The more a Nord woman loved her husband, the more she hated her first son.

That son always brings back her nightmarish memories from Beihai to Suno. All this became extremely difficult when her husband was asleep, and at that time she looked at her Swadia husband quietly, feeling a burst of happiness and the same impulsive sadness.

From that time on, she began to distance herself from her eldest son day by day. The child was a pale, good-hearted boy. He liked to go up to the city with the old butler to see the streets of Suno. The old man drove his mule cart and bought the boy by the city wall a bowl of cherries washed in water, which shone faintly in the small porcelain bowl, like the jewel in the crown of the legendary king of Parabun.

The old man once smiled and asked the little boy, "You run around all day, doesn't your Nord mother come home and beat you?" ”

The little boy sat in the car with his legs crossed, turned around and said honestly and quietly, "Mom only cares about my younger brothers and sisters." Mom doesn't like me. Sir, I know. ”

The old man knew that he had been born seven months after his mother came to the valley, and after a little thought of his whole life, he understood the mind of the Nord woman, and he silently touched the child's head, and said, "Eat, and then help me put the skin in the box." ”

The little boy lowered his head and ate the cherry carefully, and said, "Okay." ”

At the same time, my father, who was learning to walk, was trembling under the care of a Nord woman, and he was too frightened to move. Suddenly he saw Sumi, he screamed "ah", smiled and stretched out his hand, drooling happily, he aimed at Sumi's legs and walked out, if Sumi hadn't dodged, then he would have hugged his mother's legs after successfully walking out of the first few steps of his life.

Sumi unconsciously retreated, his father staggered two steps, looking at his mother's sudden retreat, he was very puzzled, and fell to the ground head-on, and the Nord woman immediately picked him up, picked him up and patted him on the back to comfort him. He cried in the arms of the Nord woman and looked back at Sumi. The eyes of the little ones are shining, and the expressions are pure and single. Sumi saw that the shining eyes were full of tears, and her expression was pure and single: accusation. Sumi cried, turned around and ran upstairs.

My father was a blank slate, and he was aware of the estrangement between his mother and him at the very beginning. From a young age, he had a deep fear, and that fear came from his mother. He was afraid of Sumi, but the premise for this attitude was that Sumi didn't like him.

His father was a young master of the valley, and he wore a dress hand-sewn by an old grandmother, and his initials H.A were embroidered on the corners of his clothes. The old grandmother had also entered the final stage of her life, and her dream now was to sew as many clothes as possible for her father, who she had to embroider four pieces of clothing for each year, according to the requirements of the four seasons of the year.

She didn't have children of her own, so in the last moments of her life, she poured all the love she had saved into her father. When she sewed the 68th dress, it was enough for her father to wear until he was 17 years old. The old man died by the castle like a white dove, and she did not suffer any pain before she died, and the fat woman sat next to her to help her deliver the thread, and when the fat woman noticed that the old lady had not moved for a long time, she reminded: "Madam, I can send a coil of thread." Within half an hour, the fat woman was horrified and spread the news of the old woman's death throughout the castle.

At this time, my father was 4 years old. He felt even more lonely, and his instincts told him that this old lady who had been smiling all the time was one of the few people who loved him with all her affection.

The old woman's funeral was simple. Buried on a rainy morning, the death knell passed through the rain curtain and came intermittently. The father saw the eldest son of the Nord woman for the first time at the funeral. Jill, who was just eight years old.

Jill stood beside the old butler, holding a pot of oil, which he kept adding to the lanterns that were lit around the tomb. Gil rarely came home, and during these years he mainly helped out in his grandfather's carpenter's workshop, occasionally accompanying his grandfather to Suno to buy raw materials, where the butler bought him a bowl of cherries as usual.

Jill was now emaciated, which made her mother hate his bloodline even more, it must have been some weak, filthy Swadia bastard. His brothers and sisters were tall and strong, just like their fathers.

Jill learns how to use compasses and ink fountains in the carpenter's workshop; Learn how to work wood with different hardnesses; Learn how to take the materials he needs from the forest and turn them into the parts he needs.

He seems to have been born with the kind of abstract thinking that engineering requires, and he can conceive in his brain the concrete shape of a part of a huge machine, and then set about to "take" it out of a piece of material.

Grandfather saw Jill during a tour of the carpenter's workshop. He was amazed to find that Jill was always able to deliver materials to the carpenters when they needed them. So Grandfather tried to explain some simple engineering to Jill, and Jill understood it with a little bit of finesse. So my grandfather started asking Jill to attend some carpentry classes that he taught to carpenters. Here, Jill is exposed to triangles, circles, diagonals, and more on a daily basis. When he returned to the carpenter's room, he was taught by the carpenters to learn more and more about the nature of the material.

At this time Gil was holding a pot of oil, produced by Roddock, with which his grandfather insisted on lighting the lamp of the poor lady of Roddock.

My father had a crush on the tall and lanky boy from the beginning, and no matter what, he sensed that there was something similar to him in this man. Maybe they're all half-breeds, maybe they're all young people, maybe they're not liked by their mothers.

The old woman became the second person to die after the completion of the White Dove Castle, and she was buried next to the mistress here.

Nord's wet nurse took care of her father with all her heart. And according to the Nord tradition, she gave her father a wooden sword when he was ten years old. This is what she asked Jill to polish. More than a month ago, Jill timidly asked her on her birthday what she wanted for a gift. The Nord woman glanced at her eldest son, "You can make me a wooden sword." Roast hard over fire and polish well. Jill happily agreed.

"Uh... Are you 13 years old? ”

"14 years old, Mom."

Then Jill's mom looked a little sad. Jill paused awkwardly, then broke the silence. Jill said that he would accompany the butler to town in the afternoon, and that he was now going to harness the mule cart and would not be back in a few days. The Nord woman said, "Go, go". Jill turned and walked away, and the Nord woman couldn't hold back anymore as she watched Jill's thin body disappear to the side of the path, and squatted on the ground and cried.

A week later, the fire-hardened and polished wooden sword was delivered to the Nord woman, and Jill was so excited that the Nord woman happily touched his head, which made Jill revel in the warmth of motherly love for the whole afternoon. But as he watched Arcadio slash at the stone wall of the castle with his wooden sword in his second cheerful hand, Jill was silent, and he stood by the wall, silently looking at his young master, his best friend.

In a few years, Sumi had become a gloomy young woman, changed into the black corset that her mother had only changed into when she was forty years old, and rarely went out, only when she saw her grandfather, Sumi's eyes lit up. Grandfather looked at it and couldn't believe that this was the little girl who walked barefoot with him on the bridge more than ten years ago.

The death of her mother completely closed Sumi's immature heart, and she no longer wanted to accept anyone else except for a few people such as her grandfather and the old housekeeper.

His father then felt a change in his dealings with Jill, Jill no longer treated him the way he used to, and his father had this ability, he could clearly feel the feelings of others for him.

Jill was more silent than ever, and his happiest thing was to learn all sorts of seemingly useless knowledge from his grandfather. Now he is the best student of his grandfather, who learned systematically with his bachelor in chemistry and physics when he was young, and now he has finally found a student. At Jill's 16-year-old coming-of-age ceremony, his grandfather gave him a bachelor's notebook, not the original, but a copy of "Chemistry—The Science of Turning Stone into Gold" by his grandfather himself. The title page reads: To my best student---- Gilbert Bun.

Once, when his grandfather was happy, he gave Gil two dinars to spend as he pleases the next time he went to Suno, with the butler. Gil spent a dinar on some bottles and jars, saltpeter in the mineral store, raw vinegar from the caravan of Zhivadin, and a little salt from the shop of the merchant from Zhivadin.

When Jill returned, he brought the ashes of the plants and trees from the old man in the gatehouse, and mixed them with saltpeter to make nitric acid. Salt and vinegar are mixed and carefully heated to collect the volatile hydrochloric acid. Then he made aqua regia in a ratio of 1:3 of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid. The raw materials bought by this dinar were made into 6 large jars of aqua regia, which were put in glass bottles that the old butler had asked for.

He carefully took out a little bit of aqua regia and threw another dinar into it, so that it dissolved in aqua regia. Then he set about carving eight or nine lifelike animal dolls out of hardwood. He managed to extract the melted gold coins and plate them evenly on the toys, which were plugged with a layer of gold, flawless and shiny.

He gave one to his grandfather, a gilded pony, and the horse was lame; gave a gold-plated pig to a Nord woman; He gave the butler a gilded mule. He took the rest of the things to sell at Suno's market, and a butler of a noble old man's house was buying toys for his young lady, and at a glance he took a fancy to these extremely well-made toys, and after negotiating, he took the remaining five toys from Jill at the price of five dinars each. That's the equivalent of a few months' earnings for Jill's father. Grandfather was glad to find out about this, and gave Jill's father another 25 dinars, saying that Jill must be Arcadio's second best helper in the future.

Old Bi Anwen was very happy and went home happily. That night, he cooked 1 leg of mutton, bought 2 jugs of wine from the housekeeper, and asked the Nord woman to bake 3 catties of bread slices and heat 1 catty of minced meat. Jill's sister then called Jill back from the carpenter's workshop.

That night, the elder said that he was happy to have such a promising son. He happily ate a lot with Jill, which made Jill let go of the drink. Gil drank the barley wine he wanted, and chatted with him until late at night. Old Bi Anwen drank too much, he tore a leg of mutton and chewed it in his mouth, took a sip of wine, and said intermittently: "The master is ready to let you assist the young master in the future, this meaning is almost very clear, the successor of the old housekeeper, or the successor of his successor, is you." You must help the young master, and you can't let the young master ruin the valley like the legend····· We're going to have a housekeeper in our house·····"

Old Pianwen's words were heard in the ears of the Nord woman, and she was silent.

After sending the elder Bianwen to bed, Jill and his mother began to clean up the table. The Nord woman suddenly said, you are not allowed to say that the young master is like others, he did not drive away his grandmother, he will not ruin the valley. Jill said: I never thought of it that way. The Nord woman blocked the hand that Jill wanted to help her: "You yourself are not at all nobler than the young master, do you understand" Jill said: "I know, I am the son of a tenant farmer, he is the son of the lord" The Nord woman said more excitedly: "No, these are determined by the world. But your birth, simple birth, you are absolutely not allowed to look down on the young master in this regard. The young master's birth time was just unfortunate to coincide with the death of his grandmother, you... You shouldn't have been born at all! Jill's face turned even paler, and the Nord woman was angry and pitiful for him, and at the same time pitiful for herself, "You go!" Walk! Jill stumbled out the door. The Nord woman sat on the ground, wiping her tears and snot from the back of her hand, crying.

At that time, who could understand her thoughts? She wants to be a simple mother, a clean mother; I want to be a simple wife, a clean wife. But those memories lingered, and Jill asked her to repeat them again and again.

She felt dirty, and she was full of guilt for the husband who had been good to her, as well as for her other three children.

Her loneliness, no one knows, no one knows. She could only cry suppressedly, trying not to wake up her husband and children who were already asleep.

At this time, a sigh sounded.

A quiet voice came from the darkness: "You poor woman, why do you suffer for a child?" The Nord woman looked back in panic and saw her husband sitting in the dark, and Swadia husband facing her. Bianvin of Swadia said: "Seven months after you came, Gil was born. ”

This sentence made the Nord woman tremble as if she was in an ice cellar, but her husband still knew. "Do you think I didn't know all along?"

“·······”

"I used to be an executioner, and I know what is going on between a female captive and her male master."

"It's none of your business, and it's not about Jill."

"Do you think I didn't know Jill wasn't my own? Do you think I'm just a simple farmer who doesn't know anything? I tell you, before coming to the valley I had traveled every mountain of Rhodok, waded through every great river of Swadia, I had seen the most beautiful sunrises in the desert of Salander, I had tracked the most cunning foxes in the snowfields of Vecchia, and above all, I had witnessed too many disasters. ”

"That was many years ago, the caravan I was following was robbed by the Kujits, I was buried in the pile of dead, I was stabbed in the back, and I was waiting in the pile of dead people to die."

"My master, the last lord of this valley, a kind knight, pulled me out of the pile of the dead. At that time, I had seen all the sufferings in the world, and I just wanted to find a place to rest quietly and sit and watch over my own wheat field. To be able to live that life is God's gift to me. The host gave me this. ”

"Later, the new owner let me get you. I don't think there's anything left to find fault with in the world. ”

"In the seventh month that you became my wife, Jill was born. My heart is very complicated, and I hate it. But I soon woke up to the fact that the world was already disgraceful, so why should we hold a newborn baby responsible for our sins? I told the people around me that whoever dared to say more, I would cut his throat, forgetting to tell you that before I became a farmer, my nickname was 'Cutting Roar Knife Bianwen'. ”

"Come on, don't blame yourself."

"It's not your fault, and it's not Jill's. He is our eldest son, and I see that he hasn't changed his clothes in two years. Tomorrow I'll go to the housekeeper to ask for a few sleepy linens, you can sew a shirt for our eldest son, I want the young master's style, but don't embroider the initials of the name in a flamboyant way, okay? You scumbag? ”

The Nord woman wailed. Woke up the three sleeping children. They hurriedly got up to comfort their mother, cleaned up the house, and went back to the room under the command of their father's eyes. None of them slept, listening with bated breath.

That night, the Nord woman felt reassured that she had never felt before, and for the first time since Jill's birth, she did not wake up in the middle of the night.

A month later, the Nord woman's face glowed with a rosy glow that she had never seen before, and people laughed and said that old Pianwen was not less busy.

After Jill was driven away at night, he went to the carpenter's workshop overnight and helped his grandfather transcribe some drawings with a blank face. The carpenters saw the young man when they were on their way to work. People shrugged, and everyone knew that this lad was different from everyone else. Jill was on the verge of a breakdown, and he had been hit too hard the night before.

By noon, he was so hungry that he was going to go to the castle to ask the old butler for something to eat, after he had finished copying another blueprint of the blower. At this time a carpenter called his name, and for the first time in sixteen years, Jill had heard such words.

"Nord boy, get out of here, your mother is calling you home for dinner."