With a cup in one hand, the hem of her dress in the other, and a
bottle under her arm, she could barely keep up with Hertha as they
raced out the kitchen to the dining room, waved to a frowning Joyhdee
in passing, and circled around Welmer as he entered the kitchen.
Their dash continued down the hall to the "children's" bedrooms, where
they reconvened in Hertha's private quarters.
The contents of the bottle shrank as the girls remained secure in
Hertha's room. Her parents had invested in a lock for her room ("To
protect their investment in her spellbook," she would explain), so
when Welmer found them out and made all kinds of threats through the
door, the girls just giggled louder. Once Welmer and all the
entertainment he brought were gone, the ladies took to discussing the
guild. As luck would have it, both of them were familiar with Gleed
and one of them made a joking reference to the size of his codpiece.
Well, it all went downhill from there, with both of them wildly
speculating on the ***ual abilities of a host of their fellow
guildmembers. To be fair, both women had been discussed in such a
fa****on by many of those same young guildsmen, but those same
guildsmen would surely blanch to hear themselves discussed in so
equally base a manner.
To Ehlissa's thinking (and, though a little tipsy, she was amply
coherent), Hertha seemed to be speaking from experience no more than
Ehlissa was. Very possibly, then, many of the rumors about her were
actually false.
"Why do your friends hate me?" Hertha asked out of the blue, or as if
she could read Ehlissa's mind.
Ehlissa tried to shrug it off. "I don't know," she lied. "I guess
they just don't know you well enough?"
Hertha was not quite satisfied or done with the topic and tried prying
for more particulars. "Did I do anything to one of them?" she asked,
and "What do they say about me?"
Ehlissa hated this topic and wished there was some way to shut her up
or, better yet, redirect her to the subject of spells. Perhaps the
most direct approach… "Hey, do you have your spellbook here?" Ehlissa
asked.
Hertha looked apprehensive about answering and Ehlissa could not blame
her. Spellbooks were extremely valuable – maybe more so than human
life sometimes. To protect their homes from inviting bulglarly or
worse, most novices kept their spellbooks under lock and key at the
guildhall anyway.
"Do you want to go for a walk?" Hertha asked abruptly.
It was not an unpleasant proposition. Hertha and Welmer were the
children of the Parstiche family that owned several butchers' shops
and a tavern in the Artisans' Quarter.
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