Valir, who had silently listened, asked with a thin smile.
“I suppose he has learned from the best, right, Mr. Hawke?”
The older man chuckled, and Kraghtol had the distinct feeling of having missed a crucial bit of context.
“You have a keen eye, Mr. el Greylune. And you can call me Torven. But yes, you are right. I used to have the same rank until I retired. What gave it away?”
“The framed diploma on the wall. And the inquisitive way you looked at Kragh while he was talking.”
He smiled his usual smile of superiority but paddled back immediately.
“I knew the story already, so I had time to look around.”
Torven exchanged a look with his wife Marla, and only when she nodded, did he sigh.
“Yes, I was with the Guild of Peace, and I suppose old habits die hard.”
He stood up and retrieved a pipe from a nearby cupboard, but Kraghtol noticed he walked around the room while doing so, as if making sure all the doors and windows were closed. Finally, he sat down again and lit the pipe.
“Did you know Marla made the alchemical core driving the clock tower?”
All three people in the room stared at the older man.
“Torven!” Marla protested, but her husband shook his head.
“It’s alright. I believe it’s only fair to share a bit of our story with these two, and it helps the point I’m about to make.”
He turned towards his guests and took a drag from his pipe before continuing.
“I’ve never told this story to anyone, and I have not written it down, because if people knew too much about it, it would endanger both Marla and me. But who am I telling this to? It seems you are in much the same situation I have tried to avoid for forty years now. It goes without saying that you cannot tell anyone what you’re about to hear now, are we understood?”
He took a moment to wait for both Valir and Kraghtol to nod in agreement before continuing.
“When I was young, I was a criminal, born into a family of thieves and murderers. I didn’t consider what I was doing wrong, but then again, I didn’t think too much at all. Do not get me wrong: this is not supposed to be an excuse. I have often pondered my guilt from that time since, but I digress. At 17, I met a… peculiar person. A dwarf named Voldrik, who came all the way from the Bronzebreak Mountains and claimed to be an inventor. He had bought the old harbormaster’s office — the clock tower building — and my family planned to rob him of everything he had, and I was part of that plan.”
Torven’s eyes scanned the closed windows again and finally settled on a point kilometers behind Kraghtol when he continued.
“I won’t bore you with the details, but in the end, I turned against my family, and even against the guilds in a way, and helped Voldrik complete his dream instead. Because of who he was and what he taught me. It was… eye-opening. He taught me to write, to think and to see, all over the course of just a few months. And he showed megrandeur. We built the clock tower, the landmark of Winterstone, as an act ofdefianceagainst the guilds.”
“Wait.Youbuilt the clock tower? Forty years ago? But why is it half-deserted like that? And why isn’t there a statue of the dwarf in front of it or anything? It looked like nobody had been in the building for decades.”
Kraghtol’s interruption seemed to amuse Torven.
“Curious, eh? Well, there are two reasons for this. First, it’s a masterpiece, and I probably contributed to that the least. Marla’s alchemicalcore is still going strong after forty years, driving the clockwork that sprang from the mind of a genius. It just doesn’t need maintenance, and thus the building just remained locked. That’s the practical reason. But there’s more to that. Wehumiliatedthe guilds back then.”
He tapped the ash onto the tray, and his eyes sparkled with a long-suppressed pride.
“We played their power game — and we won. The clock tower was too useful not to keep. But everything that led to its creation, they tried to erase. And they succeeded. Voldrik had escaped, and the wings of his dream carried him away, but Marla and I remained. The guilds had their ways of punishing each and every one of us. They made people stop speaking about Voldrik, and soon, he was forgotten, not even remaining a footnote in the city’s history. The way we played them meant they couldn’t just imprison me, so they made me a high-ranking official, always under close watch, waiting for me to sayonewrong word. And Marla…”
“They ended my career,” the teacher said flatly. “I was not a big part of what had happened back then, but I was the easiest one to punish. The Alchemists’ Guild took me under contract as a teacher for basic alchemy and forbade me from ever inventing any new alchemical mixture again.”
For the first time, Kraghtol understood the cruelty of that action. Marla Hawke must have been a bright mind in her time, and she had had all the tools needed to create those minor miracles Kraghtol had always imagined as a child. And then, someone put her under an alchemical contract never to use them again. No wonder she broke like that.
Kraghtol glanced over at Valir, who appeared to have similar thoughts reflected on his face. A thousand questions were burning on his tongue, and he decided on the most pressing.
“Why didn’t you just go away?”
Marla smiled, and her voice was bittersweet. “Perhaps we should have. But the reach of the guilds is long, and the longer we waited, the stronger their grip on our lives had become. And when we had Roderic, we had to make sure he would have the best life possible. It’s not all bad, too. Torven and I could use what power we had to do some good here and there.”
