When the predawn light found Emlie still curled up miserably on her bed, what could she do but greet the morning with a fist slammed down on her headboard in mute, defeated frustration?

I’ve lost! What could I possibly be expected to do without that oaf’s assistance? Orchestrating a getaway is…is a boy kind of job!

Emlie sullenly rolled off of the bed and stomped to her dresser. She pulled out the outfit she’d selected for her escape (a heavy riding jerkin, stout woolen leggings, a weatherproof mantle), scowled at her reflection in the mirror, and then savagely disrobed before hurling the ensemble into the Beidon-mess spilling out of the armoire. She replaced it with another garment… one that all at once decried thwarted plans, protested unromantic real-life “truths”, and stood and in obstinate defiance of the cool autumn weather.

It was a fanciful white summer dress, Emlie’s favored traipsing garb and the costume she often donned when retreating into the unassailable realm of her imagination. The beloved frock had many a time facilitated fancies of princesshood, imaginary exploits in legendary kingdoms and magical realms. It was an utterly impractical outfit – neither child’s play-garb nor adult evenware, unfashionable, improbable, yet completely “all Emlie”. Its lacy bodice combined overt demure modesty with a shadowy hint of daring décolletage. The skirts were frilly, falling to just past her knees, as did the twin linen tippets descending from the elbow-length sleeves.

Emlie yanked on the dress and belted it with a delicate braid of twined kid-hide, onto which she threaded her fine kidney pouch. Dainty pebbled turnshoes finished off the impractical ensemble. Kit complete, she made to glance at herself in the dresser’s glass and instead caught sight of the neck-stump of its decapitated zebra carving. “What are YOU looking at?” She gave the dresser a savage kick.

She started to stride away, then impulsively spun back to the dresser. She snatched up the small copy of Enno’s Historical Lore Through The Magickal Ages sitting atop it and crammed it into her pouch. The book’s title might be a cause for snickering amongst “serious scholars”, but Emlie adored its wide-eyed view of the past. Escape essentials, she sighed to herself. A similar impulse caused her to sweep her tiny atomizer full of Aromanton lilac-water in as well. If Beidon hates the odor so much, then he need not smell it ever again! She likewise pocketed her small vial of crushed amethyst unguent (from the apothecary, for the occasional-but-dreaded skin blemish) and brass-cased pocket mirror (for others an example of ‘Crucible’s mercantile stock-in-trade; for dreamy Emlie, often as not, a medium for attempted catoptromancy.) More essentials!

Passing the peg-board by her door, Emlie snatched the leather drinking jack that was a customary cornerstone of her rambling gear and hooked it onto the belt. Next, she yanked down the lightweight grey cloak and draped it around her shoulders. Finally she returned to the dresser, tugged open a drawer and reached into the exposed underside of the compartment above for a small wooden box hidden within. Her touch as she laid it down was gentle, full of a self-conscious restraint that stood in sharp contrast to the frustrated violence of a moment earlier.

She fished through the box’s treasures until her reverent fingers closed around a small disk with a core of gray-and-azure and a frame of glinting metal edge-set with a trio of stones… a brooch. She lifted the ornament tenderly, stroking the face with its inset rough granite triangle over a brilliant turquoise backing. She ran her fingertip over the twined silver and gold edging, the opal inset where one triangle-point intersected, the yellow diamond at the site of the second, the lurid cat’s-eye inset at the third. A beautiful piece of preindustrial handcraft, certainly, whose strange provenance and idiosyncratic design only heightened its appeal to the girl, but her reverence of it stemmed from a more personal place: the clasp was a bequest from her mother. Abruptly Emlie winced, thought of her mother prompting recollection of her father’s cruel accusation. And that hurt in turn brought her back to a place of bitterness and resolve, obliterating her tenderness.

Anger returning, she brusquely pinned her cloak into place with the treasure and stalked out of her room.

Emile crept down into a main hall painted in sunburst striations by the rising of the real sun behind the door’s capping half-circle of ornamental Windscriber glass. She avoided Cook and her girls as she raided the kitchen for supplies – easily enough done, since at this dawn hour the kitchen staff kept mostly to the attached bakehouse and creamery, and the scullions to their closet. She waited for an opening, then stole into the low stone preproom and snatched whatever was readily to hand: two fresh buns off of the morning’s pile, a handful of links from a plate of crisp sausage doubtless destined for her father’s breakfast tray, a trio of apples from the hamper. All were swept into Emlie’s pouch alongside her book, food knife and various oddments. On her way out, she filled her jack at the cistern. Thusly provisioned, she followed the back passage to its intersection with the main hall and opened the service door.

Her father was nowhere to be seen as Emlie departed the Hubbleton manse. Had she unconsciously half-expected to encounter him as per normal, down to serve up his customary morning benediction with a side of sardonic banter? No. Too furious, too ashamed of me to want anything to do with me.

Against her will, she found herself comparing her current situation to that of Beidon, who’d been cruelly discarded by his pauper family before his fortunate placement to serve and ultimately to succeed fat old Brimmel in his ironworks. Beidon… Remorse: had she ruined everything last night? Resurgent ire: well, if she had, then that unperceptive clod had left her no choice!

Thus isolated, teetering conflicted between guilt and grievance, Emlie drifted across the rear lawn. It was shoe-soakingly damp in the aftermath of overnight rain, but Emlie was far too distracted to care. She was likewise too preoccupied to practice anything like stealth as she passed the kennels of her father’s sporting hounds, but the animals knew her well and raised no alarm when they noted her passage. A lone tan-and-black spotted hound shoved its nose through the bars and issued a friendly bark – Emlie distracted it with the tossed broken-off end of a sausage without ever really registering the encounter.

As she wandered off into the town she was only half-perceiving her surroundings. She strolled past a group of children playing at marbles, that most emblematic of Clear crucible toys. When one of them pointed at her and whispered to the others, prompting the group to laugh, she was too preoccupied to notice, much less to take offense. So busy was she with mulling over the events of the day before that upon looking up to perceive the prismed arches of the Trademarket Square looming before her, she was honestly confused as to how she might possibly have wound up there.

Something tugged at her awareness, breaking through her distraction, some strange disruption of the pillars’ usual purity: a series of scraps of paper, gummed one to each pillar at eye-height. She gave the nearest a cursory glance… then ripped it down to read, horror rising within her:

Attention All Citizens:

The Lord Mayor Ordains That All Edicts Of The Chartered Blueprint For Modern Thought, Long Pan-Baronial Law In Clear Crucible, Shall Henceforth Be Enforced With Fullest Vigor And Zeal. In Response To A Lamentable Outbreak Of Treasonably Proscribed Heretical Whimsy, This Government Must Abdicate Its Long-Held Position Of Forbearance To Enforce These Provisions To Their Fullest Extent And Consequence. The Government Shall As Of This Instant Move To Root Out All Such Foolishness Once And For All Via The Elimination Of All Discourse, Traffic And Traces Of Its Most Wretched Cause: Recourse To Faeries, Magick, And The Irregularities Arising Therefrom.

Enacted By Mayoral Decree This 14 Barrelbind, Year 44 Of The Trade Epoch

Emlie knew to take this exceedingly personally. So affronted was she that her immediate impulse was to run back home to confront her father. She teetered on the brink, turning her head to fore and rear. But to turn back would be to admit defeat, and any premature return must be made in shame. Pride pushed her on across the empty early-morning square, crumpling the paper into her bag as she did so. Mounting upset over the vast iniquity of her father’s rash action lent speed to her steps, and in seemingly no time at all she had navigated the last few streets to the Trade Gate.

Standing at the very edge of the cobblestones, she glanced back towards the light-limned spires of her father’s town. Then forward along the hard-packed earth of the outgoing Tradeway as it ran off into the Clearwood. This was it then, the embarkation point for her venture… all she had to do was to keep walking… Straight on, and she could have done with all of it. Done with Beidon’s fecklessness, done with her father’s cruelty and false tolerance, done with the cold cloistered cruelty of Clear Crucible and its damned glass. She raised a turnshoe, hung it over the edge of the cobbles… and delayed in lowering it.

How utterly foolish is this? Running away, is it? Making a break for it? Oh, they’ll love that. ‘Emlie the Empty-Headed…off on another mad jaunt’! Emlie, utterly unaccustomed to giving a snit what the glazerfolk thought about her, was actually shocked by this unusual self-assessment. Where on the Refuse Heap did that come from?

It came, she realized, of dwelling upon her father’s harsh words of yesterday. Could they possibly be true? Was she truly a burden and an embarrassment? Affirming Grywald’s assertions, she again heard Beidon’s words of the night before. They hadn’t registered at the time (given that his next remark had spurred her to a titanic fury) but now they resonated within her head: your responsibility is your birthright. As an aficionado of the romantic sagas of Enno’s Historical Lore, Emlie took birthrights very seriously. Had she, in fact, failed to live up to hers?

She gave herself a defiant shake, aggressively banishing the line of thought. To the Heap with those old tight-straited smeltheads! And since he cares so much about what they might think, they can take my father with them! I will be as I please and DO as I choose!

She assertively planted her foot in the Tradeway turf, took a step. And then she glanced around, at the town behind… the band of trees around… the road ahead… and a twinge of uneasiness struck. A hint, just the smallest tingle surely, a slight qualm of apprehension at the enormity and finality of what she was on the verge of doing. Running away was both proper and terribly romantic when one dreamed about it… but here, with home behind and nothing but a dirty empty cart track stretching away ahead, it was perhaps just the teeniest bit… daunting.

Suddenly beset by a distress she denied and a shame she disavowed, Emlie again delayed. Shaking her head to clear it, she glanced sideways over her shoulder and caught sight of the small woodland bordering Clear Crucible – a favorite haunt, a place for respite and planning… and peradventure, for now at least, a tolerable third alternative to stealing away or slinking back.

…And I CHOOSE to go spend the day at the sylvan streamside, thank you very much, pondering the cosmic injustice of it all!

She turned off the road through the bordering hedgerow and primly strode into the woods.

Beidon woke with a start and a spray of straw. Stalks dangled from his hair, poking his face. He rolled over with a groan, snarled at the taunting sun already high overhead… and kept rolling, careening off of the side of the haystack he had inadvertently fallen asleep atop, plunging like a stone to land roughly on the soggy turf at its bottom. “Aaagh-!” He stumbled upright clutching his tailbone, in the process lodging his right foot in a cow pie. “Dolt and dullard,” he mumblingly cursed himself.

He hadn’t meant to overnight out in the communal farm plot’s backfield… he’d wandered out here last night half by accident, his course left to his meandering feet while his mind spun reeling at his furious dismissal by Emlie. Eventually his eye had been caught by a monstrous shadowed hump - the tallest stack in the field, which he’d drawn up at the foot of. Without any real purpose beyond abasement in mind he’d scrambled up and flopped down upon its apex. Staring up into the sky, he’d sought answers in the wheeling stars above; instead he’d found only further discomfit and confusion. The stars had proven remote, arcane, unknowable… just like so much of what preoccupied Emlie.

How could she be so foolish, so heedless of life’s realities and necessities?

Beidon glanced down at himself and scowled; he was still wearing his forge woolens from yesterday, and now the mouse-colored tunic and breeches were festooned with straw husks, as was his hair. He puffed past pursed lips, blowing the straw away from his face. Unfortunately, this seemingly served only to pack in the straw inside his head all the more tightly. He could feel it – muffling his thoughts, wadded under his tongue and scraping the back of his eyeballs. The last time he’d felt like this upon awakening, he’d been sneaking tastes from Master Brimmel’s ale barrel the night before. Awful. And yet I’d take that night in a heartbeat over the one just past. He attempted to brush himself down, and managed in the process to dislodge several of the square toolbags from his belt. He stooped to retrieve them, and the world lurched woozily out of joint. He flopped back against the bale, fought to retain his supper, and gave himself up to misery.

She said she was mine. She said we’d be always be together. Forever. And yet… here I am.

The stars last night had promised eternity, too. Then they’d gone and hid themselves behind black clouds which dripped a thin drizzle whose aspect had seemed nearly as morose as Beidon’s own mood. Even rained upon he hadn’t been able to muster the initiative to move.

Fickle, foolish, unknowable, impossible girl! Oh, surely she’d come around. Wouldn’t she? Always, she said. And yet…

He’d stared up uncaring, pining for the light that had been hidden from him. But the weather had held, unchanging and uncaring, his eyes had stung and blurred under the onslaught of teasing rivulets (all of them rainwater, surely), and eventually, without meaning to, he had drifted off into desolate sleep.

…And now, poor sodden Beidon was paying the achy price for his excess. He felt rills of dour reason slowly begin to trickle back into his sorrow-desiccated brain, clammy cold insinuations of fatalism, drips of resentment. Trudging back towards the spires of Clear Crucible, he strove to put to reasoned order the tumult of feeling that had overwhelmed him last night.

Good ole Beidon... always dependable, always faithful… patiently waiting for Emlie to return to earth from whatever silly phantasy she’s latched onto this time… She may come around, but will I?

Those fancies and phantasies were aspects of her character that he’d always adored without understanding them. They were exotic inscrutables, choice bits of strangeness that kept the staid apprentice forever guessing, forever on his toes, forever smiling in charmed bemusement. But does that truly work?, he reflected. Can you really, truly love somebody when the foremost part of their nature is a sovereign mystery to you? And what about when she expects you to participate and to partake?

He kicked a rock from the field’s edge, sending it ricocheting off of one of the feedstock sheds. Beidon tracked its flight, finding meaning in the image. Emlie’s always flying off in some unguessable new direction, and I’m always trailin’ along behind, smiling and nodding while I guess blindly at who and what she requires me to be this time. He smiled, reminiscing briefly over fond memories of days past. Sometimes he guessed right. Then his thoughts led him to last night and to his tone-deaf march into disaster. …Sometimes not.

The question, then, was whether this unthinking misstep, given the rift it had engendered, was one wrong guess too many. Should he wait and hope, forgive and forget? Or was he finally being told, in terms bold and certain enough for even a lunkhead like him to register, that there was no future in this love? I prize iron. What but misery can I hope for by giving my heart to golden quicksilver?

It was early as he came trudging across the cleared space before ‘Crucible’s gates, early enough that the evidence of activity came in the form of scraping noises and arrhythmic pendular movement from the Windscriber atop its tall tower.

He scowled at the scribehead, at windsail-top and chisel-bottom and the long pendulum-mounted body in between, and begrudged it its momentary appearance of gust-driven creative randomness even as inexorable grinding physics assured it its longterm surety.

Some people just luck into having it all.

He bared his teeth at the clamped-down scribing stage, at the massive sheet of brilliantine glass being slowly etched by the wind and weather as translated by the contraption above, slowly rendered more and more intricate until it reached a near-sacred degree of exquisiteness suitable for the filling of the window frames of trade hall and governor’s manse. For just that one moment, he wanted nothing so much as he wanted to snatch up a rock and smash it.

Let’s see you become worthy enough then, huh? he growled inwardly as he trudged on.

He cocked his head inquisitively at the twin treelike glass spires that served as gateposts to Clear Crucible’s Cropway, but the glass stems and crystalline leaves did not deign to answer him. He scowled at the uncooperative sculptures and stumbled on. A ten-furlong trudge, a turn onto the west-running Tradeway and past the Restday-empty Trademarket on his left, down past another few cross streets, a second right turn onto Parison Way… soon enough, he was standing beneath the hanging placard that marked his home, Forgemaster Brimmel’s ironmongery.

Sighing, he pushed open the batwing doors and stepped inside. All within was quiet and dark, for the forge like the ‘Market was closed for Restday, and Brimmel (a notorious late-sleeper) was still abed. Beidon inhaled the characteristic odors of the shop: the pervasive reek of charcoal smoke, the acrid bloody tang of the iron, the slight whiff of horses’ hooves. He stepped into the middle of the low dome suggested by the arched brick supports of the central chimney, past the anvil and the quenching trough. Even now he could feel faint residual heat from the coal forge.

Beidon allowed the tension to drain away as he settled into his accustomed surroundings. This is where I belong, he thought as he stroked his forge hammer, and this is the love I’m truly promised to. He removed his leather smith’s apron from its peg and tied it on. A faithful embrace… He lifted his hammer from the anvil and was instantly reassured by its utterly familiar weight and heft. This will never confound or disavow me, and this is all I ever–

Something clattered to the floor. Beidon stooped to retrieve it. He arose clutching a broad, wire-thin metal ring – a circlet. Beidon laid it back on the anvil before studying it with an acutely conflicted expression.

Though the design was just a simple hoop sporting a rough setting, it was still the most ambitious work the young forge-boy had ever attempted. He’d begun it on the previous morning once he’d finished his shoeing, inspired by his glimpse of golden-tressed glory. Though a more romantic soul might have sought to memorialize gold with gold, the forge boy had never doubted but that he must work with what he knew… with iron. And he’d sought no aid from his Master, asking that Grywald leave him to his secretive project.

He’d begun with confidence, rouging out the basic shape on the anvil horn. The familiarity of utter devotion had left him with zero doubt that the slightly irregular oblong would perfectly fit the remembered contours of Emlie’s brow and skull. He’d continued by roughing out the setting-cup with mandrel and swages before inserting into it a long-hoarded node of petrified lightning - smoky-white fulgurite plucked from the sands of the town’s sky-farms on one of his exploratory expeditions with Emlie. And after that, he’d hammered endlessly at the hoop-shape, thinning and shaping and evening out… again and again and again…

Despite all of this focused work, however, perfection had proved elusive.

He’d hammered out an imperfection here, a dint there… only to have two more crop up elsewhere on the object’s surface. The tongs slipped, pinching the metal. The cross-section remained stubbornly uneven. He’d worked the metal hot for as long as that was practical, then attempted cold-hammering for as long as that was endurable. Then back to forging heat, which had required more charcoal and a turn on the bellows. And so on. Hour on hour he’d labored, getting no closer to perfection. Every attempt at reshaping the circlet somehow only distorted it all the more.

Eventually the candler had arrived bearing fresh tallow for the evening and with it the day’s marketplace gossip. That had put an immediate end to Beidon’s labors; hearing that Emlie had been caught between her father and a villainous vendor at the morning market, he had immediately determined to rush to her aid, and his project and hammer had been left discarded on the work surface. And there the damned circlet at least would stay… he had no use for it anymore, and anyway the flawed thing would never-

Hold on. Beidon leaned in close to the anvil, squinted at the ring, and scowled. It had landed with one of its innumerable blemishes angled straight up at him, as if it were taunting. Slagging thing’s tempting me... Quit or no, he’d at least eradicate that one smug blemish! He hefted the hammer and, barely stopping to think, ….tap. He squinted again… and stifled a gasp.

That first innocuous blow had been utterly humble in intent, a grudging attempt to even out just one least of imperfections. Yet the small correction, made locally, seemed almost to naturally signpost the way to the next. Couldn’t I just…? Tap. Again, a tiny improvement made with blithe indifference to the overall situation. And again, a way forward revealed. It couldn’t be that easy… could it? Another quick instinctual appraisal, and tap. Tap. Tap.

The hammerblows were coming in a swift series now, their delivery almost automatic as the result of each signposted the way to the next. Beidon found himself circling the anvil like an ore cart on a track, resolute in his course, utterly confident, utterly at ease as he let events and his immediate responses to them dictate his course. In seemingly no time flat he was back at his starting position. A last squinting once-over. TAP.

The forge-boy laid down the hammer and lifted the circlet. The overall shape looked perfect, the hoop uniform in thickness and lovely in cross-section. His fingers, as he ran them around the ring, could find no flaw or imperfection. A little distance, a little change of perspective… it was SO easy…

Beidon smiled as the extent of the metaphor struck him. Its ‘flaws’ turned out to be perfectly manageable… not impossible after all. I just stopped trying to comprehend and control the whole all at once and let the metal carry me its own way in its own good time. He hefted the piece, pinching the setting between the thumbs and forefingers of both hands. My finest work yet. And running them outward along the opposing arcs of the headpiece, …Emlie…

He stared at, stared through the circlet… through the delicate iron, equal parts exquisite and unyielding metal hardness… His consideration took in the narrow world of the forge, then surged past it to include the town of Clear Crucible and even the broader landscape beyond. Somehow, the world encompassed by the circling band looked clear. Perhaps it partook of the nature of the circlet itself – perhaps you could deal with with its impossibility, if only you found the right spot to land that first tap, then simply held on. Perhaps it was unnecessary to come to grips all at once with the totality of its flaws, only to choose a starting point and carry through with focus and hope. After all, what you stood to gain, the reward for persistence and faith and intrepidity… enduring treasure!

Buoyed by this seeming revelation, Beidon retrieved his shoulder-satchel, donned it, and delicately slipped the circlet into it. He lifted his forge hammer and hooked its butt-tassel around a nub on his belt. And then, his head feeling blessedly clear for the first time in many hours, he turned towards the door. There were other, far more important repairs waiting to be made.

Moments later, rubbing sleep from his eyes and ache from his back, Brimmel the Ironmonger stumbled down the staircase from the residence. He was greeted by a cadenced draught, now blowing, now subsiding, and by the rhythmic creaking of the forge’s batwing doors as they oscillated back towards quiescence.

“Slaggin’ wind…”

Scowling in annoyance, he stilled the doors and secured their latch.

Beidon strode up the High Quarter Tradeway, arms swinging resolutely, glancing neither left nor right. He had clarity, he had a mission, and he had never felt so free or so determined. His hands caressed the twin icons of his newfound revelation, the hammer at his side and the circlet within his satchel. Patience and determination. He nodded to himself. Step back and consider. Don’t sweat every imperfection. Pick a place to start and learn from what follows. Don’t try to understand it all, don’t try to force it.

The glassworks lining the road began to give way to residences, the dwellings of wealthy Masters and Artisans too proud to live above their studios and foundries and showrooms. The homes started humbly enough but grew steadily more opulent and glass-encrusted the deeper he penetrated into the residential district. You don’t need to understand Emlie’s every daybreak and mind-trek, Beidon-boy, he reassured himself. You don’t need to have the answers to all of ‘em, you don’t need to know how to “fix” ‘em all. Smiling to himself, he traced with his finger the circlet’s iron strand as it looped around, completing its circle. You just need a place to stand for when she goes off like that – you need to be there waiting for her when she gets back. Beidon’s course angled off the Tradeway and onto a northbound private lane warded by a pair of squat glassen gateway obelisks. The lane wound uphill past stately homes and soon approached the narrow tract of the Clearwood fenced off inside of the western wall for the delight of the good and great. There it skirted the shore of an ornamental pond. Finally, upon reaching the lane’s end at the top of the low hill, a last bend of the road brought Beidon across the manicured lawn spreading from pond to trees and squarely face-to-panels with the doors of Emlie’s stately home.

Nominally the manse was a municipal building now, the Mayoral Residence, the Lord Mayor in turn being selected by acclamation of the Trade Council. It had been thus ever since the Trade Barons had laid claim to the town in the Year of Rationalization, seizing and repurposing the foremost noble homes in the name of Public Industry as embodied by the local Trade Council. The Councilors, however, had since then kept a Hubbleton in one high office or another for three straight decades, so the family had never been ousted from their former ancestral home (which changed Official Designation with whatever role the Hubbleton patriarch was currently filling) and most ‘Cruciblites still lazily called the place the Hubbleton Mansion.

Whatever the name, Beidon reflected, the nature of the place is constant enough –intimidating! Far more so, somehow, when you intended to challenge the front door than when the serving staff was letting you in the back for a visit… or even when you took the herb-garden-rose-tree route straight through the maiden daughter’s bedroom window. The famous round-topped windows seemed to glare accusingly down at him through radiant Windscriber-etched cataracts, and the sheer size of the place made him feel quite small. At any other time, Beidon would have been well and truly daunted; this morning, however, his resolve was unshakable. Even so, standing on the verge, he momentarily reconsidered his approach. His eyes sought out one second-floor window in particular, seeking to pierce the curtains and the gloom beyond. Emlie was up there. All he had to do was repeat his stealthy approach of last night. Then, once he was inside, once he was with her, he could repent of his folly. He’d go, he’d tell her. He’d go with her. Do that, and this confrontation would be unnecessary. Do that, and they could flee together just as she’d said, to make a life together. Do that… do that, and he just wouldn’t be Beidon.

Beidon sighed. He was who he was. The frontal approach, the direct approach, the honorable approach… was for him the only approach. He eyed the ornate double door for only a brief hesitating second before decisively reaching out to slam the door knocker home.

He was braced for a chilly reception – after all, Emlie was in high dudgeon, and who knew better than he how difficult that could make life for her nearest and dearest? Nevertheless, he was utterly unprepared for the almost palpable wave of censure that hit him with the opening of the door. Faced with a wall of fabric, he craned his neck up, seeking the source. Up, up to where stony eyes peered down at him through narrow, puckered slits… and a dainty pair of absurdly undersized pince-nez eyeglasses. The censorious slits gashed a severe high crag of a face, and the crag topped a veritable mountain of muscle that all-but-trembled in restraint of what Beidon perceived was its obvious eagerness to do him violence. Indeed, the knotty tree-trunk arms were reined in so close to their mountainsides that they were squeezing the upper reaches of the pectorals up tight under the clubhead chin. All over the exposed flesh, purplish blood vessels pulsed like flood-swollen rivers. Beidon hunddled down, bracing himself, sure that an attack (or more likely an avalanche) must be imminent.

But when a moment passed and no assault was forthcoming, he dared to glance back up at the door warden. Same stony silence, same barely-in-check brutality. No sign of action predicated upon it. First rings that teach, now rocks that rage… He smiled inwardly at the incongruous flight-of-fancy. Emlie will no doubt be pleased by her influence! Heartened by thoughts of the girl within, he ventured a greeting. “Errrm, ‘lo, Gordun….?”

There was a sound from above like a sawmill processing logs – an inhale. Then, in the same gravel-pit voice from last night: “….smith-boy. You’sis HERE.”

“Ummm… yes, yes I am?”

“Saved the trouble, good. Mayor wants you.”

“M-me?” Smelting sands, he knows I was in Emlie’s room last night! I’m waste filings!

“You.” The slitted eyes narrowed further. “Well?”

Does he expect a confession? Is this my one chance for mercy? “Gordun, I… that is,…” I steal through your windows to canoodle with your master’s daughter on a midnight! Forgers preserve me!

The mountainside stirred, shifted, and slid down onto him. Granite fingers pinched the nape of his neck. Master Brimmel, I’m SO sorry. Emlie… He winced in anticipation of the other hand, which surely would be closing around his windpipe any second now. Instead, though: “Study’s at the end’ve th’hall. GIT.” Beidon felt a vast movement to his side as Gordun squeezed past, exchanging places with him. Then the rockslide prisoning his neck SHOVED him forward into the vacated entryway. He spun around, astonished. He had just enough time to glimpse Gordun hurrying away down the path, moving surprisingly swiftly for a man of his bulk and apparent lugubriousness. Then the door, which Gordun had pushed with his other hand in passing, slammed shut between them.

With the door shut, the home’s regal main hall was off-puttingly dim. Beidon stood for a moment, giving his eyes time to adjust and his determination time to resolidify. The encounter with Mayor Grywald’s monstrous Bailiff had rattled him more than he cared to admit, and certainly more than he wanted Emlie’s father to perceive. Soon enough, though, his need to say his piece to the man defeated his trepidation, and Beidon started down the corridor. He was further discomfited by the opulent furnishings he passed, the delicate claw-footed High Lathsaw tables and the rare glassworks displayed atop them. He was quite self-conscious of how out of place he was in their midst, quite afraid that his wide frame might brush and break something… really, the forge-boy was far more comfortable entering this place through an upstairs window than he was sauntering down its main hall. He was nothing but grateful when he reached its end and paused at the entrance to Grywald’s study.

That smallish room was filled with handsome glasscraft and bric-a-brac. It was dominated by a large desk that sat before the bay windows in the rear wall. The Lord Mayor was behind it, hunched up on a leather chair that almost swallowed his slight frame. He was staring absently at a large cartographer’s globe, clearly not registering its intricacies. His one hand toyed nervously with an empty crystal spirits-glass on his desk, his other with a little wooden carving… a black-and-white horse head, it looked like. With his chair turned half away from the door and the large globe between them, he did not appear to notice his visitor. Beidon coughed.

Grywald spun too abruptly in his chair. His trailing hand smacked the delicate glass and sent it plunging to the floor, where it shattered. Grywald flopped in his chair for a brief comic instant, darting alarmed glances at the mess, his hands, his feet, the window… before locking onto the intruder in his study door. His eyes had the red-rimmed look of a man who hadn’t slept much (and who likely had kept close company through the night with the contents of his now-splintered glass.)

“B-boy-! That was, um, uncommonly fast!” He sat up straight, tugging at his rumpled clothes in a belated attempt at dignity. Any progress on this front was thwarted when he accidentally dropped the carving down his shirt. After a moment he gave up fishing and patting for it, and returned his attention to his guest. “Ah my, but did Gordun find you already?” Grywald chuckled mirthlessly. Finishing his fussing, he pointed to another, much smaller chair that faced the desk. “Sit.”

Beidon took a deep breath, crossed into the small room, and sat. His interlocutor focused fully upon him – a practically unprecedented circumstance, as Grywald had in the past typically treated the tradesman’s apprentice with a certain patrician disregard when encountering him at play with Emlie. Now, though, Beidon had the full attention of those bleary eyes… and He was shocked and discomfited to spot actual loathing smoldering within them!

The forge boy had fully expected to engender his fair share of hatred as a result of what he’d come to say; but to see it there from the get-go, from a man who’d benignly tolerated Beidon’s past presence in his household and in his daughter’s life, was startling. Still, there was nothing for it but to do what needed doing:

“Your Honor, there’s something I need to say.” He took another deep breath, and: “I’ve come to ask for your dau-” was as far as he got.

Beidon was hardly surprised at being cut off; the interjected question, though, took him utterly by surprise: “-Boy, I’ll not waste time – where is she??”

Beidon blinked, closed and reopened his mouth. “…Sir?”

The Lord Mayor lurched forward in his chair. “My daughter, you lowborn clod!” His spittle sprayed Beidon whilst the fumes of his vintage Stilltown-casked breakfast assaulted the boy’s nostrils. His bloodshot eyes blazed.

The forge boy was taken aback. Though he liked the man well enough (Grywald was Emlie’s honored father, after all,) and respected his authority, Beidon habitually thought of the Lord Mayor as a somewhat silly figure of fun. There was nothing funny, though, about the whiskey-and-spleen-fueled figure glaring accusingly at him from across the desk. Beidon felt the first pangs of a nervousness that was altogether different from the butterflies that had infested his stomach since he’d settled on his course of action, and he found his planned words slipping away.

“Your Honor, I’d… You mean Emlie, it’s her I’ve come to talk to you about, b-but I don’t-”

“Don’t think the familiarity you’ve connived to assume with her will grant you any special immunity should you think to, to, to play games with me! You’ve presumed to far too much already! Hand her over!”

The mayor’s flustered, raving behavior had thrown Beidon totally off-kilter. “Sir… has Emlie gone somewhere?”

Grywald nodded vigorously. “Straight into your rust-pounder’s arms, no doubt! Pulled away against her better judgment to boot, I’d wager!” Both paused a moment at that, though it was unclear whether they were struck by Grywald’s accusation, or by the incongruity of ascribing conventional “better judgment” to Emlie. Grywald nevertheless pressed forward with the idea: “For all her loveliness, my daughter may lack the sense that the First Forgers game a mule, but still I refuse to believe that she’d purposefully drive cold steel through the heart of her virtue, her future, and her family name! Certainly not for the sake of some debased partnership with a… with a… with a glorified menial who with his best expectation in trade can’t hope even to rise up to the level of the lowliest window-caster!” He eyed Beidon up and down, boozily taking his measure. His haze lingered at the top of Beidon’s head. It took the boy a moment to realize that the Lord Mayor was scrutinizing the straw-strands still stuck there as if suspecting them of being clues to his daughter’s whereabouts! Finally he addressed the boy directly again. “You see?”

Oh Forgers, but Beidon saw. His rising ire warred with his sense of self-preservation, and the teetering balance kept him momentarily mum.

“…I see,” he finally managed. The Lord Mayor took this for assent. “Then you see why it’s all craziness, utter insanity. I don’t know what drove you to put those most foolish of words in her mouth at yestermorn’s ‘Market, boy – that she loves you, by the Barons – but surely you see now the folly, eh?”

The world fell away. She loves me. She told Grywald she loves me! She wanted to take that love… our love, love for ME… take it and me and leave the only home she’s ever known with it. She was offering that to me and…and… and I threw it back in her face… Beidon nodded to himself as the truth of it came belatedly clear to him.

“…glad you understand the way of it.” Grywald had taken Beidon’s wide-eyed silent head-bob for a very different sort of comprehension. His tone was suddenly more civil, the tones those of his professional mayoral persona. "Not your fault, really, no shame in a good honest station, after all. Abandoned if I do recall, but a good ‘prenticeship erases that black mark, eh? No shame, not your doing, no…” He had risen during this speech and shakily circled the desk to stand behind Beidon’s chair. “But you are what you are, a cog really. Good fortune then that we’re in an Age of Rationality, boy, of Commerce and Mechanism and Industry! An Age that appreciates a good cog, eh? ‘To everything its role, to everyone their place’ or, uh, somesuch." He gestured animatedly, his face glowing with enthusiasm as he expounded on a pet topic, his daughter-dread and interloper-hate momentarily immaterial. He laid his hands upon Beidon’s shoulders in a gesture that was almost fatherly.

“Surely you understand? One may mix base wood ash with iron and get mere steel, but finer ingredients must catalyze sand to produce fine glass.

Or again: the tiny cog cannot hope to drive the master gear. Embrace your station, my boy, and allow my daughter to move on to hers. Emlie has a destiny, a duty, a place! You see?”

Beidon snapped back from the reverie that the singular news inadvertently imparted by Grywald had induced. Given an opening, he now dug in his heels: "Begging your pardon milord, but Emlie’s place is with me."

“I’m so glad that you….what?” The hands on his shoulders tensed, the fingers digging painfully into the base of his neck. “You are saying… you refuse to relinquish my daughter, boy?”

“I don’t HAVE her such that I COULD ‘relinquish’ her, Your Honor. And…” Beidon swallowed, and seized his courage. “..and even if I did, I wouldn’t. You yourself said that she loves me, and… and I love her!”

“Impudence!” The hands on Beidon’s shoulders gave a petty shove. A moment later, Grywald was back in his chair, glaring daggers at Beidon. “Folly, boy, folly! You’ll buy yourself nothing but woe with this hardheadedness!” The glare turned thoughtful, crafty. “…’buy’… yes, of course. Might it be that you were listening better than I thought, boy? This is the Age of Industry, yes, also the Age of Commerce! It could be you’re holding out for a… for a reasonable offer. If so, you’ll find me accommodating, er, within reason, yes.”

He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Clear Crucible is marching boldly towards the future, you know… but some of its leading lights have proven themselves to be pig-headed technophobes, some haven’t exactly been friends to Progress… old Brimmel amongst them.” A sly smile lit the Lord Mayor’s face. “It could be that an early retirement awaits the man.” Studying Beidon’s face, Grywald hastened to add, “-umm, a comfortable one of course! But voids need filling, and Industry needs capable young men to guide Her! What say you, Master Beidon? All you need do is renounce these absurd ideas, these childish recidivisms, and we can start charting a proper manhood for you here and now.”

Now it was Beidon’s turn to ball his hands. He was too offended for anything resembling fearful hesitation. “Your Honor, I may be lowborn and foolish… but I’m not for sale. Brimmel is my master, just as your daughter is my life. I’d not betray either of them, for anything!”

Grywald paused mid-inhale, his hands freezing in the act of describing another metaphor in the air. The baleful glare in his eye, previously banked, flared again. “Perhaps you should look to yourself first, young man. I can destroy you as easily as uplift you, you know! You’ll be of little use to either of them as an undesirable, a foe of the Powers That Be. A wise lad would sever ties with them, in the name of self-preservation and prosperity...”

Beidon’s blood was up now. “Just that easy, Your Honor? I just walk away from ‘em? I… I’m truly sorry, but that’s not what I am. I’m tied to Master Brimmel by promise and duty, nevermind that he’s only ever done right by me. And I’m bound to Emlie by… something deeper, even. By destiny! By the stars and the fates of her silly ol’ stories! By the… by the ‘magick’ that she works upon my heart!”

He stared back at Grywald, momentarily winded as if he had just run a race. He was amazed that he, Beidon, had said such amazing and terrible things, proud and uncaring of the consequences.

Grywald planted his palms on the desk and leaned forward. “Fool,” he exulted, “y-you’ve damned yourself with your own forfeit tongue! I threatened that, and your hands, as a lever to shake the willfulness of my damn fool girl! I-it was bluster, unfounded, I admit it… but now I see that nothing less than taking that step for true will suffice to save my daughter from your crazed obsession! And, Barons help me, I know just the man…” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Gordun! GORDUN! SEIZE THIS IMPUDENT WHELP!!”

Grywald locked eyes with his terrified guest. “My man Gordun is as literal and unquestioning as he is brutal. When I ask him for your head, that is exactly what I shall receive, and Forgers help me but that the legalities can be sorted later!” The Lord Mayor looked to the hallway expectantly; Beidon, rooted to the spot with fear, likewise turned to face his oncoming doom...

…and found it to be conspicuously empty. Gordun… but didn’t he go-? After several seconds had ticked by in silence, he turned slowly back to see discomfort mixed with something that looked a lot like embarrassment growing on the Lord Mayor’s face.

Grywald tried again: “GORDUN!!” His shout echoed down the central corridor… and drew no response.

When he turned back to his captive, Grywald’s voice was suddenly once again full of the befuddled discomfiture that was his hallmark: “Boy, ah, my Gordun… you didn’t by chance see?...” he half-implored. Beidon, by way of answer, pointed mutely to the far front door.

“Oh.” Grywald cupped his stubbly jowls in his palms. “After I explained your heinous transgression, I, erm, I sent Grywald to scour your haunts in search of her. Her, or you, or the withered witch who started all this nonsense yesterday. To squeeze you for the truth of her whereabouts, and to eject that vagrant from the municipality.” He curled his fingers in mimed demonstration of his intent, then shrugged at Beidon in an incongruously apologetic manner. “One would think the fool would’ve known to stay here to help deal with the knave in my very hands, but just before you arrived. I, um, I told him to stop at nothing in looking for my daughter, and Gordun, you see, he’s-”

“-literal and unquestioning,” finished Beidon. He nodded sagely.

The two stared at each other for a beat. Then Grywald, lunging, seized the bell-pull to one side of his chair. “Doesn’t matter!” –he squealed. He yanked the rope, and the house echoed with the sound of distant chimes, answered by the transmitted clopping of multiple sets of servile feet.

Beidon sprung to his own feet, rounded his chair, and lunged for the door… only to spy multiple hallway doors opening to disgorge a collection of butlers, serving-men, cooks, chambermaids, &etc. He skidded to a stop in the study doorway. “SEIZE THE BOY!!!” -came the shout from over his shoulder. Beidon looked wildly left… right… up and down… then, lacking a better option, he spun and fled before the advancing servant-horde back into the study. And before the eyes of a fear-frozen Grywald he vaulted over the back of the chair he had occupied seconds before and sprung up atop the Lord Mayor’s desk!

Standing tall over the room, Beidon felt sudden giddy exultation. He pulled his forge hammer from his belt and brandished its wicked metal head high over his own. Grywald cringed before the threat, once again a frail silly man in a too-large chair, his head perfectly framed by glassy sunbursts.

Beidon’s hammerstroke arced down… and out, missing the Lord Mayor by a full arm’s length. Instead, the hammer connected with the center pane of the bay window, easily reducing the famous windscriven glass to a hail of shiny fragments. Beidon glanced down at his tool. Glass may glint, but iron binds.

Then he was leaping straight over the Lord Mayor’s upturned amazed face and through the newly made opening.

Flying through the Hubbleton gardens, hammer in hand, Beidon goggled in astonishment at what he’d just done. I’ve disobeyed the Lord Mayor’s commands. He glanced behind him at the broken window and the liveried servants that were starting to climb out of it. I’ve practically attacked the Lord Mayor! And finally: I’ve avowed to the Lord Mayor that I love his daughter!

For an instant he felt faint. Even were all his other actions up to that point somehow pardonable, Grywald Hubbleton would never forgive him for this final transgression. His love for Emlie had somehow led him over the brink of a cliff whose existence he hadn’t even been aware of yesterday. And now here he was, in sudden freefall.

He threw a glance over his shoulder. The servants were jogging across the lawn after him, some of them armed (albeit with pans, fireplace pokers, etc,) and all looked very, very unfriendly. No turning back. Oddly, the thought didn’t dismay him nearly as much as might’ve anticipated. The thing about lack of choice, I guess - it at least makes the direction ahead crystal clear!

He turned back to face the rapidly dwindling garden ahead of him and the band of woods beyond. His newfound isolation (and, indeed, possible fugitive state) didn’t mortify him; rather, it was the knowledge that Emlie had made good on her pledge to flee, and that she had been forced to do so alone that weighed on him. No sooner had he considered that, however, then he was buoyed up by the fierce self-assurance that that at least was one thing that he could do something about:

Emlie, I’m coming!

He felt serenely resilient again. Picking up his pace, Beidon Smith hurdled a high bounding hedge and was lost to the Hubbleton domestics’ sight.

Next Chapter: 5. Beidon Beats The Bushes, Emlie Hits The Road