Once they had shaken on their agreement, Arlon had put up her closed sign and together they got the deer on the skinning table.

  She looked over the animal, focusing in on the cut Ambrose had made on his first attempt.

  "By the stone, did you do this with a rock?" She asked with a small laugh.

  "A sharp rock." He replied, sheepishly with a shrug. "It was all I had."

  She laughed and continued to look over the deer. Ambrose decided to use the quiet moment to ask a question he had wanted to for a while.

  "I have only ever heard Dwarves use that phrase?"

  "By the stone you mean? Yeah, my pa was a dwarf."

  As she spoke, she picked up a knife and started cutting open the animal’s stomach. "You didn't even field dress this thing; you will be lucky if the meat hasn't gone bad."

  Ambrose looked at her blankly "Field dress?"

  Arlon rolled her eyes. "You need to hang the deer and cut its throat to remove all its blood and then open its stomach to remove all its organs. I'm not even a hunter and I know that."

  He had realised he should have drained the deer after it had bled all over him but he didn't even think about needing to deal with its guts.

  "I'm really bad at this." He said, hanging his head.

  Arlon gave a small giggle. "Don't worry I'm sure you will learn. Here come see how I do this."

  Ambrose walked to stand next to the half dwarf, she showed him where she had started the cut and once the deer was open, how to properly remove the organs, explaining how it was important not to puncture any of them.

  As she was getting the organs out, she looked at them strangely. "How did you kill this thing, some of its organs are really damaged?"

  "It was a mercy killing to be honest. There are some caves on my land and it ran into one, it was so hurt I thought it would be better if I just cut its throat." Ambrose replied.

  "You cut its throat, but didn't hang it to drain? Well, I guess you was half way there."

  Once the organs were removed, Arlon changed the knife she was using for a small saw and move onto the next step.

  "Next you will need to remove the legs at the lower joint." She indicated the joint in question and started cutting. "So, are you old enough to remember the war?" She asked as she did.

  Ambrose, a bit taken aback by the sudden question, took a second before he answered. "Not really, I was only two when it ended, well I think I was two."

  "You think you was two?" Arlon asked, confused.

  "I was told that I was found in the rubble of a house, and that they assumed from the bodies found near me that both my parents died during the attack that took it down." He responded, with little emotion.

  She stopped cutting for a moment. "I'm really sorry to hear that." She said after a few seconds.

  Ambrose shrugged "Its fine, it's not a dissimilar story to a lot of people around my age. What about you, you seem too young to remember the war?"

  She finished cutting through the second of the front legs and moved on to the back two. "Yeah, I was born not long after it finished. My father came over with one of the first legions from Nortok, he was injured and my mother was a healer who treated him, and well, the rest is history." a small smile crossed her face as she recalled her parents’ story. Ambrose thought it was nice it made her happy to think about them, but a small pang of jealousy did stir in his guts.

  "You didn't want to be a healer as well?" He asked.

  "Apparently being only half a dwarf was enough for their inability to use magic to carry over, so on my dad's advice I joined the tanner’s guild. Apparently, his father was a chitin moulder and a tanner was the closest thing they had in this part of the world." She responded.

  "What's chitin?" Ambrose asked.

  "It's a type of shell material that is harvested from some large insects in Nortok." As she spoke, she finished cutting though the last leg on the deer. "Right, now that's done let's start getting the skin off."

  Arlon picked up the first knife she had been using and pointed at two hooks hanging from the ceiling, "I'm going to show you how to cut the skin back to expose just under the joint on the back legs, and then we can hang it on the hooks in the space between the tendons and the bone."

  She demonstrated to Ambrose how to do it on one of the legs, emphasizing the importance of being careful not to cut the tendons. She then handed him the knife and told him it was his turn. He carefully took it and looked closely at the leg, he took a deep breath, and started to cut.

  After about ten minutes of shaky cuts, he had finally managed to get the skin as far back as Arlon had and despite the fact it had only taken her two, he was quite happy with the result and seemingly so was Arlon.

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  "Not bad, not bad." She said with a small nod. "You might have the making of a skinner, why don't you try to join the guild?" she asked.

  Ambrose scowled slightly. "I tried." He said flatly.

  Arlon looked at him confused. "What happened, you can cut just fine, how come you didn't get in?"

  "They are one of the guilds that requires you to take a written test before they start teaching you all the practical stuff. I can read, but writing is just something I can't do well." He replied, a little embarrassed.

  She nodded in understanding. "Ah gotcha. I never really understood some of the needs for written exams for some guilds. For ones like the cartographers or the record keepers yeah, but for the skinner and the miners, it really never made sense."

  Ambrose shrugged. "Their loss."

  Arlon laughed at his comment "I guess so. Anyway, help me get this on the hooks."

  The two of them picked up the deer and after a bit of fiddling, got the hooks into the space they had opened on its legs.

  "Right now we just remove the pelt." Using her knife Arlon started carving the skin away from the body. After a few cuts she again handed the knife to Ambrose and told him to try. While he was a bit shaky at first, he found that he was able to get the hang of it.

  They kept stripping the skin, Ambrose finding that it got a lot harder when it got to the front legs and neck, until they had all the skin hanging off over the animal’s head.

  "Now we just cut the skin away from the neck." After the last few slices, the skin came away clean. She brought it back over to the table they had used before and made a cut to split it and laid it flat, skin side down.

  "Now we move on to my speciality." She said with a smile, as she looked back at him. "We will need to salt the pelt and let it dry out for a while. It's nothing I need to really teach you, just rubbing salt into the fleshy part of the skin. In the meantime, why don't you wash up?"

  Ambrose looked down at himself, he was filthy. "I guess I could go wash in the fountain, or walk over to the river just outside of town?"

  Arlon gave him a confused look. "Or you could use the bath tub I have in the back?"

  He hadn't had an actually bath since he left the orphanage and the prospect of a tube full of warm water and maybe even soap, was very appealing to him.

  After walking through to the wet room the tub was kept in, Arlon handed Ambrose a bucket and a bar of soap.

  "Right the well is in the small room just outside the door and there is wood, kindling and a flint and steel in the basket. You can light a fire right?" She asked.

  Ambrose nodded and raised his hand, he focused and a small flame appeared in his palm.

  "Promising skinner and you have some magic, the guilds are really missing out on you." Said laughed. "There is a drying rack if you want to wash your cloths as well and I suggest you do."

  With that she turned, and left Ambrose to wash.

  He filled the tub and piled some wood in the space underneath it, the basket had a mix of thick logs, dry wood and a few pieces of fat wood, so once he held the flame spell to it, it caught almost instantly. Once it was hot enough, he took off his clothes and put himself and them in the bath together. As he got in, he felt the hot water wash over the dozens of small cuts and scrapes he had picked up over the last few days, the initial sting fading to a soothing warmth.

  He used the soap to first wash his clothes, rinsing them in the bucket he had used to fill the bath, that he filled again with water. Once they were clean, he hung them to dry.

  Once he had finished washing himself, he sat back in the tub. He could get out now, but he decided to wait until the water went cold.

  It was the knocking on the wet room door that woken Ambrose from the blissful sleep he had slipped into.

  "You alive in there?" He heard Arlon calling.

  "Yeah, just getting out now." He said, after a second to get his brain working.

  He pulled himself out and proceeded to dump the bath water down a small drain in the room. Since he had moved the tub, he used the now exposed fire to dry himself along with a small towel he found in the room. By the time he was done he found his cloths where dry enough to wear.

  Once dressed, he returned to the working area, where he found that the skin was still laid out after being heavily salted.

  "Ah there you are, was worried you had drowned." Ambrose turned and saw Arlon standing by a tanning rack, another skin set up on it.

  She walked over and looked at him "You scrub up well, need a haircut though."

  Ambrose picked up and looked at some of his long black hair "Yeah, have been thinking that myself. Anyway, is the skin dry enough yet?"

  Arlon gave a small huff of a laugh "No, that won't be done for another two days but I have this dry one that is about the same size, we can use it to continued your training."

  He looked at the skin he helped to remove, sitting on the table. "That’s a lot of salt on there, it must cost a lot to tan each hide?"

  "You can scrape some of it off and bake it to dry it out." She said. "But after a while it gets too much blood into it and you have to chuck it."

  She walked over and released a small latch on the table that allowed it to be angled down somewhat. "It is unfortunately one of the expenses of the trade. Anyway, better get on if you want to be able to get the carcass to the butcher before the end of the day."

  She walked back over to a hide which was hanging at an angle on the rack. As Ambrose walked over, he could see that the flesh side on this skin was noticeably dryer.

  "Now we need to scrape the remaining meat of the pelt." She picked up a different knife to the ones he had seen her use already.

  "How many different knives do you need for this?" Ambrose asked, a bit concerned at the steadily growing cost of this activity.

  "To be honest you could probably do all of it with just a hunting knife, but the guild provides and trains you to work with different knifes for each task."

  He gave a small sigh of relief and gestured for her to continue. She showed him how to first scrape the pelt to remove all of the remaining flesh and then how to wash it first in cold water and then in hot soapy water, before finally rinsing it off and leaving to dry.

  "And that’s about it, once the pelt is dry it's ok to use, but if you really want it to last you will need to oil it."

  "With what?" Ambrose was thinking he could barely afford the salt for all this, let alone some fancy tanning oil.

  "The guild has its own secret recipe for the oil they give us, but I sometimes use fish oil." She said, with a shrug.

  I do have part of the stream on my land. Ambrose though. So fish was a resource he could get hold of.

  "But anyway, besides oiling it, if you want to use it for clothes you will also need to beat it pretty well if want it to not be too stiff" she continued.

  "Any suggestions on the best way to do that?"

  "Have you got a hammer?"

  "No."

  "Hit it with a rock." Arlon said, flatly.

  Ambrose let out an involutory laugh at the bluntness of the answer. "Gotcha."

  She smiled at him. "Anyway, that's going to take a bit to dry, and that deer needs butchering." She said, pointing to the deer still hanging from the hooks they had left it on.

  "Hopefully I can somehow sweet talk the butcher into helping me." He said, his face creased in concern.

  "Like you have with me?" Arlon said, putting her hands on her hips as she spoke.

  Ambrose simply shrugged which caused the tanner to giggle.

  "Come on, I know the butcher somewhat. I will introduce you to him."