Chapter Four – Korr
Chapter Four
Korr
The diamond won’t stay between my fingers.
I pinch it from the tray, hold it up toward the magnifying lens clamped to the edge of my bench, and my thumb slides off the facet before I can get it into position.
The stone drops back into the tray. I try again.
My forefinger barely bends past the first joint, and my thumb grinds at the knuckle, stiff and slow.
I get the diamond pinched sideways, not the grip I need, but enough to lift it, and bring it toward the earring setting held in the bench clamp.
The first earring is finished, sitting on a square of dark cloth to my left.
It’s a drop design, a small diamond in a four-prong gold setting at the end of a short stem.
It’s simple, balanced, and understated. Irrva will sell the set through her contacts in the Narrowhalls market once I finish it.
The second earring is clamped in front of me with its four prongs shaped and waiting, open around an empty setting.
I formed them before the trip. Now I need to seat the diamond and bend the prongs down over it to hold it in place, but my hands are making an hour’s work feel like I’m learning the craft all over again.
I manage to drop the diamond into the setting.
It sits crooked. I nudge it with the tip of my setting punch until it centers, then I pick up the small pliers and start bending the first prong down over the stone.
The pliers feel heavy in my grip. They shouldn’t, since I made them myself, sized and balanced so I could use them for hours without strain.
That was two years ago, and my hands were different then.
My workshop is my sanctuary. I spend more time here than in my quarters.
The bench takes up most of the space, and racks of tools line the wall behind me.
There are tweezers, files, pliers in three sizes, a small hammer, setting punches, and a soldering torch on a hook.
Trays of sorted stones sit on a shelf above the bench, each one labeled by cut and carat.
Spools of gold and silver wire hang from pegs near the door.
A few finished pieces rest on a display shelf by the entrance: two rings, a pendant, a chain with a clasp that took me eleven attempts to get right.
The walls are bare stone, and the electric light overhead gives off a low buzz that I stopped hearing years ago.
The room smells comforting to me, of metal filings, rock dust, and the faint char of old solder.
I used to spend my days in the mine. I supervised the deeper shafts, managed the crews, and knew every tunnel, support beam, and fault line in the lower levels.
I was good at the work, it mattered to me, and when the calcification took my ability to do it, I lost the one thing that told me I had a place in Steinheim.
A golem who can’t mine, can’t haul, and can’t swing a pick…
Well, I don’t know what that golem is for.
Irrva tells me I’m worth plenty, and she says it with such force that arguing with her is pointless.
But Irrva loves me, and love makes people generous with the truth.
The jewelry started because I had nothing else to do with my hands.
I watched the human cutters and polishers in the Forgehalls for years while I ran the mine, and the precision fascinated me, the way a single adjustment to an angle changed how light moved through a stone.
I taught myself by ruining a lot of gold and silver, and eventually Irrva looked at a ring I’d made and said she could sell it.
She sells most of my creations now, and they bring in good money.
The pieces I make with my failing hands end up on human women’s fingers, necks, and ears, and that is one of the few things that still makes me feel like I’m putting something into this citadel instead of just taking from it.
I tighten the third prong and inspect it through the lens. It’s clean, and I’ve got one prong left.
The detail work is supposed to stop my mind from going where it wants to go.
When I focus on the pressure needed to bend gold without cracking it, on the alignment of a prong against a facet, on the symmetry between two pieces that need to match, there’s no room for anything else.
That’s why I came to the workshop instead of staying in my quarters, where the silence is too deep and Sorina’s door is closed on the other side of our common living space.
But tonight the work isn’t enough, and my thoughts keep drifting to her.
I keep seeing the bruise along her jaw. It’s wide and dark, which makes me think it’s from a fist or an open hand that caught the bone.
The one on her cheekbone is turning green at the edges, so whoever hit her did it before she arrived at the bride market.
And the marks on her arms, the ones she tried to hide by tugging her sleeves down…
I saw them before she managed to cover them.
Those weren’t accidents. Someone did that to her with intent, more than once.
I’ve heard about this in the Narrowhalls. Human men who hurt their women behind closed doors. The citadel guard has had to step in more than once when a husband’s hands got rough, and each time I hear about it, I can’t wrap my head around it.
Golem women carry our children and bring them into the world, and the pain of that is beyond what any male body could survive.
We respect our women because they are the bringers of life, and that respect isn’t a decision we make, it’s woven into who we are.
Raising a hand against a woman is so far outside what a golem is that I don’t even have a frame for it.
But humans are not golems. And someone put those bruises on Sorina. A boyfriend, a father, or a brother, someone she was trapped with. And I stood in front of her when we arrived through the portal and watched her flinch away from my hands. I understand why, so I’m not judging her for it.
I wanted to ask who did it. I nearly did. But she was shaking and wouldn’t look at me, and I wasn’t going to stand over a woman I’d just purchased at an auction and demand that she explain her wounds to a stranger.
The pull I felt when she walked onto that stage was real.
It hit me behind the ribs, sudden and impossible to mistake for anything else.
Or so I tell myself. I’d hoped for it on my previous trips to the bride market, and not once did the pull come.
Not with any of the other women. Still, I tried, hoping against my better judgement.
This time it happened, and the sensation still sits in my chest, steady and warm.
But a pull is not a bond. The pull has led golems wrong before.
It’s rare, but it happens. The bond needs contact.
Skin on skin, long enough for the warmth to build and settle into both bodies, long enough to know for certain. And Sorina flinched when I touched her.
I won’t do it again without her permission.
I won’t find excuses for contact, won’t brush against her if we find ourselves in the same room, won’t reach for her when she stumbles.
If she is my mate, and I believe she is, then the bond will hold.
And if my body gives out before she’s ready, then it gives out.
I would rather calcify than become one more man who took something from her that she did not offer.
I pick up the setting punch and position it against the fourth prong. My right hand grips the handle, and I line the tip up where the gold needs to fold over the diamond’s edge. I press down in the most controlled way I can manage.
My fingers seize. It’s an abrupt freeze, every joint in my hand locking rigid at once.
A shudder rolls through my knuckles, into my wrist, and up through my forearm.
I try to hold the punch in position, but I can’t.
The tip skips off the prong, drags across the gold setting, and the force knocks the earring sideways in the clamp.
I hear a small, clean snap. The fourth prong breaks at the base and falls onto the bench, catching in a groove.
The diamond sits loose in the setting, held crookedly by three prongs. The piece is ruined. I would need to solder a new prong, file it to shape, and start the setting process from the beginning, but I can’t hold a file right now. I can’t hold anything.
I shove back from the bench and stand. I’m breathing heavily, my chest expanding painfully, and in a moment of frustration, I swipe my hand across the workbench.
The trays fly off, stones scattering across the floor, bouncing off the flagstones and rolling into the cracks.
Pliers and files clatter against the wall.
Spools of wire bounce and unravel. The finished earring on its square of cloth flies off the bench and disappears somewhere near the door.
A sound tears out of my chest, low and raw, and my jaw aches from opening wide to let it out.
Because even my jaw is stiffening, even that is being taken from me.
I grab the edge of the workbench with both hands, my locked fingers barely hooking under the rim, and I heave it over.
The bench crashes onto its side. The magnifying lens shatters, and drawers spill open and dump everything across the floor.
I stand in the middle of it and breathe. The electric light buzzes overhead, unchanged. Diamonds, silver, gold, and broken glass are scattered at my feet. The bench lies on its side with one leg cracked.
The anger drains out of me as fast as it came, and what replaces it is worse. My hands hang at my sides, still shaking, and I look at what I’ve done to the only room in this citadel that still gives me a sense of purpose.
I bend down, and my knees grind as I lower myself.
A small file lies near my right foot, and I pick it up with stiff, unsteady fingers and set it on the edge of the overturned bench.
I pick up a pair of pliers, then a spool of wire.
I keep going because this is a mess I made, and no one else should have to clean it up.
Also, no one should walk in here and see it.
I find the finished earring near the door.
It isn’t bent, so I set it aside and keep going.
I put every tool, stone, and spool back where it belongs, and I right the bench with a shove that takes more effort than it should.
I sweep the broken glass into a pile with the side of my boot.
The workshop looks close to how it did before, except the magnifying lens is gone, the bench has a cracked leg that needs fixing, and the second earring still needs a new prong. But it’s in order.
I lower myself onto my stool, rest my hands flat on the bench, and wait for the shaking to stop.