The Great Hall of Ashanra was unusually still. The fire pits smoldered low, their light dancing upon the carved pillars and painted frescoes of Rajas long gone. Shadows swayed across the high walls, as though the ancestors themselves leaned forward to hear the words about to be spoken.
He was barely chest-high, but the sight of him could unnerve grown men. His shoulders were broad as an ox's, his arms gnarled like old tree roots, and his long beard was braided thick, heavy with copper rings that clinked faintly when he moved. Leather garments, patched and worn, clung to him, and his boots carried the stains of sea-salt and soot. A hammer, scarred and blackened from years of work, hung at his side, not as ornament, but as a part of his very being.
"Lad, you've gone mad!" His words rang sharp, bouncing off the stone arches.
Pranvi's reply cut like steel. "Orvak Vajramala, you stand before the Samanta of Aranyavarta!"
Orvak tipped his head, the hint of a grin worrying his beard. "Aye, and before his blade as well, I see. You're like the women of my homeland—beautiful as sunrise, dreadful as winter." He lifted his callused palms as Pranvi's hand drifted to her hilt.
"Peace, girl. I meant both as a compliment."
I raised my hand and felt her irritation settle, if only by a hair.
"Orvak," I said, letting the hall travel my voice for me, "your fire is welcome. But what we speak of now is not for jest."
He folded his thick arms across his chest. The copper rings clicked and his hammer knocked his thigh with a patient thunk.
"Then speak it plainly."
"Iron ships."
The words hung in the air. For a moment, there was nothing but the soft spitting of resin in the torches.
Then Orvak's laugh erupted—round, rolling, scarred with disbelief.
"Iron ships! Throw your sword into the Granges, lad, and pray to Varuna that it floats back to you. Iron sinks. It is the nature of things."
"I carry no sword," I said, "and yet I sit here. I am not a boy who relishes in the dreams of his ambitions. I strive to bring them to reality, Orvak. Nature yields to the hand that seeks to shape it."
His laughter faded. He squinted as if weighing me on a scale only he could see. "So you've a plan to make mountains float."
"Timber rots, worms hollow it, fire eats it but iron—iron endures."
"Until rust eats it quicker," he shot back. "And iron is heavy as an honest debt. Ships float because they hold air. How do you drag an iron tomb across a wind and a current? With ambition?"
"A hull with hollow chambers," I answered. "And a fire-fed belly."
Pranvi drew in a breath. Orvak's fingers stilled upon his beard.
"A hearth," he muttered, "inside a ship." He took two steps closer, peering as if the words themselves were blueprints. "What would you burn, then? Charcoal? You've little forest left, if your roads don't lie. You'd stuff the decks with fuel rather than men. A naked princess adrift in the seas, ripe for raiders to take her captive."
Pranvi turned to me, eyes flashing. "Brother, this is folly..."
But I did not waver. I let my silence weigh upon them, my gaze fixed and unyielding.
The man's challenge rippled outward until even the banners seemed to lean to hear my answer.
At length he asked, "Say I were mad enough to forge such a thing. How would you shape its belly? Would you have me build a fire-hearth inside iron ribs? Where would the heat go? How would the wheels turn? And where would the men stand, when iron screams?"
"That," I said, "is precisely why I called you."
I leaned forward, picking up a sealed parchment from the high table.
Pranvi hesitated as I handed it to her, her brow furrowing with doubt. I gave her a warm smile and a nod. That was enough. She crossed the floor and delivered it to the dwarf.
Orvak cracked the seal and unrolled the parchment. Then spread the page against his forearm.
His eyes darted, back and forth, back and forth. His fingers trembled slightly as they traced the sketches — cylinders, chambers, wheels, vents, design of a furnace that would turn heat into motion.
The hall listened to him think.
At last, he looked up. His voice was no longer mocking but heavy, laden with wonder.
"Lad… this parchment holds the power to change your people's fate. Why entrust it to me? Why place such fire in the hands of a banished dwarf?"
"You are no outsider, Orvak. This is your home now. I shall treat you with dignity and punish you with cruelty; as I would any other man of the janapada."
The threat was quiet enough that it did not bruise the air, but it stayed there, like a blade laid upon the table where all could see.
For a moment, Orvak held my gaze, his jaw tight.
"A harsh tongue," he murmured, "but honest."
Pranvi finally found her voice. "Brother, what is it that you have drawn?"
I turned to her, smiling faintly. "A device that harnesses fire. A furnace that breathes steam, forcing chambers to push a ship forward. No oars. No wind. A vessel that answers only to us."
Her eyes widened. For a moment, I saw in them not just confusion, but fear — fear that I was reaching for something beyond mortal grasp. She blinked hard, then looked away, as though the thought itself scorched her.
Orvak rolled the parchment halfway closed and tapped the sketch with two knuckles. "You know the risks? Not the ones that sound fine in a hall but the ones that split men in half."
"I know enough to ask the right dwarf," I said. "But tell me the rest."
He breathed out through his nose. The copper rings in his beard chimed like a small bell. "You've heard the name Chitrakuta, I reckon."
"We trade with them when we can." I tilted my head. "And once, we sheltered one of their finest."
He snorted. "Finest is a word for songs. I was stubborn. That's the nearer truth." He shifted his weight, as if the past had weight, too. "There was a shipyard on the Black Shoal—a cold place where fog eats men before the sea does. A sabhasad with too much silver and not enough patience told us to build bigger than the janapada had ever dared. A wall against the isles, he called it. He wanted a name to outlast his father."
"Did you give him one?" I asked, curious.
"We called her the Sea-Widow, but not to his face." His mouth twitched. "Iron plates along a timber spine, tar and felt to quiet the seams. A furnace in her belly, smaller than this, just enough to turn a wheel and mock the wind. It near worked." He held up his forearms. Under the hair and soot I saw pale, roped scars laddering the skin. "When the pressure rose, we learned the true tongue of iron. It screams. Men freeze when metal screams."
Pranvi had not moved in a long time. Now she tilted toward those scars despite herself. "How many?"
He shrugged without air. "Enough. Too many." He met my eyes again. "I told the man we needed time to tame the pressure, to widen the chambers, to teach the stokers to listen. He called it dithering. His patience snapped before the rivets did. We launched her half-ready because a man with a silver purse said, tide waits for no one. The first high swell found the seam we feared. The hull held, barely. The janapada needed a culprit. They chose the dwarf with the loudest mouth."
"They exiled you," I said.
"The sabhasad exiled me," he corrected, and a dry smile cracked his beard. "The janapada merely agreed to hum along the tune that was played. They stamped my papers and said I'd lived too long among furnaces to know the feel of timber. One more lie among many."
He rolled the parchment closed at last and held it like a thing that might bite. "So you'll understand my reluctance, lad. I've seen iron betray men. I've watched rulers say 'now' when 'later' would save lives. Ambition is a fine word but it doesn't keep lungs from filling with steam."
"I mean to keep ours breathing," I said. "And I mean to do it without bowing to Varunad or the sabhasad."
Orvak squinted at me again, as if measuring hull thickness in the grain of my voice. "What do you have, truly? Iron, I know. Charcoal? Too little. Timber? Little. Men?" He jerked his chin at Pranvi. "A few good ones."
Pranvi's mouth hardened, but she did not take the bait. I felt her anger like a heat at my shoulder.
"We have iron," I said. "And we have fire. And soon we will have water where we want it. Managed groves can be planted along new channels—fast-growing woods we can coppice for fuel. Charcoal fines from the smithies can be pressed with clay to bricks. Not perfect, but enough for a trial. We will begin on land."
"On land?" Orvak echoed, eyes narrowing.
"A winch by the river. A steam mule," I said. "Let it pull barges from the bank before we trust it with a hull. We teach stokers to listen to iron's voice. We teach men to read her pressure like a heartbeat. And we do not launch while doubt remains."
The dwarf's shoulders eased by a hair. "You'd start with a mooring engine." He scratched his cheek with the corner of the parchment. "That I can build. That I can break on purpose, to learn where it screams."
He shot me a look, half-challenge, half-respect. "You'll accept the breaking?"
"I asked you because I will."
He grunted. "Hnh."
Pranvi's voice, when it came, was quiet with a soldier's practical fear. "If the belly bursts…"
Orvak surprised her with a nod that was almost gentle. "Then we don't stand in front of her. We don't put men where iron will want to fly. We build a shield—here" he tapped the diagram above the firebox, "and we vent the rage to the sky. It will still singe, girl. But it won't cleave men in two."
"Pranvi," I said, "you will choose the guards who watch this work. No gossip leaves the yard. If anyone asks what we forge, call it a river-winch for the Great Canal. It will not be a lie."
Her eyes flicked from me to Orvak and back. She inclined her head, slow. "I will choose them myself."
Orvak rolled the parchment carefully and cradled it in both hands, a reverence I had not seen in him before.
"I'll need men," he said. "Not soft-handed scribes. Lads with backs like beams and heads not too proud to learn. I'll need a yard by deep water, a roof to keep out rain, and the right to bar the door on any day I choose. And…" He paused, then surprised me with a crooked smile. "I'll need the right to shout at Samantas when they set deadlines that would shame a drunk."
Pranvi's lip twitched. "You'd shout at my brother?"
"I would shout at a god if he stood between me and a hole blown in a boiler," Orvak said evenly, not looking away from me. "But I'll take the punishment after."
"You'll take it before if you shout without cause," I said, though the corner of my mouth tilted despite me. "You will also swear an oath before my mother. Not to betray this work. Not to sell it. Not to speak of it to the janapada that washed its hands of you."
He shrugged. "I've thrown away oaths worth more than gold because the men who made them had none left in their mouths. But I'll give you mine, lad." He thumped his chest with one fist. "On iron!"
"And on Aranyavarta," I added.
He held my gaze. "On Aranyavarta."
Pranvi shifted a step closer, her earlier heat cooled into something sharper, colder, more useful. "If any man tries to pry this secret from you—coin, threat, or blade, send him to me."
The dwarf studied her like a craftsman studies a new tool. After a moment, he nodded. "I'll do that, girl."
"She has a name," I said, more gently than the words might have allowed.
"Pranvi," he repeated. "Good. I like knowing what to shout when the roof is coming down."
A breath I had not noticed holding left me. I stepped down from the dais, boots ringing once on the stone.
"You forge me a ship with the fire in your heart and I shall forge the nation with the flames of my ambition."
Orvak did not bow this time. He brought his fist to his chest a second time, but softer. The copper rings sang.
"On iron, Samanta!"
Pranvi's gaze found mine. For the first time since the word iron left my lips, there was not only dread in it. There was also...faith.
We set the first measures there, in the red hush of the hall. No scribes to witness it. No courtiers to embroider it. A dwarf with sea-scars, a captain with a sword-callus, and a Samanta whose hands still smelled faintly of ink and dust from a hidden ledger.
"Two more things," Orvak said, as I turned. "First, the winch. We build it where men can watch without knowing what they see. Let them carry the rumor of a clever mule. Rumors make good blankets for truth. Second, your fuel. The pressed bricks you spoke of will help, but you'll need forests that grow back the way a beard does. Coppice groves, you called them? Plant them close to your channels. I know trees that take a blade and return thicker for the insult."
"We'll plant them," I said. "The Great Canal will have green shoulders."
"The Great Canal," he repeated, as if committing a hymn to memory. "A river made by men. Hnh." He tucked the parchment beneath his arm and grinned up at me, all teeth and soot. "Let's make the river chew."
Pranvi exhaled a laugh she hadn't meant to let out.
"Work begins at dawn," I said.
"Work began when you said iron," he replied, and turned on his heel.
He strode away under banners of Rajas who had never seen a boiler, the copper rings in his beard chiming time for a march only he could hear. Pranvi watched him go, then looked back at me.
"You're certain?" she asked, "not doubting, but reminding."
"No," I said. "But certainty is a luxury we were not born into, sister."
For a heartbeat, we simply stood in the breathing red of the torches, listening to the quiet labor of the fires. I lifted my chin.
"Come," I said. "We have a yard to choose, a roof to raise, and men to swear to silence."
Pranvi nodded once and fell into step. The doors opened before us. Cold air took the smoke. Somewhere in the dark, the river turned, indifferent and enormous.
On my lips, a smirk—not triumph, not mockery. Only the expression of a boy who had already ignited a flame and knew there was work to do before it reached the chamber.