To the dwarves it read as forge-light. To the royal guard on the guests' bench, who had spent the whole day re-learning her Holy Son one impossibility at a time, it read as one more thing that would never fit in her report.
Quinlan felt the draw on the reservoir like a hand squeezing his heart, and approved of it completely, feeding the bellows while his smith pulled deep and struck true.
'Lucille and the others have already started topping it back off,' he mused, a small, private smile tugging at his mouth.
The weld closed. Clean. Somewhere in their shelves, several venerable treatises quietly became fiction, and the roar that went up shook soot from rafters that had kept their peace for generations.
