It would be inaccurate to say that Cal and Sever didn’t talk to each other for the next couple of days. But that’s how it felt. They still talked about what they were up to, still talked about what they might need from each other for a project. They didn’t brainstorm as much. They didn’t sit by the river and talk about nothing.

  Though she’d just about managed it with the anvil, or at least managed it well enough to get going, it was taking Cal a while to get the hang of forge welding. Sever had a few chunks of steel in her collection, but the majority of it was sheets, often quite thin sheets. So to make tools or weapons, Cal needed to weld these pieces together.

  She didn’t have access to any kind of flux she might use to make the process easier or more reliable. She’d never done it before. And it took her most of two weeks to even think of trying clay from the river, which worked impressively well.

  So it was that the awkwardness of the relationship was entirely mended, more or less, by the exchanging of gifts.

  Six days after the measuring incident, Cal was just dunking her second knife blade into her bucket of water when Sever burst out of the hut with arms full of clothes, eyes gleaming.

  ‘Check this,’ Sever said, with the most self-satisfied tone Cal had heard in her life. With a flick of the wrists, she unfurled the armful of clothes.

  Cal burst into applause. ‘Amazing. Outstanding. Peerless work.’

  Sever blushed and snorted. ‘Thank you, thank you. I do what I can.’

  What Sever apparently could do was make a set of slightly rough around the edges, but none-the-less perfectly functional and completely wearable clothes. In this case a pair of pants, a long-sleeved tshirt, a tanktop, a pair of boxers, and a pair of socks.

  Cal kept on clapping. ‘Perfection.’

  ‘Alright, you can stop now,’ Sever smiled. ‘I will warn you, supplies are limited. But I did make more than one set of underwear.’ She blushed again.

  Cal shrugged. ‘Glad you thought of that. Having to do naked laundry does not sound like fun.’

  Sever blushed harder. Cal was ruining it.

  ‘But also,’ Cal said, hurried. ‘Check this.’ And she pulled the steaming knife blade out of the water. ‘Second knife.’

  Sever frowned at Cal for a moment. ‘Wait, take this.’ She dumped the clothes into Cal’s lap so that she could start clapping. ‘Outstanding. Amazing. Perfect work.’

  Cal grinned. ‘Thank you, thank you. I will accept my award as soon as I’m dressed.’

  Sever’s eyes widened and she dashed back inside before Cal could get changed in front of her. Which was totally reasonable.

  It felt amazing to finally have pants again. Cal hadn’t realised how much she’d missed pants. But she had missed pants. She’d also very much missed having socks, but that wasn’t at all surprising.

  Cal had never worn cotton pants before. She wasn’t sure if she’d worn cotton underwear before, but it was the pants that felt noticeably different. They were comfortable, though. The whole outfit was comfortable.

  It felt homemade in a way that was both good and bad. A couple of spots in some seams were oddly hard and inflexible, the tanktop was much looser at the back than it was at the front. But the pants didn’t feel like they were suffocating her legs or trying to compress her butt into a sphere. The armpits and shoulders on the tshirt were loose in such a way that it didn’t ride up when she tried raising her arms over her head.

  And, despite the weave being a little uneven in a couple of spots, the whole lot was pleasantly thick compared to any of the machine-made clothes Cal had worn before. It felt much more solid.

  Unfortunately, it made Cal and Sever look like they were in a cult, as Cal discovered when Sever burst back out of the hut in her own version of the same outfit.

  Cal chose not to mention it and, instead, pointed out the other problem. ‘Sever, it’s great, I love it. Thank you so much.’

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  Sever glowered and crossed her arms. ‘But?’

  Cal struggled not to laugh. ‘But they’re going to get dirty so easily.’

  Sever un-glowered and uncrossed her arms. ‘Oh, sure. So?’

  ‘So they’re going to stain and be annoying to wash?’ Cal suggested. ‘And look a bit gross once they’re covered in stains?’

  Sever nodded a few times. ‘I’m not going so say that that’s stupid,’ she said.

  ‘But it is a belief you hold?’ Cal suggested.

  Sever pressed her lips together. ‘I didn’t say anything.’

  Cal snorted. ‘Fine. Let me rephrase. Do you know anything about dying clothes? I think that would be fun, and I like a bit of variety.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a great point Cal, and not at all stupid,’ Sever managed to say with a straight face. ‘I do, in fact, know a bit about dying clothes. Unfortunately, we don’t have the materials we would need to do that properly.’

  ‘Oh? What do you need?’

  ‘You need fabric dyes to dye fabric, Cal,’ Sever grinned.

  Cal cackled. ‘Come on, think outside the box, Sever, you don’t know any like, natural ways to dye things?’

  ‘Organic dyes?’ Sever nodded seriously. ‘Much more expensive, that’s what I know.’

  Cal wheezed. ‘Oh, sure. But like, I’m sure I saw some article about the magic of dying clothes with tea or some shit, right? You don’t want to experiment?’

  Sever kept on nodding seriously, and then stopped. ‘Alright, fine, yeah. I… oh, could just tan them, right? Be like a dull brown, probably. What do you reckon?’

  ‘I said we should experiment,’ Cal said. ‘Do like, some underwear so if it’s no good no one has to see it.’

  Sever frowned at Cal for several seconds. ‘You know there’s like, no one else around, right?’

  Cal shrugged. ‘You’re around, you’ll definitely judge me for wearing dull brown pants. I know that about you, Sever.’

  Sever snorted. ‘Sure, sure.’

  And so began several days of experiments, including the first test for Sever’s homemade clothes: washing.

  Cal was interested to learn that tanning leather, a process she’d heard of, got its name from something called tannins, which were found in tea and tree bark and, presumably, other plants that weren’t relevant right that moment.

  She was also interested to learn that tanning leather took ages. Thankfully, tanning clothes didn’t take nearly as long. And it was all pretty simple. Some crushed up bark from the nearby woodland was steeped in hot water for a while, and then the hot water was poured into a pot with some clothes and left for a few hours.

  When the clothes came out of the bark tea, they were a quite distinct brown colour. Once they were rinsed in some more water, they were a much paler and, in Cal’s opinion, fairly pleasant light brown.

  Cal considered that experiment a success.

  Sever had another idea: add charcoal to the tea.

  And so they experimented, on Cal’s clothes, to see what happened when charcoal was added, what happened when the clothes were tanned multiple times, and, eventually, what happened to the colour when the clothes were washed.

  In the same way Cal had heard of tanning, she had heard of a washboard. In the back of her mind, Cal had assumed it was related to some kind of torture, since it sounded like waterboarding. Sever assured her it was different, but arguably still a form of torture.

  Washing the clothes involved soaking them in more hot water mixed with soap, using a big stick to swirl them around from time to time. And then moving them to another bucket of water with much more soap and rubbing them against a rough surface quite hard for what felt like a very long time while you were doing it.

  Neither Cal nor Sever where surprised when the colour in the clothes lightened even further after washing.

  As much as Cal was partial to bright colours in her clothes, she’d liked pastel pinks and blues and purples back when she had cared about how she looked, she was also quite enjoying the dull browns and grey-browns that were achieved through the various tanning experiments.

  She might have just not liked white clothes. White clothes showed blood far too easily. Not that anyone was bleeding right at that moment. Cal got distracted one day while scrubbing some clothes, wondering if she’d ever get her period again.

  No use borrowing problems from the future.

  For Cal’s part, as the blacksmith of the duo, the experiments revolved around trying to make handles for the various tools, and the knives. She’d never done any woodworking, or had any interest in woodworking, but while the clothes were sitting in their tanning vats, she did discover a great feature of wood: it was soft.

  Cal had never made a file before. She’d never made most of the tools she was making before. But what she knew about files were that they were hard. They needed to be hard to work on metal. Cal had some idea about how to make steel hard, but she also discovered that files didn’t need to be that hard if you were using them for woodworking.

  At the same time as Cal was getting to be happy with her grey, brown, and grey-brown clothes, she was also very happy with the handles she’d made up for the knives, her chisel, her file, and the hammers.

  It wasn’t the same, but she was also quite happy with the gloves that Sever made her, also while the clothes were in their tanning vats.

  Sever was trying to get her own clothes to darker shades by increments, and that wasn’t working all that well. But all of Cal’s experiments had been successful.

  As far as Cal was concerned, everything was going quite well.