Glarentza, Spring 1435

The seal on Branković's letter lay on the desk like a crushed berry, the wax still faintly warm from a courier's hand. Constantine stood with his palm on the parchment as if feeling for a pulse. Beyond the shutters, the sea threw light at the walls and the breeze salted the room. Plethon waited with his cane across his knees; Theophilus stood square at ease, a steward's poise held by habit.

"Đurađ writes in good heart," Constantine said at last, thumb grazing the warm seal. "He is pleased by my acceptance and asks only for the day and the place."

Plethon smiled with his eyes before his mouth. "A right stitch between our houses."

Theophilus inclined his head. "And timely, Majesty."

Constantine set the letter down, thumb smoothing a fold that would not lie flat. "The question is where we set the altar." He glanced once at the window, once at the map pins on the wall.

"Mystras," the philosopher said without preface, both hands on the chair-back as if bracing a case in court. "Where we crowned you, we should bless this marriage. Stone remembers. So do people. It says continuity. Legitimacy."

Constantine let the image rise: incense and the shadowed nave; Taygetos leaning close like an elder listening; the weight of purple and oil. With Constantinople still clenched in Demetrios' fist, Mystras was the cleanest seal he could set, legitimacy without apology, and he felt the tug of it. Yet Thessaloniki was theirs again, the Empire's great second city after the Queen of Cities itself, and that thought had a different gravity: banners fresh on its walls, streets still tasting lime and new mortar, the city's breath after siege, marrying there would declare its central place in the life of the realm.

"What about Thessaloniki?" he said. "To honor the men who bled to take her back, and to show she stands again as the Empire's great city after Constantinople." His voice had the iron of a settled conviction. "We set our vows where our future beats, not only where our past was crowned."

Plethon's brow folded in thought, but he did not yield. "Thessaloniki would sing, yes," he said gently.

Theophilus's fingers tapped once on the desk, then went still. "Majesty," he said, careful, "by land, Branković's people cross Ottoman watchfires. By sea, they must make the long Aegean run, past corsair dens and jealous harbors. To reach Thessaloniki, they would round the Morea in any case; better, they make harbor here under our guns. Glarentza is safest of all, and the cheapest to hold the wedding. The harbor is ours; the stores are here. We save coin and risk both."

Constantine tasted the word cheapest and let it sit. His mind ran the routes like a finger along a seam: Smederevo's gate, the Danube, the ports where eyes were not friendly. He thought of a girl in a carriage under foreign hills, of an escort that would have to beg safe‑conduct from men whose favor turned with the wind. Pride pressed him toward Thessaloniki; prudence laid a hand on his shoulder. Theophilus is right, he admitted; the coin had to be minded. His constant reckonings could weary a room, but the results spoke, wringing every coin to its fiercest use, and wasting none, had carried them this far.

"Glarentza," he said at last. He did not sigh. "We make it fine here. The sea will bring her to us." He looked to Plethon. "Mystras for the crown, Glarentza for the hearth."

Plethon bowed the concession with grace. "Then let us show the hearth's warmth properly, Basileus."

"Late May," Constantine said. "Calm seas, and time to prepare without frenzy." He turned to Theophilus. "Provision, lodging, wine, gifts for the Serbian envoys. Open the purses before they squeal. We will not look poor at our own door."

"Majesty," Theophilus said, already counting loads and wagons in his head.

"Plethon," Constantine went on, "speak with the Priests. We keep the rite clean, the words right. No novelty for its own sake. The symbol is that we do not bend. A celebration of Ieros Skopos."

Plethon's eyes warmed. "Understood."

Constantine let the thought settle, heavy and right. A wedding in late spring. Not respite, nothing like respite, but a light in the calendar all the same.

By afternoon the castle heat had the room smelling faintly of parchment and resin. Constantine traded ink and wax for smoke and steel. He went to the arsenal where the stream's stolen strength worked for him now, water-wheel turning evenly, leather belts whispering over pulleys. The air outside the sheds had the taste of charcoal on it like biting an old coin; inside, it was hotter and wet with breath and bellows.

The blast furnace stood like a squat tower with a mouth ragged and orange, the flame breathing with the bellows' cadence, an animal asleep, an animal waking. Sacks of charcoal were stacked to a man's height, brown coffins trimmed with soot. A boy carried a bar still scaled and dark from the finery forge, slag freckles gleaming on its skin. Nearby, a quench tub gave off a sour steam; somewhere a hammer beat out a man's heartbeat on iron.

Luca waited at the shed door with Elias, both dusted gray, both smiling too early to hide it. In Luca's arms lay a long, wrapped thing. He held it with a craftsman's tenderness, the way a man carries a tool that has fought him and finally surrendered.

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"Majesty," Elias said, throat roughed by heat, "come see."

Luca unrolled oiled cloth. The thing in his hands was simple—no gilding, no ornament—just a tube of steel with the sheen of oil on water. Constantine took it. The metal was warm, the weight honest but not deadening. He ran a thumb along the barrel and felt no seam, no ridge under the pad of his print. Seamless. His smile came before he could approve it.

"You've done it," he said softly.

"We have," Luca said, voice steady and a little hoarse. "It bored true."

Elias held up a tray with gauges: brass rings, a slender rod tipped with cutters, a short bar grooved and lettered. "Our go and no-go," he said with the pride of naming newborn twins. "We measure each bore. If it refuses the ring it should not, it goes back into the fire."

Luca nodded toward the wheelhouse. "We forged a solid billet from the finery, thick for safety, then bored it with a water-driven mandrel." He mimed the motion with his hands, an endless straight, a pull, a turn. "Drill, then reamers, until the bore is smooth and true. We measure, polish, then temper in oil. The grain holds. No welds to fail."

Constantine bent to the muzzle and watched the light run down the bore into a neat, dark circle. He pictured a soldier's powder-smudged palm, the paper cartridge, the bite, the measure, the touch. He pictured one barrel among hundreds, the same length, the same balance, the same bite and smoke. Rows of them. Tagmata with fire in their hands, not a scatter of rather odd pieces.

"How many?" he asked, still looking down the throat.

"Three today," Elias said, matter-of-fact. "We have three more proofed and waiting for stocks. The rig ran all last night."

"We broke a few," Luca added, not hiding the truth. He jerked a thumb at a pyre of shame against the wall: warped barrels, one split open like a ripe gourd. "Heat too quick. I told them to slow the temper, and the next held."

Constantine weighed the barrel in his palms again, as if it would tell him a number. "With the rig running and the furnaces breathing?"

Luca's mouth tugged toward a restrained grin. "Easily a thousand a year if we keep men and charcoal moving. More, if we add more mandrels and more hands. The boring is the choke, not the forging." He tapped the tray. "But standard patterns change everything. Stocks cut by jig, serpentine locks all in one pattern, touch-holes drilled by the same arm's-length. Once the measurements are our law, any man can assemble one that matches the next."

Elias lifted a second barrel, a twin, and laid it beside the first. "We've stamped the breech with serial marks, Majesty. You'll know which forge, which month. If one fails in the field, the blame will not hide."

"Proofed?" Constantine asked.

Elias jerked his chin toward a low buttressed stand at the far end of the yard, its supports black and pitted. Sandbags were piled behind it like sleeping oxen. "Overcharge, then shot against the bank. No bulge, no hairline. The new steel sings but does not scream."

Constantine passed the pad of his thumb over the stamped numerals. There was a small satisfaction in the numbers, the promise of order. "Good," he said. "Then we begin. I want these in the hands of the tagmata quickly, not as curiosities in a chest."

Elias laughed once, a sound clipped by respect. "The lads will kiss the barrels, Majesty."

"Tell them to kiss them after they clean them," Constantine said dryly, and the three men smiled like boys in on the same mischief.

He turned the barrel again, feeling the lighter pull compared to bronze. "We save bronze for cannon," he said half to himself. "Steel for hands."

"Yes," Luca said. "Steel is ours if we feed the furnaces."

The wheel thrummed at their backs, a low, contented growl through the floorboards. Constantine let the sound file itself next to other necessary sounds in his head: a trumpet from the walls, the breath of bellows. All the small throats a city sings with when it's at work.

"Powder," he said, and the word made Elias's grin sober. "A gun with no powder is a stick with pretensions."

"We've more nitre than last winter," Elias offered. "Niketas's beds are leaching faster, and we've bought new barrels from Ragusa. We'll soon be back to the stockpiles we had before the crusade."

Luca lifted a shoulder. "We can make barrels faster than the world will sell you saltpeter."

"Then we rake every latrine and scrape every stable," Constantine said. A line of black humor crossed his face and was gone. "And we buy quiet and dear. If Venice frowns, we smile. If anyone asks why we want soap ash, we tell them we are very clean in Glarentza." He looked past them to the locked powder shed, where a guard sat on a stool and did not meet his eyes. "Pay the guards twice. Nothing spoils a war like a careless match."

"Yes, Majesty," Elias said.

Luca nodded, eyes bright with the craft and the danger both. Constantine caught the gleam and recognized it; men who bent fire to their will always carried that light, half pride, half awe. Luca had not been a favorite in Brescia; here he was a master with the Emperor's hand on his shoulder. Constantine put that hand there now, feeling sweat and grit through the tunic.

"You were right to ask for more," he said simply. "I was right to pay it. Tell your men today's barrels pleased me. Tell them I mean to have rows of them by summer."

"You will," Luca said, the promise plain as a stamped mark.

They walked the line together, the three of them. Constantine let the details set in his bones because that was how decisions kept their shape. He watched a journeyman fix a barrel in the cradle and bring a reamer gently to its work; he watched the water drip off the cutters, thin and brown with metal. He watched an apprentice stand on a foot-treadle to smooth an exterior on a small lathe, no style, no adornment, just taking the high spots down to the line on a wooden jig. A boy in a sweat-black shirt placed brass rings one by one over another barrel's muzzle, his lip caught in his teeth; when one refused, he chalked the piece and turned away with no fuss. A worker at a bench checked touch-hole positions with a drilled template and nodded once, satisfied, the way a baker nods when a loaf sounds right under her knuckles. Near the door, a pile of reject shapes made its quiet confession: a split tube, a twisted bar, a hoop burnt past honest use. Failure was part of the yard's grammar now; nobody shouted, they sorted, melted, tried again.

Outside, by the proofing stand, two soldiers, faces open as boys, waited with sand in their hair and a lantern on a hook. They straightened when Constantine came near, each holding a serpentine like a strange new bird: an S-shaped match-holder married to a tempered spring and hand-filed catch, one of Luca's first batches. He took one, tested the spring with his thumb, felt the grit and the little give. "Good," he said, handing it back. "They're still fiddly, treat them as if they'll bite. Drill until your hands find the motion without thinking, then drill more. These guns don't forgive men who meet them only on campaign."

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