The woodworkers were a silent bunch, but Willow liked that. The workers’ housing had someone come around an hour before dawn and pound on each of the doors in turn. Willow awoke in the room she shared with another woman—who did something in administration—and stretched after getting out of bed. The muscles in her arms were losing their tenderness and becoming more normal by the day.
It was chilly with fall coming up fast, which would spread into winter soon enough, and Willow donned a set of heavy canvas workwear. The fabric was waterproof and sturdy, as the man who sold it to her had claimed. They were called tin-pants for some reason, although she was unclear as to why.
Willow quickly grew hot with her outfit on in the workers’ housing, so she went through the door after stashing her breakfast and lunch in a crosswise sling around her back. Lights shone through the guildhall of the woodworkers and a few other facades down the twisty street, but for all else the world still seemed to be in that twilight state before real wakefulness began.
A time of new beginnings. Of new starts.
She found her master at the small caravan tightening straps on the equipment. His name was Tyrone and he stood out from the others not just from his sheer bulk, but also by his jet-black skin. Since coming to Durum she’d seen a few others with skin as dark as his, but never that dark.
He looked around, caught sight of Willow and waved her over. She hobbled across the street with her cane to the empty caravan.
“Are you gonna use that while we’re in the forest,” he asked, eyeing the cane.
“If you want me to get anywhere,” she said. Tyrone rubbed his jaw, then shook his head.
“You’re a mystery, Willow. That’s for sure. Help me secure the tools.”
He showed her knots, ways to weave rope that cinched in just the right way that the strain of so many long tools wouldn’t loosen them. It reminded her of weaving essence into magic, but infinitely more practical. And there was little chance that tying a knot could get you or someone else killed.
She felt something in the bundle as she passed her hand over the tools to pull a rope tight. A familiarity she wasn’t expecting, like catching sight of a long-lost friend. She shook her head and cinched the knot like Tyrone had showed her, then stowed the loose end of the rope.
It was time to roll out. The guildmembers took their spots on the three-wagon caravan, the back two wagons of which were uncovered and girded by thick vertical poles along their sides for the felled logs. Tyrone called her name and she shimmied up into the second wagon to sit beside a bundle of long saws.
The caravan began to move and it wasn’t long before the city’s gate reared up above them. The wall was fully thirty feet thick, the tunnel under it sealed by a gate at either end. She recognized inscripted light bars set into the arched stone ceiling, dispelling what shadows might’ve gathered in the damp tunnel.
Sooner than she’d thought the caravan emerged through the second gate and she was out of the city for the first time in months. With the curved city wall to their backs the world seemed to open up in a vista from horizon to horizon. The sky was just beginning to lighten, but even in the pale morning she could see the strange refractions of the warded tunnel and how it warped the surrounding hillsides.
The track they followed out of the city was well-worn and utterly invisible from outside the city. She looked around, but the warbeast wasn’t in sight. Tyrone didn’t seem worried; in fact, he was dozing with his back to one of the vertical wooden pillars of the logging trailer. Willow tried to settle down as well, but the constant jostling and her uneasy heart kept her from nodding off.
They traveled until the sun’s disc crested the horizon. On the packed earth of the warded tunnel track they made great time to the edge of the warbeast’s territory. The end of the tunnel was obvious from the way the straight-line of the path branched out into a delta of churned earth. The caravan doglegged left toward a forest in the middle-distance.
It was another hour until they reached it, a much rougher hour of bumps and rocking over the uneven ground. Willow held tight to the pole of the logging trailer and tried to force herself to relax. She couldn’t be this fragile anymore. She was going to work—to earn her way in the world. She had to be strong.
When they reached the edge of the forest and pulled the caravan up alongside the outermost trees, Tyrone automatically stirred from his nap. How he knew that they’d stopped for good Willow had no idea, but he jumped off the trailer and began undoing the knots around the stowed tools. Willow gingerly hopped down and helped.
The familiar feeling came again. She got it when she worked the knot around a brace of axes, and when the bundle finally opened, she saw which it was coming from as plain as day.
The ax she’d used yesterday. She saw where the edge of the head was slightly crumpled from her inexpert fix. The wood of the handle, just as she remembered. It was like seeing a long-lost friend.
“Grab an ax,” Tyrone said, then nodded toward the tall trees. “We’re going to fell until the first few are down, then you’ll be chopping them to size.”
“Shouldn’t we use the saws for that,” Willow asked, and looked over to the other cart where pairs of workmen were taking the flexible metal saws into the forest.
“They’re trained for it,” Tyrone said. “They’ll fell all day. We’re just helping until we can do our own work.”
Willow picked the ax that felt like home and used it instead of her bamboo cane to hobble into the forest. Tyrone went in ahead of her and kept glancing back to make sure she was keeping up.
She picked up her pace. She didn’t want to be a burden here, like she’d been at school.
A few trees in, Tyrone stopped at a trunk seemingly at random. He knocked it with the back of his ax and listened to the sound of the wood. Willow wondered what he was listening for, but it just sounded like wood to her.
“This one will do,” Tyrone said, and Willow hefted her ax.
“Wait, what do you think you’re doing?”
“Um,” Willow waffled. “Cutting down the tree?”
Tyrone shook his head. “Which direction will it fall?”
“Which…,” Willow said, then looked around. She supposed there were some safe directions for it to fall, and some unsafe directions. Was the caravan far enough away that it wouldn’t hit the wagons if it fell toward it? Where were the other guildmembers? How would they drag it out of the forest?
“I don’t know,” she said, and he nodded.
“The cut of the tree is key in controlling the fall. A tree fifteen feet tall is heavy enough to kill a man if it hits him right. A tree this size would demolish a house.”
She imagined it, even though she tried not to. The tree falling, landing on a building of light stone. Smashing through the roof, blowing out the door. Pulverized stone, nullification rings spinning in superheated arcs through the air. Carl under the trunk, a trickle of blood coming from his mouth.
“Hey, hey,” Tyrone said, and grabbed her shoulder. It was above where Annabelle had fixed her arm, and she hissed as the pain brought her back and jerked away. She stepped back, almost took a tumble, then steadied herself with the haft of the ax. Tyrone was staring at her.
“I’m fine,” Willow said, and walked back to the tree. “Felling direction,” she prompted.
Tyrone paused for a moment and the silence was pregnant with questions. Questions about her past, about her life before. Why she was here taking Tyrone up on an offer that was meant to be an easy let-down. Questions she didn’t offer any answer to.
“Right,” he said. “Well, the caravan is due south…”
🜛
They worked until midday to fell the one tree, both going at the trunk on opposite sides to cut the hinge on which it would pivot. Willow didn’t recreate the stunt that had gained her admission into the guild, not with the tree looming above the both of them. She was afraid it would crash down prematurely, crush them both maybe even others.
Finally after a back-breaking morning, the tree began to lean, followed by a cracking sound.
“Timber,” Tyrone bellowed into the forest in three directions, not the first time they’d heard the shouted warning. The tree tilted slowly over, so slowly, but when it hit the ground the earth shook under Willow’s feet. Tyrone was right: it was much more dangerous than it looked.
They walked out of the forest to the caravan where two other trees were already lined up and Tyrone retrieved two sets of wicked-looking iron clamps. He gave one to willow and latched his at the base of the tree, the metal biting into the wood. Willow finangled hers around the upper branches and Tyrone started dragging.
She was dead weight. Without the ax, which she’d deposited back at the caravan, she stumbled along after him. The claws were barely in the tree, Willow wasn’t even pulling, but Tyrone didn’t look back to see what the problem was. He just hauled the trunk in fits and spurts out of the forest and into the clearing beside the wagons.
By the time they got the tree positioned with all its multitudinous branches sticking hither and thither, Tyrone was drenched in sweat. So was Willow, just from the exertion of walking while attempting to pull up on the top of the tree. Tyrone returned the clamps and brought out their axes.
“Here,” he said, and offered her one, but it wasn’t right. She reached past him and grabbed the other in his off-hand, which elicited a smirk from Tyrone which was indecipherable to Willow. Did he think she was just weird or quirky? Was he regretting signing her with the guild even after she’d passed his test?
“First, the branches,” he said, motioning to the many cracked and broken-off remains of the proud tree. He got straight to work hacking with the ax, loping off the wood and throwing it into a pile nearby.
Willow hefted the ax, her ax, and it felt once again like a part of her body. She could almost sense touch through it. She supposed that was how she’d been getting along her whole life, but it was strange to have it happen to any other object.
She swung again and again, paring branches off the trunk. The morning chill burned away to a cool autumn day as they worked in the relatively bright light of the plain beside the forest. Willow tried to keep pace with Tyrone by holding herself back. In this place, in her new life, she didn’t want any strange questions. She wanted to stand out as little as possible from the crowd.
After paring the tree down to the bare trunk, it was time to section it up into logs. They worked together with a smaller saw than the two-men teams in the forest to slice the trunk. With each thrust of the thin metal, Willow began to feel it more and more. Her arms began to rest, her hands taking the strain of holding on. Eventually she realized she wasn’t pushing against the blade at all on the forward thrusts, it was just moving on its own to her will.
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Again. She’d done it again, and she hadn’t meant to this time. She felt disappointed, and worried as well. How often would this happen if she pushed herself? Why was she latching onto objects like this so easily? Was it because she had unused potential from freeing up her hands and arms? Where would it end?
With a thin ring of metal, the sawing was complete and Tyrone looked back over the log sections. He grabbed a set of metal claws and Willow likewise grabbed her set from before. They dragged the sections to the cart and loaded them up against the stanchions so they wouldn’t roll on the trip back. Tyrone explained all of this as Willow barely felt their dragging weight. Was it the claws this time, or the logs themselves?
The problem was: it was almost impossible to tell. She didn’t feel any great affinity for the claws, and each log leaving her to go into the cart didn’t provoke the same sensation of loss as the ax had.
Why? Why was this happening? Why couldn’t she just be normal?
They broke for lunch, all of the woodworkers leaning against the cartwheels or the outer trees of the forest, soaking up the sun and chowing down. Willow unwrapped the field rations she’d purchased from the store down the street from the guildhall and bit into the hard bread topped with seasoned meat.
It wasn’t nearly as good as Margaret’s fare, but she had to forget that. That life in the small room off the kitchen. The room where she first laid with Leopold. That room where she felt love blossom for the first time. Where she’d finally belonged.
She couldn’t go back. She’d kill one or more of them, eventually. Accidentally. It would happen again, just like it had with Carl. There was no way to stop it, she didn’t even half-understand what her body was capable of. If she just kept herself here, away from magic, she could live in peace.
She was sure of it.
Lunch was over deceptively early, and then it was back to work. This time they cleared branches from trees the sawing teams brought in, not venturing back into the forest for the rest of the day. Chopping, sawing, hauling. Again and again. The work was repetitive and Willow’s mind went blissfully blank.
She didn’t realize the sun was nearing the horizon until the conglomeration of woodsmen around her and Tyrone forced her to acknowledge the fact. The cutting teams were back, hacking at the remaining trunks, and everyone was pitching in to segment the logs into manageable lengths.
When everything was done, Tyrone held out his hand and Willow breathlessly handed back the ax. It parted easier from her this time. She didn’t care why. She was bone-tired and sweaty. But she’d done it. The woodsmen were tying their harvest down with ropes and Tyrone was gathering the tools to do the same. Willow hobbled off to find her cane, still propped on the wheel of one of the wagons.
They all rode together in the front wagon while the other two carried their harvest. Willow squeezed in between Tyrone and another burly man and paid little attention to the raucous conversation around her. It was nice to be unnoticed; to be invisible. Someone as small as her among men so large, she could just disappear.
The delta of turned earth marked the entrance to the warded tunnel, and only after they’d lined up with the tunnel could Willow see the rammed-earth road which led to the city gates. The illusion really was quite magnificent—it was no wonder it had kept the warbeast at bay for so long. She looked across the denuded horizon and thought she saw movement near the city’s wall to the north, but she couldn’t be sure in the failing light.
She’d expected to go straight back to her shared room after disembarking and unloading the logs for processing, but after she’d dragged the last section of wood to the workyard Tyrone approached her in the falling dusk.
“Good work today, Apprentice Willow,” he said, and she smiled but couldn’t meet his eyes. She was leaning on the articulated claws—her cane was back leaning against the guildhouse—and she knew he’d seen things today he couldn’t easily explain. Nothing supernatural, nothing impossible, just improbable. Like a wasted girl keeping up with a band of experienced woodworkers when she wasn’t hobbling from place to place.
“We’re going to get a bite. The guys usually do after we finish. Would you like to join us?”
Willow thought back to the chamber she shared with the woman in administration, the tiny space with barely enough room between the beds to shimmy out. How hard it would be to find somewhere open to get food at this hour. She nodded.
“That would be nice.”
🜛
The tavern, as it had been described to her, was almost unnoticeable between the workshops and warehouses on the twisting street. Everything smelled of sawdust and hot iron—this was the worker’s district, where she now belonged. She supposed she should get used to these smells and forget as quickly as she could the scents of parchment and paper, chalk and roast beef.
When Tyrone opened the door for her, absent of any mark or shingle that might identify it as a tavern from any other workshop, the roar nearly blasted Willow off her feet. Yellow light spilled out onto the street along with the strong funk of sour ale and boiling stew. Tyrone placed a hand at her back and gave her a little push into the tavern before shutting them in.
Another cheer went up across the small room and Willow realized that everyone was looking at her, cheering for her. She wanted to fold into herself and hide away, but Tyrone placed his arm around her shoulders and steered her to the long central table around which most of the men she’d worked with that day were seated. With an incomprehensible shout, Tyrone summoned a barmaid and Willow found a pint of ale sitting before her on the slick wooden tabletop.
“The woman of the hour,” one of the woodsmen shouted, clearly already half-drunk from the slur in his voice. Another cheer went up at the proclamation.
“What’s going on,” Willow leaned over and shouted into Tyrone’s ear, the only volume that could possibly register in the rowdy space.
“Cutting a new apprentice is always something to be celebrated,” Tyrone said back, barely having to raise his deep, gravely voice over the crowd to be heard. “But with you its something special.”
“What’s special about me,” Willow said, then snapped her lips shut. She shouldn’t prod, she shouldn’t poke. She should just disappear. Willow tried to hide her face behind the large wooden pint as she gulped ale.
“You swing like a man,” a hairy fellow beside Tyrone shouted. “I’ve never seen such a thing from a woman before. You’re strong as an ox.”
“Keep up and Tyrone will have to raise you to journeyman tomorrow,” someone cheered, which elicited another clinking of mugs all around. Two clanked into hers, spilling ale all down her workclothes. Surprisingly, the ale just ran off onto the floor as if it were slipping on a greased skillet.
“It’s months before that,” Tyrone said back, but elbowed Willow slightly. “But I wouldn’t be surprised. Our new apprentice has shown us all up, hasn’t she boys?”
Another cheer, and Willow was surrounded with a chorus of “drink, drink, drink!” She drank, sucking back the sour ale, until she couldn’t hold back any more and let out a mighty belch. This too seemed to elicit a cheer.
The night grew hazier as the drinks continued to flow. Eventually a stew was served of which Willow tucked away four servings, which again caused such an uproar that new toasts were proposed. Willow the bankbreaker. Willow the logsplitter. Willow the apprentice.
It was better, much better, than being Willow the waif.
A woodsman who she didn’t catch the name of helped her back to her dormitory. He almost had to carry her with how she was wobbling on her cane, but if any of the woodsmen were confused about the juxtaposition between her cane and her performance out beside the forest, they didn’t mention it. It was almost like she could just be as she was. It was nice.
Willow was still pleasantly buzzed as she opened her door, but that ended quickly when she saw who was waiting, sitting on her bed.
Annabelle. Illuminated by a handheld magelight, she rose from the floor-bed and slipped silently by Willow’s roommate. Had she entered after her roommate had already gone to sleep, or had she been here for hours? Willow shook her head to try and clear it of the ale, but all that did was cause her to nearly topple against the doorframe from dizziness.
“Willow,” Annabelle said, and looked her up and down. Willow too sized Annabelle up and found that she was carrying a bag over her shoulder. Whatever she was here for, Willow didn’t want her roommate to hear it. She didn’t want to mix lives.
Willow reached forward, grabbed Annabelle’s night cloak and pulled her out into the hallway. It was dark save for a slow-burning candle at the far end opposite the door. The other woodsmen had already shut themselves away to sleep off their hangovers until morning when they’d all start anew. When Willow would start with them.
“You’re drunk,” Annabelle said, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “What are you wearing?”
“What does it look like I’m wearing,” Willow said. She’d thought she had a witty retort loaded, but she was fairly certain that her words had slurred when she’d spat them.
“You look like a laborer,” she said.
“Well good,” Willow said, and swayed against the wall. “Because I am.”
“Stop playing games,” Annabelle said. “You’ve dropped out of school. Why?”
“That’s none of your business,” Willow said. “How did you know?”
“Leopold came to find me. He begged me to tell him where you were.”
Leopold. Of course he wouldn’t let her go so easily. She should have known that.
“You can’t tell him where I am.”
“I can do whatever the hell I damn please,” Annabelle said, then let out a breath. “What are you doing out here?”
“I’m working,” Willow said. It was hard to hold onto her line of thoughts, but she wanted to say this as plainly as she could.
“I’m doing something, something useful. I’m living, here. I’m useful here, without being dangerous. Without being deadly.”
“You’re useful back at the Arcanum,” Annabelle said. “You were learning magic. You were learning to control yourself.”
“I killed Carl,” Willow said. “All of my learning and was it worth it? Carl’s life for what? For a freak?”
“Carl knew the risks,” Annabelle said. “He knew after those idiots in metrology got your capacitance what it might mean. Nobody works with that kind of power and doesn’t know the risks. He’d been prepared for it. Or… he was preparing.”
“You can’t tell me that he was preparing for his imminent demise,” Willow slurred. “That he was ready for me to kill him.”
“He was always ready to die,” Annabelle hissed and pushed Willow up against the wall. She felt her back bruise, but she pushed back anyway, fueled by alcohol and rage. They wrestled softly in the dim candlelight.
“Listen to me you child,” Annabelle spat. “We’re always ready to die. We don’t belong here, Carl and I. We were sent here, and there was always a risk.”
“By your mentor,” Willow said. “Does he know about Carl?”
Annabelle paused, slackened her grip, then shook her head. “That’s what I’m here to ask you about.”
She waited for a time in the dim hallway, then backed off and unslung the pack from her back. She retrieved a wooden box from the bag and opened it at a polished brass catch.
Willow wasn’t sure what she was looking at.
“Have you ever seen something like this before,” Annabelle asked and stepped closer with the box outheld. “Did Carl ever tell you how it worked?”
Inside was a tangle of thin metal wires, a large cylinder, and what looked like the bell of a trumpet. There also seemed to be a crank, but disconnected from anything else.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Willow said. “Did Carl have one?”
“We both did. To receive messages from Asche.”
“His would be…”
Annabelle shook her head. “I searched his office, right after he died. It wasn’t there. He’d hidden it, and I don’t know where.”
“Why do you need his,” Willow asked.
“Because mine is broken,” Annabelle said. She pulled the crank handle out of the box with a snap and fitted it into a hole Willow hadn’t seen before in the side. Annabelle turned the crank a few times and a light slowly ignited within the box.
It wasn’t a light like anything Willow had ever seen. It didn’t have the same sheen as a magelight and it wasn’t like sunlight either. It was slightly orange and it felt like it was giving off a thin stream of heat. Along with the light came a sound like rain or fingernails running down wool.
“He never showed you this,” Annabelle asked, desperation in her voice. “Never talked about it?”
“No, nothing like this,” Willow said, and Annabelle stopped cranking. Immediately the light winked out, followed by the hissing sound.
“It’s broken,” Willow asked. Annabelle stuffed the box back into her pack.
“I haven’t received a transmission in a week.”
“That hissing sound, was that—” Annabelle shook her head.
“It’s supposed to be silent when its not picking anything up. This hiss… it either means that my device is broken…”
“Or,” Willow asked.
Annabelle turned toward the door of the dormitory. “Or that something’s interfering with the signal.”