Chapter 693: Kitcher’s Fell (Part One)
On the outskirts of Dunn Barony, a small hamlet perched atop a steep-sided hill that men had labeled Kitcher’s Fell. Local folklore varied about the name, with some claiming that Kitcher had been a hero of the people, leading a small army of farmers armed with nothing more than pitchforks and hand axes to repel demons from the lands humans had only begun to settle.
Other stories claimed that Kitcher had been little more than a bandit, on the run from Lothian City, who had chanced upon a demon camp and slaughtered them with his band of brigands in the hopes that it would clear their names. Given the sizeable bounties paid out by both the Lothian family and the Church for killing demons, it certainly felt plausible to people who rejected the myth of Kitcher as some kind of peasant folk hero.
Whatever Kitcher had been, he’d won the favor of the Dunn family, and the hamlet built on the site of his victory still bore his name. The man himself had died long ago, but his family still held some of the most coveted grazing land outside the hamlet’s wooden palisade walls, and his great-grandson, Keller, would likely inherit the family’s sprawling ranch when he came of age.
For now, however, the young man was barely fifteen years old, and the only thing he currently felt about his family’s ancestral home was that it was much, much warmer than the cold, wet autumn night outside with the cattle.
"Ah-choo," Keller sneezed, pulling his heavy wool cloak tighter around his shoulders and inching closer to the small fire that felt far too feeble to keep the evening chill at bay.
"You’d feel better if you drank some of the tea, young master," an aged voice said from the opposite side of the fire. "The real secret to keeping warm on nights like this is to use your fire to warm your drink and use a hot drink to warm yourself."
"How can you drink anything that comes off that fire, old man?" Keller asked, doing his best to take shallow breaths as he held his hands out toward the putrid fire. "Why do we have to burn dung to keep warm when a wood fire would be brighter and warmer?" he groused. "And it wouldn’t stink so much!"
"Haha, you’ll learn quickly how much better it is to burn dung than to burn wood when you have to haul your own fuel out here in the winter, young master," the old servant said with a hearty chuckle. "Dung is lighter once it’s dried, and a few bricks of dung will last you all night if you manage your fire well," he said over his shoulder, not bothering to look at the shivering young master who huddled near the fire.
Cabrin had served young master Keller’s family since he was even younger than the young master was and he knew his duties well. With a herd of nearly thirty head of cattle, it took a fair amount of minding to make sure as many of them as possible made it through the winter.
Even though Keller was unlikely to spend much of his life personally tending to the herd of cattle, the flock of hens, or the fields of marigold and goldenrod that had provided much of the family’s wealth over the years. It was far more likely that Keller would follow in his father’s footsteps, managing the whole of the family business and spending almost as much time in Dunn Township dealing with the merchants there as he spent at home.
But Keller’s father insisted that he spend a year doing the work of each of the family’s businesses before he would be allowed to accompany his father to learn how to manage the whole of the family business. It was an approach that Cabrin approved of, even if he had the misfortune to be young Keller’s first teacher.