The next few days were chaotic. The Vesta House was in disarray, the unexpected death of the family patriarch summoning a flurry of distant retives and allies, all desperate to affirm the loyalties and deals that had been made with a man who should not have passed for decades yet. The multitude of visitors that Vesta was forced to entertain left no time for Sara and Evie, not when years of carefully negotiated alliances were on the line.

  So Sara had to find her own entertainment. And that had proved pretty easy.

  “Keep your wrist firm,” Hurlish instructed, watching Sara with an eagle’s eye. “This is a good anvil. Use the bounce of the hammer to lift your arm again or else you’re just gonna end up tiring yourself out.”

  “I’m trying,” Sara grunted, smming the hammer down. Chips of bck bounced off the iron rod, scattering across the area. “There’s just a lot to think about. Good angle, good strength, good rhythm…”

  “You shouldn’t be thinkin’ about any of that,” Hurlish rumbled. “That’s for your body to learn. Not your head. You try to think your way through every step of this, you’re gonna spend a week making one piddly little knife.”

  Sara mumbled her acknowledgement, focusing on her work.

  Back on Earth, Sara had learned how to weld from a man with more ink than skin on his face, and most of those lessons had consisted of unmonitored trial and error. She’d ended up pretty good at it after a while, but no one could say it was because she’d had a good teacher. The bulk of her skill had come from Youtube, pirated textbooks, and painful burns.

  Getting lessons from an actual expert was a whole different story. Hurlish had been smithing for as long as she could hold a hammer, and she knew her stuff. Unfortunately, that meant she didn’t seem to remember what it was actually like to be a total beginner. Most of her apprentices came to her with at least a modicum of skill, if not an outright Css, so there was plenty of room for miscommunication.

  It didn’t help that Sara had come to Hurlish figuring she’d at least have some transferable skills from her welding career, only to get humbled on step one. An intimate familiarity with metallurgy didn’t mean Sara understood jack shit about purely mechanical skills a bcksmith needed to succeed.

  To make it worse, the forge wasn’t empty. Hurlish’s various apprentices and employees scattered around as they worked on various projects, and she could feel them judging every strike of her hammer.

  She had strength to spare, at least. She’d been a pretty strong woman back home, but her Css had turned her into something else. She didn’t have any way of measuring it, but when every strike of her hammer shook the anvil and reverberated through her shoes, she felt certain she’d make a mockery of her old self.

  That still didn’t mean she had any of the actual skills required to be a good bcksmith, though.

  “Hold up,” Hurlish ordered, stepping forward. “Lift your left hand. Get it on a better angle. You’re trying to make a punch, not a slice of bread. Higher. Good. Give it a few more hits, then we’ll put it through another heat.”

  Sara kept pounding the metal until Hurlish told her to stop, then dropped her hammer with a sigh. Moving carefully, she pced the tip of the iron in the glowing coals of the forge, where it began gaining a gentle glow.

  “Looking tired, Sara,” Hurlish noted.

  “Not tired. Frustrated, though.”

  “Thought you said you were a bcksmith in your old world.”

  “I said I was a sort of bcksmith,” Sara corrected, crossing her arms. Her entire body was soaked in sweat, something not helped by the thick gloves and leather smock she wore to protect her from flying sparks. Heat was at least something welding had gotten her accustomed to. “I was something called a welder. Still worked with metal, but not like this.”

  “What’d you do? Bend it by staring or something?”

  Sara shook her head. “Not much bending. Mostly joining. Used tools you don’t have here to heat the ends of metal and glue ‘em together. Hard work, but good work. Helped build section eight housing, pces for people without much money to live. And it paid pretty well. I liked it.”

  And that was the truth. Sara had enjoyed being a welder. She didn’t say all the other things she could have, though. About getting her start in some shady asshole’s chop shop as a sixteen year old girl, and why she did it in the first pce. About how much of a defeat it felt like to be working for the government, the very organization she’d been raging against for so long. And the conflict it had stirred up in her to see that government, through her own hands, make a marked improvement in the lives of others.

  Sara had been pretty damn conflicted about how her life was going back before she’d been swept up in this Quest. Whether or not she should be straining for a better world, trying to inspire a movement that would improve everything, or if she should focus on what was in front of her, do the good that she could all on her own. Now that she was removed from her old life, looking back, she could say she was depressed. She’d been having a rough time of it.

  She was disgusted by the world she’d ended up in. The svery, the nobility, everything about it, but in some ways she was almost relieved. It was so much easier to draw lines between should and shouldn’t when there were people putting literal chains on one another. She could fight that, because there was nothing else she could do but fight that. It wasn’t like home, when every decision she made seemed to end up hurting someone, somewhere.

  “What kind of house needs so much damn metal?” Hurlish asked, startling Sara from her wandering reverie. “What, did you build the walls out of iron instead of wood?”

  “Not all of it. But some of it was steel and other metals, yeah. I mostly did work for infrastructure stuff. Water towers, plumbing, that sort of thing.”

  Hurlish looked at her, eyebrow raised. Waiting for the punchline. When it became clear one wasn’t coming, she shook her head, whistling.

  “You were building houses for poor folk, and they had plumbing? Like, pipes for your shit and piss? I mean, I’ve heard of that sorta thing, but I don’t think even the nobles have it here. Mostly in the capital or something.”

  “Wouldn’t be legal to build a house without plumbing where I came from. Even Detroit’s not that bad.” Sara shrugged, not making eye contact, gaze focused on the iron rod glowing in the forge. “You’ve got no idea just how much this world sucks, Hurlish. People shit in buckets, for god’s sake.”

  “What? You want us to shit on the street instead?” The massive orc turned around and rolled the iron bar, putting a different face into the coals. “I’ve got a pretty sweet gig here, y’know. Maybe it doesn’t look like much to the likes of you or that fancy girl you got hanging around–”

  “I grew up poor,” Sara interrupted, a sliver of steel entering her words. “Single dad, small apartment, the works. You own your own business, Hurlish. People know your name. You’re better off now than I ever was.”

  “Alright,” Hurlish agreed, still focused on the iron. “Poor for you, maybe. But it sure doesn’t sound like it, what with you growing up with enough water pouring into your house you could shit in in it.”

  Despite herself, Sara ughed. Hurlish pulled the iron from the forge and set it back down on the anvil, handing Sara her hammer.

  “Just goes to show you how much better the pce I grew up was. Hell, the whole world. America wasn’t special. Lots of pces had it better than us, even.” Sara began pounding out a beat on the iron even as she spoke, prompting Hurlish to sidle up next to her and bend over to hear. “Most of the world had plumbing, I think. Even the pces that didn’t were working on it. Basic human right. Some people looked down on me for working with shitpipes, but I was proud of it. Stuff like that keeps the world turning.”

  “What’d you even do, though?” Hurlish pressed. “I get the basic idea. Water goes through pipes, you shit in the pipe, shit gets swept off into the river. Makes sense. But other than making the pipes themselves, what about that needs a bcksmith?”

  “Welder,” Sara corrected. She flipped the punch over, starting in on the other side. “And I did lots of stuff. I did a lot of pre-fab work, which means work not done directly on the jobsite. They’d measure things out, tell me what they need, and I’d help assemble it in a warehouse. Me and the other guys would weld the pipes together into the shape they need, make sure it could deal with the water pressure, then ship it off.”

  “But what does that mean?” Hurlish asked. “Welding. If the pipes were already made, that’s that, right? Unless you’re trying to say screwing bolts into pce is bcksmithing.”

  Sara snorted. “Nah. Wasn’t that. I guess I should’ve expined welding first. It’s complicated as hell, basically as complicated as bcksmithing, but the short of it was that I used a tool to heat two pieces of metal until they melted and fused.”

  “Some kind of spell shit, then? You’re a mage, ain’t ya?”

  “No. I mean, I am now. But not back then, no.” Sara paused in her hammering to wipe her brow, shaking off sweat, then continued. “I guess I’ll just have to expin it outright. There’s a few different kinds of welding, right? Well, there’s tons, but the basic components of it, there’s four types. Or two, if you want to divide by gas-insert or not gas-insert. Which…” Sara paused, blowing hair out of her eyes. “Okay. Start over. There’s TIG, MIG, Arc, and stick welding. TIG and MIG, they use inert gasses to get rid of the oxygen, and–”

  “Oxygen?”

  “Oh, yeah. You wouldn’t know what that is. Oxygen is the part of air you breathe. Most of what’s going in your lungs isn’t all that useful, but oxygen is. At the same time though, oxygen causes all sorts of problems with welding. Stops stuff from bonding, causes rust–”

  “Wait. You’re telling me air causes rust?”

  “Sort of. But what matters here is–”

  “Then why does shit rust so quick in water?”

  Sara took a deep breath, huffing it out as she paused her hammering to gre at Hurlish. Maybe back on Earth she would’ve been irritated with the woman’s constant interruptions. Now that she was here, though, with Amarat’s Blessings running through her head, she could tell at a gnce that the orc wasn’t being malicious with her interjections. Hurlish had obviously never been a student, never studied anything, but Sara was somehow getting the vibe from the orc’s scrunched eyes that if she’d developed the habit somewhere, she’d have a pen and notepad out, scribbling down notes. She wasn’t just shooting the breeze with Sara while they worked; her head was cocked, a hand on her hip. She was genuinely, honestly interested in learning what she could. Until now, Hurlish hadn’t given a damn that Sara was a Champion of Amarat, treating her like she would anyone else. That had been what Sara found so interesting about her, compared to everyone else.

  Now that they were talking about metalworking? Now that the orc was realizing she had an opportunity to learn something about smithing not just from a Champion, but from a whole other world? She was interested. This wasn’t an opportunity the woman was going to pass up, and she was more than willing to be rude to seize the chance, even if she was being rude to a literal envoy of divinity.

  Sara really, really liked that.

  “Alright. Back to basic basics then,” she said, feeling a warmth in her chest that had little to do with the heat of the forge. “Iron is what’s called an element, alright? A type of atom, the smallest structure that can really exist. There’s only a couple hundred types of them, and you wouldn’t know most of their names, but the whole universe is made out of them…”

  Sara began walking her way through the foundations of welding, starting at elementary school science and heading on up. Hurlish listened attentively, rarely interrupting now that Sara was taking it from the beginning. Her hands, however, occasionally reached out to correct Sara’s smithing, turning her wrist one way or another, lifting her arm a bit higher on her swings. Simple, gentle prods to get Sara into the right form. They worked side by side, both teaching one another what they knew.

  Sara was so wrapped up in the process that she didn’t realize how much time had passed. On her way to go back for another heat of the iron punch, Hurlish stopped her by holding up a hand.

  “You’re done,” the orc rumbled, taking the slot punch. She turned it over, checking the tip for errors, then nodded. “Good work. Told ya you just needed to stop thinking so much.”

  “Stop thinking?” Sara’s brow was dripping sweat, which she flicked away with a hand. “I was thinking harder than I ever have for anything, ever. You know how long it’s been since I had to remember any of that crap?”

  “You were thinkin’, but you weren’t thinkin’ about your work.” Hurlish set the punch down, leaving it to cool. She nodded at it. “Good stuff. Better than most beginners. Lot better.”

  “Thanks,” Sara huffed, still breathing hard. The amount of pride those words inspired in her took her by surprise. She didn’t let it show, of course.

  “Now, you pussying out? Or you got more work in you?”

  Sara narrowed her eyes up at Hurlish. A long way up. She wasn’t used to anyone, much less a woman, having 14 inches of height on her.

  “You just want to hear me talk more about welding shit.”

  “Yep. And I like having a free borer. Even if I’d be making more money working on what I was supposed to be doing before you two got here.” Hurlish gnced about. “Where is Evie, by the way? I saw her come in.”

  “She’s passed out in your office. Honestly, with how shaky her legs were from this morning, I was pretty impressed she made it all the way here. We’ve had a lot of free time.”

  “She won’t mind you sticking around longer, then?”

  Sara blinked. That was another thing about Hurlish. Sara had told the woman that Evie was an equal, colred or not, and the orc had said ‘alright’ and continued on with her day. Even Vesta screwed it up sometimes, even if she felt bad once Sara pointed out the way she’d inadvertently ignored Evie. Hurlish hadn’t done it once. And now she was going so far to ask if Evie would mind Sara staying te when the catgirl wasn’t even in the room.

  “No, I don’t think she’ll mind,” Sara said. “I’m not sure I could wake her up to ask, anyway. We’re waiting for some other stuff to shake out, so we don’t have much to do. That’s why I came over.”

  “Good,” Hurlish said, cpping her hands together. “Then you’re gonna learn how to make some more stuff, and I’m gonna listen to you yap about shit I don’t understand until it starts making sense.”

  Sara ughed warmly. “I’ll warn you, I’m not a teacher. That was my dad. I’ll try my best, though. What am I gonna be making?”

  Hurlish pulled out another rod of iron, identical to the first. “A metal punch, ‘course. But faster this time.”

  “Oh.” Sara had expected the master bcksmith to say a knife, or a dagger, or something at least a little bit more impressive than a punch.

  “You did better than most beginners,” Hurlish told her. “Doesn’t mean you were good enough. Get the heat going, then start bbbing. You said carbon is what turns iron into steel, not hammering, right? I wanna hear more about that.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Sara said, giving a salute that was less sarcastic than it might have otherwise been. It had been since… well, Sara couldn’t exactly recall, but it had been a very, very long time since she’d followed an order without having to bite back bile. Authority wasn’t something she did well with. Hurlish, though? The woman was easy to respect.

  “Carbon content for different steels varies,” Sara said as she pced the iron rod in the bzing furnace. She gave the bellows a good few presses as she spoke. “Tool steel is usually between about zero-point-five percent and one-point-five percent carbon, I think, but I mostly worked with stuff like carbon steel, like in rebar, which was anywhere between zero-point-zero-five, all the way up to two percent carbon. Really, purity matters almost as much as carbon content. You can’t have too many other elements–”

  “Is that what my Skill is trying to sniff out?” Hurlish asked, eyes distant, almost talking to herself. Her expression sharpened as she looked down at Sara. “I’ve got a Skill. Smith’s Sense. Got it when I first got my Css as a kid, still working under my pop’s. He loved it, because it let me sniff out the bad ore when we went to buy some.”

  “Maybe?” Sara hedged. She ignored the way Hurlish had just shared precise details of her Css with her, something wildly intimate in this society, instead focusing on the question. “There’s a lot of stuff that can screw up raw iron. I only ever worked with the finished stuff, putting it together. But it’d make sense.”

  “Huh.” Hurlish made a go-on gesture with her wrist. “Sorry. Keep at it.”

  “No problem. Like I was saying, how much carbon you want changes depending on what you’re making. Bdes, I’m guessing, you’d want a hard steel, to keep the edge, but for other tools you might want…”

  The conversation continued on, even as the day passed them by. At some point Evie came wobbling over with ptes of food, from where Sara didn’t know, then returned to the office, passing out once more. Sara and Hurlish kept working even as they ate, then long afterwards, even once the apprentices and junior smiths began to finish up and close down their own forges, leaving the room empty. They still didn’t stop talking and working when the streets grew dim and guards began to patrol, and they certainly didn’t stop when Hurlish had a neighbor come pounding on the door, compining that they were hammering away while he was trying to sleep.

  In fact, in the end, they didn’t even leave the forge. Hurlish had a house nearby, but instead they retired to her office te in the night, continuing to chat. They’d sat side by side on the sofa, Evie sprawled across their ps, with Hurlish enjoying the way the catgirl reacted to a gentle massage of her ears.

  When Hurlish eventually passed out on the couch, Sara realized that it was the first time since leaving the capital that she’d spent the night with someone without fucking them senseless. They’d just… talked. For hours.

  She could have fucked Hurlish, of course. The orc was more than up for it, and Evie was permanently down catastrophically bad. Yet Sara hadn’t bothered. She’d enjoyed the conversation too much to interrupt it.

  And it wasn’t like that she didn’t want to fuck Hurlish. After having the massive, muscur woman grabbing her limbs and adjusting her body like a doll all day? Christ. It was hard enough not to drool over those muscles. The day had left Sara almost as pent up as Evie.

  But instead of pushing the topic, Sara ended up waiting until the next morning, when she and Evie had awoken before Hurlish. Then she’d conspired with Evie to make sure the snoring orc started her day off right, with two women between her legs.

  At the end of that pleasant diversion, however, Sara’s mind was still locked on the thought. For Sara to spend most of a day, then an entire night without sex? That said something about Hurlish.

  Well. It also said something about Sara. The fact that she thought it was remarkable for her to go sixteen hours without fucking someone probably said a lot more about her than it did Hurlish, actually.

  But still, Sara thought as they left the forge, craning her head to watch the door slowly swing shut, hiding the sight of delectable green skin. Damn. What a woman.