Shango POV: Day 80

  Current Wealth: 279 gold 31 silver 16 copper

  Solitaire came home when it was still light, and he and Phelia’s bickering followed me through the house. I felt it grinding against my every nerve, posing the question of how, exactly, they could manage to leave such an absurdly huge mansion feeling so laughably cramped.

  The answer was obvious of course; we weren’t actually living in most of it. At Solitaire’s insistence, the upper floors had been all but abandoned, and we’d started to concentrate ourselves in the bedrooms over the ground floor. He’d actually rekindled the screaming match with Phelia by letting her catch him bolting big sheets of metal over the windows.

  “Where did you even get the iron?” Had been among the barrage of questions first thrown at him, which had been Phelia’s first mistake. In assuming it was iron, she’d opened the door for Solitaire to fixate on the fact that it was, in fact, bronze he’d made from tin and copper in the garden soils. All of Phelia’s futile attempts to discuss anything other than the particular kind of metal being used to reinforce her house had, sadly, failed.

  They just kept going at it, for an hour, for two, for almost three. I needed a break, somewhere I knew their bitching couldn’t reach me, so I hurried through the house until I came to the forging room.

  The one place that had required utmost silence on pain of disturbing men while they handled thousand-degree steel and rooms full of toxic fumes. My sanctuary. Ardin was working away as I entered, Beam helping him, Corvan nowhere to be seen. The magus must’ve been fresh out, though, because the actual forge itself was hot, special-made furnace glowing cherry-red on the exterior as it worked on mixing a new batch of Solitaire’s tool steel.

  “Alright.” I nodded to them. “Mind if I sit in here for a bit?”

  Beam looked up from his work of shaping some weird, ethereal tool around Ardin’s hammer, grinning.

  “They’re still ballistic?” He asked. I didn’t share in his amusement, a consequence of having been tortured by their going at it for about fifty times longer than was reasonable, and ten times longer than was humane.

  “Please don’t talk about them.” I groaned. “Talk about anything except them, talk about us almost getting eaten by a bear, just not that bullshit, not now.”

  Beam grinned his beaming Beam grin, and I knew in an instant that he had no intent of stopping.

  “Marriage troubles?” He asked, astutely. My glare bounced off him as they usually did.

  “I’m married to the most British aristocrat ever born outside of Britain.” I told him, resisting the urge to throw a bit of swearing in for good measure. “Yes, Beam, I’m having marriage troubles.”

  He looked sympathetic at that, humour evaporating, eyes growing serious.

  “Would you like to talk about it?” He asked. I considered for a moment, remembered what exactly it was that Phelia had asked me last time we’d been alone together, then found my answer.

  “Definitely fucking not.”

  Beam looked just a shade relieved at that, and to fulfil my end of the social contract I pretended not to notice.

  “How’s the armour going, then?” I asked, and that brought a spark of excitement across his face.

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  “Good.” Ardin grunted. He didn’t look up, just continued to work in that strange, split-focus way he had. He was almost like Solitaire sometimes. “We’ve been focusing on getting the measure of the metal before anything, but I reckon I have that down now. Just need to produce and work enough to actually make the stuff.”

  A flutter of anticipation went off in my gut as I eyed him.

  “And how long will that be?” I asked, daring to hope. He glanced at me, after that, with a face that dashed my stupid optimism.

  “A week, probably, maybe one or two days less if we really hurry. Sorry boss.”

  The tournament started in about half a week, and from what Solitaire had told me the earlier matches- the ones with the most fights, before as many people had been eliminated- would last at most a day going by historical precedent.

  I felt my temper fray, but forced the burning coals of my anger to die out before they could even start burning. There were a lot of reasons for why our metalworking wouldn’t be done before the start. The Dead Edge’s attack had cost us probably a day, just off the top of my head, but it wasn’t something I could fully blame on anything except simple circumstance. The question now was how to work around it.

  “Concentrate on a suit for Helena first.” I instructed, earning a few surprised stares from the pair. “She’s smaller than Argar, and her name comes up after him and Beam’s, she’ll be the quickest to finish a set of armour for and has the best odds of it being ready for her first fight.”

  If any of us were injured in the tournament, it would be horribly costly to restore their wounds, Corvan couldn’t keep pushing himself to restore everything after all, and if those wounds were extensive enough they might exceed the limit of our wealth. Best to ensure we were going in with maximised protection from the start.

  Beam and Ardin continued working away while I watched, and I found myself eying the whole process. It was oddly satisfying to see. The hot metal deforming, bits of glowing shrapnel breaking off and hissing away, great big cracks dispersing across its face before it all flaked off like some snake shedding its skin. I could tell in an instant that they’d practised long and hard, and after a few minutes they invited me to ask. Clearly, they were proud of the techniques, Beam especially, and I was curious. Might as well give all of us what we wanted.

  Apparently, the biggest obstacle in actually working the metal had been the same thing we’d been looking for in doing so. Its strength. Even heated, even to the point of almost melting, it retained enough physical resilience that all of Ardin and Beam’s not-inconsiderable physical prowess was needed just to meaningfully shift it. This led to a process of turn-taking, painstaking repetition and patience, constantly cooling and reheating it over and over again until their tiny little deformations and changes in working it had added up.

  It was, I gathered, easier with Corvan there, as his magic could add some additional pressure, but they could still manage between the two of them. Once finished, the metal had a strange lustre to it that normal steel didn’t, almost whitish in its finish, and they gave me a nice long demonstration of the more practical differences.

  “We finished this yesterday, as the final stage of our weapon-process testing.” Beam explained, holding a blade out to me. There was no handle, no guard, but he’d wrapped its base in enough leather that I didn’t worry about hurting myself as I seized it. Surprisingly light. Heavy, of course, all swords were- I’d learned that quite fucking quickly- but given its size…Light. More in line with what you might expect watching movies than the two pound pieces of iron we’d grown accustomed to seeing swung around.

  I swung it, and watched as it came down hard into a wooden post I could only hope had been prepared for such a test. The edge bit in, easily, and soon enough I was struggling to pull the thing out from where it’d gotten more than a few inches stuck in. Beam laughed.

  “And that’s just for a start.” He declared. “You’re going to go nuts when you see the armour-”

  “Metal!” Ardin snapped, dragging Beam’s focus back to what was, apparently, a particularly tricky bit. He winced, glanced at me with a hurried goodbye, and got back to work. I knew when I was being bothersome, so I took my leave and headed back out into the mansion. Quiet. It’d quietened down, good, I was feeling tired. Wearily, I trudged my way back to my quarters, rather looking forwards to dumping myself into bed and letting sleep take me.

  But there wasn’t a peaceful, empty room awaiting me when I walked in. Only an occupied one, with a devastatingly beautiful blonde seated on the bed. Phelia was in what I first took to be some sort of nightwear, but realised after a moment was a bit more…Exposing. Her face was tranquil, eyes intense, posture upright and body language open.

  “Uh.” I said, about as intelligently as I could have managed. She blinked, seemingly in slow motion, and I was suddenly aware of how long her eyelashes were before she spoke.

  “Husband.” Phelia began. “I think we have some overdue business.”