by Rabia Gale
The Grenfelds had been lucky. They had not had to flee their ancestral lands in search of quartz. Nor had they seen their influence and wealth dwindle to nothingness as other great families. The Rockthrushes, the Montans, the Capgraces—all of those once-great families were now mere names in history books and theater house plays.
Ka pooled deep beneath the manor, its colors almost opaque. If the Tors Lumena ka was a wild and wonderful sea, the Grenfeld ka lay in sunken wells, still and hidden and mysterious.
And when he reached out with his ka senses to brush across its surface, a familiar tingle ran over his body.
Rafe realized he was sitting tensely, holding his breath. He forced his muscles to relax and inhaled deeply. This was not the time to come to terms with the Grenfeld ka. His legs were stiff, his lower back ached, his throat was parched, and he was covered in travel grime.
That, and his nerves were still raw from his dealings with the Tors’ ka. The skin on his arms was reddened and tender, and unaccountably, he’d managed to get blisters on his feet.
He was sure his sister-in-law would provide him with a medicinal foot bath. Kind though the Redmonts had been, he wouldn’t have dreamed of exposing such a ridiculous injury to Isabella. He had done well enough keeping the secret from leaking through the kyra bond. He’d had a good exemplar in Isabella, after all.
Rafe turned on the buggy with a mental tug on a yellow knot. It purred to life, its entire body throbbing. Rafe eased down on a leather-handled lever and the buggy rolled forward with a small growl. The Stonelands had not been kind to the vehicle. Besides being dented by upthrown rocks, it had developed a cough and whine. Some of its inner parts had come loose. They rattled and ground together with every bounce and trailed mysterious cables along the road. Rafe had done his best to hold them in place with both sticky tape and ka patches, neither of which had lasted.
The buggy wheezed up the rutted track, its ka-run engine straining. The quartz batteries were almost dry. Rafe had coaxed the vehicle as much as he could, tweaking its systems for more efficiency.
Late last night, he’d stopped in the shadow of a cliff. He’d sensed ka within it, lurking in pools inside milky-white quartz. It had taken him a while to waken it. Even so, it was sluggish, slowly separating into thick, sticky strands. He’d purified it through the layers of the quartz in his walking stick, then coaxed it into the buggy. It was so thick, he thought it’d gum up the inner works. It lacked the snap and sizzle of the ka in the Talar or the Tors Lumena or any of the agri-caves he’d been in.
There were many more such pools of ka everywhere, hidden, dormant, nigh on unusable.
The buggy crested a small rise. Rafe looked across the dip to where Grenfeld Manor topped a higher hill.
He frowned.
In years past, the way to the big house was unobstructed. The stone walls around the manor house and grounds were low and mainly for demarcating the difference between the family’s private living spaces and those of their tenants and the business of running the estate. The wrought-iron gate in the wall had never, in Rafe’s memory, been shut and locked.
Not so now.
A trench scored the earth around the Grenfeld buildings, raw with newness. There was a fence just inside the trench and tall structures served as lookout towers.
On the path halfway down the hill was a barricade. The men on guard held rifles with an ease that spoke of frequent handling and watched Rafe’s arrival with an almost military alertness.
Rafe slowed the buggy. It jolted to a stop, the engine throbbing like a cat with a scratchy throat.
He leaned over the door and opened his mouth to speak.
One of them said, “You’re expected, Mr. Grenfeld. Glad you made it safely here.” He waved Rafe onward.
“Thanks,” said Rafe, reaching for the lever. Then he stopped, frowning. “Your voice is familiar.”
“It’s Broom, sir.” Rafe could hear a grin behind the words. “Charlie Broom.”
“Charlie. Of course.” Rafe remembered. Charlie’s father had been one of the agri-cave overseers. Of a similar age, the two boys had played together, poking about in odd corners, fishing in the ponds, shooting marbles and heaping dust piles.
Then Rafe’s quartz sickness had struck. He’d spent the next four or so miserable years confined to the manor house and grounds, often immured with a tutor, piles of meticulously-kept records, and heavy tomes on estate management. His father had intended for his younger son to take on the supervision of the family’s iron mines.
Rafe disagreed. He’d left home at fourteen and stowed away on a ship. He’d been discovered far too late to be sent back home. Promoted from stowaway to cabin boy, Rafe had spent the next three years working his way up the ranks. Once the sea held no more fascination for him, he’d apprenticed himself to a surveyor. A year later, he enrolled at university with the vague idea of licensing.
Then war broke out and Rafe enlisted in the military. Soon after, Leo Grenfeld intervened and took his great-nephew under his wing, giving him a government job. The tacit intent was that once Rafe had worked out the restlessness in his soul, he’d go into politics.
In the meantime, Charlie Broom had stayed on at Grenfeld. The gulf between them was so vast now, Rafe didn’t think an old friendship could span it.
“Good to see you again, sir,” said Broom, with a friendliness that had no hint of servility in it.
Rafe searched and failed to find anything profound to say. “Likewise,” he answered, and put the buggy into gear. It ground forward, now inching across the path.
A bridge spanned the trench. Its boards juddered as the buggy crawled over it. The fence beyond had a small gap in it. Rafe navigated it, his kyra-sight narrowing to focus on the opening.Once through without further damaging the buggy, Rafe wove around mysterious heaps he could not make out and outbuildings he did not remember. There were a few shadowy figures moving around. They called out encouragingly to him as he drove to the gates, but thankfully did not test his reflexes by getting close. He stopped the buggy near the gates and waited as they clanged open.
Then he was in the courtyard, gliding over smooth paved stone. At the stone stairs that led up to the covered portico, he turned off the engine.
His muscles still twitched with vibrations. His backside ached from thousands of jolts, both minor and not. His legs were cramped.
More leg room, he thought. Better suspension.
Phantom engine noise still rang in his ears as he cautiously descended. The world rolled underfoot, and Rafe took a firm hold of a hood ornament to steady himself. The Ironheart symbol of axe and pick in a circle bit into his palm.
Footsteps struck stone behind him in the staccato of someone running. Rafe let go of the buggy—it was warm to the touch and he added more efficient cooling mechanism to his wish list—and turned to greet the newcomer.
“Hello, Coop.”
“You idiot!” His friend burst out, coming to a stop in front of Rafe. His hands shot out and seized Rafe by the shoulders. “What were you thinking, running off with an experimental vehicle and leaving a note behind?”
“Good to see you again, too,” said Rafe cordially.
Coop squeezed his shoulder. Rafe felt the strength in his friend’s hands and frowned. More worrying was that feeling of Coop’s ire, like a dark heavy stone above his head. Too often Coop seemed to be on the verge of snapping, only drawing back in time.
Coop dropped his hands. “Well?” he demanded. “How was she?”
“Isabella’s doing fine,” Rafe assured him.
Coop stared. “No, not Isabella. The buggy.”
“Well, that’s an entirely different matter.” Rafe began checking items off his list, starting with the most important: better suspension.
Coop waved it off. “That’s a luxury for a military vehicle like this.”
“Oh, yes? You just try driving that thing for four stages straight. You’d be glad of some cushioning then.”
“Ah, I forgo
t about pampered kayan behinds…”
“So says the man who hasn’t even test-driven the buggy…”
Cheerfully bickering, they mounted the steps. Coop tugged at a door leaf, which ponderously swung open. Rafe’s memory supplied him with the details—the magnificent front doors were made of oak and bound in iron. Then they were in the high hall, with its floor of greenish marble and a glass chandelier overhead. Precious wooden paneling covered the walls. A solid staircase rose to the second story, then turned up to towards the third.
A liveried footman, wig askew, rushed up to take Rafe’s coat and walking stick. Rafe surrendered the first, but hung on to the second. Another arrived with a tray of tumblers of chilled fruit juice. There was a pattering on the second floor and Rafe aimed his kyra-sight towards the noise. Childish faces peered at Rafe and Coop from between the bannister rails.
Rafe felt odd, remembering how he had done the same as a child to unknown visitors. Now, he was the grand stranger to the two little nieces he barely knew.
He grinned and waved at them. He thought he heard a gasp and a giggle. Both ducked their heads back.
A woman came hurrying down the stairs, calling, “Now, girls, don’t be shy. ’Tis only your Uncle Rafe come home again.” Her large old-fashioned skirt was gathered up and tied to a loop halfway down its length. Her sensible shoes thunked solidly as she descended.
Marisa, his sister-in-law. She liked to make soaps and perfumes and other such concoctions in her still room, he remembered. Rafe had often found himself the bewildered recipient of berry-flavored cough syrups and anti-inflammatory ointments that reeked of garlic.
Then Theo was there, smiling and edging out of the study that had once been their father’s. He shook hands with his younger brother, both of them formal and awkward.
“Welcome home, Rafe,” he said. Behind him, his wife swept her reluctant daughters along with her. The girls clung to her skirt and watched Rafe with wide eyes.
Rafe found that he could not speak past the lump in his throat. Some grit from the journey had gotten into his eyes, too, scorch it. He rubbed them with the back of his hand and managed, “I guess I’m back, Theo.”
They dined as a family in the small dining room, which was still an imposing chamber with a great slab of a table, brass candelabras, an enormous sideboard that had been built into the wall, and ceiling-to-floor tapestries interspersed with stern portraits of Grenfeld ancestors.
There were only the eight of them widely spaced at a table that could comfortably hold a dozen or more. Each diner had his own armada of cutlery and fortifications of sauce jugs and relish dishes. Bare wood separated these individual states, while silver platters of spiced vegetables and seasoned meat were held in common.
Rafe was amused at his fanciful metaphor. He glanced across the table to where his nieces sat, eyeing him from under their bangs. He grinned cheerfully at them. The older girl dropped her gaze to her plate and studiously pushed her parsley-flecked tubers around it. The younger grinned back.
From the foot of the table, Marissa Grenfeld kept up a steady stream of pleasant chatter, focused on innocuous topics such as the state of the roads, the management of agri-caves, and the pleasures of reading. Rafe listened appreciatively—he had a great deal of respect for someone who could stretch such thin topics into suitable dinner time conversation.
“… and since we switched to Goodell’s method of crop rotation our tuber yield has increased fivefold…”
“Only about fourfold, my dear,” interjected Theo amiably from the head of the table.
“Thank you, love. Fourfold,” Marissa corrected herself. “But considering we can do this without a drop in quality… I really urge you to look into applying the method at New Hope, General Cooper!”
Rafe’s lips quivered at the thought of his friend supervising farming innovations. Coop made noises of polite appreciation and Marisa insisted he borrow—no, take, a copy of Goodell’s magnum opus since “we have at least three in this house alone, and each of our overseers has his own!”
The hapless Coop was forced to accept the gift with pleasure. His two lieutenants cut and chewed industriously through their dinners—and a good dinner it was, too. There was nothing like fresh-grown food and Rafe thought the famed Grenfeld mutton had been improved even beyond his remembrance.
He said as much to Theo, who beamed and waxed eloquent on the subject, while his wife had her turn of nodding sagely and interjecting details. Marissa was really the perfect wife for a country lord, thought Rafe, entering fully and knowledgably into all the details of estate management.
He doubted if his own mother had known what crop rotation was—or cared, for that matter.
He frowned. He could hardly call up an image of her. His hazy recollection presented her as a rustle of skirts, a thin sigh, and languid hand gestures. He had no idea how she’d spent her days, what her own desires and ambitions had been, what emotions lay under her stiff bodice and starched skirts. His father had completely overshadowed her. His mere presence in the manor house had been like a dark blot—the stain of it persisted even in his absence.
The house bore no stamp that was peculiarly his mother’s. The age-and-smoke-darkened tapestries he’d grown up with had hung in their places for centuries. Marissa had done away with them in this room, at least. Rafe could make out few details, but the hangings here seemed lighter and cheerier. They gave the impression of being pastoral cavescapes instead of the grim representations of life in the aftermath of the Scorching that generations of Grenfelds had considered suitable decoration for their dining room.
Rafe had eaten many a dreary meal under the hungry gaze of emaciated peasants reduced to sucking bird bones and eating dried grass.
Pity Marissa’s bucking of custom hadn’t extended to the family portraits. But, as Rafe told himself as he vigorously attacked his meat, it wasn’t as if he could really see his ancestors glowering at him. His own father was one of them, but a shapeless blob held very little power over his progeny.
The blush-tinted glow of Grenfeld’s rose quartz leaked out from the ground below and shone through a circular window behind Theo’s chair, turning it into an over-sized halo. Rafe had always liked that effect. It was one of the few things that made family meals bearable.
Marissa asked him questions about the Talar, and Rafe responded as a traveler would, focusing on novelties and curiosities. In this way, they whiled away the time until the final palate-cleansing course of candied nuts and cheese. Marissa gave a signal to the servants to clear away the dishes, then rose to her feet. Her guests rose, too, as she left the table, her daughters in tow. The two girls gave their Papa and his guests pretty curtseys at the door, then the female members of the dining party left.
The air seemed different now as the men sat down again. Servants brought out decanters of brandy and gin, and small bowls of snuff. Chairs scraped up to the table, Coop loosened his necktie with a sigh of relief. The lieutenants snapped to dark-eyed attention, taking everything in.
A spoon clinked against glass as Theo mixed himself a drink. Rafe swirled whisky in his own glass, wishing he could see its color. He held it up to his nose and inhaled its woodsy scent.
“All right, Rafe,” said Coop. “Spit it out. You wanted me here for something. Let’s hear it.”
Blunt and direct, that was the new Coop’s style. Rafe put down his glass and briefly made him acquainted with Karzov’s plans, as gleaned by Isabella.
“By the Hidden God!” Coop spat out softly. From his chair, Theo made an automatic good luck gesture, pointed at the floor now that Sel had retired for the night.
“My sentiments exactly,” said Rafe.
“Is it even possible?” wondered Coop. “To go to the source of magic?”
“The kayan made it to the moon,” Rafe pointed out. “And the Monarians followed them there several centuries later. We just have to follow in their footsteps.”
“How?” demanded Coop. “Jump off the rim? Tunnel t
hrough the earth?”
Rafe shook his head. “There may be someone who knows.”
“That sounds very cryptic,” commented Coop. “What do you need me for? To scare up this mysterious someone?”
“No,” said Rafe. “What I need is for you to persuade the Ironheart Council to ally with Oakhaven.”
Coop stared. Then he let out a bark of laughter. “Why don’t you ask for the moon while you’re at it?” he suggested. “That’d be just as easy.”
“Rafe’s right,” Theo broke in. “On our own, we cannot hope to win against Blackstone with their aerial forces and kayan contingent. But allied together, we have a chance. With Oakhaven’s anti-aircraft weaponry and Ironheart’s new Shimmerite technology, we can hold them back, if temporarily. Buy Rafe some time.” He nodded towards his brother.
Rafe was touched by his brother’s simple confidence in him. Sel knew he had done little enough to deserve it. “Make it happen, Coop,” he told his friend.
Coop ran his hands through his hair. The stress of his job will lead to premature baldness, thought Rafe, not without a twinge of sympathy. But the expression he turned towards the Ironheart man was one of implacability.
“It’s not as if we haven’t extended peace offerings to Oakhaven in the past two years,” said Coop. “But we’ve been rebuffed every time. Leo Grenfeld has taken against us, and what he says is what Oakhaven does these days.”
“I will support an alliance with Ironheart,” said Theo. “And do my utmost to make it come about. The Grenfeld agri-caves supply a significant amount of food to the country. My uncle is not the only Grenfeld with influence.”
“I know you’ll do your best, Lord Grenfeld,” said Coop, “but, quite frankly, Leo Grenfeld is a stubborn old coot. No offense.”