When Declan emerged from the glint to Taylor keep, surrounded by House Taylor arcanists going home for a visit, Ava Taylor was waiting for him. She’d pulled back her hair and traded arcanists garb for leather work clothes like the armory researchers wore. “Take a few minutes, that never gets easier.”
Declan’s pack was loaded with Corrosive Slime runes, he hadn’t sold a single one, and they clicked as he stood. “Ava, good to see you.”
“Come on, we need to get something taken care of first.” She took them up thirty floors in the keep and to a private office. “Skinner talked with me. Hell, Beren talked with me and both were right.”
On the desk sat an oath-stone.
Decan’s stomach sank. “I don’t want to take another.”
Ava picked it up. “This one’s my oath to you. When my husband died, I wallowed. I thought I lost everything, but what I lost was my way. I’m not a master Rune Forger but I’m consistently good. I swear I will teach you to the best of my ability, as long as you accept my rules and abide by my limitations.”
“What are those limitation?” He didn’t put his hands on the other half of the stone.
“You start with the runes I approve. You work with the tier I approve. You work under my direction and with my supervision. It’s so easy to craft a disaster and it feels like success right up until it explodes. That’s how my husband died and he regularly forged tier seven runes.”
That made Declan chafe. “What about runes I come up with? Ones I get from blazed beasts?”
“I’ll review them with you. I’ll explain why if I don’t think you’re ready for one. I won’t take them, I don’t want or need your runes, but I do need your cooperation to make sure you survive becoming a great Rune Forger.” Ava offered him the stone.
“I do swear,” he said, placing his hands on the stone.
Her half disappeared. His felt heavy in his hands. “Yours is in your arcsoul?”
“Correct. Now, you will refer to me as Senior Taylor. This is a student-teacher relationship, not a friendship and we take our duties seriously. If it goes well with you, I will take on a few more as well.” Ava gestured to the bag. “I know about the holy bearing, but the bag’s full. You might as well show me what you brought.”
“The holy bearing?”
Ava covered her mouth. “Sorry, Rohan said it’s a Foundry thing. Sacred. Am I not supposed to mention it?”
“It’s fine. I don’t show it because it winds up with questions like that but it’s not sacred. Just special.” Declan pulled it from the bag and set it on her desk. “See? My dad gave it to me when I was first wanting to be an arcanist. We couldn’t afford better.”
She picked it up and dropped it, cracking the wood on the desk. She winced as the bearing echoed. “Interesting, but definitely sacred to you and not me. Runes?”
That was a grab bag. He’d wanted to come with options and spent the days trading among House Ariloch members. “I have two complete Feather Fall runes. Enough to forge a tier two, five Corrosive Slime runes, and two of the worst Claw runes you’ll ever see. They’re not really compatible with each other. I have a third Claw but it’s not mine, it’s on loan for me to soul-cast.”
Ava looked them over. “I’m sorry to say this but you won’t be working on any of these today. The Feather Fall will be tier two and we need you to be reliable on tier zero. The Claw is the same case, though it will be the first we forge when you’re ready. I won’t forge it but I’d love to understand what you mean about the Claw runes.”
“What about Corrosive Slime? It’s technically tier two. The root is Strike with Earth essence, secondary is Water with some modifiers I’m still trying to figure out. I kept one just in case.” He’d also kept a Feather Fall because he’d done a disturbing amount of falling recently.
“Come along, student. It’s time you learned the true value of a rune. If you’re going to be an arcanist, runes are your currency as much or more than rin.” Ava lead them to a lift which dropped away, falling so fast Declan was terrified. And it just kept dropping, far longer than it had risen.
When the lift opened, it was to darkness lit by sporadic light-stones. They were deep underground, and work crews labored not twenty feet ahead, carving stone.
“Ava Taylor on the floor!” she shouted. “I need a construction report.”
Workers came running, men in protective gear that made hers look light, saluting Ava and rattling off depth and distance. “We’re ready to drop the lake and let it fill on this level.”
“Excellent, I’ll let Lord Taylor know. Would you mind a moment more? I don’t want to keep you from your duty but I need to teach.” Ava waited for the man to issue a few orders. “My student has come into possession of a few Corrosive Slime runes.”
“From the Academy swarm? Thank the gods! We’re collecting them as fast as they come in.” He looked to Declan. “House credit, of course.”
“Hold on.” Ava stopped Declan’s question. “They’re just tier one runes, right? You’d have to put your hand on a beast to kill them with it, right? And your hand would be covered in Corrosive Slime, of course. So why not use them for forging practice?”
“Because they’re building tools,” he answered. “We use them to carve the stone. Sanswa has artifices to distribute them for etching. Hell, the Clee house uses them for making artifices. You don’t fight with every rune. We’ll trade them at a shard advantage.”
“Two,” Declan answered.
“One.” Ava pronounced. “This is not a robbery. One shard advantage is a fantastic gain, one to two is far more common, one to three would be the normal outside rate.”
“One sounds good.” Declan paused, thinking. “I get the lesson. But I have a really urgent question. How fast could we get a message to the academy?”
Minutes later he stood before a transmission artifice, connected to the academy. “I’ll pay to send an urgent message to Chen Rivers. Tell him absolutely no cashing in Corrosive Slime. House-wide. Taylors will send a representative, three rune trades give a one shard advantage.”
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Once it was done, he sighed. They’d lost so many to rin. Every shard counted.
“Only three to one?” Ava asked.
He’d made the decision. “This is not a robbery. We want fair trade. Mostly fair trade. It depends a lot on who I’m trading with. Some houses, I’d be fine with a robbery. Some I might instigate a robbery.”
“Come along, student. Last time we worked on the procedures. The steps you’ll take every time on every rune. Today we’re going to focus on reading the meters more accurately.”
“Up, bad, down good, quieter is better,” Declan stated. Then he saw her expression. “What do you mean, there’s more? Up, bad.” The more interference the harder the merge.
“If you don’t mind destroying higher tier runes, absolutely. Today, we learn about rune indexing, and how to read the meter in a way appropriate for the rune you’re forging.” Ava brought him to a smaller workshop, like the armory but with only a few dozen rune storage slots. “I’ve assigned you secure storage in my workshop. You can use it to store runes you’re not ready to work on and don’t want to trade. Your workstation is not your property. The marble alone would finance an education at the Academy. A normal education, focused on a profession.”
It really was different, smaller, with a heavy metal edge. The arms were clunkier, the fingers fat with soft tips and the gauges were easily twice as large and positioned straight at the front of the workspace.
He opened the mana lock, depositing the Feather Fall runes and handing the claws to Ava. “Senior Taylor, if you have more Claw runes, I’ll find a set that are more compatible for you to compare.”
“It will be done. Now, a few finer details before we settle down. You’re turning in tier one runes. You’re working on tier zero runes, and getting the appropriate credit for the exchange. A single tier one rune is worth two tier zero, a tier two is worth four, and so on. You will fail and you will learn, and some failure is not only accepted, it’s expected.” Ava selected a pair of runes, basic Strike runes. “Let’s begin.”
###
By afternoon, Declan’s string of repeated successes ended in three consecutive failures, each more frustrating. “I read the meters. I matched the index range for Strike, the coherence was in range, I didn’t crank too fast, tell me what I’m doing wrong.” He caught himself, adding. “Please, Senior.”
Three sets of cracked, smoking runes and his hands trembled.
“You know what you did wrong, you just don’t realize it. This is a chance to learn. Hold your hand level for me.”
Declan did. Except he couldn’t. It trembled even when he applied focus on it. “Ash and shit! You let me destroy six runes because I’m hungry?”
“I’m training you for a time when you’ll work alone, not for when I’m with you. Now is the time to make mistakes.” Ava shut off the light on his workstation. “We’re done. Lord Taylor has three runes he wants you to look at and one specific question. Please don’t bother identifying the runes, in fact we’d appreciate it if you don’t. Last time, you told us there was a relationship between a set of runes. We’ve been told there’s one here, too.”
“I can do that.” Declan stood and stretched. “Do you have timer runes?”
“Second drawer in the workstation, there’s three. Set one for breaks, one for meals and one for end of day. Do it before you put on protective gear.” Ava took the two Claws and began to measure them on her workstation. Beside her she kept a set Declan had considered compatible, or at least ‘not hostile’ to each other.
“First we lunch. And every time you ask me if we’re done, I’ll extend the break five minutes.” She insisted on a bakery where none of the dishes contained meat, and refused to talk shop while she ate. “You are a teacher’s dream for a student of runes. I want better for you. I want you to be a student of life. Learn and experience everything. You’ll be a better arcanist, a better rune forger for it. Higher tier forging is art and you must embrace art to do it.”
Declan recognized a wall when he slammed into it several times in a row. He switched to discussing the culture and the language. “You’ve got at least three cultures colliding. How do you keep it civil?”
“They’re mixing, not colliding. The Huto travel with the harvest. They seed in the spring and return in the fall, it’s not their way to remain in one place. Asking them to is disrespecting their culture. The Kao were travellers once, but we offer shelter from the blazed beasts and their own government within the keep. It’s not perfect. They aren’t dedicated the way we are. The Huto, too, won’t harvest when there’s a swarm. We will because we must.”
After lunch, she punished him by wandering the market. “Oh, here’s fun. You threw axes, let’s show you a better arcanist sport.” A target sat twenty feet away, and a group of arcanists had orbited mana stones and took turns hurling them at the target with nothing but mana. Each got three shots, one for every stone, and the winner was the most hits closest to the target.
“This isn’t fair,” Declan said as he lost his second match. “I have to throw mine.”
The others had returned to work and now Ava took turns plinking her stones directly in the middle of the target, then recalling them with a wave of her hand. “Life isn’t fair. Aim better, learn better, do better.”
She had barely spoken when he reacted. He slung the mana bearing with both hands, heaving it in a wide arc. It struck the bottom of the target, making a dent, even worse, it rang, rippling mana for yards.
Declan strolled onto the range, laughing. “Ok. That didn’t work. But I tried.”
Ava hadn’t stopped gritting her teeth. “You certainly did. Let’s take a look at those runes while I poke at those Claws. “
It took a good three hours for him to get a good sense, despite not trying to identify the runes. “This one’s the only opener in the set, it’s called Hailstorm’s Omen and it’s meant to be used to set up for what comes next. You don’t have that. This one is Mounting Blizzard and if it follows Hailstorm’s Omen the slowing effect and freezing effect are multiplied. I suspect if you had the missing one, greatly. More importantly Mounting Blizzard applies ice and leaves the mana imprint active for the last one. I think it’s the last one. Maybe. Avalanche is the least assuming and most dangerous rune I’ve seen, don’t let the tier four nature fool you. The modifers weaken it—unless the target is already suffering from ice effects. Then it cracks the ice and I suspect any armor that might be beneath it. Combine it with the footing loss from Hailstorm’s Omen and I think the effect will be to roll and crush while shattering armor.”
“That’s literally the opposite of what I asked you to do,” Ava said. “You shouldn’t even know the names, let alone what they do when they chain. We just wanted to know if they were a set. A particularly foolish House heir attacked somone at the keep. We ransomed him for this and were told it was.”
“I can’t help the names. Ever since I saw the Sun Queen, names just come. The other effects, I had to be sure it was a set, not a synergy. And to be sure, Avalanche would be more effective if used with other arcanists applying ice, water, the usuals.” Declan set them down. “You want my notes?”
“Those are House Taylor property.” She took the notes. “Relax this evening. I might do a surprise inspection to ensure you aren’t working or studying. I’ll see you next week. Now I have to report to my brother.”
Declan was looking forward to returning to the market, if he were honest.
###
Ava Taylor waited in her little brother’s private room for him to finish his last set of meetings. She delivered the report, short and clean, as was her duty. “I’ll have our top forgers begin testing links for the set, but you could use it now as is.”
“Ava.” Beren didn’t command. “You look happier. Is it worth the investment of your time?”
“He’s got talent and lacks training. Thorn will be forging tier three runes before we know it.” Every interaction, it was her duty to measure if it truly benefited the family. This one benefitted her. She could almost stand to forge again.
“We could use more rune forgers, if you’ve time for other students. I won’t say it’s your duty, but consider it a requst from your beary cute little brother?”
She gave him a bow, even if she could still box his ears, and headed to her personal chambers, but not to sleep. Her arcsoul still resonated from that stupid stunt the boy had pulled and there would be new rules about that next time. But what bothered her most was how it hadn’t affected him at all. There were only a few reasons such a reaction in the mana wouldn’t and she didn’t like any of them.
She pulled a Crown Post slip and jotted down the only thing she’d say. Skinner, contact me as soon as you get this. We have to talk about Declan Thorn.
