“Why does everything in your plans involve cooking?” Adin asked as he stood next to Lucas, stripped to the waist, laying out bricks to dry in the sun on the field between the cider house and the barn.

“What’s that?” Lucas asked.

Until that moment he’d been a million miles away. He had been since the man they’d sent to deliver six dozen potions of healing and a letter of introduction to Burken Bronzebeard had come back earlier. The Parin servant had returned with a pouch full of gold, and a letter for Kar’gandin as expected, but he’d also come back with one other thing: a wanted poster.

Burken had promised a good price for any other potions that Kar’gandin wanted to send his way and promised that one of his men would look through Lucas’s Greybottom laboratory and report back, but if the dwarf were to be believed, the wanted posters were up all over town, which was exactly the opposite of what Lucas’s friends had thought would happen after over a week in hiding. Lucas had feared exactly this sort of scenario of course, but he said nothing. Instead, he just worried.

Technically, he should have worried the least. The drawings for Hura'gh and Adin were pretty dead on. Kar'gdin’s picture had been okay, but Lucas’s had looked nothing like him. That told him they still had no idea who he was, but he’d be lying if part of him didn’t think that was an excellent excuse to get while the getting was good.

He didn’t run, though. Instead, he listened as Adin repeated himself and then said, “First of all, these bricks aren’t cooking; they’re baking, and second of all - I like cooking. What’s wrong with that? Chemically or culinarily speaking, both can be a lot of fun.”

“That doesn’t seem to be the case to hear the servants talk,” Adin mused. “It sounds like quite the chore if you ask me. Personally, I’ve never tried it for myself.”

Yeah, and it shows, Lucas thought wryly. He said nothing, though. Instead, he laid his last wet clay brick down on the grass to dry and went back for another load.

According to Kar’gandin, they only needed a hundred or so to make the small firebox Lucas had asked for, but it was hard to fire so few bricks, so they were going to make a couple hundred anyway. That was kind of a pain in the dick, of course, but Lucas, more than anyone, was looking forward to having fire that he could regulate at a nice steady temperature. He was getting sick of campfire cooking, and now that they had the money for some real glassware, he didn’t want to risk ruining it in such an unstable work environment.

At least the first step was done, though. Now, they just had to pack the clay into wooden molds and leave the resulting bricks out to bake in the sun for a couple days on each side. According to their dwarf, whom Lucas trusted completely in all matters related to construction, once that was done, they could finally bake them.

No matter Adin’s complaints, it really was like baking, too. They even used sand like flour to keep the sticky red clay from holding too tightly to the wood once it had been packed hard inside the frames.

The three of them had been hard at work on this for a couple of days now, and only Hura'gh was missing. He’d proclaimed this work beneath him, so Lucas had tried and failed to convince the half-orc to take a break.

“Once this is done, I’ll help you chop down some trees so we can start seasoning firewood,” Lucas told him.

Predictably, Hura'gh hadn’t been interested in help. Instead, he’d decided to show the weaklings he was surrounded with how to fell trees and gone off with only an axe. Lucas hadn’t seen him in half a day, but from the sound of chopping, he had no doubt they’d spend a good portion of tomorrow hauling and splitting the logs that their giant was making.

Some of them would become counters for his future alchemy shop, but most of the rest was destined to be split and stacked to become firewood. I just hope that son of a bitch is cutting down the dead trees, Lucas thought with a sigh. Not only were the living apple trees going to be a good source of sugar for his still when they started brewing their own shine for potion making, but green wood would take forever to age and dry.

The days were exhausting, but they were going by uneventfully, at least. That was enough to make him smile even as he sweated under the noonday sun. Lucas had brewed and sold over a hundred healing potions so far, and even though they were still broke because almost all of that cash had been immediately used to order new glassware with the glassblower's guild and secure shipments of other rare reagents he’d need, it still felt like progress.

Plus they were eating better too now that they’d started giving Gerwin a meal budget to work with. The man was not happy that the four of them were squatting at the edge of the Parin estate and putting his mistress in jeopardy. Despite that, though, once they started paying him a dragon a week for the kitchens to provide food for the four of them, he became a lot less stingy.

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For the first week, it had been nothing but stale bread and stew composed mostly of leftovers. Admittedly, that had still been pretty good for free food, but now that Lucas was making sure they were contributing to the failing finances of the house, they were finally getting real meals. The house would deliver them sweetbreads for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and last night, they’d had potato soup and sausages for dinner.

All in all, it wasn’t bad. Except for Hura'gh’s chainsaw like snoring, and Adin’s subtle insinuations that he’d really love to get another hit of blue, life was pretty much perfect. He even had a pretty girl that was obviously trying to catch his eye.

Lucas had no intentions of getting with Denaria, of course. She was much too sweet and innocent for someone like him. He would ruin her without even trying. She was more like a butterfly, and every time she found an excuse to come out and visit him amidst their labors and ask about this or that, he had to remind himself that no matter how beautiful the blonde girl could be when she smiled, touching a butterfly was the surest way to kill it.

Besides, he reminded himself, Taking off all of those petticoats… Netflix and chill would take all night in a place like this. We’d run out of movie before we ran out of clothes.

No, now wasn’t the time for women. When everything was back under control, and the heat had died down, maybe he’d take a stroll through the red light district and find some romance the old-fashioned way: with his coin purse. For now, women would only distract him.

Right now, they needed to work. While the bricks were drying, Kar’gandin chopped wood, and he and Adin went looking for more brewable ingredients. They’d run out of elderberries and sage root in just about every direction, and orange vogel blossoms were out of season, so that put healing potions off the menu for now.

Instead, they were hunting for anything that might eventually be turned into blue, along with ingredients he could use to make potions of stamina, potions of strength, and potions of iron will. That last one, admittedly, wasn’t for selling, it was just something that Lucas wanted to brew up to see if it would help Adin grow a pair and kick the habit.

Kar’gandin had wanted Lucas to try to brew the love potions that the lordling had mentioned around the campfire the other night, but for now, Lucas put that off. When the dwarf demanded to know why he wouldn’t make something that would sell so well, Lucas had claimed they’d have to order most of the very expensive ingredients, but the truth was that he didn’t trust himself to make such complex potions without access to his notes.

That was a problem for a great many recipes he had. They might be out of materials for common healing potions, but Lucas was fairly sure that he could whip up some greater healing potions, or even some healing salves and balms if he had his notes. Unfortunately, those were in his hideout too.

Unlike the flasks and beakers, which had only been hidden amongst his other dishes and behind cushions, his notes were buried beneath the earthen floor and the hearthstone in front of his tiny hideaway’s small fireplace. So, while they were almost certainly safe, he wouldn’t be getting to them any time soon, and he wasn’t about to send someone to go and fetch them in his place.

If he made the mistake of trusting either Kar’gandin or his cousin, it would be the easiest thing in the world for them to tell him, ‘So sorry, my man found nothing, they weren’t there anymore,’ and make off with the last couple years of his alchemical research. That was unacceptable.

It was something he thought about often between other tasks, but it didn’t stop him from working, and three days later, they finally gathered the sun-dried bricks and stacked them into sort of a giant cube. It was only partway through the exercise that he realized what they were doing.

“We’re building a damn oven,” he blurted out when they were stacking up the third course.

“Indeed,” the dwarf agreed. “An oven that cooks itself.”

Lucas had never given it much thought before, but he supposed it made sense. Bricks needed to be baked until they were hard, so why not bake them in an oven that was made out of unfired bricks? It was an elegant solution.

In the end, they ended up with a cube of uniform tan bricks four feet on a side surrounding a fairly large empty cavity in the middle that had been stacked full of wood. The top had a large chimney hole, and the sides were riddled with smaller holes to allow the whole thing to breathe.

Lucas thought it looked pretty ugly, but as the sun set and they lit the fire, all that changed. Slowly their bonfire picked up steam, moving from barely visible to all consuming. They couldn’t just let it burn itself out though. According to Kar’gandin, there was a lot of work left to do.

First, they had to keep adding fuel for hours as the thing slowly became a blast furnace. Then, once that was done, they had to start closing the thing up with rocks and sand to keep all the heat in.

“I’m kinda starting to feel bad for those bricks,” Lucas joked. “We built them a little tiny hell in there.”

“Aye,” Kar’gandin agreed. “Hotter than Embermaw’s breath in there. That’s how you get the buggers nice and strong.”

“How will we know when they’ve been in there long enough?” the half-orc asked. “Will they not crumble to ash if we bake them too much?”

“Nah,” the dwarf laughed. “A little blackening is a good sign, but as a general rule, more heat is better. It's true for the forges and true for… now, what do you suppose is goin’ on over there?”

As one, the three of them turned to where the dwarf’s stubby finger was pointing, and Lucas instantly recognized the torches from their last visit. “Shit,” he muttered. “The guards - they’ve come back.”