13. Sophie
Iwandered through the garden with my face tilted toward the sun, feeling its warm embrace and willing it to melt away the stress caused by the morning’s chaos. I’d limited my time in the garden to one hour a day so it wouldn’t become an unhelpful distraction from my work. I didn’t want to be self-indulgent when people needed me. But today I was more grateful for the break than ever. In the quiet, I could hear myself think.
My thoughts kept circling back to the vastness of what these people had lost and the soulless monsters that so many of them had fought. In the capital, I’d been shielded from the horrors of war. Father had always said it was an unladylike topic of conversation. Yes, I’d heard men boasting of their military prowess, but none of them had been missing limbs or telling me about their lost loved ones.
The general protected these people, and now they looked to me to protect them too. If he was away often, surely there was much I could do during his long absences. But what? I felt like it should be more obvious. I would ask to meet with somebody who could advise me on the matter. Mistress Rose, who managed the castle staff, seemed to be humoring me, rather than giving me a true role. I wondered if she had also been instructed to hide the true goings on in the castle from me.
We turned a corner, passing manicured hedges, and I pointed to the workshop in the corner of the garden. Smoke curled from its wonky chimney, and its tiled roof sagged in the middle, giving it a charming appearance. A fenced-off yard around it contained piles of junk and broken wheelbarrows. The path to and from the door appeared well trodden, and blue kryalcomy lamps glowed inside, despite the sun still being high.
I turned to Lucy. “Who works there?”
She followed my gaze. “Callum, my lady.”
I almost misstepped in surprise. “Callum? What does he do in there?” I remembered what Meena had said about him making the ceremonial daggers.
She looked uneasy, and I wondered if his role had something to do with the forbidden topic everyone seemed to be skirting around. “I don’t really understand it, my lady.”
I pursed my lips, but my desire to understand was becoming more and more overpowering. I turned to Lucy and Meena. “Would you mind waiting here? I wish to speak to Callum alone.”
Meena looked uneasy, her eyes scanning the workshop and its surroundings, but bowed. “Shout if you need us, my lady. Even if it’s just to kick Callum’s backside.”
I half laughed. “Thank you, Meena. One day I may ask you to do just that.”
I walked to the single-story building before I overthought this and my courage faded. I knocked on the door. I heard cursing and a heavy thud. Footsteps made the rickety walls vibrate, and the door swung open. “What?”
I stepped back, surprised at his informality. Callum wasn’t wearing his jacket, his white shirt was untied around the neck, and smudges of soot and ink marred the material and covered his hands.
He looked me up and down. “Oh, it’s you.” He sighed. “Can I help?” His tone indicated I was interrupting something very important and that the last thing he wanted to do was help me.
I straightened. If he was allowed to get away with being rude, so would I. “May I come in?” I pushed past him without waiting for a reply while he spluttered beside me.
Despite the blue glass lamps, the lighting was dim and the windows murky. The workshop was a chaotic arrangement of tables covered with tools and half opened drawers filled with lumps of metal or rocks. In one corner was a furnace and what could have passed as a smithy.
It was the most intriguing place I’d ever entered. I examined some half-formed trinkets. “This is kryalcomy?”
Callum sighed and wiped his hands on a cloth, leaning back on a bench. Impatience was still clear in his stature. “It is.”
I turned the balls and disks around in wonder. How could lifeless lumps of metal form light? Kryalcomy lamps and heaters were the most common usage of the art but I knew it could do more. I also knew any kryalcomy was very expensive.
I turned to my husband’s friend. “How does it work?”
Callum gestured to his workbench where thousands of small pots contained nuggets of metal. “It’s complicated.” His flat tone was intended to end the conversation.
I narrowed my eyes. “Go on.”
He cleared his throat. “Kryalcomy and its related arts are a huge area of study, but I’ll try to give a comprehensive overview that even somebody with no training such as yourself might understand.”
I tried not to bristle and merely raised an eyebrow.
“So, there are four types of metal you need to understand the properties of. First we have kryal.” He picked up a small piece of dull grey metal. “When properly shaped and treated, kryal can attract things to itself. Similar to the way a magnet draws other metal, kryal can draw other things.”
I frowned. “How? How does it attract them?”
Callum snorted. “Do you understand how a magnet attracts things? No. Well you won’t understand this either, so stop asking questions and listen.”
I folded my arms and glared. He ignored me.
“The easiest one is light. Kryal, when heated at the same temperature that turns sand to glass and spread thin, will attract light. It is drawn in one end and out of the other. Just like a magnet, it has two poles.”
He picked up a long wooden rod. Carved into it was a groove containing a thin line of metal, far too fragile to be handled alone. When Callum held the rod up to a lamp, its light dimmed slightly, and light shone from the far end of the metal line. A thin beam of light, completely straight, was visible down the metal.
I frowned. “Why isn’t it glowing? Most kryalcomy objects have a blue or red glow around them. This looks more like a beam.”
Callum gave a theatrical sigh and held up a finger. “What did I say about questions? If you want me to explain, not a single word.” He lowered his voice. “Kryalcomy doesn’t need to glow. It’s merely a requirement of the Maegistrium in Ilustran University, the place kryalcomy originated.”
I opened my mouth, and he made an exasperated noise. “No! Just listen.” He flourished his sleeves as he replaced the wooden pole. “Now, light is the easiest to attract with kryal, but in the last hundred years, we’ve discovered other properties. In its rudimentary forms, heat was a bi-product of light transfer, but in amounts too small to use. With refining, however, we managed to separate the two qualities so we can have light without heat, and—much more difficult—heat without light. You see, enough heat to warm a room would require a blinding amount of light if you didn’t refine it.”
I thought of the soft glowing red light in my heated bath but didn’t interrupt.
“Obviously, with this you can choose to make an area hot or cold, light or dark, depending on the direction of the bar. Anyway, then we discovered how to transfer water and air by heating kryal to different temperatures and adding tiny amounts of other metals to make alloys. Thus forming the four pillars of the foundation of kryalcomy.” He held up his four fingers. “Light, heat, water and air.”
He flourished a grand bow. I didn’t respond as he’d previously requested that I say nothing. He pouted.
“Then we have this metal.” He tossed a nugget of a brighter metal, paler than silver, straight at my face. I caught it. Barely.
Callum grinned. “Turstan. This can store the properties attracted by kryal. By giving it a soft core and a hard shell, you can make it porous by varying degrees, which means you can control the speed or volume it releases the substance into its environment.”
I gave him a blank blink.
“Gah. Don’t worry about what I just said. Just think of this as a storehouse you can fill up with whatever you’ve collected from the kryal. Light or heat, normally. It then slowly releases it.”
He pointed to the glass lamps. “So those are all turstan that have been charged using a kryal lighter. They don’t require any skill to use. They’re just a lump of rock, so anyone can buy or install them.”
I nodded; things were starting to make more sense. “So it’s a piece of turstan that’s heating my bath. One that’s been infused with heat using kryalcomy.”
“Exactly.”
“Then why does it glow?”
“As I said before, in our grand country of Fenland”—I didn’t miss the sarcasm in his voice—“kryalcomy is regulated by the Maegistrium in Ilustran. There are obvious dangers to the art, and kryalcomy is complicated. It takes work to make it safe and accessible to the common man. For many reasons, every kryalcomal device must be stamped as made by an approved artist. And every kryalcomal or turstan device must glow when active so it can’t be hidden. So the turstan in your bath is infused with both light and heat.”
I looked around his workshop. The only light came from the white-blue lamps. “But that’s not what you do, is it? You’re not an approved artist.”
He gave me a serious look. “No, I am not.”
I licked my lips, feeling like one verbal misstep would send me off a cliff edge. “Some types of kryalcomy are illegal in Fenland.”
“Many types. But that’s not what you’re learning today.” He turned back to his large collection of unrefined metal. “There are two more types of metal you should be aware of. Jadum”—he held up a white rock—“which magnifies kryalcomy.” He then held out a smooth black rock. “And this is yadum, which nullifies kryalcomy.”
“Nullifies?”
He nodded and tossed the black stone into the nearby lamp. The light died at once. He skipped over and fished the black rock out of the glass case, and the light returned. “Ta da!”
“Are those banned as well?”
He scoffed as if I’d just asked the stupidest of questions. “No, no, they are merely integrated into devices so you need less infusing from kryal and so they can be switched off easily. Most devices have them. Every time you turn your lamps off with a switch, you’re triggering the mechanism that releases the yadum.”
I nodded. That made sense. It was alarming how little I knew about the devices around me.
“Isn’t yadum what you make those special knives out of for the soldiers?”
His shoulders tensed and then loosened. “Yes. And there’s nothing illegal about them. They’re just plain yadum.”
“So, if you were to stab something that used kryalcomy with one of those daggers, it would stop working.”
He nodded with a wry expression. “Though I would recommend using switches rather than daggers to turn your lights off.”
“But…”
Callum tossed the metal back into an open box. “And that concludes our lesson for today.”
I hesitated, my voice sounding small. “But…what is it that you do?”
Callum gave me a flat look. “If I told you that, Kasten would have my head. I will let him tell you, not me.” He moved off behind me.
I clenched my fists in my skirts and took a deep breath. “You say that like it’s easy for me to talk to him. He barely looks at me.” Even as the words came out, I was shocked at how easily I said such vulnerable words to a man who was little more than a stranger. Something about his rudeness was disarming, giving the expectation that there should be no pretense between us, only honesty.
Callum sighed heavily behind me as if I were being dramatic. “Look, life isn’t easy for Kasten. At all. He’s in big trouble. He doesn’t want to implicate you in it. The less you know about what’s going on, the better off you will be. He wants you to stay innocent, so the king can never blame you for any of it. And so you’re not a target for Lord Lyrason.”
Lord Lyrason?
My chest tightened. “I want to help Kasten. I’m his wife. There must be something I can do. The more trouble you’re in, the more help you need. Doesn’t he trust me? I’m sure there’s a way I can prove my loyalty.”
Callum shooed me out through the workshop door and closed it behind us, locking the large bolts with padlocks. “The last thing Kasten needs is another person to worry about. He has given you comfort and safety. Don’t throw it back in his face.” He turned to Meena, gave her a quick nod as if he were somehow handing me over, then strode back to the castle.
I stared after him, itching to look more closely at the things in his workshop. I thought of the strange pyramidal device dropped at my feet by the fugitive. Was that one of the illegal devices Callum had made? It hadn’t looked like a device for heat or light. So maybe something to do with air or water? I had never heard of such a thing before.
Maybe if I could prove myself useful and trustworthy, Kasten would explain what was going on. If not, I would have to slowly piece everything together myself.
Miss Claris would be horrified at the thrill that ran down my spine.