Chapter 17 #4
Heat hovered around Reyna’s hands like an aura.
She stepped out of the rough, three-sided shed she kept tucked away on the banks of Mormon Creek.
Dawn was just beginning to pink the eastern sky, but she’d been at work since leaving the Norroways’ place.
The smithy in Columbia didn’t open for another two hours, but the fire in this forge—her secret, her refuge—never slept. At least, not until she did.
She laughed at her personal inside joke.
No flames burned in this forge. Her own heat sufficed.
Her hammer lay on the bench in the shed, unused, as she wrapped her fingers around the iron in her hands and shaped it into an 8 x 10 picture frame to sell at the Columbia smithy.
Reyna closed her eyes, dug her bare toes into the earth, lifted her face to the newborn sun.
She breathed in the energy, the warmth, the possibilities of the world around her and willed affection and nostalgia—both emotions that people wanted to feel looking at photos of their life—to travel through the heat surrounding her hands and into the metal.
Her work did not make people feel anything they wouldn’t on their own.
But it did amplify it, helping them connect to it faster and deeper.
She laid the frame aside, the heat spreading up her arms, and beads of sweat prickling along her hairline.
The creek tumbled past her on its way to New Melones Lake.
The stream sang of coolness, and Reyna pulled a leather cord attached to a small vial from under her shirt.
She dabbed two drops of water from the vial behind her ears and sighed in relief as the heat receded to a more comfortable level.
The heat did not go out. It never went out.
But the water tempered the heat when needed, banking it for the next time she called it to action.
The vial was nearly empty, and she knelt by the creekbank to refill it.
Light angled over the surface of the water, accentuating where the current splashed against rocks, or swirled against a fallen tree trunk.
She trailed her fingers in the stream, remembering the week she had spent making the tuning fork that no one had ever noticed except Cadenza.
She’d been telling the truth when she told Cadenza the fork was her favorite thing she’d ever made.
A tuning fork found resonance. Made things match up.
Her tuning fork was no different. But hers dealt in matching up potential, and coaxing things to resonate with her will.
Reyna had holed up here for seven days, pouring her desire and aim into the iron, forming it into an instrument of alterable size that amplified and worked her will on other objects.
The heat had been intense.
At the end of her working, Reyna had walked straight into the middle of the creek and buried her lava-hot skin under the water.
Steam billowed like a sauna till she was sure someone would come looking for its source, thinking it was smoke from yet another wildfire.
The heat from her workings never physically damaged her, but she felt it every time.
She rose from the stream and returned to the shed, sitting cross-legged against the wall and rotating the tuning fork in her hands.
She’d been looking for answers for so long.
Spent her life trying to figure out who she was and why she could do what she did.
Now that she was getting those answers, something had changed.
She sighed. Before finding the answers, need—piercing and insistent—had driven her search, like a string dragging her forward.
Find the answers, find the answers. After tonight, the string had vanished.
The hunt for those answers had defined such a large part of her life.
Who was she without this constant searching?
And if that driving need was gone, how did she move ahead with all of this?
She left the shed to watch the morning sun gild the trees lining the creek.
No one came here with her. No one knew her secrets.
This place was her refuge, true enough, but it was a lonely refuge.
Reyna had navigated the unknown of herself with no one to confide in, no one to commiserate with.
No real friends. Acquaintances, yes, friends, no.
Not for lack of trying on her part, but friends knew what was going on in each other’s life—really going on.
Every time she got to the point of thinking of someone as a friend, these secrets got in the way, and the relationship fizzled out.
Friendships didn’t work when there were secrets to keep.
But last night, answers were not the only thing she had found. She’d discovered other people like her, and in Cadenza, a friend who shared her secrets. For once she didn’t have to mourn a friendship that had barely started.
Reyna twirled the tuning fork and hummed a few lines of the Flower Duet.
A spark kindled in her chest, an excited little flame straining towards the future.
Yes, she had learned extraordinary things about herself last night.
But there was more to learn about this world of Fates and Crown than could be taught in one evening. There was always more to learn.
She smiled to herself. Moving ahead to greater and greater knowledge? And with a true friend?
Yes, please.