V.2:Ch.84 (Patreon)

By the following morning, the trays from the previous week had changed enough for me to trust them a little more. Not fully, and not in any way that truly mattered, but enough. The pale crystals had dried down into something I could move without watching them cling to every trace of moisture in the air. The yellow scrapings from the stone room had lost some of their foul dampness. The black powder from the charcoal trays still stained anything it touched, but it no longer carried that soft, half-wet feel from the first days.

Falcon’s Rest smelled worse than ever. Ash lived in the walls now. Sulfur sat in the cracks between the floorboards. Charcoal dust had worked its way into my cuffs, my boots, my hair, and probably into whatever soul I still had left. Gareth looked only slightly better. He stood over the worktable with a rag in one hand and a jar of honey in the other.

“So,” he said, “this is the next great secret.”

I looked up from the drying trays. “One of them.”

He turned the jar in the light from the window. Gold caught in the glass. Thick. Slow. Clean enough.

“Looks like breakfast.”

“It is not breakfast.”

He kept looking at it for a moment, then glanced around the room. “Still. Clean house. Decent smell. Bread on the table without the whole place stinking like old fat. I’d call that civilization.”

I snorted and reached for the bottles beside him.

I pointed to the line of bottles beside him. Heavy glass, sealed with wax and cork. Strong liquor from the stock we had sent for before leaving the mansion. Gareth followed my hand, then looked back at the honey jar. His mouth tightened before he let out a slow breath through his nose.

“You want the honey,” he said, “inside the bottles.”

“Not all of it.” I tapped one of the jars beside the tray. “Some honey. Some liquor. Mixed.”

He looked at the bottles again, then at me. For a moment he said nothing. He picked up the rag, wiped his fingers once, and set it back down with more care than it needed.

“Why?”

“Because the liquor burns.” I tapped the jar. “The honey makes it cling.”

Gareth’s eyes dropped to my hand, then to the jar, then back to my face. That earned me a longer look. He was not confused this time. He did not know the full shape of it yet, but he knew I had chosen the answer on purpose.

He looked down the length of the table. Jars. Bottles. Bowls. Corks laid out in neat rows. Cloth for wiping spills. Wax waiting near the hearth to reseal whatever needed sealing. “Two people,” he muttered. “Of course it’s two people.”

He grimaced. “Why didn’t we bring more hands? Isolde. Doyle. Don’t answer that. I already know.”

We started with the bottles. The process was simple enough to insult the time it took. We opened each bottle, poured out part of the liquor into a waiting bowl, fed honey into the empty space, returned some of the liquid, sealed it again, and set it aside. The jars got the same treatment in reverse. A little poured off. A little added back. No hurry. No waste where it could be helped.

The work itself was simple, only slow and sticky.

By the sixth bottle, the table had gone slick in places despite the cloths. By the ninth, Gareth had honey on both wrists and along one sleeve. By the twelfth, I had stopped caring how much of it clung to my fingers. The smell changed with every opened seal. Sharp liquor. Sweet honey. Wax. Damp wood. Smoke from the hearth. Sweat.

Gareth wiped the neck of another bottle and held it up. The liquid inside moved slower now.

“You really think this will cling?”

“It should.” I took the bottle from him, turned it once, and watched the inside catch the light. “It only needs to hold long enough.”

His eyes flicked toward the windows. Toward the world beyond Falcon’s Rest. Toward ships that were not here yet, enemies we had not met yet, and the thing waiting at the end of all this work. He nodded once and reached for the next jar.

By midday, both of us were cursing under our breath. Honey had found the edge of every surface and the seam of every tool. The glass bottles had to be handled with dry grips or they slipped. The jars were worse because the mouths were wider and the mess had more room to become personal.

Gareth finished resealing one and held it away from his body like it offended him. “If this campaign fails after all this, I’ll find you.”

“That would be difficult if I failed. I’d probably be dead by then.”

“Then I’ll save you and kill you myself.”

I laughed under my breath and reached for the next bottle.

Mnex chose that moment to stir. “You do realize this is the least dignified path to warfare you have taken so far.”

We’re past dignity.

“I approved this.”

I wiped honey from the lip of a jar and pressed the cloth down harder than I needed to.

At least this part works.

“Better than nothing. Crude. Primitive. Dangerous. Still not gunpowder.”

That is still further than we were.

“True. Also, Gareth looks one accident away from murdering a jar.”

I glanced over. He was in fact glaring at one of them with open hostility. That almost made me smile.

By evening, the last of the bottles stood in rows near the wall, sealed and set aside. The jars joined them. Some held more honey than liquor. Some leaned the other way. Each one had the same purpose. Spread. Cling. Keep burning longer than anything simple had the right to burn. My shoulders ached.

Gareth flexed his fingers and stared at the tacky shine left on his skin. “I thought the dangerous part would feel more impressive.”

“It will.”

“Pity I won’t be there to see it.”

We left the filled jars and bottles where the room stayed cool and spent the rest of the evening checking the trays from the first phase. Dry enough. Close enough. Good enough to move into the next stage. That part mattered more.

By dawn, I had cleared the main table and laid out three separate bowls. One of pale crystals. One of yellow scrapings. One of black powder.

Gareth came in while I was sorting the last of the dried material by hand. He stopped in the doorway and looked from one bowl to the next.

“So this is why we spent a week coughing, scraping, grinding, and boiling.”

“Yes.”

He stepped closer, careful this time, and looked down at the bowls again. “And now?”

“Now we find out whether all that work bought us anything.”

He stepped closer, slow this time, like even standing near the table carried some rule I had not spoken aloud yet.

“Do I get the truth today?”

I considered him for a second. “Today you get enough of it.”

That seemed to satisfy him.

I measured the first portions with care. Not by guesswork. Not by handfuls. Mnex provided the balance I needed, adjusting my memory when I looked too long at one pile and risked trusting my own eyes more than I should.

“This much,” he said.

I see it.

“You saw wrong. Less.”

I set some aside.

“Better. More of the pale. Less of the yellow. The black is close enough.”

I worked in silence, following the line of his voice and my own caution.

Gareth watched in silence for a while. The look he gave the table suggested he had questions and had already decided he would regret the answers. I kept working without looking up. After a moment, he took the empty bowls and shifted them clear of my elbows without being asked.

When the dry portions were finally combined, the result looked underwhelming. Dirty. Uneven. More like the remains of a ruined storeroom than something worth a war. I pressed two fingers into it and rubbed the grains together. Too loose. Too eager to separate. It needed to bind without becoming useless.

I reached for the bowl of leftover liquor from the bottling work.

Gareth saw it and frowned.

I added just enough to change the texture and no more. The smell rose at once, biting through the room. I worked the mixture carefully, turning it, pressing it, folding it back into itself. Still wrong. Still too dry in places. Still not ready. I added a little more.

The mass thickened into something rougher. It held shape now. Broke apart under pressure, but less willingly. Clung to itself when forced.

Gareth leaned closer, took one look at the mass, and stopped there.

“What happens if you make a mistake?”

I looked at the table. “At best, nothing useful.”

He waited.

I glanced at him.

He straightened at once and stepped back from the table without another word.

By noon the bowl of leftover liquor had run nearly dry. That brought us to the next problem. I tipped the last of it in and worked the mass again. Better. Still not enough. We had more mixture to prepare and nothing left that I was willing to waste from the sealed bottles and jars.

Gareth saw the empty bowl. His face changed in stages. First calculation, after that realization, and finally offense.

“No,” he said.

I looked up.

“We need moisture.”

“I know what you’re thinking. No.”

I rested both hands on the table. “Do you have a better idea?”

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked toward the door like salvation might walk in with a bucket and a miracle. Nothing did.

His eyes narrowed. “I hate you a little.”

“This house lost dignity a week ago,” I said.

That earned me a look that suggested he considered strangling me with a clean cloth.

Mnex was laughing so hard in my head that I almost regretted being born.

The work continued. No man who had seen me in court or before a room full of lords would ever have guessed this was how part of a war got built. Bent over a worktable, hands blackened, face sore from bad sleep, pride sacrificed to necessity.

Gareth never spoke of it once the first round was done. For that alone, he deserved a title.

The mixture finally reached the state I wanted. Not liquid. Not a dry scatter. A heavy, damp mass that could be broken apart and forced through something wider than cloth, finer than fingers.

Which led us to the next problem. We had no proper sieve for the job. Not one large enough, not one coarse enough, and certainly not one I trusted to survive what I had in mind. I stood over the small kitchen strainers we had collected and thought for a long moment.

Gareth looked from the strainers to me and stopped there. He already knew.

“I’m about to lose another useful object,” he said.

“Probably.”

He crossed his arms. “I’d like it noted that I object.”

I took the first strainer apart at the join. The wood frame came loose with effort. The second gave up its handle more easily. The mesh from both could be stripped and reset if I spread it wider across a broader mouth.

Gareth watched the destruction in silence for nearly a minute.

Finally he asked, “Did you know how to do that already?”

“No.”

“And that reassures me less than you think.”

We built the new frame from what we had. Two broken strainers. Spare wood from a shelf in the side room. Cord. Nails pulled from a crate. The mesh stretched across the opening and tied down at each side after I widened the pattern enough to give us the size I wanted.

It was crude, ugly, and usable.

“That,” Gareth said, staring at it, “looks like a trap built by a drunk carpenter.”

“It only needs to work once.”

He looked at it again and wisely chose not to answer. We set the frame over a clean surface and carried the damp mass over in sections. At first I tried using my hands alone. Too slow. Too uneven. The material clumped, resisted, broke in the wrong places.

We needed pressure. Not a delicate sort. A dumb one.

I went outside, crossed the yard, and came back carrying a cut length of timber from the wood stack. Thick enough to serve as weight, smooth enough on one side to press without tearing the mesh apart.

Gareth saw it and stepped aside at once. “I was going to suggest a stone.”

“This is better.”

“Of course it is.”

I pressed the timber down over the first portion. The damp mass fought for a second, held shape, and gave way in rough pieces through the widened mesh. Smaller granules fell to the surface below. Thick lumps stayed above. I scraped those aside and pressed again.

Once. Twice. Three times.

It worked. Not beautifully. Not cleanly. But it worked. The smaller grains gathered beneath in a dark, uneven field. The larger pieces waited above for another pass or another purpose. I set the worst of the thick clumps apart rather than forcing them into something they were not.

Gareth crouched beside the table and picked up one of the smaller grains. “This is what you wanted.”

“Close.”

“Close feels like victory around here.”

“It will have to.”

The next days passed inside that same rhythm. Break the dried materials down. Work them together in careful portions. Bind. Press. Separate. Dry. Watch. Repeat.

The pressed mass went onto cloth-lined trays in uneven granules, some fine, some coarse. I did not bother forcing perfect uniformity out of it. Not yet. This was not a scholar’s powder for measured charges. It was a war load packed for barrels, meant to catch fast, burn hard, and rip chaos through a ship once I lit it properly.

By the fourth day of the new process, our hands had gone raw in places from the repeated grinding, pressing, and handling. Gareth had stopped complaining entirely, which was how I knew he had reached a worse stage than simple misery. He set down a tray near the window and flexed his fingers one by one.

The skin at the base of my thumb had split sometime that morning. I only noticed when the mixture found it. After that, every pass through the trays left a fresh sting behind.

“How many days has it been now?”

I looked around the room. At the bottles. The jars. The trays. The rebuilt sieve. The bowls scraped nearly clean. The fine grains drying in careful rows.

“Enough that I never want to smell this house again.”

“That,” he said, “is the most honest thing you’ve said this week.”

I sat back against the edge of the table and looked over what we had. Still not enough to satisfy the grand version of the plan I had carried into Falcon’s Rest.

Enough to matter. Enough to test. Enough to kill men who had never imagined a ship could burn in ways oil alone could not manage.

Mnex stirred again, quieter now. “You are calculating range already.”

Always.

“And the failure rate?”

Also always.

“That is why you are still alive.”

I rubbed at the bridge of my nose and left a dark streak there.

The work would need more drying yet. More waiting. Time to settle and harden into the final shape I could trust. But the main labor had shifted. We were past the stage of nothing. Past the stage of theory. The pieces existed now.

Honey and liquor rested sealed in their glass. The finer grains dried on trays where air could move over them. The coarser pieces sat apart for the barrel loads. Everything smelled dangerous.

That evening Gareth dragged a chair to the wall and sat down hard enough to make it creak.

“So,” he said, voice worn flat, “are we finally close to the part where this all stops being powder, sludge, and humiliation?”

I looked toward the rows of prepared glass and the drying trays beyond them. “Yes.”

He let his head fall back against the wall. “Good.”

I wiped my hands on a cloth that had long ago given up hope of ever being clean again. The next stage was the one that mattered.

He opened one eye and looked at me. “That better have been worth it.”

“It will be.”

He shut his eye again, either trusting me or too tired to argue.

Outside, evening settled over Falcon’s Rest. Inside, the house waited with us, holding its rows of sealed glass, drying trays, broken tools, scorched kettles, and the shape of something ugly taking form one stage at a time.

We were close now, close enough that the next test would stop being preparation and become proof.