Chapter 8: Baptism by Fire
The wind on the cliffs didn’t blow; it screamed. It ripped through the Royal Proving Grounds with a physical malice, carrying grit and the scent of frozen salt from the churning grey sea far below. Our breath plumed in the iron-cold air. The howitzer, our howitzer, sat on its makeshift carriage like a strange, dead god. The frost-kissed obsidian spikes lining the perimeter seemed to lean in, watching.
A small crowd had gathered. Clusters of fur-clad lords, their faces pinched with skepticism and cold. Military attachés with calculating eyes. Lord Tavish was there, of course, arms crossed over his chest, a silent monument to disapproval. He’d called the project “a wasteful dalliance for impractical minds.”
Mary was at the breech, performing the final checks with hands that were steady despite the cold. The cuts and blisters from the forge were just faint shadows now. I was at the aiming marks, my eyes stinging from the wind, double-checking the elevation against the distant target—a painted stone monolith on a barren scree slope.
Ellie and Nancy moved through the onlookers like a different kind of weather. They came up behind Mary and me, a wave of warmth and soft perfume cutting through the ice.
Ellie’s lips were at my ear, her voice a velvet hum beneath the wind’s shriek. “My brilliant, obsessed wife.” A kiss on my frozen cheek. Then her hand was on Mary’s shoulder, squeezing. “And my brilliant, obsessed daughter.” She leaned between us, her tone shifting into something low and charged. “If you two aren’t in the bedchambers after this, naked and on the bed, we’ll either personally go and drag you inside or we’ll send out the entire palace guard on a search. Understood?”
Nancy, pressed against Mary’s other side, nodded. Her hand found the small of Mary’s back, a proprietary, claiming touch. Her whisper was for Mary alone, but I caught the heat in it. “I want to feel you shake. But from us. Not from this.”
Then they were gone, retreating to a vantage point on a higher rock shelf, their gowns whipping around them. Two sentinels of a different faith.
Mary’s eyes met mine. A flicker of something wild and warm there, a private acknowledgment of the promise hanging in the frozen air. Then it was gone, submerged under a layer of pure, focused intensity.
“Load the high-explosive,” I said, my voice carrying.
Kira, the head smith, stepped forward with the first shell. It was a thing of brutal simplicity. Cast iron, polished dull grey, packed with our own refined powder. She handled it like a holy relic, sliding it into the open breech Mary held. The clunk of it seating was solid, final.
Mary worked the heavy block, spinning the locking mechanism. The sound was a series of precise, oiled metallic thuds. A perfect seal.
“Ready,” she said. The word was crisp, swallowed by the wind.
I looked down the barrel one last time, my heart a hammer against my ribs.This was it. The math, the sweat, the burns, the whispered arguments over diagrams at midnight. All compressed into this one cylinder of steel. I nodded, stepping clear, moving to where Mary stood by the firing lanyard—a thick, tarred cord.
The crowd had gone quiet. Tavish’s sneer was etched deep.
Mary’s hand took the braided cord. Her knuckles were white.Not from fear. From anticipation.
“Fire in the hole!” I yelled, the old, useless phrase a reflex. My hands went to my ears.Mary pulled.
The world vanished.
There was no sound at first. There was a presence—a sudden, violent compression of the air that hit the chest like a falling stone. Then the sound arrived. It wasn’t a bang. It was the sky tearing open. A single, all-consuming crack-thunder that rippled the frozen ground under our feet.
The howitzer recoiled like a beast, the carriage slamming back into the earth, digging a furrow in the permafrost. A tongue of fire thirty feet long lashed from the muzzle, vivid orange in the grey day, followed by a rolling, doughy ring of smoke.
The shockwave hit the observers. Hats flew. Cloaks billowed violently. Two lords near the front stumbled to their knees, hands clapped to their ears, faces screwed up in pain and shock. Lord Tavish was thrown back a step, his composure shattered, his arms windmilling for balance.
My eyes were locked on the distant slope. The travel time was an eternity.
Then the monolith ceased to exist.
A flash of light, a silent bloom of dirt and rock. A full second later, the secondary thump reached us, a satisfying, hollow crump that shook the cliffs. Where the painted stone had stood was a smoking scar, debris raining down in a lazy, expanding cloud.
Silence. A ringing, hollow silence broken only by the moan of the wind and the faint ting of cooling metal from the howitzer’s barrel.
Mary was still holding the lanyard. She turned to me. Her eyes were blazing, a primal, fierce light in them that had nothing to do with intellect and everything to do with raw, unleashed power. A grin split her grimy face, wild and untamed.
I felt it echo in my own chest. A surge of pure, unadulterated triumph. It was visceral, coursing through my veins like the forge fire. We had taken an idea and given it a voice, and that voice had just shouted down the sceptics from a mile away.
I looked at her, this mirror of my own mind, and nodded once. No words were needed. We had done it.
From their ledge, Ellie and Nancy watched the plume of smoke rise. Nancy’s arm was looped through Ellie’s, her body pressed close. Ellie’s head was tilted, a small, knowing smile on her lips as she observed the devastation below and the two of us standing victorious in its wake.
Her hand was not visible, hidden within the folds of Nancy’s thick gown. But the subtle, rhythmic shift of Nancy’s shoulder, the slight catch in her breath that fogged the air just a little quicker, and the intense, glazed look of concentration on Nancy’s face as she stared at Mary told a different, warmer story.
Ellie leaned in, her whisper lost to everyone but her daughter. “See what they build? That power?” She shifted her hidden hand slightly, and Nancy’s breath hitched. “Wait until you feel theirs. Later.”
Mary was already at the breech, the smoking shell casing clanging to the frozen ground. The sound broke the spell.
The observers were finding their feet, murmuring, pointing. Some faces were pale with terror. Others shone with a fearful awe. Tavish was brushing dirt from his robes, his face a storm of fury and reluctant, horrified comprehension.
Mary caught my eye, then glanced toward the path back to the castle, her meaning clear. The promise, the urgent heat waiting in the bedchambers, was now a timer counting down.