I need to get my beruf certification as soon as possible.
Bierce had slapped me on the back and said, “Josef, I’m counting on you,” when he became the head of the Ink Guild, and I felt the true weight of that slap more than ever now.
“...Woah!” My heavy thoughts were suddenly interrupted by Heidi jabbing a finger between my eyebrows.
“Drop the frown already and eat up, okay?”
“What’s with you all of a sudden...?”
“I need your help for sure to develop the new ink. I won’t be able to make so many different kinds myself, so shape up. There’s gonna be a lot of stuff I want to try tomorrow,” Heidi said as she piled meat onto my plate. It took strength and stamina to mix oil and materials together for hours at a time while making this new ink, which meant Heidi would have a real hard time doing it by herself.
Am I just an ink-making machine to you, Heidi? Huh? I thought, but despite feeling a little frustrated at my wife for once again thinking about nothing but research, I ate the meat on my plate and drank my behelle.
“Isn’t this great, Dad? I’m so glad that little girl decided to be my patron. Everything’s going so well now thanks to that.”
Although our workshop was in a better spot than before, Bierce remained the head of the Ink Guild, and the deals with nobles made in the past were all resting on the guildmaster’s ultimate decision. The fact that Bierce was the only one in the workshop with a beruf certification was still unchanged as well.
The only things that’re going well are the new ink selling and you getting research funds. Is that all that matters to you?! Come on! I silently yelled at Heidi, who was beaming thoughtlessly as she finished her dinner.
Ever since then, Lady Myne, our patron, visited the workshop seemingly every day to help with our research on colored ink. The colors changed dramatically based on the oil and materials used, and faded over time once put on paper. Overall, the research was leading into a string of failures. But we kept making different kinds of colored ink despite all the problems, with Lady Myne writing it all down.
“What to do, what to do...?” Heidi murmured, getting so absorbed in her research that she would forget to sleep and eat. She kept repeating that she needed to make ink good enough for Lady Myne like it was a magic spell as she changed the kinds of inks and searched the market for materials that looked like they would make good colors. None of that was especially new, so despite my exasperation, I wasn’t really worried about her; all I had to do was wait for the right opportunities to stuff food into her mouth and watch for when she started wavering in her seat so that I could throw her into bed.
Sadly, that wasn’t enough this time. Heidi had been murmuring something about there having to be a secret to all this while chewing on her morning bread, but I just ignored her and went ahead to the workshop. Eventually, a terrified lehange came rushing up to me.
“Mr. Josef, Mrs. Heidi’s been arrested or something!”
“What?!”
She hadn’t shown up at the workshop yet, but I’d assumed that she was so late because she had fallen asleep during breakfast—in reality, she had been captured by art workshop employees after she started fishing around inside while they were drawing. What the hell is she thinking?! I thought as I raced down the street with the lehange.
It wasn’t long before I found Heidi surrounded by angry-looking craftsmen.
“Heidi, what are you doing here?!”
“I was chewing on my bread, trying to think of good ideas, and suddenly... here I am. Why am I here?” Heidi tilted her head at me while blinking sleepily.
I immediately shook her awake. “How am I supposed to know that?! Wake up already!” I yelled, then deeply apologized to all of the hard-eyed art craftsmen watching us. “I’m sorry my sleep-deprived wife caused you trouble.”
Whether she had consciously come here or not, her goal had definitely been to find out the secret behind making ink not change colors when put on paper. But it was a major crime to steal trade secrets like that. I had to convince them that Heidi had just wandered over here sleepily, with no hidden intentions whatsoever.
“Quit messing around and tell the truth! She wouldn’t just sleepwalk over to a place like this!”
“If she weren’t sleepwalking, she wouldn’t be here at all. We have no business here.”
“Obviously she was here to steal the secrets to our paint production methods!”
“I’m a leherl working in an ink workshop and she’s its successor. We don’t need to know about paint; it has nothing to do with ink. And we both know how serious the punishments are for stealing trade secrets. We would never do that.”
While I was busy getting yelled at by a bunch of furious craftsmen, Heidi had started to fall asleep on my arm. Despite her own husband desperately apologizing for her own blunders, her head started to bob. By the time she was audibly snoring, the craftsmen had all calmed down and were just shaking their heads and expressing their sympathy for what a crazy wife I had ended up with.
“Just keep a better eye on her, alright?”
“Absolutely. It’ll never happen again.”
Heidi didn’t wake up no matter how much I shook her, so I ended up carrying her to the workshop, at which point fourth bell rang. Noon had come, with us making no progress despite the fact that Lady Myne always came in the afternoon.
...Can I actually survive as this woman’s husband? I was so annoyed by Heidi’s bizarre behavior that thoughts of divorce briefly flashed through my mind as I tossed her into
