Innalie bent down to pluck soapwort leaves for the morrow's washing and caught the distinctive scent of rorgoten on the breeze. Most of the alchemical horrors that came out of the Salted Wars were too insidious to stink, but according to rumor — which was to say, the ladies in her grandma's sewing circle — rorgoten spores amplified the smell of rot a hundred-fold... and preferred to root near people. The nearest plot of land belonged to Old Widow Mack. For a long moment, Innalie hesitated. Widow Mack had hated Innalie ever since she'd refused to marry the widow's son; after the rejection, Trent ran off with the Duke's army. Innalie flinched from the memory and peered south through the sun-dappled pine forest. The smell intensified. Innalie sighed. She couldn't let the rorgoten spread to the forest, not with the walnut harvest so soon, and who knew when Widow Mack would come out to check her beans? The old woman was moving slower and slower every year; Innalie could count the crabgrass clumps in amongst her strawberries, even from here. Properly speaking, rorgoten required the power of a trained alchemist to banish. Innalie was just a laundress, but she was the closest the village had to a proper mage; her grandma had actually met an alchemist, once. Innalie closed her eyes, then shook herself and carried her gather-basket to the widow's fence. Black, slimy gunk clung to every leaf and stalk of Widow Mack's garden, eating her fresh beans with a vigor unmatched in nature — Innalie could _see_ it spreading. Rorgoten was biological at its base, or else it wouldn't smell so much like rot. The best way she knew to get rid of grass stains was with a bit of alcohol and a bit of scrubbing. Innalie uncapped her canteen and poured a splash of ale onto the nearest. It started bubbling, each 'pop' loud enough to make her muscles clench. The stench intensified, a miasma thick enough to coat the back of her throat. "What are you doing in my garden, you horrible girl!" the widow screeched from the window. Damn. She hadn't even hopped the fence yet. "I smelled some rorgoten and came to see if I could help," Innalie said, trying to placate the old woman. Widow Mack's furious expression didn't relax. "You've got some nerve coming here—" Her voice trailed off as she moved away from the window and toward the door. Guilt clawed at Innalie's throat; she certainly hadn't meant for Trent to get wrapped up in fighting the endless border wars that sprang up after the Cult of Valor burned Aelipolis and all the proper mages fled east. He was nice enough, but at sixteen-and-change, Innalie was no more interested in stepping out with him than she was in cavorting with a goat. For the most part she tolerated boys the way she tolerated snakes—useful enough, here in the countryside. Not too dangerous, most of the time, but it took a very particular person to want to touch one and she wasn't that kind of girl. Which did nothing to stop Widow Mack from blaming Innalie for the fact that her only son had gone off and left her, all alone. The old woman stormed out onto the little pebble path Innalie had helped Trent mortar into place, one summer when they were still too young to be anything but friends. "No better than you ought to be, Innalie Watson, sneaking into my garden to steal my beans!" Innalie's lips tightened. Her family may have been poor, since her father died, but they'd never been thieves. No sense trying to defend her honor. "You've got rorgoten in your garden, Mrs. Mack! Can't you smell it? I'm trying to get it gone for you." Without waiting for a response, Innalie reached into her basket and pulled out a skin of milk, fresh that morning from her sister's goat and intended for scrubbing fruit stains out of linen. Innalie breathed boiling magic into it lukewarm liquid; it steamed when it spilled onto the beans. Where the milk touched the rorgoten, the sticky tendrils turned lemonbleach-white. Innalie smiled grimly. Milk wouldn't be enough to get rid of the rorgoten, but she was getting the sense of it now. Mrs. Mack stormed out of the house, the front of her apron dusted with flour handprints. She gasped when she got close enough to see the rorgoten coating her beans. "How did that get here?" Innalie shrugged helplessly. "I don't know, Mrs. Mack, but I'm going to get rid of it." "You?" Mrs. Mack sneered. "You're no alchemist, girl. Not even on your best day." Innalie kept her face meek. "No ma'am." She wished she had a jug of paraffin oil. But paraffin was expensive, and her little bit of hedge magic was usually enough without it, so she poured a bit of milk over her hand and infused it with a bit of _boil_ and a bit of _dry_, and sprinkled the mix of magic over the bean patch. "I'm just the town laundress." But even so, the rorgoten calcified and crumbled to dust. Widow Mack gasped. "Do you want me to come and take care of the rest?" Innalie asked. She had to work hard to keep the bite out of her voice. "Alchemist ain't got any business being in this village, girl. Git on with you before the Cultists come!" "But the rorgoten—" "Probably your fault it's here, pfhaw. Trying to play the hero, girl? Well I won't have any of it, not after what you did to my boy." "Have it your way, then!" Innalie snatched up her basket and stormed back into the forest. It took three days for Widow Mack to come begging Innalie's grandma to send "that girl" to get rid of the stench. Half the village came out to watch her cleanse the rorgoten, but by then, the spiderweb roots of its mycelium network had eaten its way halfway through the house's foundation. When Trent finally got leave and brought his new wife to visit home, Widow Mack was still rebuilding. By then, though, Innalie had already moved away, with her sister and the goat, when her sister wed a blacksmith from two towns over. Innalie got very good at cleaning coalstains out of leather. --- ## Analysis I've written about [laundry](https://eleanorkonik.com/laundry/) %% ( [[2021-03-08 Laundry (DRAFT)]] ) %% and [rorgoten](https://eleanorkonik.com/furtive/) %% ( [[2021-08-04 Furtive]] ) %% before, but _The Laundress & the Fungal Growth_ goes a bit more in depth about how I feel about laundry. Which is to say that I've come to believe the art of getting clothes clean is basically magic. When I was growing up, my mom worked as a dry cleaner. I think she'd been a factory seamstress before that, but I only remember the smell of dry cleaning chemicals and occasional summer days visiting the hot presses where she worked, in downtown Baltimore. I had a very different upbringing than either of my parents. Like most parents, I think, they wanted better for me than what they'd had. For us, that meant a life with less manual labor, so I didn't have many chores growing up. Often when I did try to help out, I would mess something up and not be allowed to do it anymore. Once, I tried to help out and wash my dad's work shirts. I didn't shake them out well enough before hanging them up, and they wound up really wrinkled. I still remember how upset my mom was, and the end result was that it took me close to a decade before I ever did anyone else's laundry. These days I'm married with a kid, and if I'm being honest my husband does as much of the housework as I do if not more, but cloth diapering taught me _so much_ about laundry. I've always thought that "doing laundry correctly" was a skill that has kind of been lost in middle-class American culture, thanks to washing machines and fast fashion. Sort of like changing your own oil or mending your own socks, I guess. But even kind of knowing that, I was startled at how _true_ that emotion was. Laundry is magic. When we decided to cloth diaper our son, I threw myself into research about how to do it correctly. Cotton is widely considered the best fabric for the absorbent layer because it's soft, readily available, and very absorbent. Wool, which is also very absorbent although the oils repels liquid at first, is often used as the outer, leakproof layer. Wool is magical because it doesn't get cold when it's wet. Some people use hyperabsorbent modern materials like microfiber in lieu of cotton, but they tradeoff is that while yes they can absorb a lot of liquid, they also compress and spill more easily. Of course, once these fabrics have absorbed a bunch of excrement, cleaning them can be a challenge. You can't wash wool in regular detergent or you'll strip the lanolin (natural oil) out. When you do wash it, in special lanolin-rich soap, it smells like a sheep until it dries. Hard water is "hard" because it has a bunch of dissolved minerals in it. "Soft" water is really just "pure" water, but it turns out the amount of dissolved minerals has a huge impact on how well detergent works. If water is too hard, it can form a scummy film or leave spots of dissolved minerals behind once it dries. Soft water is less "abrasive" than hard water which, despite what every "buy our water softener!" vendor will tell you, actually can make it harder to rinse things clean, especially with a high-efficiency machine. Then there's the whole "enzymes matter" thing, which is to say that most respectable cloth diapering communities spend a lot of time explaining to people that you can't wash human excrement in a washing machine with lavender-water and expect it to come clean. There are reams of articles out there explaining [the difference between soap and detergent](https://www.goingzerowaste.com/blog/why-you-should-never-make-laundry-detergent/). When soap accumulates in textiles it makes them repel water, which in the case of baby diapers (or towels) is pretty terrible. If you wind up with a bunch of soap buildup in textiles there are [whole processes for "stripping" out built up soapscum](https://fortheloveofclean.com/laundry-love/homemade-detergent/testimonials-from-former-users-of-homemade-soap-photo-gallery/) with borax and some other stuff. What I'm getting at here is that in order to really do laundry well, over the long term, you wind up learning a _lot_ more chemistry than people necessarily realize, and that's the phenomenon I wanted to get at with _The Laundress and the Fungal Growth_. Innalie may not have the fancy city education expected of a "real alchemist," but she certainly knows her way around magichemistry! ## **Further Reading** - If you want to read a really awesome historical fantasy series where a laundress plays a starring role, written by a longtime historical reenactor whose wife reenacts as a laundress, check out the [Traitor Son Cycle](https://christiancameronauthor.com/book-series/traitor-son-cycle/) by Miles Cameron. It's an incredible series, like if Game of Thrones was written by someone who actually lived a medieval lifestyle instead of reading about medieval politics. It's one of a handful of books I've ever actually written [a review](https://eleanorkonik.com/the-traitor-son-cycle-by-miles-cameron/) %% ( [[2021-02-26 The Traitor Son Cycle by Miles Cameron]] ) %% for.