Shut up... I wanna go back to sleep, I thought, pulling the blanket over my head. But that just made the crying louder.
...Gah! Why is there crying so close to me?! Oh, wait! Kamil!
My eyes shot open and I made immediate eye contact with Mom, who was hefting Kamil up and preparing to breastfeed. She smiled.
“You slept well, honey. It’s almost time for fifth bell to ring.”
Despite having been asleep for so long, I still felt like I hadn’t slept enough. I rubbed my eyes and looked at Kamil. My tiny little brother was giving his all to drink Mom’s milk. His sucking mouth, his unfocused, wandering eyes, and his teensy-weensy clenched fists were all super cute.
“I’m back. Is Kamil awake?”
“Hi, Tuuli. He’s drinking milk right now,” I said in the direction of the door as Tuuli, having returned from the celebration downstairs, poked her head through the door.
She walked over, sat on the side of the bed, and said “He really is tiny” while looking at Kamil.
“You and Myne were both this small too once,” Mom replied with a smile. I really didn’t know how to respond since I didn’t remember that.
Kamil moved his head away as if satisfied, and Mom patted his back gently. He let out a tiny burp.
“Not only were you slow and bad at drinking milk, Myne, it always dribbled out of the corner of your mouth. And when you finally got it down, you’d suddenly throw up out of nowhere,” Mom continued, her face crinkling up in a nostalgic smile as she looked at me.
She was basically saying that I was a handful from day one, so I pursed my lips in a pout. “I don’t know what you expect me to say about that. I was just a baby.”
“Well,” began Tuuli, “you still eat really slowly, and when you eat too much you groan about your stomach hurting, so I think you’re basically the same way now.”
“Tuuli, that’s so mean!”
“Oh, but she’s right,” Mom chimed in.
If she was going there then I had something to say too. The bread we ate here was just way too hard. It was actually too hard to bite into normally, so I always had to soak it in my soup or drink first. Waiting for it to soften slowed me down whether I liked it or not, that’s all. I only ate slow because the bread was hard. It wasn’t my fault.
“How can you blame the bread when you’re the only one who eats slow, Myne? It takes you so long because you leave it in the soup ’til it goes all soggy.”
“Well, that’s ’cause it’s too hard to eat otherwise!”
It felt like I was even worse at chewing now that I had gotten used to the fluffy bread we had in the temple, but now that I was back at home, I fought each day to appreciate the unique experience of eating rock-hard bread.
As Tuuli and I kept up our back-and-forth, Mom waved us away with a wry smile. “I think I need to change Kamil’s diaper now, so...”
“Let me do it! I want to try!” Tuuli said with shining eyes before beginning her attempt to change his diaper. I watched closely, hoping to learn how it was done so I could help one day too, like a proper older sister.
She removed the cloth wrapped around him, wiped his butt clean using the clean part, and then wrapped a new cloth around him. Done.
Tuuli let out a satisfied “Finished!” and beamed a smile. She had done it without much issue, and it sure seemed pretty easy to do.
I’ll try to do it next time.
Tuuli speedily tossed the balled-up dirty cloth into a basket before looking out of the window at the blue sky. “So, Mom... Was that the last diaper we have for Kamil? It’s a little late in the day, but we’ll get caught up in the rain if we don’t wash them soon.”
“Oh, you’re right. We should hurry. Could you take care of what we have for me? I had Gunther put up some strings in the kitchen to dry diapers, but they’re a little high up. You’ll have to ask him to hang them.”
As Mom and Tuuli moved things along, I peered out of the window myself, my head cocked to the side. There were some clouds out, but the sky was perfectly blue. I couldn’t see any signs that the weather would be getting worse soon, other than the sun setting like always.
“...How can you both tell the weather’s going to get worse?”
“How can you not, Myne? If we couldn’t tell when the weather would be bad, it’d be too dangerous for us to go to the forest. Oh, but anyway, we need to hurry and get the laundry started! Let’s go, Myne,” Tuuli said while pulling me out the front door. It was at that point that it hit me—
“Sir Damuel told me not to go outside...”
I did kind of feel that I would be fine just going to the well, but I had been firmly told that going outside would bring danger to everyone around me. And considering the recent death of the head of the Ink Guild and me being attacked during Spring Prayer, going outside wasn’t something I could take lightly.
Tuuli, having heard Damuel firmly tell me to stay inside until he came to get me, slumped her shoulders as she remembered. “We shouldn’t disobey a noble, right? Well, I’ll go do the laundry then. You can start dinner, Myne. Dad and I aren’t that hungry since we ate a lot at the celebration, so just soup should be fine. Our neighbors gave us some spring veggies and sausage.”
As I looked at the vegetables I was going to make soup with, I remembered that I had only eaten soup and bread for lunch. I put a hand on my stomach. “Well... I’m a
