Glory Season

So far, so good. Thinking through her predicament was much harder. After weeks of depressed numbness, the abrupt effect of all this adrenaline was both dizzying and exhilarating. She couldn’t help comparing her situation to those adventure reels Lamatia let summerlings watch during the high seasons, when the mothers were too busy to be bothered. Or illicit books Leie used to borrow off young vars from more lenient holds. In such tales, the heroine, usually a beautiful, winter-born sixer from an up-and-coming clan, found herself thrown against the dread schemes of some decadent house whose wealth and power was maintained by subversion rather than honest competition. Usually there was a token man, or a shipload of decent, clear-eyed sailors, in danger of being gulled by the evil hive. The ending was always the same. After being saved by the heroine’s insight and courage, the men promised to visit the small virtuous clan each winter for as long as the heroine’s mothers and sisters wanted them.

Virtue prevailing over venality. It seemed exciting and romantic on page or screen. But in real life, Maia had no mothers or sisters to turn to. She was a lone summerling fiver without a friend in the world. Clearly, Tizbe and her Jopland clients could do whatever they pleased to her.

That’s if they catch me, Maia thought, biting her lip to stop a quiver. Clenching her fists also helped. Defiance was a heady anodyne against fear.

Uh oh.

Coming to a dead stop, she swallowed hard. The trail had been meandering along a lip halfway down the canyon wall, but on turning a corner she found it suddenly plunging straight for a precipice. A rickety suspension bridge lay ahead, half of it in shadows and half reflecting painful moonlight to her dark-adapted eyes.

I must’ve taken a wrong turn. Calma could never have taken her wagon across that!

Tracing its spidery outline, Maia saw that the bridge hung over a gulch strewn with heaping mounds of ash and slag, trailing from a row of towering beehive structures on the opposite ridge. Here and there, Maia glimpsed red flickers from coal fires that were banked for the night, but never allowed to go out.

Iron foundries, she recognized with some relief. So this was Lerner Hold after all. Calma must have taken a slower freight route across the canyon floor. This was the more direct way.

Setting foot on the creaky, swaying bridge would have been frightening even by daylight. But what choice had she? I was never very good at this, she thought, remembering camping trips with other summerlings on the steppe near Port Sanger. She and Leie had loved the expeditions, putting up cheerfully with biting bugs and bitter cold. But neither of them had much love for crossing streams on teetering logs or skittish stones.

The bridge was definitely worse. Stepping forward cautiously, Maia took hold of the guide rope, which stretched across the ravine at waist level. She worked her way from handhold to handhold and plank to groaning plank, fearing at any moment to hear a shout of pursuit behind her, or the snap of some cable giving way. Eerie silence added further discomfort, driving home her loneliness.

Finally, on reaching the other side, she leaned against one of the anchor pillars and let out a ragged sigh. From the promontory, Maia surveyed the trail down which she had come. There was no sign of any full-scale search party, whose lights would be visible for kilometers. You’re probably making more of this than it deserves, she thought. To them you’re just a stupid var who stuck her nose where it didn’t belong. Lay low for a while and they’ll forget all about you.

It made sense. But then, maybe she was too stupid to know how much trouble she was in. Standing there, Maia felt the wind grow colder. Her fingers were numb, almost paralyzed, even when she blew on them. Shivering, she rubbed her hands and began peering among the furnaces and cliffside warehouses for the mansion where this branch of Lerner Clan dwelled and raised its daughters.

The house was a disappointment when she found it. She had envisioned the industrial Lerners constructing an imposing structure of steel arches, lined with stone or glass. What she came upon was a one-story warren, made of sod bricks, that rambled over half an acre. Just a few windows faced a front courtyard strewn with scrap and reclaimed junk of every description.

The windows were dark. If not for the soft hissing of the idle furnaces—and the odors—Maia might have thought the place deserted.

There was another sound, she realized. A faint one. Maia turned. She stepped carefully through the scrapyard until, rounding a corner of the house, she came in sight of a jumble of low structures, even more ramshackle than the “mansion.” Each had a small chimney from which trailed thin columns of smoke. Housing for the employees, she guessed.

One of these dwellings, set apart from the rest, seemed different. Dim light from the narrow curtained window illuminated a raked gravel path… and a small bed of neatly tended flowers. Approaching, Maia made out soft strains of music coming from within. She also smelled the aromas of cooking.

By the time she reached the door, Maia was shivering too much from the cold to be shy about lifting her hand and knocking.

* * *

Since taking jobs with the foundry only a month before, Thalla and Kiel had transformed the little cabin at the far end of the workers’ compound. “You’ll give up that foolishness soon enough,” the other employees had said. But the two young women faithfully set aside an hour each day, even after long, grueling shifts at the furnaces, to tend their garden and put their frayed house in order.

It had been tall, broad-shouldered Thalla who opened the door that night, clucking in concern and drawing Maia inside, putting her with a blanket and steaming teacup by the smoldering peat fire. Kiel, with her almost-pure black complexion and startlingly pale eyes, was the one who went to the Lerner clan mothers the next morning, and returned shortly with word that Maia could stay.

Naturally, she would have to work. “You’ll start in the scrap pile,” Kiel announced the morning after Maia’s flight from Jopland Hold. “Then you’re to spend a week learning how to shovel and ladle with the rest of us. Calma Lerner says if you’re still around after that, she’ll talk to you about an after-hours ’prenticeship in the alloys lab.”

The black woman laughed scornfully. “A ’prentice-ship. Now that’s a good one!”

Laboring for a clan of smiths wasn’t the life path Maia would have chosen. But barring some brilliant strategy to get to Grange Head without crossing paths with Tizbe’s gang, or the Joplands, it would have to do. Anyway, it was honorable work.

“What’s wrong with an apprenticeship,” she asked the older girl. “I thought—”

“You thought it was a way up the ladder, right.” Kiel waved a scarred, callused hand in dismissal. “Maybe in a fancy city, where you can hire a clone from some lawyer hive to go over your contract for you. But here? I guess you don’t know what ‘after hours’ means at Lerner Hold, do you?”

Maia shook her head.

“It means you get no wages for ’prentice time, no room-and-board points. In fact, you pay for the privilege of workin’ extra in their lab. They charge you, for lessons!”

“No quicker way into debtor’s trap,” Thalla agreed. “Except gambling.”

Debtor’s Trap was something Thalla and Kiel talked about all the time, as if they feared falling into bad habits if they ever let the subject drop. Only constant attention and thriftiness would let them prevail. Along with weeding the garden and sweeping the floor, the two young women ritually counted their credit sticks each night.

“It’s possible to come out ahead, even after food an’ lodgings are deducted,” Thalla said on the second evening, while helping Maia gingerly dab where hot cinders had scorched her skin. Heavy leather aprons and goggles had spared her body a worse singeing, but wearing all that armor made more exhausting the work of dragging heavy ladles brimming with molten, sunlike heat. It was labor even harder than working on ships, calling for the strength of a man, the patience of a lugar, and the disciplined diligence of a winter-born clone. Yet, only vars were employed in the furnaces. Only vars in need of work would put up with the miniature, artificial hell.

“Isn’t it required by law?” Maia asked, dipping her washcloth sparingly in a shallow basin of rationed water. “I thought employers had to pay enough so you could save.”

Thalla shrugged. “Sure it’s the law, handed down since the time of Lysos …”