Lora of Two Worlds

Lora had stepped down to talk with Norton, and the carriage behind her set up a heave and commotion — till a shape came flying down out of it, panting ”hff, hff,” and made straight for Norton. Everyone cried out at once:

”Chance! No pouncing!”

Lucy came running, all out of breath: ”My lady — Chance is too strong! I couldn’t hold him!”

Back up in the carriage, at the first sight of Norton, Lora had feared just this — Chance going over to pounce, the wound torn open — and had made Lucy hold the leash and keep him in for the while.

Norton was glad to see the dog too, and led Chance off toward the manor.

From the gate arch and into the manor, the whole road was people greeting Lora:

”The young lady’s come!”

”Our grapes are ripe — come pick some, my lady!”

Behind her a man cut in fast on his woman: ”You silly creature — why not pick them and carry them to her?”

For two days now all East Manor had been passing it round: the master’s youngest daughter had a book of heaven — everything in the world written in it, the very organs inside a man’s belly shown clear as clear.

How else had that physician out of Augustburg carried a first-time surgery?

In the spring it had been the ”loose-tight interleaved composting” the young lady taught Steward Coltrain — wheat straw that wanted no burning, but could be laid up and composted like manure.

Such a plain, simple method — how had a young lady who had never worked a field in her life thought of it?

This summer past they had bought no manure at all from the Taggs, the night-soil family.

Think of it now — that too must have stood written in the ”book of heaven.”

Now, seeing the young lady come, every house picked out the best of the melons and fruit grown before the door and behind it, and carried them up to the little courtyard by the hill. In this weather — the seventh month, the season when melons and fruit begin to come ripe — the tenants went about glowing, like folk at New Year.

The little courtyard by the hill was lively already. Several of the stewards’ wives had come early to light the fires and cook, to set the tables and sweep.

Chance was a born society man, and went trotting into the courtyard ahead of his two masters.

In the main room, filling the eye, stood a wheelchair solid as a bank of earth — a pity they could not forge Emotionless’s iron one; the stuff of it was still wood.

Reading the small letdown in Lora’s face, Coltrain laughed with his pride up:

”It was a rushed job — the smiths couldn’t puzzle out the ironwork — so we made the pattern in wood first. The chair’s stuff is nothing much to look at. What we lean on is the weapons that come out of nowhere. Those two daggers — you’d hunt the whole world over and not find iron harder.”

”The hardest iron in the world?”

Lora knew her numbers: the best furnace heat this day topped out at thirteen hundred degrees — carbon steel, asking fourteen fifty, lay clean beyond them. So what iron anywhere could lay claim to ”hardest”?

”My lady — my godfather brought out his meteorite iron, treasured better than twenty years. Iron that flew down out of the sky — would you call that fierce or not? Ah — and does your book of heaven set down the why of it? Why is it so hard?”

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Under the father’s and the son’s hungry, asking eyes, Lora blinked and blinked:

”It — it’s set down, yes. Because it came from beyond the sky, burning the whole way down... and it turned to iron of very high purity — eight parts iron in ten, and two parts of something harder than iron... Eh? Meteorite iron is monstrously hard to melt. How did you manage it?”

Father and son laughed together:

”It doesn’t have to be melted and run into molds to take its shape. Get it red-hot and hammer it — that’s all. It only eats the time.”

As he spoke, Coltrain pressed the switch inside the chair’s armrest — a dagger on its cord shot out, and coming down rang off the flagstones, striking sparks.

Drawn back and looked at: the dagger ran black and bright through its whole body, a red light glimmering under the surface, and the meteorite iron’s own grain flowing its own way.

”No great treasure, either — the piece was just too small, and no smith would take it in hand. This time we set them working twelve watches round, without a stop, and many days on before it took its shape. And this is only the first crude thought of the thing. The bettering of it — that the young lord must puzzle out for himself.”

Lora laughed: ”This is already fine. Send it flying out to put a fright into somebody, and you’ve bought yourself room to turn in.”

She was still touching here and pressing there when Lilac’s call came in from outside: ”My lady — the third lord and the lord are come.”

She stepped out the door — and stood struck dumb:

All that labor over the wheelchair — and the man came walking in, his little mustache pasted on.

”What? Someone in there you don’t know?” Roland had seen the odd turn of Lora’s face.

”Nothing. None of you go into the house — the back pavilion has melon and fruit laid out. Eat and watch the view — isn’t that better than the house?” Lora led the way toward the pavilion.

Leon lifted his eyes to the silkworm-thorn trees on the hill: ”The manor’s wide — whatever’s done inside, no outside eye grows the wiser. Besides the new smithy Roland spoke of, you’ve the makings of bows here as well.”

”Right. Horseshoes are already in trial use. Your Little Penn Village and our East Manor — fitting out two thousand picked men should be no trouble at all. When the winter recruiting for the defense levy opens, we set both engines going together.”

Roland and his father had thrashed this out between them already: the public road and the private road running side by side — the very best cover for prying eyes.

Leon’s private soldiers would pass openly as tenants — farming at the busy seasons, drilling in the slack — nothing, on the face of them, to tell from the old local militia.

”The rear is already moving. Leon — time your eyes went to Augustburg. I stayed a good long stretch there this time; every man who needed seeing, I saw. Some of them are quietly passing you physicians’ names even now. They haven’t forgotten you.”

The business of pulling Dorothy Dunbar out of her trap in Augustburg had burned Felix’s romantic dreams away entire.

The night before, Leon had told him everything of the road out and back from Yorvik; a sour twinge crossed Felix’s heart — but the one was the little cousin he had watched grow up, and the other the closest friend of his boyhood.

And the gladness in him outweighed the ache.

The one matter before his eyes was setting Leon on that throne. Everything else, he chose not to chew on.

This Augustburg journey had shifted the ground under Felix, subtly. The men he had gone round to were all officials who had thought well of Leon in the old years.

No one said it out loud, but every heart knew it: the sixth lord of Lohenheim — his legs were near whole.

Greene had come to see him in private — and there was another with him.

”Hugh Horn, the Queen’s brother, is making a great go of it in Augustburg these days. Openly, the Queen Mother’s own younger brother; privately, an outside official tangled up with the chamberlains; in actual fact — the watch you planted in Augustburg. Leon, keep a firm grip on him.” Felix smiled.

Lora had heard it too. Her curiosity came up:

”Then you’re holding something over him?” That wasn’t how the histories had it.

”Sixth-lord sent men ahead of everything to St. Anselm’s Abbey, where Horn had once lodged — to the abbot who knew the story of his birth. What came from the abbot and what came from the Queen Mother were two different things: the man is no long-lost younger brother of hers at all.

By then Legard and Voss, working hand in glove, had already hung the queen’s-brother title on him and moved him into a duke’s mansion. With the abbot’s written attestation in our hands — would he do anything but come to heel?”

Felix lifted the cup Lora had poured him and gave it a small smile:

”And here’s a pretty thing — on this queen’s-brother business, little cousin and the sixth lord read it one and the same, without a word passing between you. One called him a fraud; the other went and dug out his very lair. Truly...”

”A perfect match.”

Leon lifted his own cup of tisane, salted just right, and sipped it, slow and easy.