Showers
Being shown how to operate the cleaning facilities as well as the privvy is as embarrassing as wearing secondhand attire, I find. Fortunately, Atlanta bowls over the awkwardness with a determinately blasé attitude.
Even more fortunately, I need not use my recovering seiðr to manipulate the body-cleaning contraption. And I need not go far to find a natural freshet to bath under! I only need to stand on a square of tiles and pull or push a toggle stick to have water instantly raining on me. When I feel dirty, sweaty and generally unclean like this, such a contraption is a boon, as I would not wish to wallow in a bathing pool or tub. The water that comes down from the mouth of the contraption is also unexpectedly clean, for being derived from deep in an inhabited settlement.
Atlanta greets me with a knowing smile when I return to her chamber. I fight not to blush under the gaze of her laughing eyes. I may have taken some more time than it was necessary to clean myself, standing under the artificial freshet…. Not to mention, I am now wearing her – or rather, judging from the cut, her brother’s – clothes.