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Like Fire In The Forge	By : IcarusComplex Category: A through F > Circle of Magic (series) > Circle of Magic (series) Views: 1787 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Daja or The Circle of Magic (Fire In The Forging etc), nor do I make any money from this.

Chapter List
- 1-Gauze
- 2-Drawing
- 3-Cherries
- 4-God
- 5-Traveller
- 3
- 4
- 5
52 – God

It was a cold, grey morning, gilded with silver frost when the girls happened upon one another at a crossing of the temple roads. The dawnstar still winked in the lightening sky, hung low in the west like a diamond above the neckline of some gorgeous courtesan. Daja was pushing a small barrow of coal from the stores to the forge; the carters took three days’ holiday around Longnight and they hadn’t gotten around to resupplying Frostpine’s forge yet. She wore a heavy quilted coat saturated in Sandry’s magic to keep the heat in and the cold out, but as they stood talking, the chill crept insidiously into her boots and up her legs. Lina had paused in a leisurely stroll to offer devotions to a small shrine to Shurri Firesword. A plain oak quarterstaff – her constant companion during SkyFire’s insistence that novices know their weapon like their own bodies – tapped rhythmically at her leg. It seemed to Daja the novice’s light blue eyes sharpened as Daja shivered, but she might have imagined it.
Lina took Daja’s lie about not feeling the cold without comment. She fell in beside the smith as they started back toward the forges with half a smile and one hand in her own coat pocket. Daja again shivered as their arms brushed. The scent that had followed Lina into the forge that day – burning sage and woodsmoke – curled around them through the mist. It mingled pleasantly with Daja’s own hot iron and coaldust smell.
Despite her distraction, the smith-mage had the presence of mind to look surprised when the novice furtively presented her with a lump of pink-shot quartz. She almost dropped it. It was warm—nearly hot.
Don’t tell anyone, Lina whispered. A hopeful smile tucked up into the corner of her pretty mouth, as if they shared a secret now. Daja stored the image away for another cold day, and allowed Lina to take the handles of the barrow from her. Cradled in both her gloved hands, the quartz pulsed with the heat of a small brazier.
Lina was watching her, one corner of her lip between her teeth. Daja pretended not to notice and tried to quell the tingling in her fingertips where their gloved hands had connected. It was round cluster of pink prisms, the bottom gritty grey and slightly curved as if the lump had been part of some fantastic egg. They weren’t supposed to be experimenting, Lina was saying, her words slightly strained with the weight of the cart. Apprentices. Only just entering their second year of training. That put her at thirteen or so—like Daja.
But it had come so easily, Lina said. Late one night, she’d sat in the novice’s workshop, and pulled the heat of a small brazier into the quartz. The result sat in Daja’s hands. Odd washes of warmth rippled through the Trader’s gloves, up her arms and neck – to where a flush was already fighting to fill her cheeks with fire – and down her legs, chasing out the nipping chill. Lina’s eyes were full of tiny sparks as she watched Daja’s reaction to the heat-stone—slaty blue all aglint with hope and curiosity. She didn’t bother to shield it when Daja met her gaze momentarily, although a blush glowed in her cheeks.
Another magic rock. A little voice with Briar’s mocking tone tickled her ear, although she was sure the real Briar was nowhere in minds’ reach. She pushed it aside and smiled. The tingling in her fingers spread up her arms.
Later she would have no memory of the things they talked about on the way back to the forge. Fine, coppery hairs too short to be caught in Lina’s braid curled over her collar. Laugh-lines wrinkled around her nose when Daja related laying into three strapping apprentices her first week here with only her Trader staff. The tingle trickled down from her shoulders into a fizzing pool low in her belly.
Lina mentioned the quarterstaff drills of the Fire Temple classes with mingled exhaustion and pleasure. They were the best distraction from all the disagreeable scholarly deskwork she could ask for. Daja hadn’t been to training in a while; Lina had missed her, and wondered what had pulled her away. Daja skimmed over the adventure she and her foster-siblings had had in the North, taking an unexpectedly intense pleasure in the shock and wonderment in Lina’s eyes as the tale played out. She didn’t mention the living brass or the fire squares. To her mind it would be too much like she was bragging.
The novice smiled, braid swaying as she shook her head in wonderment. She had never had an adventure like that. She and Davri – the green-belted lookalike – grew up in a herding community in the northern mountains, and came south as soon as a travelling mage identified them as burgeoning mages. The most magical thing they could do in reality, she confessed half-jokingly, was spin a staff lit at both ends so fast it melted into a ring of liquid fire. It was the first time Daja had heard her make a joke. With it, the sparks in her eyes intensified until they might have melted snow from the mountaintops. Frisson like molten gold flooded over into the rest of Daja’s limbs and set her body aglow.
They had reach the forge. Frostpine had not returned from wherever he had spent the night and Daja had not lit the fire before going for coal. Dark and deserted as it was, there was nothing to distract them from each other. Lina’s mouth was sweeter than honey as they pressed up against each other in the doorway. She tasted like cinnamon, and sage, and something sharp and rich that Daja couldn’t name. Daja held her closer and felt a fresh wave of heat race through her, fingertips to toes. The calluses Daja had felt when they shook hands that first day in the forge rasped against her neck.
There had to be a kind of reason in this, she thought half-absently as Lina’s hands scrabbled for purchase on her jacket. They found it: in half a moment, the Fire temple novice had Sandry’s heat-spelled jacket unfastened from hip to throat. He hands burrowed under Daja’s shirt with minds of their own. Some kind of divine plan.
Finally she was able to satisfy the want that had plagued her since she shared a weary smile with the other girl over a courtyard choked with death and despair: clasping her hand lightly over the back of Lina’s head, she ran it down the length of the braid until she found the leather tie that kept it tightly bound. They surfaced for air, leaning away just far enough to breathe, foreheads pressed together.
Nobody but the gods would think to throw together a once-trangshi Trader and a mountain girl who pours fire into stones together.
With her eyes squeezed shut, Daja dimly heard laboured breathing. Lina’s trail of light kisses from jawline to throat and further blotted out further thought. The breathing caught. Now Daja recognised it as her own Lina’s hands slipped up from her hips to the small of her back and began to knead. She pulled the tie free of Lina’s braid. Liquid fire flowed out over her hands, slowly disentangling from itself as it spread.
Lina watched her pick strands of copper from the whole, smiling with a kind of fierce serenity. Sparks like a thousand dawnstars spiralled through the blue. A building heat inside Daja mirrored it down, down, into the depths of her body, pulling them closer to something decadent and foreign. This time, she opened Lina’s mouth to her own with teasing lick to her lower lip, and sought the origin of that honey-sweet.
The pleasant tingle building in Daja was a distant memory. All now was pressure and striking sparks, and the roar of fire in her ears deafening her to all but this. Their sighs shushed in her ears like bellows as they laid out on their coats on the hay in the loft. The soft press of their chests mingled with the delirium of other sensations: metal and hay and sage in Daja’s nose, the prickle of stalks into her back through their jackets, the redhead’s warm tongue stroking her own. Lina’s skin was soft, and warm on Daja’s as they lay together, her fingertips small and hard on Daja’s hips. Daja nuzzled into her neck seeking fuller, softer places.
She arched as two questing fingers found a tiny nub at the apex of her thighs that sent waves of white heat through her. The other girl lay half-beside her, half on top, their legs tangled together. In moving lower, Daja had levelled herself with Lina’s breasts, and she now took one pink nipple gently into her mouth. She was rewarded with a throaty moan from somewhere above. The fingers between her legs slipped lower and dipped into her opening.
She began to lose track of where she ended and Lina began. The two of them, twisting and writhing, were beginning to melt together.
The roiling, chaotic centre of Daja’s delirium began to compress, sparks coming thicker and faster now. She released Lina’s nipple and moved to capture her mouth again. Lina submitted, sliding her tongue against Daja’s with complicit desperation. Her fingers worked faster now, coaxing faster arches from the smith’s hips as she instinctually tried to keep up. Daja blindly sought for Lina’s centre. She found it slick and hotter than the forge itself, clenching and flexing around her fingers as she strove to give Lina the same feelings she was giving Daja.
There were no gods designing the way she and Lina led up to this, Daja thought dazedly as the tension coiled down to a catch inside her. Lina’s fingertips circled her nub once, twice. She gasped sharply into Daja’s mouth. Daja felt herself rise up like a hammer before the strike—sensed the catch. For a fraction of a second everything teetered in balance.
The hammer fell. The smith-mage pulled Lina’s hips tight to her own and pinched. Fire raked Daja’s back; Lina clung to her, and Daja threw her head back as pleasure-pain struck her like an anvil. They broke apart to mingle their cries.
Black, then red flashed before Daja’s eyes and a thousand tiny stars burst across the back of her eyelids.
There was nothing divine in the things that led them up to this. There was only divinity in this—this blinding expanse, this brilliant moment of fire and ecstasy.
And it was now, with the sparks and stars spiralling back to earth around them, that Daja saw the gods.
TBC
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I love Daja, shouldn't everybody love Daja? But I didn't do her justice, this much is clear. This wasn't quite where I was going with that, but sure, why not. I'm not entirely happy with it, and it feels pretty heavy-handed in places, but it's a start, and to 'Revise' something, you have to have revision material.
I was going for more artsy minimalist, but I'm not so good at that, as you might have noticed. There was an after part of this, but I liked ending on that note. Count yourselves lucky: part of that artsy minimalist thing was going to be not telling you all the juicy bits of the end. You could have used your imaginations. Instead, you get this. I'm... Sorry, maybe?
Reviews will help clear this up.
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Like Fire In The Forge

52 – God