Granice's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Granice had six weeks to build a machine no young engineer could match, and her workshop was too small to swing a hammer. The Whispering Heartwood Inventors' Grand Prize went to the boldest contraption in the region. She wanted it. At sixty-eight, she meant to prove her hands still worked better than any of theirs. But her home workbench sat wedged between a coal stove and a pantry. She measured the floor with a string and knew the truth. A prize machine needed a lathe, a forge, and room to walk around the thing. She had none of it. Her mechanical lapdog trotted circles around her boots, its brass legs clicking on the stone. She nearly tripped twice. "Not now," she muttered, sketching gears on the back of an old bill. Every design she drew was too big for the space. She crumpled the paper. The lapdog caught it and shook it like a bone. Steam hissed from the pipes overhead. Granice lived in one wing of an old stone castle, a soot-dark place crowned with chimneys and vents. She rented three rooms from the estate. The grand halls below her stood empty, gathering dust. She had passed their locked doors for years without a second thought. Now she stared at her string, then at the ceiling, then out toward the corridor. She went to find her sister. Alician managed the castle's rentals and kept every key on an iron ring at her hip. Granice found her in the lower hall, up a ladder, oiling a stuck window hinge. Red braid swinging, goggles pushed up on her brow, she didn't turn around. "Whatever it is, the answer's probably no," Alician said. "You've got that voice." "I need the old carriage hall," Granice said. "The big one, past the empty kitchens." Alician came down the ladder slow. "That room's not rented. It's not cleared, either. Forty years of junk." "I'll clear it myself." Granice held up her crumpled sketch. "I can't build this in a cupboard. I need the space, and I need the forge that's still bolted in there." Her sister studied the drawing, then studied her. They had argued for decades over who was the better hand with a wrench. Alician knew exactly what the Grand Prize meant to her. That was the problem. Her mouth twitched. "You want the hall so you can beat children half your age," Alician said. "Yes." Alician pulled a heavy key from the ring and pressed it into Granice's palm. "Then don't lose. I'll never hear the end of it if you do." Granice walked to the carriage hall and turned the key. The door groaned open on a cavern of dust and shadow. Along the far wall stood the old forge, cold and buried under crates. The floor stretched wide enough for anything she could dream. She had her space at last. Now she had to empty it, and she had six weeks less one day.