From beyond the flame-lit silhouettes of endless pavilion tents, one boisterous voice sounded above all others. “Release!”
Gunfire flared at Angelika’s command. The echoes of spent black powder thundered across the moonlit sky and faded into a crescendo of clapping and laughter. Once the last cheer had been cheered, crude woodwinds and lutes dominated the atmosphere once more, playing a lively folk dance, this time in quintuple meter.
Tonight, the Hospitaller celebrated. And they did so loudly.
No matter how far Dimitry strolled from the commotion, his troops never seemed to get any quieter. He wasn’t complaining. In a settlement that offered little more entertainment than fish and sand, he gladly took any opportunity to boost the morale of his soldiers. Today, a troop of farmers and village artisans had triumphed over the heathens without becoming the fodder of a commanding lord or bishop. The victory was theirs alone. Well, mostly. The sorceresses had watched their backs the entire time.
Still, Dimitry would be remiss to say he was any less euphoric than his soldiers. He rejoiced alongside them when he had delivered a victory speech at the celebration’s commencement. Their newfound strength meant they were less likely to become a heathen’s prey. Less likely to end up on his operating table. For him, that was plenty.
But Dimitry did not relish in the festivities for long. For him to indulge in praise while the one most responsible for today’s success labored on her lonesome in the dark left a bitter taste in his mouth. He left his troops with some heartening words before departing for the workshop on the colony’s periphery.
A yellow-robed woman leaned by the entrance of his destination, arms folded across her chest. Leandra raised her head. The wrinkles of middle age at their corners, her amethyst eyes hawked Dimitry from the shadow of her hood. She kicked the door open and held it with her elbow.
Dimitry reciprocated with an appreciative node before sliding past the court sorceress into the workshop, the wooden bowls unsteadily stacked atop his arms clattering with every step. He carried ocean-fresh staples and the remnants of this morning’s hunt. The finest culinary ingredients his settlement had to offer.
Inside, a sole tallow lantern struggled to banish the encroaching dark. Mere hours ago, the workshop glowed with modified meltia enchantments and sweltered with furnaces, blacksmiths tending to the lot. But now the occupants and their apprentices roasted fresh venison on the beach. All of them except for one.
She hunched over a tome, delicate fingers around the shift of a quill. Her cold indigo eyes pierced him from across the room. And then they softened. “Dimitry.”
He made his way across a floor overgrown with wilting grass dyed green by pale moonlight beams seeping through cracks in the walls. One could hear only rustling vegetation and whistling gales between their words. “While I respect the hustle, even princesses deserve breaks. Keep this up and you’ll end up like me.”
“It is not a vice to devote oneself to one’s labors.”
“Sounds like something a workaholic would say.”
“Then it is you who must have taught me,” Saphiria said. “Three lashes to the teacher for every one the student.”
“What?”
“It is a saying.”
A thought at the proverb’s doubtlessly barbaric origins coaxed a wince from Dimitry. He dropped off his ingredients beside a charcoal furnace and joined Saphiria across the table, pressing his palms onto ice cold wood. “I know we’re on a bit of a tight schedule, but at least come out long enough for me to tell everyone what you’ve accomplished. You made guns work. Not me. I’d feel a lot better if you took the credit for your success.”
“You need not trouble yourself on my part. I am content so long as you know.” Saphiria’s attention returned to her tome, quill moving with deft precision. “And unlike you, I flounder in casual matters. I can muster the courage for official duties, but people freeze and cower whenever I start a conversation. My presence there shall serve only to dampen the mood.”
Dimitry thought he understood. Not only did Saphiria represent the overbearing might of the throne, but she also greeted others with an inapproachable beauty and a reflexive murderous glare that could bring even the bravest peasant to his knees. The trifecta of social isolation. “Well, have you tried smiling? People tend to like that sort of thing.”
“I smile. Sometimes.”
“I’m sure the troops would love to see that.”
“Perhaps tomorrow.”
Dimitry interpreted her response as ‘I can’t be bothered’. A shame. The girl was a gentle personality tarnished by a piss-poor publicist. “Figured you’d say that. Since getting you out’s impossible, I brought some food with me. We can have our own mini cookout.”
“That can wait.” Saphiria tapped a vellum page with her quill. “Come, I wish to show you something.”
He rounded the table to accompany the girl. Pressed beneath her palm was the tome she often read to herself before bed. While Dimitry didn’t know what stories its pages contained, for opals to encrust the cover and velvet bindings to stretch down the spine, they must have been damn good. Her soot-stained fingernail scrolled past a section of gorgeous handwriting to a diagram of rectangles and wedges.
“What am I looking at?” Dimitry asked.
“Chills.” Saphiria watched him expectantly. “For casting.” Her expression was eager to share, like that of a medical student who somehow got to perform a Pfannenstiel incision on a pregnant patient.
“Alright,” he said. “But first, can you put on something warm? You’re shivering.”
“I have nothing with me.”
“Not even your cloak?”
Saphiria stepped to the side. “No.”
The girl’s movement aroused suspicion within Dimitry. He glanced past her to discover an anvil upholding a yellow cloak with a familiar snowshoe hare snoozing inside the collar. “I see that.”
“I’m not cold.”
“It’s a wild animal with its own winter coat. It’ll be fine. You won’t.”
“Stop! If you awaken Cecilia, I will never forgive you.”
“Really?” He halted his advance. “All that for some rabbit? What if it’s carrying a disease?”
Saphiria tailed him, the ferocity with which she approached a sharp contrast to her whispering. “She has been scrambling scared for three days, and I finally got her to trust me enough to fall asleep with me nearby. If you ruin this for me, I’ll—”
Dimitry pulled off his uniform and draped it over Saphiria’s shoulders. “I just don’t want you to freeze to death like you almost did in Amalthea.” He folded the woolen lapels against her exposed neck. “I’ll never get to hear about casting that way.”
The girl’s indigo eyes lost their intensity. She sniffled innocently, as if their altercation had never happened.
And that was that. As much as Saphiria deserved it, Dimitry couldn’t will himself to stay upset with her. “Is it safe to assume you didn’t eat supper?”
“I was about to.”
“And lunch? At least tell me you ate lunch.”
She stared at him in silence.
The need to further question Saphiria bubbled within Dimitry, but he feared his sanity would not sustain if he had learned to what extent she had been neglecting her well-being. He disarmed the destructive urge with a deep breath. “Turn on the heat. I’m making food.”
With a final longing glance at her tome, Saphiria swept lustrous vol shavings from a vise onto her palm, holding the other forward. “Ignia.”
A cart-bound bloomery billowed to life. The charcoals crackled as if the flames had started everywhere at once.
An inviting warmth caressed Dimitry’s spine as he laid out the ingredients on the table, uneven planks creaking with the slightest movement. Realizing he forgot to bring a pan, he lifted the lower half of a cylindrical land mine from an adjacent workbench, rinsed the cast steel base with marginally saline water, and rested the implement over the fire.
Without so much as a hint of effort, Saphiria vaulted onto the table and glided into a seated position. Legs bouncing against the base, she examined the contents of the wooden bowls, pausing at one containing fleshy opaque medallions. “I do not recognize these.”
“They’re scallops.” Dimitry knocked a lump of hog lard into the improvised pan. The greasy white mixture sizzled into a clear, viscous liquid.
“Scallops?” Saphiria unsheathed a sapphire-encrusted dagger to poke the thickest one. “Are you certain they are edible?”
“You’re telling me you’ve never had a scallop before?”
“I have heard of scallops, but I have never seen a scallop.”
“Your family’s been in the fishing trade forever and you’ve seriously never had a scallop?”
Brows furrowed, Saphiria frowned as if he had insulted her honor. “How a man who lives by the shore is unaware I cannot know, but only fish with fins have value. The trawler captains discard the rest or keep it for themselves.”
Dimitry struggled to believe that scallops, among the priciest foods of the modern age, were tantamount to waste in this world. That explained why the troops didn’t fight over them when the fishing harvests came around. He thought his fishermen were paying their respects by letting the apostle choose the best shares uncontested, but recalling their awestruck faces, they might have been amazed that Dimitry took the worst of the haul so that no one else would have to.
He dumped the medallions onto the lard. The translucent flesh turned opaque, and a savory-sweet aroma overpowered the lingering stench of scorched iron. “How about crab? I know they don’t have fins, but surely—”
“Nothing more than seafloor vermin.”
“Mussels? Shrimp? Lobster?”
“They are the food of the fisherman. If any appeared on the plates of my mother or her guests, the castle cooks would not see tomorrow. As for myself…” Saphiria cautiously peered over the pan, combing back loose strands of raven hair as if to prevent contaminating herself rather than the food.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Be as it may, scallops are a delicacy where I come from.”
“Delicacies are food that wouldn’t sell by any other name.”
“Oh, really?” Dimitry flipped the scallops one by one, crackling with renewed vigor as they returned to the grease. “We’ll see if you keep that tone once you try some.”
Saphiria imparted onto him a doubtful stare, but her attention waned before long. The silk of her carbon-smeared dress hissed as she slid across the table nearer to him. Eyes gleaming with the light of a more interesting topic, she nudged him with her knee.
Were she any other woman, Dimitry might have misconstrued the gesture, but with Saphiria, the truth was abundantly clear. Truthfully, he cared little for the minutia of forging, but without Saphiria, heathens would overrun his colony as soon as the sorceress guild left. At the very least, he should indulge her. And who knew? The knowledge might come in handy.
Dimitry turned to her to show she had his full attention. “Earlier, you said something about chills and casting. I can’t wait to hear all about them.”
Perhaps sensing sarcasm in his tone, Saphiria turned up her chin. “Do you remember asking why guns were taking so long?”
He did. The nervous anticipation wasn’t something Dimitry could forget. For three days following the discovery of cast steel, he struggled to divert himself with minor tasks from dusk to dawn, pacing his tent when distractions ran dry, desperately awaiting the first functional gun prototypes. His understanding was that hundreds of failed casting attempts preceded the twenty-four barrels Angelika’s platoon used to defeat the first wave of heathens. “It’s the barrels that are the problem, right?”
“Precisely. When we first began to cast them, the steel warped and shrank during consolidation. Most shattered with the first test charge.”
“I’ve noticed. Truth be told, I’ve been spending a lot of time worrying they’ll backfire on my troops.”
“Your fears are well-founded. Little is known about cast steel, especially the sort that melts without heat.” Saphiria leaped off the table and rolled a silvery cylinder from under a horseless wagon. “But we are learning.”
Standing over the barrel, Dimitry examined its smoothly sanded bore, the even muzzle. Nowhere near as impressive or reliable as a hand-forged voltech rifle, but the lack of bumps and cracks deserved recognition. “That’s the barrel you use in the newest batch of guns, right?”
“No.” Her hand brushed the surface gentler than one would a toddler’s cheek. “I have produced this one tonight. With chills.”
“Chills as in you had to ice it down or something?”
She shook her head. “Normally, molten metals shrink as they cool. The shrinkage creates fractures that compromise the integrity of the finished work. I believe they are why a barrel may explode upon firing. However, if we can anticipate where the fractures will form, my smiths can place chills to help shape the casting into its intended form.”
“I think I understand.” Dimitry nodded. “Very impressive.”
“I have not yet mentioned the impressive part.”
“Ah. Right.”
“Chills work by cooling the molten metal at vulnerable locations so that cracks do not form, but there is a problem. Since meltia produces molten steel no warmer than the air, a normal chill will not work. Heat is irrelevant. We needed a different solution.” Saphiria’s chest swelled with pride. “And I have found it.”
“And what’s that?”
“Solidia.”
“A spell?”
“Indeed. The enchantments I had Katerina produce allow me to control how fast the molten steel solidifies, much like a normal chill. We shan’t see so many failures going forward.”
Dimitry paused. Extrapolating on the straightforward and often ridiculous nomenclature of most spells, solidia likely induced the crystallization of liquids. It sounded dangerous. Deadly. “Saphiria, promise me you’ll get rid of those enchantments and never make another like it.”
The girl’s triumphant posture unraveled. She watched him, heartbroken. “… Why?”
Crushing the girl’s ambitions pained Dimitry. “Because… because there are liquids inside your body. Zera forbid you get too close to a solidia enchantment. If you do, I’m not even sure what’ll happen, but I promise you whatever it is, it won’t be pretty. Promise me.”
“I am aware!” She leaned in so close that her face bordered his. “Dimitry, you must weave me a solidia enchantment safe enough that I may entrust it to my blacksmiths.” She retreated an inch. “Please.”
The suddenness of her request left Dimitry dumbfounded. And then he realized what had happened. He stroked his chin and chuckled, laughter growing louder and deeper. Saphiria was clever—for her discoveries and for luring him into a conversation about work on his time off. The latter sounded like something he might do. “Alright. The modification for solidia shouldn’t be that much different from meltia. I’m sure we can figure something out.”
“Then I shall summon Katerina—“
“Tomorrow.” Dimitry tugged back on Saphiria’s arm. “Unlike us, most people like to do things other than work. Let them rest tonight.”
Perhaps realizing that calling people from their celebration to serve would be a poor publicity stunt, Saphiria rejoined him. They silently gazed about the workshop.
A cabinet full of meltia-enchanted drill bits for boring. Basins overflowing with experimental liquids for quenching. Carrying cases for heat treatment. An upright wooden basin, massive enough to one day fit a cannon. Trays of experimental naval mine self-ignition mechanisms and a mound of cast steel shards tucked into the corner. Every project managed and advanced by Saphiria in a desperately short amount of time.
“You’ve been doing a lot,” Dimitry said. “Honestly too much.”
“A labor of love is no labor at all. Besides, the sorceresses will depart soon. We must be ready for whatever may come.”
“You know, I used to think that guns were simple iron tubes. That all we needed was metal pellets and some black powder. That the nobles would come to help like they promised. That when we reached the coast, everything would just fall into place.”
Saphiria’s eyes trailed a loose bark plate on the roof, which shimmied with each whistling gale. “All is simple at its conception. My ancestors thought they perfected iron when they forged from it the first crude blade, yet centuries have passed and we still do not know what more there is to know. Cast steel is no different. Our discoveries here are naught but shallow scrapes at the edge of truth. The fruit dangling to the forest floor. Just as my ancestors could not have predicted the future,” she said, “neither can you.”
“Metal is one thing, and people’s lives are another. If it wasn’t for you, I… I’m not sure what I would have done. The heathens would have turned this place into a graveyard before the turn of the month. You have given us a fighting chance.”
“That is only natural. As future queen, it is my duty to secure the realm.”
Though Saphiria spoke in concrete terms, of hobby and iron, of responsibility and stewardship, of defense and safety, Dimitry sensed there was another factor in her unfaltering dedication—no less salient than the rest—that pushed her this far. “I guess what I want to say is that everything you’re doing here means a lot to me. Really. If this place ever becomes anything great, it was because of you.”
“It will. I know it.”
A minute they sat there, bathing in the night’s ambiance. Muffled gunfire bellowed in the distance, frigid gales poked from chinks in the walls, and a sleep running hare scratched its hind claws against the linings of a silk cloak worth more than most people’s houses.
“Dimitry?” Saphiria whispered.
“Yeah?”
“While I do not wish to pass judgment on your cooking…”
The stench of carbonized shellfish reached his nostrils. He jerked forward and glanced sideways to discover that the scallops were now scorched black like the oil burning inside the pan. “Ah, shit.”
----------------------------------------
Dimitry trashed the overcooked scallops with a heavy heart. To keep his promise to Saphiria, he pan-fried a second batch, this time to gold-crusted perfection. They traversed ankle-high snow as they ate, Leandra trailing close behind. The court sorceress resigned to carrying the royal hare. Though she did not look pleased when the critter awoke and kicked her in the stomach during a frantic breakout attempt, a quick spell zonked Cecilia right out again.
Thankfully, Saphiria was too busy devouring scallops to notice the blatant animal abuse. Most of the medallions had gone by the time they reached her lodgings. Only a few remained inside the pan.
Exposed to the cold and a massive tent flap whipping against his lumbar spine, Dimitry held the land mine casing she ate from. While no one could see them at the edge of the settlement restricted to the heiress, Dimitry felt like a butler holding a tray for his lord. Which was mostly true. Saphiria was the princess and he was her archbishop. He also cooked for her. Still, she should have the courtesy to share. “Hey.”
“Mm?” Saphiria mumbled through a full mouth.
“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself, but mind saving some for me?”
With her heirloom dagger, she nudged the smallest of three medallions towards him. “There. We are even.”
Clearly, the unfair gastronomical math of female dining companions did not limit itself to Earth. Dimitry popped the scallop into his mouth. His teeth crunched through the crispy exterior and glided through tender, buttery sweet flesh. Perfection indeed.
Saphiria finished the rest and gazed longingly into the pan, staring at her reflection in the grease as if willing the contents to replenish.
“Not bad, right?”
“I am surprised. I did not know you were a capable cook.”
Her compliment gave Dimitry an unexpected boost to his pride. With the girl sourcing and preparing most of their meals during the escape from Amalthea, he rarely got to show off his bachelor cooking. “If anyone lives alone long enough they’ll eventually pick up on a few tricks. Besides, it’s hard to mess up when the ingredients are this fresh.”
“And yet you managed.”
“Because you distracted me with metal talk.”
Saphiria giggled. “Indulge me again sometime.”
“I’ll get us some Razor clams and mussels ready for tomorrow. Maybe we can rig together some chowder.”
“Very well. I eagerly await an invitation to your banquet.” Idly swinging her trunk in the green moonlight, Saphiria’s gaze prodded his face for an extended moment. She broke eye contact and pivoted towards her tent.
“Wait,” Dimitry said.
She glanced back.
“Before you go, can I get my clothes back? It’s pretty cold.”
Her indigo irises widened as if he had accused her of an unforgivable crime. Saphiria’s arms opened, unraveling Dimitry’s uniform, which ballooned in the wind like a parachute behind her back. She folded the excessively decorated shirt down the center and held it forward.
Dimitry reached for the article, but a glimpse of the girl’s arm gave him pause. Somewhere on Saphiria’s wrist, camouflaged atop pale skin, clung a dungeon artifact. The pairing band. It had radiated light when he weaved a modified enchantment. A frantic azure before each disaster, and a tranquil blue that predicted stability.
Saphiria looked to where he was looking. She slunk back.
This wasn’t the first time Dimitry had seen her react aversively to any mention of the artifact. Before they were among others, but now was the perfect opportunity to ask. “Saphiria, about the pairing—”
“I did not mean for it to turn out this way.”
The quaver in her voice rattled Dimitry. “What way? Is something wrong?”
She bit her lip, scanning the gaps between snow-covered tents before pulling him into her own.
Dimitry jerked inside, stumbling when his foot snagged a gown clumped on the carpet-padded floor. He made his way past bags of dresses and makeup and whatever else the queen had delivered from Malten so her daughter could maintain appearances in these God-forsaken woodlands.
“I never should have given you Father’s artifact,” Saphiria said. “They have cursed us.”
“Cursed us?” He glanced at where his own pairing band was, imperceptible on his wrist. It didn’t seem to do anything, and he didn’t feel any different. “I’m not sure I’m following.”
“Can you not hear them? Those whispers? That cold voice that seeks to drag you into the ground with each wicked incantation?”
Hearing things? Dimitry’s heart broke, and soon it raced. Though he wasn’t a psychiatrist and the symptoms came suddenly, for a girl in her twenties to develop hallucinations suggested a culprit whose presence had wrecked countless lives with paranoia parading as truth: schizophrenia. “Can you tell me about this voice? Does it mimic your thoughts? Threaten you? Tell you to hurt yourself?”
“The words themselves are unintelligible,” she said, “but when they speak, it is as though they are pleading with me. Warning me.”
“Warning you? About what?”
“About you.” Saphiria retreated to the furthest ends of the space. “I cannot explain it, yet it is as if you are an interloper, a guest who lives in my home uninvited. Like you are plotting my end from within. I resist, but no matter how much I try to ignore the feeling or pull at the band, it clings to my arm and thoughts no less tightly. Please forgive me.”
He gulped, but like a reflux patient trying to swallow the globus sensation in their throat, the discomfort only worsened. Why would her artifact be trying to get rid of him? “Look, Saphiria. I believe you and I don’t blame you. You were only trying to help. Now let’s figure this out. Did anything else happen that might give us a clue?”
“At first, they were forked like wishbones except inscribed in black.”
“What was?”
“I know not.” Pacing, Saphiria made shapes with her fingers. “They flashed into my mind while I was apprehending the poison vendors in Malten.”
Her explanation only confused him more. “How about those words you heard? You said they were unintelligible, but maybe it was another language. I’m a bit of a polyglot. Try me.”
She shook her head. “It was not another language. One phrase was familiar to me. You had spoken of it before.”
“Which is?”
“Carbon dioxide.”
She was right. Dimitry had tutored Saphiria on carbon dioxide during the voyage from Coldust. Was the band feeding off her memories? “What about the others? Any that you can remember?”
“Thermal degeneration. Formal acid.”
Thermal degeneration? Acid? Dimitry had never told her about acids or bases, and this world had centuries to go before a chemist would catalog their properties. Thinking back, if Saphiria heard those words during the methanol poisoning incident, the only person who would have known about them was—
His eyes widened.
Fiddling with her hands, Saphiria watched him rush across the room. “Are you leaving?”
Dimitry plucked some charcoal from the makeshift hearth and dropped the overturned pan he held onto the ground. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The girl released a trapped breath as she teetered closer.
One by one, Dimitry scratched jet-black lines of carbon onto the silvery cast steel surface. A double-bonded oxygen, an alcohol group, and a lone hydrogen. The three formed a Y-shaped molecule around a central carbon. “Is this what you saw?”
Saphiria gasped. “You saw it too?”
“No,” he said, “but I know what it is.”
“What?”
“It’s formic acid.”
“Formic acid?” she whispered. “What does that mean?”
“It means your artifact… it shows you inside my mind.”