Lucas lay in his bed for hours that night, trying to decide what he should do here. Even after the asshole that was getting him roped deeper and deeper into this strange predicament started snoring heavily from the other side of the room, and Lucas knew he could easily grab the horse and bounce, he just lay there with his hands behind his head and stared at the shabby roof above his head.
The first day they were in here, he’d covered the holes with bundles of weeds since he didn’t have any straw, so it was mostly weatherproof now, but even so, it was a dingy little place. It must have been nice once, though. There were bunks for a dozen workmen, storage places for apples, and a few chairs that might still be safe to sit on. There were even fermenting bins and apple presses, though they’d long since rusted solid.
He didn’t imagine that cider sold for much, of course, but with this many trees, they could put it in kegs, ferment it, and then freeze the water out of it in the winter, turning it into a poor man’s whiskey. Honestly - that by itself would have been a perfectly good business model, Lucas thought to himself.
Given just how spineless the Viscount was shaping up to be, Lucas no longer had any idea of what to believe about his hardships. If Lucas had inherited vast wealth and an honest-to-god apple orchard, he… honestly probably would have fucked it up too, he realized. It had been a while since the angel had played ‘This is your Life’ with him, but it was still too recent for him to lie to himself about such things. There was the better part of a decade where he would have gladly sold everything that wasn’t nailed down for one more high.
He sighed. Nothing could ever be easy, could it?
Sleep eventually came for Lucas, but it was restless, and there were no prophetic dreams to give him the right answer. In the morning, he was left with the same dilemma and the same snoring. So, he decided to do something about both at once.
It was only sunrise, but he got dressed in the dark, and then, grabbing the pot he’d been using to brew things in, he went to the river and gathered some nice cold water. Then, with that in hand, he gave his little lordling an especially icy wake-up call.
The man bolted upright, gasping from sudden shock. To his credit, he didn’t actually scream like a girl, but Lucas was sure that if he hadn’t been standing there with a sour expression, then Adin would have done just that.
“By the stars, man, why would you do that?” the noble gasped.
“I tried to wake you up a couple of times by… let's call them more traditional means, but you weren’t budging.” Lucas lied. “Now come on, get up - we got shit to do.”
“We have what?” Adin yawned. “The sun has barely risen. What could we possibly have to do?”
“Well, that depends,” Lucas said theatrically, extending a finger for each choice he laid out. “Either you can go back to bed, and I can get on my horse and ride out of this berg before the guard catches me, or you get your ass in gear, and we can see how serious you are about cooking.”
“Cooking?” the noble asked uncomprehendingly.
“Cooking. Alchemy. Slinging potions!” Lucas exclaimed in annoyance. “Come on, man, what are we doing here? You going to get busy living or get busy dying? I ain’t got all day.”
This, at least, was enough to get the noble up and moving. Without another word of complaint, the man changed into something a little drier and got his boots on. Then, after they gathered some sacks, baskets, and knives, they were off.
They didn’t take the horse for two very good reasons. The first was that even with its barding removed, it still had a city brand, and that might be noticed by any number of keen-eyed observers. The second reason was more practical: the Greenwood wasn’t so far from here, but it would be even closer if they cut through Parin’s overgrown orchard and the fields beyond. There was only one field between the orchard and the road and only two more beyond that to the woods proper.
Strictly speaking, they didn’t really need to go there, but Lucas had no interest in taking it easy on this prick. If he wanted to start an alchemy business, then Lucas was going to watch him sweat and see how the man did.
Even that wasn’t going to be enough to make him stick around more than a few more days, of course. Teaching the lordling how to cook up blue would just be murder with extra steps.
But teaching him a couple of ways to make some healing potions might be enough of a lifeline that the man could save his sister’s house and maybe find a way to buy himself out of the jam he was in. At a couple of silvers a pop, it would probably take him years, but peddling his wares on the corner for that long would probably teach the man a little humility, too, and Lucas thought that would be a fine side effect.
So, while they walked, Lucas picked a couple basic lesser healing potion recipes that he’d used before with ingredients that should be fairly common in this area for two or three seasons a year, and he made Adin repeat them all the way there.
“Silver leaf, Sagethorn root, water,” he repeated dutifully as they crossed over the road. “And if I can’t find those, I can make something that’s almost as good with pure spirits, ground elderberry seeds, bark from a rosewood tree, and—”
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“No, not just any bark from the Rosewood tree!” Lucas interrupted. “What kind of bark did I say specifically?”
“The umm… I don’t remember,” Adin snapped in frustration. “You said I needed to take the bark and boil it in spirits and—”
“Well, if you take the bark off one of those trees and boil it like that, then congratulations, you just made rat poison,” Lucas sighed. “The brown bark is old. It has zero healing properties. You have to peel that off first to get at the red bark on the inside, and then you use the alcohol to leach out the poison.”
“If it has poison in it, then why would you use it in healing potions anyway?” Adin asked. “Couldn’t we just… I don’t know, tap the sap and make a healing potion that way?”
“The sap?” Lucas laughed. “You think just because it’s part of the same plant, it will have the same properties? Man - you’re going to do some serious damage with shit like that.”
“Well, why not?” Adin asked, obviously annoyed now. “If the outermost bark is poisonous, and the inner bark is poisonous and healing, then the sap or the heartwood should just be healing, right?”
Lucas sighed. “The leaves of the tree don’t do anything, but I hear if you’re starving, they’re edible. The seeds taste kind of weird, but some bakers like to sprinkle them on top of freshly baked bread for the color and the bark… well, we talked about that. The sap, though… let’s say it’s used in a sort of love potion, which is not what we’re looking for today.”
“Why not?” the lordling asked, suddenly intrigued. “I’d think a love potion could sell for a hell of a lot more than some lesser healing potions.”
“Listen, Viagra takes a lot more ingredients than distilled Rosewood sap,” Lucas shook his head. “Some of them have to be imported. No, that’s a story for another day.”
The Viscount looked at him with annoyance for a bit but eventually dropped the subject and went back to repeating the formulas that Lucas had given him until he could say them on command without screwing them up.
After that, Lucas added a couple of other items to their shopping list and started describing the plants to the other man in detail. In the Greenwood, most of them wouldn’t be hard to find exactly. In fact, he’d chosen these two recipes specifically because the reagents that were needed for them were both common and visible.
As much fun as it would have been to make the man figure out the difference between a scarlet funnel and a red spotted trumpet cap, the man would almost certainly end up killing someone on accident when he mixed those up. Lucas didn’t need that on his conscience. They weren’t picking up any mushrooms today,
Well, not unless I see a few truffles lying around, he corrected himself. Because those are damn good.
Truthfully, he might pick some wizened gnome caps if he found them, too. They were another ingredient he needed for blue. Really, he was sure he could find everything he needed to make the drug on their trip today, except for the sour dwarf berries, but those were cheap enough to buy at the market. If he were to just swing by his little dive on the way home and pick his glassware back up, he’d be able to go back in business by this evening.
That was too risky, though, and not at all what he'd planned for the day. Going anywhere near Lordanin until the heat had died down seemed like a terrible idea.
So they spent the day picking leaves, digging up roots, and scraping bark off of trees. Every time the lordling complained about the hard work, Lucas would laugh. “You want to quit now? Just say the word, man. Just say the word, and we’ll go right home right now.”
He didn’t give up, though, which was not what Lucas had expected. Not when their waterskin ran dry while the sun was high in the sky, and not when he pricked himself for the tenth time on the painful Sagethorn plant.
“That’s why it’s called a Sagethorn, you know,” Lucan shared. “Because after you get stuck once, you’re supposed to be wise enough never to let that happen again.”
Adin looked at him sullenly but said nothing. Instead, he continued to fill the baskets with their primary ingredients, and Lucas just kept letting him, even when they had far more than enough Elderberries. Despite the risk of goblin attacks slowly increasing as they inched toward sunset, Lucas stayed until the red light wanned and the forest canopy dimmed, just to give the Viscount one more reason to quit.
Goblins definitely put the fear in me the first time I was ambushed, Lucas thought to himself. That didn’t happen, though, and instead, they made their way back, chatting quietly as they went.
“Isn’t this too much stuff?” Adin asked, sweating under his load as they got close to home.
“It depends on how many times you fuck up,” Lucas said casually. “I could probably make close to a hundred doses out of all of this stuff, but you… We’ll be lucky to get half that.”
“What the hell are we going to do with 50 healing potions, though?” Adin protested. “That still seems a little… excessive.”
“Why, we’re going to sell them, of course,” Lucas said with a sarcastic smile. “A reputable shop might charge five silvers for a blend like this or even ten for something stronger. Since we are hardly reputable, we’ll probably only get a silver or two, but hey - that’s life.”
“That’s still at least five golden dragons,” Adin said, starting to smile as he saw the bigger picture. “That’s a hell of a lot of coin for a day’s work.”
“A day’s work?” Lucas laughed doing some quick math in his head. “Man, we’re barely getting started. And after buying all the things we need… it’s going to be more like two or three gold pieces for a week's worth of work, but still pretty good money, right?”
It was a lot of money, though. The man wasn't wrong. Well, at least it would be he thought as he imagined their stack herbs becoming potions and those potions becoming cash. A golden dragon was 20 silver kings, and each of those was 20 coppers with a crudely stamped bushel basket on them. A farmer's harvest might be worth a handful of dragons, which wasn't so different than a pile of herbs, properly treated, or even a single vial of blue. That was enough to put a lot of things into perspective for him.