The summer caravan came up the mountain with the first warm wind, and it brought me a letter.
I had never received a letter in this world. I did not know anyone who could send one. So when Oskar's runner came to the door of the Ticking Hall with a folded square of thick cream paper, sealed in plum-colored wax, I stood there holding it for a long time before I understood what it was.
The seal was a fat bunch of grapes. Underneath it, in handwriting so large and looping that it took up half the page, someone had written: To the Maker of the Rose Doll, care of Greymantle's Hall, Khazrund. URGENT.
"Plumm," said Torvi, without looking up. "He underlines everything."
I broke the seal and read it standing in the doorway.
My dear Master Greymantle, and my dear unnamed friend behind the table,
I write in haste, in triumph, and in some pain, as my physician insists I have been dancing too much.
The doll was presented to the Lady Rosalind Valcourt on the morning of her ninth birthday, before the whole household. I am told by those present that the young lady did not speak for the space of a full minute, which her father assures me has never once happened before in her life. She then burst into tears, seized the doll, and refused to let go of it for the remainder of the day, including during the feast, the dancing, and her bath. She has named her Rosie. Rosie now sleeps on her pillow. Rosie attends lessons. Rosie has been introduced to the horses.
The Marquis has awarded the grain contracts of the Ironspine March to the house of Plumm for ten years.
I mention this only in passing.
I also mention, entirely in passing, that the Marchioness has asked whether a second doll might be made, in her own likeness, for the Lady Rosalind's younger sister, who has been weeping with jealousy since midsummer. And that the Countess of Brennan's Mill, who was a guest at the feast, has asked the same. And that the Baron Aldwick has asked whether such a doll might be made of his late mother, from a portrait, and has offered a sum I will not write down in case the paper catches fire.
I have taken the liberty of telling all of them that the maker is a person of rare genius who works slowly and cannot be hurried, and that they must wait. They are now all quite desperate. You are welcome.
Your devoted servant and future customer,
Bartholomew Plumm
P.S. Master Greymantle, you are still a thief.
I read it twice. Then I read it again.
I found I was smiling so hard my face hurt. I went inside and sat down on my stool and read it a fourth time, and when I got to Rosie has been introduced to the horses, I laughed out loud, and the clockwork crow ruffled its feathers at me.
Torvi held out her hand. I gave her the letter. She read it in about ten seconds, snorted at the last line, and handed it back.
"Three dolls," she said. "One from a portrait of a dead woman."
"Can I make it off a portrait?"
"Can you?"
I thought about it. "I think so. If he sends a good painting."
"Then we'll tell them a year. And we'll charge the Baron double, because he can afford it and because I don't like him." She went back to her clock. "You've got a waiting list, lad. Most in the Hold never get one."
I folded the letter carefully and put it in the back of my ledger.
I had written I hope the girl likes her at the bottom of a page, months ago. Now I knew.
She did.
Two days later, Torvi decided my lines had stopped wobbling.
She did not announce it. I came in from the morning hunt with stone dust in my hair and found the warded gloves and the gray rune-stitched apron laid out on my bench, beside a blank light-stone and the small lead box.
"Wash," she said. "Then put those on."
I washed. I put them on.
The gloves were secondhand, as I had known when I bought them. They were stiff at the knuckles and stained dark at the fingertips where some other apprentice had worked before me. The apron hung to my shins. The tiny silver runes along every seam were faintly cold, even through my shirt. When I flexed my fingers, the leather creaked.
"Carve your line," said Torvi.
I carved it. One stroke, the same depth from end to end. I did not hold my breath this time. I did not need to. My hands knew this now.
She opened the lead box.
The chip of ether inside was the size of a grain of rice, violet and clear, and the moment the lid came up, I felt it. Not with my hands. With something behind my eyes, at the base of my skull, the same place where I had felt the elderheart on the road to Halvard. It was a prickling, crawling, restless feeling, like a crowd of ants under the skin. It made the small warmth in my fingertips flinch.
"You feel it," said Torvi. She was watching my face.
"Yes."
"Good. That's what keeps you careful." She set the mortar and pestle in front of me. "Tip it in. Don't breathe over it. Grind it fine."
I tipped the chip into the mortar with small tweezers. I ground it. Through the gloves I could feel the pestle, and the faint grit of the crystal breaking down, but not the ether itself. The warded hide held it off. It was like holding a burning coal with a thick wet rag: I knew it was there, I knew it was dangerous, but it could not reach me.
The grinding took longer than it should have, because I went slowly. Torvi did not hurry me.
When it was fine as flour, I took up the little bone spoon, and I laid the grit into my line. A pinch at a time, from end to end, tapping it level with the steel tamper. My forehead was wet. I did not breathe over it. The violet powder settled into the groove and lay there, glittering, waiting.
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I heated the soldering iron in the lamp until its tip glowed. I touched it to the stick of runeseal, and the silver solder ran. I drew a thin bright bead along the line, from one end to the other, then smoothed it flush with the flat of the iron.
The line lit.
It was not as bright as the one Torvi had made for me. It flickered once, very faintly, at the far end, where my bead of solder was a hair too thin. Then it steadied. A clean, soft, white light, running the whole length of my cut.
I had made it. Every part. Carve, lay, seal.
I sat back on my stool, my hands shaking now, finally, now that it was over.
Deed recorded: Crafted a rune.
Torvi picked up the stone and turned it over. She looked at the far end, where it had flickered. She looked at the seal. Then she set it down on the bench between us.
"That end's thin," she said.
"I know."
"Good. Next time it won't be." Her gears clicked once. "Most human apprentices take three years to lay their first ether. Some never do. They feel it in the box and their hands won't stop shaking." She looked at me. "Yours shook after. Not during."
I did not know what to say to that, so I took off the gloves very carefully, one finger at a time, and laid them on the bench with the stained fingertips turned up.
I reached level twenty at the end of that summer.
It came off a blind gnawer, of all things: the same kind of beast that had given me my first hunt. Gudrun's party had gone deeper than usual, down past the dry fountain into a long gallery where the old cart rails ran off into the dark, and a pack of them came at us out of a side tunnel. I took one with my own sword, cleanly, the way Gudrun had taught me. Wrist straight. Let the weight do it.
Party kill: less experience gained.
LEVEL UP. Level 20.
STAT POINT AVAILABLE (1)
I did not think about it.
Attunement 2 → 3
MP 10 / 10 → MP 15 / 15
The warmth in my fingertips spread. It did not get stronger, exactly. It got wider. It ran up past my knuckles into my palms and settled there, a steady, quiet heat, like holding my hands near a stove that had been banked for the night. I stood in the dark tunnel with the dead gnawer at my feet and turned my hands over, looking at them in the light of Ottil's lantern.
"Counter," said Bolli. "You're doing the face again."
"What face?"
"The smiling-at-your-hands face." He shook his head. "It's unsettling. Fenna, tell him it's unsettling."
"It's unsettling?" said Fenna, without looking up from the gnawer's jaw.
I put my hands in my pockets. I was still smiling.
In the autumn, Torvi took me to see mithril.
She did not tell me where we were going. She just said, one evening after supper, "Put on a clean shirt," and led me out of the Ticking Hall and down, past the forges, past the vaults, deeper than I had ever been in the kept part of the Hold. The galleries got narrower and older. The light-runes got brighter, not dimmer, which I did not understand until we came to a pair of doors with two dwarves standing in front of them in full starsteel plate, with axes taller than I was.
They looked at Torvi. They looked at me, for rather longer.
"He's with me," said Torvi. "Brunhild's expecting us."
They opened the doors.
The room beyond was round, with a domed ceiling covered in runes that glowed soft gold, and a single great forge in the center that burned with no smoke at all. Around the walls were racks of tools I had never seen and could not have guessed the purpose of. A dozen dwarves were working in total silence. Every one of them was old. Every one of them had a beard woven through with fine violet thread that glittered when it caught the light.
At the center, beside the forge, stood a very old dwarf woman with a white beard braided into a crown around her head, the braid thick with the same glittering thread. She was small, even for a dwarf. She did not look up when we came in. She was working at an anvil with a hammer no bigger than a spoon.
"Brunhild Stonebraid," Torvi whispered to me. "The Rune-Mother. She taught every runesmith in the Hold, including the ones who taught me. Don't speak unless she speaks to you."
I did not speak.
We stood by the wall for a long time. I could not see what Brunhild was making. Only the tiny hammer, rising and falling, and the soft chime it made, each stroke so light that it sounded more like a bell than a blow.
At last, she set the hammer down and turned around.
She was holding something in her open palm.
It was a piece of metal no bigger than a hen's egg, flattened and smoothed into a sort of oval. It was pale, paler than silver, with a faint blue sheen to it, like moonlight on snow. It did not glitter. It glowed, very softly, from somewhere inside itself, as if it were lit from within by a candle a long way off.
"Greymantle," said Brunhild. Her voice was thin and dry and very old. "This is your human."
Brunhild looked at me. Her eyes were milky with age, but they were not blind. They went over my face, my hands, the stains on my fingers from the warded gloves. Then she held out her palm.
"Hold it," she said. "Carefully."
I held out my hand. She tipped the metal into it.
I nearly dropped it, because I had braced for a weight that was not there.
It weighed almost nothing. Less than a feather. Less than the paper of Plumm's letter. I had starsteel at my hip that dragged my belt down, and here was a piece of metal the size of an egg that I could barely feel in my palm at all. Only the coolness of it told me it was there.
And then the mana hit me.
It was nothing like the elderheart, which had been a quiet presence, a held breath in a room. It was nothing like the ether, which had been a crawling, restless prickle. This was a river. The warmth in my hands, my three small points of attunement, the little banked heat in my palms, all of it suddenly moved. It flowed down into the metal, and through it, and back, in a slow, smooth current, as if the metal had been waiting for something to pass through it and was glad to finally have it. For a moment, I could feel the shape of my own mana, the whole small sum of it, more clearly than I ever had.
I did not breathe.
"Mithril," said Brunhild. She was watching my face, the way Torvi did. "Lighter than a feather. Stronger than starsteel. And it carries magic the way copper carries heat. Better than anything that comes out of the ground, or out of a beast." She tilted her head. "You feel it."
"Yes," I said. My voice came out strange. "It's... moving. Through it."
"Yes." Brunhild looked at Torvi. Something passed between them that I did not understand. "Most humans feel nothing. Dwarves feel nothing, either. We haven't the attunement." She looked back at me. "Give it back now."
I did not want to. But I gave it back.
The moment it left my hand, the river stopped. My mana settled back into my palms, small and banked, the way it always was. It felt, for a second, unbearably little.
Brunhild closed her hand around the mithril.
"This piece," she said, "is for the tip of a spear the Empire has ordered, for it's greatest warrior. A so-called Hero. The price of it alone is a thousand gold crowns." She smiled, very slightly, at the look on my face. "There is perhaps a cartful of mithril in the whole of the Ironspine, lad. One vein. We take a little out of it every hundred years. It's the rarest thing we sell. Kings wait their whole lives for a sliver of it."
She turned back to her anvil and picked up her tiny hammer.
"Greymantle tells me you make dolls," she said, without looking at us. "Good dolls."
"Yes, Mother."
"Keep making them." The hammer rose and fell. Chime. "Come back when you're older."
That was all. Torvi took my arm and led me out, past the dwarves in starsteel plate, and the doors closed behind us.
We walked back up through the Hold in silence. I did not trust myself to talk. My hands kept wanting to curl closed around something that was no longer there.
At the door of the Ticking Hall, Torvi stopped.
"I wanted you to feel it once," she said. "So you'd know."
"Know what?"
"What the best looks like. What it's for." She looked up at me. "You'll work with elderheart one day. Starsteel. Gnawer teeth. Saltglass. Good honest things. You'll make wonderful work with them." She paused. "But I saw your face in there. Don't spend your life chasing that egg, Kenji. Brunhild's waited three hundred years for the piece she's holding, and it isn't even hers. It's going on the tip of some imperial Hero's spear."
"I know," I said.
She looked at me a moment longer. I do not think she believed me.
I did not entirely believe me either.
That night I wrote in the ledger.
Day 902.
Level: 20.
Attunement: three. MP 15. The warmth is in my palms now, not just my fingertips.
Skill: puppet craft Lv. 17.
Letter: from Plumm. She named her Rosie. Rosie has been introduced to the horses.
Waiting list: the Marchioness. The Countess of Brennan's Mill. The Baron Aldwick (a doll of his mother; double price; Torvi doesn't like him).
First rune: carved, laid, and sealed myself. In warded gloves. The far end is thin.
Mithril: a piece the size of an egg. Lighter than a feather. A thousand crowns. Brunhild Stonebraid let me hold it.
My mana moved through it like a river.
I looked at the last line for a long time.
Then I closed the ledger, and set it on the shelf beside Clara and the little light-rune Torvi had made for me on my ninth day, and the new one I had made myself, with its thin end. Two small white lights, side by side.
I lay on my cot and looked at them until I fell asleep. I kept feeling, in the palm of my right hand, a coolness that was not there.