The question hit like an arrow to her heart. She turned away, biting her lips to keep them from trembling.
“Sorry!” he apologized. “I don’t wish to wound you.”
She turned back, suddenly resolute. After all, he was the one who had told her about possibilities. “No, it’s not that. I do want to tell you.” She described what had happened that day, the first time they met. “I want to blow glass, but now they won’t let me.”
His gaze swept the courtyard, then he took her hand. “Jennaya Vetro, you should have opportunities, not mistrust. Your family is narrow minded.”
“But they can’t afford to let me botch things time after time, Arrick. This workshop is life for our entire family. The family is more important than ... its youngest member.”
“We shall see,” he said. He let go her hand, closed the shed door, and started back toward his wagon. “Jennaya, do you remember what I told you the first day we met?”
“That you would be a baron someday.”
“And so I shall. Barons can change things. I’ll change things. Never you doubt that.”
~o0o~
Shortly before Jennaya’s fifteenth birthday, Arrick pulled his wagon into the courtyard, calling, “Look, Jennaya!” He slapped his palm on the left side of his chest. “Carter’s guild insignia!”
He jumped down from the wagon, pulled the broom from her hand, and danced her about the cobbles. “I found a sponsor,” he panted, while she chuckled at his enthusiasm. “Is your father here? Your mother?”
“Yes,” she said, puzzled. “And they’ll be out here in the courtyard in no time, with the noise you’re making.”
Arrick’s mobile face changed from elated to serious, intent. He leaned forward. When Jennaya looked up into his face, his gaze captured hers. “Jennaya, let me take you away. Marry me.”
The thrill that shivered through Jennaya’s body was so strong she had to look down and step away from Arrick. “But ... but I’m a daughter of the Vetro family. They’ll never let me leave.”
“They won’t let you blow glass. I can convince your parents—and no doubt all your other kin—to let you marry me. It’s you who must decide.”
He bent and picked up the broom he had dropped, and his long, strong fingers were white at the knuckles with tension.
Meeting Arrick’s warm brown eyes, Jennaya wanted to say “Yes and yes!” but instead objections came from her mouth. Unintended words, unwelcome as the glass bubble around the workshop.
“I’m not even fifteen yet. I can’t marry for at least another year.”
“I can wait a year. It will be difficult, but I thrive on difficulty.”
“Even a master carter ... my family’s so conscious of the Vetro reputation.”
“I have a year to bring them around. Any other objections? Think of them now, that I may conquer them for you.” He struck a pose with the broom.
Jennaya laughed. There was much of the actor in Arrick. “No more objections,” she cried. “Yes, I will marry you.” Tears sprang to her eyes, and she blinked to keep them from running down her cheeks.
She reached for Arrick’s hands. He dropped the broom once more and knelt on the cobbles before her, clasping her hands and looking up into her eyes, his usual mischievous grin replaced by a tremulous smile. His eyes, too, were bright with tears. “I will do everything in my power to make you happy, Jennaya. I... love you.”
“Oh, Arrick, I loved you from the first time you came to the workshop and admired my waterfall.” Drat it all, the tears had escaped her eyes.
He brought her hands to his lips and kissed them, then rose to his feet, still holding her hands. “We’ll be happy,” he whispered. Then the corners of his lips turned up, and he said, “And we will have fun.”
~o0o~
Arrick was better than his word. Not only did he obtain the permission of Jennaya’s parents and all her other kin, but he somehow managed to impress them so much that over meals she heard much conversation about his good character.
A few days before the wedding, Jennaya woke in the night, listening to the house creak around her. She had no token to give Arrick. For weeks, she had been thinking of something to give him. She knew he would appreciate the fly in the bubble. Her father had given her mother his ‘memento of failure’. But somehow she could not bear to give up that little glass ball, even to the man she loved.
She crept from her bed and tiptoed through the house and out to the workshop. The door locked, one of the few places in Crizia with an iron lock and key, but she knew where the key was kept.
The furnaces were never let cool, but she added more fuel to raise the temperature. While she worked, every small noise sent her heart thumping. Finally she dipped the blowpipe in the crucible, and brought the gather out. It had been years since she had blown glass, but all she had ever seen was held in her memory, and her muscles reacted as if she had been glassblowing for the last five years instead of sweeping out the workshop or packing crates.
There were no flies this early in the year, but Jennaya had found a shiny red-and-black beetle, big as the end of her finger, while cleaning the workshop. She set it on the table and admired it while rotating the glass and blowing into it. The memory of the time she had made her fly bubble was clear, and she copied every motion she had made that day. With a pop, the gather was gone from the end of her pipe, and a glass sphere, bigger than her memento, surrounded the beetle. She had succeeded.
The wedding was held in Crizia, where her family lived. All her relatives were there, but Arrick told her he had no family. His only guest was old Nathinn, who had been Arrick’s master back when Jennaya first met him.
After the wedding Arrick set her in his wagon, and together they traveled to their new home in the village of Lower Smoking. The house was small, but the walls and roof had recently been repaired, and it was theirs. She still wondered how he had talked her family into letting him take her away from Crizia.
Arrick, wearing a new blue tunic and breeches, his hair for once neatly trimmed and tidy, led her inside and showed her around. After she had inspected his offerings, he said, “Come outside again.”
Around the back of the house, next to the stable, was a small building, obviously new. “Your workshop, my love,” he said. “I’ve had quite the time of it, trying to get firebrick for the furnaces, so it’s not yet complete.” He opened the door and pointed inside. There was a metal-topped table, stools, and all the tools she would need for simple glass blowing.
“Arrick, I—” she broke off, unable to think of anything to say. Finally, realizing that he watched her with the expression a child gets on his face when he’s given you a snail, and hopes you are pleased with his gift, she said, “Arrick, it’s amazing. How did you . . . I can’t even . . . it’s wonderful.” She flung her arms around his neck, and for a few moments the workshop was forgotten.
Finally, her bridal finery quite awry, the practical Jennaya murmured against her husband’s ear, “Why furnaces? Why glassblowing?”
“Have you forgotten, my love?” Arrick said. “Flies in bubbles. Glass waterfalls.”
Jennaya chuckled. “So you only married me for a fly in a bubble?”
“No, I married you because you captured my heart back when you were a miserable ten-year-old. I saw the possibilities in you, even when you were sure there were none.”
“Arrick, that statement is one of many reasons I love you.” Feeling suddenly shy, she added, “I have something for you, too, although it’s not nearly as grand as a workshop.” She brought the beetle, in its glass bubble, out of the handkerchief she had wrapped it in.
When she tipped it into Arrick’s hand, he gasped. “When? How? I thought you weren’t allowed to blow glass.”
“For you, it was worth sneaking into the workshop at night alone.”
He held the beetle up to the sun, so the smooth clear glass gleamed against his fingers. “This is far more wonderful than a mere building.”
~o0o~
The middle-aged chandler next door, and his rather scatter-brained wife, Birla, were very curious about the workshop behind Arrick and Jennaya’s house. When she told them it was for glass blowing, Ingolki shook his head. “There’s a glassblower in the village, you know. Master Tobbian, he’ll be none too pleased to have competition.”
The chandler’s wife added, “He’s a crusty one, is Tobbian.”
“He needn’t worry,” said Jennaya. “I’ll be trying new things with glass. No competition for him.”
Birla seemed to think it her duty to teach Jennaya how to be a housewife. She also escorted Jennaya about the village, introducing her to everyone. It was she who informed Jennaya that the village was called ‘Lower Smoking’ because of the cracks in the mountainside that all too often emitted smoke or steam.
Once when Arrick was in Bimato city, he had a jeweler make a setting for his beetle-in-a-bubble, and he wore it on a thong around his neck. He was very careful, every night before bed, to set the fragile bubble on the clothes chest.
One evening in the fall, as Jennaya and Arrick sat together near the fire, the house shook with one of the earth tremors that she had known all her life. ‘Smoking Mountain rolling over in his sleep,’ those who lived at the mountain’s base called this. Arrick wrinkled his nose. “Let’s hope the smoke doesn’t start up again,” he said.
“The smoke Birla told me of—from cracks in the mountain?”
“Exactly. Sometimes, I’ve heard, it gets so thick people can hardly breathe.”
“Why does anyone live here, then?” Jennaya asked. She’d wondered before why Arrick had set up household here instead of in Bimato city, where the guildhouse was. She stood to massage his shoulders, still tense from a day on the wagon’s seat, guiding the horses.
“Aaah.” He leaned into her probing fingers. “People live in Lower Smoking because no one else wants this place, so land is nearly free. Outlanders, outcasts, and the elderly—and those who supply them. It’s a good base for me, though, because it’s halfway between Bimato and Crizia—”
He broke off when another tremor shook the house. As she staggered against the back of Arrick’s chair, Jennaya’s hand caught in the thong holding the beetle. The thong broke, and the glass bubble shot straight into the fire.
Immediately she seized the poker and began jerking blazing logs out onto the hard-packed dirt of the floor. The fire wasn’t as hot as the glassblowing furnace; perhaps the glass would endure.
“Jennaya!” Arrick leapt to his feet and grabbed her arm. “Don’t! You can make another one. I don’t want you hurt—” Once more he broke off, but this time because Jennaya had revealed the little glass sphere. It lay within the glowing heart of the fire, seemingly intact.
Carefully Jennaya pushed the poker into the flames, feeling as if she was gathering glass onto the end of the blowpipe. No, she didn’t want this glass to melt. She almost expected the perfect sphere to crumple instantly when touched with the poker, but instead she was able to nudge it out of the flames and onto the floor.
“Don’t burn yourself!” she cried as Arrick reached for it.
He already held it in his hand. “It’s not hot at all,” he whispered. “The setting has melted away, but the glass is clear and perfect as ever.”
“How can that be? Glass that thin should have melted.”
Arrick shrugged. “It’s obviously magic.”
Jennaya stared at her husband. Of all the ridiculous things he’d said to her, this one was the most outrageous. “Magic? That’s ludicrous.” Jennaya gingerly poked the sphere with a fingertip.
“How could it not be? Normal glass doesn’t make bubbles around flies or beetles.” He sounded so matter of fact. He must have been thinking about this for some time—unlike Jennaya, who had been so convinced that her attempts at glassblowing were failures that she hadn’t thought of what they were.
“Does that bother you?” she said, looking anxiously up at Arrick, her heart thumping.
“What do you think? I’m the one who mentioned magic. If it bothered me, would I be here?” He gathered her in his arms from behind. “I always thought it was magic. I’m surprised you never realized it.”
“But—” Her family avoided magic or any mention of it. ‘Our products are made by skill, not tricks,’ her grandmother had said on more than one occasion. “No one in our family uses magic. Grandmother is adamant about that.”
“So she doesn’t look beyond her nose. Is it your father, then, who bequeathed magic to you?”
Jennaya’s mouth opened in wonder. “I— Yes, I believe so. He told me, after I put the whole workshop into a bubble, that many people in his family botch things. But why, if it’s magic ... why do they think it’s bad?”
“Prejudice. His family should leave the mountain district. Farther north, they could all become nobility, if they learn to control their talents.”
A laugh pushed through Jennaya’s apprehension. “So you married me for magic, not my fly in a bubble?”
“I did that, but magic is secondary at best. You can do magic, but magic is not you. I married you.” Still standing behind her, he leaned forward to nuzzle her hair. She turned around in his arms, and for a time glassblowing and magic were both forgotten.
~o0o~
The next day Jennaya was patching a pair of Arrick’s breeches when the house shook and the candlestick rattled on the table. “Smoking Mountain rolling over in his sleep,” she muttered to herself, but otherwise paid the tremor little attention.
As she was preparing supper that evening another, larger, earthshake knocked over an empty chair, and the dishes on the shelf clattered together. That was more worrisome. Anyone who lived near Smoking Mountain knew that the big earthshakes could be harbingers of worse behavior by the mountain.
She hurried around the house setting items on the floor before they could fall and break. As she opened the door to see how her neighbors fared, there came a crack and a rumble, and the house shook violently.
The air outside was full of dust and smoke, and smelled of bad eggs. Jennaya stepped out and slammed the door before smoke could fill the house, then tied her handkerchief over her mouth and nose. Her eyes started to sting and water.
Ingolki and Birla’s house just up the road from hers seemed intact, and she hurried on through the village to see if the earthshake had damaged the older houses. From the shouts and cries filling the smoky air, it must have.
“Flee the mountain!” cried Emery, the village watchman, limping from house to house. “Leave for the lowlands now!”
Jennaya ran up to the old man. “What is it? Why should we leave?”
He paused in his slow limp through the village. “Ah, you’re new here,” he said, his voice muffled by the large red handkerchief he had tied over his face. “When the smoke’s this thick, the big mountain’s about to blow.” He gestured behind him, where Smoking Mountain was hidden by ash in the air. “It’s never been this bad before, that I remember. When I was a lad, my grandda told me that if the smoke stinks like this, don’t breathe it.”
“Thank you,” she said, and rushed on toward the commotion. He limped on down the road calling his warning.
The flimsier houses against the mountain were in ruins, and flames began to lick through them. “Where can I help?” Jennaya called.
“Movin’ timbers or throwin’ water,” came a voice out of the smoke. “Don’t try old Maga’s well, though, it’s gone dry.”
Jennaya joined the crowd that was digging an old woman and two children from the wreckage. One of the children was unconscious, and the old woman had a broken leg. The blacksmith pulled his wagon up and all the victims were laid carefully in the straw on the bottom. Unfortunately Maga, the old woman, was the v
illage’s healer. She shouted directions to a gangling young man—her apprentice—on how to splint her leg and care for the children.
Another earthshake, which nearly flung Jennaya and the rest of the rescuers to the ground, had the village watchman yelling, “This time Smoking Mountain’s not just rolling over in his sleep. He’s getting up to take a piss!”
“Anyone who can’t walk, into my wagon,” called the blacksmith.
“Everyone out of those houses?” came another man’s voice. At a chorus of “Yes,” and “I think so,” he continued, “Leave ‘em, then. Get out of here if you want to live. Smoking Mountain’s gonna blow, and there’ll be nothing left soon.”
Jennaya’s heart contracted in panic. Where was Arrick? Somewhere on the road between here and Bimato, she supposed. Were the rest of the villages at the mountain’s base as badly hit as Lower Smoking?
She wouldn’t let herself worry about her family. They were well acquainted with Smoking Mountain’s outbursts. The road to the lowlands from Smoking Mountain Glassware in Crizia was better than the rutted track the blacksmith’s wagon moved along. The blacksmith himself was still in the village, dashing from door to door to assure everyone was out.
Families trudged down the track away from the town, with linens thrown over their heads to shield their faces. Most herded cattle, and a few led horses loaded with household goods. Small children carried chickens, and dogs rushed about barking, adding to the chaos on the road.
Jennaya was coughing more than ever now, and took off her apron to wrap around her head until she had only the slightest gap to see through. She had just joined the old watchman, thinking perhaps she could help him, when she heard a voice calling for help.
“You keep going,” she told Emery. “I’ll see who that is.”
The bakery was in flames, and a voice called, more feebly now, from inside. Jennaya flung the door open, and was glad that fire did not leap out. She ran in through smoke hardly thicker than that Smoking Mountain was gifting them with, to find Drell, the baker, trapped beneath a toppled table.
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