Sorry for the time getting this out. More tomorrow as i'm catching up. Had a good time down in the florida keys but back to work.
Harold turned his hand over and opened it, and the Gemheart Stone sat in his palm, catching the daylight and throwing it wide in each color of gem while a smile spread across his whole face.
"We got it."
Bram's breath went out of him in a rush, and his hand came up off his belt and pressed flat to his own chest, fingers digging into the beard there. He swayed half a step back on his heels, and his eyes locked on the stone. His eyes welled, and tears spilled over as his mouth opened and shut. A sound came up out of his chest, low and broken, more of a groan than a word, and he dragged a knuckle hard across both eyes and got himself a breath.
"By Vesgrim's balls." It came out of him low and cracked at the edges. "By his pale hairy balls, lad, you found it!"
He looked like he was gonna grab for it, but barely restrained himself. Then his chin came up, and he turned on his heel to face the slope and the thousand dwarves blinking on it, and he hauled in a breath that filled his chest.
"DWARVES!" The shout rolled down the hill ahead of him. "OUR HEART IS FOUND!"
They looked stunned for a moment, then…the slope came apart. A roar went up off a thousand throats at once, picks and hammers thrown skyward, and it rolled back up the hill into the keep and across the Landing. The celebration began before anyone gave the order. Dwarves grabbing each other by the shoulders, dwarves down on their knees with their fists in the dirt, dwarves already wrestling barrels off the backs of wagons that had arrived with them — carts and crates and rope-lashed supply, a whole clan's worth of moving, dropped onto a hillside and turned into a festival inside of ten seconds.
The Landing came out to see what the noise was. Doors banging, folk drifting up from the cobbles below with their hands shading their eyes, a baker still in her apron, two of the smith's apprentices leaving the smithy to see what the commotion was. From the north road, a cohort of legionaries came in at the fast march, shields already up and locked into a wall, boots hammering in time — and the line hit the crest of the rise, got its first proper look at a thousand dwarves screaming and dancing and breaching ale, and stopped dead. The shield wall sagged in the middle as men leaned out around their own shields to stare.
Beer started moving through the crowd before the legionaries knew it. Wooden cups, clay cups, somebody's helmet upended and filled — passed hand over hand into Landing folk who'd come out for an emergency and found a party.
Josh shoved through the keep doors with Beth half a step behind him.
"What the—" He pulled up short. "Okay. Okay, what the fuck. Dwarves? Harold. Those are dwarves."
"They're dwarves," Beth said.
"Where do you even—" He turned a full circle, taking in the slope. "How many is that? Is that all of them? Are we keeping them?"
Harold let him run and turned his head a few degrees, dropping his voice under the noise so it carried to only one person. Margaret had come out behind Beth with her ledger against her chest, and he didn't look straight at her when he spoke.
"Assess him. I want your read on Bram before this gets comfortable."
Margaret's chin came down a quarter inch. "Of course." She murmured.
He turned back to the slope while Caswell came out of the hall behind them already carrying his own mug, took one look at the slope, and groaned from the bottom of his lungs.
"Oh, you're shittin' me. Oh, now there's a thousand more of these cu-."
Down in the crowd, Fitch was trying to make his way up to the keep. A knot of dwarves had him by the arms before he got ten feet — one of them pounded him between the shoulder blades hard enough to rock him forward, another pressed a cup into his hand and folded his fingers around it whether he wanted it or not. The young lord came up out of the scrum a moment later with his collar pulled half off one shoulder, a cup in one hand and a small keg hauled up under the other arm while a song was quickly taken up behind him.
Bram knocked back the cup somebody had put in his own fist, watched Fitch wrestle the keg up the slope, and his eyes settled on it with a slow, considering interest.
A squad came up the hill at Bram's back while he watched — eight of them, moving in step, heavy plate over their shoulders and shields slung on their arms and a spread of steel between them, war hammers and broad axes and one with a maul as long as he was tall. They put themselves between the clan head and the strangers and stood there, square and silent, waiting.
Harold ran his sight across them out of habit. Surprise was evident on his face as he assessed him, and Bram smirked at him. Some of those dwarves were better than his tier 2 knights.
Bram caught the squad in the corner of his eye and flicked two fingers without turning his head.
"Stand down, Guardians."
Shock went through Harold like cold water. Guardians. His eyes shot back to Bram as his smirk got even wider. “Ah, so you know what a Guardian is.”
The eight let their shields drop off-line and went easy on their feet, but they didn't go far.
"Bram." Harold kept his voice level. "You told me you were an enclave. Last of the clan, you said. Every dwarf and child you had."
"Aye, I did." Bram was grinning at him now, and there was something sly under it.
"That's a thousand dwarves on my hill. With Guardians."
"It is." Bram took Fitch's keg out of the young lord's arms with a grunt and a nod that passed for thanks, set it down on the flat of a wagon's tailgate, and looked around until he found Josh hovering at Harold's elbow. He jerked his head at him. "You. Big lad. Hold that steady."
Josh looked at Harold, got nothing back, and put both hands on the keg. "Yeah. Sure. I — yep. Holding it."
Bram drove the tap home with the heel of his palm, and the first pour came out dark. He filled cup after cup off the wagon and pushed them out into reaching hands without slowing down to answer the question Harold had asked.
"Aye well, I never said we were useless, sunny," he said, when the third cup was full. He pushed a cup at Harold and finally looked up at him slyly. "I had left a few of my people in other places, and we worked a couple of jobs as we did. Couldn’t show up to my cousins as beggars. He would absorb us. You were our only out."
He filled the next cup, then stopped with it half-poured, his eyes coming up off the keg and onto Josh's hands.
"Huh." He set the cup down. "You're connected to stone."
Josh blinked. "I'm — what?"
"Stone-touched. Got the hum on you." Bram squinted at him, then his gaze slid past Josh's shoulder to Beth, standing a step back with her arms loose at her sides, and whatever he saw there pulled him up straight. "And you—"
He stopped. His brows went up under the heavy ridge of them.
"By Hethra's beard." It came out soft, almost reverent, the loudest man on the hill gone quiet. "You're glowing, lass."
Beth's face went red from the collar up. "I'm not—"
Bram had already turned and snagged a cup off the wagon, holding it out toward her on a flat palm, and she put her hand up between herself and it and shook her head before it got close. "No. Thank you. None for me."
The dwarf looked at the cup. Looked at her. His face cracked open into a grin so wide it disappeared into his beard, and he pulled the cup back and didn't push it again.
Harold caught it the same time Bram did, the lord disappeared, and the friend crossed the two steps to Beth, got an arm around her, and swept her clean off her feet off the cobbles.
"Beth!"
"Put me — Harold, people are watching —"
"You're sure?" He set her down, held her by the shoulders, and looked at her. "How long? Does Josh—"
"What's happening?" Josh had a cup in each hand, a dwarfen child hanging off his arm, and he had absolutely no idea. "Why are we hugging? Beth, what—" He looked from his wife to Harold and back, who stared back at him blankly. "I love this. Whatever this is. To dwarves!"
A hundred dwarves roared it back at him off the slope.
Beth put her face in her hand as she smiled.
Bram put two fingers in his mouth and let out a whistle that cut clean through the noise, and three of his people peeled off the slope and came to him at a jog — a square-built dwarf with a Guardian's plate still on his shoulders and a grey-bearded woman with a satchel across her chest and a third with soot worked so deep into his hands they were permanently stained.
"Dorgan." Bram tipped his head at the Guardian. "Keep it from turning into a war. Anybody puts a hammer through a wall, it comes out of their cups."
Dorgan grunted and went back down the slope without a word.
The grey-bearded woman stared at the stone in Harold's hand, and the soot-handed one just stood there with two cups in his hand as he drained one. Bram thumbed at the pair of them. "Thessa, my head stone shaper, while Hargen keeps its forges. They come with me." He turned back to Harold, and the grin split his beard. "If you'll have us out of the open sky, we prefer solid stone. And if it's all right with you, sunny — the party stays?"
Harold looked out over it with a smile.
The whole hillside was in motion, and the Landing had stopped watching and started joining. Two of his timber crew had a dwarf smith's arm locked up on a barrelhead with a ring three deep around them and coin already changing hands, and down by the wagons, a clutch of dwarven children and human ones had found each other and worked out a game that involved a great deal of running and a goat, and somebody's grandmother was being twirled around in a dance.
He took a pull off his beer, savoring it before swallowing.
"Let em enjoy the moment." He nodded toward the keep. "We can go to my office. I think we have a lot to work out. It’s good to see you, Bram."
He moved and fell in with him, Bram at his shoulder and the two dwarves behind, and Margaret came up off the edge of the crowd and slotted in beside him without a word. Adeline met them at the foot of the stairs.
The color was still high across her face, and it climbed again the second she saw him. She opened her mouth. "My lord, I have the reports Councilor Caldwell wanted me to give you."
Harold tipped his head toward the stairs. "Save those for the meeting tomorrow. Do me a favor and let the Legion know they need to find a place to put about 1000 dwarves for a couple of nights, then join me in the office."
She nodded hurriedly and almost ran away while Bram was chuckling.
“Think the lass likes you.”
Harold waved him off and took a sip as they walked. His own guard moving ahead of him. “I just startled her earlier. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Thessa and Hargen were knocking heads behind them, whispering something to each other back and forth while her hands caressed the stone as they walked. Harold looked at her curiously, and Bram caught him looking.
Bram just shrugged. “She likes stone.”
Thessa turned abruptly, and a strong voice escaped her. “This keep has been reinforced. It’s all one piece through the center of the stone. It’s made better than we can make without the need to imbue our structures the way we do.”
Bram looked curiously at Harold while he shrugged. “It was made by the system.”
Hargen scoffed at the mention of the system.
“Bah, we can do better work than the system. Brittle work.” He spit on the floor of the keep and looked up at Harold. “Sorry,” he muttered. And bent down to wipe it off with his sleeve.
Harold just chuckled and kept walking into his office.
“So, we have a lot to go over.”