Page 77 of Quicksilver
He gave me a teasing sidelong glance. “I thought you weren't scared of the wood?”
“I wasn't! Just...answer the question.”
Kingfisher placed his elbows on the bench, leaning toward me, his hair obscuring half his face. “Because, Little Osha, the shadow gate uses a lot of magic. We Fae are sensitive to such things. If Belikon had sensed me drawing that much magic to the catacombs under his palace, he would have transported himself there before we could have blinked, let alone traveled. That tavern is fifty leagues from the Winter Palace, which, coincidentally, is the exact distance required to perform heavy-hitting magic without alerting someone you want to keep in the dark. So. Do you have any more annoying questions?”
“I do, actually. Why can't you just use the shadow gates to go between here and the other realms? You don't need relics for the shadow gates. They don't make you crazy, apparently. So why even bother with the quicksilver?”
“Martyrs, have mercy,” Fisher muttered. He spoke as if he were explaining the most rudimentary, obvious information to a five-year-old. “Shadow gates are of this realm. They can only be used within this realm. Quicksilver is not of this realm. Therefore, it can be used within this realm, but also within or to other realms as well. No, no more fucking questions. We have work to do.”
And that was that. He crossed the forge to where a huge wooden trunk sat by one of the largest crucibles, grabbed it by the handle, and dragged it over to the bench. He didn't break a sweat, even though the godscursed thing looked like it weighed more than Bill and Aida combined. My eyes nearly popped out of my head when he threw back the lid.
A mountain of silver rings sat inside, different shapes and sizes. Some of them were marked with an egis or a family crest. Some of them bore diamonds, or rubies, or sapphires. Some ofthem were delicate and elegant. A lot of them were chunky, with heavy, engraved bands. I'd never seen so much precious metal in one place at one time. “Well. It's a good thing Carrion isn't here. He'd have stolen eight of these already and neither of us would have noticed.”
“I think we've already established thatInotice when someone tries to steal my belongings.”
Holy fucking gods, he was never going to let go of that. I shot him a baleful glare as I stooped down and picked up one of the rings. It was very feminine, with roses engraved on either side of a beautiful aquamarine stone. “There must be a thousand of them,” I said breathlessly.
“Eighteen hundred,” Kingfisher said. “And that's just in this trunk. There are eight more trunks on the other side of that bench over there.”
Sure enough, I looked in the direction that he was pointing and saw at least two more wooden trunks shoved up against the wall. The others must have been hidden out of sight.
I tossed the ring back into the trunk. “Are we forging swords out of them?” Silver was too malleable to forge weapons out of back in Zilvaren, but maybe the Fae blacksmiths had figured out firing techniques to make it stronger. Perhaps they infused it with magic. Perhaps...
My mind ground to a halt, my line of logic dying a miserable death when I realized that Kingfisher was smirking at me again. That smirking meant nothing good.
“Anyone can use any old relic in a pinch, but relics are most powerful when they're forged from something important to its owner. These are the family rings of the warriors who fight for me. Each one has great meaning to the male or female it belongs to. You are going to take each and every one of these rings, and you're going to turn them into relics.”
“Fisher,no!There are nearly...” I was good with numbers, but I was too stunned to think straight, let alone perform multiplications. I got there in the end. “There are nearly fifteenthousandrings here! Do you have any idea how long it would take to melt down each of these rings and cast it into another one?”
“Years, I'm sure. But don't worry. We're not looking for a pretty piece of jewelry. You'll melt down the ring, transmute its properties so that it will shield the wearer against the quicksilver, then cast it into something simple like this.” He hooked his finger around his chain and drew out the pendant he wore around his own neck. “If there's a stone or some kind of engraving on the ring, you'll find a way to incorporate that into the medallion you make. Other than that, it should be pretty straightforward.”
“Straightforward?”My vision had gone hazy. He couldn't be fucking serious. “I said I'd help you make...enough relics...” I trailed off, a sinking feeling of dread crushing my chest. I'd done it again. I hadn't paid attention to the details, had I? And it was even worse this time because I thought I'd done a good job.
“I swear I will release you and allow you and Carrion to return to Zilvaren the moment you have made enough relics for my people. Was that not the promise you had me make?”
“Yes, but...”
“I have fifteen thousand warriors, Little Osha. To have enough relics for my people, I need fifteen thousand relics. When you're done with all of these rings, I'll release you from your oath and take you to the closest quicksilver pool so you can leave. Until then...” He eyed the trunk full of rings.
“But I don't even knowhowto turn these into relics yet! That alone could take weeks. It could takemonths!”
Not even a flicker of sympathy hid in Fisher's silver-mottled eyes. “Then you'd better get to work.”
18
CRUCIBLE
Kingfisher hadbooks written by the Alchemists before they all died out. Stacks and stacks of them. They were centuries old, the parchment crumbling. A lot of them were written in Old Fae. I barely understood any of the text, which meant that they were next to useless. When I asked him how I was supposed to glean any useful information from them when none of his own kind had been successful in doing so, he muttered something about using my initiative and left the forge in a cloud of black smoke.
At midday, a plate of food arrived out of nowhere on the bench. Some kind of meat pie with the most delicious gravy filling, along with some chunks of cheese and an apple that had been cut into slices. I only noticed that Onyx arrived with the food when I heard him whining underneath the bench. He wore a hopeful look, his black eyes staring intently up at my plate, ready should the smallest morsel fall to the floor. I didn't know how healthy human, or ratherFaefood, was for him, but the pastry was so buttery and crumbly, the filling so savory and good, that I couldn't help myself and I wound up sharing half the pie with him. He was content to run outside amongst the snow once we were done, chasing any birds that landed. Ispent a good fifteen minutes laughing at him as he coiled back onto his hind legs, wriggled his fluffy butt, and then sprang into the air, bringing his front feet crashing down on the snow as he pounced. I stopped laughing when I realized that he was hunting, and more often than not, when he pounced like that, he came up from the loose snow with a small rodent in his mouth. At least he was entertained.
After I'd wasted another hour poring over the books and getting nowhere, I decided to say screw it and focus on more practical matters. My first thought was to melt down one of the rings and just start experimenting, but then it occurred to me that if I wasn't successful (and I probably wasn't going to be), I'd have ruined one of Fisher's warrior's rings, and that wouldn't go down well at all. I found some scrap metal in a bucket by one of the benches and settled on using that for some trial-and-error experiments instead.
The first problem I ran into was that I literally hadnoidea where to start. By holding a piece of the twisted scraps and concentrating, I could feel what kind of metal it was by the vibrations it gave off. When I first noticed those vibrations back in Zilvaren, they had scared the shit out of me so badly that I'd trained myself to ignore them. Now, I used that alien sensation to differentiate between plated metals, silver, and a whole slew of different variants of iron that we didn't have back home. They each had their own frequencies.
It didn't take long to isolate the frequency for Yvelian silver. I simply held a bunch of the rings and closed my eyes, learning what that energy felt like when it traveled up my arms, and I committed it to memory. Then, I went through the bucket and separated out any scraps that shared that same frequency. I had a respectable amount of the shining metal ready to melt down after only half an hour.
For my first attempt, I melted down about a ring's worth of silver and poured it into a crucible. From there, I added a variety of different ingredients from the glass mason jars on the shelves to the molten silver with no sense that I wasaccomplishinganything. Most of it just burned up the moment it hit the metal's scalding hot surface. The salt seemed to combine well, though. I let the silver cool and hammered it out into a flat surface, and then went looking for the quicksilver to somehow test the rough medallion I'd created.
