Morning all and welcome to the Fifteen Minute Novel. Here I take the start of a story idea and work on it for fifteen minutes a day. I started with an old writing prompt that interested me, cleaned it up a bit to fit the basic outline of the story I want to write and then set aside fifteen minutes each week day to see it grow. Each morning’s writing starts with the last sentence of the day before. And so now we have the story of Kasca…
Day 112: After eating, she dusted off her hands and got to work.
After eating, she dusted off her hands and got to work. Kasca chopped, mixed and ground to paste ingredients. She let concoctions simmer and steep and distill. She worked late into the evening trying to get as much done as she could. The rush of customers had been quite startling.
As se worked, she wondered if it was just this neighborhood that lacked a healer. She thought of the lord who called her for the boy. He was located not too far away. In theory he should have gone to a more high-end establishment, but Kasca knew that sometimes proximity was an incentive. She might have been closer than the healer he usually frequented.
Slowly Kasca’s thoughts shifted from her need to restock, to the boy and his family. She knew the potion she gave him would work, but there was something off about the situation. She was aware that many of the nobles tended to treat their children as small adults. She also knew there might be a separate play room in a different part of the house.
However, nothing in the room looked like it belonged to a child of that age. While there were books and papers on the desk, they weren’t lesson books and writing practice pages. ‘They looked more like ledgers and transaction documents.’
Kasca was certain she saw at least one wax seal on the various rolls placed on the desk. ‘Doesn’t seem like something a child would be given.’
She could be wrong and the boy was precocious and studying legal documents as his family prepared him for a later position of solicitor or magistrate. Kasca frowned. It still didn’t seem quite right.
‘Maybe when the boy took ill they moved him to a different chamber to keep him away from the other children.’
While possible, Kasca also recalled the boy looked nothing like the man. The child, despite his pallor and reddened spots was dark with a more olive completion while the man was fair and blonde. ‘The boy could resemble his mother,’ she thought.
It was an odd little mystery. ‘Which I don’t have time to solve,’ she thought to herself. ‘I have more than enough here.’
When the evening deepened into night, Kasca was forced to admit her day was done. She created as much as she could with what she had. Kasca also made a list to take with her to the market in the morning. She would stock up on what she could and possibly stock her larder with more than her travel rations. ‘I might even work out my mattress issue.’
As Kasca cleaned up and locked down the shop for the night, she thought about the mattress. Generally speaking in Deva to obtain a mattress she would purchase the cloth needed from the cloth merchants and then gather the stuffing needed herself. She was partial to new hay and meadow sweet as were many in her district. Each spring there was a grand refilling of the mattresses as the seams were picked out and the old stuffing replaced with new.
The mattress would then be resewing and put back into use. As the edges refused to take more stitches the material was curled in, the mattress growing a little smaller over time until new material needed to be purchased and the process started again.
As it was spring, Kasca thought she might be able to find what she needed close by as she could not simply go into the fields or trade with a local farmer for the new hay and meadow sweet.
