She awoke long before the castle rooster crowed, the air in her bedchamber biting cold. Out of habit, she waited for the soft sound of Betha stirring the hearth, but the room remained silent. Her father's edict had been absolute: No maids. No silk. No coddling. Shivering, she threw off the heavy wolfskin blankets and dressed herself. Gone were the tailored woolen gowns dyed in Tully blue and Royce bronze. In their place, resting on her cedar chest, was a bundle of roughspun linen and boiled leather—the standard garb of a common footman. The tunic scratched at her skin, and the leather breeches were stiff and unforgiving. She braided her hair tightly, pinning it to her scalp so not a single strand could fall into her eyes.
When she stepped out into the pre-dawn gloom of the courtyard, the keep was still asleep. Only the guards on the battlements watched her with silent, confused stares as she marched toward the armory.
Hugh was already there. The blacksmith stood by the dead hearth, his arms crossed over his massive chest, a scowl etched so deeply into his face it looked carved from stone. He did not bow. He did not offer a greeting. He simply pointed a thick, soot-stained finger toward the back of the armory.
"The coal cellar is down those steps," Hugh grunted, his voice thick with sleep and lingering resentment. "The hearth needs feeding. Three wheelbarrows full. Then you clean the slag from yesterday's work out of the ash pit. If you want to play at the anvil, My Lady, you start in the dirt."
She didn't argue. She nodded once, grabbed the splintering wooden handles of an empty wheelbarrow, and headed into the dark.
By midday, she was certain she was going to die.
The coal cellar was a damp, pitch-black pit that smelled of sulfur and ancient earth. Every shovelful of coal felt as heavy as lead. Her arms, accustomed only to the weight of a wooden embroidery hoop or a silver goblet, screamed in protest within the first hour. The rough wood of the shovel handle chafed her soft palms, rapidly raising angry, red welts that soon filled with fluid.
When she dragged the first barrow up the stone steps, her legs shook so violently she nearly tipped the load back into the dark. Hugh watched her struggle from the corner of his eye, his hammer ringing against an anvil, offering neither help nor hindrance. He was testing her. He wanted her to break. He wanted her to run crying back to the solar so he could reclaim his domain.
She refused to give him the satisfaction.
"The bellows," Hugh commanded, once the hearth was finally roaring with the coal she had hauled.
The great leather lungs of the forge were suspended above the fire. Pulling the heavy iron chain required her to throw her entire body weight backward. Pull. Hiss. Release. Pull. Hiss. Release. The heat of the open furnace was a physical entity, a beast that breathed directly into her face. It baked the moisture from her eyes and parched her throat until swallowing felt like swallowing sand. Sweat poured down her face, stinging her eyes and cutting clean, pale tracks through the thick layer of black soot that had already coated her skin.
By the time the afternoon bell rang across the courtyard, her hands were ruined. The blisters on her right palm had popped, leaving raw, weeping flesh exposed to the grit and salt of her own sweat. Every pull of the bellows chain sent a fresh wave of blinding agony up her arm. She bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted copper, terrified that if she opened her mouth, a sob would escape.
When the evening horn finally blew, signaling the end of the workday, she could barely stand. She left the armory without a word, her legs moving purely on instinct.
She made her way to the Great Hall for supper, bypassing the washbasins entirely. She was too exhausted to care. When she pushed open the heavy oak doors, the din of the hall washed over her.
As she walked toward the high table, the chatter slowly died away.
Sworn swords, knights, and serving girls alike turned to stare. She looked like a vagrant who had crawled out of a chimney. Her roughspun tunic was soaked in sweat and stained black. Her face was a mask of soot, her knuckles raw and bleeding, her hair wild and plastered to her neck.
Cullen dropped his spoon, his mouth hanging open. But it was her mother's reaction that stopped the entire room.
The Lady of House Royce stood up, her face draining of all color. She looked from her daughter to her husband, her eyes wide with unadulterated horror.
"What is the meaning of this?" her mother whispered, though in the dead silence of the hall, it carried to the rafters. "Is this a jest? A punishment?"
"She is an apprentice of the forge," her father said calmly, taking a slow sip of his wine. He did not look at her with pity, but his eyes tracked the blood on her hands. "She eats with the men who work the keep."
"She is my daughter!" her mother shrieked, slamming her hands on the table. "Look at her! She looks like a common rat-catcher! Her hands—her hands are ruined! How will she play the harp? How will she present a cup to a visiting lord? You have humiliated us!"
"I have put her to a purpose," her father countered, his voice rumbling with immovable authority. "The steel she tempers will protect this house long after her harp strings have rotted away. Sit down, My Lady."
"I will not!" Her mother rounded on her, her eyes blazing with tears of fury and shame. "If you insist on rolling in the muck with the peasants, you will not sit at this table. You are a disgrace to your name. Go to the kitchens. Eat with the hounds for all I care!"
She stood frozen, the exhaustion threatening to pull her under. She looked at her father. He gave a subtle, almost imperceptible nod. Endure it. Without a word, she bowed her head respectfully to her mother, turned on her heel, and walked away from the high table. She took a seat at the furthest, darkest corner of the lowest bench, collapsing onto the rough wood next to a startled scullion boy.
The rest of the week was a blur of unrelenting agony.
Every morning she woke with muscles so stiff she had to physically unbend her fingers with her opposite hand. Every day she returned to the ash pit, the coal cellar, and the heavy chain of the bellows.
Her mother made good on her threat. She was barred from the high table, from the solar, and from the sept. She was entirely isolated, existing only in the brutal, suffocating world of the armory.
Yet, as the days bled into one another, something began to shift.
The raw, bleeding flesh on her palms began to harden, forming thick, yellow callouses that protected her from the rough wood of the shovel. The muscles in her back and shoulders, previously soft, began to pull taut, adapting to the grueling repetition.
Hugh did not speak to her unless it was to issue a sharp command, but he stopped giving her tasks purely to torture her. By the fifth day, when she correctly anticipated the exact moment the steel had reached the "winter sunset" hue and pulled the bellows chain taut without him having to yell, he paused. He looked at her, truly looked at her, his dark eyes assessing the soot-stained, exhausted girl who had not once complained, cried, or quit.
He grunted, turning back to the anvil. It wasn't respect. Not yet. But the blatant hostility had cooled into a wary, begrudging tolerance.
On the seventh day, as she was sweeping the slag from the floor, Hugh tossed a heavy, iron ball-peen hammer into the dirt at her feet.
"The coal is hauled," Hugh muttered, not making eye contact as he banked the fires for the night. "Tomorrow, you don't sweep. Tomorrow, you hit the iron."
The midnight air within the courtyard was bitter and thin, carrying the sharp bite of impending winter, but inside the armory, the heat was a living, breathing entity.
She stood alone before the massive granite anvil, the heavy leather apron hanging off her frame. The castle of House Royce was asleep, buried beneath heavy furs and thick stone walls, but she had slipped from her chambers an hour past the wolf hour. The blisters on her hands had long since ruptured, bled, and hardened into thick, yellowed callouses.
She closed her eyes and centered her weight. The physical strength required to swing the heavy shaping hammer for hours on end was entirely beyond her natural limits; her father expected her to break her arms trying. He didn't know about the rhythm in her lungs.
She inhaled. It was a slow, deliberate, incredibly deep draw of air—Total Concentration Breathing. She visualized the oxygen flooding her bloodstream, rushing into the tearing muscle fibers of her shoulders, back, and arms, instantly fortifying the bone and tissue. As her lungs expanded to their absolute, unnatural limit, her core temperature spiked, and a faint mist of vapor escaped her parted lips. The crushing exhaustion in her limbs vanished.
She needed her heavy iron tongs, resting on the workbench ten feet away. Instead of walking over and wasting the heat of the forge, she flicked her wrist. A microscopic, nearly invisible thread of tensile webbing shot from her palm, sticking to the iron handle. With a sharp tug, the tongs snapped through the air and directly into her waiting grip.
Turning to the hearth, she pulled the blindingly bright steel from the coals. It hissed violently against the cool air of the room.
She raised the hammer, letting her primary gift guide her. Expert Item Construction. It wasn't just a knack for smithing; it was a supernatural, absolute comprehension of materials and how to bind abstract concepts into physical forms. Her mind instinctively knew the exact atomic structure of the iron, the precise angle of the strike required to fold the carbon without shearing it.
CLANG.
The hammer fell. She struck again, and again, falling into a hypnotic, devastating rhythm. Inhale. Assess. Strike. Exhale. Under the guidance of her construction gift, the metal yielded perfectly, taking the shape of a wicked, fourteen-inch dirk meant for finding the gaps in heavy plate armor.
Now came the temper. The imbuing.
She did not reach for the oil barrel. Instead, she set the hammer down and whistled—a low, sharp, trilling sound that pierced the roar of the furnace.
From the pitch-black rafters high above the forge, a shadow detached itself. It descended completely silently, the massive wingspan cutting through the smoke. It landed on the edge of the stone quenching trough with a soft click of razor-sharp talons.
Horus.
The familiar the ROB wheel had granted her was a terrifyingly large falcon, its feathers a sleek, pristine mix of icy blue and snow-white, entirely untouched by the soot of the room. Its eyes were highly intelligent, glowing with a cold, predatory light. It tilted its head, watching the glowing steel in her tongs.
She didn't possess the power to manipulate ice. If she touched the superheated steel, she would burn just like any mortal. But Horus was a creature of absolute zero, and her construction gift allowed her to act as the conduit between his elemental nature and the physical world.
With a small iron chisel, she rapidly struck a jagged, geometric pattern into the glowing flat of the blade—the ancient Royce rune for Winter.
"Now," she whispered to the bird.
Horus opened his curved beak. He didn't screech; instead, a concentrated, swirling vortex of blindingly white, freezing vapor erupted from his maw, striking the glowing steel directly over the freshly carved rune.
The armory shrieked. The extreme thermal shock should have shattered the high-carbon dirk into a thousand pieces of lethal shrapnel. But her Expert Item Construction gift forced the conflicting elements to obey her design. She held the tongs steady, using her supreme crafting intuition to bind Horus's magical frost directly into the atomic lattice of the steel, locking it entirely within the boundaries of the rune.
When the vapor cleared, Horus gave a soft, clicking chirp and took flight, vanishing back into the dark rafters.
She lifted the blade. It was perfectly forged, dark and lethal, but the rune etched into its center was coated in a permanent, shimmering layer of frost that did not melt, even inches from the blazing hearth. The dirk was imbued. A cut from this blade wouldn't just bleed an enemy; it would inject the freezing, necrotic bite of a blizzard directly into their veins.
"By the Seven Hells."
She spun around, her heart leaping into her throat, the tongs gripped tightly in her calloused hands.
Standing in the shadows of the arched doorway, cloaked in a heavy riding mantle, was her older brother. Andar's eyes were wide, reflecting the dull red glow of the dying forge. He stepped fully into the light, staring not at her, but at the frost-rimed blade resting in her tongs, and then up toward the dark rafters where the giant falcon had disappeared.
"I thought Jory was drunk when he said he heard the hammer ringing at midnight," Cullen breathed, stepping cautiously across the dirt floor as if he expected the room to swallow him. "Father said you were learning the old ways. That the blood of Runestone woke in you. I thought he was just finding a cruel way to punish you for upstaging him in the yard. But that... what in the names of the gods was that bird?"
She hurriedly set the dirk down on the anvil, her mind racing. "A snow falcon," she lied smoothly, falling back on the lore she had carefully constructed. "It came from the Mountains of the Moon. The old texts say the First Men didn't just sing to the earth, Andar. They had beasts bound to their bloodline. It brought the winter to temper the steel."
Cullen stopped a few feet away, taking in her appearance. The grime on her face, the singed edges of her hair, the way she held her shoulders—tense, muscular, thrumming with the residual energy of her concentrated breathing. She looked entirely unlike the delicate sister who had sat in the solar just a month ago.
He reached out and grabbed her right wrist before she could pull away. He turned her hand over, exposing the brutalized, calloused palm.
Cullen swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing. The usual mocking arrogance that defined him was entirely absent. "He actually made you do it. He threw you in the ash pit."
"I am fine," she said stiffly, yanking her hand back. "It is my duty to the House."
"Don't give me the Septa Vane routine," Andar muttered. He reached beneath his heavy mantle and produced a small bundle wrapped in linen, tossing it onto the dusty workbench. "Cook left half a pigeon pie in the kitchens. Thought you might be starving."
She looked at the grease seeping through the linen. Her stomach gave a violent, painful ache. The breathing technique burned through her caloric reserves at a monstrous rate.
"Thank you," she said softly. She broke off a piece of the cold crust and ate it. It tasted like heaven.
Andar moved closer to the anvil, leaning over to inspect the cooling dirk. The frost-etched rune shimmered in the low light, the air around it visibly shimmering from the cold.
"I saw what you did before the bird," he said quietly, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "You didn't even touch the tongs when you pulled the iron from the fire. They just flew into your grip."
She froze mid-chew. He had seen the web-sling. She had been careless.
"It is the magic of the runes," she said, her voice steady. "The unseen threads of the First Men. The runes command the elements, and they guide the tools of the smith."
Cullen looked at her, his eyes narrowing slightly. For all his thick-headedness in the yard, he was observant. But he had been raised on the tales of the Long Night, the magic of the Starks, and the runic armor of the Royces. It was easier for his Westerosi mind to believe she was a vessel for ancestral ghosts than to comprehend anything else.
"This isn't normal steel," Andar said, reaching out to hover his hand over the dirk. He snatched it back as the residual cold of Horus's ice bit at his knuckles.
"No," she replied, tearing off another piece of pie. "This dirk could punch through a Lannister breastplate and freeze the blood in the wound."
Andar stared at the blade for a long, heavy moment. The silence in the armory stretched out, broken only by the crackle of the coals and the distant wind outside the castle walls. He was the heir to House Royce. He was expected to be invincible. But he had seen the brittle steel Hugh forged, and he knew war was always looming on the horizon.
"Make me one," Andar said.
She blinked. "What?"
"A dagger. No, a hunting knife. Something I can carry on my belt at all times." Andar stepped closer, his voice urgent. He unbuckled the standard-issue castle dagger from his hip and tossed it contemptuously into the dirt. "The steel in the armory is dead. I can feel it when I swing. It vibrates wrong. If I am to lead men, I want a blade that won't betray me."
He pointed a finger at the frost-scarred dirk on the anvil. "I want one with the runes. I want whatever ancient magic you and that... that bird just poured into that steel."
She looked at her older brother. They were separated by the rigid, ironclad gender roles of their society. But here, in the dirt and the ash of the forge, those rules had melted away. She was the master of the forge, the wielder of the ROB's gifts, and he was the warrior asking for her protection.
She looked down at her calloused hands. With her Expert Item Construction, she could forge him a blade and imbue it with her time manipulation—a rune that would briefly slow the perception of whoever the blade crossed swords with. Or a web-slinging rune that would allow him to disarm an opponent with an invisible, sticky thread.
"It will cost you," she said, her lips curving into a very faint, soot-stained smirk.
Cullen let out a breath that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. "I have three silver stags and a smuggled cask of Dornish wine hidden in the stables."
"I don't want your coin, Andar." She picked up her hammer, feeling its comfortable, deadly weight. She looked him dead in the eye. "If I make you a blade imbued with the ancestors... you have to start sneaking me down into the training yard at dawn. I want you to teach me the footwork you use against Jory."
Andar's jaw dropped. "Are you mad? If Mother catches you with a sword—"
"Father put me in a forge," she countered fiercely. "He wants me to have iron in my blood. What good is forging the weapons if I don't know how they are swung? The breathing technique... the runes... they require movement. I need to understand the balance of a fighter so I can construct better weapons."
Andar stared at her, weighing the immense risk. If their mother found out he was teaching his sister swordplay, the entire keep would be turned upside down. But he looked at the frost-rune etched perfectly into the lethal dirk, and he looked at the fierce, unyielding light in his sister's eyes.
"Fine," Andar muttered, running a hand through his hair. "Dawn. Before the guards change shifts. But if you drop the practice sword on your foot, I'm telling them you stole it."
"Deal."
She turned back to the hearth, grabbing the heavy iron chain of the bellows. "Now get out of here. And steal me a whole chicken tomorrow. I'm going to need the meat if I have to fold the steel for the rune I have in mind for you."
Andar smiled, a genuine, rare expression that softened his hard features. "Do not rush it, sister. Make it perfect."
"I always do," she replied. As he slipped out into the cold night, she closed her eyes, drew in a long, deep breath to steady her aching muscles, and reached for the tongs. Above her, Horus let out a low, approving trill, the sound freezing the dust motes dancing in the rafters.