The sword fitting was, in theory, a straightforward administrative task.
Count Edric needed a replacement blade for the estate's senior guardsman, whose old sword had developed a crack along the fuller that made it decorative rather than functional. The Stoneback family smithy was the only forge in Greymaw County worth the name. The transaction should have taken twenty minutes and involved no lasting consequences.
Caelan would think about that later how the significant things almost always arrived disguised as errands.
The Stoneback smithy sat at the northern edge of the village, set back from the road behind a low stone wall that the forge's heat had long since turned from grey to a permanent warm brown. You heard it before you saw it: the rhythmic, unhurried clang of hammer on metal, a sound that had its own particular quality, different from a blacksmith's urgent production work. Considered. Deliberate. Like someone having a conversation with the metal rather than arguing with it.
Caelan had passed the smithy a hundred times in his life and never been inside it. He'd always understood, without being told, that the Stoneback forge was not a place you wandered into. It was a place you were brought.
Today, apparently, he was being brought.
His father pushed the gate open without ceremony. The yard was neat in a functional, unsentimental way tools racked along the outer wall, a barrel of cooling water that had left a permanent dark ring in the earth around it, a stack of raw iron stock arranged with the unconscious precision of people who handle the same materials every day for years. A dwarven woman was working at a grinding wheel near the door, sharpening something Caelan couldn't identify with the focused expression of a person who had entirely forgotten the world outside the task.
She looked up. Her face was broad and sun-dark and thoroughly unimpressed by the Count's arrival, in the way that genuine craftspeople are often unimpressed by rank not rudely, but with the settled confidence of someone who knows that titles do not make the iron any more or less cooperative.
"My lord," she said, and went back to grinding.
"Maret," Edric said. "Is your husband in?"
"Elbow-deep in a commission." She tilted her head toward the interior. "Go through. He'll pretend he didn't notice you come in for about thirty seconds and then stop pretending."
Edric smiled a small, genuine thing and led Caelan inside.
The interior of the Stoneback smithy was the warmest place Caelan had ever been in his life.
Not warm in the comfortable, hearthside way. Warm in the way that made your face feel tight and your eyes want to water and the air in your lungs feel like something that had been used already. The forge at the far end blazed with an orange-white intensity that turned everything in the room into variations of shadow and firelight. Racks of finished and half-finished work lined the walls blades, fittings, agricultural tools, architectural ironwork, things Caelan had no name for.
And in front of the forge, working a piece of metal with the focused inward attention of someone solving a problem that only they could see, was a dwarven boy.
He was two years older than Caelan, stocky in the way that dwarven children are stocky not fat but dense, built close to the ground, like the earth had put something extra into the making of him. His arms were already beginning to show the particular ropey forearm muscle that years at a forge produced. His face, turned toward the work, was expressionless in the specific way of people whose concentration runs deep.
He hadn't looked up.
Master Stoneback a broader, older version of the boy, with a beard that had been singed in at least three places was, as promised, pretending not to notice them. He was examining a completed blade with the theatrical absorption of someone who has decided this specific moment requires his complete and undivided attention.
Edric waited, without impatience, for exactly as long as was polite.
"Orin," he said.
The pretending ended. Master Stoneback looked up with the expression of a man who is delighted to see you and has absolutely no idea how long you've been standing there.
"My lord! Come in, come in." His voice was a dwarven smith's voice low and carrying, built for competing with forge noise. He set the blade down and crossed the room, wiping his hands on his leather apron in a gesture that appeared to be habit rather than function, since his hands were, if anything, slightly oilier afterward. "The guardsman's blade. Yes. I have it."
He went to a rack near the wall and lifted it down a solid piece, honest rather than elegant, built for use rather than display. He handed it to Edric, who examined it with the careful attention of someone who knows what they're looking for even if they couldn't make the thing themselves.
Caelan watched the boy at the forge.
He had moved now, transferring the piece from the coals with tongs, holding it at an angle to the firelight and examining something in the metal's surface with a slight frown of what looked like professional dissatisfaction. He set it on the anvil. He didn't hammer it yet. He looked at it for a moment longer, the way you look at something you're trying to understand before you try to change it.
Then he picked up a piece of metal from the workbench beside him a small off-cut, waste from something, still warm from the forge proximity and turned around.
"Catch," he said, and threw it to Caelan.
Caelan caught it.
The heat hit his palm immediately not burning, not quite, but right at the edge of it, that sharp specific sensation that sits precisely on the boundary between hot and too hot and requires a decision. He nearly dropped it. He didn't drop it. He transferred it quickly to his other hand and then held it with both, keeping it moving slightly, and looked at the dwarven boy.
The dwarven boy looked back at him with the measured expression of someone conducting an assessment.
"You didn't drop it," he said.
"It was hot," Caelan said.
"Yes." A pause. "Most people drop it."
"What's the point of dropping it?"
Something shifted in the boy's expression not quite a smile, but the adjustment that precedes one. "There isn't one. That's the point." He turned back to his anvil. "Knowing how to hold a hot thing is more useful than knowing how to avoid one."
Caelan looked down at the off-cut in his hands, which had cooled to merely warm. It was a simple piece scrap, really, with no particular shape. But there was something in its weight that felt considered. Dense and honest and exactly as heavy as it was.
"Theron," Master Stoneback said, from across the room, with the weary precision of a father who has said this same word in this same tone many times. "That's the Count's son."
"I know," Theron said, and began hammering.
The transaction between Edric and Master Stoneback took considerably longer than twenty minutes, because it turned out to involve not just the replacement blade but a broader conversation about the estate's ironwork needs for the coming year, the state of the eastern road fittings, and at least one extended digression about a new alloy technique the elder Stoneback had been experimenting with that required a level of metallurgical detail Caelan followed for roughly the first third of before losing the thread.
He didn't mind. He had drifted to the edge of Theron's workspace far enough to be out of the way, close enough to watch and was observing.
Theron was working the piece with a patience that didn't seem like patience because it didn't seem like effort. It was something else the absence of hurry, maybe. The complete sufficient-ness of the current moment. He didn't rush toward the shape he wanted. He asked for it, incrementally, with each hammer blow landing with a certainty that suggested he could see the finished piece inside the raw material and was simply removing what wasn't it.
"You're watching my technique," Theron said, without looking up.
"I'm watching how you think," Caelan said.
A pause in the hammering. Brief.
"Different thing," Theron said. He looked up then, properly, for the first time. His eyes were dark grey and direct in the way that people are direct when they've grown up around adults who didn't have time for circumlocution. He studied Caelan for a moment with the same focused assessment he'd given the metal.
"You're the Null kid," he said.
The word landed flatly. Not unkindly Theron didn't seem to do unkind, exactly, but he also didn't seem to do cushioning. Facts were facts, delivered at face value.
"That's what the court scholar said," Caelan agreed.
"What do you say?"
Caelan considered the question. It was not the question he'd expected. "I say the system didn't know what to do with me. Which isn't the same thing."
Theron looked at him for another moment. Then he turned back to the anvil.
"Fair enough," he said.
He picked up the hammer. The rhythm resumed steady, unhurried, entirely itself. After a moment, without breaking it, he said: "You can stay if you want. Don't touch anything without asking."
Caelan found a clear space on a stool near the wall and sat down.
The forge crackled and breathed. The hammer rang. His father's voice and Master Stoneback's continued their slow commerce in the background. The warmth pressed in from all sides, and the iron smell of the place settled around him like something that had decided, without ceremony, to become familiar.
He sat there for the rest of the morning and watched Theron work, and said almost nothing, and filed away a great deal. That was how it began not with a declaration or a dramatic moment, but with a too-hot piece of metal and two boys who didn't have any use for pretending things were other than they were.
When Edric finally called him to leave, Caelan set the off-cut down on the edge of the workbench where he'd been holding it.
Theron glanced at it. Then at him.
"Tomorrow," he said not a question, not quite an invitation. Something between.
Caelan looked at him.
"Tomorrow," he agreed.
End of Chapter 3