She'd asked leave of the master whose work it was with a look and received a mute nod, and the watching knot waited for her to lift the folded billet and tilt it against the light, the way any smith on the continent would.
Instead, she brought it up beside her ear, closed her eyes, and flicked the edge with her fingernail.
*Tiiing...*
The dwarves traded glances over their beards. She flicked it again, lower down, head tilting, long elven ears angling toward the steel like it had started talking, and the muttering around her died into baffled silence.
"Sixty-four folds," she said, eyes still shut. "And every weld is clean. How, at this size?"
The master whose billet it was stared at her, then down at the tally-marks punched into the billet's end, sixty-four, by his own hand, and forgot entirely to be afraid of her. "Hydraulic hammer for the first thirty." He glanced at Brokk. Brokk did not rescue him. "...The rest by hand. Lass. The rest by hand."
"Would you show me the hammer?"
