Aylem, under the fir tree

If I was interested in this little Coyn girl before, I was now ready to take her home with me. I realized how difficult that would be, which was a new problem. It looked like she was someone who may have escaped enslavement as a Coyn in my kingdom. She would not want to go back.

The scarring on her left hand and the extremes of fear around an adult Cosm like myself argued she escaped one of the many abusive situations that existed for Coyn in my own realm. She did not act like the Sea Coyn traders I had met nor did she look like them. There was a country of only Coyn who lived on the coast, some 30 wagon-days to the west. I had met enough of them to know there was little resemblance between them and the little Coyn in front of me. The Sea Coyn had brown skin and high, broad cheekbones.

They came every year to the trading fair on the river six wagon-days from the berry bogs and salt pans of Black Falls, the southern-most town in the Kingdom of the Foskos. They traded sugar, linen, cotton, soft gums, spices, soap, and mules. We traded copper and copper alloys, obsidian, alum, lead, pigments, lumber, wool, sheepskin, magic tools, and healing potions. From the coast, the trade route for them crossed high mountains to reach the sinks of the Salt River. From there, they traveled the river in boats pulled by mules upstream, through a high desert of alternating salt-pan valleys and long north-south mountain ridges, until they reached the trading fair site of Uldlip.

The Sea Coyn had to make the trip from the sea coast to Uldlip and back again between the opening of the mountain passes late in the planting season until the first snow in the early harvest season. Those who did not return in time were blocked by snow in the passes. Those unfortunates had to spend the cold season at the west end of the Salt River Sinks, at the Tuleen caravansary there. Some trading companies even operated two different branches to transport their trading goods to Uldlip: one to cross the mountains and one to travel the Salt River.

No, my little fainted Coyn was not a Sea Coyn from the west. Her behavior around me was all wrong. No matter how reasonably I argued, she would not want to return to my side of the lava plains. I debated whether I should keep her unconscious and bring her home with me without asking. I discarded that option after a moment's consideration. What I wanted was trust. Taking her home with me would not create it.

The other problem is that my husband, Imstay, and his soldiers would certainly arrive in the morning to bring me and the children home. Imstay treats Coyn like property. He is the kind of man who would scoop up my little Coyn treasure and turn her into his possession based on the novelty of the matches alone, which Heldfirk will certainly tell him about.

I needed a plan to prevent Imstay from capturing her but first, I needed to fix her hand so she at least looked like a free Coyn. I sat the fainted girl in my lap and wrapped my hand around hers. I started with replacing the scarred skin with healthy skin. Then I removed the scars she had on both wrists. At some point, either she or someone else had slit her wrists.

Slitting wrists was an unfortunate scam for certain lowlifes who wanted to dispose of unprofitable Coyn. An owner did not pay the Coyn kill tax if a Coyn committed suicide. Those slash scars on her wrists told me volumes of what this girl had suffered.

While I had her in my lap, I couldn't resist looking at her old injuries. The badly-set bones of her forearm had to hurt. The crushed egg-shell depression on the side of her skull told me she once suffered a traumatic head injury. That might be the cause of her muteness. If so, a few months at the Healing Shrine of Mugash would cure her---assuming I could get her to stay there.

Heldfirk brought in the blankets, dry clothes, and food from my saddlebags while I gathered and packed the Coyn's possessions. That's when I saw the knife and hatchet. In a land with no steel technology, her tools were steel. The tools had homemade hilts and tool marks in the metal that were not polished out. That suggested to me that she made these herself. I went through the contents of her pouch and found something more valuable than a healing potion: a steel needle.

I had no idea how to make steel, I realized. I was training to be a bookkeeper in trade school when I died in the bombing of Coventry. I knew nothing at all about making metals or chemicals.

This girl wasn't just a runaway Coyn. She was the goose laying golden eggs or the possessor of Midas's gold touch. She had matches and steel. It would be perfect if she had glass too. Just the former were enough for a normal everyday greed; however, now I was feeling a gargantuan avarice. I didn't want to share this Coyn with my idiot husband. He would terrorize her and rob her knowledge to fund his wars.

I would cure her injuries and heal her injured soul, then spoil and cozen her for the riches she could create. Using that, I could then build a kingdom where none were slaves and no one would traffic in other races to make a profit. Influence and magic were power in this world. I had the magic side of the equation. If I could make this girl a partner, I might gain enough wealth to finally build some real influence to finally achieve the dream of a just world that I've had since I was a little girl.

I packed up her possessions and then selected some gifts to make up for the bear meat that the hungry and greedy Asgotl gobbled up. He also tore the leather bag that contained the meat. I hoped the Coyn could repair it. Such items were invaluable in the wilderness where pioneers had to be self-sufficient. I put aside a jar of pickled vegetables, a box of salt, a small pouch of brass coins, and half the box of pemmican for the Coyn. I rationed the other half for the children to eat and I abstained.

I wrote a message in English to the Coyn in charcoal on the pemmican box. I then pondered stealing the matches but remembered the girl's reluctant face when I demanded to see her fire trick. I guessed it wasn't easy to make matches and decided it wasn't right to take someone else's hard work without prior consent.

It was difficult not to take the knife. I wanted that knife! Copper alloys just didn't cut anywhere near as well as steel and I was sick and tired of fighting with my mutton and my beef. How could I get her to make me a steak knife?

I could heal almost any injury. I could mend almost any sorrow or mental anguish. I could cast every charm known to mages. I had the power to use the sacred vision crystal. I could read minds if I wanted and force others to do my will. I could kill with a thought if I needed to. My magic was frightening and the greatest in the kingdom; but none of that granted me the power to cut my meat with a knife that would stay sharp for more than five minutes. It was a standard of living issue.

I put the Coyn to sleep so she would wake well after the sun rose. She would not wake until we were long gone. I blessed my foresight in tacking out Asgotl with the multi-person saddle and told the griffin to wake me at first light. We were in the air and halfway across the plain when I saw the first advance scout of my husband's flying cavalry. Soon, he and the rest of the troops were following me back home to the palace.

Imstay was after me the second he hopped off his griffin. "Just what were you thinking, going off by yourself after the children?"

I stopped in my trek to Opo'aba's chambers. I had my sleeping girl in my arms and wanted to get her into bed as expeditiously as possible; however, Imstay's complaints always took priority over the wellbeing of his children. I don't think he even realized he did that.

I looked down at him, which he hated. As the biggest person in the kingdom, I couldn't help but bruise his ego as a manly man. "Imstay, husband, there is very little in existence that can hurt me but much which might harm our son and daughter. There was no reason not to go once I found them, and many good reasons to do so. There is nothing more to say on the subject."

I turned on my heel and left him in the dust of my long stride.

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Emily, under the fir tree

I woke alone under the fir tree, wrapped in a wool blanket with a small feather pillow under my head. From the position of the sun, it was mid-morning. If it were not for the goods the Cosm left behind, I might have mistaken the whole episode for a strange dream.

On a wood box, much bigger than I could easily carry, the monster lady had written in English: "4 U - C U soon." I couldn't turn down all this food but the message of "see you soon" was worrying. If Cosm began to visit my valley, I had to be prepared to move elsewhere. I originally picked this place for its hunting and fishing. I only later discovered its wonderful geology and minerals.

It was an almost perfect refuge. There were limestone caves on one side and an uplifted igneous intrusion on the other side of the valley, with a metamorphic roof pendent, pegmatitic veins, and skarn minerals. The active volcanic rift that intersected at the mouth of Vanishing River Valley drove enough geothermal activity that there were hot springs to soak in---and some too hot to soak in at the geyser basin, so one needed to be careful there.

I didn't want to leave. The magnetite vein up the valley alone was enough to keep me here. I succeeded in creating a successful arc light with a simple Gramme Machine generator. Now I was working on sintering magnetite in hopes of making a better magnet. I hated having to drop a project in mid-experiment.

Best of all, there were useful sulfides everywhere and all three flavors of the vitriol minerals. This gave me the basic means to reinvent modern chemistry, including the all-important ability to make sulfuric acid.

I stole my first haul of halite and sylvite, which gave me the ingredients for sodium, potassium, and chlorine compounds. Later, I was able to trade for it and left a gift one night at the trade fair at Uldlip to pay back the victim of my theft. The salts were a set of essential raw materials I couldn't get locally.

The discovery of the tourmalines in the pegmatites and the hydrothermal veins of quartz crystals was a rock hound's dream. It also gave me something of high value to trade at Uldlip. Cosm mages used transparent quartz crystals for remote viewing and for making magic tools. Some also had a use for watermelon tourmalines. Uldlip was a safe place to trade. It was run by a brown-skinned, black-haired variety of Coyn that lived out on a sea coast somewhere to the west. They reminded me of the racial type for the indigenous tribes of North America with high broad cheekbones and heroic beaked noses. They were handsome people.

Those quartz crystals I traded were pretty to look at but worthless to me unless I could figure out a way to grind the big crystals into lab vessels. My lack of glass was a problem. Tourmaline was even more useless and it didn't fetch as much value as the quartz.

The prospect of having to relocate was even more problematic. I had built the oxidizing and reducing muffle furnace out of Agricola's De Re Metallica, remembering that a reenactor friend claimed it could melt silicates with just charcoal. I was just beginning to experiment this winter with its capabilities. I had already kilned a batch of refractory clay crucibles---without having them shatter on me while baking them---and calcined a bunch of bones to make bone ash cupels. I was ready to assay lode quartz deposits for silver and gold content, to see if I could do it successfully without a borax flux.

If the furnace could get hot enough to melt silicates then I could finally make glass. The glass project would be delayed if I had to move because I would need to leave all my heavy equipment behind. I'd take my iron tools and not much else. The rest I could remake but the iron tools were essential. It was too hard to make them the first time. Replacing them would really suck.

That "see you soon" really upset me though I was a bit intrigued by what she said before the scary griffin poked its head through the branches. Well, I thought it was a griffin in hindsight. I had never seen one up close before. Regardless, I think she said she was from Coventry, which was impossible because Coventry was a place in England. But she recognized what a match was. Did she once live in England in another life?

As I packed up what I could carry, I suddenly noticed that my hand wasn't hurting like usual. It had hurt for six years, ever since I bit the embedded charm gem of control off the back of my hand with my teeth. That was both the best and worst day of my life so far. I can't even begin to describe the pain.

I was astounded to see no scars on either hand or wrist. It was so amazing to me that I fell down on my butt and just stared at the healthy pink skin for a long time before recovering my wits. I completely forgot about Coventry in England.

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