Elara Rime's Arc

Chapter 4 of 7

Elara climbed back to the forge with Rosa and the fox at her heels. She fixed the door first. She nailed a scrap plank across the split jamb, then hung a heavy utility box beside the anvil — a locked steel crate with vent slits she had bought last winter for coals and never used. She dropped her hammer and tongs inside and turned the key. It was a start. It was not enough. Rowan wanted the smithy shut. She wanted more than that. She wanted to know if the glove leather she'd chosen would hold against pass steel long enough to shape it. She had no pass steel to test on. Rowan's stock was the only stock, and ruining a scrap would end the deal before it began. Rosa fell asleep in the straw by the bellows. The fox curled against her back. Elara sat with her gloves on her knees and stared at the empty anvil. A knock came at the mended door. Not Rowan's weight. Lighter. Elara opened it to a small woman in a buttoned grey coat, ink on her fingers, a locked iron box chained to her wrist. Lena. Her friend from the city, up the ridge in boots not made for the ridge. "You look worse than last spring," Lena said. She stepped in without asking. "I brought something. You'll want it." She set the iron box on the bench, unlocked it, and lifted out a bundle of grey cloth. Inside lay three short strips of dull metal, each no longer than a finger. "Pass steel," Lena said. "Off-cuts. From a sentinel's discard pile at the pass road." Elara did not touch them. "Rowan will know." "Rowan didn't cut these. A dead man did. Forty years ago. The archive had them tagged as scrap." Lena shrugged. "I took the tag too." Elara laid a strip on the anvil. She pulled on the new glove — the lining she'd stitched last week from boiled hide and wool felt. She pressed her gloved palm flat against the metal and counted. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. The leather cooled. Then it stiffened. Then a spiderweb of frost bloomed through the felt and crawled onto her wrist. She yanked her hand back. The strip lay clean. The glove smoked at the seam where the frost had eaten through. "Not enough," Elara said. "You learned something." "I learned the lining fails at thirty counts. I need a minute at the anvil. Maybe two." Lena locked her box. "Then line it with something else." Elara looked at her gloves. At the scorched fingertips. She thought of the healer down in the village lodge, the one whose gloves came back singed each night and still kept working. Whatever that woman used, it lasted longer than boiled hide. She would have to go back down.