Quinlan looked at Black Fang.
Black Fang looked back, expression offering absolutely nothing, as if she had definitely not spent her evening kneeling behind her little sister in venom-steam, rinsing samurai hair with great patience.
"Portal," she demanded.
He didn’t move. Instead the smile arrived, small at first, then spreading, deeply obnoxious, as he filed the image away for the rest of his very long life.
Black Fang pushed off the tree and simply started walking away from the two of them.
"Portal." It came back over her shoulder, flat as a knife laid on a table, without her breaking stride.
Quinlan and Ayame watched her receding back with matching grins, fond in a way neither of them would have dared say to her face.
Kaede trailed down the path last.
She was thinner than her reign had left her, dressed in plain traveling grey with her hair bound low, and guilt organized every inch of her: where she stopped, three steps short of the group and no closer; the depth of the greeting bow she offered them and refused to rush; the way she carried nothing, asked for nothing, presumed nothing.
She had run numbers on her own sister’s life once, as a duchess. Now she held her place on a winter lawn, awaiting a sentencing that kept refusing to arrive, and the refusal was its own punishment.
Ayame crossed the lawn to her.
For a moment the two Fujimori regarded each other in the pale light, the elder settled and unhurried, the younger braced like a struck bell. Then Ayame deposited a cloth-wrapped bundle into her sister’s arms, weight-first.
"You carry the offerings."
Kaede’s arms closed around it on reflex. Rice wine, incense, white ash-paper, the shapes readable through the cloth to anyone raised in that house, and her breath went somewhere for a second.
"Yes, sis..." She caught the word halfway out, folded it smaller, and bowed her head over the bundle. "...Understood."
Ayame had already turned away.
Then the mansion doors opened, and the luggage marched out on its own.
"The head of the line does not carry baggage," Elder Chizuru of the Fujimori announced to the garden in general, crossing the lawn under a stacked tower of travel cases with her spine straight as doctrine. "The line carries for its elders. This arrangement dishonors the clan."
"Shut your mouth," Quinlan and Ayame demanded in perfect sync.
"..." The elder’s mouth worked, hunting for a counter-doctrine and finding none, then closed with the dignity of a vault door.
Quinlan surveyed his travel party: a samurai with the most gorgeous of cheeky grins, an assassin already halfway across the lawn, a duchess holding grave-offerings like a verdict, and one very dignified filing cabinet.
Across the lawn, Black Fang was still walking, small with distance now and not slowing.
"Open it already, Quin." Ayame’s eyes tracked her sister’s course over the grass. "Before she marches into one of Yoruha’s traps."
Quinlan grinned, and the [Warp Gate] bloomed.
...
To the north and a mile beneath the surface, Brokk, First Hammer of the royal smithy, climbed the long gallery to the main halls of dwarven governance with a requisition slate under one arm and half an hour of patience left, and heard the future of her people before she ever saw it.
It sounded like a tavern brawl wearing its best jewelry.
The news had arrived days ago: Ragnar captured, the elves had dissolved their own crown and knelt, all of them at once, to the Primordial Villain, the man who’d been on a warpath to destroy all their forts.
Every clan lord under the stone had been screaming at every other clan lord since.
No one had thought to close the great doors of the council hall, because what was boiling inside had long stopped caring who heard it.
"...the king ROTS in the Villain’s keeping and you’re already measuring his chair for your backside, Harrek!"
"Somebody had better measure it! Or do we wait for the long-ears’ fake god to e do it for us?!"
"The army is BONES, you copper-counting vulture! Helmets with nobody under them! Whoever takes the seat inherits a graveyard with taxes!"
"And no allies to guard it! Or did you miss what little remains of our forces crawling back through the passes empty-handed?" A goblet went over.
"The old alliance died with Elvardia, the long-ears say! Generations of treaty, dead in ONE elven evening! And for what? One strong male strutted into their forest, and the entire race rolled over for him, crown, army, and temple!"
"What did you expect from long-ears?!" a fourth lord roared over the wreckage of his chair. "Weak-willed does in heat, the lot of them! A race that spreads its legs the moment it sniffs a stronger male, then dresses the smell up as scripture!"
"That description reminds me of your wife."
"I heard your daughter takes visitors late at night."
The lord of the Copper Vaults and the lord of the Iron Gates had each other by the beard-rings within the minute. A fist cracked across a rival’s nose, a chair splintered to kindling under somebody’s backside, and their retainers pretended very hard to be furniture.
Brokk halted in the doorway with her slate and watched the finest blood of her people eat itself.
Someone finally noticed her.
"First Hammer!" Lord Harrek untangled his beard from his rival’s fist, straightened his chains, and his voice turned to syrup. He addressed the room over her head. "Let the record show the royal smithy stands with the Copper Vaults’ claim! Every hearth, every hammer!"
Brokk’s mouth opened.
"When the seat is mine," Lord Mogrun bellowed across him, "the smithy’s quotas double! Siege plate by summer! The mountain rebuilds on its anvils, as it always has!"
Her mouth was still open. Neither of them was looking at her.
A third voice slid in from the side, oiled and reasonable, some cousin of a cousin with a thin claim and a strong perfume. "And who guards your smiths when the beastkin test our passes, hm, First Hammer? These are dangerous years for craftsmen. Remember whose soldiers stand guard so you can focus on your trade."
That one, at least, had the courtesy to threaten her directly.
Brokk stayed where she was, requisition slate under one arm, pig-iron and coal and copper for the rebuild itemized in a smith’s neat columns, and waited to be asked a single question by a single soul in that hall.
She counted instead, because counting was what her hands did when they wanted to break something: four claims, two brawls, one king in a cell. Her half hour of patience had run out somewhere around the second brawl. She stayed anyway.
And zero questions, in a solid hour of shouting about the mountain’s future, about what the mountain could still make. The smiths who would carry the whole rebuild on their backs had e up exactly three times, every time as somebody’s property, indebted slaves who’d best do their bidding, or else.
Brokk gave the lords of her people one last, level look.
Then she turned around, tucked the slate under her arm, and walked, and not one voice rose to call her back, because not one of them noticed the royal smithy leave the room.
The gallery took her down through the lamplight one landing at a time, and somewhere on the long stair the shouting faded behind her and the memory arrived in its place, uninvited, warm and unhurried.
He hadn’t e with terms.
He’d e asking about flue draw and quench-oil, and worked her bellows half-naked for an hour like the labor was a privilege.
The crown’s racks had opened at one wave of his hand, and he’d watched her walk past adamantite for honest hearth-steel, then left the results of his sweat humming on her anvil.
And when the talk had finally reached her smiths, the most dangerous being alive had shrugged like it was obvious.
"Sounds like the kind of people any sane ruler would want to support."
The words had followed her home that day and never left.
The royal smithy met her the way it always met her: heat first, then the hammer-song. The song faltered tier by tier as she walked through the doors, because three hundred smiths knew exactly where their First Hammer had spent the last hour, and not one of them had yet run out of retellings of the time a conqueror worked their bellows.
Work slowed. Hammers stilled. Old Dain shifted around on his bench with both hands braced on his cane, and the apprentices collected along the second-tier rail like starlings, young master Vorn leaning further over it than any of them.
"Well?!" young Vorn blurted from the rail, and got cuffed by three masters at once for it.
On its anvil, where no one had presumed to move it, Everwright hummed.
Brokk stopped in the middle of her hall, thumbs hooking into her belt, and looked them over: the masters, the apprentices, the cold forges waiting on coal the lords were too busy brawling to approve.
Then the First Hammer of the royal smithy asked her smiths, plainly:
"Wouldn’t it be better to be ruled by the Primordial Villain?"
Reviews
All reviews (0)