Chapter 20: Forged in Fire and Lust
The Royal Armory wasn’t a place; it was a temperature. A deep, permanent cold that seeped up from the flagstones and out from the walls of blackened steel. Our breath hung in permanent, misty clouds, lit by the stark white glow of the mage-lights Mary had rigged overhead. The air smelled of cold stone, sharp metal, and the faint, greasy scent of the lantern oil we used to prevent rust.
Scattered across a long, scarred oak table were our previous triumphs. A disassembled .308 bolt-action rifle, its parts laid out on a cloth like a surgeon’s kit. Schematics for the 155mm howitzer, absurdly large on parchment, held down by various chunks of scrap iron. And now, taking up the most space, my fresh sketches for the anti-tank gun.
It was, as Mary had put it earlier, comically overkill.
A line drawing of a long, slender barrel on a split-trail carriage. I’d penciled in the dimensions: 75mm caliber. High-velocity, armor-piercing, discarding-sabot rounds. The mathematics of it, the force vectors, the metallurgy needed for the barrel liner, it was a beautiful, complex puzzle. And completely unnecessary against a man in plate mail.
I was hunched over the table, my lower back a solid ache, the swell of my pregnancy pressing uncomfortably against the table’s edge. The numbers swam for a second.
“The rifling twist rate,” I muttered, more to myself than to Mary. “It’s for stability at range, but with a sabot…”
“The spin stabilization calculation changes because the sub-projectile separates,” Mary finished, not looking up from her own work. She was calculating charge weights, her brow furrowed, the tip of her tongue just visible between her lips. “We need to model the transition from full-bore to sub-caliber flight. The in-bore dynamics are one thing, the free-flight another.”
We spoke in a shorthand of physics and engineering, a private language that built walls as strong as the Western ones around us. The delegate’s voice—bleating, pregnant engineers—echoed in the silence between our sentences. Every calculation was a rebuttal. Every schematic, a raised middle finger.
From the periphery, in a pool of softer, golden lamplight near a dormant forge, came other sounds. The soft scrape of charcoal on paper. The low, warm murmur of Ellie’s voice.
She and Nancy were supposed to be reviewing linen inventories. Instead, they sat close on a fur-draped bench, a large sketchbook open between them. Nancy was drawing, her curls falling forward as she concentrated. Ellie watched, her head tilted toward Nancy’s, her hand resting gently on the small of Nancy’s back.
“See the line of her neck here, when she’s focused,” Ellie whispered, but the armory’s acoustics carried it. “That tendon. The strength of it.”
“Mmhmm,” Nancy hummed, her charcoal moving in swift, sure strokes. “And the way her thumb rests on the calipers. It’s not a grip. It’s a… a certainty.”
They were talking about Mary. A hot, complicated flush went through me—part embarrassment, part fierce possession.
“And Amy,” Ellie’s voice dipped lower, richer. “When she gets a piece of the puzzle to fit. That tiny gasp she thinks no one hears. The way her whole body goes still, just for a second, before she pounces on the solution.”
Nancy’s sketching stopped. I could feel her gaze lift and settle on the back of my neck. “Like a hunter.”
“Exactly.”
Their words were a different kind of math. An emotional calculus that quantified us in terms of gesture and glance, not force and velocity. It should have been a distraction. Instead, it felt like fuel. The heat from their corner of the room was the only thing countering the armory’s deep freeze.
Mary pushed her chair back, the legs screeching on the stone. She walked stiffly to a rack of polearms, gripping the cold shaft of a halberd with both hands. She stretched, her spine cracking, her swollen belly a clear, undeniable curve against her worn tunic.
“The delegates,” she said, her voice flat, echoing slightly. “They looked at us and saw incapacity. They saw the pregnancy as a… a failure of readiness.”
I put my pencil down. “They see creation as downtime. A vulnerability.”
“It’s not downtime,” Mary said, turning. Her face was etched in the harsh mage-light. “It’s parallel processing. We’re building a future here.” She gestured at the schematics. “And here.” Her hand rested on her stomach for a fleeting moment. “They can’t comprehend a system that multiplies outputs instead of dividing attention.”
It was the most I’d heard her say about it. Her engineering mind framing the most biological of processes in terms of efficiency and yield. It was how she made sense of it.
From the lamplight, Ellie’s voice floated over, gentle but solid. “They fear what they can’t compartmentalize. A woman who can both design a weapon and grow a life… it breaks their little world.”
Nancy spoke up, her tone lighter, but with an edge. “So we’ll give them more to fear. Guns that break their walls. Daughters who break their rules.”
I looked back at my ridiculous anti-tank gun. A weapon designed to punch through inches of hardened steel at a thousand yards. An answer to a question this world hadn’t even thought to ask yet.
But it wasn’t really for their tanks. It was for their disdain. It was the pure, violent expression of a truth they refused to see: that life and strength weren’t opposites; they were the same damn thing.
“The barrel,” I said, my voice finding a new resolve. “We’ll need a monobloc construction for the initial prototypes. Forged, then bored. Our existing lathe can handle the external profiling, but the deep-hole drilling…”
“We’ll need to modify the jig,” Mary said, coming back to the table, her fatigue seemingly burned away. “Add a secondary stabilizing bushing. And the recoil system. A hydropneumatic setup is ideal, but for a first test, a simple concentric spring buffer might…”
We dove back into the technical abyss. The numbers became incantations. The steel, a waiting form to be shaped by our will.
Hours bled away. The mage-lights began to dim, their magic waning. Ellie and Nancy’s whispers had settled into a soft, companionable silence, their sketchbook closed, their bodies now curled together on the furs, watching us work.
Finally, we had it. A complete, brutal set of specifications. A weapon of terrifying, specific purpose.
My back screamed in protest as I straightened. Mary rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.
Ellie uncurled herself and came over. She didn’t look at the schematics. She looked at me, at the tightness around my mouth, at the grime on my hands. She placed her warm palms on my aching lower back and began to knead the locked muscles there.
“You’ve built your monument,” she said softly, her breath warm against my ear. “Now come and be soft for a while.”
Nancy was already leading a weary but serene Mary by the hand toward the archway, murmuring about a hot bath and mint tea.
For a moment, I resisted, my mind still whirring with gradients and tolerances. But then Ellie’s thumbs found a knot of pure agony and pressed, and my resolve melted. The armory’s cold, the ghost of the delegates’ sneers, the weight of the unborn child and the unborn weapon—it all receded, replaced by the simple, overwhelming reality of her touch.
We left the blueprints on the table, a declaration in ink and ambition. The armory, with its whispers of old wars, would keep our secrets for the night. The new war, the one we were crafting in both steel and flesh, could wait until dawn.