Vulcan would likely agree with her, having such a powerful mother.Most alchemists started each session with a word for the god of the forge, and for the goddess who created him—Juno.
Sybil preferred someone else.“Warm the flames, Hestia, warm my blood, and help me heat the metal.”A goddess of fire and of the home.If she could do both, so too could Sybil.
The fire built slowly, the growing flames like pure sunlight across Sybil’s skin.This what she was born for—the forge, the fire, the act of creation.This what she was denied because she’d been born a woman.
Her skin knew when the fire was hot enough, and she stepped back to study the steel she’d brought with her.She placed it in the middle of the huge worktable that took up the center of the forge.The thick wooden table was beaten and bruised, scorched and weathered from five generations of Grant use.She placed the iron in the middle of the table and stepped back, studying it with one part of her mind, considering her sister-in-law with the other.Last summer, Temple had married a lovely woman from the transcendent class.A shocking woman.Diana Grant, Marchioness of Fordham defied convention, had earned herself a title in her own right and possessed magic no woman but for Queen Victoria possessed.
If Diana could defy unspoken social rules, history, and even British laws of primogeniture, then Sybil could defy her own chains.
Hopefully they were not made of iron.Cold and hard, her brother Temple’s metal.He shaped it with ease.Perhaps she would too.Gold had been easy.Silver child’s play.Copper a diverting little medium to craft.She’d tried a multitude of metals.But not yet iron.It had always seemed above her abilities, as untrained as they were.But since she was training herself, she might as well set herself a challenge.
Iron.
But what to make of it?
She circled the table and the unformed lump of metal at its middle.She’d thought of many possibilities over the last few weeks she’d carried it in her pocket.A weapon, jewelry, something practical for the kitchen or forge.None of it felt quite right.She could alloy it.She was particularly good at that.Combine it with nickel or carbon.
She was tired of thinking.The clock ticked down.
She plucked the iron off the table and strode to the fire.She’d figure it out as she worked.
The flames danced, calling to her, spiraling into beautiful, violent ribbons of rage.Clutching the iron lump in her fist, she held her hand near the heat, closed her eyes.Her first time with iron.She must keep it simple.No alloys.The metal must teach her how it moved, what its strengths and weaknesses were, how it could be shaped.At what point of abuse it would be broken.She must learn its rhythm and its song, must learn to coax it, play with it.There would be no domination—her will over its needs.
Sybil and the iron would work together.
Her hand was warming, flames licking skin and bone until it burned bright.She thrust it farther into the flames.
Ice and sunlight.That’s what it felt like.Cold and hot at the same time.And perfect.Always perfect.She breathed low and steady until the iron melted, pouring across her flame-hardened skin.
“What do you wish to be, lovely?”she whispered through the wavering heat.The iron buzzed and bubbled.She felt that way often—buzzing and bubbling, trapped and trying to find the right shape.A key.She’d take the shape of a key to attack the lock that kept her trapped.
The iron found its purpose, and she laughed, knowing now how to shape it.She pulled her hand from the forge and strode for the worktable, letting the air cool the iron just a bit, enough to begin shaping.Her arm glowed bright orange, and her fingernails were bright white pinpricks of light.When she had the basic shape, she threw her arm into a nearby bucket of water and grinned at the sizzle, the steam.It tickled.
A drop of sweat rolled down her temple, another down the slope of her neck, and beneath her stays and man’s shirt, she was sopping.Breast sweat was horrid, and not something her brothers must deal with.Lucky bastards, all of them.
She shaped and hollowed.She poked through odds and ends in the shop as the metal cooled.She plunged it once more into the flames and splashed it again into the bucket.She assembled tiny bits and tested little mechanisms.
Outside her window, the shadows of the little wood behind Nickleby House shifted with the sun’s position in the sky.She noted the change.She must always note the time in these stolen hours.Her parents were less traditional than many of the alchemist set, but they would still drop stone dead if they knew what she was doing when they were away.
And what exactly was that?
She could not make a career out of metal as her brothers could.
Not this way.Not with her hands in the fire and metal beneath her nails.
But her inventions, the work of her mind—that would be her purpose.Her self-apprenticeship in the forge would help her better understand the metals so that her designs weren’t merely theoretical.She needed a working knowledge of her materials for her inventions to surpass the current boundaries of impossibility.
None of that mattered, though.She would have to wed, and a transcendent husband would barely tolerate her sketched fancies, and she’d be stealing fewer secret hours in the forge than ever before.Perhaps none.
Sybil stood, stretching her back and blowing a lock of hair out of her eyes.She’d tried the marriage path.It hadn’t worked out.And now that only the transcendents would have her…
Ew.
Preening, narcissistic nodcocks, the lot of them.
She picked up the old rag and found the tub of setting liquid.She used the tongs to plunge the lock into the bucket, rubbed it clean, set it to dry.Now no one could mess with the metal, reshape it to their whims.She poised above the setting liquid to immerse the key.
The clatter of carriage wheels on the road out front made her jump.
