Chapter 5

  After that conversation, something was nagging at the back of my mind, and it took the better part of two hours for me to shake it loose enough to recognize it. As I was sitting down to start working on my mother's staff, it finally floated to the top of my mind, and I looked up at Ken. "Shouldn't I have a formal vassal agreement with the Fairies of the Hall? Like the one my ancestors made with Penny's ancestors?"

  Sparkle, sitting on the shelf unit over the workbench, looked up in surprise from examining an engraving tool.

  Ken blinked a few times. "And that's another major failing in my education plans pointed out. You already have one."

  I stared up at him. "Pardon?"

  He smiled a little. "Whether you realized it or not, you were accepting them as your vassals when you promised to protect and nurture them in exchange for their service protecting that entrance to the Hall. I expect Margrave has already drawn up the paperwork and magically applied everyone's signatures to it. It's within the purview of Summers & Winters to do that for their clients. Saves time."

  "That's…insanely efficient. And a little creepy," I said. "In this instance I don't mind, especially considering the way the ICOA has been behaving. But I guess that means I need to be a lot more careful about who I make that sort of deal with."

  "You should be anyway," Penny said softly, emerging from the shadows beside the table in her human form. She spread her arms, "Look at me, for example. This was not anything either of us expected, and while it works to our benefit and has been a very pleasant side-effect of refreshing the agreement between our families, it was quite the shock."

  Indeed it had been. Penny's new post-bonding ability human appearance - an almost perfect negative image of my own, in shades of coal black fading to dark blue at the tips of her still fox-like ears, twin tails, and at the tips of her fingers - had been shocking to us both. But it had been extremely useful, giving her the ability to do a wide variety of things that were mundane to me but had been difficult for her (in the absence of thumbs). A few months of Ken pushing her to use her new form whenever practical had made her comfortable shifting back and forth as needed. She'd even learned to shift into the form of a large, entirely black Husky, when she wanted to be out in public with me.

  But it had, as she'd said, been quite the shock for her at first.

  "It worked out well for us," she tapped her own chest with two fingers, "and of course is the foundation of your relationship with Sparkle. And it's of tremendous benefit to both you and the Fairies of the Hall. But you should most assuredly be more cautious making deals going forward." She gave Ken a droll look. "Something your tutor should have taught you early on."

  Ken held up his hands. "In my defense, the lesson plans her father left me were woefully unprepared for either the reality of Caley's natural ability to absorb information like a dry sponge, or for the psychological realities of adjusting to a world she'd had no awareness of prior to coming home to Oakwood Hall."

  "That's fair," Penny said. "But perhaps you and I should have a conversation about speeding up Caley's lessons about Faerie and dealing with its residents."

  "Not a bad idea," Ken said. "You might have more practical knowledge of Faerie than I do. We should get Sparkle involved too."

  Sparkle nodded eagerly. "I've been wanting to do that from day one."

  "Well," I said, gesturing to Mom's staff stretched on the workbench in front of me, "I have my work cut out for me here. Why don't you three huddle around one of the other tables here and start building lesson plans for teaching me all about Faerie."

  Ken hesitated.

  "Ken," I said gently, "I have a solid enough grounding in enchanting to carefully disassemble this staff. Once I've done that, my task, as I understand it, is to copy the rune arrays engraved on each part onto strips of paper so they can be examined in greater detail. That's going to take me days." I made a shooing gesture. "I promise I won't accidentally blow anything up while you're on the other side of the room, and I'll call immediately if I encounter anything I don't understand."

  Sparkle and Penny both giggled, and Ken smiled in a self-deprecating way, then bowed to me. "As you say, my lady. Come on, you two. Let's go do some lesson planning."

  I watched as they went together to one of the other work tables, Penny pulling out a stool to sit on and Sparkle alighting on the table. Then, shaking my head a little, turned my attention to my task.

  Mom's staff really was a work of art. The more time I spent with it, the more I was aware of it. The strands of silver, copper, and gold that - braided together in a triple helix - made up the staff and allowed it to be flexible enough to act as a belt were made of a mesh so tightly and finely woven that I needed a pair of binocular jeweler's loupes mounted on a headband to get a good look at them and see the tiny runes engraved on them.

  It must have taken Mom months to do the engraving, it was so fine and widespread. How long would it take me to work out the riddle of why the staff wasn't working properly?

  Fortunately, I was a patient person.

  Still…as I carefully worked on the connecting points at either end of the staff with specialized tools, something was - once again - nagging at the back of my mind.

  This time it surfaced more quickly. Possibly because I was working directly on something that was literally right in front of my eyes. About an hour later, as I finished releasing the three strands and stretched them out separately on the workbench, what was bothering me finally clicked into place.

  I grabbed a fine-tipped chisel, a small hammer, and the loop-shaped gold end cap that would make up the bottom of the staff if I ever managed to shift it out of its belt form. I placed the tip of the chisel on the end cap and gave it a few careful taps with the small hammer.

  Then a few harder taps.

  "Well," I said, "that's not right." Louder, I said, "Ken, a moment?"

  He was by my side in an instant, with Penny and Sparkle not far behind. "What is it?"

  I gestured to the gold parts of the staff. "I don't think this is gold. It's not soft enough, and look…" I grabbed the work lamp on its swing arm and adjusted it, changing the way the light played over the surface of the metals. "Look at that weird, oily sheen that shows up when the light hits it just right."

  Ken sucked in a breath. "Oh my."

  Sparkle fluttered closer, zipping this way and that to look at it from different angles. "Is that what I think it is?"

  "Penny," Ken said, "three workbenches to the left you'll find alchemical substance tests. It's a box with little strips of paper in it. Bring it over, please."

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  She nodded and went, returning with a perfectly mundane-looking plastic box, about a foot wide and half that tall and deep, gray-backed and transparent-fronted, that flipped open to stand up on its own. Inside were rows of little compartments, each of them carefully labeled and filled with slips of white paper. At Ken's gesture, she opened it and set it on the workbench near me.

  "These," Ken said, "are slips of paper that have been magically and chemically treated to test and identify different metals. Your grandmother was a talented alchemist, and used these to make sure the metals, minerals, and other alchemical substances she worked with were actually what they appeared to be, and were of sufficient purity."

  "Okay," I said. "Obviously I don't need to know how to make them right now, but how do they work? In a practical sense."

  Ken's lips twitched into an almost-smile. "In a practical sense, you find the slip for the metal you want to test. Then you lay it on the metal, and watch it change color. The way your grandmother prepared them, if it turns green you have the right metal or alloy, and of sufficient purity. If it turns yellow, it's the right metal or alloy, but the purity isn't sufficient. If it turns red, it's not the right metal. Each slip is good for one use, which is why there's so many."

  "Useful," I said. "Very useful."

  Ken nodded. "Very. So, find the slips of paper prepared for testing gold."

  It wasn't hard. The neatly labeled little compartments were laid out in alphabetical order. Grandmother had apparently been very organized, rather like I was. It made me wonder, not for the first time, if my mother's apparent ADHD and other odd personality quirks had been natural, or if they were perhaps the result of spending six very formative years alone except for fairies and a ghost.

  Regardless, I quickly had a slip of paper for testing gold picked out, and laid it carefully across the golden mesh that made up one third of the staff.

  It turned red almost instantly.

  "Well," I said, "that answers that question. What is it, then?"

  "That's an excellent question," Ken said, rubbing his chin, clearly perplexed. "Well, I can tell you what it definitely isn't…it's not pyrite. I recall your grandmother tried working with it and found it to be almost completely useless." He pointed at the plastic box. "Try orichalcum. I doubt that's what it is, but it's worth a try."

  "Orichalcum is real?" I found the appropriate slot and slid out a slip of paper. "I mean…not the stuff they found at that archaeological dig in Sicily, but an actual magically-active metal?" I laid the slip of paper on the gold section of the staff, and again it turned red instantly.

  "Oh, it's real," Ken said, "It's an alloy of gold, silver, mercury, and copper that's incredibly hard to make. And it's not that." He nodded to the staff and frowned. "All right, then. There's almost no metals that look like gold."

  Penny and Sparkle watched curiously, looking back and forth between me, the staff, and Ken in almost perfect synchronization.

  Ken pointed to the plastic box and, very softly, said, "Try a test for aurite."

  Penny looked confused, but Sparkle sucked in a breath and put a hand over her mouth.

  "Okay," I said, feeling as confused as Penny looked. It wasn't any metal I'd ever heard of, but I found the slot in the box of tests quickly enough. It was packed full, as if none of the slips prepared for that purpose had ever been used. So I slid one out and laid it carefully on that section of the staff.

  It instantly turned green.

  "Oh my gods and goddesses," Ken breathed reverently.

  "Explain," I said dryly.

  Ken flashed me a quick smile. "Sorry. Aurite is to gold what mithril is to silver. It's even sometimes referred to as 'truegold,' the way mithril is called 'truesilver.' It's not…it's a different mineral entirely, and even more incredibly rare than mithril, which is rare enough to begin with. It's supposed to be incredibly strong, and it's said that there's no better metal for taking enchantments."

  He ran a hand over his mouth and chin, staring at the staff. "As I recall, your mother made a deal with a clan of dwarves in Faerie - actual, high-fantasy dwarves, mind you - to make the components of the staff out of ingots she pulled from a vault in the Hall. I wonder if she even knew it wasn't a gold ingot she gave them. They are astonishingly similar in appearance unless you're specifically looking for differences." He glanced at me. "Or finding them by accident."

  "The dwarves wouldn't have said something?" I asked, letting the existence of dwarves pass uncommented. I'd had to accept far more difficult concepts in the past ten months.

  He shrugged. "They were commissioned specifically to make the mesh strands that Chessie was going to weave together to make the staff. Dwarves are gifted artisans, but they aren't great conversationalists…it's extremely likely they were just honored to be given such an insanely rare metal to work with and assumed she'd done so on purpose. They're certainly the only smiths who could manage this feat." He tapped the finely-woven golden metal as he spoke.

  "Could that be part of the reason the staff didn't work properly?" I asked. "If Mom engraved and enchanted it without knowing what she was really working with…"

  Ken nodded. "It definitely could be. But I don't think it would have caused the problem we're seeing. If anything, it would have made the staff too efficient for the rune array she engraved on it, and caused a different problem." His eyes met mine. "Do keep that in mind while you copy out the rune arrays. Whether it's the core problem or not, they might need to be modified to account for what we just learned."

  We were all silent for a moment before I quietly asked, "How did neither of my parents notice that the wrong metal had been used?"

  The silence returned, deepening until it could almost have begun absorbing sound. I saw Sparkle and Penny exchange a look I couldn't read.

  Finally, Ken said, just as quietly, "Nobody is perfect, Caley." He gave me a sad little smile. "There are several reasons that might satisfy you, but two stand out most sharply to me: First and foremost, that staff was the last enchanting project your mother was working on, and she loved to keep your father from seeing her enchantments until she was ready to unveil them. She only showed it to him when it failed to change back to its staff form, and that was only a few days before she died."

  He sighed softly, then continued, "Secondly, enchanting was your mother's strong suit, not your father's. He spent more time working on the theoretical side of magic, with practical applications in wards and ritual magic. And he knew very little about alchemy or metallurgy."

  "Circumstance," I said.

  Ken shrugged. "You know well enough by now that after she died, your father put most of your mother's things away in storage and focused almost exclusively for years on reinforcing the Hall's wards. So much so that it took his own mentor years of study and additional help to break through them enough to just enter the grounds."

  I nodded, nibbling on my bottom lip. "I know." I sighed. "It's not like I ever thought my parents infallible. It's still tough to swallow that such an extraordinary piece of crafting could have failed because of something that I spotted within a few hours of starting to work on it."

  Ken took a deep breath and let it out, then smiled. "Well, apprentice mine, don't forget that your own studies of that staff are in their early days. And I think, based on its behavior and your initial assessment of energy flow through it, you're likely to find more problems than just this one."

  He tapped the workbench lightly, but I was now able to hear him do so where his touch hadn't made much sound even a few months ago. "I want you to work on copying out the rune arrays until it's time for lunch. I won't be at all surprised if you find more problems there."

  Although my mood was still somber, I threw him a teasing salute in return. "Aye, sir!"

  "Meanwhile, Sparkle, Penny and I will continue sorting out how to best teach you more about Faerie." He gestured to them. "Come on, you two. Let's let her work."

  They both nodded, but I felt their eyes - and a hint of worry from them - linger on me as they moved to follow him.

  Looking at the three major pieces of the staff, I decided to leave the aurite strand for last. I pulled out a long strip of paper that was meant for the purpose of writing out rune arrays, and dragged over the staff's silver strand. I put my binocular magnifying glasses back on, picked up a pencil, and got to work.

  Copying out rune arrays - especially ones as tiny as what my mother had engraved on her staff - was painstaking, laborious work. It was bad enough knowing that I was likely to find mistakes in her arrays without having to worry about making my own mistakes while copying them out. So I took my time, triple checking each rune as I copied it and double-checking each one I put down on paper against the original.

  And, of course, I had a tendency to lose track of time when I was concentrating.

  As a result, I'd barely made it down a quarter of the length of the silver strand before Ken cleared his throat. "That's an hour, and it's time for lunch."

  I looked up in surprise, and my eyes crossed trying to focus on his zoomed-in face through the magnifying lenses. "Augh!" I said with what I thought was exceptional eloquence under the circumstances, and took the thing off to rub my eyes. "Thank you."

  "You're welcome." He leaned over my shoulder and looked at what I'd done so far, nodding. "Very good. What does it look like to you so far?"

  I finished rubbing my eyes and blinked a few times to clear them. "So far, it's exactly the same one I carved on my staff."

  "Very good," he said approvingly. "Come on, rest your eyes and refuel."

  I rose from the stool I'd been sitting on and arched my back, stretching my arms above my head. "Oof. That's the same stiff back I had after studying for too long at university."

  Ken chuckled. "I'll bet."

  Penny - back in her fox form - padded over, with Sparkle riding on her shoulders, which was just adorable. "Lunch?" Penny asked.

  "Lunch," I agreed. "Let's hit the kitchen."