The Sea of Shards

The great hall of Oakhaven smelled of smoke, burnt wood and the new damp of the thaw, which came in through three hundred empty window frames. On the night of Archduke Morvath's coup, the southern archers had swept the gallery with fire arrows, and the windows that had withstood three centuries of frost burst apart in a single hour. Now the slate floor was a sea of shards that crunched under one's boots like puddle ice.

Bruno walked across it with a two-vara iron rule in one hand and a waxed leather notebook in the other, chalking down the measurements of each opening. He had been master armorer of the stronghold for twenty years: he forged gates, tempered spearheads, shod the horses of the guard. He knew nothing about glass. But Oakhaven's master glazier had died on the night of the coup with an arrow in his throat, his two journeymen with him, and Prince Fadrique had put the rule in Bruno's hand with a single sentence: before the April sleet.

Forty days were left. Bruno had counted the openings three times. Of three hundred windows, eleven still kept some piece.

He crouched by the opening of the ducal chapel and picked up a blue fragment the size of a coin. His grandfather had helped set that window when Bruno was a boy; he had let him hold the lead. He put the fragment in his apron without quite knowing why.

A rustle of cloth on straw, at the far end of the stable passage, made him look up.

He found her in the last stall, behind a pile of oat sacks, wrapped in a soaking blanket. A young woman in a gown of blue velvet cut in the southern fashion, embroidered in gold and caked with mud and dung to the knees. Her brown hair was tangled with straw and in her right hand, pointed at him, was a long shard of blue glass. Her fingers were bleeding from gripping it.

"One more step and I'll open your throat, blacksmith."

Bruno stopped three paces away and folded his arms. He didn't draw his knife. He looked at her slowly: the stance wasn't that of a frightened maid, but of someone who would rather die than ask for anything.

"If I meant you harm I wouldn't have come with a rule and a notebook," he said. "You're Doña Brianda de Soria. Lady to the Countess of Arlanza, who came with the southern envoy. The countess went out through the water postern with the tercios on the night of the coup and forgot you."

"She didn't forget. She left me."

"And what do you expect? That I'll hand you over?"

"I expect not." She didn't lower the glass. "But I've spent four days eating raw oats and listening to your people say what they'd do to a southern woman if they found one."

Bruno looked at the piece of glass she was holding. Then he looked more closely.

"That in your hand is Murano cobalt. From the chapel window."

Brianda blinked.

"How do you know?"

"Because I know nothing about glass, my lady, but I've been looking at it for three days." He took from his apron the fragment he had picked up and showed it to her on his palm. "And because you picked it out from among a thousand pieces, and not by chance. You picked it because it's the best."

Something moved in her face. She lowered the glass a little.

"My father had stained-glass workshops in Toledo before the crown's taxes ruined him. I grew up cutting glass with a diamond point, measuring lead, firing grisaille in the kiln. They married me into the house of Arlanza to pay the debts, and the countess took me as her lady because I could read accounts."

Bruno was silent for a while. Outside, in the courtyard, someone was shouting orders to clear the bodies still lying under the rubble of the gallery.

"I have forty days, three hundred openings and a forge," he said at last. "I have no one who knows which color goes beside which. If you help me, I'll give you bread, a cot in the lower tower and my word that no one touches you while you're in my workshop. When the roads open, the prince will give you an escort south."

Brianda looked at him for a long time, searching for the trap. She didn't find it. She dropped the glass into the straw.

"Show me the workshop," she said. "And give me something that isn't oats."

As they came out of the stables, a boy in a forge apron like Bruno's crossed their path in the courtyard. He was seventeen, his hair singed in patches, a black band around his arm. He looked at Brianda's southern gown, looked at Bruno, and spat on the ground between them.

"That's Ciro," Bruno said when the boy had gone. "My apprentice. A southern arrow killed his brother in the gallery."