Chapter 19: The Bloodstained Blueprint
The Royal Forge didn’t hum, it roared. The air trembled with the bass-note thump of massive trip hammers and sizzled with the scent of quenching oil and molten steel. Heat rolled in visible waves from the crucible pits, a shocking, visceral counterpoint to the eternal freeze outside. Mary and I stood at the improvised range, a cleared lane behind the slag heaps, the jagged obsidian tooth of the forge looming behind us.
Our creation felt alive in my hands. The walnut stock, freshly oiled, was smooth and cool. The metal, still bearing the subtle tool marks from the mandrel process we’d invented, was a dull, serious blue. It had weight. Purpose.
A delegation from the Southern Marches lingered ten paces behind us, wrapped in furs over gilded plate. They’d come to discuss grain shipments from our geothermal valleys. The agenda had been unexpectedly, and insultingly, expanded to include a demonstration of our “peasant’s curiosity.”
“Whenever you’re ready, my Queens,” called Lord Valtor, a man whose beard seemed designed to hide a permanent sneer. His tone was that of an adult humoring a child with a troubling new stick.
Mary caught my eye. She nodded once. We both shouldered our rifles. The action was fluid, the bolt a smooth, satisfying glide backward, then forward, seating a .30 caliber promise into the chamber. The sound was a crisp, mechanical rasp that was utterly foreign in this world of clanging swords.
Downrange, at one hundred paces, stood a warrior’s dummy clad in a confiscated Southern March breastplate—good steel, intricately engraved with their sunburst motif.
I exhaled, the forge’s heat making the air over the sights shimmer. I squeezed. The report was a sharp, cracking thunder that split the industrial din, louder and more definitive than any musket. The kick was a firm, solid push into my shoulder. Before the echo finished caroming off the obsidian walls, Mary’s shot followed, a near-identical twin.
We worked the bolts in unison. Clack-snick. Clack-snick. The spent brass spun through the air, glittering in the firelight, striking the stone floor with a high-pitched ping.
Silence, save for the forge’s breath.
A smith’s apprentice, a young girl with soot-smudged cheeks, jogged downrange. She dragged the dummy back towards us, its feet scraping on stone. She stopped before the delegation.
Two holes. Not ragged tears, but clean, perfect punctuations punched through the center of the sunburst. The steel around the holes was slightly flared outward. The hardened wood backing was splintered into a fist-sized crater.
Mary lowered her rifle. “Penetration and expansion. As designed.”
Lord Valtor strode forward, his entourage trailing. He examined the breastplate with a cursory glance. He made a sound in the back of his throat, a dismissive hmph. He plucked the deformed lead core from the wood backing, holding it up between two fingers like a piece of dung.
“A tiny piece of metal,” he announced, his voice projecting for his men. “You waste all this… clever machinery.” He gestured vaguely at our rifles. “To propel a pebble. A well-made longbow sends a shaft that can pin a man to a tree. This?” He dropped the bullet fragment. It chimed on the floor. “A nuisance. It would not even penetrate a basic magical ward. A child’s kinetic-dispersion hex would stop a dozen of them.”
He looked at Mary, then at me, his eyes lingering on the obvious swell of my stomach beneath my practical tunic, on the similar curve of Mary’s. His sneer deepened, becoming something truly venomous. “It is a tool for those who lack the strength for real arms. A suitable diversion, I suppose, for the… domestically occupied.”
He turned on his heel, his fur cloak sweeping. “Come. Let us see if their grain stores are as over-engineered as their toys.”
The delegates followed, a murmur of low laughter rippling through them. They moved away, toward the forge entrance, their voices fading but not disappearing. The acoustics of the cavernous space were treacherous.
A phrase, carried on a hot draft, snaked back to us. “…breeding sows playing at war…”
Another, fainter. “…see her heft a real lance? She’d piss herself…”
Then Valtor’s voice, clear as a bell in a sudden lull of hammering: “Let them have their noise-makers. It keeps them out of the way of real governance.”
I stood frozen. The rifle in my hands, moments ago an extension of my will, now felt like a dead weight. The heat of the forge became a suffocating blanket. Rage, cold and precise, began wiring my system, seeking an outlet, a torque specification for a neck. Mary was a statue beside me, her knuckles bone-white on the walnut, her jaw clenched so tight a muscle flickered under her skin.
Then they were there.
Ellie and Nancy appeared from the shadow of a great quenching trough, having watched the entire exchange from the sidelines. They didn’t speak. Ellie moved to me, Nancy to Mary.
Ellie’s hands came up, not to the rifle, but to my face. They were shockingly cool. She turned my head away from the retreating delegates, her thumbs stroking my temples. “Look at me,” she whispered, her voice a balm against the sear of the insults. “Right here.”
Nancy pressed her forehead against Mary’s, her long curls creating a private curtain around their faces. “Breathe, Mare,” she murmured. “Just breathe. They’re nothing. Echoes in a cave.”
Ellie’s gaze held mine. I saw no art in it now, only a fierce, feral understanding. “They fear what they don’t understand,” she said quietly, her voice only for me. “They fear the precision. They fear that you can solve the problem of them from farther away than they can shout a curse. They especially fear that you built that solution while growing a life inside you. It breaks their world.”
My breath hitched. The cold rage was still there, but it was being channeled, contained by her touch. Mary let out a slow, shuddering exhale, leaning into Nancy.
“They want you hot and stupid,” Nancy whispered, her lips now at Mary’s ear. “They want a charge they can parry. Don’t give it to them.”
Ellie leaned in closer, her voice dropping to a husky, intimate register that vibrated in my bones. “They think pregnancy is a weakness. A distraction.” Her hand slid from my face, down my neck, coming to rest, possessively, over the curve of my belly. “They have no idea it’s a forge. It tempers you. It makes every priority sharper. It tells you exactly what, and who, you’re fighting for.”
She finally looked at the rifle still in my grip. A slow, wicked smile touched her lips. “The blueprints were the foreplay. This was the first touch. The real meeting?” She glanced toward the castle keep, then back to me, her eyes dark with a promise that vaporized Lord Valtor’s pettiness into irrelevance. “That comes next. On our terms. In our language.”
She took the rifle from my numb hands, passing it to a waiting smith. Nancy did the same with Mary’s. Then, linking arms with us, our wives turned us, not toward the political battlefield, but inward.
Away from the mocking echoes. Away from the heat of industry. Back toward the sanctum of stone and fur and milk, where a different kind of strategy was being drawn, where the only audience that mattered waited, and where the only strength we needed to prove was to each other.