As Old As Time: A Twisted Tale (Twisted Tale, A) Read Free Page B

the blob when he was suddenly aware of someone sitting down in the chair next to him, adjusting her voluminous skirts to fit the space.
    “You know, you need to
speak
to the metal.”
    He looked up at the vision next to him and blinked.
    The girl with green eyes and blond hair regarded him calmly, a little smile on her face and a book half-closed in her hand.
    The normal thing to do at this point would have been to offer to buy her a drink, to tell her how he had seen her around town, or even to gibber nervously about how pretty she was and question why she was sitting next to him.
    But she was talking about the metal.
    “
Speak
to it?” he asked. “What do you mean?”
    “Ask it what it
needs
, to do what you want it to do. At least, that’s what a friend of mine who knows about such things says.”
    “Well, I’ve tried everything else,” he said with a sigh. He held up the little ugly bits of metal and cleared his throat.
“HEL-LO. METAL. WHAT DO I NEED TO DO TO GET YOU TO WORK?”
    The woman laughed, a throaty, honey sound that wasn’t mean in the slightest. Maurice found himself chuckling as well, and even the grumpy bartender managed a smile.
    The girl pushed a stray golden lock of hair out of her face and closed her book all the way, setting it beside her.
    “Not like that, I don’t think. At least not in
our
language. You need to know the language of metal. I’m Rosalind, by the way.” She held out her hand.
    “Enchanté,”
Maurice said frankly, not bothering to pretend he didn’t know it already—that he whispered it at night sometimes, just to see how it felt. He took her hand and kissed it. “Not my name, of course.
Maurice
is my name.”
    “I’ve seen you around,” she said, indicating the world outside the tavern with the tip of her alder wand. “No matter what you’re doing—pulling turnips, laying stones, digging—you’re always thinking about something else: your metal. You’re always carrying bits of it—and you’re always covered in the soot of a blacksmith. Whatever are you doing?”
    “I am trying to develop a
use-ful steam en-gine
,” Maurice said, clapping the metal bits down on the bar on each syllable for emphasis. “The problem is that thus far it’s all about someone opening valves and closing valves and drawing up water….They’re trying to use them to drain mines over in England and Scotland—a lot of water problems they have over there—but it could do so much more. Instead of pushing and pulling water, you could push and pull a piston, and then, of course, there you are.”
    “Of course,” the woman said with another smile. “There we are.”
    Maurice stared at her for a moment, trying to figure out if she was making fun of him. Then he laughed self-deprecatingly. “I don’t speak as well as the pictures in my head do. I can’t…fully…the possibilities….It’s too much to explain all at once. It would be world-changing.”
    “Ah,” the woman said. “Like gunpowder.”
    “No,
not
like gunpowder. This would be for building and making, not killing and conquering.”
    “Not all gunpowder is for killing. I have a friend who makes the most amazing fireworks. And who—a little like you—spends all her spare time trying to launch things higher and higher into the air, using gunpowder and a thing like a cannon aimed at the sky.”
    “You have a lot of interesting friends, it seems,” Maurice said, sighing. “I wish I could meet them.”
    “I’m not sure I would like that,” the girl said thoughtfully. “If I introduced you to my friends, you would spend all your time talking to them and not to
me.”
    Maurice stared at her for a long moment, trying to decide if what he thought she meant by that was what she actually meant by that.
    And, with a smile, it became apparent that she did.
    With a feeling of unreality approaching straight-up wonder, Maurice began to court Rosalind. Or perhaps it was the other way around. It didn’t matter—and he