Sword and Sorceress 30

by Waters, Elisabeth

  “Alex, I’ve been over here every day this week. Surely you know that your romantic interests have been the talk of the town since you took over the Dowers’ farm. Elsa Pickering almost refused to sell me any bread yesterday she was so mad.”

  The tips of Alex’s ear turned slightly pink, and he opened and closed his mouth a couple times before he could get a word out. “….oh. They’re all talking? About us? I didn’t mean…”

  “I’m sure it will all blow over soon. After all, lady magicians are basically confirmed spinsters. People seem to think we can’t have a family and a job. Just makes the gossip that much more exciting.”

  “But you’re not nearly old enough to be considered a spinster! I... I mean… it doesn’t make any sense. Elsa Pickering is older than you are.”

  “Just the way things are, I’m afraid. As I said, it will blow over. On a slightly related note, do you think you could do me a favor? I’d like to take a look at the cow one more time, but I have some errands to run tomorrow. I don’t suppose you could meet me at the inn with her so I can give her a final once over? I’ll buy you a drink, gossips be damned.”

  Alex’s eyes caught fire as he smiled at me. “Well, I supposed there are some things worth daring the gossip for.”

  Unaccountably, I blushed. Perhaps those gossips were more correct than expected.

  ~o0o~

  I walked towards the inn and smiled. Alex’s cow was tied to the hitching post out front, so presumably he was inside waiting for me. I patted the cow’s neck as I walked past her, then glanced behind me. The afternoon light glinted off the coffee pot, which seemed strangely quiet today. Smiling, I entered the inn and looked around for Alex.

  Possibilities

  Julia H. West

  Like Julia’s “Soul Walls” in Sword and Sorceress 24, here is another story with an unusual mixture of magic and art.

  When I request author bios, I tell them that if it is not turned in by the deadline I will make something up. Occasionally an author takes that as a challenge. I did not make this one up; this is what Julia sent me.

  In a land of aether flyers and steam-powered automatons, Julia H. West lives in a mechanized cottage, surrounded by penguins and cats. She maintains that there is no truth to the rumor that the cats write an appreciable amount of her fiction. The penguins might know more, but are keeping their beaks closed. (They can, perhaps, be bribed with fish.)

  Most of the fantasy and science fiction short stories Julia has had published in various magazines and anthologies are available as eBooks from Callihoo Publishing (http://callihoo.com). Her website is at http://juliahwest.com.

  Ten-year-old Jennaya, short hair trapped beneath a kerchief, fidgeted in the stifling workshop. Her grandmother’s voice buzzed in her ears like the flies near the door as the wiry old woman described quality of glass, materials to make it, and shaping techniques.

  Jennaya let the words wash over her. She had watched glassblowers since infancy, and already knew that. But the spider building a web in the corner of the window frame was new and interesting.

  Jennaya wrenched her attention from the spider when her grandmother opened the furnace door. She dipped the end of a long metal pipe into molten glass in the crucible there, and drew out an orange-hot gather. Jennaya’s grandmother expertly rotated the pipe while blowing through the tube, then rolled the glass across a metal-topped table, dipped it into a bowl of colored glass beads, and thrust it back into the furnace to melt the beads. After blowing, rotation, and shaping with tongs and wooden molds, a colorful bottle emerged from the gather. Grandmother snipped the bottle off the end of the pipe and set it in the annealing furnace.

  “Now you.” Grandmother handed the pipe to Jennaya, who accepted it eagerly. This was her first step in joining the family business and becoming one of the master glassblowers of Smoking Mountain Glassworks.

  Jennaya knew the steps of glassblowing, and could rattle them off whenever asked. But now, although her grandmother guided her through the process step by step, Jennaya found it much harder to control the glass than she expected.

  Her grandmother, who had taught generations of glassblowers, finally rescued the gather before it fell to the floor. The old woman returned the glass to the crucible, put hands to hips, and glared at Jennaya. “Pay more attention to the glass, and less to that spider.”

  “I am.” Jennaya pushed sweaty hair, which had escaped from her kerchief, out of her eyes. She accepted the blowpipe with its gather of glass back from her grandmother, then tried again to blow through the tube while rotating it. The glass blob sagged, and all she accomplished was to blow a hole through its side.

  “Feh.” Jennaya’s grandmother made a disgusted noise and dumped the mess back into the furnace. “Focus on the glass!”

  Ashamed at her lack of progress, Jennaya took a deep breath and forced herself to concentrate on the glass, not the spider in the window or the flies buzzing about. For more than half her life she’d watched her mother, grandmother, and aunts manipulate glass. If she matched her own actions to those in memory, instead of treating glassblowing as a new experience, would that help?

  She drew a gather from the furnace and moved arms and hands along with a memory picture. She tuned out her grandmother’s murmurs of “Better, better.” Finally it was going right. An opalescent bubble formed at the end of her blowpipe, and she watched dreamily, eyes half lidded, as it grew larger, more fragile and perfect.

  The tints of the glass reminded her of the colors glistening across a fly’s back. That thought broke her concentration. Desperately she blew, trying to regain the beautiful thing she had been making. But now, overlaid on memories of her family blowing glass, was that picture of the house fly’s iridescent green back.

  A pop startled her. Her grandmother said, “By all the—” then cut off her exclamation.

  Jennaya blinked, her mind’s eye filled with dizzying images of glassblowing and flies. The blowpipe clattered to the floor as she collapsed. Her grandmother caught her and sat her against the wall, near the open window, saying, “Catch your breath now, child.”

  As the images behind her eyes faded, Jennaya saw that on the table lay a perfect sphere, the size of her fingertip, with a fly floating motionless inside.

  ~o0o~

  For months all Jennaya’s female relatives worked to help her learn glassblowing. Despite their help, she lost control trying the simplest of tasks. She left lop-sided burn marks on wooden stools, or lumps of cooling glass on the floor. One bowl, which appeared to have turned out well, cooled long enough for her tutors to heave a sigh of relief. Then it sagged slowly into a flat glassy puddle.

  At night, Jennaya lay in bed clutching the bubble trapping the fly, either crying or fuming, depending on how the day had gone. “I don’t care what they think,” she told herself over and over. “It’s not my fault. I’m doing my best.” But she did care what they thought, so tears usually won over anger.

  One day when her efforts had spread a sparkling glassy waterfall down one wall of the workshop, a voice brought Jennaya back from the verge of tears, and interrupted her Aunt Phenria’s building rage. “That’s pretty,” said a barefoot boy standing in the doorway. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “You’re unlikely to see anything like it again,” snapped Aunt Phenria. “What do you want?”

  “Load of sand. Up at the house, they told me you were waiting for it here.” He answered Aunt Phenria, but was looking at Jennaya and smiling.

  “Jenn, show him where to put it while I figure out how to clean up this mess.”

  Jennaya escaped the workshop gratefully, leading him to the supply shed at the back.

  “I’m Arrick,” he said, easily swinging the bag of sand from his shoulder and settling it in an empty place near other bags and crates in the shed. “New apprentice for old Nathinn Carter. I expect I’ll be a baron someday, but for now I carry crates and bales because I’m strong.”

  Jennaya chuckled at his pronounceme
nt, and he gave her a wide grin. “I’m Jennaya,” she said. “I . . . I don’t know what I’ll be, since I’m a failure at glassblowing.” She wrinkled her nose and stared down at her shoes.

  “Don’t say ‘failure,’” Arrick chided. “If you made that waterfall, you have talent at glassblowing; it’s just different from what others expect.”

  “But it was an accident. It wasn’t what Aunt Phenria wanted.”

  “Could you make that on purpose? Think how much one of the barons—perhaps even the Count—would pay to have a wall of his banquet room all sparkly with a glass waterfall.”

  Jennaya left off studying her shoes and glanced up at Arrick, startled. He grinned at her. “Possibilities, Jennaya. Think in possibilities. You tried something, you got an unexpected result. Doesn’t mean it’s a failure, just that it’s different.”

  She blinked at Arrick. He didn’t sound like the farm boy he surely was—or had been. He talked like a scholar, or one of the barons he’d mentioned.

  “What else have you done—that someone called a ‘failure’?”

  She reached into her skirt pocket and brought out the little bubble with the fly inside. “This. The very first day I tried glassblowing.” She opened her hand to show him.

  His eyebrows raised into his fringe of wind-knotted hair. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.” He shrugged, adding, “Of course, I’ve only been to Bimato city and the villages around Smoking Mountain, so I haven’t had much chance to see wonders.”

  He reached for the bubble. As Jennaya pulled her hand away, he asked, “May I touch it?”

  No one was interested in things she made; they weren’t what her kin wanted. She held the bubble out and said, “Of course.”

  Arrick touched the bubble gently with one calloused finger. “It really is glass! How did the fly get into it?”

  “I don’t know.” She explained what she had been doing.

  “Beautiful. I think you should try to make more.”

  “My grandmother would skin me. Or mama, or one of my aunts would. They don’t want me making things like this.”

  “That’s a shame.” Arrick touched the bubble again. “I wager you could sell these.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Jenn!” an exasperated voice came from the workshop. “Don’t dawdle the day away. You have work to do.”

  “I’d best run,” said Arrick. “If my luck holds, I’ll deliver here again.”

  Jennaya put the bubble back into her pocket, and said merely, “Thank you.”

  In the workshop three aunts, four cousins, her mother and grandmother all stared at the glass waterfall, discussing how to dispose of it. Jennaya winced when she walked in to hear them arguing.

  “What are we going to do with you, Jenn?” her mother asked, standing with her arms folded, frowning at the glassy wall.

  Because she didn’t think she could get into any more trouble, and because of what the carter’s lad Arrick had said to her, she answered, “Apprentice me somewhere else.”

  Of course, that turned the argument to her. “The Vetro women have always been glassblowers,” cried her grandmother, “and we are the best.”

  “You’re just lazy,” sneered a cousin.

  The others shouted their opinions, with much hand waving. Jennaya hunched her shoulders, crumpled her skirt in her fists, and said nothing. It had been nice talking to that boy, Arrick. But now ... this.

  Possibilities. Ignoring accusations and criticism, Jennaya threaded her way through the crowd of her kin, picked up the blowpipe, and collected a gather of glass from the furnace. You should try to make more, Arrick had said about the bubble with the fly in it.

  She brought up the memory of what she had been doing, that day months ago when she had first tried glassblowing. Flies had buzzed about the workshop. She had relived her memories of others glassblowing.

  Something inside her told her she could blow glass. Her muscles understood what they needed to do. But every time, something went wrong.

  Not this time. Fiercely holding in her mind the picture of her grandmother blowing a perfect bottle, Jennaya began rotating the hot glass. But it was hard to hold onto that image of her grandmother. So many people, all with differing advice, had taught her recently. Each had a distinct way of holding the pipe, of controlling the stream of air. And what could she put within her bubble? There were no flies. Was that spider still on the window frame?

  “Jennaya, what are you doing?” Her mother’s sharp question startled her. There was a pop.

  A moment of disorientation, and Jennaya looked down at the metal-topped table to see what she had done this time. There was nothing—no bubble, no spreading puddle of glass, no sad lopsided creation. But the blowpipe she held was empty; the glass had to have gone somewhere. As she straightened and glanced up apprehensively to see if she had created another waterfall, she realized that all around her people were shouting even louder than they had been before.

  It wasn’t just the women of the family in the workshop now—her father, older brother, and several uncles had crowded in. She blinked. What was going on? There was so much noise that understanding anyone was impossible. Finally she grabbed her father’s arm. “What is it, Papa? Why is everyone in here?”

  Her father’s usually pleasant face was grim. “Ah, little one,” he said, squatting so she could hear him better. “It’s not your fault.”

  “What isn’t my fault?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he put a hand on her shoulder and led her through the noisy crowd to the yard outside. Jennaya was startled to notice that the sun was just disappearing behind Smoking Mountain. It had been midday when she’d shown Arrick where the shed was.

  Again her father bent to speak quietly with Jennaya. “It runs in my family,” he said. “Your mother loves me enough that she does’t care.”

  “What runs in your family, Papa? What happened?”

  He settled into the dust of the courtyard and looked up at her. “People in my family botch things, no matter how hard we try. I was apprenticed to a blacksmith. There’s as much possibility for disaster there as for a glassblower, I assure you.”

  “What did I do?” Jennaya’s voice came out in a wail, and she lost the battle to keep tears from dripping down her cheeks.

  Her father looked away from her, lips pursed. Finally he said, “You put the entire workshop into a glass bubble. I didn’t think that was possible.” He took a deep breath and blew it out in a snort. “My bad blood, coming out in a most spectacular way.” He pushed himself to his feet, patting sparkling dust from the seat of his breeches.

  Jennaya stared up at him, mouth open. “How could that even happen?” she asked. “There wasn’t enough glass. And I... I was inside the workshop. So was Mama. Grandmother, and the aunts, and—”

  Shaking his head, her father said, “How does anything go wrong? I kept a horseshoe I ... didn’t quite make.” He was silent for a moment. “I was thinking of your mother when I made it, and it turned out more like a rose than a horseshoe. So I gave it to her.”

  Like my fly in a bubble, Jennaya thought. A memento of a failure. “But how did you get us out?”

  “That was a sight,” he said, shaking his head. “A glass ball taller than me, shining in the noonday sun. We could see the workshop inside, and your brother dug along an edge and found the glass continued right down into the dirt.” He patted her shoulder. “He ran for your grandfather, and soon all the men were there, looking at this great ball of glass, and arguing about it. That went on half the day. Some wanted to try to hide it—cover it up with sheets, or build a larger building over it.

  “Finally, since it was getting late in the day, and none of the others seemed fearful for the safety of those inside—did you have enough air?—I sneaked over to it and tapped it. There was a sound like a great gong, and the sphere crumbled into shining dust.” He bent and scooped some from the courtyard’s cobbles.

  “But Papa—it didn’t seem like half a d
ay. I made the bubble, and then everyone crowded into the shop, talking and yelling.”

  “I suppose I didn’t need to worry about you having enough air, then,” her father said. “The ways of spectacular failures are peculiar, aren’t they?”

  ~o0o~

  After that, Jennaya wasn’t allowed to blow glass. She mixed sand, ash, and lime. She swept, and inventoried, and did other tasks in the workshop—but no glassblowing.

  Half a year later, Jennaya had resigned herself to a life of drudgery. She was packing glass bowls into crates, carefully cushioning them with sawdust and wood shavings, when a familiar voice called, “Jennaya!”

  It was Arrick, the carter’s lad. His cheerful grin was especially welcome here, where people tended to act as if she wasn’t present. “Is that the load I’m to take?”

  “Crates of glass bowls?” she asked.

  “Straight on to Bimato city,” he said cheerfully. “The Count himself ordered them.”

  “Oh, he did not. He ordered glass from us before, and it was far fancier than this.”

  “True.” Arrick squatted next to her in the courtyard. “Can I help?”

  “Mama probably wouldn’t like that. Thank you for offering, though.”

  He sat beside her, chattering about things he had seen on the road from Bimato, loads he had carted, and how his master trusted him with almost any cargo now. “Careful and trustworthy, he says I am.”

  When he loaded the crates into his wagon and bade her a cheerful good day, she watched the wagon rumble off down the road that—so Arrick said—circled the entire base of Smoking Mountain. The spring sunshine seemed less bright now that he was gone.

  Every few weeks after that, Arrick stopped by. Sometimes he delivered lime or pigments. Occasionally he picked up shipments, often to take to Bimato city. But he always took time to talk to Jennaya.

  “Pardon my asking,” he said one day as he carried a heavy bag of sand into the shed. He had grown taller and more muscled, and his voice had deepened since Jennaya first met him. “You needn’t answer if you don’t wish to. But why do I never see you blowing glass?”