much larger than a hand cart or a carpet!"
As much as it pains me to admit it, Janick is right, on both counts. She had the foresight to plan for the road to be traveled in both directions by lorries pulled by multiple oxen, albeit one abreast per direction, Seloniel starts to realize that Janick's knowledge of logistics is far better than she initially believed. I always saw her as a girl whose obsession with alcohol magic will lead to her downfall.
Once Janick's temper has defused, they keep talking about the next steps for the village, which now includes feeding its residents. After all, carpet freight has its limits.
"Speaking of wagons, we might want to build one of the size capable of being pulled by two oxen" Seloniel suggests to her.
"But then you'd need pastures for two oxen, and ideally two cows as well, and this area's pastures aren't that great, even if we were to clear-cut the surrounding areas around the village!" Janick is left wondering how this plan would even fly, but so many buildings in this town are vacant since, well, the uprising, so she thinks the village should have enough space for four bovines. "I'd hold off on building the wagon until we actually have two oxen and two cows!"
"I'm sure some vagrant or refugee would love nothing more than to work with cows on the frontier and do so tax-free!"
"What I believe we need is a life wizard. That wizard should take care of the village's medical needs as well as of the animals, I guess, we need to pray and get lucky with refugees"
With that said, Janick barely has enough strength remaining to even make her prayers regarding refugee intake. Thus far, she can feel like not many would even be able to find this tax haven on the frontier until they find some semblance of roads. Yet, before she sleeps, she feels like it's only a question of time until the first refugees arrive in Laverton.