Annice was waiting nervously. She’d gone round to Griffin’s cottage yesterday, both to check on him and to ask him a question. The conversation wasn’t helping anything at all in her head. She’d done a lot of thinking, and she still couldn’t make sense of half her thoughts. They just kept circling back to the north, like someone following a compass. Or someone out on the water, using the ruined Abbey as a landmark, visible a long way away.
They hadn’t talked long yesterday. She’d been able to see he was still recovering. When she’d knocked, he’d been up in the kitchen. He’d been leaning on one crutch, heating up some soup and stirring with the other hand, so that seemed better than it might be. But he’d moved slowly, like everything took thought. Now, he would be here any minute, because she’d asked him to come here.
She kept peering out the window. Finally, there he was, coming up in the chair, with the two crutches tucked however he did that. They ran down behind the back of the seat. That was good because what she wanted to ask him almost certainly involved going upstairs. She hurried around to get the gate, ducking her chin and smiling, not managing more than a few words. “Thank you for coming.” It wasn’t much, but she felt like it was that or it would be a flood of babble.
Once he was in the front room of the shop, he looked up at her. “You wanted me to look at something? Upstairs, you said.” He turned around, threading the crutches out of where they rested between the wheel and the chair, angled up to the back. They held for a moment, then came free, and she was distracted, watching them.
“How do you that? Keep them in place?” Annice gestured with a hand.
“Magic. Though if someone non-magical asks, it’s magnets. You can do it with magnets, actually. We did some of the testing that way, but it’s a lot more fiddly, and you have to line them up perfectly. And in my case, actual magnets interfere with some things in my day to day work. Otherwise it’s a huge bother to have crutches with you and the chair. Some people make a sort of sling, but then it catches on things or bumps into people. This, they slot into that little holder at the bottom, to make sure they don’t slip down, then another near the back. There are charms that will grab them and hold them in place.”
That was a lot more information than she’d expected, as if a part of the conversation three days ago had unlocked something in him. “That’s very clever.” It was. She could think of many uses for that kind of sticking something in place. “And you’re sure you’re all right to come upstairs?”
“It’s only two flights, after all. You have, what, twenty-four stairs? Not a hundred ninety-nine. And I know you’ll not mind me taking my time.” Griffin said it easily, but it hit Annice hard, like a blow to her stomach, knocking the wind out of her. It was true, of course, she wouldn’t rush him. But he apparently trusted she wouldn’t, and how could he do that?
“Of course not, no rush.” She let out her breath. “Look, I said a little yesterday. That there was something I think my Da made, and I don’t know enough about it. It’s up on the second floor, in the workroom now. But I don’t know if there are other things like it in the house. And I don’t know what it does.”
“So, shall we start in the workroom then? I assume there’s somewhere I can sit, once we’re there - a chair, a stool, a bench, I can make do with an old crate just fine.”
“Stools.” Annice ducked her head. “If you’d rather wait a little, rest, that’s fine?”
He considered, touching a spot on the chair just above the wheel, then pushed himself upright, settling his arms into the crutches. “Show me, then?”
Griffin was slower than he had been, taking each step carefully, like he wasn’t entirely sure what his feet were doing. That must be an odd sensation, not one Annice knew much about, except when she had pins and needles that went away in a few minutes, or perhaps bumped her funny bone and her hand felt queer, all down her arm. He had to stop at the top of the first flight, leaning gently against a wall. He stared at a spot on the floor, rather than any of the angles that would have shown him the kitchen or the nearest bedroom or anything else.
The next flight brought them up into the studio, and this time, she immediately went and pulled out one of the stools, setting it near the door where he could see everything. He said nothing for minutes, but he was looking around here intently, as if he were memorising it all, so he’d never lose it. It made Annice look at the workroom with new eyes, but she waited until he spoke.
“Would you tell me a little about the space? What the tools do?” Griffin’s voice was quiet, the way someone ought to speak in church or in the cemetery, like it was something holy. Unexpectedly holy.
“Once, this would have been a proper workshop. More than a few people working, each one doing a specific task. Now, I do them all, just in sequence.” It was how things lined up, so they’d flow. “This is the bench, to check the stones over, looking for flaws. Then you chisel the bigger pieces into the size you want to start, as a rough.”
He nodded, and that gave her a little more confidence to go on. “The grindstone, here, where you get the piece into a rough shape. It’s sandstone, and it can crack if you’re not careful, and that’s...” She shivered. “Grandad had stories about injuries. Magic helps that one. We can keep the shards from going everywhere.”
Griffin glanced at her, his head tilted a little. “I’m clear that this is difficult, skilled work.” His voice was still that odd quiet. “What’s in those boxes, there?” He gestured at the shallow wood boxes next to the grindstone.
“Sawdust. You have the stones, and you’ve been using water with the grindstone. You put the pieces in the sawdust until they dry out a little. Ours have charms, again, to help that happen evenly, but sawdust still does most of the work.” She should think about replacing the sawdust. Change of season always meant that. “Then the carver’s bench. Everyone has their own kind of tools, a lot of us make our own.” Annice swallowed hard, because she’d said ‘us’ out loud, and she normally hid that.
When she managed to look at Griffin, he was still smiling, encouraging her along with a little wave of his hand. “The stove’s for glue, or for making a new milling wheel. You melt lead, pour it in the mould, sharpen it with a file, and then add some carborundum powder. That’s for the grooves and lines. I don’t use that as much anymore. Most of my work is carving.”
“So, you’re saying that besides all the skills that go with the jet, you have to manage all these tools, making new milling wheels as you need them. Keep all of your tools in good shape.” Annice had never heard someone put it that way, but who else was going to do it if she didn’t? She nodded, hesitantly, and Griffin went on. “That’s a skill in itself. Plenty of people don’t have it. And that?”
“Rouge wheel.” This one made her laugh. “Charms definitely help here, too. You heard, maybe, what they call jet workers?”
“Red devil, is that what you’re aiming at? It seems a specific sort of term, doesn’t it? But no one explained it.” Griffin settled back a little on his stool, then moved to lean the crutches against the wall at the edge of his reach.
“There’s a reason for that. That’s for polishing, the rouge wheel.”
“The name does in fact suddenly make sense, yes,” Griffin considered. “Jeweller’s rouge, of course. Isn’t that, um.” He looked up at the ceiling, as if searching his memory. “Ferrous, no, ferric oxide.”
“That, and then linseed oil, some paraffin, some lamp black. You work it into the stone. But the oil and the paraffin are slick, and that sprays up from the wheel, mixes with the dust, which is that sort of dried blood brown, and then, well. We work with sharp tools. There’s often a bit of our blood in there.” She held up her own hands, looking at them in a way she didn’t usually, all the little nicks and scars and minor injuries. A couple of fresh ones, still healing. Nan had been the one who made the best healing salve, and she’d long since run out of Nan’s stock.
Griffin nodded. “There’s a line of thinking about crafters that a piece isn’t real until it’s been blooded. Doesn’t take much, but just a drop.”
She blinked at him. “How do you know that? How’d you know about ferric oxide? Or any of the things you knew.”
He spread out his hands. “You wouldn’t believe me if I said that a Schola education can do wonders. Though actually, that is part of it. We don’t turn out as many pure crafters as Alethorpe does. Who could?” That had an amusing, teasing note to it, like it was a joke that had run through part of his life. “But the houses, at Schola, we have different things we focus on. I was in Salmon, people who want to be excellent at lots of skills. One of the way to do that is crafting. We had workshops - nothing specifically like this. But a woodworking shop, a little bit of carving, certainly sewing and leather. Some people got very interested in little devices that did things. You picked up a lot, just talking to people. But this is ...”
He nodded, looking around the room, pivoting on the stool to see all of it. “This is elegant. This is a dance. Of course what you make is beautiful. You’ve set it up so that beauty is the natural result.”
