Chapter 539: A Future I Design
While Ashlynn made preparations to welcome Ollie and Virve into her coven, a very different welcome was taking place outside the Vale of Mists.
At Young Lord Owain’s insistence, Masters Isabell and Tiernan had accompanied the young lord and Lady Jocelynn all the way to the Town of Hanrahan, the seat of Baron Hanrahan’s power and the center of Hanrahan Barony.
The journey took three days by carriage and they’d spent the previous evening in a tiny village at the eastern edge of the barony where the sheep outnumbered people by at least five to one. To hear Owain tell it, the lands they’d passed on their way to the very edge of the frontier were filled with untapped potential, but all the Masters saw when they gazed at the rolling hills studded by ancient rock formations was an endless array of challenges that would make taming the land difficult even for the most ambitious frontiersman.
The Town of Hanrahan was significantly better off, situated in a hollow where several streams drained into a deep lake, the farms and orchards outside the town’s impressive stone walls were clearly a jewel to be treasured by any lord and generations of Hanrahans had clearly worked hard to see to the prosperity of the town they oversaw.
In the guest rooms of Hanrahan manor, Master Isabell studied her reflection in the room’s polished bronze mirror, ensuring that nothing was out of place. Silver rimmed spectacles perched on her slender nose and she’d pulled her steel gray hair into a tight braid that hung half way down her back, standing out in sharp contrast to the severe black dress she wore for the evening’s banquet.
Some would say that she looked more like a tutor or school mistress than a future knight, but to her, this was no different than a suit of armor. On her chest, the crest of Blackwell City’s Illustrious Comapny of Engineers, a lighthouse shining on a mason’s level, had been embroidered in glittering silver thread. The emblem served as both a badge of her office and the only ornamentation she chose to wear on occasions as formal as this one.
Earning the right to wear that emblem, and to wear it in silver no less, had taken a lifetime of effort and study, including ten long years spent traveling the universities and libraries of the old countries before she returned to her native Blackwell City to take over the Illustrious Comapny of Engineers.
In those years, she’d received offers from countless lords to join their houses and even a king had offered her a place in his court along with the chance to replace her silver emblem with gold and the title of Royal Engineer. It was an offer that few people in her profession could resist, but despite the wonders of the old countries and their institutions of learning, she never felt like she belonged to that world.
Or, perhaps it wasn’t that she had never belonged in the old world as much as she hadn’t been comfortable with the woman she was starting to become the longer she spent there. The recognition of lords and kings hadn’t come to her because of the bridges she designed or even the acquaducts that opened up new farmland. Rather, it had been her ability to tear things down that won her the most praise and recognition in countries where men still warred on one another over lines on a map and control of wealth and resources.