Chapter 18: Scent of Gunpowder and Desire
Morning in the Icy Kingdom was a blunt, grey affair. The warmth of our bed, of our entangled bodies, felt like a dream stubbornly clinging to the edges of the cold, hard reality that seeped through the stone. My muscles ached in a pleasant, specific way—a testament to the night before—but my mind was already clicking forward, switching gears from warmth to wire, from sensation to schematics.
Mary was already dressed, standing by the window and staring out at the glacier-scarred plains. She held herself with that familiar, focused stillness. I saw her fingers absently trace the line of her lower lip, and I knew she was tasting memory.
“Armory?” I said, pulling on a heavy tunic.
She turned, a flicker of a smile touching her eyes.“Armory. The foreman will be waiting.”
Ellie and Nancy were still a drowsy, gorgeous heap of linen and bare limbs. Ellie lifted her head, her hair a glorious mess. “Bring me back something pretty,” she murmured, her voice sleep-roughened. “A new hinge for the nursery door. Or a的故事 about steel tempering. I’m not picky.”
Nancy just giggled, burrowing deeper into Ellie’s side.
The Royal Armouries did feel like a cathedral. A cold, dead one. Our footsteps echoed off the flagstones, disturbing a silence that seemed centuries thick. The air smelled of stale ice, forge-soot long cooled, and the faint, metallic tang of old blood that no amount of scrubbing could ever lift from the stones. Banners hung limp from the distant rafters, their colors bleached by time.
“It’s inefficient,” Mary said, her voice a clean cut through the gloom. She gestured at the walls lined with ceremonial greatswords, their blades pitted with rust. “Display without purpose. Weight without function.”
“They had a purpose,” I said, running a finger along a frozen gauntlet. “Intimidation. Theater.”
“Theater doesn’t stop a charging Northman,” she replied flatly. “A .308 Winchester will.”
The foreman, a grizzled man named Kael with forearms thick as rope, met us at the entrance to the active forge works. He nodded, respectful but wary. We were outsiders, women, and we’d demanded his time and resources. I held up the rolled parchment.
“We need to talk about twist rate,” I said.
The next hour was a rapid-fire exchange of terminology and numbers. The space transformed from a mausoleum to a workshop in my mind. Mary and I stood over a scarred oak table, the blueprints weighted down with a hammer and a cup of bitter forge-tea.
“Twenty-inch barrel,” I stated, pointing. “Chrome-moly steel. Any longer and it’s unwieldy in the mountain passes. Any shorter and we lose too much velocity.”
Mary leaned in, her shoulder brushing mine. “Agreed. But the stock. This design is wrong.” She took the charcoal pencil from my hand, her fingers sure. “The comb is too high. The recoil with a 180-grain round, especially for someone smaller like Nancy or my mother, will drive it into the cheekbone. We need to drop it here, and hollow the checkering for a firmer grip with gloves.”
Her use of ‘my mother’ was so casual, so ingrained. It warmed me in a way the forge’s distant heat could not.
“You’re thinking about Ellie’s grip,” I said, not a question.
“I’m thinking about effective grip,” she corrected, but a faint blush touched her cheeks. “Which her hands exemplify.”
We bickered over the minutiae of the ejector port geometry, debated the merits of a three-lug versus a six-lug bolt. It was our language. A love poem written in tolerances and torque specs.
Across the vast hall, partially obscured by a rack of pikes, Ellie and Nancy watched.
They pretended to examine a display of etched breastplates, but their attention was fixed on us. I could feel it, a tangible pressure on the back of my neck. I stole a glance.
Ellie stood behind Nancy, her chin resting on Nancy’s shoulder. Her hands were not on the ancient armor. They were inside the open front of Nancy’s gown, moving in slow, hidden circles. Nancy’s head was tilted back against Ellie, her mouth slightly open, her eyes half-lidded and fixed on Mary and me. They were whispering. I saw Ellie’s lips move close to Nancy’s ear, and Nancy’s resulting shiver was not from the cold.
“They’re at it again,” Mary muttered without looking up from the blueprint. A line of concentration was etched between her brows, but a smile played on her lips.
“Obviously.”
“Can you hear what they’re saying?”
I focused. Ellie’s voice, a low hum, carried snippets across the still air. “…see how she holds that caliper… the precision of it… makes me think of her hands elsewhere…”
Nancy’s whispered reply was gleeful. “…and Mary’s neck when she’s focused… that tendon… I want to…”
I looked back at Mary. Her ears had gone pink. She kept her eyes glued to the drawing. “We should increase the magazine capacity to five rounds,” she said, her voice deliberately steady.
“We’re limited by the action length,” I replied, playing along. “Unless we modify the feed lips.”
“Modify them,” she said, her voice tight. “I want more capacity.”
From across the room, Ellie’s laugh, a soft, knowing ripple, reached us. Nancy had turned in her embrace, now kissing Ellie’s throat, heedless of the surrounding history of war.
Our technical dialogue continued, but it was underlaid now with a new, electric current. Every decision, every measurement, was somehow imbued with the silent, voyeuristic press of their desire. Designing the rifle’s firing pin wasn’t just about metallurgy; it was about the sharp, sudden impact they were imagining. Discussing the stock’s finish was about the grip of a sweat-slicked palm.
It was maddening. It was exhilarating.Finally, we were done. The blueprint was a masterpiece of precise annotation, a call to arms against the creeping cold. I handed it to Kael. “Start with the action and barrel. Use the best stock blank you have. Walnut. Nothing porous.”
He took it, his eyes scanning the drawings. His skepticism melted into genuine appraisal. “This is… modern. Elegant.”
“It needs to work,” Mary said.
“It will,” he grunted, already turning to his apprentices.
The moment his back was turned, the spell broke.
Ellie and Nancy were upon us in an instant, no longer watching from a distance. They smelled of their own warmth and a faint hint of musk. Nancy slipped her hand into mine, her fingers intertwining tightly. “You two are unbearably attractive when you’re dictating death machines,” she breathed, her lips against my ear.
Ellie took Mary’s arm, leaning into her. “All that talk of pressure and bore… very stimulating.” She nipped playfully at Mary’s earlobe. Mary’s stern composure finally cracked, a genuine, deep laugh escaping her.
“We have work,” Mary protested weakly as Ellie began to steer her firmly toward the armory doors.
“The work is done,” Ellie said, her tone leaving no room for argument. “The kingdom is safe. Now your queen has a different need for her engineers.”
Nancy tugged my hand, her eyes bright with promise. “Come on. We need to test the structural integrity of the bed. I have hypotheses.”
Laughing, powerless and utterly willing, we let them lead us out of the frozen cathedral of war, back toward the living, breathing warmth of our chambers. The blueprints were with the smith. The defenses were in motion.
For now, our only duty was to the delicate, fierce architecture of each other.