The next morning, Lissa woke groggily. She had not slept as well as she normally did, and her body had decided it would wake up even earlier than usual in protest. The light from the small gaps between the shutters in her south-facing window was the faint red-grey light of early dawn. The house was still and quiet this early; even her father would only just be getting up at this time. She stretched and shifted restlessly under her woolen covers, trying to go back to sleep. Soon though, her eyes remained open of their own accord. As she slowly, grumpily roused, her thoughts began to solidify, beginning where they had seemed to end off in the night—frustrated and full of discontent. She stewed for several minutes before the events in the moonlight finally rose to the surface of her awareness.
She bolted upright, eyes going big as saucers as she remembered the moonlight causing her drab bracelet to glow. Was that a dream, or had it really happened? Looking at it now in the meager portion of dawn light reaching through the shutters, the bracelet was as bland and boring and simple as ever. But hadn't there been a little purple flower? Without even really processing the thought, she dashed to the far side of her room, fussed with the shutter latch, and threw the window wide open. There, rimmed in the red-orange glow of first light was a tiny stalk of purple flowers just peeking up over the windowsill.
It was real.
This was huge. This changed everything. Her bracelet had glowed, and she had seen it! She reached out the window, quick as a flash, and plucked that pretty stalk of flowers. Of course she had string somewhere and after a few minutes of searching, tied the stalk upside down to dry. She was keeping that blessed flower as a memento; no one would convince her that she hadn't seen what she saw.
Job accomplished, she suddenly realized how chilly it was and shut the window once again, and returned to her bed to snuggle under her thick covers. It was slightly uncharacteristic of her not to go charging straight to her parents' bedroom to announce her discovery, but she had become frustrated with her parents' responses around disappointment. They hadn't minded not being woken quite so often, and Lissa was beginning to gain a small sense of self-reliance. It was time for her to think about what to do.
For Lissa, the most difficult part about thinking was how easily she was distracted by her own thoughts. Imagined scenes of her future triumphs were interspersed with the moment in the moonlight replayed over and over again, and neither were terribly helpful to Lissa in planning her next steps. As the dawn outside grew brighter and burned away the low fog that had risen from the night's melting frost, Lissa's scattered thoughts slowly came to some conclusions. She wanted to make things, so it was reasonable to start by learning more about how to make things. And she wanted to understand her bracelet, so it also made sense to start with how yarns were made than her mom's ability to make clothes. So it was aunt Igmi who she should learn from.
When she finally began to hear her mother moving about in the kitchen, Lissa dressed and went to help prepare breakfast. Tecka was surprised and pleased by the girl's good mood, which had been absent as of late, and she gladly accepted her daughter's help. Lissa bode her time, waiting until both parents were present to make her move.
Only once both Tecka and Drust were seated at the table for breakfast did Lissa announce, "I want to apprentice with Aunt Igmi!"
The two stunned parents shared a conversation of expressions only, and it was Drust who finally answered, "Why do you want to be her apprentice all of a sudden?"
Lissa, who despite her many qualities was not yet practiced at concealing anything in a negotiation, said, "Because my bracelet glowed in the moonlight."
Her parents exchanged another look, this one of confusion. This time it was Tecka who asked, "What? What do you mean, Lissa?"
The dam holding back Lissa's words broke, and all her thoughts came rushing out of her mouth at once, with the same level of organization and coherence her parents had come to expect from her. She spoke in one uninhibited stream, "Last night when I couldn't sleep, I got up to tell Anella that she's mean to me, and then little tiny spider webs in my bracelet glowed in the moonlight, so then I went back to sleep, and when I woke up I remembered the purple flower, and then I thought about how to make Lost Treasures and decided that I need to be good at making yarn, and I can learn from Aunt Igmi!" She paused only long enough to inhale loudly, and continued, "Just because I can't do magic now, can't I be an apprentice anyway? Please? PUH-LEAASE! PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE???"
There were so many questions that Tecka and Drust had about what Lissa had just said, but the girl's request wasn't up to them to decide. Igmi would have to decide whether or not to attempt to apprentice hyper-active Lissa at such a young age and without the aid of a profession's skills. After trying to get more information out of her (What purple flower? Are you sure you won't get bored in a few weeks?), and cautioning her to speak more respectfully to the moon, her parents agreed to at least talk with aunt Igmi about some sort of arrangement.
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As it turned out, Igmi was willing to attempt to take on Lissa as an early apprentice. It wasn't like such things were never done, and she felt it to be a reasonable trade given that 1) Lissa had shown an aptitude for spinning while they were traveling, and 2) her own son, Bup, had already become an apprentice to Drust in all but title. Since they were still so young, neither Lissa nor Bup were allowed to walk to their apprenticeships alone. So, every morning right after breakfast, Drust walked Tecka and Lissa to the boutique to fetch Bup from Igmi and Hayzen's shop next door. Lissa would occasionally help her mother, but most of her days were spent with Igmi, learning (with frequent distractions) about her aunt's profession. Because Lissa was so easily distracted in conversation, Igmi decided that verbal instruction was simply untenable, and instead spent a lot of mental effort choosing physical tasks that needed to be done for the shop that would help Lissa build her skills and knowledge as a spinner, knowledge like: different fiber types, breed variation within fiber type, and the different means of preparing and spinning each fiber in order to produce the kind of finished yarn the spinner desired.
To that end, she started Lissa off with a simple 2-ply yarn that she needed several pounds of in order to fulfill a bulk saddle blanket order someone had placed for early spring delivery. The yarn needed to be thick and needed to be worsted in both fiber preparation and manner of spin. Lissa had done some fiber preparation in her life, but that was mostly the cleaning process: skirting her father's wool of dirt and any remaining poop, scouring it of waxy yellow lanolin, and picky out any remaining grass or leaves. What she had done very little of was actually taking clean wool and preparing it to be spun. She learned just how much work and how many hours it took to work an entire fleece through the long nail-sharp tines of the wool combs used for a worsted-style preparation.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Lissa had secured one of the pair of tall, pointy combs, tines pointing straight up, to the edge of a low workbench that Igmi had prepared for her. She carefully loaded it with small handfuls of clean, white wool from a large basket next to her. When a little less than a third of the length of the tines were full, she took the second comb and began carefully, but clumsily, combing through the very ends of the wispy wool that she had loaded onto the secured comb. As she worked, the comb in her hand began to gather clumps of the wool. She continued combing steadily deeper into the wool until all that remained on the stationary comb were short tangled clumps. She slid them up off of the comb, placing them into another basket. Aunt Igmi had explained that this 'discard' wouldn't be able to be used for her current project, but it would still be useful for other things and shouldn't thrown away.
Careful not to let any of the fiber slip off the comb in her hand, she loosened the clamps on the stationary comb and swapped the combs' places so that the full comb was now clamped tightly into place on the edge of her workbench. She began combing through the white fluff again, slowly transferring the fibers to the comb in her hand. While she worked, Lissa imagined that she wasn't just working with common wool, but that it somehow had the same incredible spider silk-like fiber that her bracelet had shown in the moonlight. She daydreamed that if she took the yarn that she would spin from this wool out into the moonlight, it would glow just as brightly as her bracelet. Those daydreams and the tactile nature of combing wool helped her to focus on her task.
Three transfers later, she was left with a small pile of discard and a clamped comb full of perfectly aligned fibers. From nearby on her workbench, she grabbed her diz, a small, slightly curved shell that had been sanded smooth with a hole in the center of it about as big around as a ladybug. She placed it against the fluffy tips of the wool, convex side facing her. It took a frustrating amount of coaxing with her small fingers to get the wool started through the hole in its center, but finally, she was able to pull a long, straight tuft of her beautifully combed fibers through the diz. Lissa was careful not to pull the wool all the way apart from the comb, but worked very, very carefully to pull all the wool off the comb in one long strand.
It wasn't her first time doing all of this, or even the second time—that time had been a complete disaster—but she was still very much a novice, and the 'combed top' (as her aunt called the long, coiling strand that she was pulling out of the diz) still ended up a bit lumpy and inconsistent. That was alright though; even looking at all its lumps and imperfections, Lissa was pretty sure that she would still be able to spin what they needed out of it. Having gotten all the useful fiber off the comb successfully in one long strand, she coiled it gently around her palm into a loose little nest, and placed it with several identical nests in a third basket nearby. The very last bit of fiber on the stationary comb went into the second basket of discard, and Lissa paused for a moment to appreciate her progress.
Aunt Igmi had worked with her for a few hours each morning until she was confident that Lissa could work with the sharp combs by herself without close supervision. That gave Lissa a sense of pride she hadn't felt before. Sure, the fiber she had prepared was far from professional, and she didn't have anything of the natural grace and instinct that someone with the [comb fiber] skill would have, but she had learned this on her own without any magical assistance, and her aunt trusted her to work on it on her own. She looked at the baskets around her and groaned when she saw just how much wool she had left to prepare. She was barely through a quarter of the large basket of clean but uncombed wool after a week of work. To be fair, she was only actually working on the fiber for a few hours each day. At six, Lissa's ability to sit still was severely strained for even that long.
She got up to see if there was anything fun to do. Her little body stretched involuntarily after sitting so long. She grabbed the smaller basket that held the discarded wool and wandered over to the far side of the room where her aunt Igmi was working on testing the local dyes that the [king] had included in their welcoming gifts. The narrow woman was concentrating, jotting down—not exactly words—but a sort of improvised pictographic system in order to keep track of her experiments with the different dyes. Lissa couldn't read them, and she opened her mouth to ask what they said when Igmi held up a finger to indicate that Lissa should wait until she was finished writing. The tiny girl huffed and squirmed, but complied until the soft scratching of her aunt's stylus against the sheet of impressionable inner tree bark came to a halt.
"Yes, Lissa?" Igmi addressed her.
"I'm all done. This is the discard." Lissa held up the basket with only a small bit of fluff in the bottom.
"You're not done, Lissa. It's not even lunch time," her aunt replied. "You know where the discard goes."
Lissa frowned deeply, and announced, "but I'm bored..."
Igmi, not the least bit amused, scoffed, "Child, why do you think it's called work? Because it's playtime? No. Tell me again, why did you want to be my apprentice, hm?"
Lissa, still not moving away from the clay bowls with pretty colored liquid and small bits of fiber inside, pouted as she answered, "because I want to make magic things. But—"
Igmi cut her off, saying, "That's right. You want to make magic things, and you don't want to wait for the normal age and time to begin. So, I agreed to take you on early in exchange for Drust taking on Bup." From her expression, the woman thought that Drust was definitely getting the easier end of this bargain. "If you want to do something extraordinary, you have to be very diligent doing the ordinary."
Igmi honestly had no idea if Lissa or anyone would be able to work magic into textiles. None of the skills she could see within the skill trees of her profession of [spinner] allowed her do such a thing, but there were so many things out in the wide world. She wouldn't take the child's motivation and crush it, rather she would attempt to leverage it toward Lissa's own good. Even if she could never make a flying carpet or whatever it was she wanted to make, learning Igmi's trade would be good for the child and (mostly) helpful for their whole family.
Lissa's eyes hardened and her pouted annoyance turned into a determination, "You're right, aunt Igmi. I will do extraordinary things, and if I have to be..." she began to loose a little steam, "... bored to get there, then... that's what I'll be."
Igmi watched the child turn sharply on her heel, swing around so quickly that she almost knocked over one of Imgi's dye experiments, and stomp over to deposit the discarded wool into a larger wooden box full of short cuts and fuzzy wool nepps. Every time Lissa was reminded of what she was working toward, Igmi got at least another half hour of work out of her. The narrow woman shook her head and smiled a small hidden smile to herself. For being so young, she was learning quite well and her combed top was becoming quite consistent. Maybe she would reward Lissa with some pretty-colored silk to play with when she went home for the day.
Well... Maybe.