Maker of Fire

Usruldes the Wraith, in the shelter on the hill southeast of Aybhas

I envied the paper makers and the fun they had. In all my travels, I had never seen anything like it. Watching the paper process from description to final product was fascinating.

I wondered where the Coyn came from that she knew about this paper stuff. I also wondered how the Queen knew about it. I surmised that the Queen observed it using the Great Crystal. Her clairvoyant range using the crystal probably stretched all the way to the eastern coast. She could see things in the crystal that the rest of us could only dream of seeing.

It takes several days to make a hide into vellum. If this paper stuff could be made faster than vellum, it could reduce the cost of books. Places like the healing shrine that must record patient progress could do away with the bulk and inconvenience of using many wax tablets. Note-taking for my agents would become much easier for the same reason. I was quite interested in paper.

It was miserable watching the paper makers eat dinner afterward. The meal was grilled trout and grilled asparagus basted with butter. It was the small green asparagus that grows on the river and canal banks and not the bigger white asparagus which I find tougher to eat and less flavorful. I tried not to dwell on their happy and convivial dinner as I gnawed on my tasteless and dry flying-cavalry ration square.

The Holy Lisaykos looked older than I remembered. So many years had passed since I had seen her. I would see her from a closer distance in just a half year when I enrolled my oldest daughter at this very shrine. My daughter did so well at the Mugash entrance exam that they accepted her at the exam itself. She took the exam for every shrine and she was accepted at every one, even the Shrine of Erhonsay whose exam is half martial arts. She chose the Healing Shrine of Mugash and sealed my fate.

I will not deny my daughter the joy of being escorted by her parents at the enrollment ceremony. The King has placed my name, my real name, on the Coldtide Festival list for promotion into the nobility. He did it just so I can escort Fedso'as from a prestigious position near the back of the pack on enrollment day.

It is just a court lordship. What matters is the public use of my real name. My name alone will bump my daughter ahead of all other court lords and far ahead of my wife's standing as a craft master.

If my birth family is paying attention, and of course they will be, they will come to Aybhas looking for me at my daughter's enrollment. It is just four and a half rotations, forty-five short days between the Coldside Festival and enrollment at the Shrine of Mugash on mid-cold season day. I know I must meet my mother there. I anticipate that enrolling my daughter at the highly-respected Shrine of Mugash will ensure at least civility from her.

Will the rest of the family come? I do not know. My courage flees from me when I think about it. Oyyuth noticed I am losing sleep over it. I told her my story before we were married, omitting my family name. I told her who I was the night after our hand-in-hand ceremony. The haup Gunndits are the most powerful of all the southern lords. I worry that my reentry to public life will hurt the brewery and the future of my children if my birth family takes measures against me in retribution. To be more honest, I'm scared out of my underwear over meeting my mother and my sister, Lord Gunndit. What do you say to your family that you ran away from 19 years ago?

I am such a coward.

The King knows how much I love working in the field, which is why my subordinate, Deputy Spymaster Snow Bear fills in so much for Spymaster Wraith. I offered to step down and let Snow Bear take my position. He has all the right skills to be a great spymaster. Both he and the King turned me down. Now I face retirement sooner than I wanted if I become too public a person, all because I won't deny my daughter this singular wish of hers that I escort her at her enrollment. I've been gone from home on so many missions that I couldn't even think of denying her when she asked me. She even told the King to his face, ordering him not to send me on a "courier mission" at enrollment time.

I am so screwed.

---

Lisaykos, Healing Shrine of Mugash

It was such fine weather that I had a table set up on the south balcony on the fourth floor and had dinner served there for everyone at the papermaking in the afternoon, including the General. He assured me that he had the freedom of the garrison so I didn't need to find him a bed for the night.

Emily didn't much like sitting in a normal chair on four lounge cushions, but there was no way around it, short of letting her sit on the table. She was still uncomfortable with being one undersized Coyn surrounded by the rest of us, but she was better accustomed to it now than she was when she first arrived.

The General asked if he might bring the garrison commander with him in the morning. He had quite smoothly inserted himself into the paper making. It looked like he was having so much fun that it felt wrong to turn him away. I had never seen this side of the General before and I found it fascinating.

The next morning, he and Captain Tyoep showed up at the south garden right at the second bell. I think he didn't tell her that the Queen was present. When the Captain made her obeisance to the Queen, she was more nervous than I've ever seen her. Aylem usually doesn't stay overnight at the shrine but did so this time because she too wanted to see how the paper turned out.

Yesterday afternoon, the layered stack of felt and paper was pressed in the old olive press, coated on both sides with a thin layer of hide glue, and then hung on strung lines to dry overnight, like pillow covers on a clothesline. Thuorfosi took down one and brought it over to the work table. It was half-again the area of a standard wax tablet. She then picked up the table and moved it to where Emily was sitting. I confess, it was fun to watch Emily's expression when Thuorfosi did that.

Emily assumed a neutral expression instantly and fingered the paper between her fingers. Aylem walked over and did the same. "Feels like it could be smoother. It feels like parchment before you polish it," the Queen remarked. Emily nodded. She waved at Thuorfosi to get her attention and then pointed at a box sitting next to the pile of unused felts. Thuorfosi brought it over and Emily pulled out a leather sandbag for polishing parchment and a small stoppered jar.

Inside the jar was a fine white powder which Emily sprinkled on the sheet. She then took the leather sandbag in both hands and started to polish the paper.

"Emily, let me do that," the Queen said. Emily paused and gave her a sharp look. "Seriously, it will go faster." Emily visibly exhaled, dropped her shoulders, and stepped back on the chair she was standing on. Though the General and the Captain were shocked, and Thuorfosi and Wolkayrs were very uncomfortable at the sight of the Queen doing menial work, I was merely exasperated that Aylem forgot her dignity in public.

After a minute of applying the white powder and sandbag, the Queen straightened up. "What's the powder?" Aylem asked.

Emily grinned and reached into her belt pouch for something she had made three days ago. Unlike when she made it, it now had a point carved on one end of the stick-like object. She held it in her hand like a pen and wrote on the polished patch on the sheet: "Wheat starch, though any starch should work for polishing."

"Hey, that's that thing you made with the candle and the clay," Wolkayrs burst out. Emily gave him a grin like a fox in a hen yard.

"Emily, is that a pencil?" Aylem asked. It was the first time I had ever heard the word. I guessed it was just another thing from Emily's and Aylem's old world.

Emily sported a self-satisfied smile, gloating even, as she passed it to the Queen. Aylem examined it and dragged the tip across her fingernail and looked at the line it left behind. She then bent down and wrote: "Where did you get wheat starch?" She passed the pencil back to Emily, who wrote, with a grin, "from wheat."

"Arg!" Aylem gestured at the heavens. "You made wheat starch, yes? How did you make it?"

Emily wrote: "Soak wheat kernels in hot but not boiling water. Filter through a cloth to get the wheat out. Evaporate the water after filtering. The powder left behind is starch. The kitchen here made it for me."

I was beginning to feel like we needed to assign someone to follow Emily around and take notes on everything she did, except I know if we did that for real, it would creep her out.

"So what's with the candle and clay to make a pencil?" Aylem asked. "How does one make a pencil?"

Emily looked a bit apologetic and wrote: "Long story."

"I can explain the process," I interjected. "Wolkayrs and I watched her make it a few days ago. I suspect she did so because she knew we were going to try making paper at the end of the rotation." And so, I related the story of the pencil which began when I lifted the restriction on Emily's confinement after fixing her skull fracture.

Four days ago, as soon as I was sure the pieces of her skull bonded into one solid piece, I allowed Emily to walk on her own. It would take at least another rotation for the repaired bone to become sturdy. Bone work was difficult and tiring healing and even several days after the reconstruction, the repaired skull was still fragile and an accidental blow could easily rebreak it.

I would have preferred to keep her immobile for two entire rotations but Emily is not the sort of person who can sit still and do nothing. She needs something to do almost all of the time. When she does sit still, staring off into space with a frown etched into her eyebrows, it means she is thinking; and when she is done thinking, she will throw herself into her next task without pause.

As soon as she could move around again, she asked for an old or broken plate, small enough that she could hold it; a wood dowel half the thickness of an arrow stave; a beaker of water; some rags; a small smooth board; some glue; and a candle of second or third quality. Since an occupied Emily is a happy Emily, I asked Wolkayrs to take care of her requests. After all, Emily watching has become one of my favorite pastimes as of late. She is infinitely surprising.

Well before the mid repast, something strange and interesting was happening at Wolkayrs' work table. Standing on a chair, Emily first held the broken plate shard over the candle, which being of the inferior grade of beeswax, smoked a bit. As soon as she had a significant coating of soot on the plate shard, she scraped it off onto a piece of rag. By the fourth bell, she had a little pile of soot collected.

Emily is the sort of person who gets so focused on what she is doing, that she will work straight through mealtimes. Wolkayrs had to blow out the candle and take the plate from her to get her to eat. When I laughed, he gave me an accusatory glare and snipped: "You are not any better, Holy One!"

When the mid repast was over, Emily climbed back on the chair and got back to work. She mixed some of the soot with some of the white clay Aylem gave her. She then rolled the mix together into long thread-like rolls which were very thin. Setting them aside, she pulled out that strange little sky metal blade that's hidden in the billet protector of her belt, which certainly made Wolkayrs' eyes pop open. He had no idea she had such a thing.

She used that little blade to cut the stave into two halves. At this point, Wolkayrs gave up any pretense to doing his own work and was watching, just like I was, to see what she was up. She cut a channel down the middle of the flat surfaces of the stave halves. By the time that was done, the threads of rolled clay and soot were dry and stiff enough to hold vertically next to the relit candle flame. She hardened the threads that way---by holding next to the flame and using the heat to harden and dry them, finger length by finger length. Soon after she started, she had to put the first thread down in a hurry because it got too hot and burnt her fingers.

After I walked over and had healed her fingertips, she wrapped the end of the thread in a rag and went right back to what she was doing. She hardened two of the threads that way. She broke the tip off of one and dragged it across a light-colored rag. It left a grey line behind and Emily, who is usually serious and somewhat grim, broke out into an unrestrained smile. I really liked the look of that smile.

She laid a baked thread into the grove on one half of a stave. She fitted the other half on top to check the fit, removed it, and then painted glue on the two halves. She fitted the halves together and squeezed to get the excess glue out, which she then wiped away with a rag. Having made one of these things, she then made a second.

"So that's the story of making that pencil thing," I concluded to the paper-making crowd. The Queen liberated the pencil from Emily's hand and passed it around. Everyone took a turn writing with it. The only complaint, which several voiced, was that it was a little small. It was hard to get a proper hold on it to write. Emily just rolled her eyes. I guessed from the expression on her face that she was thinking something like, "I made it for me, not for you."

Emily motioned for Thuorfosi to bring more sheets of paper from the drying line. When Thuorfosi put them down, Emily shocked everyone by taking out that little knife from her belt and cutting a sheet into four uneven pieces. The first piece she folded into a box and the second into its lid. She then folded the smallest piece of paper into a long-necked bird with wings. I was amazed at how fast and confident her little hands were at folding the paper. On the last piece, she regained the pencil and wrote: "paper - it's not just for writing."

She then took that piece after everyone had a chance to see what she wrote and folded it into a tapering triangle shape of three surfaces. "I get it," the Queen started laughing softly and shaking her head. Emily grabbed the folded thing, drew back her arm, and let it fly. It glided some thirty or forty hands before it lost velocity and hit the ground, tip first.

"That's amazing!" Bobbo went running after it. He picked it up and tried throwing it but it flew immediately into the ground. "I guess that was too hard," he picked it up and tried again, barely putting any force into his launch. The paper triangle sailed back toward the rest of us and landed on the table.

The next half bell was spent by everyone but me making paper airplanes, which is what Emily called them. I wanted Emily to show me how to make the folded bird but she told me to wait until later since folding the bird was much more complicated.

I needed to make my rounds and hear the reports of my department heads. I left the other six behind so they could make more paper with the pulp that was left. This would give us an idea of how many sheets could be made if we wanted to try to upscale the process as a new craft industry.

Since Emily was the idea person behind paper, the required blessing from the Shrine of Giltak for a new craft was a formality. That was a measure of just how much influence a blessed revelator had. I'm sure Emily had no idea that she could have real influence if she wanted to exert it, though she wasn't that sort of person. Bobbo's description of a crazy genius artificer was near perfect, as far as I could tell; and I had her under my roof for the next two seasons.

I finished my work and invited Kayseo and Twessera out to the south garden to see the mayhem. We walked out to see the Queen and Captain Tyoep putting up more drying lines because they ran out of room with the lines put up yesterday. Wolkayrs and the General were tightening the press and Thurofosi was working with the mould and deckle. Emily was missing from her chair.

I had visions of her running off on some crazy notion of hers and bumping the head that we worked so hard to put back together. "Hey! Where is Emily?"

The Queen turned her head my way, "behind you by the wall."

I looked and there she was, sleeping between Asgotl's forelegs, her head resting on her arms draped over his leg above the elbow. I restrained myself from chuckling since Asgotl was obviously sitting very still so as not to wake her. The look on his face was like he was trying to juggle eggs without breaking them.

---