Another Amica was given responsibility for the ovens, although Charlee continued to clean the solar panels. Once she had come inside each morning, she would present herself at her table and Skuld would tell her what she wanted from her for the day.
Charlee’s starting responsibilities included peeling and preparing vegetables, something she had considered she was already adept at doing, as she had been prepping vegetables at home for years. She learned very quickly that she barely understood the first thing about such a lowly task.
The vegetables had to be cleaned properly. This usually involved soaking in a solution of vinegar and water. The vinegar was made here in this big kitchen, but that was an advanced skill Skuld would pass on to only the most gifted Amica. As most of the vegetables came directly from the roof garden, picked carefully by a pair of Amica for the ideal degree of ripeness, they usually required scrubbing as well as soaking.
Charlee wondered if the top layer of the skin on her hands would flake away as she had them constantly immersed in the acidic solution, but Skuld had given her a little glass pot of ointment with no label and told her to rub it in each night before bed. The ointment, which smelled like nothing she had ever sniffed, kept her skin soft despite the vinegar.
Skuld was a martinet about vegetable preparation and would stand over Charlee’s table, lecturing about the proper way to hold a knife, the proper way to slice carrots, wash lettuce, and more. But Charlee was not the only one Skuld would shriek at. One of the other tables was reserved exclusively for the preparation of meats, and that table was scoured and sterilized obsessively. One of the big tables was used mostly for the preservation of things: bottling vegetables, pickling everything, drying and curing. In late summer and into the fall, the work on that table spilled over to the others as the produce from the garden on the roof and produce bought from the fresh organic food market at wholesale prices was prepped and preserved and the long rows of bottles and cans, barrels and bags were stored in the root cellar. The produce in the root cellar would feed the entire household for the coming winter.
Charlee’s afternoons were filled with cleaning. The entire house was cleaned from top to bottom by the more junior Amica. There was a year-long schedule that was consulted daily. Clean by Amica standards was a standard that Charlee had never even dreamed was possible. The cleaning schedule included seasonal maintenance, and Charlee’s education leapt upwards when each Amica armed herself with toolkits that included hammers, saws, pry-bars and more, and took to installing storm windows, repairing wiring, cleaning gutters, fixing hot air ducts and more. There were no men in Ylva’s house, but it was a better maintained and working house than any Charlee had ever known.
After a year, Charlee was moved out of the kitchen and into the one other workroom on the main floor, long before Skuld was even close to being pleased with her skills enough to move her onto one of the other tables.
The other workroom was simply called ‘the store’ by the Amica. It took Charlee a few days to realize that they meant “store” in the sense that the room was a storage facility and a place where things could be acquired. What things?
Charlee’s earliest tasks in the store were once again cleaning and maintenance, and she learned that yet another level of clean existed. The need for cleanliness and sterility were even more necessary in the store, for it was here that, for example, the ointment she had used on her hands to prevent drying from the vinegar solution was prepared.
There were dozens and dozens of ointments, salves, lotions and preparations made in the store, and Charlee was quite certain that she was seeing only a small portion of the range of possible products. They encompassed simple beauty treatments, such as skin cleansers, toners, tighteners and moisturizers, and even makeup, to household cleansers, to preparations for washing laundry and people. Charlee’s first solo project was to make more of the pretty-smelling soap they used, and she completely ruined the mixture, resulting in a foul pot of oozing fat. The carbolic mixture had reddened her hands beyond the help of moisturizers. A week later, her skin had peeled. But by then, she had produced another batch of soap that had passed inspection.
The store also made products that were medicinal in nature, but Charlee learned this only by listening in to the Amica working at the other benches over fresh blueberries and their leaves and stems, and realized that what they were making was a painkiller that far surpassed anything Tylenol could claim to ease. Her attention was caught, for she was reminded sharply of the big bed in the quiet room, and Ylva’s soft command to relax and sleep while she worked at Charlee’s wounded face. The whatever-it-was they had made her sniff had knocked her out as efficiently as any operating room injection.
After the soap incident, Charlee was shown how to make a simple kohl preparation that nearly everyone in the house used as eye liner. In its more liquid form, by adjusting the amount of wax and oil, and other ingredients, it became mascara.
Other more complex projects were given to her by Silia, who supervised the store. Charlee began to realize that the formal training she had been waiting to begin had started the day she stepped into the house with her single duffel bag. There was no such thing as formal training here. There were no classrooms. The teachers were Amica who knew more than she did, and everyone learned by doing. It was a highly practical apprenticeship.
After that, Charlee found her arduous duties a little easier to bear. She began to ask questions about everything she did, as that was how she would learn not just what she was to do, but why.
In her third year, Charlee was still working in the store, but she had advanced through beauty products and household products, on to very basic medicinals and health preparations. It was there that Charlee realized her learning would be sharpest, for in order to properly understand how the preparations worked, she needed to know advanced anatomy and biology, plus a good grounding in chemistry and hands-on medicine. She realized she was learning by practice what a good country doctor would have known in the nineteenth century.
But she did no book-learning. Everything was explained to her as she did the work. Silia or one of the more senior Amica would walk her through the first repetition, telling her about the preparation, what it was used for, secondary uses that it might be useful for, plus side effects. There were no serious side effects, unless the patient had a severe allergy to the common ingredients they used, as the preparations were non-toxic and depended more upon the mysterious powers of plants and herbs to do their curing than the stringent and harsh power of chemicals.
Shortly into her third year in the house, Ylva sent for Charlee.
Charlee brushed off her hands and then washed them carefully, for she had been making a coagulant and it could tighten the surface of her skin up painfully if she let it dry there. Then she peered in the mirror to ensure her appearance was suitable and made her way up to Ylva’s office on the second floor.
Charlee passed through the front sitting room into the office itself. Ylva was reading one of the big, ancient tomes that were kept on the shelves in here and accessed by no one without her permission.
Ylva took off her glasses and smiled at her. “Charlee, it’s been a while since I saw you. You’re looking well.”
“They said you went away,” Charlee said.
“Up to the north of the state for a few days, visiting an old friend.” Ylva smiled. “Are you happy, Charlee?”
Charlee considered the question. “Yes,” she said, surprised. “Very.” And she was. She was learning so much, and endless questions were welcomed. Where else could she have got to dabble in dozens of pools of knowledge, feeding her curiosity with an endless supply of things she didn’t know, that she hadn’t dreamed existed.
“Are the older Amica still running you off your feet?”
When she had first begun here, the more senior Amica had resented her, just as Ylva had predicted. As the more senior of them supervised the younger Amica, they took their resentment out upon her by giving Charlee the worst,
the dirtiest and the hardest duties. She had been a slave to their every wish.
“Not anymore,” Charlee told Ylva. “I think they quit because I wouldn’t complain.”
“Good for you. Silia and Skuld report very favorably about you.” She picked up her glasses and wrote on the paper in front of her, next to the big book, and tore the sheet off. “I want you to run an errand for me. The address is on the outside of the note. Deliver the note to the address.”
Charlee looked at the address. “I can walk from here.”
“Yes, it’s a pleasant twenty minutes from here. Ask for Anja. Take your coat. It’s brisk out today.”
It was brisk, and very nice to be out in the fresh air. Some of the Amica were responsible for the rooftop garden and spent most of their summer mornings weeding and planting. It seemed to be very pleasant work. Charlee wondered when and even if that duty would become hers. She didn’t fret about it, though. Ylva’s house and the schedules and routines and even the structure of one’s apprenticeship were organic and cyclic. Sooner or later, Charlee would be ready to learn the lessons imparted from the responsibility of feeding the household.
She didn’t get out of the house very often. There was no restriction upon leaving the house. It was simply that her duties were long and hard and she didn’t have the energy to socialize or even go shopping after that. She had money, if she needed it. On top of the room and board that Ylva provided, she paid a small stipend to each Amica for the work they did to keep the household running. But Charlee didn’t need to buy anything, for everything she could possibly need could be found right there in the house. It was made, or there was no need for it.
So she enjoyed being out of the house for the change it brought, but the hurried and harried pedestrians looked sour, and the sound of the traffic along Fifth Avenue was louder than she ever remembered it being.
When she reached the address she was looking for, she found it was a big, boxy building with few windows on the ground floor. It was made of red brick and was an ugly, squat thing with three floors. Weeds grew out of the cracks in the sidewalk.
Tentatively, she knocked on the iron door that seemed to be the main door. There was no buzzer. After a few minutes of steady knocking, the door opened and a girl who couldn’t have been much older than Charlee looked out. “Hi.”
Charlee checked the name on the folded note. “I’m looking for Anja.”
The girl stepped back and opened the door so Charlee could come through. “You shoulda come round the back. Back’s always open,” she said, her Bronx thicker than Charlee’s had ever been.
Charlee looked at her again. “Are you...?” Then she halted. She had no idea where she was, or where this building fit into Ylva’s world. She had to be cautious until she understood more.
“I’m Bree,” the girl said and gave her a quick smile. Bree was wearing a pair of pants and a tailored shirt that looked incredibly expensive and completely out of place in this old building. “C’mon, I’ll take you to Anja.” She led Charlee through a short, dim passageway and pushed open another door. The door gave onto a factory-sized room that rose right through all three floors. The windows in the second and third floors spilled natural light onto the room. There were dozens of women here, all working over gigantic tables.
And everywhere, there was fabric. There were rolls of the stuff, lying on racks that reached up dozens of feet high. Many more lay on the tables, unrolled enough to spill the fabric across the surface.
Other tables held machinery: sewing machines, cutting machines, and even more machinery whose functions Charlee couldn’t even begin to guess at. Then there were racks of finished garments at one end of the room. Charlee couldn’t see all of them from the doorway, but the little she could see looked odd.
“Over here,” Bree said and walked in between the tables and their operators, waving here and there. She took Charlee over to a woman who had the pure white hair of a very old woman, but her hair hung down to her waist and curled softly. The woman looked up as Charlee approached and Bree waved to her. “This is Anja,” Bree said.
Anja seemed to be very young, despite the hair. She looked at Charlee with her brows raised. “Hello,” she said cautiously.
Charlee held out the folded note. “It’s from Ylva. She asked me to deliver this to you.”
Anja unfolded the note and read it quickly. Then she folded it again, and looked Charlee over. “What are you wearing?” she asked.
Charlee pulled self-consciously at the sweat pants and T-shirt she wore under the peacoat. “I guess they’re house clothes. I work a lot. Physically.”
Bree grinned, like she had said something funny.
Anja crossed her arms. “So do I work a lot. Physically. Am I wearing what you’re wearing?”
Charlee took in Anja’s nicely fitting skirt and the jacket she wore over it. The jacket had three-quarter sleeves, which wouldn’t get in the way as she worked. There was a blouse underneath that looked like it might be silk. Charlee could feel herself blushing. “I guess, no. You’re not,” she replied to Anja.
Anja snorted. “I should think not,” she said and twirled her finger in the air. “Turn around.”
“Excuse me?”
“Spin. Like a top. I want to see your shape.”
“But I should be getting back.”
“Ylva has a dozen or more apprentices. She can do without you for now. Turn, I say.”
Helplessly, Charlee turned.
“A nice figure,” Anja said. “A bit tall and a bit skinny, but workable. Bree, get her working at the beginner’s loom.”
Bree jerked her head in an unmistakeable ‘follow me’ movement.
Charlee bit her lip as Anja put her hands on her hips, daring Charlee to refute her order.
Charlee followed Bree instead, who took her over to one of the big, tall, spidery machines that held hundreds of thin threads running up and down the frame. It confirmed what she had suspected. “You actually weave cloth here?” she asked Bree.
“Some cloth, for special occasions, but mostly what we get out of beginners like you is cloth for washrooms and test garments.” She patted the wide, hard stool. “Have a seat and I’ll walk you through it.”
Charlee sat. The sun was going down when she stood once more, while Anja inspected the yardage she had created that day. “It’s fair to middling,” Anja decreed, her nose wrinkling. “I’ll show you some tricks tomorrow that’ll make it smoother and tighter.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Seven sharp,” Anja added and walked away.
Charlee apprenticed in Anja’s factory for the next year. Anja didn’t just make clothing from cloth she and her workers wove. They also spun wool and cotton to make the threads to weave and knit. But they used commercially created fabric, too, for demand for their work was too high to meet otherwise.
As Charlee learned in her year there, Anja’s factory also worked with leathers, creating close-fitting, shaped garments in a stiff leather that reminded her strangely of the breastplates and armor that the Romans had worn. When she had asked about this, she had received a short nod from the Amica who was teaching her to cure the hides. “The stiffer the leather, the better it turns knives and spears. We hope that the Einherjar who wears these has sufficient skill to turn a sword with his own sword blade. Still, he would not be an Einherjar if he was not a warrior.” She shrugged and moved on with the lesson.
Einherjar was a term Charlee had heard before, but she was still waiting for the opportunity to ask what it meant, for every Amica she met seemed to know. This was one of the areas of insufficient knowledge that Ylva had warned her she would come across.
But there were assumptions she could make without asking. She had only ever heard the Einherjar referred to as “he”, so it was a fraternity. A group of men who used swords, spears and knives. Was Asher one?
She had not seen Asher since the prom and in a way, it was a relief. She was learning too much and had too many pressing questions. I
t wasn’t time for her to see him yet. She had not yet seen fully behind his mask. But she missed him. She missed their weekday check-ins, and the way his smile warmed whenever he saw her walking through the door.
But she was often too busy to miss him. Anja kept Charlee running as fast Ylva ever had. Each morning she would arrive at seven and be put to work, either completing a current project or learning the skills to move onto the next one. For the first half of her year, she had learned how to design, cut and sew garments, including the critically important and complex elements of fit. “Fit is everything,” Anja had said during one of the three breaks everyone took during the day. “A perfectly tailored garment that does not fit well will look like garbage and make the wearer look fat and old and ugly. A simple garment, made with perfect fit, will make the wearer look like a princess.” Charlee was not the only one to absorb this lesson. The Amica in Anja’s factory were all sensitive to not just proper fit, but their appearance overall. Charlee learned that the flawless appearance Bree had presented the day they met was a standard all of them aspired to.
Over the next year, Charlee made herself a large wardrobe of clothes, designed to meet any occasion, to fit her perfectly and to flatter her appearance. The design of the garments and the cloth they were made of was not left to her sole discretion. Each item of clothing was discussed en group. The virtues of the design and its practicality and beauty were debated and the design adjusted until it was considered as close to perfect as a mere Amica could get.
For the last three months of the year, she learned more about the making of armor, which was a fascinating study.
It was fall once more when Charlee met Ylva on her way down to the front door to head for Anja’s factory. Ylva was standing inside the birdcage and called Charlee’s name softly.
Charlee halted at the bottom of the stone staircase, her breath catching, for there was a falcon sitting on Ylva’s outstretched arm.
The Branded Rose Prophecy Page 31
