Chapter One - House on Fire
You wake up and discover the smell isn’t your overworn nightclothes. Your house is on fire.
This is an awful way to wake up, under any circumstances. In this case, you are no longer safely tucked away in the embrace of the 21st century and its fire response infrastructure. You’re not even on Earth, or not the Earth you have grown up in. Let us not say then that it is the Earth, or that it is the 12th century. Instead we shall merely suggest it is what Earth and the 12th century might have been, if one arrived there via a dark mirror portal discovered in the real Earth’s past.
In this not-Earth, you are the lone surviving child of a shipwreck. All that your father - well, your ‘father’ - will tell you is that he pulled you from the wreckage at shore, just before the incoming tide could claim you. Even then, he said, your smile warmed him so much that he barely felt the rain on the way back. It even seemed to warm the house so he has hardly ever needed wood for the fire.
In time, you suspected differently. In more time, you suspected he did too, though neither of you spoke of it.
He doesn’t blame you, by the way. He never has. Not when his good bearskin rug, pride of his youthful adventures, caught fire…
“I must have pulled it too close to the hearth,” he judged, shrugging. “Besides, it was old and balding. It was probably overly prideful to have held on to it for so long.”
…not when the entire house caught fire and he had to rebuild, in winter…
“I should have known better,” he said, “than to leave the house without checking that the fire was well and truly out. Besides,” he shrugged, “it gives me an opportunity to build it properly, build it the way I should have, the way I’d always dreamed.”
…not when it caught fire again, at night this time, and the smoke gave him the wheeze he has to this day…
In fact, he apologised to you. Over and over, saying how he should have built it better, should have used better stone. Yes, stone. Next time it would be stone right throughout, and thank God you hadn’t suffered any ill effects from sleeping in a burning house. When he’d run into your room, coughing and hacking, he’d feared the worst. Flames crawling along the walls, teasing across the floor, feasting on your little bedframe, and there you lay: all curled cuteness, snoring like you’d fallen asleep on an angel’s lap. Not in the least bothered by the flames. He gathered you up, his arms burned from his elbows all the way to his fingertips and his legs the same, knees to toes, and not a hair on your head was even singed. It was a miracle.
A miracle. That’s what he called it while you changed the bandages, every day for a six-month.
Besides, he said, he’d never liked how high his voice used to be and much preferred the gravelly texture it had now. Speaking of gravel, best get onto building that house!
“But Da,” you said, “a house of stone? Where will we get the money for it?” You were no financial wizard at the time, being eight, but you were very aware that materials came at a cost.
“I’ve an idea, youngster,” he said, winking and tapping a finger to his nose.
Since he seemed so prone to encounters with flame, he’d do well to learn its ways, he said.
When he opened his smithy, he was terrible. The winds only knew how he managed to keep drumming up enough business to pay his monthlies, right from the first. People always liked your father, and that’s a fact. On the odd occasion, some whom he owed would generously lower the amount due that month.
Yessir, he had the money for the hammers right enough but he had to pay off the anvil too, he said, and the one did no good without the other, now, did it? How could he make the money to pay more dues without hammer, anvil, and tongs, which all had to be paid? Coal, too, don’t forget. Without coal, why, what are the other three but big heavy clangers?
And so it went.
Your father wheedled, cajoled, and charmed his way into smithing. And since he was so much nearer the locals than even Clowston, he found few situations where neighbours weren’t willing to take a chance on his lack of experience, training, or natural skill. He threw himself into it, which meant so did you, by necessity. You went where he went in those days. If he closed up shop to head Clowston way and beg the masters there to let him so much as watch through the window, then so did you, and up on the wall beside him you’d be. Propped up on a makeshift stand and clinging to your father’s arm while he watched and whispered his observations to you.
He actually got quite good. It just took a long time. A long time and a lot of other people’s goodwill, especially from the master smiths who finally invited your father inside to sit against the wall.
“Better’n having you stand there and block all the outgoing heat,” they groused.
But you caught a grudging glint of respect in their eye as they said it. It was nearly all that they said, yet it was more and more obvious to you that even these solitary men liked your father, especially Madr.
“May as well use your hands, seeing you’re still here,” he’d sniff, and get Da to pump the bellows or hold the tongs, and eventually to hit the steel just there. Now there. Don’t apologise to it, lad, strike it. It’s metal, not glass. Good. Good, keep going. That was it.
As a younger child you started calling Madr ‘Grand Da,’ and he growled that he hated children, then he’d sneak you a hard sweet and get you to pump the bellows for your father.
Da’s hair was silver and Madr’s was gone entire by the time Madr pronounced him a full-fledged master. The Master never Apprenticed, laughed Madr, during one of his frequent visits. He could do that now, having retired; his joints couldn’t take it anymore and he’d been working slower and slower.
Da would send half of all earnings from his trade to Madr for the rest of the older master’s life.
You got pretty good, yourself. Da pumped the bellows for you, guiding you while you worked. Da said you were much better than he had been, and that if you went out to apprentice now then you would start no lower than Journeyman, isn’t that right Madr?
Madr shrugged and said he hated children. But he hated you less than most. And he palmed you a hard sweet.
Of course, it helped that you had essentially learned at the same time as your father.
“We learned different things, youngster,” Da wheezed. “You watched, but I practised. Just do as you’re doing, stay careful and if you make a mistake, just remember: People don’t expect you to learn without collecting a few burns.”
But you didn’t. Collect any burns, that is. Not one.
You are now nineteen years old. The neighbours have prospered, long since feeling much better about going to you and your Da rather than going all the way to Clowston for overpriced work that wasn’t as good as what they could get right here. Flourishing neighbours attracted business, attracted residents, and soon you lived in a budding village, on the verge of flowering into whatever was slightly bigger than a village.
Maybe if you’d sucked at smithing a bit more and left to seek your fortune. Maybe if your father hadn’t been such a natural pillar of community so that he put down roots and called that place home. Maybe if you’d just never been curious about the world beyond your smithy.
But you didn’t, he had, and you were.
You went out, which is totally fine. You met a cute someone who was just passing through, a festival was on and you wanted to go to the tavern but Da was tired tonight. You go, he said. He’d been a bit weak lately and coughing more. Just an illness, he said, it will pass.
Because you went, you met that cutie, had a dance, and met the competition. You hadn’t been looking for trouble, but you found it anyway.
Because you recognised the trouble’s potential before it started, you went to bed angry. You walked away, you see. Wisely, perhaps, but to do so still smarted. You didn’t mind that there had been four of them. They were scrawny and you felt confident they would have ended up on the thudding end of the hammer swing.
What you minded was that they were low-level wealth connected to medium-level wealth, both of which need opportunity rather than reason to dominate the less fortunate. These youths could go crying to their daddies and rain down on your father like the ocean’s black fury. They could ban trade with your business so no one would touch you. Point you out to the taxation authorities so they called due an account that didn’t exist. Call creditors in to repossess everything you own, never mind that it’s all bought and paid for.
All for some wounded pride. No, a moment of satisfaction wasn’t worth a hellish lifetime. The cutie pouted and you stalked away, ignoring the jeers calling out behind you.
You exercised self-control. You went home and went to bed. You went to bed angry.
Because you went to bed angry, you didn’t do your normal checks. You didn’t check the forge fire and make sure the coals were smothered. You lay down and cooled yourself off instead, chanting that the people you were mad at were only visitors and would soon be gone. Life would return to normal soon and you would be among people you cared about, people who got along with you.
Which is a big part of why you woke up so concerned to find your house on fire. In your childhood, a house fire was a dangerous disaster, certainly, but only you and your father had ever needed to face it. Twice.
These days, largely due to your father’s success, there were more houses. Houses which used to have a lot of space between themselves and the next house now found all the space between was gone, filled up with more houses.
The smoke didn’t bother you and you weren’t scared of the flames on your floor. They would grow, though, and what if the fire leapt? Half the township could go up like a piece of straw.
You hear no sounds of alarm, so you are the first to detect the fire. There is a nearby source of readily available water. You could get to it before anyone else, even if you shouted now, and possibly gain precious seconds on attacking the flame before it can become an inferno.
You fling off the covers. Just as your feet hit the floor, you hear your father coughing.
A great voice booms.
“A fork in the path of destiny appears briefly, shimmers, and is gone.”
“Hmm. Interesting choice.”
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