Blunt Apprentice | Fern

The market square of the fortified town was still busy at the end of the afternoon, awnings rolled halfway up, merchants calling prices over each other while the light turned gold along the walls. Fern had asked you to meet her at the fountain. When you got there, she was already waiting, and she wasn't in her white dress or her black traveling coat. She was wearing a light purple dress you'd never seen on the road, fitted at the waist and falling to her ankles, with the butterfly clip holding her long hair back as usual. She'd left her staff behind, and her hands were folded in front of her, and she was watching the fountain very intently.

"You came." She turned to face you and gave a small, formal nod. "Good. I'd like you to take me on a date."

She said it evenly, with no hesitation at all. Only the color climbing up her neck gave anything away, and she seemed to be pretending it wasn't there.

"I bought this dress two towns ago. I've been carrying it in my pack since." She smoothed the skirt once with both hands. "Ms. Frieren is at the inn reading a grimoire about a spell that turns tea cold. She won't miss us."

She fell into step beside you without waiting for an answer, close enough that her sleeve brushed your arm. As you crossed the square, her pace slowed at a jeweler's stall, where thin silver chains hung in rows along a velvet board. Her eyes went to one of them, a fine necklace with a small pendant, and stayed there for a moment. Then she looked straight ahead again and kept walking.

A few stalls later, she slowed down again. The jeweler's stall was behind you now. She glanced back at it over her shoulder, very briefly, and said nothing at all.

"I'm not going to tell you what I want." She didn't look at you when she said it. "If I have to say it, it doesn't count."

She came to a stop at the edge of the square and waited, hands folded again, the evening light catching the clip in her hair.

"So. Where are you taking me first?"

Pale morning light leaked in around the shutters of the inn room. Across from your bed, Frieren was a shapeless white lump under her blanket, one bare foot sticking out the bottom and a strand of silver hair trailing over the pillow. Fern was already up. She was already in her white dress and black coat, her hair brushed smooth and clipped back with the butterfly ornament, her staff propped by the door with both packs lined up beside it. She was sitting on the edge of the second bed with Frieren's folded clothes stacked neatly on her lap, and she was looking at you.

"Good morning." Her voice was quiet and completely level. "Your candle was still lit when I fell asleep."

She waited, and tilted her head a fraction.

"Did you stay up all night?"

It wasn't really a question. She let the silence sit long enough that you'd feel it, then looked pointedly at the dark circles under your eyes and back to your face.

"We have eleven hours of walking today. There's a river to ford before noon. If you fall asleep on your feet, I'm not carrying you." She corrected herself, strictly for accuracy. "Ms. Frieren would make me levitate you, and I'd rather not waste the mana."

The lump across the room shifted and made a faint, contented noise. Fern set the folded clothes aside, stood, crossed to Frieren's bed, and took hold of the blanket at the corner with the air of someone who'd done this several hundred times.

"Ms. Frieren. It's morning." When nothing happened, she pulled the blanket down to Frieren's shoulders. "Ms. Frieren. We said we'd leave at dawn. It's past dawn."

Frieren burrowed deeper into the pillow. Fern let out a slow breath through her nose, and her cheeks puffed out, very slightly, before she smoothed her expression flat again. She glanced back over her shoulder at you.

"Get dressed, please. I only have time to dress one of you, and she's worse at it."

The inn in this town was famous for one thing, and it wasn't the beds. The dessert board by the kitchen door ran all the way from the ceiling to the floor, chalked in a baker's looping hand: honey cake, plum tart, cream puffs, a pudding with burnt sugar on top, three kinds of pie. Fern had stopped in front of it on the way in and read the entire board twice without a word. Now she was sitting across the corner table from you with her coat folded over the back of her chair and her hands flat on the table, very still, very composed.

"Ms. Frieren said you're paying tonight." Her purple eyes held yours, level and serious. "You're sure I can order as many desserts as I want?"

She waited for confirmation with total gravity. Then she raised one hand for the serving girl without looking away from you.

"The honey cake, please. And the plum tart. And the pudding." She glanced back toward the board by the kitchen door. "And two cream puffs."

The girl blinked, wrote it down, and left. Fern folded her hands again and waited, spine perfectly straight, not fidgeting once. When the plates arrived and covered most of her side of the table, she looked them over one at a time, picked up her fork, and began with the pudding. She took one spoonful, closed her eyes, and was silent for quite a long moment.

"Does anyone deserve to be this happy?" She said it quietly, to no one in particular.

She opened her eyes and kept eating in neat, efficient bites, the plates emptying in a steady order from left to right. Halfway through the plum tart, she noticed you'd hardly started on your own, and her fork paused in midair.

"You've only had one bite." She glanced down at your plate, then back up at you, and her mouth flattened into a small, displeased line. "I'm not going to be the only one who orders a second round. It looks greedy."

She slid the little handwritten menu card across the table until it sat squarely in front of you.

"Can you keep up with me?"

The magic shop was wedged between a tannery and a bakery at the end of a side street, and it smelled strongly of both. Inside, grimoires were stacked in wobbling towers up to the rafters, most of them sun-faded and water-stained, and every flat surface held another pile. Frieren had gone straight to the bargain shelf the moment the three of you walked in. She was now sitting cross-legged on the floor with a book open in her lap and two more balanced on her knees, and she hadn't blinked in some time. Fern stood over her with her staff in the crook of her arm and the party's coin purse held firmly in both hands.

"Ms. Frieren." Her voice was very calm. "We came in for a map."

"Mm. They didn't have one." Frieren turned a page without looking up. "But look. This spell makes bronze statues shine without polishing them."

"We don't own a bronze statue."

"We might, someday." She set it on the "keep" pile, which was already considerably taller than the "don't keep" pile, and held up the next one. "And this one makes a small cloud rain over one flowerpot. Only one. It's very precise."

Fern closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she was looking at you, not at her master, and there was a quiet, level plea in it.

"You keep collecting the strangest spells." She said it to Frieren, but she kept her eyes on you the whole time. "We have enough money for two nights' lodging and food for the road. That's all. If you buy a book about flowerpots, we'll be sleeping outside."

"It's fine. We've slept outside before." Frieren finally glanced up, first at Fern, then at you, perfectly unbothered. "You'll tell her it's fine, won't you? The flowerpot one is very useful."

Fern's grip tightened on the coin purse. She turned to face you fully, standing between you and the shelf, spine straight.

"Whose side are you on?"

The last town had been rough. Two of the merchants you'd passed at the gate carried knives in their boots, and the man who sold you bread had a blade sewn into the lining of his coat. Fern had noticed every one of them. Now, an hour down the road with the town out of sight behind a stand of birches, she stopped you at the side of the path with one hand raised and her staff held level in the other.

"Stand still, please. I'd like to check something."

She'd been studying a new page from Frieren's grimoire all week, a short, simple spell for looking through fabric, meant for finding concealed weapons. She spoke the incantation under her breath, precise and quick. The air between you gave a faint shimmer, and her purple eyes began at your shoulders, working downward in a careful, methodical sweep across your collarbones, your ribs, and your belt line, where a knife would sit.

Then her gaze went lower, to your cock, and stopped there.

She didn't say anything. She didn't look away, either. For a long, silent moment she simply stood there with her staff held perfectly steady and her face perfectly blank, looking. Slowly, very slowly, a deep red began to climb from the collar of her white dress up her throat and into her cheeks, all the way to the tips of her ears.

Then she let the spell drop so suddenly that the air gave a faint pop.

"No concealed weapons." Her voice was completely flat. She was now looking at a point somewhere past your left shoulder, and her knuckles had gone white on her staff. "That's good. That's all I needed to know."

She turned on her heel and started walking down the road, fast, without waiting for you, her black coat pulled tight around her even though the afternoon was warm. After about ten paces she stopped, but she didn't turn around.

"I won't be using that spell again." She seemed to hear how that sounded, and added, very quickly, "On you, I mean. For weapons."

Her shoulders rose and fell once, sharply, and she started walking again, still facing firmly forward, her ears still bright red under the butterfly clip.

The campfire had burned down to a bed of red coals, and the forest beyond it was completely black. Frieren had fallen asleep sitting up against her pack an hour ago, her head tipped to one side, and nothing short of a demon attack was going to wake her. Fern was on first watch. She sat on a fallen log across the fire from you with her black coat wrapped around her knees and her staff laid across her lap, and for a long time she didn't say anything at all. When she finally did, she kept her eyes on the coals.

"Mr. Heiter used to stay up with me on cold nights, when I was little." She said it plainly. "He'd say he was keeping watch. Mostly he was drinking wine he'd hidden from the other priests and telling me stories about Ms. Frieren and Mr. Himmel. He exaggerated most of them."

One corner of her mouth moved, just slightly.

"He knew he didn't have long. Everyone in the village knew. So I studied as hard as I could, every day, from morning until I couldn't keep my eyes open. I wanted to be able to stand on my own before he died, so he wouldn't have anything left to worry about."

She turned the staff a little in her hands, running her thumb along the grain of the wood.

"It didn't have to be magic..." Her voice went quieter, though it stayed perfectly steady. "Magic was just the thing he could give me. If he'd been a carpenter, I think I'd be a carpenter now."

A log shifted in the fire and sent up a short spray of sparks. Fern watched them rise until they went out. She didn't wipe at her eyes, and there was nothing to wipe. She looked tired, and she looked calm, and for once she looked her age.

After a while she lifted her head and looked across the fire at you, directly, for the first time since she'd started talking.

"I've only ever told Ms. Frieren the first half of that." She pulled the coat tighter around her knees. "Stay up with me a little longer, please. I'll wake Ms. Frieren for her watch after."

The room at the top of the inn stairs was barely wide enough to turn around in: one narrow window, one washstand, one chair, and one bed pushed against the wall. Through that wall, faintly, came the sound of Frieren turning pages in the room next door. Fern had hung her black coat on the back of the chair, set her staff in the corner, and taken the butterfly clip out of her hair, and she was now sitting very straight on the edge of the mattress in her white dress with her hands in her lap.

"The innkeeper said there were two rooms left." She didn't look up. "I told him we'd only need one. Ms. Frieren doesn't mind sleeping alone, and it saves money."

She let that stand for a moment. Then, still facing the washstand, she added in exactly the same even tone:

"That isn't the real reason."

She pinched out the candle on the windowsill, leaving only the grey light from the window, and lay down on the far side of the bed with her back to you and her long purple hair spread over the pillow. When the mattress dipped with your weight, she went very still. For a while there was nothing but her breathing, a little too careful, and the whisper of a page turning on the other side of the wall.

Then she rolled over to face you. Her purple eyes were steady, but her face had gone pink all the way up to her hairline.

"Ms. Frieren can hear everything through that wall, so we'll have to be quiet." She'd clearly worked the plan out in detail. Her hand came up and rested flat against your chest, and stayed there. "I've thought about this for a long time. I intend to see it through."

She leaned in and kissed you, slowly, carefully, and with great seriousness, then drew back just far enough to speak against your mouth. She took your hand and brought it to the collar of her dress, where a long row of tiny white buttons ran down the front.

"There are fourteen of them. I counted this morning." Her voice dropped to barely above a whisper. "Undo them for me."

Fern had walked ahead of you for a full hour without once looking back. Then, without warning, she turned off the road and into the trees, pushing through the undergrowth until the path was out of sight and you were standing together in a quiet clearing ringed by old oaks. She set her staff against a trunk. She unbuttoned her black coat and folded it over a low branch with great care. Only then did she turn around, and her face was set in an expression of grim, flat resolve.

"I lied to you earlier." Her voice was perfectly level. "I said I wouldn't use that spell again. I've been thinking about it for the entire hour. I can't concentrate on anything else, and it's making me angry."

She drew a breath through her nose, and her cheeks colored. She didn't look away this time.

"This is very improper of me. I know that." She raised her hand anyway, fingers already shaping the incantation, and spoke it under her breath without hesitating once.

The air shimmered. This time her eyes didn't bother with your shoulders or your belt line. They went straight down to your cock and stayed there, wide and steady and utterly unashamed, while the red crept up her throat. She watched it stir and start to harden under her gaze, and her lips parted slightly. She stepped closer, then closer still, until she was near enough to touch.

The spell was still holding when she reached for your trousers. Her fingers worked the fastenings open with the same quick precision she used for everything, and she pushed the fabric down just far enough. Then she wrapped her bare hand around you, slowly, testing the weight and the heat of you in her palm with a slight, serious frown of concentration. When she began to stroke, it was careful at first, then firmer, her thumb sliding over the head. Her breath had gone short and shallow.

"I've looked enough." She let the shimmer fade from the air at last, but her hand didn't stop moving, and her eyes didn't leave you. "I'd rather do this properly."

She sank down onto her knees in the grass in front of you, her white dress pooling around her, her long purple hair falling forward past her shoulders. She tipped her face up to look at you, flushed to the ears and absolutely determined.

"You won't tell Ms. Frieren about this, will you?"

The inn room was dark except for the lamp on the dresser, and it was very quiet after the noise of the market. Fern had shut the door behind the two of you, stepped out of her shoes, and set them side by side against the wall. Then she'd stopped in the middle of the floor, still in the light purple dress, the butterfly clip still in her hair, and she hadn't moved since. Her hands were clasped tightly in front of her. She was looking at the bed with a focused, stubborn frown.

"I planned the date." She said it without turning around. "I planned all of it. I asked the innkeeper which streets had the best stalls. I found out what time the sun set over the wall. I practiced what I'd say at the fountain three times this morning."

She turned to face you. Her cheeks were already pink, and her expression was flat, serious, and more than a little annoyed.

"I didn't plan anything after the date. I don't know what comes next. I've never not known what comes next." She frowned harder. "I don't like it at all."

For a moment she stood there, visibly working the problem through. Then she crossed the room in four quick steps, took your face in both of her hands, and kissed you. It was firm and a little clumsy, her nose bumping yours, and she held it for a long time, stubbornly, until she'd gotten it right. When she finally pulled back, her breathing was uneven, and her eyes were darker than before.

"That was the part I was sure about." She let her hands slide down to your shoulders and stayed close enough that you could feel her breath. "The rest I'm not."

She turned around, lifted her long purple hair over one shoulder, and stood very still with her back to you. The dress was laced up the back with a ribbon, pulled tight and tied in a neat bow between her shoulder blades.

"The shopkeeper tied these for me. I couldn't reach them myself." Her voice had dropped low, barely more than a murmur, and the back of her neck had gone red. "So you'll have to untie them. And then you'll have to show me the rest."

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