Maker of Fire

Emily, Healing Shrine of Mugash

The morning after the Queen returned to Is'syal, Lisaykos started me off by giving me the queen's cheat sheet to Fosk letters. These were on parchment. She also put a pile of wax tablets next to me where I was sitting on the lounge against the south wall in her study.

"I was thinking since you already know a writing system, that we should start with you writing out the first chapter of the Lay of the Eleven Gods in your letters. By the time you get to the end of the first chapter, you will probably be able to read Fosk letters. I've given you several tablets to use so you don't need to stop and smooth the wax back down once you've filled a tablet. Just take another and keep going. Wolkayrs will smooth them down for you once you've filled them all."

There were about 20 tablets piled up, all the size of a legal pad from my perspective. The Cosm walked around with these things in their pockets or belt pouches. It would take me a while to fill all of them. I felt sorry to add more work for Wolkayrs. Since I couldn't speak, I couldn't protest that I should be erasing my own tablets. Being mute made it very frustrating for me to be with others since I could never express any nuance in what I was thinking. Simple yes-or-no communication by hand gesture or head nodding was quite limited.

It took me three days to gain a working mastery of Fosk letters. I found it was much easier reading them than writing them, though that might be the consequence of how Lisaykos chose to teach me. Diphthongs were a challenge. Lisaykos had a few good laughs at some of my attempts to write words that I had never seen written before.

Lisaykos was an interesting teacher. The Queen recorded Latin letters and Fosk equivalents. There were 13 different vowels and 24 constants. I liked the way consonants worked. There are two ways to write the sound of qu in English, qu or kw. In Fosk, there was just one letter for that sound. The same worked for the k sound, which can be c, k, or q in English, but is just one consonant in Fosk. So consonants were easy and vowels took a little work. Though I was raised in this current life speaking Fosk, I retained the knowledge of English. There were just enough differences that it threw me off in amusing ways, especially when I tried to write without referring back to an existing text.

I was surprised to find that Lisaykos was easier to be with than the Queen. I might even say comfortable if it were not for the occasional twinge of panic when she moved just a little too fast or got a little too close. I think the difference was due to her sense of personal space. She was a person who liked a substantial personal space around her and treated me as if I needed a large personal space too.

She was also much calmer and more predictable than the Queen. She always spoke first before approaching so she seldom startled me. She always asked if I needed help navigating the furniture, instead of just picking me up and moving me without warning. She never used exaggerated care as if I would break, which was a problem with both Kayseo and Twessera, who tended to treat me like fragile and expensive glass. Lisaykos's movements were natural and always just the perfect amount of force, never too hard nor too timid.

My room was ready the day after Fosk lessons began. By the time I settled into the new space, I realized I felt safe around Lisaykos, Wolkayrs, and Thuorfosi. Thuorfosi came every day to help me in the morning because the tub couldn't be reengineered for my size and the hot water tank required magic.

Moving to a new room was both tolerable and vexing at the same time. I wanted to be back in my valley, to see what I might be able to salvage from the destruction of my home. I also wanted to visit where I left my magnetite, to see if any of it had been magnetized by lightning yet. I knew that visiting Uldlip and setting up a new home were out of the question for this year, but the shrine wasn't home for me. It wasn't overt, but my stay at the healing shrine still felt like captivity. It was a warm and pleasant prison, but a prison nonetheless. I was not free to just walk out the door and I had no idea if this touched-by-Tiki thing would create another barrier to leaving.

---

Wolkayrs, Healing Shrine of Mugash

The bed for the Coyn blessed by Tiki was much rougher than I liked but I built it in a hurry from odds and ends laying around my father's woodworking shop in town. It was actually much more than a bed. I made it so that the mattress was just below the level of the window sill with a steeply slanted headboard, so the Blessed Emily can sit up in bed and look out the window easily. My wife had told me that the Coyn would sit or stand on the window sill in the room where she first stayed to look outside. My thought was to make looking out the window both easy and comfortable for her.

The elevated platform of the bed rested on a chest of drawers underneath. At the foot of the bed, I built a stair of seven Coyn-scaled steps. I placed two small square chests with hinged lids on either end of the small room. The chests could serve as seats for anyone who might visit. They were just high enough to be useable seats but low enough that the Blessed Emily could open them and store things inside like sheepskin coats during the growing season.

I built a hidden sliding panel inside the already hidden sliding door in the hallway. The door was disguised as part of the wood paneling on the walls. All I did was modify the bottom panel, to make it a sliding door that only the Coyn would fit through easily. I did the same modification in the bottom panel of the door between the high priestess's bedroom and the Coyn's. I replaced the door into the bathing and necessary room with one that had a regular latch and a foot latch.

Knowing that my mistress Lisaykos and the Queen both worried that someone might want to abduct Emily, I built a hiding place for her behind the bottom drawers, one of which had a collapsing back to make it easy to get into the hidden space.

On the day I showed her the room, I pointed out that the bearskin I used as a rug was the one the Queen had wrapped her in on the day of her rescue. Before I had the chance to show her the hiding place, which I was saving for last, she had sat down on the rug and was running her fingers through the hair, looking really sad and weeping quietly.

It was then that I stopped seeing her as the Blessed Emily, touched by Tiki and worthy of reverence. What I saw at that moment was a small young Coyn woman, alone in the world and far from her home, tiny and vulnerable. I wanted to hug her and comfort her but I had been warned not to touch her, that she was shy and wary of Cosm. Instead, I excused myself quickly and left her in peace, only telling the high priestess I had erred in using the bearskin from her home.

My wife showed her the hiding place the next morning when she came to help the Blessed Emily with her bath. She reported back to me that the bearskin was now folded up and placed in one of the square chests.

---

Imstay King, Yuxviayeth Region

"This is amazing," Imstay kept running his fingers over the smooth surface of what looked like sky metal. It was about a quarter of an annulus broken off from what had once been an entire ring of metal. Bits of copper wire were still wrapped around it. "I've never seen a piece of sky metal like this, this big and this thick. Do you think that Coyn made this?"

"Frankly, my king, there is no other logical conclusion that fits the evidence we've recovered to date." General Bobbo explained. "The men also found stone casting molds, now mostly broken, for spoons, eating prongs, and buckles of all sizes. The captain in charge of the scouts executed the man who tried to hide a large crystal from the cave in his tunic and many small ones in his pouch. I sent one of my own agents to Uldlip and confirmed that this speechless Coyn has traded crystals for the last four years at the trade fair."

"So she mines crystals, casts metal, forms shapes out of sky metal, and has created a way to make instant fire," Imstay summed up. "She sounds like some oddball genius artificer hiding in the woods. This makes the news from High Priestess Foyuna most unwelcome. We can't afford to anger the shrines, which is what would happen if we invited the Coyn for a permanent stay in one of our workshops."

"There is perhaps a way," Bobbo suggested. "We can try negotiating with the Coyn. Since Tiki has shown his approval of her, that makes her a part of the kingdom. She may be open to making things to benefit the kingdom for compensation."

"We're almost done here so I will send you to find and speak with this Coyn," Imstay remarked. "We just need to set up a fort with a garrison here and leave enough wagons to ship the harvest, and then we can head home earlier than we originally proposed." The king put the piece of metal down and glowered at it, "I want you to leave now. You're the best talker out of all of my officers. Go and see what you can arrange with the Coyn, assuming you can talk with her. Figure out who her keepers are and how the Queen has set things up to protect her. I want to know everything about her. I want the instant fire. I also want to know how she can make shapes like that out of fire metal.

"And Bobbo, see if you can determine what caused the cave to explode. If it was something that she made, it could a great weapon of war and we don't want anyone besides our kingdom to possess that."

"Permission to speak frankly?"

"That usually means you're going to tell me something which will probably make me angry," Imstay laughed and gave his general a hard look. "I promise not to kill, torture, or maim you for what you're about to say."

"It wouldn't hurt to get on a better footing with the Queen regarding those who treat the Coyn in harmful ways, and please do not pretend that you don't know what and who I'm talking about. If the Queen or your cousin are protecting this Coyn, you will be in a better position to bargain for what you want if you made meaningful concessions to the Queen." Bobbo did not flinch at the hostile glare the king sent his way. He kept his voice level and his face neutral and non-judgemental.

"See what you can find out or negotiate first, and don't bother with that woman. Come back and report to me in person," the King snarled. If only there were a way to get rid of his queen; but her magic was too powerful to attack directly and all his attempts to incapacitate or marginalize her had failed to date.

Imstay sat down on his traveling throne and emptied his drinking horn of the ale the Queen had invented. It was so odd that adding the yeast late and floating it on top to ferment the wort could completely change the flavor. She had come up with all these ideas back in the days when they still tried to come to terms with each other.

He felt he had made a good faith effort to meet her more than halfway. The changes in how the mounts were treated had actually put an end to the undeclared state of hostility between the sapient mounts and the Cosm of Foskos. He couldn't say relations were friendly, but the destruction of outlying Cosm settlements by the wild mounts had stopped once evidence of improved conditions for their captured and subjugated brethren became known to them.

Conditions were so improved for the captured and tamed mounts that four years ago when a drought in the mountains to the northwest caused a scarcity of game, two entire clans of griffins voluntarily accepted servitude with the Cosm of Foskos to escape starvation. Granted there were some novel negotiated innovations in the terms for their surrender, and they would only negotiate with the Queen, which was unprecedented, but so far the arrangement was working well.

It annoyed him that it was working well because the Queen reaped the credit. Aylem had subtly changed the role of queen with her meddling, and that vexed him since it undercut his position. He could live with it. He had to live with it.

They had parted ways over the Coyn. She wanted the same for the Coyn as had been given to the mounts. He could not agree. Griffins and eagles and winged horses provided great value. The only thing Coyn provided was raw labor, which was not that substantial given their lack of size and strength. He wasn't even sure that they were as smart as the mounts, though he did have to concede that some of them were handy with crafts. Their skill with crafts made sense since they had to be good with their hands to make up for their lack of magic skills. He often thought the kingdom might be better off without the Coyn, given the resources needed to keep them housed, clothed, and fed.

"Usruldes," he said quietly so the sentries at the door to his pavilion wouldn't hear.

"I am here, Imstay King," a tall lithe man in black appeared kneeling before Imstay.

"Follow Bobbo. Report to me everything he does. Also, locate this Coyn and detail some of your agents to keep an eye on her. Make sure no one else is keeping an eye on her."

"Yes, Mighty One." With that, he was gone as quickly as he had appeared.

---