And when he tossed her over his shoulder, she was silent for a shocked second.
And then she wasn’t.“What do you think you’re doing?”she demanded.“It only hurts a tiny bit!”
“I think it’s rather obvious what I’m doing.”
“Put me down!You’ve seen I can walk on my own.”
He had.He just… didn’t want her to be able to.Not yet.He paused only briefly before the front door, a stutter of a step revealing that truth.Then he opened the door and plopped her onto her feet (one bare) in the entryway.
“Stay here.”He backed out of the doorway.
“Where are you?—”
He put his finger on the tip of her nose, and her eyes crossed as she looked at it.“Stay here.”
Then he slammed the door between them and headed back to the stables.It took less time than before to find his way to the blacksmith’s forge, and this time he didn’t waste time knocking.
The blacksmith looked up from his anvil, a staff of iron glowing hot in one hand and a hammer heavy and raised in the other.He dropped the staff’s hot end in a bucket of water.“What the hell do you wa?—”
“Listen here, cretin.You’re going to give me every single one of your tools.Now.And a cart in which to carry them.”
The blacksmith laughed, putting his hammer down and stabbing the blade into a nearby bucket of water where it sizzled.“You’re mad.”
Hewasmad.He had no power to beat this man, not physically or socially.He had no money and few connections, nothing of his own but for a tattered book filled with his grandmother’s handwriting and pressed flowers and herbs.He had the clothes on his back and several deals with the devil.
He also had a glorious woman, beaten but not defeated and for one hour of his cursed life he could give her the one thing he had—himself.
Cowardly and lying.Untrustworthy and selfish.
Apollo marched across the forge, reached into the water bucket, and retrieved the cooling staff of iron, not yet fully formed into its destiny.It was still hot, but he was ready, and when it was held between him and the blacksmith, he reached for his heat.It came quickly, readily, as if the days spent in the magnifying room had settled heat against his skin like sunbeams against glass.
The metal blazed to life, and Apollo shaped it swiftly, intuitively, sliding it between the fingers and thumb of his opposite hand.
Too curious or too stupid to be wary, the blacksmith watched him, was caught off guard when Apollo put the sharp, burning point of a newly honed sword against his neck.The blacksmith’s skin scorched until he remembered it didn’t have to, and his heat rose up to protect him.
“You’re safe against the heat,” Apollo said, “but not against a knife’s edge.You do what I say, or I slice through your throat and simply take all the tools myself.But if you help me, you can have your life and, perhaps, a favor from London.Better tools.I’m related to the Royal Alchemist, and I have trained in the Master Alchemist’s forge.Give me these old tools and receive better.Or…” He pressed the tip of the blade harder against the blacksmith’s artery.
“Fine!”the blacksmith yelped.“Fine!Just take ’em!”
“Glad to see you’re so practical.I do appreciate a solid sense of self-preservation.”Something he seemed to have lost in the last half hour.
But whatever his loss, Sybil had gained.
And he was rather uncomfortable with how that made up for just about anything.
15
A STURDY TABLE
Sybil read Diana’s letter one more time, standing over the sketches she’d torn from Stone’s notebook and organized in wobbly lines across her bedchamber floor.She’d spent the last few days arranging them and rearranging them to see if order made any difference in understanding.It was the most she could do without tools.And Apollo had locked himself up in the parlor, practicing alchemy.
Of course he’d become just as secretive as all the alchemists she’d ever known.She should have expected it.
Between the letter and the pages and Apollo’s disappearance, she was ready to cry.Diana sent little that Sybil didn’t already know.True alchemy, the ability to turn lead into gold, was nothing but a myth, one that had often driven alchemists to madness.
That explained Stone.
It also meant she should give up her own quest to understand the device.Bedlam, she’d heard, was hell on earth.Yet…
