Steelfated, page 7
The gust tipped over the Octadriel on the desk- one of Morgain’s own design- and one of the containment crystals suspended in it darkened as a crack opened on its face. Morgain grunted in dissatisfaction. That was an expensive thing to break.
“That artifact was over seven hundred years old!” She snapped at the intruder before she identified them. “Guards, I told you I had no wish to be bothered by-” She started to round on the door with a glare, but the look froze on her face when she recognized the voice before she saw the intruder.
“Oh, I’m aware of how old it was, Morgain. If you wish to live to be seventeen, I’d suggest that you not let your father hear such language pass over your tongue and through your teeth.”
Morgain winced and felt the color rising in her cheeks. That was her mother standing in the doorway, looking down at her with a sharply arched eyebrow.
A deep chuckle sounded behind her mother, and Morgain nearly winced again, before she scowled at the man who was laughing. That would be one of the two guards on duty, one of whom was responsible for the battery of the door. She listened to the laugh for a moment before she took a stab at which one of the guards was posted at the door.
“Shut it, Brick, before I get you reassigned to latrine duty.” She snapped. The laughter increased.
“Hey, I didn’t do it!” came an indignant reply.
“Sorry. I meant Block.” The laughter redoubled, coming from both sides of the door. Elaine’s eyebrow arched farther into her hairline. “What?” Morgain asked innocently.
“Brick and Block?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“They both serve the same purpose and are about as intelligent.” The laughter cut off.
“Hey!” The two guards stuck their heads around the door, and both of them gestured rudely at her behind her mother’s back, where Elaine wouldn’t see them.
Their proper names were Egan and Domnall Cooper, but the twin brothers bore a remarkable resemblance to the building materials for which she had nicknamed them. She was also more than a little sure that she occasionally called them by the inverse, yet they paid her name-calling little heed.
The twins were excellent guardsmen, but like most soldiers and guardsmen from the Highlands, they were borderline insubordinate.
Given their warlike society, their generally large statures, and their fearlessness, Highland Mercenaries commanded an exceptionally high price and were always in demand. Highlanders would follow any order given in their military chain of command without hesitation and without fail. Despite that, Kings usually cringed when the suggestion to hire them was raised.
True, they would follow any orders given to them, but they failed to do so quietly. They would complain and hurl insults at their commanders as frequently as they did at the enemy, and their commanders returned the favor. Also, any leeway left them in their orders would be used to its fullest, and likely most irritating, effect.
While their kings cringed at hiring highland mercenaries, innkeepers openly wept.
Drinking and brawling were primary sources of entertainment for the highlanders, and wooden inn furniture and plaster walls simply didn’t hold up. To that point, most inns in the Highlands were carved directly out of stone and reinforced by druids. The Mercenaries always paid for the repairs, but that didn’t help their reputation too much.
The only exception she had ever seen to that rule was Gael Mallory, the young man who was the captain of her personal guard. Gael’s utter devotion to her house, and her father in particular, kept him on his best behavior.
Brick and Block did not suffer from the same devotion, rather, they embodied the stereotype of Highlanders completely. They were two of the eight men under Gael’s command, who kept watch in six-hour shifts. She always had a pair of them nearby when she was within the Long City’s walls.
The Arch-druids had forbidden their presence during the vast majority of her training outside the city proper, and completely during her tattooing. She’d conveniently forgotten their attitudes.
Morgain glanced up at her mother and the irritated scowl dropped off her face, replaced quickly with a look of mild chagrin.
Elaine Muirdoch was an aging, yet still beautiful, woman. Her jet-black hair and almond-shaped eyes, a soft cool brown, gave her a rather exotic appearance for the Tuathan Highlands. No one in the Long City, save her father and Gemma-her mothers beyond ancient nursemaid, knew for certain where exactly she had come from.
Most only knew that it was far, far to the east and north of the Highlands. Some people thought Elaine had come from Mag’rel, others that she came from Thanaetia. Morgain was unsure, and Elaine had never spoken of her homeland or her upbringing. Gemma refused to talk about it without Elaine’s express permission, which Elaine had always vehemently denied.
Despite her reticence to talk of Elaine’s upbringing, Gemma had told some wild tales to Morgain when she was a child. Some of which were so detailed and fabulous they had to have been memories, not creations.
Though she towered over her mother’s slightly shorter than average height, Elaine had a presence like silk wrapped steel, smooth and graceful. Beautiful to look at, but with a potentially dangerous strength hidden within that beauty.
Ignoring Morgain’s scowl for the childish teenaged petulance they both knew it was, Elaine continued speaking.
“It was old, yes, but it was a party favor- a prank that the Connacthian court jesters used to throw about at feasts to startle the gentry. There are a hundred and fifty more of them in this tower alone. It was no priceless artifact. And no one, save you, thinks that any of those are worth more than a day’s study.”
“Yet I was studying it.” She retorted, puffing the same lock of hair that had dripped on her nose back out of her eyes. Morgain rolled herself gracefully back to her feet and returned the Octadriel to its regular position. She cursed as she removed the cracked crystal from its setting, but she set it aside and removed another one from a drawer.
The device looked something like a chandelier made of silver. Unlike a chandelier, however, the Octadriel stood up like a canvas on an easel, rather than hanging from the ceiling. It was about a foot and a half in diameter. The Octadriel held eight containment crystals, each about four inches tall and an inch and a half wide. Arranged in a circle forming the outside of the apparatus, the crystals turned to face the light of the sun as it moved across the sky. Containment crystals drew and stored magic from the world about them naturally and with no input. The stored magic was incredibly useful to a druid who, instead of drawing from the earth, could draw from the energy stored within a crystal. Doing so did NOT accrue the usual debt involved with using Archenarium’s magic. The Octadriel was a sort of focus for charging the crystals. Crystals held in an Octadriel gathered magic much more quickly than those that were left lying about.
Morgain had built this one around four years ago. It had been shortly after the Arch-druids had determined she was ready to receive the tattoo on the bottom of her foot so she could see things that contained and held magic, particularly magic other than that which she could easily use.
She had adapted this one after a prototype she had built for her friend Gwen, who was a healer. It was designed to take eight smaller crystals, each about an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide, around each of the main crystals in the same pattern as the original crystal. It was an idea that her druidic training and watching ships at sail had inspired.
With the augmentation, Morgain’s Octadriel could pull over four times as much power into the crystals in a day than what it had produced from its original maker. The extra power came at the cost of a cracked crystal every so often, however. To most druids of common means, or even those who were simply less well off than she herself was, it was not an adaptation that was always worth the expense.
Morgain had little worry about the financial cost, though. Her father had the money to pay for a new crystal every month and never blink. The crystals were expensive, but not prohibitively so, and certainly not for the Muirdoch family, who owned the richest mines in the Highlands, and whose mints produced the Dragon, which was Saerin’s anchor currency.
Morgain set the cracked crystal to the side. She could take it to a gem cutter later and have two or maybe three of the smaller crystals made from the remains of the larger. There was no sense in being wasteful, after all.
“I know there are a pile of those brass oblongs lying around, and we think they are party favors, but there is something about them that intrigues me. I think they have a deeper purpose. Why would they put such delicate scrollwork and designs into something intended only to explode and release smoke? The flutes alone would have taken a worker hours to make, and they are basically uniform across all of them. At least they are for each of the various sizes. Why would you do that for a party favor?” She dusted herself off and went back to the podium, looking for any remnants of the brass cylinder. One sliver, about the size of a fingernail trimming, had buried itself in the wood’s surface on her desk. Not enough to study. She plopped herself down into a cushioned chair and steepled her fingers in front of her face.
“Are you sure they didn’t use a die, a mold, or simply press them that way?” Elaine asked. Morgain blinked twice, then whirled to face her mother as the words percolated through her wandering mind. She swore as her elbows crashed into a stack of books and papers, sending them careening across the table. The lock of hair fell back in front of her eye, and she puffed at it irritably. A misaligned stack of oddments collapsed when she puffed her hair, then dropped her head into her hands with a groan.
“If that’s true, then they could have mass produced them.” She whined. She dropped her forehead onto the table with a thud.
This knocked another stack of things from the podium. She could hear the mild disapproval of her cluttered workspace in her mother’s voice. Despite the disapproval, there was an undisguised thread of amusement when she spoke.
“The Connacht did many strange things, Morgain. No one knows why they did what they did, or what caused their… collapse. Be careful to keep your ambition in check. Lest you fall in a similar, though hopefully less dramatic, manner. Suffocating under an avalanche of books from your desk would be an ignoble end for a nobly born highlander.” Elaine said, walking to the window and leaning against the sill. The wind lifted her hair slightly, and she closed her eyes contentedly for a moment. Morgain rose and walked to join her mother at the window, but remained silent.
“We all have our flaws, Morgain, and despite your insistence that the druids are different, you suffer from one of the most common flaws affecting all mages.”
“Which is?” She did not mean for there to have been so much snip in her voice, but Elaine didn’t comment on it.
“You lose yourself completely in your work, staying blind to the world around you. Here, in the safety of Daggerhold, with guards on your doors, that is one thing. Elsewhere though…” she trailed off.
Morgain winced. That assessment of her behavior struck far too close to the mark for her comfort.
Her headstrong nature and ambition, traits she had inherited from her father, though he was too stubborn to admit they had come from him, were paramount to her success in life. She had pioneered several new inventions, including the changed Octadriel, using things people thought were useless. Conversely, the same traits led her into trouble nearly as often as to success.
For instance, at eight years old, she had take two of her father’s rather expensive looking glasses and removed the smaller lens from each of them. Once they were out, she was excited to realize that they maginified things when she looked through them, though it tied up her hands. After a short time, she had wrapped the outside edges of the lenses in copper wire, and then bent and twisted the wire together until it was smooth and made a frame that hooked over her ears. This freed her hands to keep studying things. At the end of the day, she had given them to Gemma to help her see things. The lenses had looked ridiculous- and her father had been furious at the ruination of two of his good looking glasses, but Gemma had sworn that with them she could see much better than she had in years. Donovan had taken the things and had almost bent them in half until he looked through them and realized their potential. He had recruited a dwarven lens maker, a master carpenter, and a scrimshander, and together the three had presented him with a much more user-friendly version of Morgain’s invention, with thin wooden or bone frames, rather than the ones made out of copper wire.
Donovan had made more money by far from that invention than it had cost to repair the looking glasses, as the eyeglasses’ popularity had exploded across Saerin, especially among the elderly and those who did detailed work.
She had several other inventions she had brought to her father, though few were as successful as the eyeglasses had been, and always had at least a dozen with which she was not yet satisfied or was still planning.
Elaine gave a small cough, looked back at Morgain, and realized that she was lost in her thoughts again. She rolled her eyes and placed her hands within the flowing silk sleeves of her pale blue dress.
“You need to be ready for the High Council- your father and brother left this afternoon. We are to leave at nightfall. You need to be there by sundown tomorrow.”
“The High Council?” Morgain said, blinking suddenly and trying to stifle a yawn. “What day is it?”
“What day do you think it is?”
“Based on the sun… late in the afternoon on the fourth.”
“Morgain, it’s the afternoon of the sixth.” Elaine said, turning back to Morgain with a hint of concern on her face. She grabbed Morgain brusquely by the cheeks and placed the back of her hand on her forehead. Then she tilted her chin up to look into her eyes. She gave a sigh and a tut, then asked, “When did you last sleep? Aside from that ten minute long doze you just fell into?”
“Umm… The night of the third.” Morgain said, her cheeks still pinched together between her mother’s hands. “I took a nap or two, though, I think.”
“Where?”
Elaine scowled, gesturing at the cot in the corner. Morgain had covered it with books, and a pair of leather pouches from which components and ingredients spilled from into haphazard piles. Elaine’s eyebrows rose. Morgain blinked a few times. Now that she had stopped, her weariness was rapidly catching her.
“Uh, I managed somehow. I must have, but I honestly can’t remember. I had just gotten to where I think I could have opened that cylinder without… well, without the result that you saw.” Morgain’s words were slightly slurred, though whether that was due to her deprived state, or her mother’s iron grip on her cheeks, she didn’t know. Both probably.
Elaine snorted softly, but Morgain continued, ignoring the sound. “There was an intricate weave in the surrounding Tapestry that was… rather delicate. I almost had it unwound until you startled me into crossing the strands.” Elaine tutted once more and released her daughter’s face. Morgain yawned again.
“I would suggest you bathe and find the dress your father had me order for you. Oh, and you have a friend here. Make sure she prepares herself as well, would you?” Morgain groaned.
“Sundown, Morgain. If you are late, I’ll make Egan and Domnall carry you through the middle of the square in pigtails and pink small clothes. All the way to the Hall of the High Council.” Morgain blinked twice and shook her head.
Pink? That was the only color she didn’t like to wear. Where would her mother have gotten pink small clothes to fit her? She slapped herself in the face lightly.
Exhaustion was catching her and her mind was wandering. She’d best get ready. She had no doubt the threat was one her mother would make good if she didn’t.
It took Morgain three quarters of an hour to finish cleaning up the mess from the explosion and cross the parapet back to her father’s keep and to her own chambers. In the interim, the sky had darkened, and thunder was growling in the west. Such storms lashed through the long, rather narrow valley of the Caldahorn almost every afternoon. The precipitation they brought was usually heavy, but short lived. As cool as the early spring day was, whether this one would bring rain or snow rested on the flip of a coin.
Morgain saw light coming under the crack in the door across the hall from her own and paused. Vaguely she remembered her mother saying something about a friend coming to visit her, but she couldn’t for the life of her think of who it may be. She didn’t have too many friends who were in the city at the moment, and Ruari Karthwyn and Imogen Candlemoore had already visited her since she had returned to the Long City. She knocked, then realized how ridiculous it was to knock on the door to her own private rooms, and just pushed the door open. Despite her weariness, the sight of her “guest” brought a bright smile to her face.
Gwenllian Faughn, Gwen for short, was, or had been, Morgain’s best friend. The dynamic between them at the moment was… bizarre… as it was with any member of the Steelfated.
Gwen was a couple of years older than she, nineteen, and also a druid- a healer. She was Morgain’s polar opposite. That was one reason that Morgain had formed the bond with the young woman who had become not only her best friend but also her father’s ward. Morgain’s rapid fire mind usually kept her too busy to make a scene in public, and thus she came across somewhat quiet and reserved, a refined young beauty from the southlands.
Gwen was…
Not…
The Faughn family was from the Caer- the shortest distance to the lowlands of the Caldahorn where the Tuathan highlanders had fled, and she lived to create controversy and her exploits could single handedly keep the rumor mill flowing. From her low-cut dresses, to her dark makeup, her attitude, and her ability to move through men faster than Morgain could change her clothes, everything about Gwen created a scandal. And both their fathers had always resented her for that.
