I Accidentally Caught a Falling Goddess - Gold at the Iron Gate

From the bench beside the water butt, a dry piece of split bamboo cracked against the meat of his right tricep with the sting of a horsefly.

“Lower your elbow two inches on the recovery,” Elspeth said, not looking up from the leather strap she was punching with an awl. Her buffleather coat was gone, replaced by a dark grey woolen gown Lucia had let out at the shoulders with gussets of bleached linen, but she still wore her iron-shod riding boots, their heels dug deep into the frozen dirt. Her chest was bandaged tight under the wool, though the pale cerulean aether along her knuckles had returned to a steady, quiet hum. “You’re pulling the bar back with your bicep like you’re hauling an eel-trap out of the mud. The point leads, the pommel follows, the elbow tucks to the flank. If you leave your armpit open like that in a real yard, a second-year student with a bodkin will take your lung before your feet settle.”

Corin lowered the bar, the raw iron thudding into the dirt between his toes. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, leaving a streak of grey rust across his brow. “I’ve done four hundred thrusts from the left stance and four hundred from the right. My palms feel like they’ve been dragged through a gravel pit.”

“Then wash them in salt water and do two hundred more,” she said, pulling the waxed thread tight through the leather with her teeth. “The noble boys in the High Quarter have been doing thrusts since they were seven years old. Their fathers bought them weighted ash-foils balanced to the half-ounce, and their tutors rubbed their shoulders with sweet oil every evening after the bath. You started thirty days ago with a rusted spit taken from an abandoned bakery. You think three hundred repetitions makes you a swordsman?”

“I don’t think anything,” Corin muttered, lifting the bar again. “I think my mother leaves for the laundry barracks before the bells strike five, and my sister didn’t come home until two this morning because some drunken sergeant in the taproom spilled three flagons of ale and made her scrub the floorboards on her knees.”

Elspeth paused, the awl hovering above the leather. She looked at him through her pale, untrimmed bangs, her grey eyes sharp and unreadable as flint. “Your form is better than it was on the river road. The marrow-purge cleared the foulness out of your joints. You don’t have the heavy, sluggish drag of a boy raised on turnip mush anymore. Your bones are clean.”

“Clean doesn’t buy tuition,” he said, driving the iron bar forward in a straight, level thrust that whistled through the freezing air.

“Put the bar down,” she commanded, standing up and tossing the leather strap onto the wash-bench. “The porridge is boiling over on the stove, and I’m not eating scorched oats two mornings in a row.”

Inside the cramped kitchen, the air was warm and thick with the steam of boiling oats and the sweet, resinous smoke of dry birch logs. Suzanne had left a pot of mint tea steeping on the hearth-shelf before heading to her sewing shift, alongside half a loaf of dark rye bread covered with a clean linen cloth.

Corin dipped two wooden bowls full of the thick, grey mush, set them on the scrubbed pine table, and sat on the low stool by the chimney. His fingers were cramped into claws from gripping the iron bar; he had to flex them three times before he could hold the wooden spoon without dropping it.

“The registration boards went up at the parish corners yesterday,” he said between mouthfuls of hot oats. “The winter term begins in eight days.”

Elspeth blew across the surface of her tea, her square jaw resting in the palm of her right hand. “Which pen are you planning to throw yourself into?”

“Santos College, on the North Dike,” Corin answered, scraping the bottom of his bowl. “It’s the only one that doesn’t ask for a recommendation from a district magistrate. If you hold an imperial patent, they take ten gold sovereigns for the year. My mother borrowed the last sovereign from Master Sona yesterday against my next three months of night-shift wages at the vats. We have ten crowns in the pot beneath the hearthstone.”

Elspeth set her wooden mug down with a sharp, dry clatter that made the salt-cellar jump. “Santos College.”

“It’s a school,” Corin said, his brow furrowing at the venom in her voice. “They teach standard infantry drill and the basic blade forms.”

“Santos College is an open ditch where broken-nosed sergeants who were drummed out of the provincial border watch teach the third sons of horse-gelders how to hold an unweighted halberd so they don’t stab their own kneecaps on parade,” she said, leaning across the table, her eyes narrowing. “You spend three years hauling gravel for their perimeter wall, you learn five basic parries that any decent mercenary can break with a wooden cudgel, and when you graduate they give you a stamped sheet of common butcher’s paper that qualifies you to stand outside a warehouse gate in the rain for four silver groats a week. Is that what you had in mind when you carried me through the marsh?”

Corin’s ears went red. He slammed his spoon onto the table. “Ten sovereigns is everything we have, Elspeth! It took my family nine years to save those coins! My father’s death-scrip was three crowns, and my mother wore her knuckles down to the bone over laundry tubs to keep the other seven from being spent on bread when the wheat froze! What do you want me to do? Walk into the Royal Academy and ask the Duke to let me in because I have an honest face?”

“The Royal College of Marches and Guilds,” Elspeth said, her voice dropping into a quiet, icy drawl. “That’s the only school in this province worth the dirt on its flagstones. They have masters who fought the cinder-drakes on the river wall. They have an aether-well in the central rotunda that accelerates marrow-resonance by two tiers in twelve months. The men who graduate from their third court become knightsprotector, marshals of the frontier, and personal blades to the See.”

“The Royal College charges one hundred gold sovereigns a year for tuition,” Corin said, his voice shaking with bitter exhaustion. “Three hundred sovereigns for the three-year patent. You could sell this house, the dye-vats, the wash-shed, and my sister’s marriage bed, and you wouldn’t see forty sovereigns. It’s a school for the sons of earls and high magistrates. It isn’t for people who eat turnip broth out of chipped wooden bowls.” Elspeth didn’t answer him.

She stood up from the table, walked across the scullery into the small bedchamber, and returned thirty seconds later carrying her battered calfskin saddlebag.

The bag was stiff with dried ditch-mud, the iron buckles green with verdigris. She hoisted it with her right arm, held it two feet above the pine table, and unbuckled the central strap.

She tipped it upside down.

The sound that followed was not the thin, hollow jingle of silver groats. It was a heavy, deafening, metallic roar—a solid cascade of thick, yellow gold coins that poured across the pine boards like gravel from a carter’s tail-board, overflowing the bread trench, tumbling off the edges of the table, and rolling across the cold flagstones to settle into the cracks between the floorboards.

The kitchen smelled instantly of old vaults, dried mint leaves, and minted bullion.

Corin froze, his hands hovering above his empty bowl, his mouth slightly open. He had never seen more than five gold coins in one place in his entire life; the sheer, blinding density of the pile on the rough pine table made his vision swim.

“That is two hundred and eighty imperial gold crowns,” Elspeth said, leaning against the chimney-breast with her arms crossed over her linen shawl. “Minted in the High Bank of Thanecroft, but legal tender in every port and garrison town from here to the southern sea.”

Corin swallowed hard, his throat dry as chalk. “Where did you… where did you get this?”

“I am a Warden-Captain of the Third Marcher District, Frankland,” she said, a faint, dry twitch touching her mouth. “My family owns fourteen thousand sheep on the northern moors and three lead mines in the high crags. My father gives me an allowance of one hundred sovereigns every midsummer to keep me from coming home and telling my brothers how to manage the tenant farms. When I kill a warlock with eleven crown warrants on his head, the court pays a bounty in unclipped gold. I don’t buy silk gowns and I don’t drink sweet wine in the capital. This has been sitting in the bottom of my saddle-rig for two years.”

“Take it back,” Corin said, pushing his stool away from the table as if the gold were hot coals. “I’m not a beggar, Elspeth. I’m not taking charity from a foreign warden.”

Elspeth took two long, unhurried strides across the kitchen, gripped the collar of his homespun shirt with her good hand, and yanked him off the stool until his nose was four inches from hers. Her grey eyes were cold and wide, her breath smelling of bitter mint tea.

“Listen to me, you stubborn little fool,” she hissed, her fingers twisting into the wool until the seams groaned. “You think this is charity? You think I care about your miserable common pride? I am twenty-eight years old. My fiancé died in a muddy ditch at the River Ouse, and the men who sent him there are sitting in the high council chambers playing with toy soldiers on painted maps. I watched you throw a four-pound stone at a heretic warlock who would have peeled your marrow like an apple. I watched you drink rotten demon bile out of my chest without blinking an eye. Your bones are clean, your will is hard as iron, and if you go to that butcher’s ditch on the North Dike, you will spend your life guarding flour barrels for men who aren’t fit to lace your boots.”

She shoved him back onto the stool, her chest heaving against her bandages.

“You take one hundred of these crowns to the Royal College on registration morning. You enroll in the Department of Steel. You learn every form, every parry, and every counter-resonance those noble bastards have kept locked behind their iron gates for two hundred years. And when you reach the rank of knight-protector, you pay me back every single sovereign with six percent annual interest, calculated from the day of enrollment.”

She pointed a calloused finger at the small wooden bowl on the hearth.

“And take those seven crowns out of the hearth pot and give them back to your mother so she doesn’t have to boil soldiers’ laundry until her fingers bleed. If I see you letting her scrub another sergeant’s coat while there is gold sitting on this table, I’ll take my bamboo lath and break it over your shins. Do you understand me, Frankland?”

Corin looked from the pile of gold coins to her fierce, scarred face.

Deep in his throat, a knot of something hot and sharp dissolved, leaving behind a cold, absolute stillness that settled straight down into his marrow.

He dropped to one knee on the cold flagstones, bowed his head until his brow nearly touched the pine bench, and laid his calloused right hand flat against the wood.

“I will reach the sovereign blade, Elspeth,” he said, his voice quiet, steady, and without a trace of tremor. “I swear it by the marrow in my bones.”

“Get up, you idiot,” she muttered, though her hand lingered on his shoulder for a brief, heavy second, her thumb pressing into the muscle of his neck with rough warmth. “Help me count these into stacks of twenty before your sister comes down and thinks we robbed the provincial treasury.”

The winter wind coming off Lake Angdos tasted of slate-dust, pine frost, and the cold, mineral brine of the high mountains.

Corin walked up the broad, tree-lined avenue of the Imperial District in a clean, dark navy woolen tunic his mother had spent three nights altering from an old officer’s coat, the frayed sleeve-linings replaced with neat, invisible seams of black linen. Beneath his leather belt, tucked tight against his belly in a double-stitched calfskin money-belt, rested one hundred imperial gold sovereigns—heavy, cold, and solid as a row of iron rivets.

At the end of the avenue rose the Iron Gate of the Royal College of Marches and Guilds.

It was not a gate in any common sense; it was a monument carved from black granite and white limestone during the seventh year of the first emperor. Ten colossal pillars, each three fathoms thick and thirty paces high, supported an arched lintel carved with the battle-standards of the five founding legions. In the center of the vast gravel quadrangle beyond stood the equestrian bronze colossus of Emperor Pierre I, the greenpatinated broadsword in the emperor’s right hand pointing directly toward the northern frontier.

The quadrangle was swarming with people.

Carriages with lacquered doors bearing the heraldic crests of every great house in the Pontine Empire were lined up three deep along the carriage-rails, their matched teams of bays and greys stamping their hooves into the crushed shale. Young men in velvet-lined mantles, braided military frocks, and tailored fencing tunics stood in small, loud knots beneath the colonnades, their high-heeled riding boots polished to a mirror shine, their rapiers and smallswords swinging from gold-threaded baldrics. Private squires in blue and gold livery bustled through the crowd carrying leather weapon-cases, brass-bound trunks, and velvet cushions holding registration papers stamped with red wax seals.

Corin adjusted the collar of his coat, stepped past the granite base of the third pillar, and entered the Great Enrollment Rotunda.

The rotunda was large enough to hold a regiment of cavalry on parade. High above, the domed ceiling was pierced by thirty-two arched clerestory windows that cast long, diagonal shafts of pale winter sunlight across the polished marble floor. In the center of the hall, two massive wooden signboards hung from the iron tie-beams: to the east, the Department of Aether-Evocation; to the west, the Department of Steel.

The western side was divided into six long queues, each ending at an oak registration desk where senior proctors sat behind stacks of parchment ledgers.

Corin took his place at the end of the fourth queue, standing behind a tall youth with broad shoulders wrapped in a cape of silver-fox fur. The boy was talking loudly to his companion, a slender youth in a dark green velvet coat with puffed sleeves.

“My father wanted me to enter the Evocation Hall,” the fox-caped boy was saying, twirling a polished whalebone cane between his gloved fingers. “He offered to buy an arch-mage’s dispensation for forty crowns. But I told him straight: magic is for clerks and priests. Real men take the blade. Besides, Diana Salmond registered for the Department of Steel yesterday morning.”

The second youth laughed, a high, nasal sound. “You think you have a chance with Salmond’s daughter, Cassio? The girl has been drilling with the Blade-Saint since she was five years old. They say she reached the Azure Verge before her seventeenth birthday. She’d dislocate your shoulder with a wooden practice foil before you could finish your opening bow.”

“A woman is still a woman, Longo,” the first boy replied, a smug, self-satisfied smirk spreading across his smooth, pink face. “Even a general’s daughter likes a title and an estate on the south river. Once we’re in the third class together, we’ll see whose name carries weight.”

Corin stood quietly behind them, his hands resting in his pockets, his thumb tracing the rough edge of his ancestor’s faded patent of nobility. He looked at the boys’ tailored cloaks, their uncalloused knuckles, the expensive silver buckles on their shoes. They talked about the sword as if it were a dance-step or an invitation to a garden party—something you put on with clean linen to impress girls in the parlor.

None of them had ever smelled boiling mordant. None of them had ever had their nose broken in an alleyway over a stolen manuscript.

A sudden, sharp ripple of movement went through the eastern entrance of the rotunda.

The chatter in the hall died away like a candle flame pinched between wet fingers. Dozens of young men who had been standing in the queues suddenly turned their heads, their eyes widening, several of them stepping out of line entirely to press toward the central aisle. “She’s here,” someone whispered near the front of the third queue. “The Lady Diana.”

Corin turned to look.

Walking through the high marble archway were two young women.

The one on the left had a mass of bright, unruly violet hair that spilled over the shoulders of a dark purple wool frock, her jaw square and stubborn, her hands tucked deep into the pockets of an oversized leather fencing jacket. She was scowling at the crowd with open irritation, her nose wrinkled as if she had smelled sour milk.

Beside her walked Diana Salmond.

She wore no velvet, no fur trim, and no family jewels. Her attire was a simple, dark grey wool tunic beneath an unadorned cuirass of brushed steel, its surface clean and free of gilding save for the small, stamped insignia of the imperial army at the left shoulder. Her golden hair was drawn back in a severe, tight braid that hung straight down her spine, bound with a strip of black leather.

She was taller than most of the boys in the hall, her shoulders broad and level, her waist narrow, her step long, balanced, and completely silent on the polished marble. She did not swing her arms; her right hand rested lightly against the plain iron pommel of the broadsword at her hip, her fingers loose and easy.

Her face was not merely pretty; it had the clear, severe, and breathtaking symmetry of a marble statue carved by a master who understood that true beauty had no need for ornament. Her skin was pale, her grey eyes calm, steady, and entirely devoid of the nervous arrogance that marked the noble sons around her.

As she walked down the central aisle, the crowd of young aristocrats parted before her like water before the prow of a skiff.

“Lady Diana!” a young man with a braided silver collar called out, bowing so low his cloak swept the marble. “Allow me to hold your place in the second queue! My father is Baron Vane of the—”

“Thank you, sir,” she said. Her voice was low, clear, and perfectly modulated, carrying easily across the vast hall without being raised. “I am quite capable of standing in line on my own feet.”

The violet-haired girl beside her rolled her eyes violently, threw her hands up, and glared at the surrounding boys. “Will you lot clear out of the aisle? You’re buzzing around like blowflies over a gut-bucket! Go back to your places before the proctors call the guard to clear the floor!”

Several of the young nobles flushed red, but none of them answered back; they merely muttered among themselves and shuffled back into their queues.

Diana touched the violet-haired girl’s sleeve with a faint, calming smile. “Judith, please. They are merely being polite.”

“They’re being ridiculous, Di,” the girl named Judith snapped, shaking her head until her violet curls bounced. “We had three years of this nonsense at the preparatory school. If I have to spend another three years listening to boys with soft hands tell me about their fathers’ hunting lodges, I’m going to take an ash-stave and clear the dormitory corridor myself.”

Diana gave a soft, musical laugh that made half the young men in the fourth queue catch their breath, then turned and took her place quietly at the end of the line, two paces behind Corin.

Corin did not turn around to stare. He kept his back straight, his eyes fixed on the registrar’s desk twenty yards ahead, but he could feel the cold, electric weight of her presence behind him—a subtle, humming pressure in the air that smelled faintly of weapon grease, clean linen, and cold rain.

Ten minutes later, the queue moved forward, and Corin stepped up to the massive oak desk.

Behind the desk sat a woman in her mid-twenties with a mass of natural, pale yellow curls tied loosely with a green ribbon. She wore the tailored, dark blue uniform of a senior academy instructor, an iron-capped quill pen balanced lightly between her ink-stained fingers.

She took a sip of tea from an earthen mug, looked up at Corin, and picked up the top parchment from the stack.

“Name and lineage,” she said, her voice brisk and professional.

Corin reached into his coat, pulled out the worn, yellowed patent of nobility, and laid it flat on the desk alongside his graduation certificate from the municipal trade school. “Corin Frankland. Hereditary baronetcy of the Oakhaven March, patent granted in the twenty-seventh year of

Emperor Pierre I.”

The instructor raised her eyebrows slightly, picked up the old parchment, and held it up against the light from the clerestory window. She ran her thumb over the crumbling beeswax seal, checking the depth of the imperial stamp.

“The Frankland patent,” she murmured, a faint, curious smile touching her lips. “An old line. I haven’t seen this crest on the registry since your grandfather’s cousin died at the siege of the western ford.”

She looked down at the second paper, and her eyebrows rose higher.

“The Municipal Skill College of the South District?” She looked up at him, her sharp, hazel eyes taking in his clean navy coat, his dye-stained fingernails, and the faint scar across his nose. “You graduated in practical arithmetic and fabric dyeing?”

“I did, instructor,” Corin said levelly.

“The Department of Steel is an elite martial institution, Master Frankland,” she said, tapping the quill against the desk. “We do not teach basic literacy or how to hold a hoe. Every other student in this hall has had six years of preparatory fencing and basic aetheric conditioning. You will be competing against the finest blade-prospects in the southern empire. Are you certain you wish to submit this petition?” “I am certain,” Corin said.

Before she could dip her pen in the inkpot, a sharp, familiar voice came from the side aisle behind the registration barrier. “Aunt Brittany!”

Corin’s stomach tightened.

Walking briskly toward the desk was Annabel Logres, wearing a dark green velvet riding habit with polished silver buttons, her thick copper curls bouncing over her shoulders, a rolled parchment certificate tucked beneath her arm.

She stopped dead three paces from the desk, her green eyes locking onto Corin’s face.

For a second she couldn’t get her breath to move, and then her cheeks flushed with sudden, incredulous fury.

“You?” she gasped, her voice loud enough to carry across four queues. “What in the seven hells are you doing in the Royal Rotunda?”