Chapter 657: A Secret Shared by Two Girls
Roland poured a cup of tea and glanced toward the couch. “Would you like some?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Nightingale was reading one of May’s new plays — holding the book with one hand, a strip of dried fish with the other, feet propped on the tea table and her robe shifted to one side so her legs could breathe. The black knit stockings Soraya had painted onto her skin showed clearly in the autumn light. She didn’t move them when he looked, only when someone else entered the office.
Since returning from wherever she’d gone for two days after her conversation with Anna, she had seemed different — lighter, as though something that had been held carefully in place had been allowed to settle where it wanted. She’d started smiling at him often, and sometimes he caught her watching him with a particular quality of attention — frank, unhurried, quietly alive.
I knew I shouldn’t have asked Soraya to paint those stockings.
He carried a cup to her. “Here.”
She put the book down and took it with both hands, breathing in the fragrance first. “Lovely. Could you add a lump of sugar?”
She liked everything — salty and sweet both, in any amount. During his illness she had lost weight visibly. Since his recovery, she had climbed back to exactly where she’d been before, and stopped there. Her body seemed to have found its equilibrium and held it as a fixed point. He’d teased her about overindulging, back when he’d thought it mattered; he now acknowledged it didn’t.
He added sugar, returned to his desk, and tried to resume the blueprint. Several strokes of the quill later, he gave up the pretense of focus.
“Nightingale.”
“Mm?”
“What exactly did Anna tell you?”
In an instant she was off the couch and had materialized on the corner of his desk, sitting cross-legged, near enough that he could smell the tea-warmth on her. “It’s a secret.”
“Even from me?”
A pause — weighing. “I made a promise to Anna. If it were only my secret, I’d tell you anything you wanted to know. But it isn’t only mine. She asked me to keep it for now.”
“All right.” He took a sip and set the cup down. He could ask Anna directly, but there were degrees of emotional intelligence even he recognized, and one of them was knowing when not to pursue a thing. Whatever Anna had said, Nightingale had come back from it whole.
He picked up his quill again.
“Thank you,” Nightingale said.
“For what?”
She was looking at him when he glanced up — full attention, unhurried. The autumn light came through the window behind her and caught the ends of her fair hair, made her skin luminous.
“For telling her what I feel.”
Time had the quality of something briefly paused.
Good news arrived from the Ministry of Construction in the afternoon: Neverwinter’s first converter steel mill was complete at the North Slope Mountain.
It looked nothing like a mill. It was an iron shed — simple, angular, functional — housing one large piece of equipment Roland had designed himself. The converter’s body was steel throughout, angular in cross-section, resting on a grate and coated with heat-resistant material. Its surface was dark grey and dull in the daylight, the mass of it suggesting weight and purpose rather than any aesthetic intention. Beside the blast furnace and the existing smelter works, it held its own.
He arrived at the Furnace Area to find the equipment already surrounded by experienced workers and City Hall officials, peering at it from various angles with the slightly baffled concentration of craftsmen confronting something unfamiliar.
“Your Majesty.” Lesya of the Ministry of Construction met him at the steps. “I followed the design exactly. But — can this thing actually make steel? There’s no hearth.”
Roland smiled. “In nature, fire isn’t the only thing that produces heat. Get the workers ready. We’re running the first test.”
He had weighed the three standard options against Neverwinter’s specific constraints. The electric furnace was out immediately — the necessary infrastructure didn’t exist. The open hearth furnace had elegant simplicity and familiar operation, but its energy consumption was punishing. Neverwinter’s coal reserves sat far upriver at the Redwater source, and its coking plant had only just come online — barely enough to feed the existing blast furnace. An open hearth furnace would drain what little surplus they had. It also required a regenerator to be efficient and consumed half a day per heat, which made it impractical as a production facility.
The converter required almost no fuel. It worked by oxidizing the impurities already present in liquid pig iron — silicon, manganese, carbon — generating its own heat through the reactions themselves. A blast of oxygen-rich air through a pipe was sufficient. The setup was compact, needing no regenerator, and the orbit doubled as the liquid steel’s transfer line. A heat took less than an hour; with mature technique, it could be done in fifteen minutes.
The first step: iron ingots into the pear-shaped furnace, delivered by the steam crane.
“Anna — make it liquid.”
She climbed the stairs to the converter’s mouth without ceremony, summoned her Blackfire, and reduced the ingots to flowing iron in minutes. The heat painted her face in red-orange light. She stepped back, looked down at Roland, and he gave the next instruction.
“Insert the blowing pipe.”
The foreman directed his crew with the ease of men long familiar with cranes and heavy equipment. The steam engine boomed. The steel pipe descended into the converter mouth from above, connected at its other end to a flexible coated line leading to the air pump.
Oxygen-rich air entered the furnace.
For a moment, nothing.
Then the mouth erupted. Orange sparks scattered in arcs. Brilliant white flame shot upward, enveloping the pipe and the grate and the top third of the converter itself. The sound of expanding gas overwhelmed the steam engine’s noise entirely.
Every official took a step backward.
Roland stayed where he was, hands behind his back, face into the hot wind. The reactions were running in sequence now — silicon burning first, then manganese, then the long combustion of carbon, the carbon monoxide forcing its way out of the melt and igniting on contact with air. It looked like a volcano deciding to wake up. The roar of it resonated in his chest.
A pity we can’t use pure oxygen yet. The flames would be even more spectacular, and the efficiency gain would be substantial. But that required separation technology he hadn’t built.
The flames dimmed as the carbon was consumed. Phosphorus and sulfur, the last elements, combined with the limestone he’d added and rose as slag. When the mouth quieted, he instructed the foreman to tilt the furnace — the liquid steel poured cleanly through the tap hole, a bright stream, separated from the lighter slag floating on its surface. He had them stop before the vessel was empty; the last of the steel went with the slag, waste he’d recycle rather than contaminate the output.
The final step: deoxidation. Lucia’s aluminum, drawn from the alumina Neverwinter imported from Longsong Stronghold, dissolved into the steel and pulled the remaining oxygen out as floating oxide slag.
Done.
The officials stared at the molds filling with bright steel. No one spoke for a moment.
They’re doing the arithmetic, Roland thought. They know the Star of Steel requires Anna and Lucia. They know this required workers and a pipe and a steam engine. The conclusion was arriving in each of them at its own speed, but it was arriving.
They could not build another Anna. But they could build another converter. They could train more workers. Steel — real steel, in quantity — would no longer be measured in what the witches could produce on any given day.
He let them sit with it. The warmth on his face, the steady cooling glow from the molds, the smell of slag and hot metal — all of it felt like something about to begin.
He saw these flames as an emblem: the world stepping forward.