[OOC Note: This adventure was for a version of Fenley, Fenley Brittleleaf, created for an RP situation that never came to pass. I am rebooting the character for a new RP opportunity. Thus, the following writing does not apply to the current Fenley Plumwood. It is preserved for historical purposes only. After all, there could be two people with the name Fenley in Bree-land!]
Tiny churning clouds with every breath, swirling and then dissipating. Creaking sounds from all the framing of what will be a livestock barn when it's done; the wood contracts in the cold, shifts, strains its nails and tests its joinery. One creak turns to a shriek, slowly; then a moment of silence hanging in the air. Then, crashing, tearing, a cacophony of thuds and cracks.
Master Greenlake inspected the bit of the roof framing that collapsed, tearing itself to pieces. He concluded the wood was faulty; a key joist made from a timber that had too much cross-grain, and was cured badly, causing an internal cleave-plane right along the angle where it would be strained. Sent Fenley to bring the timber back to Bree, with the cart, and demand a dozen new timbers to replace it and the others lost in the disaster. Their fault: the wood was badly made. They should replace it at no cost. Mister Thornley certainly wouldn't pay for it!
The whole way, Jake jumps into the cart, then back off, then around the front of the tired, annoyed horse pulling the cart, who doesn't seem to agree she needs to be barked at again. Jake doesn't mind her ingratitude at his timely proclamations. His barking is always provided at no cost, in great quantity, and with excessive zeal. The nag pauses, and it almost seems she shrugs her shoulders (do horses even have shoulders? aren't they fetlocks or something?) before continuing her plodding gait towards the city gate.
He probably should have talked to the lumber merchant himself. Master Greenlake sent him not just because it's the kind of chore a journeyman is sent on, but also because it's the sort of thing he should learn how to do. One day Fenley will be a master himself and need to be able to get a fair deal. Only he wasn't sure if it was a fair deal. Might not have been faulty wood. Might have been he cut corners a bit in putting that timber into place because he was eager to get done for the day that day. There was a trader's waggon at the Thornley farm, and the trader's daughter had a harp, or a lute, or something, and was trying to learn how to use it. And she was kind of pretty. There might, just might, have been a little haste in putting together that truss that day, and that might be more why the timber broke than any knots in the wood. Fenley didn't much want to admit that, so he asked his old master, Gib Heathstraw, to help with the negotiation. Gib wasn't too happy about it, but sometimes it's easier to do a thing than to explain to Fenley why you're not going to.
Only a few hours out of Bree hauling a cart full of timbers, and there's a rumbling sound in the sky. The cold has eased, clouds are rolling in, and it almost sounds like a summer thunderstorm. The Thornley farm is shrouded in something that looks like mist, but that's just what a blizzard looks like at a distance. Soon lazy snowflakes are dancing around the cart, a few and then suddenly many more, and Jake is jumping to catch them, barking at every gust of wind (and that means barking a lot), while the nag gets slower and slower. Even before they reach the cabin of that Ranger fellow, the ground is white, and the sky too; Fenley can barely see ahead of himself.
The nag is nearly refusing to take another plodding step, so he tugs her by sheer force to that cabin. Pounding on the door, insistently. The Ranger seems irked, but agrees to let Fenley put the horse in his little stable to wait out the storm. Then inside the cabin to wait by the fire. An annoyed Ranger, some surly dwarf mumbling about sword-crafting, and nothing but time. Fenley passed some of it thinking back to the trader's daughter, and the sound of her laugh -- more musical than her harp-playing, which says a lot both about her laugh and her skill with the harp, unfortunately. On the other hand, getting her to stop playing had a double benefit. But he could only reminisce about that so long before the dour joylessness of his company made it impossible to keep grinning.
When he found himself wishing he could be up framing the new trusses and hauling them into place instead of here, he realized things had gotten bad. The snow had stopped coming down, but it was way too high to haul a cart through. But the sun was bright and warm; it would probably melt in a few days. Worth it to wait?
Fenley had a better idea. A bit of rope and an hour of work later, and the dozen timbers were lashed together into a makeshift sleigh, two used as runners and the other ten crosswise atop them. The snow was firm-packed and slick enough that he could pull it as easily as the nag was hauling the cart. Though it tended to get wedged in the snow each time Jake jumped up onto it, it was easy enough to extricate, and on they went. Master Greenlake would be surprised to find his timbers arriving in the form of a sled! And, despite the storm, on time. (The nag and cart could be collected another day.)
Sometimes being a little irresponsible and a little wild actually helps getting the work done.
Not often, though. Later that day, those same timbers had been pressed into duty as a sled dragged up one of the nearby hills, then ridden back down, Fenley and Jake howling and laughing the whole way. On the eleventh slide down the hill, one of the timbers snapped. "Great," Fenley said. "Now I'm going to have to go into town tomorrow to demand a replacement! Who knows what will come of that!"
