From the last remaining print house in Belavere City, this journalist receives official scribble from the House of Lords that their raids in the Northeast have proven fruitful.
Lord Tanner named Kenton Hill, a little-known collier town, as the home of the elusive Miners Union command—a confounding statement of which this reporter remains skeptical.
Moreover, the Right Honorable Lord has proclaimed that the rebel chairman, a PATRICK COLSON, has been arrested and transported to Belavere City.
Inside sources add to these startling revelations that the House recognizes Colson as none other than a hidden Alchemist.
There has been no word as to the welfare of former House Alchemist Domelius Becker.
CHAPTER THREEPATRICK
The year he turned thirteen, Patrick and his brothers came close to death.
It was a dead winter, the most ravenous anyone could remember. The coal ran low before frost stuck to the ground. Influenza spread. Bluff prices rocketed. There were many families in Kenton Hill who simply awaited death from their beds, bellies hollow, throats aflame, burning schoolbooks in the hearth to keep children warm in their final hours.
Many did not make it to spring, and there were fraught moments in which Patrick was certain he was slipping away.
Donny caught the fever first. He slowly boiled before their eyes. Their mother spooned soup past his cracked lips.
The next morning, Patrick awoke sweating, panting, barely aware of Tess Colson mopping his brow. Gunner quickly followed, all three of them abed while their mother changed their pajamas, their sheets, collected their vomit, prayed.
Patrick remembered it only in fragments—a shutter of frames. His mother counting farthings on a wooden table, eyes tightening. Donny’s wails. Gunner sleeping interminably, as though he were already dead. He remembered his own body convulsing, seizing, squeezing the very last vestiges of his strength.
Patrick did not remember his father in this reel of memory. As he recalled, John Colson had gone away to Dorser by train that winter. The Miners Unionhad been in its infancy then, the support not yet far-reaching. He traveled often in the beginning, amassing members with his speeches, establishing connections. Always, he returned a little more invigorated than when he left, while his wife slowly iced over.
Patrick’s mother did not cry that winter, but she apologized often—every time her sons moaned, cried, vomited. “Bluff,” he remembers begging her. And her forehead would crease so deeply it seemed it was splitting, and she’d return to those coins on the table, counting them over and over, then swearing and knocking them to the floor.
And then when it seemed Donny was at his worst, when he hadn’t woken for more than two days, hadn’t eaten for even longer, Tess Colson left them alone. Patrick heard the kitchen door collide violently with its frame.
Gunner might have held his hand, Patrick thought. There was an image in his mind, his big brother reaching out across his cot, fingers hot and limp. Patrick thought perhaps he himself cried, that he begged for their father.
His next memory was a lick of heat in his veins. Patrick had come awake with a clearer mind, to the sight of his mother leaning over him, cheeks ruddy red with the cold, a spoonful of black solution poised at his lips. “Drink, son,” she had said calmly.
The clarity of age led Patrick to surmise his mother stole the bluff, having found herself short of coin. From what household, he did not wish to know.
The Colson brothers recovered as the bottle of bluff ran dry, in time for their father to return, in time for Tess Colson to yield to her own rampant fever.
The influenza of that dead winter was later named gray fever. It turned one’s skin red first, then purple, then ashen near the end. Of all the Colsons struck down that season, it was Tess who came closest to death. She was the color of storm clouds when John Colson walked back through the door, his smile wide and beard heavy with snow. Gunner had whaled his fists against John’s chest for staying away so long. Donny had cried. Patrick had wrapped his arms around his father’s middle, despite not having hugged his father that way since he was small. Tess had coughed in a way that invoked death.
John Colson’s timely return, Patrick knew, was the only reason his mother still lived. After that, even when Tess Colson seemed at her worst, Patrick had not worried for her. He knew his father had everything in hand. His father could fix it, could fix anything. He’d come back with pockets full of money and vials.
It took two days for the bluff to win the battle. Two days of Patrick and Gunner and Donny hovering uselessly by her bed, watching their mother snatch in each breath. They held on to her bedsheets as though they could anchor her there. “Patience, boys,” John told them. “She’s as tough as they come. Tougher than me, even.”
He was right, as he always was. Her color returned, the coughing thinned. She rose from her sick bed and yelled at Donny for running through the kitchen. But Tess Colson was never quite the same. Her lungs seemed to hoard remnants of the fever, and no amount of bluff ever snuffed it for good.
Soon after Tess recovered, John Colson hauled a sack into the kitchen and dumped its contents onto the floor. Terranium ore spilled out, blue-black and glistening.
He’d pointed one calloused finger at it. “Siphon these rocks,” he’d said to Patrick. “And your mother’ll never again lay sick in bed.”
And he had. Eventually.
It took weeks to make any progress. The idium he’d stolen from the National House had long since begun to wane. The magic that remained in him was weak. Reluctant. Most of those terranium rocks had crumbled, splitting unevenly, the bluff inside made unusable. To this day, there are two holes in the plaster of the Colson’s kitchen, where Patrick had launched the ruined ore away in frustration.
“Easy, son,” his dad had said, over and over. “Easy does it. Be patient with it. Feel the hollow? That’s where the ink is hiding. Split it right down the middle.”
But the ore was delicate. It shattered at the slightest disruption, contaminating that which it fiercely guarded.
“Gentle with it,” John Colson had told him. “Learn control. Learn composure. Composed men do far better than the bulls.”
