19TH OF LAST SEED
The morning began ambitiously. I bought several days’ worth of bread, milk, and water from Ambarys Rendar at the Corner Club, and broke my fast on a crust of barleybread, larded with drippings from a roasting leg of goat in the Club’s backroom: Rendar’s little treat, I suppose.
When I reached the market, I had only to slightly raise the skirts of my robes to wipe the smirk from Oengul’s face. Begrudgingly though, he stayed true to his word. I am to work for him at a rate of 13 Septims an hour. I fancy I looked a strange sight, working by the forge in once-fine robes already growing shabby from soot and work. But I tinkered, and I learnt, both by being near to the anvil and forge and seeing them worked, and by working myself. I fashioned leather for boots, the trimmings and strippings on armours, and even for the handle of a fine steel sword. More’s the point, I quickly made back the money I had given Rendar for my sustenance over the next few days…
But perhaps I grew greedy? On my way home to the Gray Quarter, I chanced upon a sailor, already drunk it seemed. An easy mark too, or so I thought, and made to take a little coin from him. I take no pride in telling you that I was caught. Caught by the wrist and beaten black and blue and kicked to the mud. What few of my faculties were not dazed spurred me to react. I hissed a brief calming cantrip into the cold air, bedazzling the sailor for long enough to let me slip into the Corner Club.
It is there I must have passed out, for I write this by candle light, in a pile of laundry beneath the Club’s wooden stairs. It seems Rendar has taken pity on me again. I only hope Oengul will do the same, and not work me overhard tomorrow.
20TH OF LAST SEED
Today has been a strange one.
And Rendar’s generosity continues. This morning I woke beneath his stairs to a bowl of milk, another crust of barleybread and a piece of honeycomb thick as two of my fingers. My bruises still ached, but this breakfast helped to put the spirit back in me. I offered coin but he’d have none of it. Only told me I would be late to the marketplace, and to the forge. Word, as ever, travels fast around the Gray Quarter, and when it seems a child of its streets is on the brink of something…Now that is a golden sort of gossip indeed.
You understand that, to go from grubbing in the mud at the bottom of this gorge, as an urchin and child of the streets, to brushing shoulders with respectable merchants, working for Nordic taskmasters as something approaching an equal—that is close to exceptional. Either it is the greatest shame a mother could wish on her child - playing lapdog to a Nord, as Suvaris Atheron does to the Shatter-Shields; as I so recently did - or it is a great honour in the making.
I intend to be the latter. I will rise from here. And after today the open world, the taste of real coin, both seemed closer than ever before. But I digress…
I worked for Oengul, as I did yesterday, fighting against my battered limbs. Rendar’s breakfast held strong throughout, and I made up for my lacklustre with unceasing labour. Still only leather, however. I have not yet learnt how to approach metal, let alone forge it.
As the sun began to set and the merchants of the marketplace packed up their wares, I bumped into Torbjorn Shatter-Shield who insisted that, if I would not work for him any longer, I should at least drink with him. I was practically dragged to Candlehearth Hall once more. Thankfully, this time, he bought. And one clay pot of mead between us became two. Then three. There was already fire in my veins by then, but Shatter-Shield insisted on one last drink. That, reader, is when I first tasted wine. Not that Nordic rotgut - mead - better suited to taking the morning’s ice from your porch than drinking. But wine. Good stuff, he said, from Cyrodiil. Its taste was rich, and so dry I nearly spluttered until I began to taste fruit. So rare a taste in this frozen land. I knew not whether to laugh or cry. It took me by surprise and overcame me.
I hardly know how I found myself under the Corner Club’s stairs once more, writing in such shaky scrawl as I do now.
Strange…That would seem to be another thing I do not remember. I have found in my tunic’s pocket a key.
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