Rowan of Northmont tried not to fidget on the most important day of his life. Stand tall, he reminded himself. His back straightened a bit as Cashin Grandbow examined three years of work with a critical eye. You have just as much a right to be here as anyone— more, even.
Cashin strolled around a glowing glass tube lit with faintly green Fulminancy, tendrils of lightning lapping lazily against the glass, slower and more docile than Fulminancy had any right to be. The man shook his head, muttering to himself, and scribbled something feverishly in a tiny notebook. Outside Cashin’s study, a line of hopeful men and women trailed away from the study, experiments and ideas in hand. A few in the front glanced at Rowan’s black sash and gave him a dirty look. Rowan was the same rank as Cashin, but his sash would curry him no favors with the man; Rowan’s status as a Dud and an outcast was well known in the Uphill, and could well ruin his deal with Cashin entirely.
Cashin crouched in front of the tube, eyes alight with the glow. He ran a hand through brown hair still thick with relative youth, and whistled softly.
“Clouds above, boy,” he said, grinning. “Do you know what you’ve done here? Don’t answer that— of course you do.” He peered at the tube again, chewing absently on his pencil, and shook his head. “Fanas’s holy storm, this clouding thing is incredible.”
Rowan fought the elation that flared deep within— that spark of recognition and accomplishment he’d been chasing for so long. The deal isn’t sealed yet, he reminded himself, and took a deep breath before speaking.
“Thank you, Lord Grandbow,” he said with a slight bow. “I hoped you would find it interesting. Fulminancy in its current form isn’t quite conducive to being adopted city-wide, but with a few changes of my own design, I think you’ll find it quite agreeable in most homes.”
“It’s quite honestly like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Grandbow said, still grinning faintly. “And let me tell you— I’ve seen a lot.”
Rowan glanced at the line of people still trailing outside the study’s door, long enough that it now ended somewhere in the street. Grandbow was one of the most generous investors in the city, and it was well-known that he was looking for new work after his recent disaster with the parlor. “I don’t doubt that, Lord Grandbow.”
Grandbow waved at him absently, still peering into the tube, as if he could divest the secrets simply from staring at it. “It’s just Cashin,” he said. He added more notes to his tiny notebook as he spoke, and Rowan tried to peer over his shoulder without being too obvious. It would be hard to steal Rowan’s design without understanding a few more of its secrets, but Rowan worried nonetheless. “I’m a businessman, not a politician,” Cashin said, wagging his pencil at Rowan. “No fancy titles, no last names. I wouldn’t care if you were a white sash from Downhill if you had good ideas in your head. You’d do well to remember that if you’re going to deal with me.”
“If I’m going to—“ Cashin tossed his notebook at Rowan suddenly, and Rowan barely managed to catch the tiny thing in fumbling hands. “Sir?”
“Numbers, boy,” Cashin said. “What do you want for it? I’ll give you as many gold minings as you want. I’ll fund your research, your patents, give you equipment, whatever you need. You’re sure this stabilizes it?”
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Rowan stood there for a moment, holding the tiny notebook, stunned. Then he recovered enough to stammer out an answer. “Of course,” he said. “I tested multiple iterations of it. This one seems to be the most stable out there, and I tried several variations of it as well. I didn’t want a repeat of whatever caused that parlor accident Downhill.”
It was a gamble to bring up Cashin’s parlors. Rowan barely knew the man, but failure could provoke even the calmest man to blows. Still, it was the truth, and Rowan was nothing if not honest.
Cashin’s gaze darkened, and as he straightened from Rowan’s little tube of light, some of the levity and childlike excitement gone from his face. He suddenly seemed much closer to his almost forty years.
“That one was bad for business,” he said quietly. “Years of trying to manage those and make them safe, and someone still manages to open an unregulated one right under my nose. I even had members of the Council on it, but they were too late.” He shook his head and met Rowan’s eyes. “I need a new deal. What you’ve got here could change the entire city. Can you imagine it? No more fuel Downhill, which means fewer fires with those shacks they build to withstand the Drystorms. Uphill we won’t have to squint by tiny globes. Might be able to get some actual work done at night. Clouds, we could export Fulminancy if we were careful.”
Rowan frowned as Cashin became more animated, pacing the room. “The nearest city is a month away,” Rowan said carefully. Cashin simply winked at him.
“However close they are, I’m sure they’d pay a high price for something like this. How’d you do it anyway?”
Rowan thumbed through Cashin’s notebook absently, noting several possible deals the man had jotted down. His hand twitched a bit on a particular page. Rowan had come from money; his family was hardly poor, and even estranged as he was, his friendship with Arlette meant that he had never wanted for much. Lab equipment, however, was expensive, and Rowan was running out of funds. Brilliant or not, his experiments with Fulminancy would come to an end if he couldn’t fund them.
His struggle with that was apparently at an end, judging from the numbers Rowan saw on the page. He shut the notebook with a snap, trying to keep his face straight, and walked over towards the tube of light where Cashin stood.
“Fulminancy has a tendency to destabilize from a distance,” he told Cashin, tapping his tube. “That’s why we usually keep it in such small globes. If it has something to latch onto, however, you can stabilize it a bit more. It retains more of its initial properties as it leaves a user.”
“So you give it something to latch onto, and it spreads the light around,” Cashin said. He whistled again. “Though…that’s not all there is to it, is there?”
“Not quite,” Rowan said, frowning. “There’s—“
Cashin held up a hand. “Don’t tell me the rest of it. If I’m going to be your patron, I don’t want to hold your secrets— just your wallet.”
This is the oddest man I’ve ever met, Rowan thought. Still, could he really complain? He’d dreamt of this for years. The kind of funds Cashin offered would mean Rowan could expand his little experiment into something truly world changing. How could his family possibly keep him estranged after that? It would certainly be hard to ignore the father of modernism in Hillcrest.
“So?” Cashin asked, hope in his voice. “I’ve got a meeting with the Council tonight. I’d love to tell them about a budding investment I’ve got in the works.”
He held Rowan’s eyes, expectant, the faint green light of the tube blossoming against his face. Rowan flipped the notebook open, tapped a page, and smiled.
“I believe you have yourself a deal.”