“My pleasure, sir.” Braileer held his fiddle case, and set it down at his feet. “I was hoping I could take your sword for polishing and repairs. There are a few nicks I could work out of the razorglass in the garrison glassworks.”
He’d asked the same thing for the last two nights, and Idrian had refused him both times. The very thought of being more than a few feet from his sword caused him to panic. He ran a finger down the flat of the pink razorglass ribbon, then laid his hand on the steel that supported it. “Does Tadeas keep sending you up here hoping to distract me?”
“Major Grappo is very concerned about your well-being, sir.”
Idrian snorted, swallowing a sharp retort. Braileer didn’t deserve it. “You can rest easy tonight. We’ll be back to fighting soon enough. Take what relaxation you can get.”
“Thank you, sir.” Instead of heading back down into the bastion, Braileer reached down and laid his fiddle case flat, flipping it open and drawing out the instrument. “Do you mind, sir?”
“I…” Want to be alone was what Idrian wanted to say. To be alone with the specters flitting about, where he could concentrate on telling the difference between what was real and what was not. But he knew that remaining alone just made things worse. The shadows were less common in company. “Go on, then.”
Braileer set the fiddle to his neck and plucked at the strings a few times, then produced his bow. He finished tuning and then, slowly, the sound almost imperceptible, he began to play.
Idrian leaned on the merlon beside his sword, his eyes raised to the sky, his thoughts distant. The song played in the back of his head, low and mournful, before it picked up into a steady cadence. He half listened for some time until he realized that he was humming along with it. He turned sharply to Braileer. The young armorer didn’t seem to notice the look and kept playing.
Idrian waited until the melody came around again, and then he sang.
“‘Bend your back to the work, raise your arm with the flail, for the winter she be coming. Grain for the man, straw for the cattle, for the winter she be coming. It’ll blow in hard, it’ll blow in cold. If we don’t thresh this field, then our bellies will starve and our hearts will freeze, and we shan’t plant more in the spring. And we shan’t plant more in spring.’”
Braileer repeated the final refrain four more times, then lowered both fiddle and bow.
“That’s a Marnish farmer’s song,” Idrian said, shaking his head. “Depressing as piss.”
“It’s the only Marnish song I know,” Braileer admitted with an embarrassed smile, “but I thought it might cheer you up. Did I … misjudge that?”
“No, no.” Idrian felt suddenly overwhelmed, his mind leaping forty years and eight thousand miles away. “I haven’t heard that since I was a kid.” He gave a shudder and pressed on his godglass eye. “Another gift from Tadeas?”
“No, sir. Just me, sir.”
Idrian turned to stare back at the horizon. Several minutes passed in silence, during which Braileer plucked at his fiddle, adjusting the strings once more, but did not play again. Something about that song seemed to stab right through Idrian, and he found himself smelling crushed grain and mountain flowers, accompanied by the trickling sound of a high stream. He swallowed a lump in his throat.
“You’re a good man, Braileer. Go play for the soldiers again. They need it more than I do.”
“Yes, sir.”
Idrian waited until the armorer had left, and finally abandoned his vigil to walk down into the bastion, his sword on his shoulder. The Ironhorns had the distinction of camping in the fort courtyard, and it didn’t take him long to find Squeaks. She and Fenny were cuddled together in the corner, behind a tent, their hands out of sight and giggling to each other. “Squeaks,” Idrian called, averting his eyes. “Just a moment, please.”
Squeaks extricated herself from her wife and came over to join Idrian, her cheeks red. “Evening, sir. I never asked, but did those gloves fit?”
“Just as gloves should,” Idrian replied, giving her a soft smile. He heard his own voice and realized that the edge that had been in it since that flying glassdancer was now gone. Was Braileer’s fiddle – a brief memory of a long-forgotten home – all that he needed? Or would it be back soon? It didn’t matter, not right now. “That thing I fought on the roof up there,” he said, gesturing to the high window of the garrison commander’s quarters, “did you get a good look at it?”
Squeaks seemed to draw into herself a little, her mirth disappearing. “Not any more than anyone else from the ground. But … yes, I suppose I could describe it.”
“Did it look like the strange creature you saw in the forest the night of the Grappo Torrent?”
From the way Squeaks stiffened, Idrian guessed he was the first person to ask her that – and that she’d been thinking about it a lot. “No. Not a thing like it. As different as you and me.”
“Was the thing in the forest a glassdancer?”
“I certainly didn’t sense it like a glassdancer. Not like the thing on the roof.”
Idrian looked back up into the sky, thinking.
“Is that all, sir?”
“That’s all, Squeaks. Give Fenny a kiss for me.”
That seemed to break the somber moment, and Squeaks grinned at him. “Right away, sir,” she said, and hurried back around behind the tent.
There were, Idrian considered, two possibilities: One was that they were all a little mad, and Squeaks was seeing things in that forest. The other was that there wasn’t just one creature. There were two, or three, or a dozen, or a hundred. It was impossible to tell. Were they spies? Assassins? Were they some secret Grent weapon? Had Kerite brought them with her from a distant land?
It did not matter. The next time he saw that flying glassdancer, he was going to kill it.
Thessa did not want to admit how relieved she was when Breenen caught up with her and Tirana on the road, trailing several carts full of supplies and another two dozen enforcers. It brought their total number up past forty. Not an army by any means, but if the Dorlani or the Magna or any other guild-family happened to follow them out into the countryside, they weren’t going to sneak up and steal the phoenix channel from underneath their noses.
Their convoy didn’t arrive at the Forge until almost midnight. It was drizzling and windy, though it had been clear less than a mile back, and Thessa was grateful when she hiked up to the crest of the Forge to find not only that Pari and her helpers had set up a number of tents wherever a windbreak could be found, but that the lighthouse had been secured with canvas and a fire blazed in the hearth of the main floor.
“The lightning rod is in place,” Pari reported, clearly pleased with herself. Thessa stood outside long enough to squint up at the copper crown rising a dozen feet above the lighthouse ruins, then went inside and examined Pari’s handiwork.
“No problems?”
“I just followed your diagrams.”
A thick copper cable came in through the roof, hanging loose just above the ground. Nearby was a shorter length of cable that would thread right though the middle of the phoenix channel. Next to that, a third length was buried in the dirt floor of the lighthouse. Each length ended in a coupling that could be easily fitted to another; the lightning rod would attach to the phoenix channel, which would attach to the grounding element. If Thessa’s theory was correct, the lightning would pass through the center of the phoenix channel, providing energy that the phoenix channel would amplify and direct forward into a small basket of spent godglass. The lightning would then bury itself harmlessly in the ground.
The phoenix channel was brought up first, and though the hour was late, Thessa knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep until it was installed. She fixed the couplings in place wearing thick leather gloves, though she had no idea if they would actually stop lightning from killing her in the case of a freak strike. Pari helped her, scrambling around, bringing in everything that the Grappo enforcers carried up from the carts.