“Heimee?” I asked as he grabbed a handful of barley from the floor and examined it closely. “I met this girl yesterday, Brinn. Do you know her?”

“No girls in the house. Now look, see that?”

I looked at the grain: it had sprouted. “Uh?”

“This malt’s ready for the kiln,” Heimee said. “So let me get this straight, you stroll around town for five minutes and just happen to stumble upon another orphan? Do you have a special calling or something?”

I stared at him.

“No girls in the house.”

“I met her at the apothecary.”

“Oh, oh. Oh. Oh, no. You’re fond of her. You’re gonna go dumb on me, aren’t you?”

I crossed my arms. “That’s not it.”

“Then why are you asking?”

I pursed my lips. “Is it time to shovel again?”

Heimee smirked. I think. It’s always hard to tell with a face like his. “Start pushing the grain down the chute.”

We fetched our trusty spades, but before we got started, Heimee continued, “She lives with her aunt. Mean old hag. If you liked the apothecary, you’re going to love her aunt. Bakes a mean loaf, but if Brinn’s anything like her, I don’t want her anywhere near here. Is she pretty?”

I blushed. “You said she’s an orphan? Did she lose her family in the Collapse too?”

“Worse. Her village was raided.” Heimee contorted. “Stupid war. If only people stopped reacting to every little provocation, this world would be a far better place.”

“War?”

Heimee squinted at me. “You do know there’s a war going on, right?”

I kind of did. I heard about it at the camp, though I failed to grasp its dimension or severity.

“It’s unfortunate what happened to the Kallaks,” Heimee continued. “Then again, there’s plenty of injustice going around. Just keep pushing the green malt.”

“Are we safe here?” I asked.

Heimee stopped shoveling and shrugged. “This is more a pissing contest than anything else. An absolute moron sits on the throne, and this is the crap he churns out. The king’s as clever as what comes out of Otto’s ass. It’s Munika who runs the country. Do you think a man bred for war will file for peace? I’d bet you he’s the one poking the wasps’ nest. The Erosomites aren’t interested in an all-out war. If they were, we would all be speaking Erom by now. That doesn’t mean they won’t invade if we give them a chance. There must be at least one warmongering idiot in their assembly, and that’s all it takes. But trouble will only find us here if Fort Kelmir falls. Guillinsbaer’s garrison will protect Guillinsbaer, sure enough, but the surrounding villages—

“You know what? This conversation is hard enough with a drink in my hand.” Heimee clutched his spade and began shoving barley down the chute like he was mad at it.

The chute led to the kiln on the adjacent building, the one with the mushroom chimney.

Once the malted barley or green malt—it had changed its name though I could not figure out why—was in the kiln, we spread it evenly across the floor. The room smelled of smoke, no surprise there, but not the wrong kind of smoke that hurts your eyes and throat, but pleasant, nutty, and woody. It reminded me of breakfast: toasted bread, tea, cookies, and fresh butter. A long rod with paddles stood on raised rails. Its purpose was to stir the barley to ensure even smoking and drying.

Fortunately for me, Otto was up and ready to operate the paddle rod. Later, Heimee attached Otto to a wheel that rolled the rod from end to end in the smoking room, airing the barley.

Next, Heime and I fed the furnace with a precise mix of peat and deadwood that he meticulously calculated by frowning a lot and scratching his chin.

“I was planning on meeting her tomorrow,” I said.

“Who?”

“Brinn.”

“We should be done after lunch. Don’t fall in love! There’s nothing worse than a love-struck boy. Or any love-struck buffoon. Love strikes you dumb.”

After the smoked and dried malt cooled down enough to be worked with, we shoved it down another chute that led to an Otto-operated mill to grind the grain into coarse flour. Heimee pulled a crank, and the barley poured into a huge copper pot called the mash tun to be mixed with water. And so, it was time to pump again; pump until my arms turned to overcooked noodles.

Then it all got very technical. So I’ll sum it up. We heated the mash tun to about twenty Heimees by burning more peat beneath it and stirring it constantly for about half an hour, pulling on a rod that turned blades inside. That was another great exercise, let me tell you. We collected the resulting decoction by opening a tap and draining it through the perforated bottom into another tank. We pumped fresh water into the mash tun and repeated the process at twenty-three Heimees. And a third time at twenty-five Heimees.

Then came the really fun part: shovel the spent grain out of the tank and clean it. It was moist and damp, and the air inside the tank was even sweeter than before. According to Heimee, the spent grain was great cattle feed. We kept some for Otto and would sell the rest to nearby farms.

Ah, then we pumped the decoctions from the temporary storage tank underground into one of two huge tanks called washbacks. There, Heimee mixed the product of our labor—now called wash—with yeast coupled with a big initial stir to dissolve it. After that, we only had to stir it from time to time.

Heimee cleaned the sweat off his brow. “Got a brand new batch of barley this morning. What do you reckon? Should we get to it?”

If I had to do that again, I would surely die or, worse, puke.

Heimee laughed. “Tomorrow it is.”

***

In the evening, I found two more of Salamorin’s tales hidden among a sea of whisky books. One was even a book Dad used to read to me when I was little. It made me feel close to him. I missed them so much. I wanted to devour them in one breath, but, of course, I didn’t read a single word. I opened the book, vaguely saw some letters, and woke up the following day.

Heimee wasn’t too pleased about the icicles hanging from the drapes, but it was so cozy snuggling under the warm blankets knowing the world was cold and austere outside of them. I just couldn’t help opening the window and invite the cold in.

“If you sleep out, you’ll find the door locked,” Heimee signed to me after we steeped the new load of grain. It was surprisingly easier this time around.

“I’ll be home before nightfall,” I assured him. I had no doubts about my timing; it’s not like I’m a great conversationalist after dark.

The lake was bigger than I expected, mostly frozen, with sparse trees surrounding it. It wasn’t full of kids like I feared it would be. I counted ten—some playing whilp, some ice skating. I found Brinn sitting on a rock, tying skates to her shoes.

“Lud, you came,” she said. Then she continued to speak while tying her skates, so I couldn’t see her face. I didn’t want to look like a fool, so I nodded. She smiled and passed me a pair of skates.

It dawned on me that I shouldn’t have nodded. Well, how hard could ice skating be?

A big kid, older than me, eyebrows bent on consuming his eyes, came over. “Hey,” he said, “heed on more pay wilb, wanna-oh?”

Some people just don’t know how to move their lips properly. Time to investigate. He had a whilp stick in his hand, and he casually nodded to his friends who waited with a whilp wheel. I processed that information in my brain and—

“What’s wrong with ya?” the kid said. That sentence was always an easy one to translate, and as he said it, my brain decoded his previous statement: need one more to play whilp, wanna join?

I wiggled the skates and shrugged, “Sorry, going ice skating.”

His eyes emerged from his overcast eyebrows, and he promptly called his friends while wiggling a plump finger at my face. Even at the refugee camp, I didn’t have to endure this kind of behavior. Two kids came to his side.

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He moved his lips with exaggeration now. I bet he was talking loudly too. Like a jerk, but I got what he said. “He sounds like he swallowed a hot potato.”

“I’m deaf,” I said patiently.

The boys all cracked up, hands on their bellies, slapping their knees. I gritted my teeth. Why do people like them exist? What’s the point?

“You’ll never need an umbrella with eyebrows like those.”

The laughter subsided, and I got punched in the eye.

I stumbled, falling on my bum. The big kid stepped closer, ready to kick me, but Brinn got in the way, arms flailing. She cocked a finger at the kid’s face, then at me before pressing it into his chest.

“He started it,” I read on his lips with one eye closed and in pain—a near-impossible feat. I was kind of proud of it.

Brinn slapped Eyebrows across the face, and for a moment, the big kid appeared to deflate, hand rubbing his reddening cheek. He looked at me with fury and turned away, taking his friends with him.

Brinn extended her hand to me. “Never mind Moreen. He’s a moron.”

I touched my sore eye lightly, it felt bloated and hot, before taking her hand. “Yeah, but friends call him Moreen, for short.”

“You should put some snow on that,” Brinn said and scooped a handful of snow, pressing it to my eye. “Keep it there for a minute or so.”

“I never skated before.”

She took my hand and led me out onto the ice. “It’s easy. I’ll teach you.” She skated backward, holding my hands. “Are you related to Heimee?” It was hard to concentrate on her lips long enough without losing balance, and I had already fallen so many times my bum was as sore as my eye.

I shook my head and fell. “He saved my life,” I said, wincing.

Brinn pursed her lips as she helped me back up. “He seems nice.”

“That’s a strange way to spell grumpy.”

She looked down and tapped the back of my knees. I think she wanted me to bend them. I couldn’t be sure. It would be easier if she faced me while she talked. It’s always very frustrating when people do that, but somehow, when she did it, it was kind of cute.

“Brinn, would you like to learn sign language?”

She blinked. Then she regarded me for a very long time. That’s the sort of question you should never ask someone you just met. You know, you should always start small and talk about the weather for a month at least. Get to know her full name, maybe even her favorite color. Then, if the time is right, you can drop the, ‘Hey, would you mind learning an impossibly challenging language because lip reading is a bit of an inconvenience to me? Thanks.’

“Sure!” she said.

I was taken aback. What? Was it that easy? I should’ve done this with everyone I’ve ever met.

“Then we can share secret messages!” Her eyes glittered with joy.

“Yes, that,” I said, scratching the back of my head, which made me lose balance and fall again.

Brinn laughed as she helped me up. “Is it hard to lip-read? You always take some time before you answer.”

“It is very hard. It takes all my attention. And I can only read about a third of what people say, and I have to guess the rest—take clues from context, facial expressions, and such. Then some people talk like this,” I open my mouth as wide as possible, “and others like this,” I remained placid, barely moving my lips.

“But my lips are easy to read, right?”

“You are a great enunciator,” I said. “But you kind of move a lot.”

“Oh! I was talking to your knees just now, wasn’t I? Do you want me to talk slower?”

“No, talk normally. I hate when people do that, or when they talk louder. Actually, I don’t hate it. It makes it super easy to tell if they’re idiots.”

“Were you born this way?”

I shook my head. “It happened slowly. I’m lucky in a sordid way. If I had been born deaf, I don’t think I would’ve been able to lipread.”

Brinn looked over her shoulder. A commotion brewed at the edge of the ice shelf. “I think someone fell in the water,” she said and pushed me on my skates over to see.

Some appeared to shout, while others covered their mouths in horror. I followed their stare. A boy splashed about in the frigid lake, desperately trying to hold on to a chunk of ice, but it kept flipping on him. The current pulled him away and his soaked clothes weren’t doing him any favors.

“Take off your clothes!” I shouted, but my voice must’ve drowned in the noise. I guess that was a poor choice of words.

Why was no one helping him? Couldn’t they see he was in shock? I untied the skates, took my shoes off, and removed my jacket.

A hand grabbed my shoulder. “Ludik, the water is freezing,” Brinn said.

I shrugged her off and continued stripping until only my breaches remained.

Brinn clutched my arm. “You’ll drown too.”

I wrenched my arm free and jumped in the water. The shock hit me like an old friend with a knife in his hand. The lake was deep and so murky I couldn’t see the bottom. I surfaced and spun around but couldn’t find the boy. On the ice, the kids pointed, and I followed their directions.

“Yes, there,” they seemed to say.

I dove under, deeper with each stroke. Dad had taught me how to swim in the river in our old village. The one that almost killed us. He said it was important that I learned how to swim, that a lot of kids are curious about the water and drown because no one’s watching. A quick and silent death would not be his son’s fate.

I saw a brownish blur squirming in the murk. I swam to it and got hold of his jacket. I kicked hard to push us up, but his clothes made him too heavy. When we breached the surface, my lungs burned for air. Whenever I tried to rest my legs, the weight of his clothes dragged us back down. I pulled his jacket off while we sank. The boy offered little help in his rescue, shivering uncontrollably. I swam back to the surface, arms stiff from all the hard work. “Help me get him up,” I shouted as I reached the edge of the ice.

The kids inched forward a little but not enough to reach me, afraid to step on thinner ice. I couldn’t hoist the boy by myself. Were these his friends?

Then, Moreen got on all fours and neared the edge. His massive hand reached out and grabbed the kid by the collar of his shirt, pulling him out of the water while his friends held him by the waist. I pulled myself up, sliding like a salamander, while the ice cracked and wobbled under me. When I reached thicker ice, Brinn met me with my jacket and rolled it around my shoulders.

I glanced at the boy while Moreen shook him like a rattling toy. The boy had stopped moving. Moreen then slapped him so hard across the face that I thought I heard it. The boy gulped for air as if that was the first breath he’d ever taken, arms and legs spasming, and began to shiver frantically again.

“Take his clothes off,” I said. “Get him warm.”

Finally, the remaining kid began to offer help in the form of scarves, beanies, and jackets that Moreen used to wrap the boy in. Then he lifted the kid in his arms, stared at me with his ugly face, and gave a simple yet respectful nod, as if he was the one who had to forgive me. There are some people I will never understand. Some words escaped his lips, but I was too tired to put any real effort into reading them, so I nodded back. Nods get you very far in the deaf world.

“That was intense,” Brinn said. “Aren’t you cold?”

I didn’t want to get sicker than I had to, so I turned around, removed my wet breeches, and dressed up my clothes.

“Don’t worry,” Brinn said when I turned back to her. “I only peeked a little.”

I don’t know if I blushed. I didn’t think it was possible to blush at that moment, but I felt like I blushed. “You know, I don’t think ice skating is for me.”

“How are you even talking after swimming in that water? I am happy that Poleen is safe, but Bastard’s bother, you could’ve died.”

I gave her a faint smile. “I’m used to being cold. Want to meet up tomorrow?”

“Only if it is this exciting.”

“I’ll do my best to live up to the expectations.”

***

“It’s nice to see you’re making friends.” Heimee stared at my purple eye after passing a cup of warm tea. “I hope you deserved it.”

I told him what had happened. He heard me without interrupting, cranking his jaw and drinking his glass of snake venom.

“Ah, Ludik, the deaf hero of Bum-hole,” he signed at last and raised his glass in my honor. “You could’ve died too, you know. Did you somehow forget how I found you?”

“What was I supposed to do? Let him die?”

“That’s what the other kids were doing.”

“Then why didn’t you leave me on the side of the road? That’s what the other grown-ups did.”

“Hardly a day goes by I don’t regret it.” Heimee took a sip from his glass and smiled. “I’m glad you have a kind heart, kid. A dumb and stubborn heart, but kind. That counts for more than you know. You still look as cold as a mountain top. Do you know what warms you right up?”

“Whisky?” I took a guess.

“Whisky,” Heimee said, raising his cup. He took a long draught and passed the glass to me.

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“Suit yourself. I find this won’t be an excuse to skip work tomorrow?”

“I wouldn’t miss it.”

The next day, the first brew was ready. The sweet wash turned into a kind of ale. Heimee gave me some to taste. It didn’t kill me, not like the twenty-year-old Heims, but I concluded that alcohol was not for me.

We sieved it several times until we got a clear liquid that we transferred, via pumping, into the wash still. The wash still is this very tall wizard’s hat, entirely made of copper that ends in a large copper tube where the alcohol condenses and collects. Alcohol evaporates at a lower temperature than water, so Heimee was very careful about the temperature inside the still. To be honest, it all sounded like magic to me. We put a gross but not so deadly liquid on one side, and it comes out the other ready to dissolve metal.

To my astonishment, we repeated the process in a second, smaller still, called the spirit still.

The spirit went in the still and out came a liquid Heimee treated with the utmost respect. He didn’t offer me a sip, and he didn’t try it himself. Apparently, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can turn you blind.

Heimee studied the temperatures and turned a crank dividing the pouring spirit into cuts. He mumbled something about foreshots, hearts, and tails. I didn’t pay attention; I wasn’t taking any risks involving blindness.

“You won’t go blind by simply being close to it. I know what I’m doing,” Heimee said as he dropped some kind of floating device into the fresh spirit. “Perfect. Now all we need is to pour it into barrels.”

“Why do you do this?” I asked. The whole process dumbfounded me.

Heimee regarded me for a long time, nodded to himself, and sat on an old wooden stool he usually used to reach high shelves. He motioned for me to sit next to him.

I felt a harrowing lecture coming but did as told.

“That’s a good question,” Heimee signed. “Do you know what it’s called when someone doesn’t give up and, despite grueling adversity, still gets what they want?”

“Stubbornness?” I prodded.

Heimee chuckled. “Close. But not quite. The word you’re looking for is perseverance. This land was supposed to be utterly worthless. But it’s my land. Bequeathed to me by my parents. Any other fool would have sold it for a bolt and moved on.” Heimee looked around from the washbacks to the stills before nodding to himself. “But I turned it into a household name. I didn’t give up. Through sweat and hard labor, I produced one of the most sought beverages you can find. Sold on every establishment. Present on every worthy spirit shelf across the kingdom. It wasn’t easy. Perfecting this art took many attempts. Many, many failures. But I did not give up. I persevered. Every bottle I produce is proof of that.

“If what you’re trying to accomplish doesn’t involve hardship, sacrifice, pain, if it doesn’t require determination, if it’s so easy anyone could do it, is it really worth it? No. But if you want to make something known, something great, something right; if you want to make this a better world or leave something behind that did not exist before you set out to do it, you can only do it with perseverance. Am I making sense to you?”

“I guess,” I said. “But why whisky?”

Heimee smiled. “I kind of stumbled upon it. Maybe that’s what the Bastard wanted and saw in me the right man for the job. He certainly drinks his fair share. But mostly, I do it because I love it—because it feels right. It wasn’t always the case, though.” He placed a hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eye. “You’re stubborn. That’s a good quality. Annoying but good. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

I nodded, of course. But in the end, I concluded that Heimee had to be insane. You have to be properly mad to make whisky—turning barley into a lethal mouthwash and then having it mature well into puberty in oak barrels stored in a damp, dark cellar is utterly insane.

The worst part was that I was beginning to enjoy it.