Chapter One · Goban & Gobandottír's

Da heard the rider before I ever did. His hammer stopped above the iron, held there in one great fist while his head turned slightly towards the road. It was such an unnatural thing for him to do that I noticed the absence of the blow before I noticed anything else. The forge had its own rhythm when the two of us worked side by side, and after near twenty-five winters of standing somewhere within earshot of it, I knew that rhythm well enough to feel when it broke. Hammer, turn, hammer, turn, back to the coals before the colour disappeared. There was no thinking about it, and there hardly needed to be. Yet Da stood with the hammer raised and the billet fading beneath him, yellow giving way to a sullen orange while he listened to something beyond the river.

"Da."

He did not answer.

Only then, in the strange little pocket of quiet left behind by the hammer, did I catch the sound of hooves. They came fast along the road beyond Hunting's Run, striking the frozen earth unevenly enough that whoever rode had either lost all of their sense or had some cause to treat his horse poorly. Nobody rode that hard through Pankurth before breakfast, for there was scarcely anywhere in the village worth getting to in such a hurry. The mill would still be opening its shutters, the hunters who meant to leave had gone before dawn, and even the tavern would have little more than yesterday's ale and a woman sweeping rushes from beneath the tables.

The horse apepared between the pines in a dark, steaming shape, its rider crouched over its neck beneath a purple cloak that snapped and twisted behind him.

Da lowered the hammer without striking and I watched the billet go red.

"Leave it," I sighed, already reaching across him with the tongs, but he had stepped away from the anvil before I could finish speaking. I caught the iron and thrust it back into the coals myself, working the bellows twice until the charcoal brightened around it. That was a morning's heat near wasted before some bastard had ridden too hard and my father, for perhaps the third time in his entire life, had forgotten the work in front of him.

Da had manned the forge near every day of his damned life, and when he was not there, it was me. There had never been talk of sons, nor any great mourning over the lack of them. Da had raised me with the assumption that I would inherit the anvil just as he had inherited it from his father, and his father from his father, and so on backwards through however many generations of Gobans and Hjorrs and Gunnars our family could remember before the names became half-story. That was my lot in life, apparently, and so it was what I had studied for the better part of what I had already lived. I was his heir because I was his daughter, and because I knew the work.

Leif's mother once said that Da had been split like a log; one half older, larger and worn down by the years, and the other still growing into the same grain.

Between the two of us we had let meals cool, missed feasting days, worked through rain blowing sideways beneath the veranda and once continued through half a roof coming down after the snow had gathered too heavily upon it. We had worked whilst ill enough that Johanna threatened to drag us from the forge itself. We had worked until moonrise because an axle needed mending before a merchant left at dawn. We argued, of course. Two smiths with the same tension to their jaws and the same hot blood in their veins were bound to clash from time to time, but we never let the iron burn for it.

Until recently, anyway.

The rider hauled upon his reins beside the forge. His mare skidded on the hard dirt where the frost still clung beneath the eaves, recovered with a clatter of shoes and stood blowing so hard I could see the muscles beneath her wet hide. Foam had gathered white along her bit and her nostrils were wide and red within, each breath coming from them in a great plume that tore the cold apart almost at once.

I didn't like that, and I liked the rider even less for it.

The man wore Jarl Sigvir's stag upon his breast. Mud had swallowed his boots to the ankle and stippled the lower half of his purple cloak, and what little hair had escaped his hood was plastered dark against his forehead. He looked young beneath it all. Younger than me, perhaps, though exhaustion could certainly do strange things to a face.

"Goban Hjorrson?" he called.

Da wiped one hand down the front of his leather apron as he stepped beneath the eaves. He was a bear of a man even with age beginning to work at him, tall and broad-backed like a draft horse, with the sort of shoulders that made the doorway behind him seem narrower than it was.

"'Pends who's askin'."

The rider blinked at him, perhaps having expected greater reverance from a village smith confronted by the Jarl's colours. He fumbled inside his cloak and produced a folded missive sealed in violet wax. "By order of Jarl Sigvir, in answer to the command of the High King Eirik, and His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Sigismund. For Goban and Gobandóttir’s Smith."

At that, Da looked over his shoulder at me, but I pretended not to notice.

The name had been his notion. When I was sixteen and first trusted to take orders without him breathing down the back of my neck, he had painted the new words above the doorway himself. The lettering was crooked because Da's skill with a brush was considerably worse than his skill with a hammer, but there it remained: 'GOBAN AND GOBANDÓTTIR’S', faded now by both smoke and weather. Folk in Pankurth still called the place 'Goban's' because they had called it 'Goban's' for longer than I had been alive. Da corrected them whenever he heard it.

The courier dismounted with a curse when one boot momentarily caught the stirrup. His legs near failed him when they met the ground. He steadied himself against the mare, gave her neck a distracted pat and brought the letter across to Da.

"What is it?" I asked, wiping my hands upon my smock.

"Orders." The rider bent with his palms braced upon his thighs, still trying to recover his breath despite the horse having done most of the work. "Every smith in the province no doubt has the same. Arms levy's doubled. Finished stock goes to Mournstead City within three days. Master smiths are to present their tallies before the steward."

Da turned the missive over without breaking the seal. His thumb pressed into the purple wax, deforming one of the stag's antlers. "Three days."

"Aye."

"The road takes two with a loaded wagon."

The young man straightened a little, though his face pinched with the effort. "Then I'd load it today."

I looked at Da. Da looked at him. Neither of us appreciated being told how long the road to Mournstead took by a man who had probably been given that horse yesterday, but there was little sense in arguing the matter. Da broke the seal with his thumbnail and unfolded the page.

Then he frowned, his eyes moving over the cramped marks of Ketheric.

Slowly.

Very slowly.

Da could read a tally and a name. He could read enough of a contract to know when a merchant meat to skin him, provided the merchant had the decency to use ordinary words and large letters. Court hands were another matter. Whoever wrote for Sigvir seemed to think that making every stroke resemble a dying spider was proof of their education.

Da's lips worked soundlessly, one thick finger travelling beneath the first line before stopping, going backwards, and beginning again.

"Give it here," I said.

His brow lowered. "You can't read either."

"I can read," I protested.

"You can read better than me. That's not the same thing."

"It's enough t' know yer holdin' it upside down."

The courier coughed into his fist and so I quickly busied myself adjusting the glove upon my left hand, though the thing did not need adjusting.

"Give it back," the courier muttered at last, and took the letter from him before either of us could further disgrace ourselves. He smoothed the page against his forearm and began reading aloud, stumbling only once over whatever flowery title some court clerk had attached to the Emperor. The meaning was simple enough. Fjällgaard was to furnish men, grain, horses and arms. Mournstead Hold was to double the stock already promised. Every sound weapon upon a smith's rack was to be surrendered for assessment and payment in the city, and refusal would be considered a dereliction of fealty in a season of war.

He lowered the page and jabbed at the last lines with one reddened finger. "First wagons expected before the third sunset."

"They want everythin'," I said.

"Swords, shields, axes. Helmets if you happen to also be an armourer. Arrowheads by the barrel. Plate, mail, spearheads. Whatever's sound."

"For where?"

"Highroost, so I heard." His attention had already drifted back to the road. "Some people are thinkin' the muster's bein' brought forward."

Da's expression changed at that. Not much, because little ever changed upon Da's face unless you knew what you were looking for, but I saw the tightening beside his mouth. "Against Mogruthar?"

The courier gave him a look as if to ask who else it might possibly be. "I've six more stops before noon." He reached for the reins, and I caught the mare's bridle near the bit.

The horse flinched from me, throwing her head enough that the leather jerked painfully through my fingers, and I softened my hold at once. Up close she looked worse. Sweat had soaked her chest dark beneath the harness and made narrow channels through the dust along her shoulder. Her sides still worked too quickly. I ran my palm along the damp fur of her neck, feeling the heat beneath it.

"Water her first."

The courier frowned. "Jarl won't thank me fer loiterin'."

"You'll kill the poor beast."

"She's fine."

"She's shakin'."

"She's been runnin'."

"Yes," I said, in a voice gruffer than what was likely necessary. "I noticed."

Da came up beside me and ran his hand once over the mare's shoulder, then felt beneath the tack where the sweat had gathered the thickets. His expression soured. "Horse dies, you'll be loiterin' longer."

The courier looked between us, then at the trough beneath the veranda and finally back towards the road. I could near see the argument happening behind his eyes, but sense defeat the fear of the Jarl by a narrow margin.

"Not too much," I warned as he led the mare beneath the eaves. "She'll drink herself sick."

"I know horses."

I looked at the white foam crusted around the bit with a dull expression. "Aye."

He scowled at me but said nothing more.

Da drew the mare's head up twice while she drank. I took the missive from the courier and tried to puzzle through it myself. My reading was better than Da's, though that was not the achievement I sometimes made it sound. I knew enough to make out most of the demands if I took my time. Twelve swords. Six shields. Whatever sound pieces of plate could be spared. A quantity of arrowheads and horseshoes that made my wrists ache merely thinking about it.

There were no details about battles. No useful explanation of what had happened in the east, nor how far the Menevines had come. Nothing of ships or dead men or burned villages. The Jarl apparently did not think smiths required such luxuries as knowing what they were arming people for.

However, beneath the reckoning or iron and grain, I found men. Fifty able bodies from the Hold were to go north to Highroost and join the muster there before the march east. My eyes stopped upon the line and I read it twice to be certain.

"Are they takin' volunteers?" I called.

Da turned from the horse, but I kept my attention upon the page.

The courier, who had begun retightening the mare's girth, shrugged. "They're takin' whoever the Empire's captains see fit. Guard first, I heard. Hunters and woodsmen after. Any mages get special priority, considerin' we have so little. More if they ask it."

"And women?"

That earned me a proper look.

His eyes travelled over me with an openness that I probably would have found rude under any other circumstances, taking in the breadth of my shoulders beneath my smock, my burned forearms and the hammer hanging from my belt. I was near six feet and an inch besides, broader than some men through the chest and certainly heavier than the courier. All my winters of living iron had seen to that. I did not know what conclusion he reached, only that it seemed to make the question less amusing than he had first thought.

"A Reachman company'll take women," he said carefully. "Imperial captains might be another matter. Suppose if you can keep pace and carry steel, it's worth askin' at the keep."

Da released the mare's bridle. "Horse has had enough."

The courier looked at him, then at me.

I bit the inside of my cheek.

He wiped his mouth despite having taken no water himself, shoved the missive back into my hands and swung into the saddle. "Three days. Steward was plain on it."

"Aye," Da said. "Heard you the first time."

The mare resisted when the rider turned towards the woods. He answered with his heel and she lurched reluctantly forwards, shoes slipping once upon the frost before she found her footing. I watched them go with my arms folded tightly across my chest. Purple cloth flashed between the trunks, appeared again further down the road and finally vanished altogether behind the pines.

Da remained where he was.

Cold worked its way beneath my sweat-wet clothes while I stood beside him with the letter in my grip. The forge burned hot at my back, but the warmth did not reach far beyond the eaves. Hunting's Run would silver-grey below us, shallow enough at this point that stones broke its surface and made little white tongues in the current. Across it, pine branches bowed and shifted as a flock of small birds burst from the canopy and settled again farther upstream.

The village resumed around us as though nothing had happened. An axe worried steadily somewhere beyond the nearest houses. A wagon wheel complained along the frozen road. Someone shouted after a dog. A child shrieked with laughter at some game beyond the roofs; probably little Lunka, Vagnir's bairn, who had apparently discovered screaming during the summer and had seen no reason to stop. All the small sounds usually swallowed by the forge returned sharpened by my father's stillness.

"Three days," I said eventually.

Da took the letter from me, folded it without looking at it and walked back beneath the eaves. "Best we get a move along, then."

That was all he said, and naturally, I followed.

There was no room for talking. Da set the pace and I endeavoured to match it, though I suspected that was exactly what he wanted. We both had a habit of working harder when there were things we did not wish to discuss, which meant that the forge had seen some of its most productive days after our worst arguments. The billet I had saved had come back to heat. I drew it from the coals while Da took his place at the anvil.

The forge snarled in its bed of stone, its breath hot and acrid and spilling from the open veranda to claw at whatever skin the cold had not already numbed. Smoke gathered among the rafters in pale twisting fingers before finding the opening and escaping into the morning air. Every strike sent sparks skittering across the floor; bright little things that lived only long enough to flare against my boots and disappear. Scale broke from the iron in black flakes. Sweat worked its way down my ribs beneath the linen serk, and my woollen smock had long since surrendered to ash, grease, and whatever other filth had accumulated upon a blacksmith over the course of a week. There was no point fussing over clean clothes in a forge.

By the time the courier's mud had dried pale upon the floor, my braid had begun to come loose. Damp strands struck against my temple and cheek. I blew one away, but it returned. I tucked it behind my ear, but it escaped again. By the fifth time I was prepared to cut the whole damned braid off with the shears.

Da noticed me twitching at it and, wisely, said nothing.

Our racks held nine finished swords. Two wanted grips, one had yet to meet the grindstone, and another had been bothering me since the previous evening. Three axes stood against the wall, one barrel of arrowheads sat beneath the workbench alongside smaller stock we had expected to take to the city at the end of the month.

We could probably meet the levy. Probably. If nothing cracked, or warped, or came from the quench brittle. If we did not sleep tonight.

A smith spent a considerable amount of his life learning how many things could go wrong with an object that, to everyone else, appeared to be nothing more than a piece of metal beaten into the correct shape.

I drew the troublesome sword from the rack while Da returned the billet to the fire. It was mine from its first heat to the final grind: a plain longsword of the sort the Empire ordered by the hundred. Nothing pretty or worthy of the Jarl's wall. Straight double edge, shallow fuller, ordinary tang. It would take a leather-wrapped grip and a plain crossguard if it ever left the shop. Had it had not been mine, I doubt I would have even remembered it a week from now.

The edge ran true until the last fingersbreadth above the tang, where the grind thickened. It was only barely. Most people would not have seen it, but I did. I had noticed it the night before and set the sword aside with the intention of correcting it when I had the time. Apparently, however, time had been requisitioned by Emperor Sigismund along with everything else.

I turned the blade towards the light.

"That one stays."

I looked across at Da. He was working the bellows with one hand, his attention apparently fixed upon the fire.

"But the order says every sound piece."

"Then it stays."

I frowned. "But I can fix it."

"Not today."

"It won't take long."

Da gave the bellows another pull. the leather sighed and the coal brightened around the waiting iron. "We finish what can be finished. Start another axe."

I ran my thumb carefully beside the fault, not upon the sharpened edge but close enough to feel the change in the thickness. "A rough grind won't mend itself."

"Nor will the other eleven swords forge themselves while you fuss over one."

"It's not fussin'."

"It is when we've a day at most."

"A man could die for less than this."

Da looked at me through the shimmer of heat. "A man can die with the finest sword Oradryn ever blessed."

I frowned harder. "That makes poor work no better, then."

"Didn't say it did." He held out his hand. "Give it here."

I passed the blade over with considerably more reluctance than the situation required.

Da tested the balance first—he always did. Then he turned it beneath the light until he found the fault without my needing to point it out. His thumb moved once over the thickened grind.

He was not a handsome man, my father, though perhaps he had been once. I supposed I was not a particularly handsome woman either, if I favoured him as strongly as everyone claimed. His nose had been broken too many times, his heavy-lidded hazel eyes sat deep beneath brows that made him look permanently unimpressed, and his red beard had a habit of collecting ash no matter how often he brushed it clean. His limbs were like pine trunks, scarred and hair-lined and crossed with burns, and age had begun to put a little softness around the middle of him where once there had been none. But still, I had always thought he looked right in the forge, as though someone had built the place around him.

"Well," he said eventually, "quench is clean."

I folded my arms.

"Taper too." He tilted the sword. "You've left meat near the tang, that's all."

"Enough t' turn the edge."

He nodded. "Enough that we don't send it, aye." He laid the blade apart from the levy stock. "Recognisin' a fault's half the craft. Knowin' which fault matters today is another."

I hated when he answered sense with sense. It gave my temper nowhere useful to strike.

“They’ll put worse in soldiers’ hands.”

“Likely.”

I looked up at him. “That’s it? Likely?”

Da had already turned back towards the fire, apparently satisfied that the matter required no more thought than that. “What would you rather I say?”

“I don’t know. Somethin’.”

“Somethin’,” he repeated, and when I called him a rotten bastard under my breath, he carried the heated billet to the anvil with a dry chuckle that made it quite clear he had heard me. I followed with the heavier tongs from the wall. They were the better pair, jaws even and handles wrapped where the iron had worn smooth, and had been mine in practice for years despite Da never formally giving them to me. “And we’re meant t’ fill the wagon,” I continued, taking the far end of the billet when he offered it, “take their coin and trust whoever gets this lot knows what he’s doin’?”

“We’re meant t’ keep our oath t’ the Jarl.”

“Sigvir keeps his seat. Sigismund keeps his continent. Some farm boy gets what blade was finished quickest.”

Da’s hammer came down harder than he intended, spreading the glowing bar too far beneath the blow. He corrected the angle before striking again. “That farm boy still needs it.”

“Aye, he does. That’s what sits ill with me.” At his grunt, I turned the piece and watched him begin working smaller blows along its length. “Men I don’t know will carry work I made into a country I’ve never seen. If it fails, I’ll never hear of it. If it holds whilst they butcher someone with it, I won’t hear that either.”

“Best you don’t.” He kept hammering when I asked him why, and for a few strikes I thought that was all the answer I would get. The billet flattened beneath us, sparks jumping from its edges and dying against my apron. Only when I asked again did he stop and leave the hammer resting upon the anvil. He looked tired more than angry, which somehow made me feel worse about pressing him and did absolutely nothing to stop me. “Because you’ll drive yourself mad if you start reckonin’ every ugly thing a man might do with something that passed through your hands. We make what’s asked of us and make it well. What another man chooses t’ do with it belongs to him.”

“Convenient.”

“Necessary.” Da returned the steel to the coals and nudged charcoal over it with the tongs. “We’ve made axes, arrowheads, skinning knives, kitchen knives. You mean t’ wonder whether some husband’s opened his wife with one every time you sharpen a blade?”

My stomach tightened. “That’s not the same.”

“Steel doesn’t know that.”

“But people do.”

“Aye. Which is why the choice belongs t’ them.”

There was little I could say to that without dragging us around the same argument again, so I took up the bellows. The leather had gone stiff in the cold and required both hands to work properly. Each pull made the forge breathe brighter, orange pushing through the deeper red of the coals until the heat flashed against Da’s beard and the scarred breadth of his forearms. Outside, frost still silvered the shaded edge of the road, and for a while I watched it between pulls rather than looking at him.

“Fjällgaard’s not under attack,” I said eventually. When Da closed his eyes, I added, “Not yet.”

“‘Not yet’ is what the letter’s for.”

“But if the Menevines are in Cynvarra, why send Reachmen east before they ever come here?”

“Because that’s what armies do.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the answer I’ve got.” He had found some imaginary fault along the edge of his tongs and was running his thumb over it with sudden interest, which told me more plainly than anything else that he did have other answers and simply did not want to give them.

“You were a soldier.”

His thumb stopped. “For a little while, and not with the Imperials.”

“That doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten how an army works. You know more than me.”

“A turnip knows more than nothin’. Ask one of those.”

I stared at him whilst he bent towards the fire. There were advantages to having known someone for your entire life, and one of them was knowing precisely which forms of annoyance they could endure and which would eventually break them. Da could withstand shouting with admirable ease. He could withstand insults, sulking and doors shut hard enough to shake their hinges. Being watched in silence was another matter. I did not move or speak, and after perhaps half a minute his shoulders rose with a long breath.

“Stop that.”

“I’m not doin’ anythin’.”

“Yes, you are. That.”

I widened my eyes at him. “What?”

“Gods preserve me.” Da caught the billet and brought it back to the anvil, where he turned it beneath the light rather than striking. The end had brightened almost white, but he inspected it for longer than the steel required, arranging his thoughts more than examining the heat. “Sigismund has more land than we have sense. Every mile of it expects savin’. Doesn’t matter if it’s a Reachman village or some Adridorian field neither of us could point to on a map. He wears the crown over all of it, so when one piece starts burnin’, every other piece pays for the water.”

That was more like him. Da loved to speak in metaphor, particularly when plain words might oblige him to admit that he was worried.

I took the far end of the billet. “And Cynvarra? That isn’t his.”

“No, but if the Menevines have moved into Cynvarra in force, then they’ve left Mogruthar in force. That matters.” He adjusted the steel beneath my tongs and began striking. “Maybe they stop there. Maybe they don’t. Emperor’s not goin’ t’ wait until their ships are landin’ on Adridor’s shores before he decides which.”

“The letter says fifty men from the Hold.”

“Fifty bodies to Highroost.”

“To march east. Sounds suspiciously like fightin’ to me.”

Da’s jaw shifted beneath his beard, but the billet had already darkened towards cherry-red and gave him an excuse to end the matter. He took it from me and carried it back towards the forge. “You want certainty, go ask Felathar. I’m a blacksmith.”

I snorted and returned to the bellows. That was the difficult nature of talking politics with my father. Between the two of us we knew enough to recognise when something was wrong and nowhere near enough to say what ought to be done about it. Most news reached Pankurth after passing through so many mouths that a border skirmish could become an invasion by the time it came to us, or an invasion could become three drunk soldiers fighting outside an inn. The Jarl sent notices when he wanted taxes, iron or bodies. Merchants brought rumours with their wares, hunters brought others from the larger settlements, and everybody repeated whichever portions had interested them enough to remember.

Cynvarra itself scarcely felt like a real place to me. I knew it as red grasslands across the water and dog-headed people whose proper name I had misremembered for years after first hearing it as a child. Some traders spoke of scattered clans and others of cities, kings, armies and old roads. Beyond them lay Mogruthar and its ashen mountains, where the Menevines built their cities amongst smoke and volcanic stone and, according to one wool merchant drunk enough that Da refused to believe half of what he said, possessed ships that travelled without sail or oar.

Places like that did not sit properly in my head beside Pankurth. Pankurth was something I could put my hand upon. Wet thatch and muddy boots, Hunting’s Run muttering beneath the veranda, pine smoke caught in wool, miners coming down from the hills black beneath their nails and loggers ruining their shoulders before forty. Hunters like Leif hung skins where the dogs could not reach them, and women leaned across fences to speak for half an hour whilst maintaining that they had merely stopped on their way somewhere else. Our buildings were squat things of timber and stone that seemed to crouch against the weather.

Cynvarra was red grass, Mogruthar was smoke, and Adridor was south, enormous and warm and filled with people who had apparently liked putting feathers upon their helmets. Yet those places had begun reaching into ours. Refugees had appeared in the larger towns. Grain was being counted, horses taken, and the weapons Da and I made for farmers, guards and whatever merchant had enough coin to order one were suddenly being bundled together for men travelling east.

I worked the bellows until the billet had come back to heat. “They’ll need smiths.”

Da’s shoulders tightened. “They have smiths.”

“Not enough if they’re stripping every village rack bare. Highroost’s going t’ have thousands of men coming through. Maybe more. All of them carryin’ something made of iron, ridin’ something wearing iron or draggin’ something held together by iron. Armour breaks, swords need edges, horses throw shoes, wagons crack axles. They’ll have smiths, aye, but they’ll need more.”

“I know what smiths do.”

“Then you know I’m right.”

His hammer came down crooked. The billet leapt sideways with a crack, caught the horn of the anvil and near spun free before Da trapped it beneath the tongs. One side had folded where the blow struck badly, and for several seconds neither of us spoke. Da stared at the damage first and then at me, his nostrils widening.

“You distracted me.”

I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. “You’ve worked through roof-fall and fever. I watched you finish Jannik’s plough with your hand wrapped because you’d near split your thumb open the day before. Don’t start blamin’ me because you heard what I said.”

“I heard foolishness, and it makes an ugly noise. Gets in the ears.” Da lifted the billet to inspect the fold and, apparently deciding he had not irritated me sufficiently, added, “Throws a man’s aim.”

“Aye, I get it.”

He returned the billet to the fire and became immediately fascinated with every object around it. The charcoal needed shifting. The tongs wanted moving. A hammer whose face had been smooth since before I was born suddenly required inspection. He knew what he was doing, and I knew what he was doing. Worse, he knew that I knew, which left us in one of those stupid little arguments where neither person wanted to be the first to admit there was an argument at all.

I waited until he had buried the steel as far beneath the coals as it could reasonably go. “They’ll take women who can keep pace. Courier said so.”

“I heard him.”

“That means I could go as a smith. I could work whilst they gathered, mend armour, shoe horses, whatever they needed. Train whilst I did it.”

“No.”

The word came so quickly that I nearly laughed. There had been no pause or thought, not even the pretence of considering what I had said. Da had simply waited for the shape of my sentence to reveal itself so he could cut it down.

“You didn’t even think about it.”

“I’ve thought about it plenty. Every time you’ve brought it up for the last nine years, as it happens.”

“That isn’t the same thing. You don’t even know exactly what I’m suggesting.”

At that he finally turned. The hammer rested loose in one hand while the other hooked at his belt, and there was something almost tiredly amused in his expression, though not enough to make me feel any better. “You want t’ go to Highroost with the muster. You’ll work their forge until some captain decides he needs another body more than another smith, convince yourself you’ve learned in a handful of days what other folk spend years learnin’, then march east with men you don’t know and get yourself killed in Dauvellir on some patch of ground I can’t even find t’ bury you. That near enough?”

My mouth opened before I discovered that I had no useful answer. Heat crept into my face as Da lifted one brow at me. “That is an unnecessarily miserable version of it.”

“It’s the version I heard.”

“You heard what you wanted t’ hear.”

“Maybe. Doesn’t make me wrong.”

I stared at him, trying to decide which part irritated me most. Probably the fact that he had managed to take the vaguest shape of what I wanted and drag it all the way into a shallow grave in some nameless eastern field before I had even decided whether I wanted to leave Pankurth. “I’m not askin’ you t’ come with me.”

The change in him was small, little more than a tightening around his eyes and a momentary stillness through the shoulders, but I had spent my whole life learning to read movements most men would not have noticed. His gaze dropped towards the hammer and one thick thumb rubbed slowly along the leather of its haft.

“That makes it worse.”

I had meant the opposite. I was not asking him to abandon the forge or Pankurth, the house that had belonged to his father before him, the river, the graveyard where half our family lay or the anvil that had already survived more generations than either of us properly knew. I only meant that if I wanted something beyond those things, it did not require my father to want it too. The words had clearly found some other wound, however, and for a moment I considered letting the matter drop.

Nearly.

“You still think I can’t do it.”

Da took the billet from the fire. He did not answer until he had set it square upon the anvil. “I know you can’t.”

My shoulders pulled tight before I could stop them. Suddenly I was aware of my own body in the most humiliating way: the thickness through my arms earned over years at the anvil, the width of my shoulders, the burns around my wrists and the calluses built until I could hold hot tools longer than most men who came through our door. I had always taken a sort of ugly pride in being difficult to dismiss physically. I could lift what some men needed another pair of hands for and work the hammer from dawn until the light went. If something required strength, stubbornness or endurance, I had grown up assuming there was no particular reason I could not do it.

Da must have seen something of that in my face because the hardness in his eased. “You’ve no training, Guin. Not real training. You’ve held swords because we make swords. You know whether a grip’s too wide, whether the balance pulls wrong or the edge’s too heavy, and I reckon you could tell me half those things with your eyes shut. None of it tells you what t’ do when someone’s tryin’ t’ put one through you.”

“I know that.”

“Do you?” He touched the folded edge with the hammer face. “Strength isn’t training either. You’ve plenty of that. More than some lads twice your foolishness, but it still doesn’t teach you where t’ put your feet when a man’s comin’ at you, when t’ move, or when stayin’ still is the thing that keeps you breathin’.” He flexed the stiffness from one hand before closing it around the hammer again, the movement drawing my attention to the pale seams across his knuckles and wrist. “Doesn’t teach you what happens when the man beside you gets his throat opened and falls against you.”

The image came into my head before I could stop it. A body folding sideways, its weight striking mine, blood hot enough to steam in winter air. Something of that must have shown upon my face because Da lowered the hammer.

“You ever seen a man die?”

I looked through the open side of the forge towards the empty road and the churned tracks left by the courier’s mare. “‘Course not.”

Da rubbed the heel of his palm over an old white scar along the inside of his wrist. It seemed unconscious until he noticed me looking and dropped his hand. “Neither had I, first time.”

I had known that scar my whole life. When I was little I had traced it once with a dirty finger whilst sitting in his lap, and he told me that iron had teeth if you were careless. I had assumed it belonged to the forge because most marks upon either of us did. Now, watching him shift the billet another finger’s width over the anvil rather than offer any grand story of how he had earned it, I wondered how many others I had misunderstood.

“That’s what I mean,” he said eventually. “You’d go east blind.”

The first answer that came to me was angry enough that I swallowed it. “I’ve been trainin’.”

His head lifted slowly. “With who?”

There were several possible ways of answering and all of them sounded guilty, so I made the mistake of saying nothing. Da narrowed his eyes and supplied the answer himself. “Laufson?”

“He knows more than I do.”

“Leif knows which end of a bow points away from him.”

“He’s hunted his whole life.”

“Deer don’t carry swords, Guin.”

“No, but Leif does, and he’s still shown me things.”

That earned me the look I had been hoping to avoid. Da stopped pretending to work and leaned some of his considerable weight against the anvil. “What things?”

“Stances.”

“What stances?”

“The ones from that manual he found. It’s a proper manual,” I added when his expression failed to improve. “It has pictures.”

His eyelids dropped shut. One scarred hand rose slowly to cover most of his face, and he dragged it down over his nose and beard with the groan of a man who had discovered rot in the roof beams. “Oh, for the love of…”

“It is proper. There’s writin’ in it and everythin’. It has Varyn’s seal.”

Da’s hand stopped halfway down his beard. “Leif could draw Varyn’s seal on his arse. Doesn’t make his arse a knight.”

A laugh escaped through my nose before I could stop it. I scowled at him immediately, mostly for having managed it at all, and the twitch at the corner of his mouth only made things worse. For a moment the argument loosened and became familiar again, stupid in the ordinary way our arguments often were. Da returned to the billet while I rolled my sore wrist and shifted the striker between my hands, and I almost wished we could leave it there.

Then I remembered why we were talking about Leif at all.

“The point is I’m trying. I know I don’t know enough, Da. I’m not pretendin’ otherwise. That’s why I’ve been trying t’ learn what I can.”

He watched me put the striker back upon the bench. “You’re squintin’, then.”

“Better than keeping my eyes shut.”

That took the remaining amusement from his face. I regretted the words as soon as I saw it, though I still believed them. Da returned to the billet instead of answering, drawing the steel from the coals and laying it across the anvil. The fold from his bad strike remained raised along one edge, uglier now that the scale had broken away. He turned it twice beneath the forge-light before touching the damaged place with the face of his hammer.

“And how long d’you reckon it takes t’ stop squintin’?”

“As long as it takes.”

He made a low noise in his throat and struck the fold lightly. “Useful.”

“I’d learn before I went east.”

The hammer stopped.

Da did not lift his head. “Before you went east.”

My stomach pulled tight. Up until then we had both pretended that this was supposition. If the muster needed smiths, if the captain took women, if I chose to ask. I had spoken too plainly and made the thing sound decided before I had decided it myself. “I mean if I went.”

“Aye. That’s not what you said, though.”

“You know what I meant.”

“I generally do. That’s half the trouble.” Da scraped scale from the billet with the hammer face and then continued in the same tired, practical tone. “You don’t know when the army marches. You don’t know how long they drill, whether they drill at all, or whether half those poor bastards get handed axes and told which direction t’ run. You’ve never even seen a muster.”

“It won’t march in three days. I don’t need t’ have led an army to know thousands of people don’t arrive at Highroost one morning and leave again before supper.”

“No, but it might help t’ have seen an army before decidin’ what happens after.”

That was the gall of it. He was right, and every time I reached for certainty I found another empty place where my knowledge ought to have been. I had never seen the capital of Fjällgaard. I had never watched an army gather, break camp or march anywhere. I had never worn armour longer than it took to mend a strap and make certain the thing sat properly afterwards. I did not know how many smiths travelled with a company, how long a levy trained or whether some Imperial captain would take one look at me and laugh before I had finished offering my name.

Leif had travelled more than I had, though nowhere near as much as he liked to imply. He could disappear into the woods for six days and return speaking as if he had crossed half of Aldremor, only for the tale to shrink once enough ale loosened the truth from him: four days following elk, one sheltering with charcoal burners because it rained, another half-day lost because he refused to admit he had taken the wrong trail. Still, he had seen more. Almost everyone had.

Through the open side of the forge I could see the road lying pale between the pines before it bent from sight beyond Hunting’s Run. I had looked at that same patch every day of my life, watching merchants and hunters come and go. Once or twice a year soldiers passed through in small numbers, usually loud and hungry and considerably less impressive than the songs made them sound. I had followed that road as far as Mournstead City, and that was nearly the whole accounting of my travels.

Da had gone back to the billet. His blows were lighter now, coaxing the damaged fold outward rather than trying to beat it flat all at once. When he extended the far end towards me I stepped forward automatically and caught it with the tongs. Neither of us needed to ask. For several minutes the old rhythm returned between us, hammer and turn, hammer and turn, back to the coals before the colour went, until the fold had nearly disappeared and Da finally set the hammer aside.

He removed one glove finger by finger and flexed the stiffness from his knuckles. “This is where your work is, Guin.”

I stared at him. “That’s not good enough. It’s what you always say. This is where your work is, this is your home, this is where you belong. You say all three things like they’re the same thing and then act like I’m dense when I ask why.”

“Most folks spend their whole bloody lives wishin’ they had one place they belonged.”

“And I’m lucky. Fine. I know that.” I moved away from the anvil, suddenly too penned in beside it, and braced one hand against the workbench when its edge caught my thigh. “I know what this place is and I know what you’ve given me. Being grateful for it doesn’t mean I have t’ stand in the same patch of dirt until I’m old. Every time I talk about leaving for a season, you hear forever. Every time I say I want t’ see somewhere else, you look at me like I’m already halfway gone.”

Da’s fingers curled against the anvil. “Careful.”

Just like that, Ma had entered the forge without either of us saying her name, smelling of lavender and honey. Something sour twisted in my stomach. “I’m not talkin’ about her.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No. I’m talking about me. That’s the problem. Once I start talkin’ about leaving, you don’t know the difference.”

Da straightened. “I know the difference.”

“Then act like it.”

His nostrils flared and for a moment I expected the shouting match we had both been avoiding since the courier left. His hand closed around the hammer beside him, but instead of raising either it or his voice, he placed it carefully upon the bench. “I said no, Guin.”

It was the same quiet voice he had used when I was little and there was truly no argument left to make. My body remembered it. Heat climbed from my chest into my face and my spine went rigid, and for one ridiculous instant the forge seemed to shrink around me until I was nine years old again with soot beneath my nose and both fists balled because Da would not let me lift the large hammer. I had been convinced then that wanting something badly enough ought to make me old enough to have it. I was a grown woman now, and one word from Da could still strip all my years away.

I looked aside before he could see how badly it had gotten beneath my skin, and that was when I noticed the flawed sword again. It lay apart from the levy stock exactly where Da had put it earlier, its unfinished edge catching the forge-light along the bench. I crossed to it before I had properly decided why and wrapped one hand around the unfinished grip.

“You call this a gift.”

Da frowned. “What’re you on about now?”

“The forge. The work.” I lifted the sword between us, not high enough to point it at him, and ran my thumb beside the thickened grind. “You’ve spent half my life telling me I’ve got a gift for it.”

“Aye. You do.”

“Then why does that only count while I use it here?”

His brows drew together. “That isn’t what I said.”

“It’s what it feels like you said.”

“That’s different.”

“Not from where I’m standing.” When he warned me not to bend one thing into another simply because I was angry, I lowered the sword against my thigh and looked around the forge instead. The walls were crowded with evidence of the life he had made for me: tools passed down from his father, unfinished orders, nails sorted into old clay jars and the peg where my apron had hung since I was tall enough to reach it without standing upon a crate. My name sat over the door because he had put it there himself. “You’ve always said this place will be mine one day.”

“And it will.”

“There. That.” I gestured around us with my free hand. “You trust me with all this. The anvil, the orders, the house, whatever debts you forget t’ tell me about until the creditor’s already at the door. You trust that a sword I make won’t fail in some stranger’s hand. You trust me t’ bargain with merchants, shoe their horses, fix their tools, take their money and put our name on the work when it’s done. But as soon as I talk about doin’ any of that beyond Pankurth, I’m green again. Suddenly I don’t understand the world. Suddenly every road ends in some grave you’ve already dug for me inside your head.”

“That’s not fair, Guin.”

“No. Maybe it isn’t.” My grip tightened around the unfinished tang. “But neither is telling me I’m capable enough t’ inherit your whole life and incapable the moment I want one that looks different.”

Da opened his mouth and nothing came out. A pocket of sap cracked in the fire and spat sparks across the stones between us, but neither of us moved to check the billet. For a long while he looked at me, and when he finally spoke most of the anger had gone from him.

“I won’t chain you to this anvil. You want work elsewhere someday, fine. A tannery, a stable. Hells, the Jarl’s own forge if you must.” His eyes dropped towards his hands. “But I’ve told you time and time again that I won’t let you die for purpose. A life doesn’t make a life matter, Guin. It only makes short work of endin’ one.” He rubbed one thumb over the other, his voice roughening slightly before he finished. “And you’re all I got left.”

I could not argue with that one, though a guilty part of me still wanted to. Fortunately for both of us, the billet chose then to remind us that it existed. One edge had gone too hot beneath the charcoal and Da swore as he caught it in the tongs. I put the sword back upon the bench and took the far end without being asked.

The fold from his bad strike remained. Da worked at it with smaller blows now, patient ones, coaxing the iron back towards what it ought to have been rather than trying to bully it there. When the colour faded I returned it to the coals and worked the bellows, and neither of us apologised. I did not tell him I would stay and he did not tell me again that I could not leave. There was only the old sound between us for a while, leather breathing, fire answering and Hunting’s Run muttering beneath the veranda.

By midday the ruined bar had become the broad head of an axe and eight of the swords were wrapped for the road. Da left me to choose the best that remained upon the racks, which I took as permission to be fussier than the Jarl would have liked. I turned each piece beneath the light, tested the edges, checked the quench lines where I could and rejected anything that gave me reason to doubt it. One knife had a hairline split along the fuller so fine that I only found it because the light caught it wrong. I carried it to Da without saying anything, and after running one blackened thumbnail beside the crack, he set it beside my troublesome sword without complaint.

When we finally stopped to eat, the morning had bled well into midday and my shoulders felt packed with sand. We did not bother going inside. Da tore a heel from the black loaf while I cut yesterday’s onion with one of the poorer kitchen knives, and between us we made a meal of hard cheese, bread and whatever could be peeled clean enough to eat. Even after washing at the trough everything tasted faintly of soot. The Jarl’s letter lay on the bench between us, half beneath the cloth holding the cheese, and every time I looked away from my food my eyes found the bottom of the page again.

“We can’t finish all this and reach Mournstead unless we leave tomorrow,” I said. “Bishop and Abbey need fetchin’ from Freja’s da, the left wheel was pullin’ last month and the rear traces are near worn through. I’ll mend those before dark.”

Da shaved a stubborn rind from his cheese with one thumbnail. “I’ll manage the delivery.”

I stopped chewing. The wagon runs had always belonged to both of us. When I was little I had ridden beside him with my feet nowhere near the floorboards, asking so many questions that he once threatened to leave me with the next shepherd we passed. Later, when I was tall enough, he let me drive the easier stretches. By the time I was grown, the road to Mournstead had become ours in the same way the forge was ours. Lately, however, he had begun speaking of taking Hildrun’s eldest or hiring one of the carters instead. My place beside him had never required asking, and I did not intend to begin now.

“No, you won’t. Nine swords, three axes, the barrel of arrowheads, plate, shoes, rivets and whatever else the steward bullies out of us, and maybe twelve swords if we don’t sleep tonight. You’re not loading that alone, drivin’ two days, keeping watch and unloading it yourself because you’ve decided I’m suddenly dangerous near a city.”

“I didn’t say you were dangerous near a city.”

“You’re thinkin’ it loudly.” His mouth twitched, which I took as permission to continue. “And Bishop hates you.”

“Bishop hates everyone.”

“He likes me.”

“He bites you.”

“Affectionately.”

Da rubbed his brow with the heel of his hand, but there was a smile trying to work its way through his beard now. “I’ve done worse.”

“Aye, and complained about every one of those things for ten years, you old grouch. We deliver the levy, hear what Sigvir’s men actually know, buy whatever iron hasn’t tripled in price and come home. Two days there, two back. Same as always.”

Da swallowed and busied himself gathering onion skins into his palm. He folded the cloth beneath the cheese with unnecessary precision, his eyes fixed upon his hands for so long that I knew what he was going to ask before he finally did.

“And the muster?”

My thumb pressed into the bread’s hard crust until it cracked. I could have lied and told him the courier’s answer and our argument had satisfied me, that I would keep my head down at the keep and come home without asking a single question, but Da would have known. “I mean t’ look into it. I’m not promising anything. I want t’ listen, that’s all.”

“That’s never all with you.”

There was little accusation in it now, mostly tiredness. I looked down at what remained of my bread and admitted, “Maybe not.”

Da watched me for a while before gathering the remains of our meal into the cloth. The skin beneath his eyes looked darker than it had that morning. His attention went once towards the road and then returned to me, and I wondered how long he had been worrying about this before the courier ever arrived. Eventually he tied the cloth and pushed himself upright. “Fetch the horses after we finish the axe. And before you start looking pleased with yourself, you’ll keep your mouth shut at the keep.”

“I can listen.”

“I’ve never seen proof.”

I made a small flourish with what remained of my bread. “Then Mournstead may witness a miracle.”

The chuckle that escaped him was low and reluctant, and I was embarrassingly pleased by it.

The afternoon narrowed itself into labour. We finished the axe, bound the swords in oiled cloth and packed what remained of the sound stock in straw. I mended the traces while Da counted the arrowheads twice because he distrusted my first count, then discovered that his second matched mine exactly and pretended this proved nothing. The wagon came out from beneath the lean-to and we greased the left hub before loading anything heavy enough to make the work miserable. Between that, fetching Bishop and Abbey and discovering that Bishop had apparently spent the last month cultivating a new hatred for having his feet handled, there was little time left for the morning’s argument.

As the stock disappeared from the racks, however, the forge began to look wrong. Too much bare wall showed between the hooks. Half-finished orders had vanished into bundles and the barrel of arrowheads waited beside the doorway, ugly and squat and heavier than either of us wanted to admit. A forge ought to have work in it. Things waiting to be fixed, scraps somebody swore would become useful, tools left where they should not be and orders promised yesterday. The levy stripped the place too clean.

My flawed sword remained upon the bench through all of it. Every time I passed I saw the thickened grind near the tang, and every time I told myself there was something else that needed doing first. The fault had neither worsened nor improved since morning, of course. Things rarely fixed themselves because you were busy.

By the time the last bundle had been secured in the wagon, dusk had begun gathering between the pines and the cold was creeping back beneath the veranda. Hunting’s Run had turned black except where the last light caught upon the water. Da remained at the workbench with the Jarl’s letter, scratching our tally beside the steward’s demands, while I put away the tools we had left scattered over the course of the day. When I reached the flawed sword I stopped.

Da heard the grindstone begin turning and looked up. “Thought I said t’ leave it.”

“The levy’s packed.”

“And the light’s goin’.”

“I can still see the fault.”

He regarded me for several seconds, then bent back over the tally without answering. His quill resumed scratching across the page while I brought the wheel up to speed beneath my foot and set the steel carefully against it. The first touch shrieked through the forge and sent sparks jumping across my knuckles. My angle was wrong. I lifted the blade, changed my grip and tried again.

The rough place caught beneath my hands. Too much pressure would eat the good edge with the bad, whilst too little would polish the surface and leave the weakness underneath. I knew that already. Knowing it and having the patience to behave accordingly were different skills, and after the day I had spent arguing with Da about everything I did not yet know, I was in no mood to prove him right over a grindstone.

I worked slowly. A little steel, then I checked the line beneath the remaining daylight. Another pass, then another. Steel dust gathered in the sweat upon my fingers and my shoulders cramped from holding the angle steady. One loose strand of hair had worked itself free again and stuck to my cheek, but I was too stubborn to move a hand from the blade to fix it. Behind me Da’s quill continued over the parchment, though the gaps between scratches grew long enough that I knew perfectly well he was watching.

Gradually the note from the wheel changed. The roughness beneath my hands eased and the line began to run clean from the fuller towards the tang. I stopped before impatience could convince me to take off more than I needed, cooled the blade at the trough and carried it towards the open side of the forge, where enough grey light remained to inspect the edge.

Da did not need asking. He put the quill down and held out one hand.

I passed him the sword and waited whilst he tested the balance first, as he always did, then turned the blade beneath what remained of the light. His thumb moved beside the edge until he found the place where the fault had been. He checked it from the other side, sighted down the length and finally returned the grip towards me.

“Well?”

“Sound.”

Something in my chest loosened at the word. I took the sword and turned automatically towards the levy stock, where nine swords lay wrapped beneath the far wall, plain things for the most part, made for people I did not know and places I had never seen. I had taken perhaps two steps before stopping. I looked towards the wrapped levy again, then crossed the forge in the other direction and laid the sword beneath my own peg.

Da’s eyes followed me. He had picked up his quill again but had not yet put it to the page. “That one not goin’?”

“No.” I adjusted the sword where it rested against the wall, making certain the unfinished edge could not catch either of us when we passed. The decision felt considerably smaller now that I had made it than it had whilst the blade was in my hands, though no less certain. “That one’s not the Emperor’s.”

Da looked at the sword for another moment. Whatever he thought about that, he kept it to himself. He only bent over the tally again and scratched one number from the count.