Almost as if she’d been waiting for him to turn his light off or something Ursala slipped into bed next to him just a few moments after he’d settled back to go to sleep.
The move surprised Tor more than a little and even more when she started kissing him, warmly, as she pressed against him.
She whispered to him that she really didn’t feel up to having sex yet, because of her poisoning, which he understood fully, he let her know. Plus, he confided to her, he didn’t actually know what to do, so he probably wouldn’t be very good anyway.
Chuckling she told him…
If not everything he’d need to know, a lot of it. He knew that more than once he muttered “what” in a shocked tone that probably sounded strange to poor Sara who was trying to sleep, or at least had turned her own light off so as to not bother them. Seriously, some of the things she claimed peopled did in bed regularly barely seemed physically possible.
Before she left him, about an hour later, she’d managed to get her top off, which she then had him explore intimately and managed to grope him in places that made him blush to think about, even while she did it. It felt nice, and he really wanted to do a lot more. Some of the things she’d mentioned doing sounded alluring, if wrong.
Not the acts themselves, which he figured, if they were really possible to do, were all normal enough, even if a hick like him didn’t know about it. No, Tor just couldn’t escape the feeling that Rolph was going to suddenly burst in and start hacking him apart with a sword. Who could blame him? Except, by the rules of Rolph’s own class, Tor wasn’t even doing anything incorrect at all.
It was confusing.
Ursala kissed him for a while before going back to her own bed, much to Tor’s relief. Oh, he wanted a lot more from her, that was made painfully clear. Denying it wouldn’t work at all, his body had responded way too easily and obviously for him to try and delude himself there. But by the same token, he had to be up in about six hours and was more than a little tired.
The next day he got to baking early, well before Sorlee got into the kitchen at all. He had the plates with him for the griddles, but, well, no griddles.
At breakfast he popped his head into the dining hall, a large building connected by a hallway to the kitchen, so that the heat could be kept out as much as possible without anyone ever having to walk outside with food. It was a solid and glassy reddish color, with magical lights on the ceiling. He found Godfrey sitting with Kolb at a long table and just because he knew that he needed to eat more, got a small plate of food and joined them, pulling over a heavy chair.
He explained the griddles to Godfrey, which after a minute had the man making notes and drawing a basic plan out.
“So the top has to be metal, but the rest can be focus stone?”
“Um, focus stone?” Tor asked, having never heard the term before.
“Yes. Some of the men decided that “Concentrated dirt” didn’t sound like something you’d want your dishware to be made of, so they came up with focus stone. So far most seem to like the name alright.” He sounded slightly nervous, like Tor was going to have a problem with it. Anything not called Tor-whatever was brilliant as far as he was concerned.
“OK, please tell them I like the name, will you? Focus stone for the base and everything but the device and the metal griddle.”
Tor turned the heating devices over to the man and went back to work, wondering how many days it would take for them to be available in the kitchen. The answer was three hours. Even then, one of the men that came over with carrying the griddles in to the room confided, it wouldn’t have taken that long, but they’d had to send someone down to the Capital to buy the metal tops.
Cook, who had a real name that Tor had never learned, he was sure, took to the new devices instantly and most of the lunch meal was prepared on them. Hot meat sandwiches and grease fried potatoes. It wasn’t Tor’s favorite kind of food personally, but the men in the dining hall acted as if it were suddenly a festival day. Tor took some back for Ursala and Sara, only to find that, when he got there, they were both gone. Not knowing what else to do, he settled down to eat his share of the food and wait. When no one came back after half an hour, he decided to walk around and see what was up with everyone else.
He didn’t find the girls, but a whole new compound looked to be going up in the back, complete with a dozen new buildings and their own wall. It was connected on one side to the rest of the wall, which had a large door cut in it now, ten feet high and twice that wide. The huge slab had been removed by cutter, then floated off to the side and was lying out of the way on the ground to the left of the new door. No one paid much attention to him as he walked through, except for when he got in the way for a few seconds, and people started yelling at him to move. Laughing he scampered back just as a team of twenty people, men and women, started digging out a foundation that was marked off to make a vast building he saw. Really big. About half the size of the palace. What it was for he had no clue, but thinking about the palace made him decide to go and visit. First he needed to head off to the beach and lay out the new river for testing…
He shook his head and laughed.
He needed too? No it just had to be done. Tor could just find someone to do it and act like a sensible person for once, not haring off all over the continent trying to do it all himself. He’d just take a couple of the rivers down to the palace with him in a few days or… Would that be a good first training exercise for Kolb’s people? Sure it would, since he was making it all up anyway. How long could they have a new river in place going from the ocean, to both his place and the military base for the flyers, before anyone reported it to the military anyway? If they could manage a couple of hours, that would be pretty good, wouldn’t it? The sun beat down on him, which he didn’t feel the heat from at least as he searched around for the bald man. Who, it turned out was directing the building of guard towers for the walls at the back.
The things were… Big. They stuck up in a way that certainly caught the eye. Not bigger than the palace parapets, perhaps, but with nothing even close to their height around they looked vast. Well, it was fine, he guessed, as long as they balanced it out in the front too. It wasn’t very humble, but maybe no one would notice, being that they were way out in the middle of nowhere? The glassy red-black of the focus stone looked good at least. Count Ross would be jealous of his wall and little town if he ever got to see it or that old gardener or mason fellow who’d laid claim to it would at least.
If he hadn’t already used some of the “borrowed and lost” equipment to make his own new wall. Then enjoyed a soak in a tub with a water heater from the same place? Tor laughed about it. He’d yet to see that box of stuff show up, but then again, maybe they just didn’t know where to send it? Or, just possibly they sent it off to Two Bends like he’d said to. That would be fine. For that matter they could keep it, now that there was a war on, if they could use any of it for the effort.
Tor found some shade that didn’t look too likely to be buried, blown up or needed for the next hour or two, sat down on a single small patch of scrubby grass and waited for Kolb to either finish up or not be needed any more. After about twenty minutes the man noticed him and came over.
“Tor?”
The words were hesitant as if he didn’t know what to call him. Tor worked well enough. It was his name and really, Kolb calling him sir or worse, lord something or other would just be wrong, in more ways than one. Technically he was still just the guys Squire, so “boy” could work, in a pinch.
“You wanted to know a little more about what kind of force you’re supposed to build?” Tor took a deep breath and fell into as deep a trance as he could manage and still talk clearly. He sucked at lying and was only marginally better at making things up on the fly. Planning was his big thing, really, where Tor shined, if he could be said to at all most of the time.
“What we need is a fast action team. You do anything and go anywhere. This is to be results oriented. You’ll get orders, but those will just have the needed goal. Go and do whatever, and the when it needs to be done if that’s important… if the time or timing is important I mean. The rest is up to you and your people. No rules, no one looking over your shoulder and no specific task profile. Anything means anything. One day you might take on a Count’s army by yourselves, the next you may all be servicing sailors in some port whorehouse. You’ll never have enough time, resources or planning and will probably have to set out to do everything on a moment’s notice as a rule. Right now I want you to pick a team for your first job.” Tor smiled.
