Troy sat at the head of the table and waved to catch Milo’s attention. “If you do the spellwork on the necklaces now, though, won’t the magic fail before they can even be used?”
“Huh? Ohhhh, right, I told you the spell would only last about six months. No, no, I meant six monthsof use. Unless the necklace is touching skin, the spell isn’t active. I actually saw one necklace last a full year because it was a mild winter.”
“Oh, you meant six months of active everyday use.”
“Correct-o.”
“That does make more sense.”
Dinner wrapped up there. Rowan took himself off—he normally did a last patrol around the fortress to make sure everyone was set on night watch at this hour—and people dispersed. Roana followed Milo to his workroom, while Reagan said she needed to stop by her room first. The workroom still needed to be properly unpacked and organized, but he didn’t have the right shelf space yet. Rowan had found a good worktable and chairs to put in here, which at least gave them space to work. Luckily, he had plenty of oil lamps, but he’d cast a few mage lights if needed.
Milo dug through crates that had been brought in earlier, finding the base materials. Platinum wire, rectangular platinumbases, plus spools of leather cord with small hooks to attach. Good, everything he’d ordered.
Setting some of it on the table, he then fetched the basic tools, including wire cutters and pliers. Reagan entered the room and started setting out her own tools, and within a minute she was already set up in her chair and ready to go.
Roana was messing with her twin by carefully pushing the plier handle juuuuust so it wasn’t perfectly aligned with everything else. Reagan glared at her and moved it back.
Roana slowly reached over to do it again, got a smack on the hand for it, and snickered, delighted at the reaction.
With the way she was acting, it was like having Ruben in the room.
Handing tools to Roana, Milo started explaining. “I’ll do one so you’ve got an example to look at, but it’s really not very hard. Most of it is assembly, which I think you can do blind, Reagan. The one part that needs to be accurate is the sigil itself. We’re making a stylized fire emblem.”
“Uh…how?” Reagan looked around in askance. “With paint, or…?”
“No, with the platinum wire. It has to be all platinum because the warming spell won’t react well to ink or paint. It has to be metal.” Milo had made charms like this so many times, he could eyeball everything. He cut himself a nice length of wire and then started bending it. “Have you not seen heating charms before?”
“Well, we’ve heard of them, but the previous mages didn’t do stuff like this. Uncle Harold was old.” Roana shrugged likewhat else was there to say?
Granted, if the man had been old and near retirement age, he’d likely had to cut back on how much work he’d done. It made sense he’d focus more on maintaining spells for safety.
Both girls watched carefully as Milo bent the wire into a stylized flame shape. Hardly bigger than his fingernail, it wasn’tsuper fancy, just three small triangular-ish shapes, like a small fire reaching upward.
“There, done. It doesn’t have to be thisexactshape, but something fire looking. Also the right width to fit on the platinum base. Now, once this wire is done, I’ll fix it to the base like so…” Milo grabbed a small base and enacted a very simple spell. “Fuse.”
The emblem welded itself onto the platinum base obediently, acting like he’d taken it to flame to manage just that.
“I won’t place the heating spell on it yet. You’re going to need to touch it a lot in order to finish the necklace, after all. But that’s the gist.”
“We won’t be able to fuse, though, right?”
“You won’t, so just set the emblems aside after making them. I’ll come through at night before bed and fuse them all together, then do batches of the charm later once it’s completely assembled.”
“Lots of steps to this,” Roana observed.
“True, but it’ll go so much faster with you two helping me.” Which was absolutely the truth.
Roana eyed the wire, then decisively reached for it and cut off a strip, much like Milo had done. She carefully used the pliers to bend it, and the shape was decent; nothing Milo deemed worthy of correcting.
“Like this?”
“Yup, that’s just fine.”
Roana was pleased by the praise. Of the two, she wasn’t crafty by nature, more the outdoorsy sort. Both twins had told him that earlier but were also adamant about helping. Reagan tapped her on the shoulder, pointing to Roana first. “Wire?” Then pointed to herself. “Assembly?”
“Done,” Roana agreed.
Well, they had a nice division of labor. Reagan would be more comfortable with the actual assembly of the necklaces, and the wire bending was something Roana seemed comfortable doing.
